EUROPE AND CATHAY.
[Sidenote: Why the voyages of the Northmen were not followed up.]
The question has sometimes been asked, Why did the knowledge of the
voyages to Vinland so long remain confined to the Scandinavian people or
a portion of them, and then lapse into oblivion, insomuch that it did
not become a matter of notoriety in Europe until after the publication
of the celebrated book of Thormodus Torfæus in 1705? Why did not the
news of the voyages of Leif and Thorfinn spread rapidly over Europe,
like the news of the voyage of Columbus? and why was it not presently
followed, like the latter, by a rush of conquerors and colonizers across
the Atlantic?
Such questions arise from a failure to see historical events in their
true perspective, and to make the proper allowances for the manifold
differences in knowledge and in social and economic conditions which
characterize different periods of history. In the present case, the
answer is to be found, first, in the geographical ignorance which
prevented the Northmen from realizing in the smallest degree what such
voyages really signified or were going to signify to posterity; and,
secondly, in the political and commercial condition of Europe at the
close of the tenth century.
[Sidenote: Ignorance of geography.]
In the first place the route which the Norse voyagers pursued, from
Iceland to Greenland and thence to Vinland, was not such as to give
them, in their ignorance of the shape of the earth, and with their
imperfect knowledge of latitude and longitude, any adequate gauge
wherewith to measure their achievement. The modern reader, who has in
his mind a general picture of the shape of the northern Atlantic ocean
with its coasts, must carefully expel that picture before he can begin
to realize how things must have seemed to the Northmen. None of the
Icelandic references to Markland and Vinland betray a consciousness that
these countries belong to a geographical world outside of Europe. There
was not enough organized geographical knowledge for that. They were
simply conceived as remote places beyond Greenland, inhabited by
inferior but dangerous people. The accidental finding of such places
served neither to solve any great commercial problem nor to gratify and
provoke scientific curiosity. It was, therefore, not at all strange that
it bore no fruit.
[Sidenote: Lack of instruments for ocean navigation.]
Secondly, even if it had been realized, and could have been duly
proclaimed throughout Europe, that across the broad Atlantic a new world
lay open for colonization, Europe could not have taken advantage of the
fact. Now and then a ship might make its way, or be blown, across the
waste of waters without compass or astrolabe; but until these
instruments were at hand anything like systematic ocean navigation was
out of the question; and from a colonization which could only begin by
creeping up into the Arctic seas and taking Greenland on the way, not
much was to be expected, after all.
[Sidenote: Europe in the year 1000.]
But even if the compass and other facilities for oceanic navigation had
been at hand, the state of Europe in the days of Eric the Red was not
such as to afford surplus energy for distant enterprise of this sort.
Let us for a moment recall what was going on in Europe in the year of
grace 1000, just enough to get a suggestive picture of the time. In
England the Danish invader, fork-bearded Swend, father of the great
Cnut, was wresting the kingship from the feeble grasp of Ethelred the
Redeless. In Gaul the little duchy of France, between the Somme and the
Loire, had lately become the kingdom of France, and its sovereign, Hugh
Capet, had succeeded to feudal rights of lordship over the great dukes
and counts whose territories surrounded him on every side; and now
Hugh's son, Robert the Debonair, better hymn-writer than warrior, was
waging a doubtful struggle with these unruly vassals. It was not yet in
any wise apparent what the kingdoms of England and France were going to
be. In Germany the youthful Otto III., the "wonder of the world," had
just made his weird visit to the tomb of his mighty predecessor at
Aachen, before starting on that last journey to Rome which was so soon
to cost him his life. Otto's teacher, Gerbert, most erudite of
popes,--too learned not to have had dealings with the Devil,--was
beginning to raise the papacy out of the abyss of infamy into which the
preceding age had seen it sink, and so to prepare the way for the
far-reaching reforms of Hildebrand. The boundaries of Christendom were
as yet narrow and insecure. With the overthrow of Olaf Tryggvesson in
this year 1000, and the temporary partition of Norway between Swedes and
Danes, the work of Christianizing the North seemed, for the moment, to
languish. Upon the eastern frontier the wild Hungarians had scarcely
ceased to be a terror to Europe, and in this year Stephen, their first
Christian king, began to reign. At the same time the power of heretical
Bulgaria, which had threatened to overwhelm the Eastern Empire, was
broken down by the sturdy blows of the Macedonian emperor Basil. In this
year the Christians of Spain met woful defeat at the hands of Almansor,
and there seemed no reason why the Mussulman rule over the greater part
of that peninsula should not endure forever.
Thus, from end to end, Europe was a scene of direst confusion, and
though, as we now look back upon it, the time seems by no means devoid
of promise, there was no such cheering outlook then. Nowhere were the
outlines of kingdoms or the ownership of crowns definitely settled.
Private war was both incessant and universal; the Truce of God had not
yet been proclaimed.[309] As for the common people, their hardships
were well-nigh incredible. Amid all this anarchy and misery, at the
close of the thousandth year from the birth of Christ, the belief was
quite common throughout Europe that the Day of Judgment was at hand for
a world grown old in wickedness and ripe for its doom.
[Footnote 309: The "Truce of God" (_Treuga Dei_) was introduced
by the clergy in Guienne about 1032; it was adopted in Spain
before 1050, and in England by 1080. See Datt, _De pace imperii
publica_, lib. i. cap. ii. A cessation of all violent quarrels
was enjoined, under ecclesiastical penalties, during church
festivals, and from every Wednesday evening until the following
Monday morning. This left only about eighty days in the year
available for shooting and stabbing one's neighbours. The truce
seems to have accomplished much good, though it was very
imperfectly observed.]
[Sidenote: The condition of things was not such as to favour colonial
enterprise.]
It hardly need be argued that a period like this, in which all the vital
energy in Europe was consumed in the adjustment of affairs at home, was
not fitted for colonial enterprises. Before a people can send forth
colonies it must have solved the problem of political life so far as to
ensure stability of trade. It is the mercantile spirit that has
supported modern colonization, aided by the spirit of intellectual
curiosity and the thirst for romantic adventure. In the eleventh century
there was no intellectual curiosity outside the monastery walls, nor had
such a feeling become enlisted in the service of commerce. Of trade
there was indeed, even in western Europe, a considerable amount, but the
commercial marine was in its infancy, and on land the trader suffered
sorely at the hands of the robber baron. In those days the fashionable
method of compounding with your creditors was, not to offer them fifty
cents on the dollar, but to inveigle them into your castle and broil
them over a slow fire.
[Sidenote: The outlook of Europe was toward Asia.]
In so far as the attention of people in Europe was called to any
quarter of the globe outside of the seething turbulence in which they
dwelt, it was directed toward Asia. Until after 1492, Europe stood with
her back toward the Atlantic. What there might be out beyond that "Sea
of Darkness" (_Mare Tenebrosum_), as it used commonly to be called, was
a question of little interest and seems to have excited no speculation.
