great seal the “letters patentes,” whereby his lieutenant the viceroy of India had given the pilgrim the order of knighthood. “And thus,” says Bartema by way of conclusion, “departing from thence with the kyngs pasporte and safe conducte, at the length after these my long and great trauayles and [p.337] dangers, I came to my long desyred native countrey, the citie of Rome, by the grace of God, to whom be all honour and glory.” This old traveller’s pages abound with the information to be collected in a fresh field by an unscrupulous and hard-headed observer. They are of course disfigured with a little romancing. His Jews at Khaybor, near Al-Madinah, were five or six spans long. At Meccah he saw two unicorns, the younger “at the age of one yeare, and lyke a young coolte; the horne of this is of the length of four handfuls.[FN#6]” And so credulous is he about anthropophagi, that he relates of Mahumet (son to the Sultan of Sanaa) how he “by a certayne naturall tyrannye and madnesse delyteth to eate man’s fleeshe, and therefore secretly kylleth many to eate them.[FN#7]” But all things well considered, Lodovico Bartema, for correctness of observation and readiness of wit, stands in the foremost rank of the old Oriental travellers. I proceed to quote, and to illustrate with notes, the few chapters devoted in the 1st volume of this little-known work to Meccah and Al-Madinah. CHAPTER XI.—Of a Mountayne inhabited with Jewes, and of the Citie of Medinathalnabi, where Mahumet was buried. In the space of eyght dayes we came to a mountayne which conteyneth in circuite ten or twelve myles. This is inhabited with Jewes, to the number of fyue thousande