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Heroes of the Nations.

PER VOLUME, CLOTH, $1.50.—HALF MOROCCO, $1.75.

I.—Nelson, and the Naval Supremacy of England. By W. Clark Russell, author of "The Wreck of the Grosvenor," etc.

II.—Gustavus Adolphus, and the Struggle of Protestantism for Existence. By C.R.L. Fletcher, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

III.—Pericles, and the Golden Age of Athens. By Evelyn Abbott, M.A., Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

IV.—Theodoric the Goth, the Barbarian Champion of Civilisation. By Thomas Hodgkin, author of "Italy and Her Invaders," etc.

V.—Sir Philip Sidney: Type of English Chivalry. By H.R. Fox Bourne.

VI.—Julius Cæsar, and the Organisation of the Roman Empire. By Warde Fowler, M.A., Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.

VII.—Wyclif, Last of the Schoolmen and First of the English Reformers. By Lewis Sergeant.

VIII.—Napoleon, Warrior and Ruler; and the Military Supremacy of Revolutionary France. By William O'Connor Morris.

IX.—Henry of Navarre, and the Huguenots in France. By P.F. Willert, M.A., Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

X.—Cicero, and the Fall of the Roman Republic. By J.L. Strachan-Davidson, M.A., Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

XI.—Abraham Lincoln, and the Downfall of American Slavery. By Noah Brooks.

XII.—Prince Henry (of Portugal) the Navigator, and the Age of Discovery. By C.R. Beazley, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

XIII.—Julian the Philosopher, and the Last Struggle of Paganism against Christianity. By Alice Gardner, Lecturer on Ancient History, Newnham College.

XIV.—Louis XIV., and the Zenith of the French Monarchy. By Arthur Hassall, M.A., Senior Student of Christ Church College, Oxford.

(For titles of volumes next to appear and for further details of this Series see prospectus at end of volume.)

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, Publishers

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Heroes of the Nations

EDITED BY
Evelyn Abbot, M.A.
FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE GLORIA RERUM.—OVID, IN LIVIAM, 265.

THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON FAME SHALL LIVE.

PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

GATEWAY AT BELEM.
with statue, between the doors, of prince henry in armour.

PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

THE HERO OF PORTUGAL AND OF MODERN DISCOVERY

1394-1460 A.D.

WITH AN ACCOUNT OF GEOGRAPHICAL PROGRESS THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE AGES AS THE PREPARATION FOR HIS WORK

BY

C. RAYMOND BEAZLEY, M.A., F.R.G.S.

FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD; GEOGRAPHICAL STUDENT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 1894

Venient annis sæcula seris
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus,
Tethys que novos detegat orbes,
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.

Seneca, Medea 376/380.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

NEW YORK
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET

LONDON
24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND

The Knickerbocker Press

1895

Copyright, 1894

BY

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
G. P. Putnam's Sons

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

LIST OF MAPS.[6]

his volume aims at giving an account, based throughout upon original sources, of the progress of geographical knowledge and enterprise in Christendom throughout the Middle Ages, down to the middle or even the end of the fifteenth century, as well as a life of Prince Henry the Navigator, who brought this movement of European Expansion within sight of its greatest successes. That is, as explained in Chapter I., it has been attempted to treat Exploration as one continuous thread in the story of Christian Europe from the time of the conversion of the Empire; and to treat the life of Prince Henry as the turning-point, the central epoch in a development of many centuries: this life, accordingly, has been linked as closely as possible with what went before and prepared for it; one third of the text, at least, has been occupied with the history of the preparation of the earlier time, and the difference between our account of the eleventh-and fifteenth-century Discovery, for instance, will be found to be chiefly one of less and greater detail. This difference depends, of course, on the prominence in the later time of a figure of extraordinary interest and force, who is the true hero in the drama of the Geographical Conquest of the Outer World that starts from Western Christendom. The interest that centres round Henry is somewhat clouded by the dearth of complete knowledge of his life; but enough remains to make something of the picture of a hero, both of science and of action.

Our subject, then, has been strictly historical, but a history in which a certain life, a certain biographical centre, becomes more and more important, till from its completed achievement we get our best outlook upon the past progress of a thousand years, on this side, and upon the future progress of those generations which realised the next great victories of geographical advance.

The series of maps which illustrate this account, give the same continuous view of the geographical development of Europe and Christendom down to the end of Prince Henry's age. These are, it is believed, the first English reproductions in any accessible form of several of the great charts of the Middle Ages, and taken together they will give, it is hoped, the best view of Western or Christian map-making before the time of Columbus that is to be found in any English book, outside the great historical atlases.

In the same way the text of this volume, especially in the earlier chapters, tries to supply a want—which is believed to exist—of a connected account from the originals known to us, of the expansion of Europe through geographical enterprise, from the conversion of the Empire to the period of those discoveries which mark most clearly the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World.

The chief authorities have been:

For the Introductory chapter: (1) Reinaud's account of the Arabic geographers and their theories in connection with the Greek, in his edition of Abulfeda, Paris, 1848; (2) Sprenger's Massoudy, 1841; (3) Edrisi, translated by Amédée Jaubert; (4) Ibn-Batuta (abridgment), translated by S. Lee, London, 1829; (5) Abulfeda, edited and translated by Reinaud; (6) Abyrouny's India, specially chapters i., 10-14; xvii., 18-31; (7) texts of Strabo and Ptolemy; (8) Wappäus' Heinrich der Seefahrer, part 1.

I. For Chapter I. (Early Christian Pilgrims): (1) Itinera et Descriptiones Terræ Sanctæ, vols. i. and ii., published by the Société de l'Orient, Latin, Geneva, 1877 and 1885, which give the original texts of nearly all the Palestine Pilgrims' memoirs to the death of Bernard the Wise; (2) the Publications of the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society; (3) Thomas Wright's Early Travels in Palestine (Bohn); (4) Avezac's Recueil pour Servir à l'histoire de la géographie; (5) some recent German studies on the early pilgrim records, e.g., Gildemeister on Antoninus of Placentia.

II. For Chapter II. (The Vikings): (1) Snorro Sturleson's Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norse Kings; (2) Dozy's essays; (3) the, possibly spurious, Voyages of the Zeni, with the Journey of Ivan Bardsen, in the Hakluyt Society's Publications.

III. For Chapter III. (The Crusades and Land Travel): (1) Publication of the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society; (2) Avezac's edition of the originals in his Recueil pour Sevir à l'histoire de la géographie; (3) Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither; (4) Yule's Marco Polo; (5) Benjamin of Tudela and others in Wright's Early Travels in Palestine; (6) Yule's Friar Jordanus; (7) Sir John Mandeville's Travels.

IV. For Chapter IV. (Maritime Exploration): (1) The Marino Sanuto Map of 1306; (2) the Laurentian Portolano of 1351; (3) The Catalan Map of 1375-6; (4) scattered notices collected in early chapters of R.H. Major's Prince Henry the Navigator; (5) Béthencourt's Conquest of the Canaries (Hakluyt Society, ed., Major); (6) Wappäus' Heinrich der Seefahrer, part 2.

V. For Chapter V. (Geographical Science): (1) Neckam's De Naturis Rerum; (2) the seven chief Mappe-Mondes of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; (3) the leading Portolani; (4) scattered notices, e.g., from Guyot de Provins' "Bible," Brunetto Latini, Beccadelli of Palermo, collected in early chapters of Major's Henry the Navigator; (5) Wauwerman's Henri le Navigateur.

VI. For Chapter VI. (Portugal to 1400): (1) The Chronicle of Don John I.; (2) Oliveiro Martins' Sons of Don John I.; (3) A. Herculano's History of Portugal; (4) Osbernus de Expugnatione Lixbonensi.

VII. For Chapter VII. (Henry's position in 1415): Azurara's Discovery and Conquest of Guinea.

VIII. For Chapter VIII. (Ceuta): (1) Azurara's Chronicle of the Conquest of Ceuta; (2) Azurara's Discovery of Guinea.

IX. For Chapter IX. (Henry's Settlement at Sagres): (1) Azurara's Guinea; (2) De Barro's Asia; (3) Wauwerman's Henri le Navigateur et l'École Portugaise de Sagres.

X. For Chapter X. (Cape Bojador and the Azores): (1) Azurara's Guinea; (2) O. Martins' Sons of Don John I.

XI. For Chapter XI. (Henry's Political Life, 1433-41): (1) Pina's Chronicle of King Edward; (2) O. Martins' Sons of Don John I.; (3) Azurara's Chronicle of John I.; (4) Pina's Chronicle of Affonso V.

XII. For Chapter XII. (From Boyador to Cape Verde).—(1) Azurara's Guinea; (2) De Barros; (3) Pina's Chronicle of Affonso V.; (4) O. Martins' Sons of Don John I.

For Chapters XIII. to the end.—(1) Azurara's Discovery and Conquest of Guinea; (2) Narratives of Cadamosto and Diego Gomez; (3) Pina's Chronicle of Affonso V.; (4) Prince Henry's Charters.

The three modern lives of Prince Henry which I have chiefly consulted are:

R.H. Major's Henry the Navigator, Wappäus' Heinrich der Seeffahrer, and De Weer's Prinz Heinrich, with O. Martins' Lives of the Infants of the House of Aviz in his Sons of Don John I.

The maps and illustrations have been planned in a regular series.

I. As to the former, they are meant to show in an historical succession the course of geographical advance in Christendom down to the death of Prince Henry (1460). Setting aside the Ptolemy, which represents the knowledge of the world at its height in the pre-Christian civilisation, and the Edrisi which represents the Arabic followers of Ptolemy, whose influence upon early Christian geography was very marked, all the maps reproduced belong to the science of the Christian ages and countries. The two Mappe-mondes above referred to are both placed in the introductory chapter, and are treated only as the most important examples of the science which the Græco-Roman Empire bequeathed to Christendom, but which between the seventh and thirteenth centuries was chiefly worked upon by the Arabs. Among early Christian maps, that of St. Sever, possibly of the eighth century, the Anglo-Saxon map of the tenth century, the Turin Map of the eleventh, and the Spanish map of the twelfth (1109), represent very crude and simple types of sketches of the world, in which within a square or oblong surrounded by the ocean a few prominent features only, such as the main divisions of countries, are attempted. The Anglo-Saxon example, though greatly superior to the others given here, essentially belongs to this kind of work, where some little truth is preserved by a happy ignorance of the travellers' tales that came into fashion later, but where there is only the vaguest and most general knowledge of geographical facts.

On the other hand, in the next group, to which the Psalter map is allied, and in which the Hereford map is our best example, mythical learning—drawn from books like Pliny, Solinus, St. Isidore, and Martianus Capella, which collected stories of beasts and monsters, stones and men, divine, human, and natural marvels on the principle Credo quia impossible—has overpowered every other consideration, and a map of the world becomes a great picture-book of curious objects, in which the very central and primary interest of geography is lost. But by the side of and almost at the same time as these specimens of geographical mythology, geographical science had taken a new start in the coast charts or portolani of Balearic and Italian seamen, some specimens of which form our next set of maps.

Dulcert's portolano of 1339 and the Laurentian of 1351 are two of the best examples of this kind of work, which gave us our first really accurate map of any part of the globe, but which for some time was entirely confined to coast drawing, and was meant to supply the practical wants of captains, pilots, and seamen. The Catalan atlas of 1375-6 shows the portolano type extended to a real Mappa Mundi; the elaborate carefulness and sumptuousness of this example prepares us for the still higher work of Andrea Bianco and of Benincasa in the fifteenth century. As the Laurentian portolano of 1351 commemorates the voyage of 1341 and marks its discoveries in the Atlantic islands, so the Catalan map of 1375-6 commemorates the Catalan voyage of 1346, and gives the best and most up-to-date picture of the N.W. African coast as it was known before Prince Henry's discoveries.