In the view of mediæval Europe the inhabited world was cut off on the
west by this mysterious ocean, and on the south by the burning sands of
Sahara; but eastward it stretched out no one knew how far, and in that
direction dwelt tribes and nations which Europe, from time immemorial,
had reason to fear. As early as the time of Herodotus, the secular
antagonism between Europe and Asia had become a topic of reflection
among the Greeks, and was wrought with dramatic effect by that great
writer into the structure of his history, culminating in the grand and
stirring scenes of the Persian war. A century and a half later the
conquests of Alexander the Great added a still more impressive climax to
the story. The struggle was afterward long maintained between Roman and
Parthian, but from the fifth century after Christ onward through the
Middle Ages, it seemed as if the Oriental world would never rest until
it had inflicted the extremities of retaliation upon Europe. Whether it
was the heathen of the steppes who were in question, from Attila in the
fifth century to Batu Khan in the thirteenth, or the followers of the
Prophet, who tore away from Christendom the southern shores of the
Mediterranean, and held Spain in their iron grasp, while from age to age
they exhausted their strength in vain against the Eastern Empire, the
threatening danger was always coming with the morning sun; whatever
might be the shock that took the attention of Europe away from herself,
it directed it upon Asia. This is a fact of cardinal importance for us,
inasmuch as it was directly through the interest, more and more
absorbing, which Europe felt in Asia that the discovery of the western
hemisphere was at last effected.
[Sidenote: Routes of trade between Europe and Asia.]
[Sidenote: Claudius Ptolemy.]
[Sidenote: Early mention of China.]
It was not only in war, but in commerce, that the fortunes of Europe
were dependent upon her relations with Asia. Since prehistoric times
there has always been some commercial intercourse between the eastern
shores of the Mediterranean and the peninsula of Hindustan. Tyre and
Sidon carried on such trade by way of the Red Sea.[310] After Alexander
had led his army to Samarcand and to the river Hyphasis, the
acquaintance of the Greeks with Asia was very considerably increased,
and important routes of trade were established. One was practically the
old Phoenician route, with its western terminus moved from Tyre to
Alexandria. Another was by way of the Caspian sea, up the river Oxus,
and thence with camels to the banks of the Indus.[311] An intermediate
route was through Syria and by way of the Euphrates and the Persian
gulf; the route which at one time made the greatness of Palmyra. After
the extension of Roman sway to the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Euxine,
these same routes continued to be used. The European commodities carried
to India were light woollen cloths, linens, coral, black lead, various
kinds of glass vessels, and wine. In exchange for these the traders
brought back to Europe divers aromatic spices, black pepper, ivory,
cotton fabrics, diamonds, sapphires, and pearls, silk thread and silk
stuffs.[312] Detailed accounts of these commercial transactions, and of
the wealth of personal experiences that must have been connected with
them, are excessively scant. Of the Europeans who, during all the
centuries between Alexander and Justinian, made their way to Hindustan
or beyond, we know very few by name. The amount of geographical
information that was gathered during the first half of this period is
shown in the map representing Claudius Ptolemy's knowledge of the earth,
about the middle of the second century after Christ. Except for the
Scandinavian world, and some very important additions made to the
knowledge of Asia by Marco Polo, this map fairly represents the maximum
of acquaintance with the earth's surface possessed by Europeans previous
to the great voyages of the fifteenth century. It shows a dim knowledge
of the mouths of the Ganges, of the island of Ceylon, and of what we
sometimes call Farther India. A very dim knowledge, indeed; for the huge
peninsula of Hindustan is shrunk into insignificance, while Taprobane,
or Ceylon, unduly magnified, usurps the place belonging to the Deccan.
At the same time we see that some hearsay knowledge of China had made
its way into the Roman world before the days of Ptolemy. The two names
by which China was first known to Europeans were "Seres" or "Serica,"
and "Sinæ" or "Thin." These two differing names are the records of two
different methods of approach to different parts of a vast country, very
much as the Northmen called their part of eastern North America
"Vinland," while the Spaniards called their part "Florida." The name
"Seres" was given to northwestern China by traders who approached it
through the highlands of central Asia from Samarcand, while "Sinæ" was
the name given to southeastern China by traders who approached it by way
of the Indian ocean, and heard of it in India, but never reached it.
Apparently no European ships ever reached China before the Portuguese,
in 1517.[313] The name "Sinæ" or "Thin" seems to mean the country of the
"Tchin" dynasty, which ruled over the whole of China in the second
century before Christ, and over a portion of it for a much longer time.
The name "Seres," on the other hand, was always associated with the
trade in silks, and was known to the Romans in the time of the Emperor
Claudius,[314] and somewhat earlier. The Romans in Virgil's time set a
high value upon silk, and every scrap of it they had came from China.
They knew nothing about the silk-worm, and supposed that the fibres or
threads of this beautiful stuff grew upon trees. Of actual intercourse
between the Roman and Chinese empires there was no more than is implied
in this current of trade, passing through many hands. But that each
knew, in a vague way, of the existence of the other, there is no
doubt.[315]
[Footnote 310: Diodorus Siculus, i. 70.]
[Footnote 311: Strabo, xi. 7, § 3.]
[Footnote 312: Robertson, _Historical Disquisition concerning
the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India_, Dublin, 1791,
p. 55. I never have occasion to consult Dr. Robertson without
being impressed anew with his scientific habit of thought and
the solidity of his scholarship; and in none of his works are
these qualities better illustrated than in this noble essay.]
[Footnote 313: The Polos sailed back from China to the Persian
gulf in 1292-94; see below, p. 282.]
[Footnote 314: The name "Seres" appears on the map of Pomponius
Mela (cir. A. D. 50), while "Sinæ" does not. See below, p. 304.
Jam Tartessiaco quos solverat æquore Titan
In noctem diffusus equos, jungebat Eoïs
Littoribus, primique novo Phaethonte retecti
Seres lanigeris repetebant vellera lucis.
Silius Italicus, lib. vi. _ad init._]
[Footnote 315: For this whole subject see Colonel Sir Henry
Yule's _Cathay and the Way Thither_, London, 1866, 2 vols.,--a
work of profound learning and more delightful than a novel.]
[Sidenote: Cosmas Indicopleustes.]
[Sidenote: Shape of the earth, according to Cosmas.]
