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. 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 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

classes are the Armenians and the Greeks, who live kt with the former in the towns and villages, occupying emselves 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). The ill report of the people of this region did not begin with the Turkmans, for the Emperor Constantine Porphyrog. quotes a Greek proverb to the disparagement of the 3 kappas, Cappadocia, Crete, and Cilicia (In Banduri, I. 6).

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 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-Turkiýah), 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 place 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. And Asia Minor generally, once the mother of so many breeds of high repute, is now poorer in horses than any province of the Ottoman empire.

(Pereg. Quat. p. 114; I. B. II. 255 seqq.: Hayton, ch. xiii.; Liber Jurium Reip. Januensis, II. 184; Tchihatcheff, As. Min., 2de partie, 631).

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 nowadays termed Turks, the latter by their old name of Turkomans" (William of Tyre, i. 7).

Casaria is KAISARÍYA, 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.

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.3]

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'.

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 which is curious in more ways than one, tells how the citizens of Florence established races for their troops, and, among other prizes, was one which consisted of a Bucherame di bambagine (of cotton). Polo, near the end of the Book (Book III. ch. xxxiv.), speaking of Abyssinia, says, according to Pauthier's text: Et si y fait on moult beaux bouquerans et autres draps de coton." The G. T. is, indeed, more ambiguous: "Il hi se font maint biaus dras banbacin e bocaran" (cotton and buckram). When, however, he uses the same expression with reference to the delicate stuffs woven on the coast of Telingana, there can be no doubt that a cotton texture is meant, and apparently a fine muslin (see Book III. chap. xviii.). Buckram is generally named as an article of price, chier bouquerant, rice boquerans, &c., but not always, for Polo in one passage (Book II. ch. xlv.) seems to speak of it as the clothing of the poor people of Eastern Tibet.

Plano Carpini says the tunics of the Tartars were either of buckram (bukeranum), of purpura (a texture, perhaps velvet), or of baudekin, a cloth of gold (p. 614-15). When the envoys of the Old Man of the Mountain tried to bully Saint Lewis, one had a case of daggers to be offered in defiance, another a bouqueran for a winding sheet (Joinville, p. 136).

In accounts of materials for the use of Anne Boleyn in the time of her prosperity, bokeram frequently appears for "lyning and taynting" (?) gowns, lining sleeves, cloaks, a bed, &c., but it can scarcely have been for mere stiffening, as the colour of the buckram is generally specified as the same as that of the dress.

A number of passages seem to point to a quilted material. Boccaccio (Day viii. Novel 10) speaks of a quilt (coltre) of the whitest buckram of Cyprus, and Uzzano enters buckram quilts (coltre di Bucherame) in a list of Linajuoli, or linen-draperies. Both his handbook and Pegolotti's state repeatedly that buckrams were sold by the piece or the half-score pieces-never by measure. In one of Michel's quotations (from Baudouin de Sebourg) we have:

"Gaufer li fist premiers armer d'un auqueton

Qui fu de bougherant et plaine de bon coton."

Mr. Hewitt would appear to take the view that Buckram meant a quilted material; for, quoting from a roll of purchases made for the Court of Edward I., an entry for Ten Buckrams to make sleeves of, he remarks, "The sleeves appear to have been of pourpointerie," i.e. quilting (Ancient Armour, I. 240).

VOL. I.

E