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Pascatir is the country of the Bashkirs, Baschkirians, or Pascatirians in Great Bulgaria, called Great Hungary in the text, between the Volga and the Ural. Rubruquis properly rejects the stories of monstrous men, related by the ancients, yet seems to swallow the absurd story of the purple dye, engrafted by the Kathayan priest on a very natural invention for catching apes.
There are many other poor nations in those parts, inhabiting as far to the north as the cold will permit, who join on the west with the country of Pascatir, or the Greater Hungary, of which I have made mention before . In the north the mountains are perpetually covered with snow, and the bounds are unknown by reason of the extreme cold.
All this that I have written concerning the land of Pascatir, I was informed by certain friars predicants, who had travelled there before the irruption of the Tartars; and as they had been subdued by their neighbours the Bulgarians, who were Mahometans, many of them adopted that faith. Other matters respecting these people may be known from various chronicles.
From Russia, Moxel, Greater Bulgaria, Pascatir, which is the greater Hungary, and Kersis, all of which are northern countries and full of woods, and from other countries towards the north which are subject to their authority, they procure valuable furs of many kinds, which I have not seen in our parts.
With them the Blacians or Walachians, the Bulgarians, and the Vandals united. These Bulgarians came from the Greater Bulgaria, The people named Ilac or Vlac, who inhabit beyond the Danube from Constantinople, not far from Pascatir, are the same people, being properly named Blac or Blacians, but as the Tartars cannot pronounce the letter B, they are called Ilac, Vlac, or Wallachians.
From this country of Pascatir the Huns went, who were afterwards called Hungarians. Isidore writes, that with swift horses they passed the walls of Alexander, and the rocks of Caucasus, which opposed the barbarians, and even exacted tribute from Egypt, and laid waste the whole of Europe as far as France, being even more warlike in their day than the Tartars are now.
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