Last of these groups of maps is that of examples from Henry's own age, such as the Fra Mauro map of 1459 or the maps of Andrea Bianco and Benincasa (e.g., 1436, 1448, 1468), among which the first-named is the only one we have been able to give here.

The Borgian map of 1450 is given as an extraordinary specimen of what could be done as late as 1450, not as an example of geographical progress; and the map of 1492, recording Portuguese discoveries down to the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, is added to illustrate the advance of explorers in the years closely following Henry's death, as it was realised at the time.

The maps have in most cases been set from the modern standpoint, but, as will readily be seen by the position of the names, the normal mediæval setting was quite different, with the S. or E. at the top.

II. The illustrations aim at giving portraits or pictures of the chief persons and places connected with the life of Prince Henry. There are three of the Prince himself; one from the Paris MS. of Azurara, one from the gateway of the great convent church of Belem, one from the recumbent statue over his tomb at Batalha. Two others give: (1) The whole group of the royal tombs of Henry's house,—of his father, mother, and brothers in the aisle at Batalha, and (2) the recumbent statues of his father and mother, John and Philippa, in detail; the exterior and general effect of the same church—Portugal's Westminster, and the mausoleum of the Navigator's own family of Aviz—comes next, in a view of this greatest of Portuguese shrines.

Coimbra University, with which as rector or chancellor or patron Prince Henry was so closely connected, for which he once provided house room, and in which his benefactions earned him the title of "Protector of the studies of Portugal" is given to illustrate his life as a student and a man of science; the mother church of the order of Christ at Thomar may remind us of another side of his life—as a military monk, grand master of an order of religious chivalry which at least professed to bind its members to a single life, and which under his lead took an active part in the exploration and settlement of the African coasts and the Atlantic islands.

The portraits of Columbus, Da Gama, and Albuquerque, which conclude this set of illustrations, are given as portraits of three of Prince Henry's more or less conscious disciples and followers, of three men who did most to realise his schemes. The first of these, who owed to Portuguese advance towards the south the suggestion of corresponding success in the west, and who found America by the western route to India,—as Henry had planned nearly a century before to round Africa and reach Malabar by the eastern and southern way,—was the nearest of the Prince's successful imitators in time, the greatest in achievement; he was not a mere follower of the Portuguese initiative, for he struck out a new line or at least a neglected one, made the greatest of all geographical additions to human knowledge, and took the most daring plunge into the unknown that has ever been taken—but Columbus, beside his independent position and interest, was certainly on one side a disciple of Henry the Navigator, and drew much of his inspiration from the impulse that the Prince had started. Da Gama, the first who sailed direct from Lisbon to India round Africa, and Albuquerque, the maker, if not the founder, of the Portuguese empire in the East, were simply the realisers of the vast ambitions that take their start from the work and life of Prince Henry, and he has a right to claim them as two leading champions of his plans and policy. In many points Albuquerque, like Columbus, is more than a follower; but in the main outline of his achievement he follows upon the work of other men, and, among these men, of none so much as the Hero of Portugal and of modern discovery.

Lastly. I have to thank many friends generally for their constant kindness and readiness to assist in any way, and in particular several for the most generous and valuable help in certain parts.

Mr. T.A. Archer, besides the benefit of his suggestions throughout, has given special aid in Chapters I., III., V., and the Introductory Chapter, especially where anything is said of the connection of geographical progress with the Crusades.[7]

Mr. F. York Powell has revised Chapter II. on the Vikings, and Professor Margoliouth has done the same for the Introductory Chapter on Greek and Arabic geography; Mr. Coote has not only given me every help in the map room of the British Museum, but has read the proofs of Chapter V. Mr. H. Yule-Oldham in Chapter XVIII. on the Voyage of Cadamosto, and Mr. Prestage in Chapters VIII. and IX. on Prince Henry's capture of Ceuta and settlement at Sagres, have been most kind in offering suggestions. For several hints useful in Chapter I.—the early Christian pilgrims—I have also to thank Professor Sanday; and for revision of a great part of the proof-sheets of the entire book, Mr. G.N. Richardson and the Rev. W.H. Hutton.

As to the illustrations, of portraits and monuments, etc., I am especially obliged to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University (Dr. Boyd), who has allowed his water-colour paintings of Portuguese subjects to be reproduced; and to the Rev. R. Livingstone of Pembroke, and Sir John Hawkins of Oriel, for their loan of photographs.

Prince Henry The Navigator.

The Lusitanian Prince who, heaven-inspired,
To love of useful glory roused mankind,
And in unbounded commerce mixed the world.

Thomson: Seasons, Summer, 1010-2.

INTRODUCTION.

THE GREEK AND ARABIC IDEAS OF THE WORLD, AS THE CHIEF INHERITANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN MIDDLE AGES IN GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE.

rabic science constitutes one of the main links between the older learned world of the Greeks and Latins and the Europe of Henry the Navigator and of the Renaissance. In geography it adopted in the main the results of Ptolemy and Strabo; and many of the Moslem travellers and writers gained some additional hints from Indian, Persian, and Chinese knowledge; but, however much of fact they added to Greek cartography, they did not venture to correct its postulates.

And what were these postulates? In part, they were the assumptions of modern draughtsmen, but in some important details they differed. And first, as to agreement. Three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, an encircling ocean, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Caspian, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, the South Asiatic, and North and West European coasts were indicated with more or less precision in the science of the Antonines and even of Hannibal's age. Similarly, the Nile and Danube, Euphrates and Tigris, Indus and Ganges, Jaxartes and Oxus, Rhine and Ebro, Don and Volga, with the chief mountain ranges of Europe and Western Asia, find themselves pretty much in their right places in Strabo's description, and are still better placed in the great chart of Ptolemy. The countries and nations from China to Spain are arranged in the order of modern knowledge. But the differences were fundamental also. Never was there a clearer outrunning of knowledge by theory, science by conjecture, than in Ptolemy's scheme of the world (c. a.d. 130). His chief predecessors, Eratosthenes and Strabo, had left much blank space in their charts, and had made many mistakes in detail, but they had caught the main features of the Old World with fair accuracy. Ptolemy, in trying to fill up what he did not know from his inner consciousness, evolved a parody of those features. His map, from its intricate falsehood, backed as it was by the greatest name in geographical science, paralysed all real enlargement of knowledge till men began to question, not only his facts, but his theories. And as all modern science, in fact, followed the progress of world-knowledge, or "geography," we may see how important it was for this revolution to take place, for Ptolemy to be dethroned.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PTOLEMY.
[(see list of maps)]

The Arabs, commanding most of the centres of ancient learning (Ptolemy's own Alexandria above all), riveted the pseudo-science of their predecessors on the learned world, along with the genuine knowledge which they handed down from the Greeks. In many details they corrected and amplified the Greek results. But most of their geographical theories were mere reproductions of Ptolemy's, and to his mistakes they added wilder though less important confusions or inventions of their own. The result of all this, by the tenth century a.d., was a geography, based not on knowledge, but on ideas of symmetry. It was a scheme fit for the Arabian Nights.

And how did Ptolemy lend himself to this?

His chief mistakes were only two;—but they were mistakes from which at any rate Strabo and most of the Greek geographers are free. He made the Indian Ocean an inland sea, and he filled up the Southern Hemisphere with Africa, or the unknown Antarctic land in which he extended Africa.[8] The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one side to the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west, though there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it was not yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a mélange of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work of imaginary astronomical reckonings. On the far east, Ptolemy joined China and Africa; and on this imaginary western coast, fronting Malacca and Further India, he placed various gratuitous towns and rivers. Coming to smaller matters, he cut away the whole of the Indian peninsula proper, though preserving the Further or "Golden" Chersonesus of the Malays, and he enlarged Taprobane, or Ceylon, to double the size of Asia Minor. Thus the southern coast of Asia from Arabia to the Ganges ran almost due east, with a strait of sea coming through the modern Carnatic, between the continent and the Great Spice Island, which included most of the Deccan. The Persian Gulf, much greater on this map than the Black Sea, was made equal in length and breadth; the shape of the Caspian was, so to say, turned inside out and its length given as from east to west, instead of from north to south; while the coast line, even of the familiar Euxine, Ægean, and Southern Mediterranean, was anything but true. Scandinavia was an island smaller than Ireland; Scotland represented a great eastern bend of Britain, with the Shetlands and Färoes (Thule) lying a short distance to the north, but on the left-hand side of the great island. The Sea of Azov, hardly inferior to the Euxine, stretched north half way across Russia. All Central Africa and the great Southern or Antarctic continent was described as pathless desert—"a land uninhabitable from the heat"; and the sources of the Nile were accounted for by the marshes and Mountains of the Moon.

Thus all the problems of ancient geography were explained: where Ptolemy's knowledge failed him altogether, no Western of that time had ever been, or was likely to go. The whole realised and unrealised world was described with such clearness and consistency, men thought, that what was lacking in Aristotle was now supplied.

Yet it is worth while observing how, centuries before Ptolemy, in the ages nearer to Aristotle himself, the geography of Eratosthenes and Strabo, by a more balanced use of knowledge and by a greater restraint of fancy, had composed a far more reliable chart.[9]

This earlier and discredited map avoided all the more serious perversions of Ptolemy. Africa was cut off at the limit of actual knowledge, about Cape Non on the west and Cape Guardafui on the east; and the "Cinnamon-bearing Coast," between these points, was fringed by the Mountains of Æthiopia, where the Nile rose. This was the theory which revived on the decline of the Ptolemaic, and which encouraged the Portuguese sailors with hopes of a quick approach to India round Africa, as the great eastern bend of the Guinea coast seemed to suggest. Further, on this pre-Ptolemaic map the Southern Ocean was left untouched by a supposed Southern Continent, and except for an undue shrinkage of the Old World in general as an island in the midst of the vast surrounding ocean, a reliable description of Western Asia and Central Europe and North Africa was in the hands of the learned world two hundred years before Christ.

It is true that Strabo's China is cramped and cut short; that his Ceylon (Taprobane) is even larger than Ptolemy's; that Ireland (Ierne) appears to the north of Britain; and that the Caspian joins the North Sea by a long and narrow channel; but the true shape of India, of the Persian Gulf and the Euxine, of the Sea of Azov and the Mediterranean, is marked rightly enough in general outline. This earlier chart has not the elaborate completeness of Ptolemy's, but it is free from his enormous errors, and it has all the advantage of science, however imperfect, over brilliant guessing.

Of course, even in Ptolemy, this guess-work pure and simple only comes in at intervals and does not so much affect the central and, for his day, far more important tracts of the Old World, but we have yet to see how, in the mediæval period and under Arabic imagination, all geography seemed likely to become an exercise of fancy.

The chief Greek descriptions of the world, we must clearly remember, were before the mediæval workers, Christian and Moslem, from the first; these men took their choice, and the point is that they, and specially the Arabs, chose with rare exceptions the last of these, the Ptolemaic system, because it was the more ambitious, symmetrical, and pretty.

Let us trace for a moment the gradual development of this geographical mythology.

Starting with the notion of the world as a disc, or a ball, the centre of the universe, round which moved six celestial circles, of the Meridian, the Equator, the Ecliptic, the two Tropics, and the Horizon, the Arab philosophers on the side of the earth's surface worked out a doctrine of a Cupola or Summit of the world, and on the side of the heavens a pseudo-science of the Anoua or Settings of the Constellations, connected with the twelve Pillars of the Zodiac and the twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon.