In the course of the reign of Justinian, we get references at first hand
to India, and coupled withal to a general theory of cosmography. This
curious information we have in the book of the monk Cosmas
Indicopleustes, written somewhere between A. D. 530 and 550. A pleasant
book it is, after its kind. In his younger days Cosmas had been a
merchant, and in divers voyages had become familiar with the coasts of
Ethiopia and the Persian gulf, and had visited India and Ceylon. After
becoming a monk at Alexandria, Cosmas wrote his book of Christian
geography,[316] maintaining, in opposition to Ptolemy, that the earth
is not a sphere, but a rectangular plane forming the floor of the
universe; the heavens rise on all four sides about this rectangle, like
the four walls of a room, and, at an indefinite height above the floor,
these blue walls support a vaulted roof or firmament, in which God
dwells with the angels. In the centre of the floor are the inhabited
lands of the earth, surrounded on all sides by a great ocean, beyond
which, somewhere out in a corner, is the Paradise from which Adam and
Eve were expelled. In its general shape, therefore, the universe
somewhat resembles the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, or a modern
"Saratoga trunk." On the northern part of the floor, under the
firmament, is a lofty conical mountain, around which the sun, moon, and
planets perform their daily revolutions. In the summer the sun takes a
turn around the apex of the cone, and is, therefore, hidden only for a
short night; but in the winter he travels around the base, which takes
longer, and, accordingly, the nights are long. Such is the doctrine
drawn from Holy Scripture, says Cosmas, and as for the vain blasphemers
who pretend that the earth is a round ball, the Lord hath stultified
them for their sins until they impudently prate of Antipodes, where
trees grow downward and rain falls upward. As for such nonsense, the
worthy Cosmas cannot abide it.
[Footnote 316: Its title is [Greek: Christianôn biblos,
hermêneia eis tên Oktateuchon], i. e. against Ptolemy's
Geography in eight books. The name Cosmas Indicopleustes seems
merely to mean "the cosmographer who has sailed to India." He
begins his book in a tone of extreme and somewhat unsavory
humility: [Greek: Anoigô ta mogilala kai bradyglôssa cheilê ho
hamartôlos kai talas egô]--"I, the sinner and wretch, open my
stammering, stuttering lips," etc.--The book has been the
occasion of some injudicious excitement within the last half
century. Cosmas gave a description of some comparatively recent
inscriptions on the peninsula of Sinai, and because he could
not find anybody able to read them, he inferred that they must
be records of the Israelites on their passage through the
desert. (Compare the Dighton rock, above, p. 214.) Whether in
the sixth century of grace or in the nineteenth, your
unregenerate and unchastened antiquary snaps at conclusions as
a drowsy dog does at flies. Some years ago an English
clergyman, Charles Forster, started up the nonsense again, and
argued that these inscriptions might afford a clue to man's
primeval speech! Cf. Bunsen, _Christianity and Mankind_, vol.
iii. p. 231; Müller and Donaldson, _History of Greek
Literature_, vol. iii. p. 353; Bury, _History of the Later
Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene_, vol. ii. p. 177.]
I cite these views of Cosmas because there can be no doubt that they
represent beliefs current among the general public until after the time
of Columbus,[317] in spite of the deference paid to Ptolemy's views by
the learned. Along with these cosmographical speculations, Cosmas shows
a wider geographical knowledge of Asia than any earlier writer. He gives
a good deal of interesting information about India and Ceylon, and has a
fairly correct idea of the position of China, which he calls Tzinista or
Chinistan. This land of silk is the remotest of all the Indies, and
beyond it "there is neither navigation nor inhabited country.... And the
Indian philosophers, called Brachmans, tell you that if you were to
stretch a straight cord from Tzinista through Persia to the Roman
territory, you would just divide the world in halves. And mayhap they
are right."[318]
[Footnote 317: Such views have their advocates even now. There
still lives, I believe, in England, a certain John Hampden, who
with dauntless breast maintains that the earth is a circular
plane with centre at the north pole and a circumference of
nearly 30,000 miles where poor misguided astronomers suppose
the south pole to be. The sun moves across the sky at a
distance of about 800 miles. From the boundless abyss beyond
the southern circumference, with its barrier of icy mountains,
came the waters which drowned the antediluvian world; for, as
this author quite reasonably observes, "on a globular earth
such a deluge would have been physically Impossible." Hampden's
title is somewhat like that of Cosmas,--_The New Manual of
Biblical Cosmography_, London, 1877; and he began in 1876 to
publish a periodical called _The Truth-Seeker's Oracle and
Scriptural Science Review_. Similar views have been set forth
by one Samuel Rowbotham, under the pseudonym of "Parallax,"
_Zetetic Astronomy. Earth not a Globe. An experimental inquiry
into the true figure of the earth, proving it a plane without
orbital or axial motion_, etc., London, 1873; and by a William
Carpenter, _One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe_,
Baltimore, 1885. There is a very considerable quantity of such
literature afloat, the product of a kind of mental aberration
that thrives upon paradox. When I was superintendent of the
catalogue of Harvard University library, I made the class
"Eccentric Literature" under which to group such books,--the
lucubrations of circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, inventors of
perpetual motion, devisers of recipes for living forever
without dying, crazy interpreters of Daniel and the Apocalypse,
upsetters of the undulatory theory of light, the
Bacon-Shakespeare lunatics, etc.; a dismal procession of
long-eared bipeds, with very raucous bray. The late Professor
De Morgan devoted a bulky and instructive volume to an account
of such people and their crotchets. See his _Budget of
Paradoxes_, London, 1872.]
[Footnote 318: Cosmas, ii. 138. Further mention of China was
made early in the seventh century by Theophylactus Samocatta,
vii. 7. See Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. pp. xlix., clxviii.]
[Sidenote: The Nestorians.]
In the fourth and following centuries, Nestorian missionaries were very
active in Asia, and not only made multitudes of converts and established
metropolitan sees in such places as Kashgar and Herat, but even found
their way into China. Their work forms an interesting though melancholy
chapter in history, but it does not seem to have done much toward making
Asia better known to Europe. As declared heretics, the Nestorians were
themselves almost entirely cut off from intercourse with European
Christians.
[Sidenote: Effects of the Saracen conquests.]
[Sidenote: Constantinople in the twelfth century.]
The immediate effect of the sudden rise of the vast Saracen empire, in
the seventh and eighth centuries, was to interpose a barrier to the
extension of intercourse between Europe and the Far East. Trade between
the eastern and western extremities of Asia went on more briskly than
ever, but it was for a long time exclusively in Mussulman hands. The
mediæval Arabs were bold sailors, and not only visited Sumatra and Java,
but made their way to Canton. Upon the southern and middle routes the
Arab cities of Cairo and Bagdad became thriving centres of trade; but as
Spain and the whole of northern Africa were now Arab countries, most of
the trade between east and west was conducted within Mussulman
boundaries. Saracen cruisers prowled in the Mediterranean and sorely
harassed the Christian coasts. During the eighth, ninth, and tenth
centuries, Europe was more shut in upon herself than ever before or
since. In many respects these were especially the dark ages of
Europe,--the period of least comfort and least enlightenment since the
days of pre-Roman barbarism. But from this general statement
Constantinople should be in great measure excepted. The current of
mediæval trade through the noble highway of the Dardanelles and the
Bosphorus was subject to fluctuations, but it was always great. The
city of the Byzantine emperors was before all things a commercial city,
like Venice in later days. Until the time of the Crusades Constantinople
was the centre of the Levant trade. The great northern route from Asia
remained available for commercial intercourse in this direction. Persian
and Armenian merchants sent their goods to Batoum, whence they were
shipped to Constantinople; and silk was brought from northwestern China
by caravan to the Oxus, and forwarded thence by the Caspian sea, the
rivers Cyrus and Phasis, and the Euxine sea.[319] When it was visited by
Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century, Constantinople was
undoubtedly the richest and most magnificent city, and the seat of the
highest civilization, to be found anywhere upon the globe.
