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many and how great, God himself knoweth, and it would be a long story to tell in a letter. However, the Emperor of the Tartars had been slain by his natural brother, and the caravan of Saracens with which I travelled was detained by the way in the cities of the Saracens, for fear of war and plunder.
Hence I was long tarrying among the Saracens, and I preached to them for several days openly and publicly the name of Jesus Christ and his gospel. I opened out and laid bare the cheats, falsehoods, and blunders of their false prophet ; with a loud voice, and in public, I did confound their barkings ; and trusting in our Lord Jesus Christ I was not much afraid of them, but received from the Holy Spirit comfort and light. They treated me civilly and set me in front of their mosque during their Easter ;1 at which mosque, on account of its being their Easter, there were assembled from divers quarters a number of their Cadini,2 i.e., of their bishops, and of their Talisirani,3 i.e., of their
sovereign (Wadding, vii, 212), and in John Marignolli. In Andrea Bianco's Map of the World in St. Mark's library it is called " Imp. de Medio, i.e., seu (obalek" (for Armalek). But the Carta Catalana makes the same mistake as Pascal, calling it the empire of Medeia", and the Portulano Mediceo also, in the Laurentian library, makes Armaloc capital of the "Imp. Medorum." Media seems always to have bothered mediœval travellers and geographers who thought it their duty to find Medes extant as well as Persians. Hayton's Media embraces Kurdistan and Fars; Clavijo puts it between Persia proper and Khorasan.
1 The Bairam, one of the great Mahomedan festivals entitled 'Id, is (Herbelot says) commonly called the Easter of the Turks." (See Note at p. 154.) The Christians applied this name to it, because of its following the fast of Ramazan, which was (more appropriately) termed the Mahomedan Lent. And the Mahomedans also conversely applied the term Bairam to the Easter of the Christians.
2 Kadhi or Kazi is properly a judge, but from the quasi-identity of Mahomedan law and divinity, he deals with both. He is a Dr. Lushington rather than a bishop.
I cannot make out what this word is. It is used (Thalassimani) in the same sense by Barbaro in Ramusio (ii, 107); and, as Mr. Badger tells me, also (Talismans) in Rycaut's History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (p. 204). Talismani are also repeatedly mentioned in the Turkish Annals translated by Leunclavius, and in his Pandectce appended
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