With Arabic astrology we are not here concerned; it is only worth noting in this connection as the possible source of early Christian knowledge of the Southern Cross and other stars famous in the story of exploration, such as Dante shows in the first canto of his Purgatorio. But the geographical doctrines of Islam, compounded from the Hebrew Pentateuch and the theoretical parts of Ptolemy, had a more immediate and reactionary effect on knowledge. The symmetrical Greek divisions of land into seven zones or climates; and of the world's surface,[10] into three parts water and one part terra firma; the Indian fourfold arrangement of "Romeland" and the East; the similar fourfold Chinese partition of China, India, Persia, and Tartary: all these reappeared confusedly in Arabic geography. From India and the Sanscrit "Lanka," they seem to have got their first start on the myth of Odjein, Aryn, or Arim, "the World's Summit"; from Ptolemy the sacred number of 360 degrees of longitude was certainly derived, beautifully corresponding to the days of the year, and neatly divided into 180 of land or habitable earth and 180 of sea, or unharvested desert. With the seven climates they made correspond the great Empires of the world—chief among which they reckoned the Caliphate (or Bagdad), China, Rome, Turkestan, and India.

The sacred city of Odjein had been the centre of most of the earlier Oriental systems; in the Arabic form of Arim ("The Cupola of the Earth"), it became the fixed point round which circled mediæval theories of the world's shape. "Somewhere in the Indian Ocean between Comorin and Madagascar," became the compromise when the mountain could not be found off any of the known coast-lines; it was mixed up with notions of the Roc, and the Moon Mountains in Africa, of the Magnet Island and of the Eastern Kingdom made out of one vast pearl; and even in Roger Bacon it serves as an algebraic sign for a mathematical centre of the world.

The enlargement of knowledge, though forcing upon Arabic science a conviction of Ptolemy's mistake in over-extending the limits of the world known to him, only led to the invention of a scholastic distinction between the real and the traditional East and West, while the confusion was made perfect by the travestied history always so popular among Orientals. The "Gades of Alexander and Hercules," the farthest points east and west, were named after the mythical conquests of the real Iskander and the mythical hero of Greeks and Phœnicians. Arim in the middle, with the pillars of Hercules and Alexander, and the north and south poles at equal distance from it—the centre and the four corners of the world as neatly fixed as geometry could define—this was the map, first of the Arabs, and then of their Christian scholars.

To form any idea of the complete spell thus cast over thought both in Islam and Christendom, we may look at the words of European scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living far from Islam, long after its intellectual glory had begun to decay, and at a time when Christian scholastic philosophy had reached an independent position. Gerard of Cremona and Adelard of Bath (the translator of the great Arabic geographer, Mohammed Al-Kharizmy) in the twelfth century, Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus in the later thirteenth, are all as clear about their geographical postulates as about their theological or ethical rules. And what concerns us here is that they exactly reflect the mind of the Arabic science or pseudo-science of the time just preceding, so that their words may represent to us the state of Mohammedan thought between the eighth and twelfth centuries, between the writers at the Court of Caliph Almamoun (813-833) and Edrisi at the Court of King Roger of Sicily (1150).

(1.) Adelard, summarising Mohammed Al-Kharizmy with the results of his Paris education, tells us of the Arabic "Examination of planets and of time, starting from the centre of the world, called Arim, from which place to the four ends of the earth the distance is equal, viz., ninety degrees, answering to the fourth part of the world's circumference. It is tedious and unending to attempt to place all the countries of the world and to fix all the marks of time. So the meridian is taken as the measure of the latter and Arim of the former, and from this starting-point it is not hard to fix other countries." "Arim," he concludes, "is under the equator, at the point where there is no latitude," and he plainly implies that there were then existing among the Arabs tables calculating all the chief places of every country from the meridian of Arim.

(2.) Gerard of Cremona, who, though for some time a resident at Toledo, is essentially an Italian, tells us about the "Middle of the World," from which longitudes were calculated, "called Arim," and "said to be in India," whose longitude from west to east or from east to west is ninety degrees.

In his Theory of the Planets Gerard tells us still more wonderful things. Arim was a geographical centre known and used by Hermes Trismegistus and by Ptolemy, as well as by the great Arab geographers; Alexander of Macedon marched just as far to the east of Arim as Hercules to the west; both reached the encircling ocean, and accordingly "Arim is equidistant from both the Gades, 90 degrees; likewise from each pole, north and south, the same, 90 degrees." This all recurs in the tables of Alphonso the Wise of Castille about a.d. 1260, and two of the greatest of mediæval thinkers, Albert and Roger Bacon, reproduced the essential points of this doctrine, its false symmetry, and its balance of the true and the traditional, with variations of their own.

(3.) Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus, second only to Aquinas among the Continental Schoolmen, in his View of Astronomy, repeats Adelard upon the question of Arim, "where there is no latitude," while (4) Roger Bacon discusses not only the true and the traditional East and West, but even a twofold Arim, one "under the solstice, the other under the equinoctial zone." Arim he finds not to be in the centre of the real world, but only of the traditional. In another passage of the Opus Majus, Bacon, our first English worker in the exact sciences, allows the world-summit not to be exactly 90 degrees from the east, although so placed by mathematicians. Yet there is no contradiction, he urges, because the men of theory are "speaking of the habitable world known to them, according to the true understanding of latitude and longitude," and this "true understanding" is "not as great as has been realised in travel by Pliny and others." "The longitude of the habitable world is more than half of the whole circuit." This, reproduced in the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Peter Ailly (1410), fell into the hands of Columbus and helped to fix his doctrines of the shape of the world ("in the form of a pear") of the terrestrial paradise, and of the earth's circumference,—so enormously contracted as practically to abolish the Pacific.[11]

To return to the Arabs: We have seen how they not merely followed Greek theories, which their own experience as conquerors in the Further East went to discredit, but, in the great outlines of geography, added to earlier errors, put prejudice in the place of knowledge, and handed on to Christendom a half-fanciful map of the world. It only remains for us to illustrate their leading fault, of a too vivid fancy, with a few details on minor points.

(1.) Ptolemy's "Habitable Quarter" of the world, amounting to just half the longitude of the globe, was literally accepted by the Moslem world, as it accepted the Pentateuch from the moment when it began its study of science at the Court of Almamoun (813-833). But, as the conquests of the Caliphs disclosed districts in the east far beyond Ptolemy's limits, it was necessary, in case of keeping his data for the whole, to compress the part which alone was to be found fully described in his chart: "On the west, unhappily, there were no countries newly discovered to compensate for this abridgment." By Massoudy's time,—by the tenth century,—fact and theory were thus hopelessly at variance.

(2.) On the shape of Africa, the mass of Arabic opinion confirmed Ptolemy, but among the more enlightened there is traceable from Massoudy's time a tendency either to react towards Strabo's partly agnostic position, or to invent some new theory rather more in harmony with the known facts. That is, either their later map-makers cut off Africa at Cape Non or Bojador and Cape Guardafui, and gave away the rest to the "Green Sea of Darkness," or, like Massoudy, they sketched a great Southern Continent, divided from Africa by a narrow channel, which connected the Western Ocean with the Sea of Habasch—of Abyssinia or India. In either case Africa was left an island.

(3.) The words "Gog and Magog" from Jeremiah, describing the nomades of Central Asia, appear in the Koran as Yadjoudj and Madjoudj. The complete story, in the tenth century and in Edrisi's day, connects them with Alexander the Great, who is also found in the Koran as Doul-Carnain, and with the Wall of China. "When the Conqueror," said the Arabs, "reached the place near where the sun rose, he was implored to build a wall to shut off the marauders of Yadjoudj and Madjoudj from the rich countries of the South." So he built a rampart of iron across the pass by which alone Touran joined Iran, and henceforth Turks and Tartars were kept outside. Till the Arabs reached the Caucasus, they generally supposed this to answer to Alexander's wall; when facts dispelled this theory, the unknown Ural or Altai Mountains served instead; finally, as the Moslems became masters of Central Asia, the Wall of China, beyond the Gobi desert, alone satisfied the conditions of shadowy but historic grandeur, beyond all practical danger of verification.

(4.) In striking contrast with the steady advance of Arabic exploration and trade in the Eastern Sea is the Moslem horror of the Western Ocean beyond Europe and Africa, the "Green Sea of Darkness" or the Atlantic. And what we have to note is that they imparted much of this paralysing cowardice to the Christian nations. Only the Northmen of Scandinavia, living a life apart, and forced to make their way over the wild North Sea, were untouched by this southern superstition, and ventured across the ocean by the Färoes, Iceland, and Greenland, to the coast of Labrador.

The doctors of the Koran indeed thought that a man mad enough to embark for the unknown, even on a coasting voyage, should be deprived of civil rights. Ibn Said goes further, and says no one has ever done this: "whirlpools always destroy any adventurer." As late as the generation immediately before Henry the Navigator, about a.d. 1390, another light of Moslem science declared the Atlantic to be "boundless, so that ships dare not venture out of sight of land, for even if the sailors knew the direction of the winds, they would not know whither those winds would carry them, and as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run a risk of being lost in mist, fog, and vapour. The limit of the West is the Atlantic Ocean."

This was the final judgment of the Arabic race and its subject allies upon the western limits of the world, and in two ways they helped to fix this belief, derived from the timid coasting-traders of the Roman Empire on Greek and Latin Christendom. First, the Spanish Caliphate cut off all access to the Western Sea beyond the Bay of Biscay, from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. Not till the capture of Lisbon in 1147, could Christian enterprise on this side gain any basis, or starting-point. Not till the conquest of the Algarve in the extreme south-west of the peninsula, at the end of the twelfth century, was this enterprise free to develop itself. Secondly, in the darkest ages of Christian depression, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth centuries, when only the brief age of Charlemagne offered any chance of an independent and progressive Catholic Empire in the west, the Arabs became recognised along with the Byzantines as the main successors of Greek culture. The science, the metaphysic, the abstract ideas of these centuries came into Germany, France, and Italy from Cordova and from Bagdad, as much as from Byzantium. And on questions like the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean, or the shape of Africa,—where Islam had all the field to itself, and there was no positive and earlier discovery which might contradict a natural reluctance to test tradition by experiment—Christendom accepted the Arabic verdict with deference.

In the same way, on still more difficult points, such as the theory of a canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea, or from the Caspian to the Arctic circle, or from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Paris and Rome and Bologna and Oxford accepted the Arabic descriptions.

It has been necessary for us to attend to the defects of Arabic geography, in order to understand how in the long Saracen control of the world's trade routes and of geographical tradition, science and seamanship were so little advanced. Between Ptolemy and Henry of Portugal, between the second and the fifteenth centuries, the only great extension of men's knowledge of the world was: (1) in the extreme north, where the semi-Christian, semi-Pagan Vikings reached perhaps as far as the present site of New York and founded, on another side, the Mediæval Kingdom of Russia; (2) on the south-east coast of Africa, from Cape Guardafui to Madagascar, which was opened up by the trading interest of the Emosaid family (800-1300); (3) in the far east, in Central and Further Asia, by the discoveries of Marco Polo and the Friar preachers following on the tracks of the earlier Moslem travellers. The first of these was a Northern secret, soon forgotten, or an abortive development, cut short by the Tartars; the second was an Arabic secret, jealously guarded as a commercial right; the third alone added much direct new knowledge to the main part of the civilised world.

