From the most remote antiquity the Euxine has been noted for the fury of its tempests and for the reputed terrors of its navigation, as well as for the savage character of the inhabitants on its coast. For this reason the ancients called it _Pontus Axenus_--the inhospitable sea. Subsequently, as if to placate its fury, by an euphemism, it was called the _Euxine_--the hospitable sea--a name which it has since borne. But the first name given to this extended body of water was simply _Pontos_--the Greek word for sea--as if it were the sea _par excellence_. The noted traveler, Giovanni da Piano Carpini, a Franciscan friar, and Ricoldo da Monte di Croce, a Dominican missionary in the Orient, called it _Mare Magnum_--the great sea. In the _Itinerarium_, however, of Blessed Oderic of Pordenone it bears the name _Mare Majus_--the greater sea--as it does also in _I Viaggi_ of Marco Polo who calls it _Mare Maggiore_. But this is not all. Friar Jordanus speaks of it as the Black Sea--_Mare Nigrum_, as likewise does Sir John Mandeville who gives it the name _Mare Maurum_--_Mauros_, in Byzantine, as in Modern Greek, signifying black. But there was, probably, no better reason for calling this sea black than there was for giving to certain other well-known seas the epithets of red, white, and yellow. From all this it appears that what we now know as the Euxine or Black Sea has been rich in names as well as in myths and legends.[32] The Euxine, however, is famed not only for legendary associations but for having been for centuries a section of the great highway between the Occident and the Orient. It was by this route that Fra Oderic of Pordenone, that celebrated missionary of the fourteenth century, made his wonderful journey from Venice to China and other parts of the Far East. It was by the same route that Marco Polo--the most famous traveler of the Middle Ages--returned from his long peregrinations in eastern Asia to his home in the Queen City of the Adriatic. And it was by way of the Euxine that Marco Polo’s father and uncle had preceded him to far-off Cathay where they were most cordially received by the famous Kublai Khan.