[Footnote 319: Robertson, _Historical Disquisition_, p. 93;
Pears, _The Fall of Constantinople_, p. 177,--a book of great
merit.]
[Sidenote: The Crusades.]
[Sidenote: Barbarizing character of Turkish conquest.]
[Sidenote: General effects of the Crusades.]
In the days of its strength the Eastern Empire was the staunch bulwark
of Christendom against the dangerous assaults of Persian, Saracen, and
Turk; alike in prosperity and in calamity, it proved to be the teacher
and civilizer of the western world. The events which, at the close of
the eleventh century, brought thousands upon thousands of adventurous,
keen-witted people from western Europe into this home of wealth and
refinement, were the occasion of the most remarkable intellectual
awakening that the world had ever witnessed up to that time. The
Crusades, in their beginning, were a symptom of the growing energy of
western Europe under the ecclesiastical reformation effected by the
mighty Hildebrand. They were the military response of Europe to the most
threatening, and, as time has proved, the most deadly of all the blows
that have ever been aimed at her from Asia. Down to this time the
Mahometanism with which Christendom had so long been in conflict was a
Mahometanism of civilized peoples. The Arabs and Moors were industrious
merchants, agriculturists, and craftsmen; in their society one might
meet with learned scholars, refined poets, and profound philosophers.
But at the end of the tenth century, Islam happened to make converts of
the Turks, a nomad race in the upper status of barbarism, with flocks
and herds and patriarchal families. Inspired with the sudden zeal for
conquest which has always characterized new converts to Islam, the Turks
began to pour down from the plains of central Asia like a deluge upon
the Eastern Empire. In 1016 they overwhelmed Armenia, and presently
advanced into Asia Minor. Their mode of conquest was peculiarly baleful,
for at first they deliberately annihilated the works of civilization in
order to prepare the country for their nomadic life; they pulled down
cities to put up tents. Though they long ago ceased to be nomads, they
have to this day never learned to comprehend civilized life, and they
have been simply a blight upon every part of the earth's surface which
they have touched. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Asia Minor
was one of the most prosperous and highly civilized parts of the
world;[320] and the tale of its devastation by the terrible Alp Arslan
and the robber chiefs that came after him is one of the most mournful
chapters in history. At the end of that century, when the Turks were
holding Nicæa and actually had their outposts on the Marmora, it was
high time for Christendom to rise _en masse_ in self-defence. The idea
was worthy of the greatest of popes. Imperfectly and spasmodically as it
was carried out, it undoubtedly did more than anything that had ever
gone before toward strengthening the wholesome sentiment of a common
Christendom among the peoples of western Europe. The Crusades increased
the power of the Church, which was equivalent to putting a curb upon the
propensities of the robber baron and making labour and traffic more
secure. In another way they aided this good work by carrying off the
robber baron in large numbers to Egypt and Syria, and killing him there.
In this way they did much toward ridding European society of its most
turbulent elements; while at the same time they gave fresh development
to the spirit of romantic adventure, and connected it with something
better than vagrant freebooting.[321] By renewing the long-suspended
intercourse between the minds of western Europe and the Greek culture
of Constantinople, they served as a mighty stimulus to intellectual
curiosity, and had a large share in bringing about that great thirteenth
century renaissance which is forever associated with the names of Giotto
and Dante and Roger Bacon.
[Footnote 320: "It is difficult for the modern traveller who
ventures into the heart of Asia Minor, and finds nothing but
rude Kurds and Turkish peasants living among mountains and wild
pastures, not connected even by ordinary roads, to imagine the
splendour and rich cultivation of this vast country, with its
brilliant cities and its teeming population." Mahaffy, _The
Greek World under Roman Sway_, London, 1890, p. 229.]
[Footnote 321: The general effects of the Crusades are
discussed, with much learning and sagacity, by
Choiseul-Daillecourt, _De l'Influence des Croisades sur l'état
des peuples de l'Europe_, Paris, 1809.]
[Sidenote: The Fourth Crusade.]
There can be no doubt that in these ways the Crusades were for our
forefathers in Europe the most bracing and stimulating events that
occurred in the whole millennium between the complicated disorders of
the fifth century and the outburst of maritime discovery in the
fifteenth. How far they justified themselves from the military point of
view, it is not so easy to say. On the one hand, they had much to do
with retarding the progress of the enemy for two hundred years; they
overwhelmed the Seljukian Turks so effectually that their successors,
the Ottomans, did not become formidable until about 1300, after the last
crusading wave had spent its force. On the other hand, the Fourth
Crusade, with better opportunities than any of the others for striking a
crushing blow at the Moslem, played false to Christendom, and in 1204
captured and despoiled Constantinople in order to gratify Venice's
hatred of her commercial rival and superior. It was a sorry piece of
business, and one cannot look with unmixed pleasure at the four superb
horses that now adorn the front of the church of St. Mark as a trophy of
this unhallowed exploit.[322] One cannot help feeling that but for this
colossal treachery, the great city of Constantine, to which our own
civilization owes more than can ever be adequately told, might, perhaps,
have retained enough strength to withstand the barbarian in 1453, and
thus have averted one of the most lamentable catastrophes in the history
of mankind.
[Footnote 322: They were taken from Chios in the fourth century
by the emperor Theodosius, and placed in the hippodrome at
Constantinople, whence they were taken by the Venetians in
1204. The opinion that "the results of the Fourth Crusade upon
European civilization were altogether disastrous" is ably set
forth by Mr. Pears, _The Fall of Constantinople_, London, 1885,
and would be difficult to refute. Voltaire might well say in
this case, "Ainsi le seul fruit des chrétiens dans leurs
barbares croisades fut d'exterminer d'autres chrétiens. Ces
croisés, qui ruinaient l'empire auraient pu, bien plus aisément
que tous leurs prédécesseurs, chasser les Turcs de l'Asie."
_Essai sur les Moeurs_, tom. ii. p. 158. Voltaire's general
view of the Crusades is, however, very superficial.]
[Sidenote: Rivalry between Venice and Genoa.]
The general effect of the Crusades upon Oriental commerce was to
increase the amount of traffic through Egypt and Syria. Of this
lucrative trade Venice got the lion's share, and while she helped
support the short-lived Latin dynasty upon the throne at Constantinople,
she monopolized a great part of the business of the Black Sea also. But
in 1261 Venice's rival, Genoa, allied herself with the Greek emperor,
Michael Palæologus, at Nicæa, placed him upon the Byzantine throne, and
again cut off Venice from the trade that came through the Bosphorus.
