BIOGRAPHICAL AND INTRODUCTORY NOTICES

These notices of Eastern Travel are found, like unexpected fossils in a mud-bank, imbedded in a Chronicle of Bohemia, which was first printed from an old MS. in the latter half of the last century. Of the author there is not very much to be learned, except what can be gathered from these reminiscences of his. John of Florence, a Minorite, is known to the ecclesiastical biographers as the author of sundry theological works, and as Bishop of Bisignano. And a John of Florence, a Minorite, is also known, through brief notices in the Annals of Raynaldus and Wadding, as having gone on a mission to Cathay. But till the publication of the Bohemian Chronicle the identity of these Johns does not seem to have been suspected, and even since the date of that publication they have been carefully discriminated by a very learned Franciscan.

The two Johns were, however, one. He was a native of Florence or its neighbourhood, and came of the Marignolli of San Lorenzo, a noble family of the Republic which derived its name from a village called Marignolle, in the Valley of the Arno, about two miles south-west of the city. The family of the Marignolli was, in the middle ages, one of the most influential in Florence, and its members were generally leaders in the Guelf faction.