Note (13) — 36.—The countries in which I have been, that belong to Tartary.

(13.) “and has daily twenty thousand men at his court.”—In writing after his own fashion the native name of Fostat as “Missir”, erroneously called Old Cairo by Europeans (Abd-Allatif, S. de Sacy edition, 424), Schiltberger imagined that the name was equally applicable to Cairo, because at that period the two towns had largely extended towards each other, so as to form one city. De Lannoy (Voy. et Ambass., 80) distinguishes Cairo from Fostat or Misr, which he calls Babylon, a name it had received in consequence of the settlement there of a Babylonian colony in the reign of Cambyses (Noroff, Pout. po Yeghyptou, i, 154). Even now the Copts include a part of Cairo and of Fostat under the name of Boblien—Little Babylon—the new Babylon of the writers of the middle ages, who took it upon themselves to bestow on the sovereigns of Egypt the title of Sultan of Babylon, and some of whom, Arnold of Lubeck for instance (Geschichtschr. der Deutsch. Vorzeit., etc., xiii Jahrhund. iii, 283), have even confounded the Euphrates with the Nile. De Lannoy assists us in a measure to discern the error into which Schiltberger has fallen ... “est à-sçavoir que le Kaire, Babillonne et Boulacq furent jadis chascune ville à par lui, mais à présent s’est tellement édiffiée, que ce n’est que une mesme chose, et y a aucune manière de fossez entre deux plas sans eaue, combien qu’il y a moult de maisons et chemins entre deux, et peut avoir du Kaire à Babillonne trois milles et de Boulacq au Kaire trois mille.” Noroff considered Boulak to be the Egyptian Manchester, because of the manufactories established there by Mehemet Ali. The population of the three towns was quite in proportion to their extent, and certainly so continued until about twenty years before De Lannoy’s arrival, when it decreased; indeed it is stated by Aboul-Mahazin, that Egypt and Syria had fallen preys to every sort of calamity during the reign of Faradj, 1399–1412. Apart from the Mongol invasion and incessant civil war, those countries were assailed by the European maritime powers, and visited by plague and famine, so that the population was reduced by one-third.