In August Marco Minghetti succeeded in forming a military league and a customs union between Tuscany, Romagna and the duchies, and in procuring the adoption of the Piedmontese codes; and envoys were sent to Paris to mollify Napoleon.
Marco remained for seventeen years in the service of the Great Khan, and was employed on many important missions.
Far superior to these maps is Fra Mauro's map (1457), for the author has availed himself not only of the information collected by Marco Polo and earlier travellers, but *was able, by personal intercourse, to gather additional information from Nicolo de' Conti, who had returned from the east in 1440, and more especially from Abyssinians who lived in Italy at that time.
Marco Polo in the latter part of the 13th century, and Friar John of Montecorvino, afterwards archbishop of Cambaluc, in the beginning of the 14th, speak of the descendants of Prester John as holding territory under the great khan in a locality which can be identified with the plain of KukuKhotan, north of the great bend of the Yellow river and about 280 m.
Moreover, we know that the Ethiopic Church did long possess a chapel and altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and, though we have been unable to find travellers' testimony to this older than about 1497, it is quite possible that the appropriation may have originated much earlier.(fn 5) We know from Marco Polo that about a century after the date of Pope Alexander's epistle a mission was sent by the king of Abyssinia to Jerusalem to make offerings on his part at the Church of the Sepulchre.