From this time forth the mutual hatred between Venice and Genoa "waxed
fiercer than ever; no merchant fleet of either state could go to sea
without convoy, and wherever their ships met they fought. It was
something like the state of things between Spain and England in the
days of Drake."[323] In the one case as in the other, it was a strife
for the mastery of the sea and its commerce. Genoa obtained full control
of the Euxine, took possession of the Crimea, and thus acquired a
monopoly of the trade from central Asia along the northern route. With
the fall of Acre in 1291, and the consequent expulsion of Christians
from Syria, Venice lost her hold upon the middle route. But with the
pope's leave[324] she succeeded in making a series of advantageous
commercial treaties with the new Mameluke sovereigns of Egypt, and the
dealings between the Red Sea and the Adriatic soon came to be
prodigious. The Venetians gained control of part of the Peloponnesus,
with many islands of the Ægean and eastern Mediterranean. During the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their city was the most splendid and
luxurious in all Christendom.
[Footnote 323: Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. lxxi.]
[Footnote 324: A papal dispensation was necessary before a
commercial treaty could be made with Mahometans. See Leibnitz,
_Codex Jur. Gent. Diplomat._, i. 489.]
[Sidenote: Centres and routes of mediæval trade.]
Such a development of wealth in Venice and Genoa implies a large
producing and consuming area behind them, able to take and pay for the
costly products of India and China. Before the end of the thirteenth
century the volume of European trade had swelled to great proportions.
How full of historic and literary interest are the very names of the
centres and leading routes of this trade as it was established in those
days, with its outlook upon the Mediterranean and the distant East! Far
up in the North we see Wisby, on the little isle of Gothland in the
Baltic, giving its name to new rules of international law; and the
merchants of the famous Hansa towns extending their operations as far as
Novgorod in one direction, and in another to the Steelyard in London,
where the pound of these honest "Easterlings" was adopted as the
"sterling" unit of sound money. Fats and tallows, furs and wax from
Russia, iron and copper from Sweden, strong hides and unrivalled wools
from England, salt cod and herring (much needed on meagre church
fast-days) from the North and Baltic seas, appropriately followed by
generous casks of beer from Hamburg, were sent southward in exchange for
fine cloths and tapestries, the products of the loom in Ghent and
Bruges, in Ulm and Augsburg, with delicious vintages of the Rhine,
supple chain armour from Milan, Austrian yew-wood for English long-bows,
ivory and spices, pearls and silks from Italy and the Orient. Along the
routes from Venice and Florence to Antwerp and Rotterdam we see the
progress in wealth and refinement, in artistic and literary
productiveness. We see the early schools of music and painting in Italy
meet with prompt response in Flanders; in the many-gabled streets of
Nuremberg we hear the voice of the Meistersinger, and under the low
oaken roof of a Canterbury inn we listen to joyous if sometimes naughty
tales erst told in pleasant groves outside of fever-stricken Florence.
[Sidenote: Effects of the Mongol conquests.]
[Sidenote: Cathay.]
[Sidenote: Carpini and Rubruquis.]
[Sidenote: First knowledge of an eastern ocean beyond Cathay.]
With this increase of wealth and culture in central Europe there came a
considerable extension of knowledge and a powerful stimulus to
curiosity concerning the remote parts of Asia. The conquering career of
Jenghis Khan (1206-1227) had shaken the world to its foundations. In the
middle of that century, to adopt Colonel Yule's lively expression,
"throughout Asia and eastern Europe, scarcely a dog might bark without
Mongol leave, from the borders of Poland and the coast of Cilicia to the
Amur and the Yellow Sea." About these portentous Mongols, who had thus
in a twinkling overwhelmed China and Russia, and destroyed the Caliphate
of Bagdad, there was a refreshing touch of open-minded heathenism. They
were barbarians willing to learn. From end to end of Asia the barriers
were thrown down. It was a time when Alan chiefs from the Volga served
as police in Tunking, and Chinese physicians could be consulted at
Tabriz. For about a hundred years China was more accessible than at any
period before or since,--more even than to-day; and that country now for
the first time became really known to a few Europeans. In the northern
provinces of China, shortly before the Mongol deluge, there had reigned
a dynasty known as the _Khitai_, and hence China was (and still is)
commonly spoken of in central Asia as the country of the Khitai. When
this name reached European ears it became _Cathay_, the name by which
China was best known in Europe during the next four centuries.[325] In
1245, Friar John of Plano Carpini, a friend and disciple of St. Francis,
was sent by Pope Innocent IV. on a missionary errand to the Great Khan,
and visited him in his camp at Karakorum in the very depths of Mongolia.
In 1253 the king of France, St. Louis, sent another Franciscan monk,
Willem de Rubruquis, to Karakorum, on a mission of which the purpose is
now not clearly understood. Both these Franciscans were men of shrewd
and cultivated minds, especially Rubruquis, whose narrative, "in its
rich detail, its vivid pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong
good sense ... has few superiors in the whole library of travel."[326]
Neither Rubruquis nor Friar John visited China, but they fell in with
Chinese folk at Karakorum, and obtained information concerning the
geography of eastern Asia far more definite than had ever before been
possessed by Europeans. They both describe Cathay as bordering upon an
eastern ocean, and this piece of information constituted the first
important leap of geographical knowledge to the eastward since the days
of Ptolemy, who supposed that beyond the "Seres and Sinæ" lay an unknown
land of vast extent, "full of reedy and impenetrable swamps."[327] The
information gathered by Rubruquis and Friar John indicated that there
was an end to the continent of Asia; that, not as a matter of vague
speculation, but of positive knowledge, Asia was bounded on the east,
just as Europe was bounded on the west, by an ocean.
[Footnote 325: Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. p. cxvi.; _Marco Polo_,
vol. i. p. xlii.]
[Footnote 326: Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. cxxx.; cf.
Humboldt, _Examen critique_, tom. i. p. 71. The complete
original texts of the reports of both monks, with learned
notes, may be found in the _Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires,
publié par la Société de Géographie_, Paris, 1839, tom. iv.,
viz.: _Johannis de Plano Carpini Historia Mongolorum quos nos
Tartaros appellamus_, ed. M. d'Avezac; _Itinerarium Willelmi de
Rubruk_, ed. F. Michel et T. Wright.]
[Footnote 327: Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. p. xxxix.; Ptolemy, i.
17. Cf. Bunbury's _History of Ancient Geography_, London, 1883,
vol. ii. p. 606.]
[Sidenote: The data were thus prepared for Columbus;]
[Sidenote: but as yet nobody reasoned from these data to a practical
conclusion.]
