NOTE 2.—“The Seven Arts,” from a date reaching back nearly to classical times, and down through the Middle Ages, expressed the whole circle of a liberal education, and it is to these Seven Arts that the degrees in arts were understood to apply. They were divided into the _Trivium_ of Rhetoric, Logic, and Grammar, and the _Quadrivium_ of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music, and Geometry. The 38th epistle of Seneca was in many MSS. (according to Lipsius) entitled “_L. Annaei Senecae Liber de Septem Artibus liberalibus._” I do not find, however, that Seneca there mentions categorically more than five, viz., Grammar, Geometry, Music, Astronomy, and Arithmetic. In the 5th century we find the Seven Arts to form the successive subjects of the last seven books of the work of Martianus Capella, much used in the schools during the early Middle Ages. The Seven Arts will be found enumerated in the verses of Tzetzes (_Chil. XI._ 525), and allusions to them in the mediæval romances are endless. Thus, in one of the “Gestes d’Alexandre,” a chapter is headed “_Comment Aristotle aprent à Alixandre les Sept Arts._” In the tale of the Seven Wise Masters, Diocletian selects that number of tutors for his son, each to instruct him in one of the Seven Arts. In the romance of _Erec and Eneide_ we have a dress on which the fairies had portrayed the Seven Arts (_Franc. Michel, Recherches_, etc. II. 82); in the _Roman de Mahommet_ the young impostor is master of all the seven. There is one mediæval poem called the _Marriage of the Seven Arts_, and another called the _Battle of the Seven Arts_. (See also Dante, _Convito_, Trat. II. c. 14; _Not. et Ex._ V., 491 _seqq._) NOTE 3.—The Chinghizide Princes were eminently liberal—or indifferent—in religion; and even after they became Mahomedan, which, however, the Eastern branch never did, they were rarely and only by brief fits persecutors. Hence there was scarcely one of the non-Mahomedan Khans of whose conversion to Christianity there were not stories spread. The first rumours of Chinghiz in the West were as of a Christian conqueror; tales may be found of the Christianity of Chagatai, Hulaku, Abaka, Arghun, Baidu, Ghazan, Sartak, Kuyuk, Mangu, Kublai, and one or two of the latter’s successors in China, all probably false, with one or two doubtful exceptions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] See plates with ch. xvii. of Bk. IV. See also the Uighúr character in the second _Païza_, Bk. II. ch. vii. [Illustration: The Great Kaan delivering a Golden Tablet to the Brothers. From a miniature of the 14th century.] CHAPTER VIII. HOW THE GREAT KAAN GAVE THEM A TABLET OF GOLD, BEARING HIS ORDERS IN THEIR BEHALF.