At the eastern end of Asia, Gervase, following the Roman geographers, had placed the Seres on the shores of an ocean named after them.[1260] “Seres” was a classical designation of the people of China in so far as that country was the terminus of the overland route toward the Far East described by Pliny and Ptolemy. Beyond vast solitudes, the former had said,[1261] you come to this remote land, where the people comb silk from the trees; though they carry on an extensive trade in this commodity, they avoid all personal dealings with strangers (whose commercial morality must have been high) by leaving the silk on the banks of streams to be picked up by those who wish to procure it. Solinus [1262] copied Pliny’s account, but Isidore,[1263] followed by the author of the _De imagine mundi_,[1264] gives us less detail, merely stating that Seres is a city of the East, from which were named the Seric region, the people, and a kind of cloth. Pausanias first among classical writers had understood that silk comes from a worm. The silk manufacture was introduced into the Byzantine Empire in 552 A. D., and it may well be from Byzantine sources that there originated the more or less correct understanding of its production revealed in the _Letter of Prester John_,[1265] where we are informed that the salamander is a worm which makes a sort of capsule (_pellicula_) around him, “as do the other worms that make silk.” CHINA If the land of the Seres lay at the end of the overland route eastward, the sea route ended, according to the _Periplus of the Erythraean Sea_, at the land of “Thin” (China), and according to Ptolemy’s _Geography_ at the country of the “Sinae.”[1266] Here we have the first use in the West of the word “China,” knowledge of which had probably reached the Occident through Arabic channels, though not until the sixteenth century was it recognized that the land of the “Seres” (Cathay) and “China” were the same.[1267] An indication of the Ptolemaic “Sinae” is found in Plato of Tivoli’s translation of Al-Battānī’s _Astronomy_:[1268] here a branch of the Indian Ocean is described as reaching to the furthest point of India where lies “Thiema” (China). Benjamin of Tudela also speaks of the country of “Zin,” or China, in the uttermost East near the reputed Sea of Nikpa, where violent and stormy winds blow—possibly the typhoons of Far Eastern waters. Ships carried into this sea by the winds stick fast there; their supplies of food give out, and the crews often die of starvation. In order to avoid this fate, some of the men, armed with knives, throw themselves into the sea and are carried to shore in the talons of an enormous bird, the griffon. By slaying the griffon with their knives they are able to escape.[1269] This story reminds us, on the one hand, of Western reports of the congealed sea[1270] and, on the other, of Arabic tales of the Rukh, which reappear in Marco Polo’s travels.[1271]