Here we arrive at a notable landmark in the history of the Discovery of
America. Here from the camp of bustling heathen at Karakorum there is
brought to Europe the first announcement of a geographical fact from
which the poetic mind of Christopher Columbus will hereafter reap a
wonderful harvest. This is one among many instances of the way in which,
throughout all departments of human thought and action, the glorious
thirteenth century was beginning to give shape to the problems of which
the happy solution has since made the modern world so different from the
ancient.[328] Since there is an ocean east of Cathay and an ocean west
of Spain, how natural the inference--and albeit quite wrong, how
amazingly fruitful--that these oceans are one and the same, so that by
sailing westward from Spain one might go straight to Cathay! The data
for such an inference were now all at hand, but it does not appear that
any one as yet reasoned from the data to the conclusion, although we
find Roger Bacon, in 1267, citing the opinions of Aristotle and other
ancient writers to the effect that the distance by sea from the western
shores of Spain to the eastern shores of Asia cannot be so very
great.[329] In those days it took a long time for such ideas to get from
the heads of philosophers into the heads of men of action; and in the
thirteenth century, when Cathay was more accessible by land than at any
time before or since, there was no practical necessity felt for a water
route thither. Europe still turned her back upon the Atlantic and gazed
more intently than ever upon Asia. Stronger and more general grew the
interest in Cathay.
[Footnote 328: See my _Beginnings of New England_, chap. i. How
richly suggestive to an American is the contemporaneity of
Rubruquis and Earl Simon of Leicester!]
[Footnote 329: Roger Bacon, _Opus Majus_, ed. Jebb, London,
1733, p. 183.]
[Sidenote: The Polo brothers.]
[Sidenote: Kublai Khan's message to the Pope.]
In the middle of the thirteenth century, some members of the Polo
family, one of the aristocratic families of Venice, had a commercial
house at Constantinople. Thence, in 1260, the brothers Nicolò and Maffeo
Polo started on a trading journey to the Crimea, whence one opportunity
after another for making money and gratifying their curiosity with new
sights led them northward and eastward to the Volga, thence into
Bokhara, and so on until they reached the court of the Great Khan, in
one of the northwestern provinces of Cathay. The reigning sovereign was
the famous Kublai Khan, grandson of the all-conquering Jenghis. Kublai
was an able and benevolent despot, earnest in the wish to improve the
condition of his Mongol kinsmen. He had never before met European
gentlemen, and was charmed with the cultivated and polished Venetians.
He seemed quite ready to enlist the Roman Church in aid of his
civilizing schemes, and entrusted the Polos with a message to the Pope,
asking him for a hundred missionary teachers. The brothers reached
Venice in 1269, and found that Pope Clement IV. was dead and there was
an interregnum. After two years Gregory X. was elected and received the
Khan's message, but could furnish only a couple of Dominican friars, and
these men were seized with the dread not uncommonly felt for
"Tartareans," and at the last moment refused to go. Nicolò and his
brother then set out in the autumn of 1271 to return to China, taking
with them Nicolò's son Marco, a lad of seventeen years. From Acre they
went by way of Bagdad to Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian gulf,
apparently with the intention of proceeding thence by sea, but for some
reason changed their course, and travelled through Kerman, Khorassan,
and Balkh, to Kashgar, and thence by way of Yarkand and Khotan, and
across the desert of Gobi into northwestern China, where they arrived in
the summer of 1275, and found the Khan at Kaipingfu, not far from the
northern end of the Great Wall.
[Sidenote: Marco Polo and his travels in Asia.]
[Sidenote: First recorded voyage of Europeans around the Indo-Chinese
peninsula, 1292-94.]
[Sidenote: Return of the Polos to Venice.]
It has been said that the failure of Kublai's mission to the Pope led
him to apply to the Grand Lama, at Thibet, who responded more
efficiently and successfully than Gregory X., so that Buddhism seized
the chance which Catholicism failed to grasp. The Venetians, however,
lost nothing in the good Khan's esteem. Young Marco began to make
himself proficient in speaking and writing several Asiatic languages,
and was presently taken into the Khan's service. His name is mentioned
in the Chinese Annals of 1277 as a newly-appointed commissioner of the
privy council.[330] He remained in Kublai's service until 1292, while
his father and uncle were gathering wealth in various ways. Marco made
many official journeys up and down the Khan's vast dominions, not only
in civilized China, but in regions of the heart of Asia seldom visited
by Europeans to this day,--"a vast ethnological garden," says Colonel
Yule, "of tribes of various race and in every stage of uncivilization."
In 1292 a royal bride for the Khan of Persia was to be sent all the way
from Peking to Tabriz, and as war that year made some parts of the
overland route very unsafe, it was decided to send her by sea. The three
Polos had for some time been looking for an opportunity to return to
Venice, but Kublai was unwilling to have them go. Now, however, as every
Venetian of that day was deemed to be from his very cradle a seasoned
seadog, and as the kindly old Mongol sovereign had an inveterate
land-lubber's misgivings about ocean voyages, he consented to part with
his dear friends, so that he might entrust the precious princess to
their care. They sailed from the port of Zaiton (Chinchow) early in
1292, and after long delays on the coasts of Sumatra and Hindustan, in
order to avoid unfavourable monsoons, they reached the Persian gulf in
1294. They found that the royal bridegroom, somewhat advanced in years,
had died before they started from China; so the young princess became
the bride of his son. After tarrying awhile in Tabriz, the Polos
returned, by way of Trebizond and the Bosphorus, to Venice, arriving in
1295. When they got there, says Ramusio, after their absence of four and
twenty years, "the same fate befel them as befel Ulysses, who, when he
returned to his native Ithaca, was recognized by nobody." Their kinsfolk
had long since given them up for dead; and when the three wayworn
travellers arrived at the door of their own palace, the middle-aged men
now wrinkled graybeards, the stripling now a portly man, all three
attired in rather shabby clothes of Tartar cut, and "with a certain
indescribable smack of the Tartar about them, both in air and accent,"
some words of explanation were needed to prove their identity. After a
few days they invited a party of old friends to dinner, and bringing
forth three shabby coats, ripped open the seams and welts, and began
pulling out and tumbling upon the table such treasures of diamonds and
emeralds, rubies and sapphires, as could never have been imagined,
"which had all been stitched up in those dresses in so artful a fashion
that nobody could have suspected the fact." In such wise had they
brought home from Cathay their ample earnings; and when it became known
about Venice that the three long-lost citizens had come back,
"straightway the whole city, gentle and simple, flocked to the house to
embrace them, and to make much of them, with every conceivable
demonstration of affection and respect."[331]
[Footnote 330: Pauthier's _Marco Polo_, p. 361; Yule's _Marco
Polo_, p. li.]
[Footnote 331: Ramusio, _apud_ Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p.
xxxvii.]
[Sidenote: Marco Polo's book written in prison at Genoa, 1299.]
