A few years later, Martinus Polaccus or Polonus, Martin the Polack, or the Pole, (Polack is now disused, Shakespeare makes Horatio say, "_He smote the sledded Polack on the ice,_") who died in 1278, the author of a chronicle of popes and emperors down to 1207, says: "John of England, by nation of Mayence, sat 2 years, 5 months, and 4 days. It is said that this pope was a woman." The chronicle of Polonus is merely a synchronistic history of the popes and emperors in the form of dry biographical notices. Nevertheless, from the fact that he had lived many years in Rome and was intimate with the papal court his book had, to use a modern phrase, an immense run. [Footnote 3] [Footnote 3: The tradition concerning the resignation of Pope Cyriacus was also widely spread by the same chronicle. The story ran that Pope Cyriacus resigned the pontificate in the year 238, and first took its rise a thousand years after that date. It was pure fiction, and was connected with the legend of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. No such pope as Cyriacus ever existed.] It was translated into all the principal languages, and more extensively copied than any chronicle then existing. The number of copies (MS.) still in existence far exceeds that of any other work of the kind, and this fact suggests an important reflection. Great stress is laid by some writers on the multitude of witnesses for Joan. But the multitude does not increase the proof when they but repeat one another, and they suspiciously testify in nearly the same words. "The advocates for Pope Joan," says Gibbon, "produce one hundred and fifty witnesses, or rather echoes, of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. They bear testimony against themselves and the legend by multiplying the proof that so curious a story _must_ have been repeated by writers of every description to whom it was known." The various versions that copy one another must necessarily bear a strong family likeness. Their number can add nothing to their value as proof, and is no more conclusive than the endeavor to establish the doubted existence of a man by a great variety of portraits of him, all--as Whately so well remarks in his _Historic Doubts_--"all striking likenesses--of each other."