This follows an engraving in Ruge’s _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, p. 53. The original is at Rome. There is a copy of an old print in Jules Verne’s _Découverte de la Terre_.] It has been said that Macrobius, a Roman of the fifth century, in a commentary on the _Dream of Scipio_, had maintained a division of the globe into four continents, of which two were then unknown. In the twelfth century this idea had been revived by Guillaume de Conches (who died about 1150) in his _Philosophia Minor_, lib. iv. cap. 3. It was again later further promulgated in the writings of Bede and Honoré d’Autun, and in the _Microcosmos_ of Geoffroy de Saint-Victor,—a manuscript of the thirteenth century still preserved.[88] It is not known that this theory was familiar to Columbus. The chief directors of his thoughts among anterior writers appear to have been, directly or indirectly, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Vincenzius of Beauvais;[89] and first among them, for importance, we must place the _Opus Majus_ Of Roger Bacon, completed in 1267. It was from Bacon that Petrus de Aliaco, Or Pierre d’Ailly (b. 1340; d. 1416 or 1425), in his _Ymago mundi_, borrowed the passage which, in this French imitator’s language, so impressed Columbus.[90] [Illustration: ANNOTATIONS BY COLUMBUS. On a copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s _Imago mundi_, preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville, following a photograph in Harrisse’s _Notes on Columbus_, p. 84.] An important element in the problem was the statements of Marco Polo regarding a large island, which he called Cipango, and which he represented as lying in the ocean off the eastern coast of Asia. This carried the eastern verge of the Asiatic world farther than the ancients had known; and, on the spherical theory, brought land nearer westward from Europe than could earlier have been supposed. It is a question, however, if Columbus had any knowledge of the Latin or Italian manuscripts of Marco Polo,—the only form in which anybody could have studied his narrative before the printing of it at Nuremberg in 1477, in German, a language which Columbus is not likely to have known. Humboldt has pointed out that neither Columbus nor his son Ferdinand mentions Marco Polo; still we know that he had read his book. Columbus further knew, it would seem, what Æneas Sylvius had written on Asia. Toscanelli had also imparted to him what he knew. A second German edition of Marco Polo appeared at Augsburg in 1481. In 1485, with the _Itinerarius_ of Mandeville,[91] published at Zwolle, the account—“De regionibus orientalibus”—of Marco Polo first appeared in Latin, translated from the original French, in which it had been dictated. It was probably in this form that Columbus first saw it.[92] There was a separate Latin edition in 1490.[93]