the latter applied to the western portion of Armenia, west of the Euphrates, and immediately north of Cappadocia.

But when the old Armenian monarchy was broken up (1079–80), Rupen, a kinsman of the Bagratid Kings, with many of his countrymen, took refuge in the Taurus. His first descendants ruled as barons, a title adopted apparently from the Crusaders, but still preserved in Armenia. Leon, the great-great-grandson of Rupen, was consecrated King under the supremacy of the Pope and the Western Empire in 1198.

Coin of King Hetum and his Queen Isabel.

The kingdom was at its zenith under Hetum or Hayton I., husband of Leon's daughter Isabel (1224-1269); he was, however, prudent enough to make an early submission to the Mongols, and remained ever staunch to them, which brought his territory constantly under the flail of Egypt. It included at one time all Cilicia, with many cities of Syria and the ancient Armenia Minor, of Isauria and Cappadocia. The male line of Rupen becoming extinct in 1342, the kingdom passed to John de Lusignan, of the royal house of Cyprus, and in 1375 it was put an end to by the Sultan of Egypt. Leon VI., the ex-king, into whose mouth Froissart puts some extraordinary geography, had a pension of 1000l. a year granted him by Richard II., and died at Paris in 1398.

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. 5, tom. xvii.; St. Martin, Arm.; Mar. San. p. 32; Froissart, Book II. ch. xxii. seqq.; Langlois, V. en Cilicie, 1861, p. 19.)

This is a constantly

NOTE 2.- "Maintes villes et maint chasteaux." 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. 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," &c. (Voyage, p. 65.) Cilician Armenia retains its reputation for sport, and is much frequented by our naval officers for that object.

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 Géographie. It is true that the province of Comagene under the Greek Empire got the name of Euphratesia, or in Arabic Furátiyah, but that was not in question here. The great trade of Ayas was with Tabriz viâ 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 Book III. chs. xxix. and xxxviii., and notes in each case).

With regard to the phrase spicery here and elsewhere, it should be noted that the Italian spezerie included a vast deal more than ginger and other "things hot i' the mouth." In one of Pegolotti's lists of spezerie we find drugs, dye-stuffs, metals, wax, cotton, &c.

CHAPTER II.

CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF TURCOMANIA.

IN Turcomania there are three classes of people. First, there are the Turcomans; these are worshippers of Mahommet, a rude people with an uncouth language of their own.' They dwell among mountains and downs where they find good pasture, for their occupation is cattlekeeping. Excellent horses, known as Turquans, are reared in their country, and also very valuable mules. The other two classes are the Armenians and the Greeks, who live mixt with the former in the towns and villages, occupying themselves with trade and handicrafts. They weave the finest and handsomest carpets in the world, and also a great quantity of fine and rich silks of cramoisy and other colours,

and plenty of other stuffs. Their chief cities are CONIA, SAVAST [where the glorious Messer Saint Blaise suffered martyrdom], and CASARIA, besides many other towns and bishops' sees, of which we shall not speak at present, for it would be too long a matter. These people are subject to the Tartar of the Levant as their Suzerain." We will now leave this province, and speak of the Greater Armenia.

NOTE 1.--Ricold of Montecroce, a contemporary of Polo, calls the Turkmans homines bestiales. In our day Ainsworth notes of a Turkman village: "The dogs were very ferocious. the people only a little better" (J. R. G. S. X. 292).

NOTE 2.--In Turcomania Marco perhaps embraces a great part of Asia Minor, but he especially means the territory of the decaying Seljukian monarchy, usually then called by Asiatics Rúm, as the Ottoman Empire is now, and the capital of which was Iconium, KUNIYAH, the Conia of the Text, and Coyne of Joinville. Ibn Batuta calls the whole country Turkey (Al-Turkiyah), and the people Turkmán; exactly likewise does Ricold (Thurchia and Thurchimanni). Hayton's account of the various classes of inhabitants is quite the same in substance as Polo's. The migratory and pastoral Turkmans still exist in this region, but the Kurds of like habits have taken their places to a large extent. The fine carpets and silk fabrics appear to be no longer produced here, any more than the excellent horses of which Polo speaks, which must have been the remains of the famous old breed of Cappadocia.

A grant of privileges to the Genoese by Leon II., king of Lesser Armenia, dated Dec. 23, 1288, alludes to the export of horses and mules, &c., from Ayas, and specifies the duties upon them. The horses now of repute in Asia as Turkman come from the east of the Caspian.

