ITALIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EXPLORATION
(1200-1500)
Although in the fifteenth century Italy lost the commercial leadership
which she had so long held, she did not cease to be the teacher of the
other countries of Europe. In those arts which lay at the base of
exploration, as in so many other fields, Italy was far in advance of
all other Western countries. Through the Middle Ages she preserved much
of the heritage of ancient skill and learning; by her Renaissance
studies she recovered much that had been temporarily lost; and in
geographical science she early made progress of her own. "The greatness
of the Germans, the courtesy of the French, the valor of the English,
and the wisdom of the Italians" is the tribute paid by a fifteenth-
century Portuguese chronicler to the nations of his time, and this
"wisdom of the Italians" he especially connects with exploration and
navigation.[Footnote: Azurara, "Chronicle of Guinea," chap. ii.]
As a nation Italy played but a slight part in the discoveries of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but through her scattered sons she
used her fine intelligence to initiate and guide much of the work that
was completed by the ruder but more efficient and vigorous nations of
the Atlantic seaboard. Educated men from Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and
Florence emigrated to other lands, carrying with them science, skill,
and ingenuity unknown except in the advanced and enterprising Italian
city republics and principalities. Italian mathematicians made the
calculations on which all navigation was based; Italian cartographers
drew maps and charts; Italian ship-builders designed and built the best
vessels of the time; Italian captains commanded them, and very often
Italian sailors made up their crews; while at least in the earlier
period Italian bankers advanced the funds with which the expeditions
were equipped and sent out.
Columbus, Cabot, Verrazzano, and Vespucci were simply the most famous
of the Italians who during this period made discoveries while in the
service of other governments. The Venetian Cadamosto led repeated and
successful expeditions for Prince Henry of Portugal; Perestrello, the
discoverer of Porto Santo, in the Madeiras, and Antonio de Noli, the
discoverer of the Cape Verd Islands, were both Italians. [Footnote:
Ruge, "Der Zeitalter der Entdeckungen," 217.] This was no new condition
of affairs. In the time of Edward II. and Edward III., in the service
of England, we find the names of Genoese such as Pesagno and Uso de
Mare. Another Genoese, Emanuel Pesagno, was appointed as the first
hereditary admiral of the fleet of Portugal, and by the terms of his
engagement was required to keep the Portuguese navy provided with
twenty Genoese captains of good experience in navigation. Of the sixty
men who made up the complement of Magellan's fleet of 1519, in the
service of Spain, twenty-three were Italians, mostly Genoese.
[Footnote: Navarrete, quoted in Ruge, Zeitalter, 466, n.] At the same
time all Spanish taxes were administered by Genoese bankers, and they
or other Italians had a monopoly of all loanable capital. [Footnote:
Hume, Spain, Its Greatness and Decay, 87]
Long before the great period of discoveries Italians contributed to the
increase of geographical knowledge by travel and narratives of travel
over the world as it was already known, but only known vaguely and by
dim report. Down to the middle of the thirteenth century the total
knowledge of the lands and waters of the globe possessed by the
educated men of Europe was not appreciably greater than it had been a
thousand years earlier. The disintegration of the old Roman world, the
more stationary habits of life, and the narrower interests of men
during the early Middle Ages were unfavorable to travel.
The later Middle Ages were not lacking in keen intellect, in large
knowledge, in powers of systematization and elaboration of what has
already been acquired; but they had neither the material equipment nor
the mental temperament to carry the boundaries of knowledge further.
What was known of the world to Ptolemy in the second century made up
the sum of knowledge possessed by the geographers of all the following
centuries to the thirteenth. Indeed, the mediaeval tendency to
establish symmetrical measurements, to adopt fanciful explanations, and
to find analogies in all things, obscured earlier knowledge and made
geographers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries less correct in
their knowledge of the world than were those of the second or the
third. [Footnote: Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography.]
The discoveries, conquests, and settlements of the Northmen in the
north of Europe and the northern Atlantic were so detached from the
knowledge of the south and came to a pause so early in time that
notwithstanding their potential value they contributed practically
nothing to the general geographical knowledge of Europe. Nor did
Christian, Jewish, or Arabic accounts of Eastern lands written by
travellers of the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries
become widely known or influential. [Footnote: Ibid., II., chaps, i.-
iv.] Even the knowledge brought home by the Crusaders was of a
restricted territory, most of it already comparatively familiar; and
therefore they added little to the common stock.
