spoils of this victory.

But two great names close the five hundred years of Arab learning.

1. Ibn Batuta (_c._ 1330), who made himself as much at home in China as
in his native Morocco, is the last of Mohammedan travellers of real
importance. Though we have only abridgments of his work left to us,
Colonel Yule is well within his rights in his deliberate judgment, "that
it must rank at least as one of the four chief guide books of the
Middle Ages," along with the _Book of Ser Marco Polo_ and the journals
of the two Friar-travellers, Friar Odoric and Friar William de
Rubruquis.

2. With _Abulfeda_ the Eastern school of Moslem geography comes to an
end, as the Western does with Ibn Batuta. In the early years of the
fourteenth century he rewrote the "story and description of the Land of
Islam," with a completeness quite encyclopædic. But his work has all the
failings of a compilation, however careful, in that, or any, age. It is
based upon information, not upon inspection; it is in no sense original.
As it began in imitation, so it ended. If it rejects Ptolemy, it is only
to follow Strabo or someone else; on all the mathematical and
astronomical data its doctrine is according to the Alexandrians of
twelve hundred years before, and this last _précis_ of the science of a
great race and a great religion can only be understood in the light of
its model--in Greek geography.




CHAPTER I.