In the extreme north (left-hand side) there is a large structure which looks like an Italian church with its campanile (13). The legend beneath, suggested ultimately by a passage from Marco Polo, runs about thus: “[This is] the sepulcher of the [Grand Khan] and they do this when he comes to be carried for interment: he comes accompanied by many armed men who kill those whom they find on the roads, and they say that the souls of these are blessed because they accompany the soul of the Grand Khan to another life.” Marco Polo adds that at the time of the funeral of Mangou Khan 20,000 persons were thus slain! The actual place of burial of the Mongol Khans was in Cathay, far away from northern Russia where Leardo, following the model of Catalan maps, draws it. European cartographers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seem to have known and cared little about the relative positions of places in Asia; as Italian merchants by this time had established contacts with the Mongols in southern Russia, what was more natural than to place the Mongol overlord’s tomb in the hinterland of the Black Sea? Here there was more available space than in the Far East, and here on Leardo’s map the Grand Khan’s tomb could be made symmetrically to balance Prester John’s palace across the map in Africa (299). South of the sepulcher we see the River Volga (6, 7) flowing into the northwestern corner of the Caspian (250). A branch from the east (8), perhaps the Kama, joins the Volga where the latter bends at a right angle to the south. East of the lower Volga is a “desert of thirty days” (10), Polo’s mysterious demon-haunted desert of Lop, where the traveler hears ringing bells and other uncanny sounds (possibly “singing sands”). Like the Grand Khan’s tomb, this desert is also wofully misplaced, since the actual desert of Lop lies in eastern Chinese Turkestan. The responsibility is not Leardo’s, however, for the Lop desert is in the same place on the Catalan Atlas of 1375 and on the Este map.