of one who has not been there, and yet peradventure these authors tell no lie.'
There is Zayton also, a wondrous fine seaport and a city of incredible size, where our Minor Friars have three very fine churches, passing rich and elegant ; and they have a. bath also and a fondaco which serves as a depôt for all the merchants.2 They have also some fine bells of the best quality, two of which were made to my order, and set up with all due
1 Probably a reference to the accounts of Kingss6 or Hangcheu, by Polo and Odoric, see p. 113. But hear what Dobner has to say on Cam-say : " In our time Cambay, the chief city of Guzerat, which on account of its size, wealth, and splendour, is often called the Indian Cairo. The river Indus flows through the kingdom, so that Marignolli was quite right in a previous passage when he referred the Columns of Alexander to those parts, in imitation of which he put up another himself in the same quarter"!! (p. 95.)
2 The original (in Dobner) reads : habent tres ecclesias pulcherrimas optimas et ditissimas balneum fundatum omnium mercatorum depositorium" Meinert and Kunstmann translate ein gestiftetes Bad," but this seems somewhat unmeaning, and I have assumed that fundatum' should read Fundacum (t for c again) in the sense of the Italian Fondaco. This was the word for a mercantile establishment and lodging house in a foreign country, nearly what we should call a factory, and we find it still applied at Venice to the old foreign factories, though the common Italian dictionaries ignore this meaning of the word. In Sicily the word still means an inn, especially one where the cattle and goods of traders are put up. It is borrowed from the Arabic Fanduk, a public hostel for traders where they put up along with their wares," and that again comes from the Greek aavaoXeîov.
Pagnini (Della Decima, etc., ii, 89) gives a Florentine correspondence about a treaty of commerce with the Sultan of Egypt in the year 1422, in which the chief items of privilege to be demanded for the Florence merchants are under the heads of Fondaco, Church, Bath, Steelyard. In the thirteenth century we find the King of Lesser Armenia granting the Venetians at Mamistra a fondlik to deposit their merchandise and property in." (Journ. Asiat., ser. v, tom. xviii, 353.) In a treaty between Abuabdallah Mahomed, King of Granada, and the Genoese, in 1278, it is provided that the latter shall have in all the king's cities Fundiks in which to conduct their business, and these shall be allowed to have churches, baths, oven, and warehouses (Not. et Extraits, xi, 28; see also Amari Dipl. Arab., pp. xxx, 88, 101). And in a treaty between Michael Paleeologus and the Genoese, it is specified that the latter shall have in certain ports and islands logiam, palatiicm, ecclesiam, balneum, furnum et jardinum (Ducange, Hist. de Constantinople, App., p. 6). These quotations
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