About the middle of the thirteenth century, however, began a series of
journeys which were more fully recorded in narratives more widely
circulated and in a more receptive period. Three incentives habitually
carry men into distant and unknown lands--missionary zeal, desire for
trade, and curiosity. Actuated by one or other of these influences, an
increasing number of Europeans visited lands far beyond the eastern
terminations of the trade-routes, and some of them brought back reports
of which the influence was wide and lasting.
Among the earliest and most observant were a succession of Franciscan
friars, sent after 1245 on missionary journeys to the court of the
ruler of the great Tartar Empire, which was then so rapidly
overspreading Asia and eastern Europe. The first of these was John de
Piano Carpini, a native of Naples, who belonged to a Franciscan house
near Perugia. He went through Bohemia, Poland, southern Russia, and the
vast steppes of Turkestan, and found the Khan at Karakorum, in
Mongolia. He was two years on the journey, and after his return wrote
an exact and interesting account of his observations and experiences.
[Footnote: Travels of John de Piano Carpini (D'Avezac's ed.).]
A few years afterwards William de Rubruquis--a Fleming in this case,
not an Italian--was sent to visit the Mongol emperor by Louis IX. when
he was in the East. He followed a more southerly route than Carpini,
skirting the northern shores of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Sea
of Aral, and then passing northward to Karakorum. Returning he crossed
the Caucasus and passed through Persia and the lands of the Turks,
finally reaching the Mediterranean through Syria. The account which he
wrote of his adventures was much fuller than that of Piano Carpini, and
gives descriptions of China as well as of the central Asiatic lands.
[Footnote: Travels of William de Rubruquis (D'Avezac's ed).]
Just at the beginning of the next century two other travellers, John de
Monte Corvino [Footnote: Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, II, chap
v.] and Odoric de Pordenone, [Foornote: Travels of Odoric de Pordenone
(D'Avezac's ed)] both Italians, made journeys through Persia, India,
southern Asia, and China, and later wrote accounts of these more
southern lands quite as full as were those already mentioned concerning
the northern parts of the great eastern continent. The most famous of
all mediaeval travellers in the East were the Venetian merchants Nicolo
and Matteo Polo and their nephew Marco. These enterprising traders,
leaving their warehouses in Soldaia on the Crimea, in two successive
journeys made their way along the northern and central trade-routes to
Pekin, in northern China, or Cathay, which had become the capital of
the Great Khan. For almost twenty years the Polos were attached to the
court of Kublai Khan, the nephew, Marco, rising higher and higher in
the graces of that ruler.
Marco Polo was one of the well-known type of Italian adventurers who
appeared at foreign courts, and, with the versatility of their race,
made themselves useful, and indeed indispensable, to their masters. He
learned the languages of the East, and went upon missions for the Great
Khan to all parts of his vast empire. When, in 1292, the Polos obtained
permission to return home they followed the longest and most important
of the three main trade-routes which have been described. They sailed
from Zaiton, a seaport of China, and passing along the shores of
Tonquin, Java, and farther India, made their way from port to port,
through the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon, then to the Malabar coast of
India, along which they passed to Cambay, and thence through the Red
Sea to Cairo, and so to Venice. Their journey homeward from China, with
its long detentions in the East Indies, took almost three years.
All the world knows of Marco Polo's subsequent experiences in Venice,
his capture and imprisonment in Genoa, the stories of his travels with
which he whiled away the weary days of his captivity, and the gathering
of these into a book which spread widely through Europe within the next
few years and has been eagerly read ever since. [Footnote: Marco Polo
(Yule's ed,), Introduction.]
Neither the travels of Marco Polo nor those of his predecessors or
immediate successors disclosed any lands the existence of which was not
before known to Europeans; but they gave fuller knowledge of many
countries and nations of which the names only were known; and they gave
this knowledge with astonishing freshness, minuteness, and accuracy.
The writers of these books travelled over many thousands of miles, and
they described, in the main, what they saw, although, of course, they
repeated, with more or less of exaggeration, much which they only knew
from conversation or from hearsay. Besides the written stories of such
experiences, other Europeans who accompanied these travellers, or who
made independent journeys to various parts of Asia, spread knowledge of
the same things. The author of a later popular volume of travels,
passing under the name of Sir John Mandeville, managed, by making use
of a slight acquaintance with Asia, of a fuller knowledge of the
writings of other travellers, and, most of all, of the resources of a
fertile imagination, to weave a tissue of mendacious description which
really lessened knowledge. [Footnote: Travels of Sir John Mandeville
(ed. of 1900).]