But throughout their period of commercial rule from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, the Arabs took a keen interest in land traffic, conquest, and exploration. They were of small account at sea; it took them some time to turn to their own purposes Hippalus' discovery (in the second century a.d.) of the monsoon in the Indian Ocean; but, on land, Moslem travellers and writers—generally following in the wake of their armies, but sometimes pressing on ahead of them—did not a little to enlarge the horizon of the Mohammedan world, though it was not till Marco Polo and the Franciscan missionaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that Christian Europe shared in this gain.

As the early Caliphs conquered, they made surveys of their new dominions. Thus after Tarik and Mousa had overrun Spain, Walid at Damascus required from them an account of the land and its resources. The universal obligation of the Mecca pilgrimage compelled every Moslem to travel once in his life; and many an Arab, after the Caliphate was settled in power from the Oxus to the Pyrenees, journeyed to and fro with the joy of a master going over vast estates, shewing his dreaded turban to subjects of every nation.

This, however, was not geographical science, or even pseudo-science. Before Mohammed the Arabs had possessed some knowledge of the stars and used it for astrology; but it was at the Court of Almamoun (813-833) that their inquiring spirits first set themselves to answer the great question of geography—Where? Through the ninth and tenth centuries there arose a succession of travellers and thinkers who, with all their wild dreamings, preserved the best results of Greek maps and would have made much greater advances but for their helplessness in original work. As they could not recast Aristotle in philosophy, so they could not with all their new knowledge of the Further East recast the geography of Ptolemy and Strabo.

A few great ages, the age for instance of Almamoun in Bagdad (a.d. 830), of Mahmoud in Ghazneh (a.d. 1000), of Abderrahman III. in Cordova (a.d. 950), give us the history of Arabic geography.

Beginning in the latter years of the eighth century, Moslem science was reformed and organised, in the New Empire, by the patronage of the Caliphs of the ninth. Itineraries of victorious generals, plans and tables prepared by governors of provinces, and a freshly acquired knowledge of Greek and Indian and Persian thought, made up the subject-matter of study. The barbarism of the first believers was passing away, and Mohammed's words were recalled: "Seek knowledge, even in China." By the end of the eighth century Ptolemy's Geography and the now lost work of Marinus of Tyre had already been translated. Almamoun drew to his Court all the chief "mathematicians" or philosophers of Islam, such as Mohammed Al-Kharizmy, Alfergany, and Solyman the merchant. Further he built two observatories, one at Bagdad, one at Damascus, and procured a chart fixing the latitude and longitude of every place known to him or his savants. Al-Kharizmy interpolated the new Arabic Ptolemy with additions from the Sanscrit, and made some use of Indian trigonometry. Alfergany wrote the first Arab treatise on the Astrolabe and adopted the Greek division of the seven Climates to the new learning. Solyman, at the time of closest intercourse between China, India, and the Caliphate, travelled in every country of the Further East, sailed in the "Sea of Pitchy Darkness" on the east coast of Asia, and by his voyages became the prototype of Sinbad the Sailor.

The impulse given by Almamoun did not die with him. About 850 Alkendy made a fresh version of Ptolemy; as early as 840 the Caliph Vatek-Billah sent to explore the countries of Central Asia, and his results have been preserved by Edrisi. A few years later (c. 890) Ibn-Khordadbeh, "Son of the Magi," described the principal trade-routes, the Indian by the Red Sea from Djeddah to Scinde, the Russian by the Volga and North Caspian, the Persian by way of Balkh to China. It was by this last that some have thought the envoys of the English King Alfred went in 883, till they turned south to seek India and the Christians of San Thomé.

The early scientific movement in Islam reached its height in Albateny and Massoudy at the beginning of the tenth century. The former determined, more exactly than before, various problems of astronomical geography.[12] The latter visited every country from Further India to Spain;—even China and Madagascar seem to have been within the compass of his later travels; and his voyages in the Indian Ocean bring us to the real Sinbad Saga of the tenth century.

Sinbad, as his story appears in the Arabian Nights, has been traced to an original in the Indian tales of The Seven Sages, in the voyages of the age of Chosroes Nushirvan or of Haroun-Al-Rashid, but the tale appears to be an Arabic original, the real account, with a little more of mystery and exaggeration than usual, of the ninth-and tenth-century travellers, from Solyman to Massoudy, reproduced in form of a series of novels.[13]

With Massoudy begins also the formal discussion of geographical problems affecting Islam. Was the Caspian a land-locked sea? Did it connect with the Euxine? Did either or both of these join the Arctic Ocean? Was Africa an island? If so, was there also an unknown Southern Continent? What was the shape of South-Eastern Asia? Was Ptolemy's longitude to be wholly accepted, and if not, how was it to be bettered? By a use of Strabo and of Albateny rather than of Ptolemy, Massoudy arrived at fairly accurate and very plausible results. His chief novelties were the long river channel from the Sea of Azov to the North Sea, and the strait between South Africa and the shadowy Southern Continent. On his scheme the Indian Ocean, or Sea of Habasch, contains most of the water surface of the world, and the Sea of Aral appears for the first time in Moslem geography. Lastly his account of the Arab coasting voyages from the Persian Gulf to Socotra and Madagascar proves, implicitly, that as yet there was no use of the compass.

Massoudy cut down the girth of the world even more than Ptolemy. The latter had left an ocean to the west of Africa: the former made the Canaries or Fortunate Islands, the limit of the known Western world, abut upon India, the limit of the Eastern.

The first age of Arabic geography ends with Massoudy, its greatest name, in the middle of the tenth century. The second age is summed up in the work of the Eastern sage Albyrouny and of Edrisi, the Arabic Ptolemy (a.d. 1099-1154), who found a home at the Christian Court of Roger of Sicily. In the far East and West alike, in Spain and Morocco, in Khorassan and India, Moslem science was now driven to take refuge among strangers on the decay of the Caliphates of Bagdad and Cordova. The Ghaznevides Mahmoud and Massoud in the first half of the eleventh century, attracted to their Court not only Firdusi and Avicenna, but Albyrouny, whose "Canon" became a text-book of Mohammedan science, and who, for the range of his knowledge and the trained subtlety of his mind, stands without a rival for his time.[14] The Spanish school, as resulting directly in Edrisi, half Moslem, half Christian, like his teachers, is of still more interest. One of its first traces may be found in the Latin translation of the Arab Almanack made by Bishop Harib of Cordova in 961. It was dedicated and presented to Caliph Hakem—one of our clearest proofs of the conscious interworking of Catholic and Mahometan philosophy in the age of Pope Sylvester II. and of our own St. Dunstan. A century later, on the recapture of Toledo by Alfonso VI. (1084), an observatory was built, served by Jews and Moslems, who had been steadily producing, through the whole of the eleventh century, astronomical and geographical tables and dictionaries. A whole tribe of commentators on place-names, on the climates and constellations, and on geographical instruments was at work in this last age of the Spanish Caliphate, and their results are brought together by Abou Hamid of Granada and by Edrisi.

Born at Ceuta in 1099, this great geographer travelled through Spain, France, the Western Mediterranean, and North Africa before settling at the Norman Court of Palermo. Roger, the most civilised prince in Christendom, the final product of the great race of Robert Guiscard and William the Conqueror, valued Edrisi at his proper worth, refused to part with him, and employed men in every part of the world to collect materials for his study. Thus the Moor gained, not only for the Moslem world but for Southern Europe as well, an approximate knowledge even of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the coasts of the White Sea. His work, dedicated to Roger and called after him, Al-Rojary, was rewarded with a peerage, and it was as a Sicilian Count that he finished his Celestial Sphere and Terrestrial Disc of silver, on which "was inscribed all the circuit of the known world and all the rivers thereof."

Each of his great Arabic predecessors, along with Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and Strabo, was welded into his system—the result of fifteen years of abstract study, following some thirty of practical activity in travel.[15]

A special note may be made on Edrisi's account of the voyage of the Lisbon "Wanderers" ("Maghrurins") some time before 1147, the date of the final Christian capture of the Portuguese capital. For this is the earliest recorded voyage, since the rise of Islam, definitely undertaken on the Western Ocean to learn what was on it and what were its limits. The Wanderers, Edrisi tells us, were eight in number, all related to one another. They built a transport boat, took on board water and provisions for many months, and started with the first east wind. After eleven days, they reached a sea whose thick waters exhaled a fetid odour, concealed numerous reefs, and were but faintly lighted. Fearing for their lives, they changed their course, steered southwards twelve days, and so reached an island, possibly Madeira,—which they called El Ghanam from the sheep found there, without shepherd or anyone to tend them. On landing, they found a spring of running water and some wild figs. They killed some sheep, but found the flesh so bitter that they could not eat it, and only took the skins. Sailing south twelve more days, they found an island with houses and cultivated fields, but as they neared it they were surrounded, made prisoners, and carried in their own boats to a city on the sea-shore, to a house where were men of tall stature and women of great beauty. Here they stayed three days, and on the fourth came a man, the King's interpreter, who spoke Arabic, and asked them who they were and what they wanted. They replied they were seeking out the wonders of the ocean and its limits. At this the King laughed heartily, and said to the interpreter: "Tell them my father once ordered some of his slaves to venture out on that sea and after sailing across the breadth of it for a month, they found themselves deprived of the light of the sun and returned without having learnt anything." Then the Wanderers were sent back to their prison till a west wind arose, when they were blindfolded and put on board a boat, and after three days reached the mainland of Africa. Here they were put ashore, with their hands tied, and so left. They were released by the Berbers, and after their reappearance in Spain, a "street at the foot of the hot bath in Lisbon," concludes Edrisi, "took the name of Street of the Wanderers."

On the other extremity of the Moslem world, on the south-east coast of Africa, there was more real progress. By Edrisi's day that important addition of Arabic travellers and merchants to the geographical knowledge of the world, by the remarkable trade-ventures of the Emosaids, had been already made.

It had taken long in the making.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO EDRISI.
[(see list of maps)]

About a.d. 742, ten years after the battle of Tours, the Emosaid family, descended from Ali, cousin and son-in-law of Mahomet, tried to make Said, their clan-chieftain, Ali's great-grandson, Caliph at Damascus. The attempt was foiled, and the whole tribe fled, sailed down the Red Sea and African coast, and established themselves as traders in the Sea of India. First of all, Socotra seems to have been their mart and capital, but before the end of the tenth century they had founded merchant colonies at Melinda, Mombasa, and Mozambique, which, in their turn, led to settlements on the opposite coasts of Asia. Thus the trade of the Indian Ocean was secured for Islam, the first Moslem settlements arose in Malabar, and when the Portuguese broke into this mare clausum, in 1497-8, they found a belt of "Moorish" coast towns, from Magadoxo to Quiloa, controlling both the Indian and the inland African trades, as Ibn Batuta had found in 1330.

By Edrisi's day, moreover, the steady persistence and self-evident results of Arabic overland exploration had become recognised by a sort of "Traveller's Doctorate." It was not enough for the highest knowledge to study the Koran, and the Sunna, and the Greek philosophers at home; for a perfect education, a man must have travelled at least through the length and breadth of Islam. All the successors of Edrisi, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, shew this mingling of science and religion, of practical and speculative energy.

Tradition still governed Moslem thought, but there had come into being a sort of half-acknowledged appendix to tradition, made up of real observations on men and things. And in these observations, geographical interest was the main factor.

