(From Fergusson.)]
NOTE 2. - The Lac of this passage appears to be WALLACHIA. Abulfeda calls
the Wallachs Aulak; Rubruquis Illac, which he says is the same word as
Blac (the usual European form of those days being Blachi, Blachia), but
the Tartars could not pronounce the B (p. 275). Abulghazi says the original
inhabitants of Kipchak were the Urus, the Olaks, the Majars, and the
Bashkirs.
Rubruquis is wrong in placing Illac or Wallachs in Asia; at least the
people near the Ural, who he says were so-called by the Tartars, cannot
have been Wallachs. Professor Bruun, who corrects my error in following
Rubruquis, thinks those Asiatic Blac must have been Polovtzi, or
Cumanians.
[Mr. Rockhill (Rubruck, p. 130, note) writes: "A branch of the Volga
Bulgars occupied the Moldo-Vallach country in about A.D. 485, but it was
not until the first years of the 6th century that a portion of them passed
the Danube under the leadership of Asparuk, and established themselves in
the present Bulgaria, Friar William's 'Land of Assan.'" - H.C.]
NOTE 3. - Oroech is generally supposed to be a mistake for Noroech,
NORWEGE or Norway, which is probable enough. But considering the Asiatic
sources of most of our author's information, it is also possible that
Oroech represents WAREG. The Waraegs or Warangs are celebrated in the
oldest Russian history as a race of warlike immigrants, of whom came Rurik,
the founder of the ancient royal dynasty, and whose name was long preserved
in that of the Varangian guards at Constantinople. Many Eastern
geographers, from Al Biruni downwards, speak of the Warag or Warang as a
nation dwelling in the north, on the borders of the Slavonic countries, and
on the shores of a great arm of the Western Ocean, called the Sea of
Warang, evidently the Baltic. The Waraegers are generally considered to
have been Danes or Northmen, and Erman mentions that in the bazaars of
Tobolsk he found Danish goods known as Varaegian. Mr. Hyde Clark, as I
learn from a review, has recently identified the Warangs or Warings with
the Varini, whom Tacitus couples with the Angli, and has shown probable
evidence for their having taken part in the invasion of Britain. He has
also shown that many points of the laws which they established in Russia
were purely Saxon in character. (Bayer in Comment. Acad. Petropol. IV.
276 seqq.; Fraehn in App. to Ibn Fozlan, p. 177 seqq.; Erman, I. 374;
Sat. Review, 19th June, 1869; Gold. Horde, App. p. 428.)
[1] This Ukak of Ibn Batuta is not, as I too hastily supposed (vol. i. p.
8) the Ucaca of the Polos on the Volga, but a place of the same name
on the Sea of Azof, which appears in some mediaeval maps as Locac or
Locaq (i.e. l'Ocac), and which Elle de Laprimaudaie in his
Periplus of the Mediaeval Caspian, locates at a place called Kaszik, a
little east of Mariupol.