Nevertheless, as a result of these travellers' reports, the traditions
of earlier times and the knowledge of the nearer East possessed by
traders were supplemented and popularized. The journeys of the
travellers of the later thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries were a
veritable revelation to Europe of the condition of Tartary, Persia,
India, China, and many intervening lands. Especially strong was the
impression made by the reports about China and Japan. The land of the
Seres, lying on the border of the eastern ocean, had indeed been known
to the ancients, and mentioned by tradition as the source from which
came certain well-known products; but under the name of Cathay, which
Marco Polo and his contemporaries gave to it, it attained a new and
strong hold on men's imaginations. Its myriad population, its hundreds
of cities, its vast wealth, its advanced civilization, its rivers,
bridges, and ships, its manufactures and active trade, the fact that it
was the easternmost country of Asia, washed by the waters of the
external ocean--all made Cathay a land of intense interest to the
rising curiosity of thirteenth-century Europe. [Footnote: Pigeonneau,
"Histoire du Commerce de la France," II, 12, etc.] Similarly the great
island of Cipangu, or Japan, lying a thousand miles farther to the
eastward, though never actually visited by Marco Polo, and described by
him with a vague and extravagant touch, was of equally keen interest to
his readers, as were the "twelve thousand seven hundred islands" at
which he calculates the great archipelagoes which lie in the Indian
Ocean and the Pacific.
It was his accounts of "the province of Mangi," the cities of Zaiton
and Quinsay, "the Great Khan," "the island of Cipangu," and of their
vast wealth and active trade that took special hold on the mind of
Columbus. His copy of Marco Polo may still be seen, its margins filled
with annotations on such passages, made by the great navigator;
[Footnote: Vignaud, "Toscanelli and Columbus," 95.] and it was to these
that his mind reverted when he had discovered in the West Indies, as he
believed, the outlying parts of the Khan's dominions. [Footnote:
"Columbus's Journal," October 21, 23, 24, 26, 30, November 1, etc.] To
the westward also ancient knowledge was reacquired and made clearer.
The "Fortunate Isles" were rediscovered and identified as the Canaries
by the Italian Lancelot Malocello in 1270 [Footnote: Beazley, Hakluyt
Soc, "Publications," 1899, lxi, lxxviii.], then forgotten and
rediscovered in 1341 [Footnote: Ibid, lxxx; Peschel, "Zeitalter der
Entdecktungen," 37.] by some Portuguese ships, manned by Genoese,
Florentines, Castilians, and Portuguese. In 1291 Tedisio Doria and
Ugolino Vivaldi, Genoese citizens, equipped two galleys and sailed out
through the Straits of Gibraltar and then to the southward, with the
object of reaching the ports of India, but were never heard of again
[Footnote: Peschel, "Zeitalter der Entdeckungen," 36.]. Both the
Madeira Islands and the Azores became known as early as 1330, though
perhaps only in a shadowy way, and were visited from time to time later
in the fourteenth century, before they were regularly occupied in the
fifteenth [Footnote: Nordenskiold, "Periplus," 111-115; Major, "Prince
Henry the Navigator," chaps, v., viii., xiv.].
Through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, therefore, thanks for
the most part to Italian travellers, substantial gains were made in
exactitude and clearness of knowledge of the Old World. Though the
bounds of geographical knowledge were not carried much farther, and
less than one-fourth of the surface of the globe was as yet known to
Europeans, within these bounds knowledge became far more clear.
Ignorance and superstition were still abundant; a mythical kingdom of
Prester John was believed by one geographer to exist in Africa, by
another to be situated in India, and by still another to be in China;
the Atlantic was still dreaded by some as the dark, unknown limit of
the world; ignorant men may still have believed that the sea boiled at
the equator, and that men with dogs' heads and other monsters had each
its own part of the earth; but Italians of any education, especially
those acquainted with the writings of their countrymen, must have been
quite free from such mediaeval notions. By the year 1400 scientific
information, critical habits of thought, and an interest in all forms
of knowledge had reached in Italy a high degree of development and were
fast spreading through Europe.
The theory that the earth was round was familiar to the Greeks and
Romans, and was supported in the Middle Ages by the great authority of
Aristotle. [Footnote: Aristotle, De Ccelo, II., 14.] The only
difficulties lying in the way of an acceptance of this view through the
mediaeval period were, in the first place, the mental effort required
to conceive the earth as round when its visual appearance is flat; and,
secondly, the opposition of churchmen, who interpreted certain texts in
the Bible in such a way as to forbid the conception of the earth as a
sphere. Yet neither of these influences was strong enough to prevail
over the opinions of the majority of learned men. To them the earth was
round, as it was to Aristotle, Ptolemy, and other ancients. [Footnote:
Ruge, Zeitalter der Entdeckungen.] The ball which the Eastern emperors
carried as an emblem of the world-wide extent of their rule, and which
was borrowed from them by various mediaeval potentates, had probably
not lost its meaning. Dante, in the Divina Commedia, not only plans his
Inferno on the supposition of a spherical earth, but takes for granted
the same conception, on the part of his readers. [Footnote: Inferno,
canto 34, lines 100-108.]
