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PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR
* * * * *
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
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.
[Illustration: GATEWAY AT BELEM. WITH STATUE, BETWEEN THE DOORS, OF
PRINCE HENRY IN ARMOUR.]
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.
PAGE
PREFACE xvii
INTRODUCTION.
THE GREEK AND ARABIC IDEAS OF THE WORLD, AS
THE CHIEF INHERITANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN
MIDDLE AGES IN GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE. 1
CHAPTER I.
EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS (CIRCA 333-867) 29
CHAPTER II.
VIKINGS OR NORTHMEN (CIRCA 787-1066) 50
CHAPTER III.
THE CRUSADES AND LAND TRAVEL (CIRCA 1100-1300) 76
CHAPTER IV.
MARITIME EXPLORATION (CIRCA 1250-1410) 106
CHAPTER V.
GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE IN CHRISTENDOM FROM THE
FIRST CRUSADES (CIRCA 1100-1460) 114
CHAPTER VI.
PORTUGAL TO 1400 (1095-1400) 123
CHAPTER VII.
HENRY'S POSITION AND DESIGNS AT THE TIME OF
THE FIRST VOYAGES, 1410-15 138
CHAPTER VIII.
PRINCE HENRY AND THE CAPTURE OF CEUTA (1415) 147
CHAPTER IX.
HENRY'S SETTLEMENT AT SAGRES AND FIRST DISCOVERIES
(1418-28) 160
CHAPTER X.
CAPE BOJADOR AND THE AZORES (1428-41) 168
CHAPTER XI.
HENRY'S POLITICAL LIFE (1433-41) 179
CHAPTER XII.
FROM BOJADOR TO CAPE VERDE (1441-5) 192
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ARMADA OF 1445 228
CHAPTER XIV.
VOYAGES OF 1446-8 240
CHAPTER XV.
THE AZORES (1431-60) 250
CHAPTER XVI.
THE TROUBLES OF THE REGENCY AND THE FALL OF
DON PEDRO (1440-9) 257
CHAPTER XVII.
CADAMOSTO (1455-6) 261
CHAPTER XVIII.
VOYAGES OF DIEGO GOMEZ (1458-60) 289
CHAPTER XIX.
HENRY'S LAST YEARS AND DEATH (1458-60) 299
CHAPTER XX.
THE RESULTS OF PRINCE HENRY'S WORK 308
INDEX 325
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
MAIN GATE OF THE MONASTERY CHURCH AT BELEM, _Frontispiece_
Built on the site of an old sailor's chapel, existing in
Prince Henry's day, and used by his men. In the niche
between the two great entrance doors, is a statue of Prince
Henry in armour.
THE MONASTERY CHURCH AT BATALHA[1] 132
West front of church in which Prince Henry and his
House lie buried. This church was founded by the Prince's
father, King John, in memory of his victory over Castille
at Aljubarrota.
BATALHA CHURCH--PORTUGAL'S WESTMINSTER[1] 136
The aisle containing the tombs of Prince Henry and his
brothers, the Infants of the House of Aviz.
EFFIGIES OF KING JOHN THE GREAT AND QUEEN PHILIPPA 148
Henry's father and mother, from their tomb in the Abbey
of Batalha.
GATEWAY OF THE CHURCH AT THOMAR 154
The Mother Church of the Order of Christ, of which
Henry was Grand-Master.
HENRY IN MORNING DRESS[2] 258
The original forms the frontispiece to the Paris MS. of
Azurara's _Discovery and Conquest of Guinea_.
COIMBRA UNIVERSITY 298
THE RECUMBENT STATUE OF PRINCE HENRY 306
From his tomb in Batalha Church; with his escutcheons (1)
as titular King of Cyprus; (2) as Knight of the Garter of
England; (3) as Grand Master of the Order of Christ.
ALLEGORICAL PIECE[3] 310
Supposed to represent Columbus, as St. Christopher,
carrying across the ocean the Christian faith, in the
form of the infant Christ. From the map of Juan de la
Cosa, 1500.
VASCO DA GAMA[4] 314
From a portrait in the possession of the Count of
Lavradio.
AFFONSO D'ALBUQUERQUE[5] 318
[Footnote 1: From a water-colour.]
[Footnote 2: From Major's _Life of Henry the Navigator_.]
[Footnote 3: From the Hakluyt Society's _Select Letters of Columbus_.]
[Footnote 4: From the Hakluyt Society's edition of _Three Voyages of
Vasco da Gama_.]
[Footnote 5: From the Hakluyt Society's edition of Albuquerque's
_Commentaries_.]
LIST OF MAPS.[6]
PAGE
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PTOLEMY 2
From Nordenskjöld's fac-simile atlas
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO EDRISI. _c._ 1150 24
As reconstructed by M. Reinaud from the written
descriptions of the Arabic geographer. This illustrates
the extremely unreal and untrue conception of the earth
among Moslem students, especially those who followed the
theories of Ptolomy--_e.g._, in the extension to
Africa eastward, so as practically or actually to join
China, making the Indian Ocean an inland sea.
