PREFACE

Summary

The little work here presented was printed in the original Latin at Paris in 1839, under the editorship of M. Coquebert-Montbret, in the Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires, publié par la Société de Géographie, vol. iv.

I cannot find that it has ever been published or translated in England, or even noticed in any English book, except in the Ceylon of Sir James Emerson Tennent, where there is an allusion to it.

The book itself does not add anything to our knowledge; but the observations of a traveller who resided in India so far back as the beginning of the fourteenth century must be very dull indeed if sufficient interest cannot be derived from their date to make them acceptable. Nor do I think our author is dull, whilst I regret that he is so brief, and has omitted so much that he might really have laid up as an addition to our knowledge. The very fact that there were Roman Catholic missionaries and a bishop in India at that period, just between the days of Marco Polo and those of Ibn Batuta, may indeed be excavated from old ecclesiastical chronicles; but it is certainly unfamiliar to the knowledge of those who do not dig in such mines.