Three years afterward, in 1298, Marco commanded a galley in the great
naval battle with the Genoese near Curzola. The Venetians were totally
defeated, and Marco was one of the 7,000 prisoners taken to Genoa, where
he was kept in durance for about a year. One of his companions in
captivity was a certain Rusticiano, of Pisa, who was glad to listen to
his descriptions of Asia, and to act as his amanuensis. French was then,
at the close of the Crusades, a language as generally understood
throughout Europe as later, in the age of Louis XIV.; and Marco's
narrative was duly taken down by the worthy Rusticiano in rather lame
and shaky French. In the summer of 1299 Marco was set free and returned
to Venice, where he seems to have led a quiet life until his death in
1324.
[Sidenote: Its great contributions to geographical knowledge.]
"The Book of Ser Marco Polo concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the
East" is one of the most famous and important books of the Middle Ages.
It contributed more new facts toward a knowledge of the earth's surface
than any book that had ever been written before. Its author was "the
first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia;"
the first to describe China in its vastness, with its immense cities,
its manufactures and wealth, and to tell, whether from personal
experience or direct hearsay, of Thibet and Burmah, of Siam and Cochin
China, of the Indian archipelago, with its islands of spices, of Java
and Sumatra, and of the savages of Andaman. He knew of Japan and the
woful defeat of the Mongols there, when they tried to invade the island
kingdom in 1281. He gave a description of Hindustan far more complete
and characteristic than had ever before been published. From Arab
sailors, accustomed to the Indian ocean, he learned something about
Zanzibar and Madagascar and the semi-Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. To
the northward from Persia he described the country of the Golden Horde,
whose khans were then holding Russia in subjection; and he had gathered
some accurate information concerning Siberia as far as the country of
the Samoyeds, with their dog-sledges and polar bears.[332]
[Footnote 332: Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. cxxxi.]
[Sidenote: Prester John.]
[Sidenote: The "Arimaspians."]
Here was altogether too much geographical knowledge for European
ignorance in those days to digest. While Marco's book attracted much
attention, its influence upon the progress of geography was slighter
than it would have been if addressed to a more enlightened public. Many
of its sober statements of fact were received with incredulity. Many of
the places described were indistinguishable, in European imagination,
from the general multitude of fictitious countries mentioned in
fairy-tales or in romances of chivalry. Perhaps no part of Marco's story
was so likely to interest his readers as his references to Prester John.
In the course of the twelfth century the notion had somehow gained
possession of the European mind that somewhere out in the dim vastness
of the Orient there dwelt a mighty Christian potentate, known as John
the Presbyter or "Prester."[333] At different times he was identified
with various known Asiatic sovereigns. Marco Polo identified him with
one Togrul Wang, who was overcome and slain by the mighty Jenghis; but
he would not stay dead, any more than the grewsome warlock in Russian
nursery lore. The notion of Prester John and his wealthy kingdom could
no more be expelled from the European mind in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries than the kindred notion of El Dorado in the
sixteenth. The position of this kingdom was shifted about here and
there, as far as from Chinese Tartary to Abyssinia and back again, but
somewhere or other in people's vague mental picture of the East it was
sure to occur. Other remote regions in Asia were peopled with elves and
griffins and "one-eyed Arimaspians,"[334] and we may be sure that to
Marco's readers these beings were quite as real as the polished
citizens of Cambaluc (Peking) or the cannibals of the Andaman islands.
From such a chaos of ideas sound geographical knowledge must needs be a
slow evolution, and Marco Polo's acquisitions were altogether too far in
advance of his age to be readily assimilated.
[Footnote 333:
"But for to speake of riches and of stones,
And men and horse, I trow the large wones
Of Prestir John, ne all his tresorie,
Might not unneth have boght the tenth partie."
Chaucer, _The Flower and the Leaf_, 200.
The fabulous kingdom of Prester John is ably treated in Yule's
_Cathay_, vol. i. pp. 174-182; _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p.
204-216. Colonel Yule suspects that its prototype may have been
the semi-Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. This is very likely.
As for its range, shifted hither and thither as it was, all the
way from the upper Nile to the Thian-Shan mountains, we can
easily understand this if we remember how an ignorant mind
conceives all points distant from its own position as near to
one another; i. e. if you are about to start from New York for
Arizona, your housemaid will perhaps ask you to deliver a
message to her brother in Manitoba. Nowhere more than in the
history of geography do we need to keep before us, at every
step, the limitations of the untutored mind and its feebleness
in grasping the space-relations of remote regions.]
[Footnote 334: These Arimaspians afford an interesting example
of the uncritical statements of travellers at an early time, as
well as of their tenacious vitality. The first mention of these
mythical people seems to have been made by Greek travellers in
Scythia as early as the seventh century before Christ; and they
furnished Aristeas of Proconnesus, somewhat later, with the
theme of his poem "Arimaspeia," which has perished, all except
six verses quoted by Longinus. See Mure's _Literature of
Antient Greece_, vol. iv. p. 68. Thence the notion of the
Arimaspians seems to have passed to Herodotus (iii. 116; iv.
27) and to Æschylus:--
[Greek: oxystomous gar Zênos akrageis kynas
grypas phylaxai, ton te mounôpa straton
Arimaspon hippobamon', hoi chrysorrhyton
oikousin amphi nama Ploutônos porou;
toutois sy mê pelaze.]
_Prometheus_, 802.
Thence it passed on to Pausanias, i. 24; Pomponius Mela, ii. 1;
Pliny, _Hist. Nat._, vii. 2; Lucan, _Pharsalia_, iii. 280; and
so on to Milton:--
"As when a gryphon through the wilderness,
With winged course o'er hill or moory dale,
Pursues the Arimaspian who by stealth
Had from his wakeful custody purloined
The guarded gold."
_Paradise Lost_, ii. 944.]
[Illustration: Two sheets of the Catalan Map, 1375.]
[Sidenote: Other visits to China.]
[Sidenote: Overthrow of the Mongol dynasty, and shutting up of China.]
Nevertheless, in the Catalan map, made in 1375, and now to be seen in
the National Library at Paris, there is a thorough-going and not
unsuccessful attempt to embody the results of Polo's travels. In the
interval of three quarters of a century since the publication of Marco's
narrative, several adventurous travellers had found their way to Cathay.
There was Friar Odoric, of Pordenone, who, during the years 1316-30
visited Hindustan, Sumatra, Java, Cochin China, the Chinese Empire, and
Thibet.[335] It was from this worthy monk that the arrant old impostor,
"Sir John Mandeville," stole his descriptions of India and Cathay,
seasoning them with yarns from Pliny and Ktesias, and grotesque conceits
of his own.[336] Several other missionary friars visited China between
1302 and 1330, and about ten years after the latter date the Florentine
merchant, Francesco Pegolotti, wrote a very useful handbook for
commercial travellers on the overland route to that country.[337]
Between 1338 and 1353 Giovanni Marignolli spent some years at Peking, as
papal legate from Benedict XI. to the Great Khan, and also travelled in
Ceylon and Hindustan.[338] That seems to have been the last of these
journeys to the Far East. In 1368, the people of China rose against the
Mongol dynasty and overthrew it. The first emperor of the native Ming
dynasty was placed upon the throne, and the Chinese retorted upon their
late conquerors by overrunning vast Mongolia and making it Chinese
Tartary. The barriers thrown down by the liberal policy of the Mongol
sovereigns were now put up again, and no more foreigners were allowed to
set foot upon the sacred soil of the Flowery Kingdom.
