402 IBN BATUTA'S TRAVELS IN BENGAL AND CHINA.
Beat/tit), and she was now about to pay a visit to her own people.1 Ibn Batuta was allowed to join the cortège. Their route seems to have been singularly devious, leading them by UKAK2 ten days above Sarai, near the " Hills of the Russians," described as a fair-haired, blue-eyed, but ugly and crafty race of Christians, thence to the port of SOLDAIA (perhaps with the intention of going by sea) and then by land the whole way to Constantinople, where they were received in great state, the emperor (Andronicus the Younger) and empress coming out to meet their daughter, and the whole population crowding to see the show, while the bells rang till the heavens shook with the clangour. He tells us how, as be passed the city gate in the lady's train, he heard the guards muttering to one another Sarakin2c ! Sarakinic ! a name, says he, by which they called Mussulmans.
It is curious to find the name Istambul in use a century and more before the Turkish conquest.3 Thus he tells us the part of
1 These marriages appear to have been tolerably frequent as the Greek emperors went down in the world, though the one in question does not seem to be mentioned elsewhere. Thus Hulagu having demanded in marriage a daughter of Michael Palaeologus, a natural daughter of the emperor, Mary by name, was sent in compliance with this demand : Hulagu was dead when she arrived in Persia; but she was married to his successor, Abaga Khan. The Mongols called her Despina Khatun(Aeuroîva). An illegitimate sister of the same emperor, called Euphrosyne, was bestowed on Nagaia Khan, founder of a small Tartar dynasty on the Greek frontier; and another daughter of the same name in 1265 on Tulabuka, who twenty years later became Khan of Kipchak. Andronicus the Elder is said to have given a young lady who passed for his natural daughter to Ghazan Khan of Persia, and a few years later his sister Mary to Ghazan's successor, Oljaïtu, as well as another natural daughter Mary to Tuktuka Khan of Kipchak. Also in the genealogy of the Comneni of Trebizond we find two daughters of the Emperor Basil married to Turkish or Tartar chiefs, and daughters of Alexis III, Alexis IV, and John IV making similar marriages. (D' Ohsson, iii, 417, and iv, 315, 318 ; Deguignes, i, 289; Hammer, Gesch. der Ilchane; Preface to Ibn Batuta, tom. ii, p. X; Art. Comneni in Smith's Diet. of Gr. and Rom. Biog.)
2 Ukaka or Ukek and Majâr have already been mentioned at p. 233, supra. The ruins' of Majar exist and have been described by Klaproth (Defremery in J. As., 1850, p. 154).
3 But even in the ninth century IVlasudi says that the Greeks never called their city Constantinia but Bolin (,r6Àcv—Town of the Londoner), and, when they wished to speak of it as the capital of the empire, Stan-
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