The Life of Al Heravy of Herat (1173-1215), the "Doctor Ubiquitus" of Islam in the age of the Crusades, gives us a picture of another Massoudy. The friend of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, the "first man among Christians," Heravy seems able in his own person to break down the partition wall of religious feud by the common interest of science. In 1192 he was offered the patronage of the Crusading princes, and Richard Cœur de Lion begged for the favour of an interview, and begged in vain. Heravy, who had been on one of his exploring journeys, angrily refused to see the King whose men had broken his quiet and wasted his time. Before his death, he had run over the world (men said) from China to the Pyrenees and from Abyssinia to the Danube, "scribbling his name on every wall," and his survey of the Eastern Empire was the single matter in which Turks and "Romans" made common cause,—for Greeks and Latins at Byzantium alike read Heravy, like a Christian doctor. Another example of the same catholic spirit is "Yacout the Roman,"[16] whose Dictionary, finished in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, was a summary of geographical advance since Edrisi, like the similar work of Ibn Said, of the same period.

But as a matter of fact, the balance both of knowledge and power was now shifting from Islam to Christendom. The most daring and successful travellers after the rise of the Mongols were the Venetian Marco Polo and the Friar Preachers who revived Chinese Christianity (1270-1350); Madeira and the Canaries (off Moslem Africa) were finally rediscovered not by Arabic enterprise, but by the Italian Malocello in 1270, by the English Macham in the reign of our Edward III., and by Portuguese ships under Genoese captains in 1341; in 1291 the Vivaldi ventured beyond Cape Bojador, where no Moor had ever been, except by force of storm, as in the doubtful story of Ibn Fatimah, who "first saw the White Headland," Cape Blanco, between Cape Bojador and Cape Verde.

In the fourteenth century the map of Edrisi was superseded by the new Italian plans and coast-charts, or Portolani. As the Moslem world fell into political disorder, its science declined. "Judicial astrology" seemed gaining a stronger and stronger hold over Islam, and the irruption of the Turks gradually resulted in the ruin of all the higher Moslem culture. Superstition and barbarism shared the honour and the spoils of this victory.

But two great names close the five hundred years of Arab learning.

1. Ibn Batuta (c. 1330), who made himself as much at home in China as in his native Morocco, is the last of Mohammedan travellers of real importance. Though we have only abridgments of his work left to us, Colonel Yule is well within his rights in his deliberate judgment, "that it must rank at least as one of the four chief guide books of the Middle Ages," along with the Book of Ser Marco Polo and the journals of the two Friar-travellers, Friar Odoric and Friar William de Rubruquis.

2. With Abulfeda the Eastern school of Moslem geography comes to an end, as the Western does with Ibn Batuta. In the early years of the fourteenth century he rewrote the "story and description of the Land of Islam," with a completeness quite encyclopædic. But his work has all the failings of a compilation, however careful, in that, or any, age. It is based upon information, not upon inspection; it is in no sense original. As it began in imitation, so it ended. If it rejects Ptolemy, it is only to follow Strabo or someone else; on all the mathematical and astronomical data its doctrine is according to the Alexandrians of twelve hundred years before, and this last précis of the science of a great race and a great religion can only be understood in the light of its model—in Greek geography.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS.

CIRCA 333-867.

he special interest of the life and work of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) lies in the relation it bears to the general expansion of Europe and Christendom—an expansion that had been slowly gathering strength since the eleventh century. But even before the tide had turned in the age of Hildebrand and the First Crusade, even from the time that Constantine founded the Christian Empire of Rome, the Christian Capital on the Bosphorus, and the State Church of the Western World,—pilgrimage, trade, conquest, and colonisation had been successively calling out the energies of the moving races, "the motor muscles" of Europe. It is through the "generous Henry, Prince of Portugal," that this activity is brought to its third and triumphant stage—to the time of Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan,—but it is only by tracing the earlier progress of that outward movement, which has made Europe the ruling civilisation of the world, that we can fairly grasp the import of that transition in which Henry is the hero.

More than any other single man he is the author of the discovering movement of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries,—and by this movement India has been conquered, America repeopled, the world made clear, and the civilisation which the Roman Empire left behind has conquered or utterly overshadowed every one of its old rivals and superiors—Islam, India, China, Tartary.

But before the fifteenth century, before the birth of Prince Henry, Christendom, Greek and Latin, was at best only one of the greater civilising and conquering forces struggling for mastery; before the age of the Crusades, before the eleventh century, it was plainly weaker than the Moslem powers; it seemed unable to fight against Slav or Scandinavian Heathendom; it was only saved by distance from becoming a province of China; India, the world's great prize, was cut off from it by the Arabs. Even before the rise of Islam, under Constantine or Theodosius or Justinian, the Church-State of the Byzantine Cæsars, though then ruling in almost every province of Trajan's empire, was in a splendid but sure decline from the exhaustion of the southern races. Our story then begins naturally with the worst time and climbs up for a thousand years, from the Heathen and Mohammedan conquests of the fifth and seventh centuries, to the reversal of that judgment, of those conquests, in the fifteenth. The expansion of Europe is going on all this time, but at our beginning, in the years before and after Pope Gregory the Great, even the legacy of Greece and Rome, in wide knowledge of the world and practical exploring energy, seemed to have passed from sight.

And in the decline of the old Empire, while Constantine and Justinian are said to receive and exchange embassies with the Court of China, there is no real extension of geographical knowledge or outlook. Christian enterprise in this field is mainly one of pilgrimage, and the pilgrims only cease to be important when the Northmen, first Heathen, then Christian, begin to lead, in a very different manner, the expansion of Europe. Into this folk-wandering of the Vikings, the first great outward movement of our Europe in the Middle Ages, is absorbed the reviving energy of trade, as well as the ever-growing impulse of pilgrimage. The Vikings are the highest type of explorers; they do not merely find out new lands and trade with them, but conquer and colonise them. They extend not merely the knowledge, but the whole state and being of Europe, to a New World.

Lastly, the partial activity of commerce and religion made universal and "political" by the leading western race—for itself only—is taken up by all Christendom in the Crusades, borrowed in idea from Spain, but borrowed with the spirit of the Norse rovers, and made universal for the Latin world, for the whole federation of Rome. In the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries we have the preparation for the discovery and colonisation of the outside world by Europeans in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era.

From the conversion of Constantine to the Reformation the story of Christendom is unbroken; the later Roman Empire is the Church-State of a Christian Prince, as modern Europe is the Church-State of a nominally Christian society. Mediæval Europe thought of itself as nothing but the old world-state under religion; from Spain to Russia men were living under a Holy Roman Empire of an Italian, or Teutonic, or Byzantine, or independent type. England and Russia were not parts of the Germanic revival of Charlemagne, but they had just the same two elements dominant in their life: the classical tradition and the Christian Church.

And so throughout this time, the expansion of this society—by whatever name we may call it, discovery, exploration, geographical knowledge—has a continuous history. But before the rise of Islam, in the seventh century, throws Christendom into its proper mediæval life, before the new religion begins the really new age, at the end of which lived Henry himself, we are too far from our subject to feel, for instance in the fourth and fifth-century pilgrims and in Cosmas Indicopleustes, anything but a remote preparation for Henry's work. It is only with the seventh century, and with the time of our own Bede and Wilfrid, that the necessary introduction to our subject really begins.

Yet as an illustration of the general idea, that discovery is an early and natural outlet of any vigorous society and is in proportion to the universal activity of the State, it is not without interest to note that Christian Pilgrimage begins with Constantine. This, the first department of exploring energy, at once evidences the new settlement of religion and politics. Helena, the Emperor's mother, helped, by her visit to Palestine, her church at Bethlehem, and her discoveries of relics in Jerusalem, to make a ruling fashion out of the custom of a few devotees; and eight years after the council of Nicæa, in 333, appeared the first Christian geography, as a guide-book or itinerary, from Bordeaux to the Holy Places of Syria, modelled upon the imperial survey of the Antonines. The route followed in this runs by North Italy, Aquileia, Sirmium, Constantinople, and Asia Minor, and upon the same course thousands of nameless pilgrims journeyed in the next three hundred years, besides some eight or nine who have left an account mainly religious in form, but containing in substance the widest view of the globe then possible among Westerns.

Most of the pilgrims, like Jerome's friend Paula, Bishop Eucherius, and Melania, tread the same path and stop at the same points, but three or four of them distinctly add some fresh knowledge to the ordinary results.

St. Silvia, of Aquitaine (c. 385), not only travels through Syria, she visits Lower Egypt and Stony or Sinaitic Arabia, and even Edessa in Northern Mesopotamia, on the very borders of hostile and heathen Persia. "To see the monks" she wanders through Osrhöene, comes to Haran, near which was "the home of Abraham and the farm of Laban and the well of Rachel," to the environs of Nisibis and Ur of the Chaldees, lost to the Roman Empire since Julian's defeat; thence by "Padan-aram" back to Antioch. When crossing the Euphrates the pilgrims saw the river "rush down in a torrent like the Rhone, but greater," and on the way home by the great military road, then untravelled by Saracens, between Tarsus and the Bosphorus, Silvia makes a passing note on the strength and brigand habits of the Isaurian mountaineers, who in the end saved Christendom from the very Arabs with whom our pilgrim couples them.

Again, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the time of Justinian, is at the end, as Silvia is at the beginning, of a definite period, the period of the Christian empire of Rome, while still "Cæsarean" and not merely Byzantine, "patrician" and not papal, "consular" and not Carolingian.

And contemporary with Cosmas are two of the chief among the earlier or primitive pilgrims, Theodosius and Antoninus the Martyr. The first-named indulges in a few excursions—in fancy—beyond his known ground of Palestine, going as far east as Susa and Babylon, "where no one can live for the serpents and hippo-centaurs," and south to the Red Sea and its two arms, "of which the eastern is called the Persian Gulf," and the western or Arabian runs up to the "thirteen cities of Arabia destroyed by Joshua,"—but, for the rest, his knowledge is not extensive or peculiar. Antoninus of Placentia, on the other hand, is very interesting, a sort of older Mandeville, who mixes truth and its opposite in fairly even proportions and with a sort of resolute partiality to favourite legends.

He tells us how Tripolis has been ruined by the late earthquake (July 9, 551); how silk and various woven stuffs are sold at Tyre; how the pilgrims scratched their names on the relics shewn in Cana of Galilee—"and here I, sinner that I am, did inscribe the names of my parents"; how Bethshan, the metropolis of Galilee, "is placed on a hill," though really in the plain; how the Samaritans hate Christians and will hardly speak to them; "and beware of spitting in their country, for they will never forgive it"; how "the dew comes down upon Hermon the Little, as David says, 'The dew of Hermon that fell upon the hill of Zion'"; how nothing can live or even float in the Dead Sea, "but is instantly swallowed up"—as exact an untruth as was ever told by traveller; how the Jordan opens a way for pilgrims "and stands up in a heap every year at the Epiphany during the baptism of Catechumens, as David told, 'The sea saw that and fled, Jordan was driven back'"; how at Jericho there is a Holy Field "sown by the Lord with his own hand." A report had been spread that the salt pillar of Lot's wife had been "lessened by licking"; "it was false," said Antoninus, the statue was just the same as it had always been.

In Jerusalem the pilgrims first went up the Tower of David, "where he sang the Psalter," and into the Basilica of Sion, where among other marvels they saw the "Corner-stone that the builders rejected," which gave out a "sound like the murmuring of a crowd."

We come back again to fact with rather a start when told in the next section of the Hospitals for 3000 sick folk near the Church of St. Mary, close to Sion; then with the footprints and relics of Christ, and the miraculous flight of the Column of Scourging—"carried away by a cloud to Cæsarea," we are taken through a fresh set of "impressions."

