[4] As reported by Gibbon, from Matthew Paris, p. 396, forty or fifty herrings were sold for a shilling. This must be an error, perhaps for 40 or 50 thousand; as a shilling of these days was worth at least from fifteen to twenty modern shillings in effective value; and within memory herrings have often sold, in a very plentiful fishery, for a shilling the cart-load, when salt could not be had in sufficient quantity.--E. [5] Decl. and Fall. XII. I. CHAP. VIII. _The Travels of John de Plano Carpini and other Friars, sent about the year 1246, as ambassadors from Pope Innocent IV, to the great Khan of the Moguls or Tartars_.[1] INTRODUCTION. In the collection of early Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries, by Hakluyt, published originally in 1599, and reprinted at London in 1809 with additions, there are two separate relations of these travels. The _first_, in p. 24, is the journal of John de Plano Carpini, an Italian minorite, who, accompanied by friar Benedict, a Polander, went in 1246 by the north of the Caspian sea, to the residence of Batu-khan, and thence to Kajuk- khan, whom he calls Cuyne, the chief or Emperor of all the Mongols. The _second_ in p. 42, is a relation taken from the Speculum Historiale of Vincentius Beluacensis, lib. xxxii. ch. 2. of the mission of certain friars, predicants and minorites in the same year, 1246, to the same country; and in p. 59. of the same collection, there is a translation by Hakluyt into antiquated English of this second account. From this second narrative it appears, that Vincentius had received an account of the journey of the second mission from Simon de St Quintin, a minorite friar belonging to the party; and that he had worked up along with this, the whole of the narrative which had been separately published by Carpini of his journey; which indeed forms by far the larger and more interesting portion of the work published by Vincentius. This latter edition, therefore has been considered as sufficient for the present collection, because to have given both would have been an unnecessary repetition; and it is here translated from the Latin of Hakluyt, I. 42.