(22.) “twelve hundred and eighty years from Christ.”—The holy places had been frequently won and lost during the Crusades, but they were never again recovered from the Egyptians, after the expulsion of the Mongols from Syria by the sultan Koutouz and his amir Beïbars in 1260, the year 658 of the Hegira. Schiltberger’s error in computation, of twenty years, probably arose from his having added the years of this date, 658 instead of 638 to the 622 years that had elapsed from the birth of Christ to the commencement of the Mahomedan era. These dates amount together to 1280, which he must have thought corresponded to 658 of the Hegira, the period indicated to him as that at which Mussulman rule was established in Syria and Palestine, and Christians lost their influence.—BRUUN. (23.) “and this they do that they may make more profit.”—Many travellers in Egypt, whether previous to, during, or since the Crusades, have noticed that balsam was to be obtained only from the Matarea garden near Cairo. To his translation of Abd-Allatif’s description of Egypt, Silvester de Sacy adds several passages on the cultivation of balsam in that country, being extracts from the reports of European and Eastern writers; but he omits Arnold of Lubeck and De Lannoy. Whilst at Cairo, the latter was presented by the patriarch of India with a “fyole de fin balme de la vigne, où il croist, dont il est en partie seigneur”; and he repeats the tradition related by Brocardus (_Terræ Sanctæ Descr._, 311), that the vine of the balsam had been brought to Babylon, meaning Cairo, by Cleopatra. Schiltberger was in Syria and Egypt at about the same time as De Lannoy, and may have heard this tradition, also the legend that was related to the Bishop of Lubeck, to the effect that the balsam tree did not put forth in the garden of Matarea until the Virgin, in passing by when on her flight from the persecutions of Herod, had washed her son’s clothes in the stream that irrigated the garden. Makrizi associates this very fable with the well at Matarea, adding, that the balm-tree had quite disappeared from the country about the Jordan where it was formerly exclusively obtained. Strabo (XVI, ii, 41) and Pliny (XII, v, 4) both say that this plant was cultivated in the royal gardens at Jericho, of which it was the chief ornament (Josephus, _Wars_, etc., iv, 8); but it is doubtful whether it disappeared entirely from Judæa after the days of Cleopatra and Augustus, because some was purchased at Jerusalem in 705 by St. Guillebaud (cited by S. de Sacy, Abd-Allatif, 91); and Burkhardt learnt that balm-oil was to be obtained at Tiberias, extracted from a fruit that greatly resembled the cucumber, and grew on a stem very like the balsam tree at Mecca.