journey to the Great Khan in the years 1245–47, written by Franciscan friars, members of the expedition prepared by the pope Innocent IV and headed by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine. One of the members of this expedition was Benedict of Poland. He wrote a short account of his journey, De Itinere Fratrum Minorum ad Tartaros. An author of the more extensive account of this journey, based on Benedict's oral narrative, Hystoria Tartarorum, was C. de Bridia, probably also a Pole. Hystoria Tartarorum contains an important description of the Battle of Legnica, one of the most important events during the Mongol invasion of Poland. 19th century The first nineteenth-century Polish traveler to Mongolia was Jan Potocki (1761–1815), who visited Mongolia during his journey to China and wrote a travel report in French (Polish translation Podróże, 1959). The father of the Polish Mongolian philology was Józef Kowalewski, who visited Mongolia several times (1829, 1831–33). Kowalewski was a former filomata, a friend of Adam Mickiewicz, a professor of Mongolian philology at the University of Kazan, an author of several works devoted to very diverse aspects of Mongolian culture and language, often pioneering. His most important work is a Mongolian–Russian–French dictionary in three volumes (1844–49). Polish research on the geography and culture of Mongolia intensified after the January Uprising, when many Poles became political prisoners in neighboring Siberia – one of the most famous among Poles participating in the research expeditions to Mongolia was Aleksander Czekanowski. 20th century World-famous among turkologists and mongolists was a Polish scholar Władysław Kotwicz, author of many works devoted to Mongolia and Mongolian literature, the discoverer (1912) of the old-Mongolian stone inscriptions in the Erdene Zuu Monastery. Other well-known Polish mongolists were Marian Lewicki, Stanisław Kałużynski and Stanisław Godziński. Lewicki prepared editions of many monuments of the classical Mongolian literature. In 20th-century Mongolia there was interest in Polish literature, strengthened by the fact that both communist Mongolia and communist Poland belonged to the same political bloc. Many translations of Polish literary works into Mongolian were published, although they were usually translated indirectly, through the Russian language. Especially a large number of Polish children's literature was translated into Mongolian. However, most of these texts were published in magazines and not as books. Some Mongolian citizens studied Polish philology at Polish universities. Some translators translated literary works directly from Polish into Mongolian. Among the most important were D. Biambaa (poems