We have no evidence that either in the 13th or 14th century Cathayans, i.e. Chinese, ever reached Europe, but it is possible that some did, at least in the former century. For, during the campaigns of Hulagu in Persia (1256-1265), and the reigns of his successors, Chinese engineers were employed on the banks of the Tigris, and Chinese astrologers and physicians could be consulted at Tabriz. Many diplomatic communications passed between the Hulaguid Ilkhans and the princes of Christendom. The former, as the great khan's liegemen, still received from him their seals of state; and two of their letters which survive in the archives of France exhibit the vermilion impressions of those seals in Chinese characters--perhaps affording the earliest specimen of that character which reached western Europe.
Just as the Polos were reaching their native city (1295), after an absence of a quarter of a century, the forerunner of a new series of travellers was entering southern China by way of the Indian seas. This was John of Monte Corvino, another Franciscan who, already some fifty years of age, was plunging single-handed into that great ocean of paganism to preach the gospel according to his lights. After years of uphill and solitary toil converts began to multiply; coadjutors joined him. The Papal See became cognizant of the harvest that was being reaped in the far East. It made Friar John archbishop in Cambaluc (or Peking), with patriarchal authority, and sent him batches of suffragan bishops and preachers of his own order. The Roman Church spread; churches and Minorite houses were established at Cambaluc, at Zayton or Tsuan-chow in Fu-kien, at Yang-chow and elsewhere; and the missions flourished under the smile of the great khan, as the Jesuit missions did for a time under the Manchu emperors three centuries and a half later. Archbishop John was followed to the grave, about 1328, by mourning multitudes of pagans and Christians alike. Several of the bishops and friars who served under him have left letters or other memoranda of their experience, e.g. Andrew, bishop of Zayton, John of Cora, afterwards archbishop of Sultania in Persia, and Odoric of Pordenone, whose fame as a pious traveller won from the _vox populi_ at his funeral a beatification which the church was fain to seal. The only ecclesiastical narrative regarding Cathay, of which we are aware, subsequent to the time of Archbishop John, is that which has been gathered from the recollections of Giovanni de' Marignolli, a Florentine Franciscan, who was sent by Pope Benedict XII. with a mission to the great khan, in return for one from that potentate which arrived at Avignon from Cathay in 1338, and who spent four years (1342-1346) at the court of Cambaluc as legate of the Holy See. These recollections are found dispersed incoherently over a chronicle of Bohemia which the traveller wrote by order of the emperor Charles IV., whose chaplain he was after his return.