THE MAPPE-MONDE OF ST. SEVER 48
(B. Mus., Map room, shelf 35 [5], sheet 6). Of uncertain
date, between _c._ 780-980 but probably not later
than the 10th century. One of the earliest examples of
Christian map-making.
THE ANGLO-SAXON MAP 54
(B. Mus., Cotton mss., Tib. B.V., fol. 59). This gives
us the most interesting and accurate view of the world
that we get in the pre-Crusading Christian science. The
square, but not conventional outline is detailed with
considerable care and precision. The writing, though
minute, is legible; but the Nile, which, like the Red
Sea in Africa, is coloured _red_, in contrast to the
ordinary _grey_ of water in this example, is made to
wander about Africa from side to side, with occasional
disappearances, in a thoroughly mythical fashion. This
map, from a ms. of Priscian's _Peviegesis_, appears
to have been executed at the end of the 10th century; it
is on vellum, highly finished, and has been engraved, in
outline, in Playfair's _Atlas_ (Pl. I), and more fully
in the _Penny Magazine_ (July 22, 1837). In the reign
of Henry II., it appears to have belonged to Battle Abbey.
THE TURIN MAP OF THE 11TH CENTURY 76
(B. Mus., Map room. From Ottino's reproduction).
One of the oldest and simplest of Christian Mappe-Mondes,
giving a special prominence to Paradise, (with the figures
of Adam, Eve, and the serpent), to the mountains and
rivers of the world, and to the four winds of heaven. It is
to be associated with the Spanish map of 1109, and the
Mappe-Monde of St. Sever.
THE SPANISH-ARABIC MAP OF 1109 84
(B. Mus., Add. mss., 11695). The original, gorgeously
coloured, represents the crudest of Christian and Moslem
notions of the world. Even more crude than in the Turin
map and the Mappe-Monde of St. Sever, both of which offer
some resemblances to this. The earth is represented as of
quadrangular shape, surrounded by the ocean. At the E.
is Paradise with the figures of the Temptation. A part of
the S. is cut off by the Red Sea, which is straight (and
coloured red), just as the straight Mediterranean, with its
quadrangular islands, divides the N.W. quarter, or Europe,
from the S.W. quarter, or Africa. The Ægean Sea joins
the Mediterranean at a right angle, in the centre of the
map. In the ocean, bordering the whole, are square
islands, _e.g._, Tile (Thule), Britania, Scocia,
Fu(o)rtunarum insula. The Turin map occurs in another
copy of the same work--_A Commentary on the Apocalypse_.
THE PSALTER MAP OF THE 13TH CENTURY 92
(B. Mus., Add. mss., 28, 681). A good illustration of
the circular type of mediæval map, which is sometimes
little better than a panorama of legends and monsters.
Christ at the top; the dragons crushed beneath him at the
bottom; Jerusalem, the navel of the earth, in the middle
as a sort of bull's-eye to a target, all show a "religious"
geography. The line of queer figures, on the right side,
figuring the S. coast of Africa, suggests a parallel with the
still more fanciful Mappe-Monde of Hereford. (For copy
see Bevan and Phillott's edition of the Hereford map).
THE S.W., OR AFRICAN SECTION OF THE HEREFORD
MAP _c._ 1275-1300 106
(B. Mus., King's Lib., XXIII). The S. coast of Africa,
as in the Psalter map, is fringed with monstrous tribes;
monstrous animals fill up a good deal of the interior; half
of the wheel representing Jerusalem in the middle of the
world appears in the N.E. corner; and the designer's idea
of the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands is specially noteworthy.
The Hereford map is a specimen of the thoroughly
traditional and unpractical school of mediæval geographers
who based their work on books, or fashionable collections
of travellers' tales--such as Pliny, Solinus, or Martianus
Capella--and who are to be distinguished from the scientific
school of the same period, whose best works were the
Portolani, or coast-charts of the early 14th century.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MARINO SANUTO. _c._ A.D. 1306 114
(B. Mus., King's Lib., 149 F. 2 p. 282). The shape of
Africa in this map is supposed by some to be valuable in the
history of geographical advance, as suggesting the possibility
of getting round from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean.
SKETCH MAP OF DULCERT'S PORTOLANO OF 1339 116
(From Nordenskjöld's fac-simile atlas). This illustrates
the accuracy of the 14th century coast-charts, especially in
the Mediterranean.
THE LAURENTIAN PORTOLANO OF 1351 120
(From the Medicean Lib. at Florence; reproduced in
B. Mus., Map room, shelf 158, 22, 23). This is the most
remarkable of all the Portolani of the 14th century, as
giving a view of the world, and especially Africa, which is
far nearer the actual truth than could be expected. Especially
its outline of S. Africa and of the bend of the Guinea
coast, is surprisingly near the truth, even as a guess, in
a chart made one hundred and thirty-five years before the
Cape of Good Hope was first rounded.
N.W. SECTION OF THE CATALAN MAP OF 1375-6 124
(B. Mus., Map room, 13, 14). This gives the British
Islands, the W. coasts of Europe, N. Africa as far as Cape
Boyador, and the Canaries and other islands in the Atlantic.
