THE CRUSADES AND LAND TRAVEL.
CIRCA 1100-1300.
The pilgrims were the pioneers of the growth of Europe and of
Christendom until Charlemagne, in one sense, in another and a broader
sense until the Crusades.
Their original work, as far as it can be called original at all, was
entirely overshadowed by the Vikings, who made real discoveries of the
first importance in hunting for new worlds to conquer; but when first
the Viking rovers themselves, and then the Northmen, settled in the
colonies and the old home, took up Christianity as the Arabs had taken
up Islam, the pilgrim spirit was translated, as it were, into new and
more powerful forms. Through the conversion of Hungary and of
Scandinavia,[22]--Europe, Christian Europe, was compacted together in a
stronger Empire than that of Constantine or of Charlemagne--a spiritual
federation, not a political unity--one and undivided not in visible
subordination, but in a common zeal for a common faith. This was the
state of the Latin world, and in a measure of the Greek and Russian
world as well, by the middle of the eleventh century, when the Byzantine
Emperors had broken the strength of the Eastern Caliphate, and recovered
most of the realm of Heraclius; when the Roman Papacy under Leo IX.,
Hildebrand, and Urban began its political stage, aiming, and in great
part successfully aiming, at an Imperial Federation of Europe under
religion; when on every side, in Spain, in France, in England, in
Germany, and in Italy, the nations that had been slowly built into that
_Domus Dei_ were filled with fresh life and purpose from the Norsemen,
who, as pirates, or conquerors, or brothers, had settled among them. The
long crusade that had gone on for four hundred years in Spain and in
southern Italy and in the Levant, which had raged round the islands of
the Mediterranean, or the passes of the Alps and Pyrenees, or the banks
of the Loire and the Tiber,--was now, on the eve of the first Syrian
Crusade of 1096, rapidly tending to decisive victory. Toledo was won
back in 1084; the Norman dominion in the Two Sicilies had already taken
the place of a weak and halting Christian defence against Arab emirs;
pilgrims were going in thousands where there had been tens or units by
the reopened land route through Hungary; only in the far East the first
appearance of the Turks as Moslem champions,[23] threatened an ebb of
the tide. Christendom had seen a wonderful expansion of the Heathen
North; now that it had won the Northmen to itself, it was ready to
imitate their example. The deliberate purpose of the Popes only gave
direction to the universal feeling of restless and abundant energy
longing for wider action. But it was not the crusading movement itself
which brought so much new light, so much new knowledge of the world, to
Europe, as the _results_ of that impulse in trade, in travel, and in
colonisation.
[Footnote 22: As completed about A.D. 1000-1040.]
[Footnote 23: As in 1071, when they crushed Romans and the Byzantines in
the battle of Manzikert.]
[Illustration: THE TURIN MAP OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
(1) From the eleventh century, from the beginning of this period, all
the greater pilgrims, Sæwulf the English-merchant, King Sigurd of
Norway, Abbot Daniel of Kiev, and their followers, have something more
in view than piety; they have a general interest in travel; some of them
a special interest in trade; most of them go to fight as well as to
pray.
(2) But as the warlike spirit of the Church Militant seems to grow
tired, and its efforts at founding new kingdoms--in Antioch, in
Jerusalem, in Cyprus, in Byzantium--more and more fruitless, the direct
expansion of European knowledge, begins in scientific travel. Vinland
and Greenland and the White Sea and the other Norse discoveries were
discoveries made by a great race for itself; unconnected as they were
with the main lines of trade or with religious sentiment, they were
unrealised by the general consciousness of the West. A full account of
the Norse voyages to America was lying at the Vatican when Columbus was
searching for proofs of land within reach,--of India, as he expected, in
the place where he found an unknown continent and a new world. But no
one knew of these; even the Greenland colony had been lost and
forgotten in the fifteenth century; in 1553 the English sailors reached
the land of Archangel without a suspicion that Ohthere or Thorer Hund
had been there six hundred years before; Russia from the thirteenth to
the sixteenth centuries was almost out of sight and mind under the
Tartar and Moslem rule; but the missionaries and merchants and
travellers who followed the crusading armies to the Euphrates, and crept
along the caravan routes to Ceylon and the China Sea, added Further and
Central Asia--"Thesauri Arabum et divitis Indiæ"--to the knowledge of
Christendom.
And as this knowledge was bound up with gain; as the Polos and their
companions had really opened to the knowledge of the West those great
prizes of material wealth which even the Rome of Trajan had never fully
grasped, and which had been shared between Arabs and natives without a
rival for so long; it was not likely to be easily forgotten. From that
time, at the end of the thirteenth century, to the success of the
Portuguese on another road, at the end of the fifteenth, European
interest was fairly engaged in pressing in upon the old land-routes and
getting an ever larger share of their profits.
