Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/160

 fcS WORKMEN AND HEROES which in Purchas' account of Marco Polo's travels, it is said that Coleridge fed asleep and dreamed the famous poem beginning : In Xanadu did Kublai Khan A stately pleasure dome decree. Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea." These Polo brothers were the first Europeans that the Great Khan had evei seen ; but before this time, Friar Piano Carpini, in 1 246, and Friar William Rubruquis, in 1253, had penetrated into Mongolia on some errand not now dis- tinctly understood, but far enough to learn that a great and civilized country existed somewhere in the eastern extremity of Asia. They also learned that be- yond this extremity of the continent there was a sea ; people had until then be- lieved that the eastern end of Asia disappeared in a vast and reedy bog, beyond which was deep and impenetrable darkness. More exact knowledge of that far eastern sea was subsequently acquired by the Venetian travellers. From these wandering friars the Great Khan had heard, at second-hand, doubtless, of Euro- pean princes, potentates, and powers, and of the Pope of Rome. He was mightily taken with the noble Venetians, and we are told that he treated them with every courtesy and consideration. He was anxious to secure through them the aid of the Sovereign Pontiff, of whose functions he enter- tained high respect, in the civilizing of the hordes that had lately been added to the Mongol Empire by wars of conquest. And he entreated the good offices of the polished and cultivated Venetians in securing for him the good offices of the Pope for that end. Accordingly, the two brothers, after satisfying to some degree their curiosity, set out for home, full of tales of their strange adventure, we doubt not; and they reached Venice in 1269, only to find that the Pope Clement IV. was dead, and that no successor had been chosen in his place. There was a long interregnum, and the brothers, taking with them the son of Nicolo, the young Marco, then a stout lad, began to retrace their steps to Cathay, despairing of being able to enlist the one hundred priests which the Great Khan had asked them to borrow for missionary purposes from the Pope. At Acre, then held by European powers that had been engaged in the crusades for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, they took counsel with one Tebaldo Visconti. an eminent prelate, who was Archdeacon of Lie"ge and a person of great consequence in the Eastern church. At their request, he wrote letters to the Great Khan, authenticating the causes of their failure to fulfil the wishes of the Khan in the matter of obtaining the missionaries whom he desired. Then they pushed on toward the farther East, and while waiting for a vessel to sail from the port of Ayas, on the Gulf of Scanderoon, then the starting-point for the Asiatic trade, they were overtaken by the news that their friend the Archdeacon Tebaldo had been chosen Pope, under the title of Gregory X. They at once returned to Acre, and were able to present to the newly elected