_E sichurissimo_! It takes some of the gilt off Columbus and Vasco da Gama and the age (forsooth) of 'discovery'.
But a change came over everything in the middle of the fourteenth century.

Darkness fell again and swallowed up Peking and Hangchow, the great ports, the crowding junks, the noble civilization.

No longer was the great trade route _sichurissimo_, and no longer did Christian friars chant their Masses in Zaiton.

The Tartar dynasty fell and the new rulers of China reverted to the old anti-foreign policy; moreover, Islam spread its conquests all over central Asia and lay like a rampart between the far east and west, a great wall of intolerance and hatred stronger by far than the great wall of stone which the Chinese had once built to keep out the Tartars.

All Marco Polo's marvels became no more than a legend, a traveller's tale.
But that great adventurer was not done for yet.