Note (2) — 36.—The countries in which I have been, that belong to Tartary.

(2.) “A city called Haitzicherchen, which is a large city.”—Hadjy-tarkhan was situated on the right bank of the Volga, a few miles above the modern Astrahan, and near Itil, capital of the kingdom of the Khozars, an ancient city that had already disappeared in the time of Rubruquis, 1253, when Hadjy-tarkhan itself, it would appear, had scarcely begun to exist. Ibn Batouta (1331) notes having sojourned at the last-named place upon the occasion of his journey from Soudagh to Saraï; and Pegolotti says that travellers tarried there when on their way to China. The name appears as Azitarcan in the Catalan atlas, 1375, in which work, and in the splendid map of the brothers Pizzigani, we also find “Civitat de ssara”, or “Civitas Regio d’Sara”, the city of New Sarai, destroyed by Timour, and mentioned by Schiltberger. Its ruins are still to be seen near the town of Tzaref on the Akhtouba, an arm of the Volga. There was, however, the other Saraï, spoken of by Aboulfeda, Ibn Batouta, and Pegolotti, the remains of which are visible, also on the Akhtouba, but at a distance of two hundred miles to the south of Tzaref, and near Seliterny-gorodok, where numerous coins of the khan Uzbek have lately been found by a professor of the University of Kazan. No such coins have ever been picked up at Tzaref, which is not surprising, seeing that it was Janibek, the son of Uzbek, who transferred his residence from Saraï to the new city of that name, as Colonel Yule has already shown in one of his notes to Marco Polo (i, 6), and as I have since sought to prove in an article that was published at Kieff in 1876 (Troudy 3go. Archeo. Syezda).