As early as 1243 an Englishman is noticed as living among the Western Horde, the conquerors of Russia; but official intercourse begins in 1246 with John de Plano Carpini. This man, a Franciscan of Naples, started in 1245 as the Legate of Pope Innocent IV. to the Tartars, took the northern overland route through Germany and Poland, reached Kiev, "the metropolis of Russia," through help of the Duke of Cracow, and at last appeared in the camp of Batou, on the Volga. Hence by the Sea of Aral, "of moderate size with many islands," to the court of Batou's brother, the Great Khan "Cuyuc" himself, where the Christian stranger found himself one of a crowd of four thousand envoys from every part of Asia (1246).
After sixteen months Carpini made his way back by the same route, "over the plains" and through Kiev, to give at Rome the first genuine account of Tartary, in its widest sense, from the Dnieper to China (1247).
The great rivers and lakes and mountains of Russia and Turkestan, the position and distribution of the land and its peoples, "even from the Caspian to the Northern Ocean, where men are said to have dogs' faces," are now first described by an honest and clear-headed and keen-eyed observer, neither timid nor credulous.
Carpini really begins the reliable western map of Further Asia. His personal knowledge did not reach China or India, but in his Book of the Tartars, Europe was told nearly the whole truth, and almost nothing but the truth, about the vast tract and the great races between the Carpathians and the Gobi Desert. In the same was included the first fair account of the manners and history of the "Mongols whom we call Tartars," and the simple truthfulness of the Friar stands out in all the allusions that make his work so human;—his interviews with the Tartar Chiefs and with brother-travellers, his dangers and difficulties from Lettish robbers and abandoned or guarded ferries, his passage of the Dnieper on the ice, his last three weeks on "trotting"[24] hacks over the steppes.
We have gone a good way from Abbot Daniel, for in John de Plano Carpini Christian Europe has at last a real explorer, a real historian, a genuine man of science, in the service of the Church and of discovery.
Carpini was followed after six years by William de Rubruquis, a Fleming sent by St. Louis of France on the same errand of conversion and discovery (1253), but by a different route, through the Black Sea, and Cherson, over the Don "at the Head of Azov, that divides Europe and Asia, as the Nile divides Asia and Africa," to the great camp on the Volga, "the greatest river I had ever seen, which comes from Great Bulgaria in the north and falls into a lake (the Caspian Sea), that would take four months to journey round." Higher in their course the Don and the Volga "are not more than ten days' journey apart, but diverge as they run south." The Caspian is "made out of the Volga and the rivers that flow into it from Persia." Thence through the Iron Gates of Derbend, between the Caspian and the Caucasus, "which Alexander made to shut the barbarians out of Persia." Helped by a Nestorian, who possessed influence at the Tartar Court, like so many of his Church, Rubruquis reached the "Alps" of the Altai country, where he found a small Nestorian lordship, governed like the Papal States, by a priest, who was at least one original of the great mediæval phantom—Prester John.
Crossing the great steppes of eastern "Tartary," "like the rolling sea to look at," Rubruquis at last reached the Mongol headquarters at Caracorum, satisfied on the way that the Caspian had no northern outlet, as Strabo and Isidore had imagined. Thence he made his way home without much fresh result.