(3) There was another side of the same problem, a still brighter hope
for men who could dare to try it. By finding a sea-path to the Indian
store-house, mariners like the Venetians and Genoese, or their Spanish
pupils, might cut into the treasuries of the world at their very source,
found a trade-empire for their country, and gain the sole command of
heaven on earth, of the true terrestrial paradise.
Then masters of the wealth of the East and of the fighting power of the
West, the Christian nations might crush their old enemy, Islam, between
two weights, hammer and anvil; might fairly strike for the rule of the
entire habitable globe.
It was with thoughts of this kind, vaguely inspired by the Crusades and
their legacy of discovery from Bagdad to Cathay, that the Vivaldi left
Genoa to find an ocean way round Africa in 1281-91, "with the hope of
going to the parts of the Indies"; that Malocello reached the Canary
Islands about 1270; and that volunteers went on the same quest nearly
twenty times in the next four generations before their spasmodic efforts
were organised and pressed on to achievement by Henry and his Portuguese
(1412-1497).
(4) Lastly, the renaissance of Europe in the crusading age was not only
practical but spiritual. Science was at last touched and changed by the
new life scarcely less than the art of war, or the social state of the
towns, or the trade of the commercial republics. And geography and its
kindred were not long in feeling some change, though it was very slowly
realised and made useful. The first notice of the magnet in the West is
of about 1180; the use of this by sailors is perhaps rightly dated from
the thirteenth century and the discoveries of Amalphi.
But to return. We must trace more definitely the preparation which has
been generally described for the work of Prince Henry first in the
pilgrim-warriors, and the travellers of the New Age, merchants or
preachers or sight-seers, who follow out the Eastern land-routes; next
in the seamen who begin to break the spell of the Western Ocean and to
open up the high seas, the true high-roads of the world; lastly in the
students who most of all, in their maps and globes and instruments and
theories, are the trainers and masters and spiritual ancestors of the
Hero of Discovery.
The first of these classes supplied the matter, the attractions and
rewards of the exploring movement; the others may be said to provide the
form by which success was reached, genius in seamanship.
And the one was as much needed as the other.
Human reason did its work so well because of a reasonable hope; men
crept round Africa in face of the Atlantic storms because of the golden
East beyond.
It was as we have seen the land travellers of the twelfth and thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries who laid open that golden East to Europe, and
added inspiring knowledge to a dream and a tradition. And of these land
travellers the first worth notice are Sæwulf of Worcester, Adelard of
Bath, and Daniel of Kiev, three of that host of peaceful pilgrims who
followed the conquerors of the First Crusade (1096-9). All of these left
their recollections and all of them are of the new time, in sharp
contrast with the hordes of earlier pilgrims, even the most recent, like
Bishop Ealdred of Worcester and York, who crowned William the Conqueror,
or Sweyn Godwineson or Thorer Hund, whose visits are all mere visits of
penitence. Every fresh conversion of the Northern nations brought a
fresh stream of devotees to Italy and to Syria, a fresh revival of the
fourth century habit of pilgrimage; but when mediæval Christendom had
been formed, and religious passion was more steady and less unworldly,
the discoverer and observer blends with the pilgrim in all the records
left to us.
Sæwulf was a layman and a trader, who went on a pilgrimage (1102), and
became a monk at the instance of his confessor, Wulfstan, Bishop of
Worcester. But though his narrative has been called an immense advance
on all earlier guide-books, it ends with the Holy Land and does not
touch even the outlying pilgrim sites, in Mesopotamia or Egypt, visited
and described by Silvia or Fidelis.
Starting some three years after the Latin capture of Jerusalem in 1099,
the English traveller takes us up six different routes from Italy to
Syria, evidence of the vast development of Mediterranean intercourse and
of practical security against pirates, gained very largely since the
second millennium began.
His own way, by Monopoli, Corfu, Corinth, and Athens, took him to Rhodes
"which once had the Idol called Colossus, one of the Seven Wonders of
the World, but destroyed by the Persians, with nearly all the land of
Roumania, on their way to Spain. These were the Colossians to whom St.
Paul wrote."
Thence to Myra in Lycia, "the port of the Adriatic as Constantinople is
of the Ægean."
Landing at Jaffa, after a sail of thirteen weeks, Sæwulf was soon among
the wonders of Jerusalem, that had not grown less since Arculf's day. At
the head of the Sepulchre Church was the famous Navel of the Earth,
"now called Compas, which Christ measured with his own hands, working
salvation in the midst, as say the Psalms." For the same legends were
backed by the same texts as in the sixth or seventh century.
Going down to the Jordan, "four leagues east of Jericho," Arabia was
seen beyond "hateful to all who worship God, but having the Mount whence
Elias was carried into Heaven in a chariot of fire."
