[Illustration:  Coin of King Hetum and his Queen Isabel.]

The chief remaining vestige of this little monarchy is the continued existence of a Catholicos of part of the Armenian Church at Sis, which was the royal residence.  Some Armenian communities still remain both in hills and plains; and the former, the more independent and industrious, still speak a corrupt Armenian.

Polo’s contemporary, Marino Sanuto, compares the kingdom of the Pope’s faithful Armenians to one between the teeth of four fierce beasts, the Lion Tartar, the Panther Soldan, the Turkish Wolf, the Corsair Serpent.

(Dulaurier, in J.  As. ser.  V. tom. xvii.; St. Martin, Arm.; Mar.  San. p. 32; Froissart, Bk.  II. ch. xxii. seqq.; Langlois, V. en Cilicie, 1861, p. 19.)

NOTE 2.—­“Maintes villes et maint chasteaux” This is a constantly recurring phrase, and I have generally translated it as here, believing chasteaux (castelli) to be used in the frequent old Italian sense of a walled village or small walled town, or like the Eastern Kala’ applied in Khorasan “to everything—­town, village, or private residence—­ surrounded by a wall of earth.” (Ferrier, p. 292; see also A.  Conolly, I. p. 211.) Martini, in his Atlas Sinensis, uses “Urbes, oppida, castella,” to indicate the three classes of Chinese administrative cities.

NOTE 3.—­“Enferme durement.”  So Marino Sanuto objects to Lesser Armenia as a place of debarkation for a crusade “quia terra est infirma” Langlois, speaking of the Cilician plain:  “In this region once so fair, now covered with swamps and brambles, fever decimates a population which is yearly diminishing, has nothing to oppose to the scourge but incurable apathy, and will end by disappearing altogether,” etc. (Voyage, p. 65.) Cilician Armenia retains its reputation for sport, and is much frequented by our naval officers for that object.  Ayas is noted for the extraordinary abundance of turtles.

NOTE 4.—­The phrase twice used in this passage for the Interior is Fra terre, an Italianism (Fra terra, or, as it stands in the Geog.  Latin, “infra terram Orientis"), which, however, Murray and Pauthier have read as an allusion to the Euphrates, an error based apparently on a marginal gloss in the published edition of the Soc. de Geographie.  It is true that the province of Comagene under the Greek Empire got the name of Euphratesia, or in Arabic Furatiyah, but that was not in question here.  The great trade of Ayas was with Tabriz, via Sivas, Erzingan, and Erzrum, as we see in Pegolotti.  Elsewhere, too, in Polo we find the phrase fra terre used, where Euphrates could possibly have no concern, as in relation to India and Oman. (See Bk.  III. chs. xxix. and xxxviii., and notes in each case.)