(Pereg. Quat. p. 114; I. B. II. 255 seqq.; Hayton, ch. xiii. ; Liber Jurium Reip. Januensis, II. 184.)

Though the authors quoted above seem to make no distinction between Turks and Turkmans, that which we still understand does appear to have been made in the 12th century: "That there may be some distinction, at least in name, between those who made themselves a king, and thus achieved such glory, and those who still abide in their primitive barbarism and adhere to their old way of life, the former are now-a-days termed Turks, the latter by their old name of Turcomans" (William of Tyre, i. 7).

Casaria is KAISARIYA, the ancient Caesarea of Cappadocia, close to

the foot of the great Mount Argaeus. Savast is the Armenian form (Sevasd) of Sebaste, the modern SIWAS. The three cities, Iconium, Caesarea, and Sebaste, were metropolitan sees under the Catholicos of Sis.

CHAPTER III.

DESCRIPTION OF THE GREATER HERMENIA.

THIS is a great country. It begins at a city called ARZINGA, at which they weave the best buckrams in the world. It possesses also the best baths from natural springs that are anywhere to be found. The people of the country are Armenians, and are subject to the Tartar. There are many towns and villages in the country, but the noblest of their cities is Arzinga, which is the See of an Archbishop, and then ARZIRON and ARZIZI.2

The country is indeed a passing great one, and in the summer it is frequented by the whole host of the Tartars of the Levant, because it then furnishes them with such excellent pasture for their cattle. But in winter the cold is past all bounds, so in that season they quit this country and go to a warmer region, where they find other good pastures. [At a castle called PAIPURTH, that you pass in going from Trebizond to Tauris, there is a very good silver mine.']

And you must know that it is in this country of Armenia that the Ark of Noah exists on the top of a certain great mountain [on the summit of which snow is so constant that no one can ascend; for the snow never melts, and is constantly added to by new falls. Below, however, the snow does melt, and runs down, producing such rich and abundant herbage that in summer cattle are sent to pasture from a long way round about, and it never fails them. The melting snow also causes a great amount of mud on the mountain].

The country is bounded on the south by a kingdom called Mosul, the people of which are Jacobite and Nestorian Christians, of whom I shall have more to tell you presently. On the north it is bounded by the Land of the Georgians, of whom also I shall speak. On the confines towards Georgiania there is a fountain from which oil springs in great abundance, insomuch that a hundred shiploads might be taken from it at one time. This oil is not good to use with food, but 'tis good to burn, and is also used to anoint camels that have the mange. People come from vast distances to fetch it, for in all the countries round about they have no other oil.5

Now, having done with Great Armenia, we will tell you of Georgiania.

NOTE 1.--ERZINGAN, an ancient Armenian city, and still a place of some prosperity for a town under Turkish rule. I do not find mention of its hot springs by modern travellers, but Lazari says Armenians assured him of their existence. There are plenty of others in Polo's route through the country, as at Ilija, close to Erzrum, and at Hassan Kala'a.

The Buckrams of Arzinga are mentioned both by Pegolotti (circa 1340) and by Giov. d'Uzzano (1442). But what were they?

Buckram in the modern sense is a coarse open texture of cotton or hemp, loaded with gum, and used to stiffen certain articles of dress. But this was certainly not the medieval sense. Nor is it easy to bring the medieval uses of the term under a single explanation. Indeed Mr. Marsh suggests that probably two different words have coalesced. Fr.-Michel says that Bouqueran was at first applied to a light cotton stuff of the nature of muslin, and afterwards to linen, but I do not see that he makes out this history of the application. Douet d'Arcq, in his Comptes de l'Argenterie, &c. explains the word simply in the modern sense, but there seems nothing in his text to bear this out.

A quotation in Raynouard's Romance Dictionary has "Vestirs de polpra e de bisso que est bocaran," where Raynouard renders bisso as lin; a quotation in Ducange also makes Buckram the equivalent of Bissus; and Michel quotes from an inventory of 1365, “unam culcitram pinctam (qu. punctam?) albam factam de bisso aliter boquerant."

Mr. Marsh again produces quotations, in which the word is used as a proverbial example of whiteness, and inclines to think that it was a bleached cloth with a lustrous surface.

It certainly was not necessarily linen. Giovanni Villani, in a passage