Giovanni de' Marignolli

The mission left Avignon in December 1338;[1] picked up the "Tatar" envoys at Naples on 10 February 1339;[16] and arrived at Pera near Constantinople on May 1.

[16] Leaving June 24, they sailed across the Black Sea to Caffa on the Crimea, whence they travelled to the court of Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde, at Sarai on the Volga.

The khan entertained them hospitably during the winter of 1339-40[1] and then sent them with an escort[16] across the steppes to Armalec, or Almaliq (within modern Huocheng County), the northern seat of the house of Chaghatai.

First he visited the shrine of St Thomas near the modern Madras, and then proceeded to what he calls the kingdom of Saba, and identifies with the Sheba of Scripture, but which seems from various particulars to have been Java.

They found shelter in the little port of Pervily or Pervilis (Beruwala or Berberyn) in the south-west of Ceylon; but here the legate fell into the hands of "a certain tyrant Coya Jaan (Khoja Jahan), a eunuch and an accursed Saracen," who professed to treat him with all deference but detained him four months and plundered all the gifts and Eastern rarities that he was carrying home.

[3] After this we have only fragmentary notices, showing that his route to Europe lay by Ormuz, the ruins of Babel, Bagdad, Mosul, Aleppo and thence to Damascus and Jerusalem.

The writer is an unnamed Archbishop of Armagh, easily identified with Richard Fitz Ralph, a strenuous foe of the Franciscans, who had broken lances in controversy with Ockham and Burley.

The letter implies that some intention had been intimated from Avignon of sending Marignolli to Ireland in connexion with matters then in debate—a project which stirs Fitz Ralph's wrath.

[5][d] The fragmentary notes of Marignolli's eastern travels often contain vivid remembrance and graphic description, but combined with excessive vanity and an incoherent lapse from one thing to another.

Indeed, the mode in which they were elicited illustrates how little medieval travellers thought of publication:[1] The emperor Charles, instead of urging his chaplain to write a history of his vast journeys, set him to the repugnant task of recasting the annals of Bohemia and the clerk consoled himself by salting the insipid stuff with interpolations, à propos de bottes, of his recollections of Asiatic travel.