Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/821

Directoriuni ad Passagiiim Transmariniini 8ii Martin Zaccaria, the Genoese captain of Chios, in some of his victories over the Turks ; still more, he had once made his wa)' so far south as to lose sight of the northern pole, in a region where he found the Antarctic reach an " elevation " of 24 degrees — about the latitude of southern Madagascar. Again, after describing the races that followed the Greek rite — Slavs, Bulgars, Wallachs, Georgians, Goths and others — he tells us how in his southern wanderings he once arrived at a " fairly large " island in the Indian Sea (probably Socotra), wherein baptism and circumcision were both practised, and about which he declares, with tantalizing brevity, he could have furnished many a curious detail, if he had not re- garded the whole as foreign to his subject. Once more, he relates how in Persia (where he seems to have journeyed and missionized as early as 1308) he noticed the slave markets glutted with Greek captives ; on the other hand he was delighted to find that the bare rumor of an attack from Latin Christendom threw the Moslems of Iran into a state of acute alarm. He appears to have been one of the prime agents in that more complete submission of Lesser Armenia to Rome which took place in 1318; he speaks of his residence in "Constantinople or Pera " ; while from his detailed treatment of Russia and the character of his references to that country, its lack of stone or brick (save only in the Latin cities on the coast), the nature of its people, and other particulars, we may infer that he had seen for himself a large portion of the lands on the north of the Black Sea. The authorship of the Directoriuni remains a mystery. It has been ascribed by some to that John de Cora who in 1330 was appointed by Pope John XXII. archbishop of Sultaniyah in North Persia, and who is probably the author of a certain Lizre de I'Estat dit Grant Caan, written by command of the aforesaid Pope Jolin, which gives some valuable material for the history of the Catholic missions of the fourteenth century in Asia, and especially in China. But our present writer, though fully contemporary with John de Cora, though belonging to the same order, and though once, at any rate, associated with the same mission, cannot possibly be identified with the bishop of Sultaniyah ; the former's episcopate " in the empire of Constantinople "" cannot be made to correspond with any of the Persian sees ; while the attitude adopted by the Directorium toward the Eastern Church is toto caelo removed from the diplo- matic attitude of the Lizre du Grant Caan, where something like an alliance is suggested between the Catholic missionaries in the Mongol realms and the native Nestorian Christians of the same countries. And if the identification with John de Cora is unsatis-