During the transition period of the struggle between Christendom and Islam, Palestine had narrowly escaped the horrors of a Mongol invasion. Mangu Khan, to whom St. Louis had sent the mild and pious William de Rubruquis at his distant capital of Karakorum (in Mongolia) in 1253, was defeated by the Egyptian Sultan Kelaun, successor of the terrible Bibars, in 1280, and had already been defeated in 1276 by Bibars himself near La Chamelle (now Homs) in Northern Syria. A very interesting letter has lately been published by Mr. Basevi Sanders from Sir Joseph de Cancy in Palestine to Edward the First in England,[23] written in 1281, and describing the later defeat near Le Lagon (the Lake of Homs), which saved the country from the cruelty from which other lands were then suffering. The Mameluk Sultans ruled in Palestine down to 1516 A.D., when the Turkish Selim overthrew their power at Aleppo, since which time Palestine has been a Turkish province. During the three centuries of Mameluk rule there are many descriptions, Christian and Moslem, of the country, and the well-known Travels of Sir John Mandeville are among the earliest. He was a contemporary of Marino Sanuto, and although those portions of the work (with which he consoled his rheumatic old age) that refer to more distant lands are made up from various sources, going back to the fables of Pliny and Solinus, still the account of Palestine itself appears to be original, and contains passages (such as that which relates to the fair held near Banias) which show special knowledge of the country. In 1432 Sir Bertrandon de la Brocquiere, with other knights, made an adventurous journey through the whole length of the country, and through Northern Syria and Asia Minor to Constantinople.[24] To the same period belongs John Poloner’s description, which shows us how tenaciously the Latin monks held to their possessions in the Holy Land.[25] [Illustration: THE HOLY LAND, FROM THE ATLAS OF ORTELIUS, _c._ 1591.] In the fifteenth century we have Moslem accounts by Kemâl ed Dîn and Mejr ed Dîn, which are of value in tracing the architectural history of Jerusalem. Mejr ed Dîn was Kady of the city, and his topographical account, though brief, is minutely detailed.[26] Among other Christian travellers of this century, Felix Fabri (1483-84), a Dominican monk, has left one of the best accounts. But how little these later Christian pilgrims contributed to enlarging our exact knowledge of Palestine may be judged of from such a map as that contributed by Christian Schrot to the Atlas of Ortelius, a map very decidedly inferior to that supplied more than two centuries earlier by Marino Sanuto.