Note {2} — Chapter I

Note 2.—“Maintes villes et maint chasteaux.” This is a constantly recurring phrase, and I have generally translated it as here, believing chasteaux (castelli) to be used in the frequent old Italian sense of a walled village or small walled town, or like the Eastern Kala’, applied in Khorasan “to everything—town, village, or private residence—surrounded by a wall of earth.” (Ferrier, p. 292; see also A. Conolly, I. p. 211.) Martini, in his Atlas Sinensis, uses “Urbes, oppida, castella,” to indicate the three classes of Chinese administrative cities.