The conception of the sphericity of the earth was really a matter of
mental training. In the fifteenth century those who had gained this
knowledge were fewer than in modern times, but the class who did so
believe were no less sure of it. Astronomers, philosophers, men of
general learning, and even navigators and pilots were quite familiar
with the idea and quite in the habit of thinking of the earth as a
sphere. In all probability Columbus represented the beliefs of his
class, as well as his own, when he said, "I have always read that the
world, comprising the land and the water, is spherical, as is testified
by the investigations of Ptolemy and others, who have proved it by the
eclipses of the moon and other observations made from east to west, as
well as by the elevation of the pole from north to south." [Footnote:
Hakluyt Soc., Publications, Hist. of Columbus--Third Voyage, II., 129.]
Opposition to voyages westward was based rather on the probability of
the enormous size of the earth and on the supposed difficulty of
sailing up the slope of the sphere than it was upon any serious doubt
of its sphericity.
The habitable world was quite a different conception. It consisted of
Europe, Asia, and Africa, these three continents forming a continuous
stretch of land lying on the surface of the spherical earth, the rest
of its surface being presumably covered with water. There was more or
less speculation about the existence of other habitable lands on the
earth than those which were known, but the interest in this possibility
was languid at best, and it was denied by learned churchmen on biblical
grounds.
The map-makers of that period continued, like those of the earlier
Middle Ages, to base their work on mere half-mythical traditions,
unrelieved and uncorrected by the results of actual discoveries. Their
maps are still much like picture-books, filled with biblical and
literary lore, indicating but a slight attempt to incorporate exact
measurements and outlines. A development more revolutionary than the
mere gradual increase of knowledge was necessary to break the bonds of
academic tradition. [Footnote: Santarem, Essai sur L'Histoire de la
Cosmographie, I., 75, 167, 178.]
Just at the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, a new line
was struck out in map-making by the construction and steady development
of sailing charts, or "portolani." These humble attempts at
geographical representation were intended as practical aids to
navigation for Mediterranean mariners, and were based on practical
observation. During the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries they
reached a wonderful degree of accuracy. The coasts, bays, islands, and
promontories of the Mediterranean were plotted out in them and drawn
with striking correctness. Some four hundred such sketch-maps remain to
us, drawn by Italians from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries,
besides nearly a hundred made in other countries. [Footnote: Beazley,
in Hakluyt Soc., Publications, 1899, cxx.] They did not undertake to
give the internal features of the countries whose coast-lines they
depicted, and as their main purpose was to aid Mediterranean trade,
they did not extend so far beyond its shore as the erudition of the age
would have made possible.
The best of the world maps of the fifteenth century were based on these
Italian portolani rather than on mediaeval maps, and at the same time
added such enlarged information as became common in the Italy of the
fifteenth century. [Footnote: Ibid., cxxi., etc.]
Thus, at the very beginning of the fifteenth century European explorers
had the benefit of the traditional ancient geography, of the new
exactness of knowledge drawn from the observations of recent
travellers, of the accurate but limited portolani of the Italian
navigators, and finally of the more pretentious, if vague and often
misleading, world maps of learned geographers. If a sailor wished to
navigate the Mediterranean and its adjacent waters, if he planned to
sail up the coast of Europe to the British Isles and on into the
Baltic, or to pass down the Atlantic coast of Africa to Cape Nun, he
might rely on the maps and charts which the Italian geographers could
furnish him. Or if he launched his galleys on the Red Sea he might use
their guidance down the east coast of Africa to the equator. He would
also find tolerably accurate descriptions of all the southern coasts of
Asia. In the interior a traveller by land could know beforehand the
main features of the countries he might traverse. Beyond these limits,
either by sea or by land, geographical knowledge must be sought by
discovery or followed along the lines of dim report. If European
sailors should follow the coast of Africa below the twenty-seventh
parallel of north latitude, or of Europe above the sixtieth, or if they
should direct their course into the western ocean beyond the Azores,
they would be sailing into the unknown, and whatever they should find
would be fresh acquisition.