Eighteen days journey from the Jordan is Mount Sinai, by way of Hebron,
where "Abraham's Holm Oak" was still standing, and where, as pilgrims
said, he "sat and ate with God," but Sæwulf himself did not go outside
Palestine, on this side. After travelling through Galilee and noting the
House of Saint Archi-Triclin (Saint "Ruler-of-the-Feast"), at Cana, he
made his way to Byzantium by sea, escaping the Saracen cruisers and
weathering the storms that wrecked in the roads of Jaffa before his eyes
some twenty of the pilgrim and merchant fleet then lying at anchor. But
not only can we see from this how the religious and commercial traffic
of the Mediterranean had been increased by the Crusades; the main lines
of that traffic had been changed. Since the Moslem conquest, visitors
had mostly come to Palestine through Egypt; the Christian conquest of
Syria re-opened the direct sea route as the conversion of Hungary and
north-east Europe had re-opened the direct land route one hundred years
before (_c._ 1000-1100). The lines of the Danube valley and of the
"Roman Sea" were both cleared, and the West again poured itself into the
East as it had not done since Alexander's conquest, since the Oriental
reaction had set in about the time of the Christian era, rising higher
and higher into the full tide of the Persian and Arabian revivals of
Asiatic Empire.
Among the varied classes of pilgrim-crusaders in Sæwulf's day were
student-devotees like Adelard and Daniel from the two extremes of
Christendom, England and Russia, Bath and Kiev; northern sea-kings like
Sigurd, or Robert of Normandy; even Jewish travellers, rabbis, or
merchants like Benjamin of Tudela. All these, as following in the wake
of the First Crusade, and for the most part stopping at the high-water
mark of its advance, belong to the same group and time and impulse as
Sæwulf himself, and are clearly marked off from the great thirteenth
century travellers, who acted as pioneers of the Western Faith and
Empire rather than as camp-followers of its armies.
But except Abbot Daniel (_c._ 1106) and Rabbi Benjamin (_c._ 1160-73)
who stand apart, none of our other pilgrim examples of twelfth century
exploration have anything original or remarkable about them.
Adelard or Athelard, the countryman of Sæwulf and Willibald, is still
more the herald of Roger Bacon and of Neckam. He is a theorist far more
than a traveller, and his journey through Egypt and Arabia (_c._
1110-14) appears mainly as one of scientific interest. "He sought the
causes of all things and the mysteries of Nature," and it was with "a
rich spoil of letters," especially of Greek and Arab manuscripts, that
he returned to England to translate into Latin one of the chief works of
Saracen astronomy, the Kharizmian tables. We have already met with him
in trying to follow the transmission of Greek and Indian geography or
world-science through the Arabs to Europe and to Christendom.
[Illustration: THE SPANISH-ARABIC MAP OF 1109. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
Abbot Daniel of Kiev in himself is a very ordinary and rather mendacious
traveller, a harmless, devout pilgrim, as careless in all matters of
fact as Antonine the Martyr. But, as representing the beginnings of
Russian expansion, he is of almost unique interest and value. His tract
upon the Holy Road is one of the first proofs of his people's interest
in the world beyond their steppes, and of that nation's readiness and
purpose to expand Christian civilisation in the East as the Franks,
after breaking through the Western Moslems, were now doing. Mediæval
Russia, Russia before the Tartars, after the Northmen, was now a very
different thing from the "people fouler than dogs" of the Arab
explorers. The House of Ruric had guided and organised a nation second
to none in Europe, till it had fallen into the general lines of
Christian development. Jury trial and justices in assize it had taken
from the West; its church and faith and architecture, its manners and
morals came to it from the court of the Roman Empire on the Bosphorus.
Daniel and the other Russians, who passed through that Empire in the age
of Nestor for trade or for religion, were the vanguard of a great
national and race expansion that is now just beginning to "bestride the
world."
In 1022 and 1062 two monks of Kiev are recorded, out of a crowd of the
unknown, as visitors to Syria, and about 1106, probably through the news
of the Frankish conquest, Daniel left his native river, the Snow, in
Little Russia, and passed through Byzantium and by way of the
Archipelago and Cyprus to Jaffa and Jerusalem, describing roughly in
versts or half-miles the whole distance and that of every stage.
His tone is much like Sæwulf's and his mistakes are quite as bad, though
he tells of "nothing but what was seen with these self-same eyes." The
"Sea of Sodom exhales a burning and fetid breath that lays waste all the
country, as with burning sulphur, for the torments of Hell lie under
it." This, however, he did not see; Saracen brigands prevented him, and
he learnt that "the very smell of the place would make one ill."