The same wild notions of place and time and nature follow the Martyr through Galilee to Gilboa, "where David slew Goliath and Saul died, where no dew or rain ever falls, and where devils appear nightly, whirled about like fleeces of wool or the waves of the sea"—to Nazareth, where was the "Beam of Christ the Carpenter"—to Elua, where fifteen consecrated virgins had tamed a lion and trained it to live with them in a cell—to Egypt, where the Pyramids become for him the "twelve Barns of Joseph," for the legend had not yet insisted that the actual number should be made to fit the text of the seven years of plenty.

But with all this Antoninus now and then gives us glimpses of a larger world. In Jerusalem he meets Æthiopians "with nostrils slit and rings about their fingers and their feet." They were so marked, they told him, by the Emperor Trajan "for a sign."

In the Sinai desert he tells us of "Saracen" beggars and idolaters; in the Red Sea ports he sees "ships from India" laden with aromatics; he travels up the Nile to the Cataracts and describes the Nilometer at Assouan, and the crocodiles in the river; Alexandria he finds "splendid but frivolous, a lover of pilgrims but swarming with heresies."

But far more wonderful than the practical jumble of Antoninus Martyr is the systematic nonsense of Cosmas, who invented or worked out a theory and scheme of the world, a "Christian topography," which required nothing more than a complete disuse of human reason. His assurance was equal to his science.

It may have been his voyage to India, or his monastic profession, or his study of Scripture, or something unknown that made him take up the part of a Christian Aristotle; in any case he felt himself called into the field to support the cause of St. Augustine against infidelity, and to refute the "anile fable" of the Antipodes. Cosmas referred men back to Revelation on such matters, and his system was "demonstrated from Scripture, concerning which a Christian is not allowed to doubt." Man by himself could not understand the world, but in the Bible it was all clear enough. And from the Bible this much was beyond dispute.

The universe is a flat parallelogram; and its length is exactly double of its breadth. In the centre of the universe is our world surrounded by the ocean, and by an outer world or ring where men lived before the Flood. Noah and his Ark came over sea from this to the present earth.

To the north of our world is a great hill, like the later Moslem and older Hindu "Cupola of the Earth," which perhaps was Cosmas' own original. Round this the sun and moon revolve, making day and night as they appear or disappear behind it.

The sky consists of four walls meeting in the "dome of heaven" over the floor on which we live, and this sky is "glued" to the edges of the outer world, the world of the Patriarchs.

But this heaven is also cut in two by the firmament, lying between our atmosphere and that "New Heaven and New Earth wherein dwelleth Righteousness"; and the floor of this upper world is covered by the "waters that be above the firmament"; above this is Paradise, and below the firmament live the angels, as "ministers" and "flaming fires" and "servants of God to men."

The proofs of this are simple, mainly resting on some five texts from the Old Testament and two passages of St. Paul.

First the Book of Genesis declared itself to be the "Book of the Generation of the Heaven and the Earth"—that is, of everything in the heavens, and the earth. But the "old wives' fable of the Antipodes" would make the heaven surround and contain the earth, and God's word would have to be changed "These are the generations of the sky." For the same truth—the twofold and independent being of heaven and earth—Cosmas quotes the additional testimony of Abraham, David, Hosea, Isaiah, Zachariah, and Melchisedek, who clenched the case against the Antipodes. "For how indeed could even rain be said to 'fall' or to 'descend,' as in the Psalms and the Gospels, in those regions where it could only be said to 'come up'?"

Again, the world cannot be a globe, or sphere, or be suspended in mid-air, or in any sort of motion, for what say the Scriptures? "Earth is fixed on its foundations"; "Thou hast laid the foundations of the earth and it abideth"; "Thou hast made the round world so sure, that it cannot be moved"; "Thou hast made all men to dwell upon the face of the whole earth"—not "upon every face," or upon any more than one face—"upon the face," not the back or the side, but the broad flat face we know. "Who then with these passages before him, ought even to speak of Antipodes?"

So much against false doctrine; to establish the truth is simpler still. For the same St. Paul, who disposes of science falsely so called, does not he speak, like David, like St. Peter and St. John, of our world as a tabernacle? "If our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved," "We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened," which points to the natural conclusion of enlightened faith, that Moses' tabernacle was an exact copy of the universe. "See thou make all things according to the pattern shewn thee in the Mount." So the four walls, the covered roof, the floor, the proportions of the Tent of the Wilderness, shewed us in small compass all that was in nature.

If any further guidance were needed, it was ready to hand in the Prophet Isaiah and the Patriarch Job. "That stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in"; "Also can any understand the spreadings of the clouds or the noise of his tabernacle?"

The whole reasoning is like the theological arguments on the effects of man's fall upon the stars and the vegetable world, or the atmospheric changes due to angels.

But though Cosmas states his system with the claims of an article of faith, there were not wanting men, and even saints, who stood out on the side of reason in geography in the most traditional of times. Isidore of Seville, and Vergil, the Irish missionary of the eighth century, both maintained the old belief of Basil and Ambrose, that the question of the Antipodes was not closed by the Church, and that error in this point was venial and not mortal. For the positive tabernacle-system of "the man who sailed to India" there was never much support; his work was soon forgotten, though it has been called by some paradox-makers "the great authority of the Middle Ages"—in the face of the known facts, that this was the real position of Ptolemy and Strabo, that no one can speak of the "Middle Ages" in this unqualified way any more than of the Modern or Ancient worlds; and that Cosmas is almost unnoticed in the great age of mediæval science, from the twelfth century.

And whatever we may think of Cosmas and his Christian System of the Whole World, Evolved out of Holy Scripture, he is of interest to us as the last of the old Christian geographers, closing one age which, however senile, had once been in the truest sense civilised, and preparing us to enter one that in comparison is literally dark. From the age of Justinian, and from the rise of Islam in the early years of the seventh century, the geographical knowledge of Christendom is on a par with its practical contraction and apparent decline. There are travellers; but for the next five hundred years there are no more theorists, cosmographers, or map-makers of the Universe or Habitable Globe.

From the time that Islam, after a century of world-conquest, began to form itself into an organised state, or federation of states, in the later eighth and earlier ninth centuries a.d.,—thus making itself until the thirteenth century the principal heir of the older Eastern culture,—Christendom was content to take its geography, its ideas of the world in general, from the Arabs, who in their turn depended upon the pre-Christian Greeks.

The relation of Ptolemy and Strabo to modern knowledge is best seen through the work of the Arabic geographers, but the Saracens did much to destroy before they began to build up once more. As the northern barbarians of the fifth century interrupted the hope of a Christian revival of Pagan literature and science, so the Moslems of the seventh and eighth cut short the Catholic and Roman revival of Justinian and Heraclius, in which the new faith and the old state had found a working agreement.

Between Cosmas and the Viking-Age, "Christian," "Roman," "Western" exploration falls within very narrow limits: the few pilgrims whose recollections represent to us the whole literature of travel in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, add nothing fresh even of practical discovery; theory and theoretical work has ceased altogether, and the first stirrings of the new life in the commerce and voyages of Amalphi, and in the sudden and splendid outburst of Norse life in its age of piracy, are not yet, are not really before the world until the time of Alfred of England, of Charles the Bald, of Pope Nicholas I. "the Great." Yet such as it is, this pilgrim stage of European development stands for something. Religion, as it is the first agent in forming our modern nations, is the first impulse towards their expansion. And to us there is a special interest.

For the best known of western travellers in this darkest of the Christian ages (600-870 a.d.), Arculf and Willibald, are both connected with England and the beginnings of English science in the age of Bede.

Arculf, a Frank or Gallican Bishop, who about 690 visited, first of "Latin" writers since the Mohammedan conquest, Jerusalem, the Jordan valley, Nazareth, and the other holy places of Syria, was driven by storms on his return to the great Irish monastery of Iona. There he described his wonders to the Abbot Adamnan, who then sat in the seat of the Irish Apostles Patrick and Columba, and by Adamnan this narrative was presented and dedicated to Aldfrith the Wise, last of the great Northumbrian Kings, in his Court at York (c. a.d. 701). Not only does the original remain to us, but we have also two summaries of it, one longer, another shorter, made by Baeda, the Venerable Bede, as a useful manual for Englishmen, Concerning the Holy Sites. We are again reminded by this how constantly fresh life is growing up under an appearance of death. The conversion of England, which Gregory the Great, Theodore, and the Irish monks had carried through in the seventh, that darkest of Christian centuries, was now bearing its fruit in the work of Bede, who was really the sign of a far more permanent intellectual movement than his own, and in that of Boniface, Wilbrord, and Willibald, who began to win for Christendom in Germany more than a counterpoise for her losses in the South and East, from Armenia to Spain.

Arculf is full of the mystical unscientific spirit of the time. He notes in Jerusalem "a lofty column, which at mid-day casts no shadow, thus proving itself to be the centre of the earth for as David says, 'God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.'"

"At the roots of Lebanon" he comes to the place "where the Jordan has its rise from two fountains Jor and Dan, whose waters unite in the single river Jordan." In the Dead Sea a lighted lamp would float safely, and no man could sink if he tried; the bitumen of this place was almost indissoluble; the only fruit here about were the apples of Sodom, which crumbled to dust in the mouth.

The three churches on the top of Tabor were "according to the three tabernacles described by Peter."

From Damascus Arculf made for the port of Tyre, and so came by Jaffa to Egypt. Alexandria he found so great that he was one entire day in merely passing through. Its port he thought "difficult of access and something like the human body in shape, with a narrow mouth and neck, then stretching out far and wide."

The great Pharos tower was still lit up every night with torches. Here was the "Emporium of the whole world"; "countless merchants from all parts": the "country rainless and very fertile."

The Nile was navigable to the Town of Elephants; beyond this, at the Cataracts, the river "runs in a wild ruin down a cliff." Its embankments, its canals, and even its crocodiles, "not so large as ravenous," are all described, and Arculf, returning home by Constantinople, concludes with an account of the capital of Christendom, "beyond doubt the metropolis of the Roman Empire, and by far the greatest city therein"; lastly, as the pilgrim sails by Sicily he sees the "isle of Vulcan vomiting smoke by day and flame by night, with a noise like thunder, which is always fiercer on Fridays and Saturdays."

Willibald, a nephew of St. Boniface and related through his mother to King Ina of Wessex, started for the East about 721, passed ten years in travel, and on his return followed his countrymen to mission work and to death among the heathen of Upper Germany. He went out by Southampton and Rouen, by Lucca and the Alps, to Naples and Catania, "where is Mount Etna; and when this volcano casts itself out they take St. Agatha's veil and hold it towards the fire, which ceases at once." Thence by Samos and Cyprus to Antaradus and Emesda, "in the region of the Saracens," where the whole party, who had escaped the Moslem brigands of Southern Gaul, were thrown into prison on suspicion of being spies. A Spaniard made intercession for them and got their release; but Willibald went up country one hundred miles, and cleared himself of all suspicion before the Caliph at Damascus. "We have come from the West, where the sun has his setting, and we know of no land beyond—nothing but water." This was too far for spies, he pleaded, and the Caliph agreed, and gave him a pass for all the sites of Palestine, with which he traversed the length and breadth of the Holy Land four times, finding the same trouble in leaving as he had found in entering. Like Arculf, he saw the fountains of Jor-Dan, the "glorious church" of Helena at Bethlehem, the tombs of the Patriarchs at Hebron, the wonders of Jerusalem. Especially was he moved at the sight of the columns in the Church of the Ascension on Olivet, "for that man who can creep between those columns and the wall is freed from all his sins." Tyre and Sidon he passed again and again "on the coast of the Adriatic Sea (as he calls the Levant), six miles from one another"; at last he got away to Constantinople, with some safely smuggled trophies of pilgrimage, and some "balsam in a calabash, covered with petroleum," but the customs officers would have killed all of them if the fraud had been found out—so Willibald believed. After two years of close intercourse with the Greek Christians of New Rome, living in a "cell hollowed out of the side of a church" (possibly Saint Sophia), the first of English-born travellers returned to Old Rome, as Arculf had done, by sea, noticing, like him, "Theodoric's Hell" in the Liparis. He could not get up the mountain, though curious to see "what sort of a hell it was" where the Gothic "Tyrant" was damned for the murder of Böethius and Symmachus, and for his own impenitent Arianism. But though he could not be seen or heard, all the pilgrims remarked how the "pumice that writers use was thrown up by the flame from the hell, and fell into the sea, and so was cast upon the shore and gathered up."

