ABSTRACT
Westerners were growing increasingly familiar, too, with the products of the Mongol world, like the luxury textiles that figure in the inventory of Marco Polo's goods. Polo's book was translated into several vernacular languages, though Pipino's Latin rendering, made in the second decade of the fourteenth century and extant in sixty manuscripts, was the most widely read. The thing that circumscribed Western perceptions of Asia has to do with discrepancies between new information and that found in traditional authorities. Having been made aware, therefore, of an impressive and powerful civilization in Cathay, Western Christians continued to imagine the Great Khan presiding over it long after he had in fact withdrawn into the steppes of Mongolia. The vast extent of the Mongol realms helped to reinforce the impression that Christians were a small minority. A new world, then, had been opened up to Latin Christians by the Mongol conquests.
