When the Black Death in its progress westwards came to Constantinople in 1347, the emperor-historian, John Cantacuzenes, was present in his capital to witness the arrival of the pestilence; in his history he wrote that it came among them from the country of the hyperborean Scythians, that is to say, the Tartars of the Crimea. The other contemporary Byzantine historian, Nicephorus Gregoras, says that the pestilence began among the Scythians in the Crimea and at the mouths of the Don. The Russian annals, which are an independent source, and likely enough to have a correct tradition, also say that the plague was God’s punishment on the people of the Don territory and of several other localities with obsolete names, including the famous city of Sarai on the Volga[281]. The Chersonese, and the country from the Don to the Volga, or from the Euxine to the Caspian, are the regions thus clearly indicated as the scene of the first outburst of the Black Death; but there was no clue to its unaccountable appearance there, or to the connexion between its outburst on the confines of Europe and the distant home in the East which the rumour of the day vaguely assigned to it. The more definite association of the Black Death with China dates from 1757, when the abbé Des Guignes, in his _Histoire des Huns_[282], took up the old tradition of the Arab historian, Aboel Mahasin, that the plague began in Tartary, that the smell of corpses spread on every side, that the infection passed from Cathay or Tartary to the Tartars of the Kaptchac (Crimea), and from them to Constantinople and Europe on the one hand, and to Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and North Africa on the other. He pointed out also that the overland caravan trade was a ready means of transport for the infection. That which specially attracted his attention as the historian of the Mongol power was the other statement of the Arab historian in the same context, that China had been visited by floods so disastrous that men, beasts, and even birds perished, and that the country was almost depopulated. Upon that hint Des Guignes collected from the Chinese annals of the first half of the fourteenth century a considerable list[283] of calamities, which had actually happened--floods causing the loss of millions of lives, earthquakes, and the like, appending the catalogue without comment as a note to the text where he has occasion to mention the Black Death. Des Guignes’ note was reproduced verbatim by Hecker in his essay on the Black Death in 1832, and the unwonted series of phenomena in China was made the basis of certain mystical speculations as to the effect of earthquakes in causing a “progressive infection of the zones,” a perturbation of “the earth’s organism,” a “baneful commotion of the atmosphere,” or the like. In that nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death originating in China has remained to the present hour; the intuition of