Such was the philosophy of Catholicism about the countries of the known world in the eighth century, for Willibald's account was published with the imprimatur of Gregory III., and, with Arculf's, took rank as a satisfactory comment on the old Bordeaux Itinerary of four hundred years ago.

Again, the impression given by our two chief Guide-Books, Arculf and Willibald, is confirmed by the monk Fidelis, who travelled in Egypt about 750, and by Bernard the Wise of Mont St. Michel, who went over all the pilgrim ground a century later (867). Fidelis, sailing up the Nile, was astonished at the sight of the "Seven Barns of Joseph, (the Pyramids) looking like mountains, but all of stone, square at the base, rounded in the upper part and twisted at the summit like a spire. On measuring a side of one of them, it was found to be four hundred feet." From the Nile Fidelis sailed by the freshwater canal of Necho, Hadrian, and Amrou, not finally blocked up till 767, direct to the Red Sea, "near where Moses crossed with the Israelites." The pilgrim wanted to go and look for Pharaoh's chariot-wheels, but the sailors were obstinate, and took him round the Peninsula of Sinai, down one arm of the sea and up another, to Eziongeber and Edom.

Bernard, "the French Monk" of Mont St. Michel, took the straight route overland by Rome to Bari, then a Saracen city, whose Emir forwarded the pilgrims in a fleet of transports carrying some nine thousand Christian slaves to Alexandria. Here, like Willibald, Bernard found himself "suspect"—thrown into prison till Backsheesh had been paid, then only allowed to move stage by stage as fees were prompt and sufficient, for a traveller must pay, as an infidel, not only the ordinary tribute of the subject Christians of Egypt, but the "money of the road" as well. Islam has always made of strangers a fair mark for extortion.

Safe at last in Jerusalem, the party (Bernard himself and two friends, one a Spaniard, the other a monk of Beneventum) were lodged "in the Hostel of the glorious Emperor Charles, founded for all the pilgrims who speak the Roman tongue," and after making the ordinary visits of devotion, and giving us their account of the Easter Miracle of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Sepulchre, they took ship for Italy, and landed at Rome after sixty days of misery at sea.

Bernard's account closes with the Roman churches—the Lateran, where the "keys of the whole city are given every night into the hands of the Apostolic Pope," and St. Peter's on the "West side of Rome, that for size has no rival in the world."

At the same time, or a little earlier than the Breton traveller (c. 808-850), another Latin had written a short tract On the Houses of God in Jerusalem, which, with Bernard's note-book, is our last geographical record before the age of the Northmen.

A new time was coming—a time not of timid creeping pilgrims only, but of sea-kings and seamen, who made the ocean their home, and, for the North of Europe at least, broke the tradition of land journeys and coasting voyages.

But the early pilgrims after all have their place. It is of no use insisting that the mental outlook of these men is infantile;—that is best proved by their own words, their own scale of things; but it is necessary to insist that in these travellers we have comparatively enlarged experience and knowledge; and as comparison is the only test of any age, or of any man therein, the very blunders and limitations of the past, as we see them to be, have a constant, as well as an historical, value to us. That is, we are always being reminded, first, how we have come to the present mastery over nature, over ourselves, over all being; and, secondly, how imperfect, how futile, our work is still, and seems always doomed to be, if judged from a really final standpoint, or rather from our own dreams of the ultimately possible.

So if in the case of our mediæval travellers their interests are the very reverse of ours; if they take delight in brooding over thoughts which to us do not seem worth the thinking; if their minds seem to rest as much on fable implicitly accepted as on the little amount of experienced fact necessary for a working life, it will not be for us to judge, or to pity, or to despise the men who were making our world for us, and through whose work we live.

THE MAPPE-MONDE OF ST. SEVER.
[(see list of maps)]

Especially we cannot afford to forget this as we reach the lowest point of the fortunes, the mental and material work and position and outlook, of Europe and Christendom. A half-barbarised world had entered upon the inheritance of a splendid past, but it took centuries before that inheritance was realised by the so altered present. In this time of change we have men writing in the language of Cæsar and Augustine, of Alexander and Plato and Aristotle, who had been themselves, or whose fathers had been, pirates, brigands, nomades,—"wolves of the land or of the sea"—to Greeks or Romans of the South; who had been even to the Romanised provincials of the North, as in Britain, mere "dogs," "whelps from the kennel of barbarism," the destroyers of the order of the world. The boundless credulity and servile terror, the superstition and feudal tyranny of the earlier Middle Ages, mark the first stage of the reconstruction of society, when savage strong men who had conquered were set down beside the overworked and outworn masters of the Western world, to learn of them, and to make of them a more enduring race.

CHAPTER II.

VIKINGS OR NORTHMEN.

CIRCA 787-1066.

he discoveries and conquests and colonies of the Norse Vikings, from the White Sea to North America, are the first glimpses of light on the sea of darkness round the little island of the known world that made up Christendom. And from the needs of the time these were the natural, the only natural beginnings of European expansion. From the rise of Islam, Saracens controlled the great trade-routes of the South and East. It was only on the West and North that the coast was clear—of all but natural dangers.

In the Moslem Caliphate men were now busy in following up the old lines of trade, the immemorial traditions of the East, or as in southern Africa, extending the sphere of commercial activity and so of civilisation; men of science were commenting on the ancient texts of Greeks and Latins, or adapting them to enlarged knowledge.

But in Christendom, in the atrophy both of mental and physical activity, broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals of Charles the Great, of the Isaurian Emperors, of Otto I., of Alfred and his House, the practical energy of Heathen enemies,—for the Northmen were not seriously touched by Christianity till about the end of the first millennium,—was the first sign of lasting resurrection. After the material came the spiritual revival; the whole life of the Middle Ages awoke on the conversion of the Northern nations and of Hungary; but in the abundant and brilliant energy of the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, we must recognise the offspring of the irrepressible Norsemen as well as of the Irish and Frank and English missionaries, who in the Dark Ages of Christendom were working out the empire of Innocent III.

In exploration, especially, it was true that theory followed achievement. Flavio Gioja, of Amalphi, did not apply the magnet to navigation—did not "give sailors the use of the magnet"—till navigation itself had begun to venture into the unknown Atlantic. The history of geographical advance in the earlier Middle Ages is thus rather a chronicle of adventure than of science.

But the Norse discoveries are not only the first, they are the leading achievements of Western travel and enterprise in the true Unknown, between the time of Constantine and the Crusades. The central fact of European expansion in the Dark Ages (from the seventh to the eleventh century) is the advance of the Vikings to the Arctic Continent and to America about the year 1000. All that precedes this on the same line is doubtful and unimportant. For, of the other voyages to the West in the sixth, the eighth, the tenth centuries, which, on Columbus' success, turned into prior claims to the finding of the New World, there is not one that deserves notice.

St. Brandon in 565, the Seven Spanish Bishops in 734, the Basques in 990 may or may not have sighted their islands of "Antillia," of "Atlantis," of the "Seven Cities." They cannot be verified or valued, any more than the journeys of the Enchanted Horse or the Third Calendar. We only know for certain a few unimportant, half-accidental facts, such as the visits of Irish hermits to Iceland and the Färoes during the eighth century, and the traces of their cells and chapels—in bells and ruins and crosses—found by the Northmen in the ninth.

It was in 787 that the Vikings first landed in England; by the opening of the next century they were threatening the whole coast line of Christendom, from Gallicia to the Elbe; in 874 they began to colonise Iceland; in 877 they sighted Greenland; in 922 Rolf the Ganger won his "Normandy" from Charles the Simple, by the Treaty of Clair-sur-Epte; as early as 840 was founded the first Norse or Ostman kingdom in Ireland, and in 878 the Norse earldom of the Orkneys, while about the same time the first Vikings seem to have reached the White Sea and the extreme North of Europe.

This advance is almost as rapid as that of the early Saracens; within a hundred years from the first disturbance of Danes and Northmen by the growing, all-including power of the new national kingdoms,—within three generations from Halfdan the Black,—first the flying rebels, and then the royalists in pursuit of them, had reached the farthest western and northern limits of the known world, from Finisterre in "Spanland" to Cape Farewell in Greenland, from the North Cape in Finland to the Northwest Capes of "Irland," from Novgorod or "Holmgard" in Russia to "Valland," between the Garonne and the Loire.

The chief lines of Northern advance were three—by the north-west, south-west, and north-east, but each of these divided, after a time, with important results.

The first sea-path, running by Caithness, Orkneys, Shetlands, and Färoes, reached Iceland, Greenland, and at last Vinland on the North American Continent; but from the settlements on the coasts and islands of northern Scotland, a fresh wave of pirate colonists swept down south-west into the narrow seas of St. George's Channel and beat upon the east and north and south of Ireland and the western coasts of England and of "Bretland."

The second invasion ran along the North German coast, and on reaching the Straits of Dover, fell upon both sides of the English Channel, according as the resistance was stronger or weaker in Wessex or in Frankland. The advanced guard reunited with Ostmen and Orkneyers in the Scilly Isles, and in Cornwall, and pressed on to the plunder of the Bay of Biscay and its coasts. The most restless of all were not long in finding out the wealth of the Moslem Caliphate of Cordova, and trying to force their way up the Douro and the Tagus.

The expansion on this side was not to stop till it had founded, from the Norman colony on the Seine, a Norman kingdom of England, and a dominion in the Two Sicilies, but this was the work of the eleventh century, the time of organisation and settled empire.

On the third side of northern expansion, to east and north-east, there were two separate roads from the first; one taking the Baltic for its track, and dividing northwards to Finland, up the Gulf of Bothnia, eastwards to Russia and Novgorod ("Gardariki" and "Holmgard"), the other coasting along "Halogaland" to Biarmaland, along Lapland to Perm and the Archangel of later time.

Of these three lines of movement by far the most vital to our subject is the first, which is also the earliest; the second, to south and south-west, hardly gives any direct results for our story; and the third, to east and north, is mainly concerned with Russian history. While King Alfred was yet unborn, Norse settlements had been permanently founded in the outlying points, coasts, and islands of Scotland and Ireland, and in the years of his boyhood, about 860, Nadodd the Fäeroe Jarl sighted Iceland, which had been touched at by the Irish monks in 795 but was now to be first added as a lasting gain to Europe, as a new country, "Snowland"—something more than a hermitage for religious exiles from the world. Four years later (in 864) Gardar the Swede reached this new Ultima Thule, and re-named it from himself "Gardar's Holm." Yet another Viking, Raven Floke, followed the track of the first explorer in 867, before Iceland got its final name and earliest colonisation from the Norsemen Ingolf and Leif and the sheep-farmers of the Färoes in 874, the third year of Alfred's reign in Wessex.

