ABSTRACT
Pelliot devoted a long note (Horde d'Or, pp. 144-59; summarized in Recherches, pp. 109-11) to this passage, which in his view represented a confusion between the Vlach people of present-day Rumania and the Ulaq, a race living in the Ural region who are mentioned also by the fourteenth-century traveller John of Marignolli under the name Olachi (Van den Wyngaert, p. 542): both names would have been pronounced Ulaq by the Mongols. At a later date, however, he came to doubt whether the Ulaq ever existed (Polo, p. 760). At one time Rubruck's Ulac were also connected with the Lac of Marco Polo (tr. Ricci, pp. 389, 393), but the identification of these latter by Bratianu (pp. 295-300) with the Lesgians (above, p. 112 and n.5) is now accepted. A new explanation of the problem has recently been proposed by V. Ciociltan, 'Wilhelm von Rubruks Angaben iiber Rumanen und Baschkiren im Lichte der orientalischen Quellen', Sudostforschungen, XLII (1983), 113-22. He suggests that Rubruck's statement has to be understood from the perspective not of Western geographical knowledge but of the friar's oriental informants, for whom the term 'Bashkirs' would have included the Hungarians: this would explain the bizarre geographical data without any need to posit a branch of the Ulac in the Volga-Ural region.
