[Footnote 11: 'Memoirs of the Political Relations of the Christian Princes with the Mongol Emperors.'--Second Memoir, p. 145-157.] 'A great many Italian, French, and Flemish monks were charged with diplomatic missions to the great khan. Mongols of distinction came to Rome, Barcelona, Valentia, Lyons, Paris, London, and Northampton, and a Franciscan of the kingdom of Naples was archbishop of Pekin. His successor was a professor of theology of the faculty of Paris. But how many other persons less known were drawn after these, either as slaves, or attracted by the love of gain, or urged by curiosity, into countries up to that period unknown! Chance has preserved the names of some. The first envoy who came to visit the king of Hungary, on the part of the Tartars, was an Englishman, banished from his country for certain crimes, and who, after having wandered over all Asia, had finished by taking service amongst the Mongols. A Flemish shoemaker met in the depths of Tartary a woman from Metz, named _Paquette_, who had been carried off in Hungary; a Parisian goldsmith, whose brother was established in Paris upon the great bridge; and a young man from the environs of Rouen, who had been at the taking of Belgrade. {148} He saw also some Russians, Hungarians, and Flemings. A chorister, named _Robert_, after traversing Oriental Asia, returned to end his days in the cathedral of Chartres. A Tartar was purveyor of helmets in the armies of Philip the Handsome. John de Plancarpin fell in, near Gayouk, with a Russian nobleman whom he calls _Temer_, who was officiating as interpreter; several merchants of Breslau, Poland, and Austria accompanied him in his journey to Tartary. Others returned with him by way of Russia; they were Genoese, Pisans, and Venetians. Two merchants from Venice, whom hazard had conducted to Bokhara, consented to follow a Mongol ambassador from Houlagou sent to Khoubalai. They sojourned several years in China and Tartary, returned with letters from the great khan for the pope, went back to the great khan, taking with them the son of one of them, the celebrated Marco Polo, and once more quitted the court of Khoubalai to return to Venice. Travels of this sort were not less frequent in the following age. In the number are those of Sir John Mandeville, an English physician, of Orderic of Frioul, of Pegoletti, of William Bouldeselle, and of several others. We can readily conceive that those whose memory is preserved are but a very small portion of those that were undertaken, and that there were at the period in question more people capable of executing distant journeys than of writing accounts of them. Very many of these adventurers must have settled and died in the countries they went to visit. Others returned to their native land as obscure as they went away, but with an imagination filled with what they had seen, and gave