THE ANGLO-SAXON MAP.
[(see list of maps)]

Three years later, 877-8, at the very time of the farthest Danish advance in England, when Guthrum had driven the English King into the Isle of Athelney, the Norsemen reached their farthest point of northern advance in Europe; Gunnbiorn sighted a new land to the north-west, which he called "White Shirt," from its snow-fields, and which Red Eric a century later re-named Greenland—"for there is nothing like a good name to attract settlers." By this the Old World had come nearer than ever before to the discovery of a new one.

Geographically, this side of the Arctic Continent falls to the share of North America, and once its fiords had been made in their turn centres of colonisation and of further progress, the actual reaching of Newfoundland and Cape Cod was natural enough. The real voyage lay between Cape Farewell and the European mainland; it was a stormy and dangerous passage from the Greenland Bays to Labrador, but not a long one, and, as far as can be judged from scanty records, neither so cold nor so icebound as at present.

But exploration had outrun settlement. It was not till 986, more than one hundred years after Gunnbiorn's discovery, that Eric the Red, one of the chiefs of the Iceland colonists, led a band of followers and friends into a permanent exile in the unknown land. The beginnings of several villages were made in the next few years, and the first American discoveries followed at once. About 989 one Bjarni Herjulfson, following his father from Iceland to Eric's Fiord in Greenland, was driven west by storms first to a flat, well-wooded country, then to a mountainous island, covered with glaciers. He bore away with a fresh breeze and reached his home in Eric's Fiord in four days.

But his report aroused great interest; the time had come, and the men, and Norse rovers, who after so much in the past were ready to dare anything in the future, eagerly volunteered to follow up the new route; Bjarni himself visiting Norway and telling his story, was blamed for his slackness, and when he went back to Greenland there was "much talk of finding unknown lands." In the year 1000 Leif, a son of Red Eric, started with a definite purpose of discovery. He bought Bjarni's ship, manned it with five and twenty men and put out. First they came to the land Bjarni had sighted last, and went on shore. There was no grass to be seen, but great snowy ridges far inland, "and all the way from the coast to these mountains was one field of snow, and it seemed to them a land of no profit,"—so they left, calling it Helluland, or Slate-land, perhaps the Labrador of the sixteenth century.

They put to sea again and found another land, flat and wooded, with a white sand shore, low-lying towards the sea. This, said Leif, we will call after its nature, Markland (Woodland). Thence driving for two days before a north-east wind, they came to an island, where they landed to wait for good weather. They tasted the dew on the grass and thought they had never known anything so sweet. Sailing on again into a sound between the island and a ness, they reached a place where a river came out of a lake; into this they towed the ship and anchored, carrying their beds out on the shore and setting up their tents, with a large hut in the middle, and made all ready for wintering there.

There was no want of fish food—"the largest salmon in the lake they had ever seen"—and the country seemed to them so good that they would need no fodder for cattle in the winter. There was no frost; the grass seemed fresh enough all the year round, and day and night were more equal than in Iceland or in Greenland. The crew were divided in two parts: one worked at the huts and the other explored the country, returning every night to the camp. From the wild vines found by the foragers, the whole district was called Vinland, and samples of these, enough to fill the stern boat, and of the trees and "self-sown wheat" found in the fields were taken back to Eric's Fiord. Thereafter Leif was called the Lucky, and got much wealth and fame, but Thorwald Ericson, his brother, thought he had not explored enough, and "determined to be talked about" even more than the first settler of Vinland.

He put to sea with thirty men and came straight to Leif's Booths in Vinland, where he stayed the winter. On the first signs of spring Thorwald ordered his vessel to be rigged, and sent his longboat on ahead to explore.

All alike thought the land beautiful and well-wooded; they noticed that the distance was small between the forest and the sea, that the beach was all of white sand, and that there were many islands off the shore and very shallow water; but they saw no trace of man or beast, except a wooden corn-barn on an island far to the west. After coasting all the summer they came back in the autumn to the booths.

The next spring Thorwald went eastwards, and "towards the north along the land they drove upon a cape and broke their keel and stayed long to repair, and called the place Keel-Ness (Kjalarness) from this." Then they sailed away eastwards along the country, everywhere thickly wooded, till at one place Thorwald drew up his ships to the land and laid out gangways to the shore, saying, "I would gladly set up my farm here."

But now they came upon the first traces of other men; far off upon the white sandy beach three specks were sighted—three skin boats of the Skrælings or Esquimaux, with three men hiding under each. Thorwald's men captured and killed eight of them, but one escaped "to where within the fiord were several dwellings like little lumps on the ground." A heavy drowsiness now fell upon the Norsemen, in the Saga, till a "sudden scream came to them, and a countless host from up the fiord came in skin boats and laid themselves alongside."

The Vikings put up their shield-wall along the gunwale and kept off the arrows of the Esquimaux till they had shot them all away, and "fled off as fast as they could," leaving Thorwald with a mortal wound under the arm. He had time just to bid his men "carry him to the point he had wished to dwell at, for it was true that he would stay there awhile, but with a cross at head and feet; and so died and was buried as he had said." The place was called Crossness from the dead chief, but the crew stayed all the winter and loaded the ship with vines and grapes, and in the spring came back to Eric in Greenland.

And now, after the first mishap, discovery became more serious—not to be undertaken but by strong and well-armed fleets. It was this that checked the expansion of these Arctic colonies; at their best they were too small to do more than hold their own against nature and the Skræling savages in their tiny settlements along the coast, where the ice-fields have long since pushed man slowly but surely into the sea, with his painfully won patches of hay and corn and pasturage.

But the colonists would never say die till they were utterly worn out; now they only roused themselves to conquer the new lands they had found, and found disputed.

First a third son of Red Eric, Thorstein, bethought him to go to Vinland for his brother Thorwald's body. He put to sea and lost all sight of land, beating about in the ocean the whole summer, till he came back to Greenland in the first week of winter. (1004-6.)

He was followed by the greatest of the Vinland sailors, Thorfinn Karlsefne, who really took in hand the founding of a new settlement over the Western Sea. He came from Norway to Iceland soon after Thorwald's death in 1004, passed on to Greenland about 1005, "when, as before, much was talked about a Vinland voyage," and in 1006 made ready to start with one hundred and sixty men and five women, in three ships. They had with them all kinds of cattle, meaning to settle in the land if they could, and they made an agreement, Karlsefne and his people, that each should have an equal share in the gain. Leif lent them his houses in Vinland, "for he would not give them outright," and they sailed first to Helluland (Labrador), where they found a quantity of foxes, then to Markland, well-stocked with forest animals, then to an island at the mouth of a fiord, unknown before, covered with eyder ducks. They called the new discoveries Stream Island and Stream Fiord, from the current that here ran out into the sea, and sent off a party of eight men, in search of Vinland, in a stern boat. This was driven by westerly gales back to Iceland, but Thorfinn, with the rest, sailed south till he came to Leif Ericson's "river that fell into the sea from a lake, with islands lying off the mouth of the stream, low grounds covered with wheat growing wild, and rising grounds clad with vines."

Here they settled, re-named the country "Hope, from the good hope they had of it," and began to fell the wood, to pasture their cattle in the upland, and to gather the grapes.

After the first winter the Skrælings came upon them, at first to traffic with furs and sables against milk and dairy produce, and then to fight; for as neither understood the other, and the natives tried to force their way into Thorfinn's houses, and to get hold of his men's weapons, a quarrel was bound to come.

Fearing this, Karlsefne put a fence round the settlement and made all ready for battle, "and at this very time was a child born to him in the village, called Snorre, of Gudrid his wife, the widow of Thorstein Eric-son, whom he had brought with him." Then the Esquimaux came down upon them, "many more than before, and there was a battle, and Thorfinn's men won the day and saved the cattle," and their enemies fled into the forest.

Thorfinn stayed all the winter, but towards spring he grew tired of his enterprise, and returned to Greenland, "taking much goods," vines, wood for timber, and skin-wares, and so came back to Eric's Fiord in the summer of 1008.

Thus ends the story of the last serious effort to colonise Vinland, and the Saga, while giving no definite cause for this failure upon failure, seems to show that even the trifling annoyance of the Skrælings was enough to turn the scale. Natural difficulties were so immense, men were so few, that a pigmy enemy had all the power of the last straw in a load, the odd man in a council. The actual resistance of American natives to European colonists was never very serious in any part of the continent, but the distance from the starting-point and the difficulties of life in the new country were able, even in the time of Raleigh and De Soto, to keep in check men who far more readily founded and kept up European empires in the Indian seas.

So now, though on Thorfinn's return the "talk began to turn again upon a Vinland voyage, as both gainful and honourable," and a daughter of Red Eric, named Freydis, talked men over—especially two brothers, Helge and Finnboge—to a fresh attempt in the country where all the House of Eric had tried and failed; though Leif lent his booths as before, and sixty able-bodied men, besides women, were found willing to go, the colony could never be firmly planted. Freydis and her allies sailed in 1011, reached the settlement, which was now for the third time recolonised, and wintered there;—but jealousies soon broke up the camp, Helge and Finnboge were murdered with all their followers, and the rest came back in 1013 to Greenland, "where Thorfinn Karlsefne was just ready for sailing back to Norway, and it was common talk that never did a richer ship leave Eric's Fiord than that which he steered." It was that same Karlsefne who gave the fullest account of all his travels, concludes the Saga, but whether Thorfinn ever returned to Vinland, whether there were any more attempts to settle at Leif's Booths or elsewhere, whether the account we have of these voyages is really an Eric Saga, only telling the deeds of Red Eric and his House—for after Bjarni, almost every Vinland leader is of this family—we cannot tell. We can only fancy that all these suggestions are probable, by the side of the few additional facts known to the Norse Skalds or Bards. The first of these is, that in 983-4, Are Marson of Reykianes in Iceland was driven by storms far West to White Man's Land, where he was followed by Bjarni Asbrandson in 999, and by Gudleif Gudlangson in 1029. This was the tale of his friend Rafn, "the Limerick trader," and of Are Frode, his great-great-grandson, who called the unknown land Great Ireland.[17] True or untrue, in whatever way, this would be a later discovery than those of Eric and his sons, if the news of it did not come into Iceland or Norway till after Thorfinn Karlsefne's voyage, as is generally supposed. Again, the length of the voyage is a difficulty, and the whole matter has a doubtful look—an attempt to start a rival to the Eric Saga, by a far more brilliant success a few years earlier.

We seem to be on more certain ground in our next and last chapter of Viking exploration in the north-west, in the fragmentary notices of Greenland and Vinland voyages to the middle of the fourteenth century, and in the fairly clear and continuous account of the two Greenland settlements of the western and the eastern Bays.

We hear, for instance, of Bishop Eric going over from Eric's Fiord to Vinland in 1121; of clergy from the Eastern Bay diocese of Gardar sailing to lands in the West, far north of Vinland, in 1266; of the two Helgasons discovering a country west of Iceland in 1285; of a voyage from Greenland to Markland in 1347 by a crew of seventeen men, recorded in 1354.

Unless these are pure fabrications, they would seem to prove something of constant intercourse between the mother and daughter colonies of north-west Europe and north-east America, and something of a permanent Christian settlement of Northmen in the New Continent is made probable by assuming such intercourse. Between 981-1000, both Iceland and Greenland had become "Catholic in name and Christian in surname"; in 1126 the line of Bishops of Gardar begins with Arnold, and the clergy would hardly have ventured on the Vinland voyage to convert Skrælings in an almost deserted country.