[6] This Friar makes a strange hotch-potch of what he had read, _e.g._: “The Tartars, when they came out of the mountains, made them a king, viz., the son of Prester John, who is thus vulgarly termed _Vetulus de la Montagna!_” (_Mon. Hist. Patr._ Script. III. 1557.) [7] G. Villani died in the great plague of 1348. But his book was begun soon after Marco’s was written, for he states that it was the sight of the memorials of greatness which he witnessed at Rome, during the Jubilee of 1300, that put it into his head to write the history of the rising glories of Florence, and that he began the work after his return home. (Bk. VIII. ch. 36.) [8] Book V. ch. 29. [9] _Petri Aponensis Medici ac Philosophi Celeberrimi, Conciliator_, Venice, 1521, fol. 97. Peter was born in 1250 at Abano, near Padua, and was Professor of Medicine at the University in the latter city. He twice fell into the claws of the Unholy Office, and only escaped them by death in 1316. [10] [It is curious that this figure is almost exactly that which among oriental carpets is called a “cloud.” I have heard the term so applied by Vincent Robinson. It often appears in old Persian carpets, and also in Chinese designs. Mr. Purdon Clarke tells me it is called _nebula_ in heraldry; it is also called in Chinese by a term signifying cloud; in Persian, by a term which he called _silen-i-khitai_, but of this I can make nothing.—_MS. Note by Yule_.] [11] The great Magellanic cloud? In the account of Vincent Yanez Pinzon’s Voyage to the S.W. in 1499 as given in Ramusio (III. 15) after Pietro Martire d’Anghieria, it is said:—“Taking the astrolabe in hand, and ascertaining the Antarctic Pole, they did not see any star like our Pole Star; but they related that they saw another manner of stars very different from ours, and which they could not clearly discern because of a certain dimness which diffused itself about those stars, and obstructed the view of them.” Also the Kachh mariners told Lieutenant Leech that midway to Zanzibar there was a town (?) called Marethee, where the North Pole Star sinks below the horizon, and they steer by _a fixed cloud in the heavens_. (Bombay Govt. Selections, No. XV. N.S. p. 215.) The great Magellan cloud is mentioned by an old Arab writer as a white blotch at the foot of Canopus, visible in the Tehama along the Red Sea, but not in Nejd or ’Irák. Humboldt, in quoting this, calculates that in A.D. 1000 the Great Magellan would have been visible at Aden some degrees above the horizon. (_Examen_, V. 235.)