Among Polo’s successors were John of Montecorvino (_c._ 1247–1328), a Franciscan, who became Archbishop of Peking, and wrote the first valuable account of the Coromandel coast of India about 1291; and Jordanus, a French Dominican, who, having carried Catholicism into India about 1320, improved even upon Polo’s account of the general geography, climate, and products of the peninsula. Another Franciscan who was also a skilled observer both in China and India was Odoric of Pordenone (_c._ 1236–81).
It may be worth recalling the difficulties which stood in the way of immediately making use of the work of travellers and students at this period. Printing was not to come into use in Europe for a century yet. Scribes, no doubt, tended to pay most attention to works of the most popular sort, and it is, therefore, no matter for wonder if the works of conscientious travellers, such as we have been describing, did not obtain anything like a wide circulation within a short period of their production. On the other hand, a work which did obtain very wide favour, judged by the standard of the time, was that much-discussed account of wholly, or very largely, imaginary experiences and wonders which appeared first in French about 1357–71 under the name of Jean de Mandeville, or, in the more familiar English form, Sir John Mandeville. This is an account in the nature of a parody of the work of Odoric and other eastern travellers, in the sense that the writer took their facts and substituted or superimposed his own fictions. It is a matter for discussion how far his work was based, if it were based at all, on independent travel and research; yet it contains something of interest to students of the history of geography, if only as an opportunity for the exercise of their imagination--as, for example, when the writer tells a story of a man who started forth from his home and travelled always eastward, until at last he reached it again, thus encircling the globe. The difficulties in the way of disseminating knowledge will similarly account for the fact that, although the great Arab traveller Ibn Batuta has his place in this period, he in no way affected European geographical study. He was a native of Tangier (1304–78), who occupied thirty years of his life in travel, covering extraordinary distances in west, south, and east Asia, and in Africa, and wrote valuable accounts. Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Persia, the territories north of the Black Sea and the Caspian, were all well known to this wanderer, who also sailed through the Red Sea and along the East African coast, visited many parts of India, the Maldive Islands, Ceylon, Sumatra, and China, and closed his career as a traveller with journeys through Spain and across the Sahara to Timbuktu. His journeys are estimated to have amounted to more than 75,000 miles. Modern criticism has proved the remarkable accuracy of his descriptions of many lands and places; but they were unknown to contemporary Europe, and, indeed, until the last century.