[Footnote 335: Odoric mentions Juggernaut processions and the
burning of widows; in Sumatra he observed cannibalism and
community of wives; he found the kingdom of Prester John in
Chinese Tartary; "but as regards him," says wise Odoric, "not
one hundredth part is true of what is told of him as if it were
undeniable." Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. pp. 79, 85, 146.]
[Footnote 336: Colonel Yule gives a list of fourteen important
passages taken bodily from Odoric by Mandeville. _Op. cit._ i.
28. It is very doubtful if that famous book, "Sir John
Mandeville's Travels," was written by a Mandeville, or by a
knight, or even by an Englishman. It seems to have been
originally written in French by Jean de Bourgogne, a physician
who lived for some years at Liège, and died there somewhere
about 1370. He may possibly have been an Englishman named John
Burgoyne, who was obliged some years before that date to flee
his country for homicide or for some political offence. He had
travelled as far as Egypt and Palestine, but no farther. His
book is almost entirely cribbed from others, among which may be
mentioned the works of Jacques de Vitry, Plano Carpini, Hayton
the Armenian, Boldensele's Itinerary, Albert of Aix's chronicle
of the first crusade, Brunetto Latini's _Trésor_, Petrus
Comestor's _Historia scholastica_, the _Speculum_ of Vincent de
Beauvais, etc., etc. It is one of the most wholesale and
successful instances of plagiarism and imposture on record. See
_The Buke of John Mandevill, from the unique copy (Egerton MS.
1982) in the British Museum. Edited by G. F. Warner._
Westminster, 1889. (Roxburghe Club.)]
[Footnote 337: One piece of Pegolotti's advice is still useful
for travellers in the nineteenth century who visit benighted
heathen countries afflicted with robber tariffs: "And don't
forget that if you treat the custom-house officers with
respect, and make them something of a present in goods or
money, they will behave with great civility and always be ready
to appraise your wares below their real value." _Op. cit._ ii.
307.]
[Footnote 338: The works of all the writers mentioned in this
paragraph, or copious extracts from them, may be found in
Yule's _Cathay_, which comprises also the book of the
celebrated Ibn Batuta, of Tangier, whose travels, between 1325
and 1355, covered pretty much the whole of Asia except Siberia,
besides a journey across Sahara to the river Niger. His book
does not seem to have attracted attention in Europe until early
in the present century.]
[Sidenote: First rumours of the Molucca islands and Japan.]
Thus, for just a century,--from Carpini and Rubruquis to
Marignolli,--while China was open to strangers as never before or since,
a few Europeans had availed themselves of the opportunity in such wise
as to mark the beginning of a new era in the history of geographical
knowledge. Though the discoveries of Marco Polo were as yet but
imperfectly appreciated, one point, and that the most significant of
all, was thoroughly established. It was shown that the continent of Asia
did not extend indefinitely eastward, nor was it bounded and barricaded
on that side, as Ptolemy had imagined, by vast impenetrable swamps. On
the contrary, its eastern shores were perfectly accessible through an
open sea, and half a dozen Europeans in Chinese ships had now actually
made the voyage between the coast of China and the Persian gulf.
Moreover, some hearsay knowledge--enough to provoke curiosity and
greed--had been gained of the existence of numerous islands in that
far-off eastern ocean, rich in the spices which from time immemorial had
formed such an important element in Mediterranean commerce. News, also,
had been brought to Europe of the wonderful island kingdom of Japan
(Cipango or Zipangu) lying out in that ocean some hundreds of miles
beyond the coast of Cathay. These were rich countries, abounding in
objects of lucrative traffic. Under the liberal Mongol rule the Oriental
trade had increased enough for Europe to feel in many ways its
beneficial effects. Now this trade began to be suddenly and severely
checked, and while access to the interior of Asia was cut off, European
merchants might begin to reflect upon the value of what they were
losing, and to consider if there were any feasible method of recovering
it.
[Sidenote: The accustomed routes of Oriental trade cut off by the
Ottoman Turks.]
[Sidenote: Necessity for finding an "outside route to the Indies."]
It was not merely the shutting up of China by the first Ming emperor,
in 1368, that checked the intercourse between Europe and Asia. A still
more baleful obstacle to all such intercourse had lately come upon the
scene. In Asia Minor the beastly Turk, whose career had been for two
centuries arrested by the Crusades, now reared his head again. The
Seljukian had been only scotched, not killed; and now he sprang to life
as the Ottoman, with sharper fangs than before. In 1365 the Turks
established themselves in the Balkan peninsula, with Adrianople as their
capital, and began tightening their coils about the doomed city of
Constantine. Each point that they gained meant the strangling of just so
much Oriental trade; for, as we have seen, the alliance of
Constantinople with Genoa since 1261 had secured to the latter city, and
to western Europe, the advantages of the overland routes from Asia,
whether through the Volga country or across Armenia. When at length, in
1453, the Turks took Constantinople, the splendid commercial career of
Genoa was cut with the shears of Atropos. At the same time, as their
power was rapidly extending over Syria and down toward Egypt,
threatening the overthrow of the liberal Mameluke dynasty there, the
commercial prosperity of Venice also was seriously imperilled. Moreover,
as Turkish corsairs began to swarm in the eastern waters of the
Mediterranean, the voyage became more and more unsafe for Christian
vessels. It was thus, while the volume of trade with Asia was, in the
natural course of things, swelling year by year, that its accustomed
routes were being ruthlessly cut off. It was fast becoming necessary to
consider whether there might not be other practicable routes to "the
Indies" than those which had from time immemorial been followed. Could
there be such a thing as an "outside route" to that land of promise? A
more startling question has seldom been propounded; for it involved a
radical departure from the grooves in which the human mind had been
running ever since the days of Solomon. Two generations of men lived and
died while this question was taking shape, and all that time Cathay and
India and the islands of Spices were objects of increasing desire,
clothed by eager fancy with all manner of charms and riches. The more
effectually the eastern Mediterranean was closed, the stronger grew the
impulse to venture upon unknown paths in order to realize the vague but
glorious hopes that began to cluster about these remote countries. Such
an era of romantic enterprise as was thus ushered in, the world has
never seen before or since. It was equally remarkable as an era of
discipline in scientific thinking. In the maritime ventures of
unparalleled boldness now to be described, the human mind was groping
toward the era of enormous extensions of knowledge in space and time
represented by the names of Newton and Darwin. It was learning the right
way of putting its trust in the Unseen.