The interior of Africa is filled with fantastic pictures of
native tribes; the boat load of men off Cape Boyador in the
extreme S.W. of the map probably represents the Catalan
explorers of the year 1346, whose voyage in search of the
"River of Gold" this map commemorates.
CHART OF THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, BY BARENTSZOON 128
(Engraved in copper 1595. Almost an unaltered copy of
a Portolano from the 14th century. From Nordenskjöld's
fac-simile atlas). This illustrates the remarkable
correctness in the drawing of the Mediterranean basin
and the coasts of W. Europe, reached by the Italian and
Balearic coast-charts, or Portolani, in the 14th century.
THE BORGIAN MAP OF 1450 290
(B. Mus., Map room, shelf 2 [6], 13, 14; copy of 1797).
This map was executed just before the fall of Constantinople
(1453), and gives a view of the world as imagined
in the 15th century. It is very fantastic and
unscientific, but remarkable among its kind for its
comparative freedom from ecclesiastical influence.
WESTERN SECTION OF THE MAPPE-MONDE OF FRA
MAURO, 1457-9 302
(_Cf._ reproduction in B. Mus., Add. mss., 11267, and
photographic copy in Map room). This map of Fra Mauro
of Murano, (near Venice), is usually understood to be a sort
of picture, not merely of the world as then known, but of
Prince Henry's discoveries in particular on the W. African
coast. From this point of view it is perhaps disappointing;
the inlet of the Rio d'Ouro(?), to the S. of the Sahara,
is exaggerated beyond all recognition; at the S. Cape (of
Good Hope) a great island is depicted, separated from the
mainland by a narrow channel--possibly Madagascar
displaced.
SKETCH-MAP OF FRA MAURO'S MAPPE-MONDE 304
As reduced and simplified in Lelewel's _Atlas_.
The corners of the table are filled up with four small
circles representing: (1) The Ptolemaic System in the
Spheres. (2) The lunar influences over the tides. (3) The
circles described in the terrestial globe. (4) A picture
of the expulsion from Eden, with the four sacred rivers.
MAP OF 1492 322
(B. Mus., Add. mss. 15760). This gives a general view
of the Portuguese discoveries along the whole W. coast of
Africa, and just beyond the Cape of Good Hope, which
was rounded in 1486.
[Footnote 6: **Missing.** Please see the Transcriber's Note
at the foot of the text.]
PREFACE
This 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]
[Footnote 7: Compare Archer and Kingsford, _The Crusades_, in the
_Stories of the Nations_.]
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.
Arabic 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Footnote 8: Rejecting the old idea of an encircling ocean as the girdle
or limit of the known world, and replacing it with a new fancy of
unbounded continent (on all sides except the north-west)--a fancy which
the vast extension of Roman Dominion under the Empire may have
fostered.]
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]
[Footnote 9: In using the expressions "Chart," or "Map" of Strabo's
description (_c._ A.D. 20), it is not meant to imply that Strabo himself
left more than a written description from which a plan was afterwards
prepared: "The world according to Strabo." The same applies to
Eratosthenes (_c._ B.C. 200) and all pre-Ptolemaic Greek geographers.
Ptolemy's Atlas, probably, and the Peutinger Table, more certainly, are
maps really drawn by ancient designers; but these are the only ones that
have survived from a much larger number.]
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.
[Footnote 10: In which the habitable quarter of the world, situated
mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, was just about twice as long as it
was broad.]
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 Phoenicians.
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]
[Footnote 11: In Columbus' letters to Queen Isabella in 1498, we catch,
as it were, the last echo of the Arabic _mélange_ of Moses and Greek
geography, along with the results of Roger Bacon's corrections of
Ptolemy. "The Old Hemisphere," he writes "which has for its centre the
isle of Arim, is spherical, but the other (new) Hemisphere has the form
of the lower half of a pear. Just one hundred leagues west of the Azores
the earth rises at the Equator and the temperature grows keener. The
summit is over against the mouth of the Orinoco."]
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.
[Footnote 12: "The Obliquity of the Ecliptic, the Eccentricity of the
Sun, the Precession of the Equinoxes."]
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]
[Footnote 13: "With the Sinbad story is connected the historical
extension of the Arab settlements in the East African coast through the
enterprise of the Emosaid family."]
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.
[Footnote 14: The school of Persian mathematicians who produced the maps
of Alestakliry-Ibn-Hankal, the book of latitudes and longitudes,
ascribed by Abulfeda to Alfaraby the Turk, was the immediate descendant
of Albyrouny.]
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]
[Footnote 15: The world he divided by climates in the Greek manner,
taking no account of political divisions, or of those resting on
language or religion. Each climate was further subdivided into ten
sections. In the shape of Africa he followed Ptolemy.]
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.
[Illustration: 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
Coeur 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.
[Footnote 16: Yacout "the ruby," originally a Greek slave, who made a
brave but fruitless attempt to change his name into Yacoub or Jacob,
became one of the greatest of Arab encyclopædists, was checked by the
hordes of Genghiz-Khan in his exploration of Central Asia, and died
1229.]
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.
The 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.
[Illustration: 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.