BIOGRAPHICAL AND INTRODUCTORY NOTICES.
THESE notices of Eastern Travel are found, like unexpected fossils in a mud-bank, imbedded in a Chronicle of Bohemia, which was first printed from an old MS. in the latter half of the last century. Of the author there is not very much to be learned, except what can be gathered from these reminiscences of his. John of Florence, a Minorite, is known to the ecclesiastical biographers as the author of sundry theological works, and as Bishop of Bisignano. And a John of Florence, a Minorite, is also known, through brief notices in the Annals of Raynaldus and Wadding, as having gone on a mission to Cathay. But till the publication
The two Johns were, however, one. He was a native of Florence or its neighbourhood, and came of the Marignolli of San Lorenzo, a noble family of the Republic which derived its name from a village called Marignolle, in the Valley of the Arno, about two miles south-west of the city. The family of the
1 See Supplementum et Castigatio ad Scriptores Trium Ordinum S. Francisci a Waddingo, &c., opus posthumum Fr. Jo. Hyacinthi Sbaralece, Romœ, 1806, p. 436. Another John of Florence, also connected with the Eastern missions of the fourteenth century, is mentioned by Quétif ; but he was a Dominican, and bishop of Tiflis in Georgia (Script: Ord. Prcedicat., p. 583).
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