The two instruments which were the most requisite for distant voyaging,
the compass and the astrolabe (the predecessor of the quadrant), were
already, in 1400, known and used by Mediterranean navigators. The
property of turning towards the north, possessed by a magnetized
needle, was certainly known as early as the close of the twelfth
century; and even its use by sailors to find their directions when the
sun and stars were obscured. More than one mediaeval writer describes
the process by which a needle is rubbed on a piece of magnetic iron,
then laid on a straw or attached to a piece of cork, and floated on
water till its point turns towards the north star. [Footnote: Alexander
Neckham, De Utensilibus; De Natura Rerum, book II., chap, xcviii.;
Guyot de Provins, La Bible, Jacques de Vitry, Historia Orientalis;
Brunette Latini, Epistolas, who mentions Roger Bacon as showing him a
magnet at Oxford in 1258. Quoted in Beazley, Hakluyt Soc, Publications,
1899, cxliv., etc.] But its properties savored of magic; the earlier
sailors, who hugged the shore, scarcely needed it, and it came into
general use as slowly and imperceptibly as most of the other great
inventions of the world.
The introduction of the compass into general use is, by tradition,
ascribed to the Italian city of Amain, and it is easy to believe that
the enterprising sailors of this commercial republic brought it into
established recognition. By the early years of the fifteenth century
the compass was provided with the card, marked with the directions,
placed in the compass-box, and made a well-known part of the equipment
of the navigator. [Footnote: Azurara, Discovery of Guinea, chap ix.]
The mariner could now tell his directions wherever he might be, and the
spider-web net-work of "compass-roses" on many of the early maps shows
how anxious the map-maker was to provide lines along which the
navigator might lay his course according to his compass. The makers of
the better class of portolani evidently had the use of the compass in
drawing their charts. [Footnote: Santarem, Essai sur L'Histoire de la
Cosmographie, I., 280-305.] The changed position of the heavenly bodies
as the early traveller passed northward or southward struck him with
especial force. Marco Polo, describing the island of Sumatra, says,
"But let me tell you one marvellous thing, and that is the fact that
this island lies so far to the south that the north star, little or
much, is never to be seen." [Footnote: Marco Polo (Yule's ed.), book
III., chap. ix.] He also notes on his journey northward through India,
when he sees it again, "two cubits above the water." When Cadamosto,
the Venetian, saw the pole-star at "the third of a lance's length above
the edge of the waves," he recorded it as one of the most striking
phenomena of his journey towards the equator.
Two instruments were known by which the elevation above the horizon of
the pole-star, or any other heavenly body could be measured. The older
of these was the "cross-staff," or St. James's staff, a simple rod
marked into degrees, at the end of which the eye was placed and along
which a measured cross-piece was pushed, till one of its ends hid a
point oh the horizon and the other the sun or star whose height was
being measured. The astrolabe was a somewhat more elaborate instrument,
consisting of a brass circle marked with degrees, against which two
movable bars were fastened, each provided at the ends with a sight or
projecting piece pierced by a hole. This was hung by a ring from a peg
in the mast or from the hand, so that gravity would make one of its
bars horizontal. Then the other bar was sighted to point towards some
heavenly body. Chaucer, in 1400, gave to his "litel Lowis my sone" an
astrolabe calculated "after the latitude of Oxenford," and wrote a
charming treatise to explain to him in English its use, "for Latin ne
canstow yit but smal, my lyte sone." In this treatise he described to
him, among other things, "diverse tables of longitudes and latitudes of
sterres." [Footnote: Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, Prologue;
Skeat, The Student's Chaucer, 396.] By means of either of these
instruments latitude could be measured or calculated. Longitude was a
more difficult problem; it involved the calculation of the difference
of time as well as measurements of elevation of the heavenly bodies.
The calculations necessary to discover actual locations from an
observation were too long and complicated to be made on each occasion;
and "ephemerides," or calculated tables of elevations of planets and of
differences of time, were required. Just when the earliest of such
tables were constructed and when chronometers came into use is obscure,
but they were in existence in at least a rudimentary form early in the
fifteenth century. [Footnote: Humboldt, Examen Critique, I., 274.]
The condition of Europe early in the fifteenth century as compared with
its condition early in the thirteenth shows a great advance in those
lines which made extensive exploration possible, and this advance was
chiefly due to Italians. Increased knowledge, improved equipment,
instruments of astronomical observation, navigating charts, and a face
of educated navigators, made a part of the European background of
American history as truly as did the incentive to exploration afforded
by the search for new routes to the East. Of course much progress
remained to be accomplished in the making of maps and globes, in the
improvement of instruments, and in the calculation of tables during the
period of discovery. The awakened scientific interest which had already
shown itself as part of the Renaissance found scope in the practical
requirements of distant voyages. While men were discovering new
continents and seas, they were at the same time solving many problems
of geographical science and perfecting the equipment by which further
advance was made practicable.