His measurements of distance are all his own. Capernaum is "in the
desert, not far from the Great Sea (Levant) and eight versts (four
miles) from Cæsarea," half the distance given in the next chapter as
between Acre and Haifa, and less than half the breadth of the Sea of
Tiberias. The Jordan reminds Daniel of his own river, the Snow,
especially in its sheets of stagnant water.
Samaria, or "Sebastopol," he confuses with Nablous; Bethshan with
Bashan; Lydda with Ramleh; Cæsarea Philippi with the greater Cæsarea on
the coast. Not far from Capernaum and the Jordan is "another large river
that comes out of the Lake of Gennesaret, and falls into the Sea of
Tiberias, passing by a large _town_ called Decapolis." From Mt. Lebanon
"six rivers flow east into the Lake of Gennesaret and six west towards
great Antioch, so that this is called Mesopotamia, or the land between
the rivers, and Abraham's Haran is between these rivers that feed the
Lake of Gennesaret."
Daniel has left us also an account of his visits to Mar Saba Convent in
the Kedron gorge near the Dead Sea, to Damascus in the train of Prince
Baldwin, and to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, to
witness the miracle of the Holy Fire, noticed by Bernard the Wise, as a
sort of counterpart to the wonder of Beth-Horon, also retold by Daniel
"when the sun stood still while Joshua conquered King Og of Bashan."
It is not in outlook nor in knowledge nor even in the actual ground
traversed that these later pilgrims shew any advance on the chief of the
earlier travellers; it is in the new life and movement, in the new hope
they give us of greater things than these. This is the interest--to
us--in King Sigurd of Norway (1107-11), a Crusader-Norseman in the new
age that owed so much of its very life to the Northmen, but who is only
to be noticed here as a possible type of the explorer-chief--possible,
not actual--for his voyage added nothing definite to the knowledge or
expansion of Christendom. His campaign in Jacob's Land or Gallicia, and
his attack on Moslem Lisbon, some forty years before it became the head
and heart of Portugal, like his exploits in the Balearics, shew us a
point in the steady decline of western Islam, and so far may be called a
preparation for Prince Henry's work, but properly as a chapter of
Portuguese, not of general European, growth.
There were many others like Sigurd,--Robert of Normandy, Godric the
English pirate, who fought his way through the Saracen fleets with a
spear-shaft for his banner, Edgar the Ætheling, grandson of Edmund
Ironside, the Dartmouth fleet of 1147 which retook Lisbon,--but the
Latin conquest of Syria has now brought us past the Crusades, in the
narrower sense, to their results, in the exploration of the Further
East.
The first great name of this time, of our next main chapter of
Preparation, is Benjamin of Tudela, but standing as he does well within
the earlier age, when the primary interest was the Holy War itself, he
is also the last of the Palestine travellers--of those Westerns whose
real horizon was the sacred East of Syria. He is a little before the
awakening of universal interest in the unknown world, for the Christian
Northmen lost with the new definiteness of the new faith much of their
old infinite unrest and fierce inquisitive love of wandering, and their
spirit, though related to the whole Catholic West by the crusading
movement, was not fully realised till the world had been explored and
made known, till the men of Europe were at home in every country and on
every sea.
Benjamin, as a Jew and a rabbi, has the interest of a sectary, and his
work was not of a kind that would readily win the attention of the
Christian world. So the value of his travels was hidden till religious
divisions had ceased to govern the direction of progress. He visited the
Jewish communities from Navarre to Bagdad, and described those beyond
from Bagdad to China, but he wrote for his own people and none but they
seem to have cared about him. What he discovered (_c._ 1160-73) was for
himself and for Judaism, and only his actual place in the twelfth
century makes him a fore-runner of the Polos or of Prince Henry. We may
see this from his hopeless strangeness and confusion in Rome, like a
Frank in Pekin or Delhi. "The Church of St. Peter is on the site of the
great palace of Julius Cæsar, near which are eighty Halls of the eighty
Kings called Emperors from Tarquin to Pepin the father of Charles, who
first took Spain from the Saracens.... In the outskirts of the city is
the palace of Titus, who was deposed by three hundred senators for
wasting three years over the siege of Jerusalem which he should have
finished in two."
And so on--with the "Hall of Galba, three miles round and having a
window for each day in the year," with St. John Lateran and its Hebrew
trophies, "two copper pillars from the temple of Solomon, that sweat at
the anniversary of the burning of the Temple," and the "statues of
Samson and of Absalom" in the same place. So with Sorrento, "built by
Hadarezer when he fled before King David," with the old Roman tunnel
between Naples and Pozzuoli, "built by Romulus who feared David and
Joab," with Apulia, "which is from King Pul of Assyria"--in all this we
have as it were Catholic mythology turned inside out, David put into
Italy when the West put Trajan at the sources of the Nile. It was not
likely that writing of this sort would be read in the society of the
Popes and the Schoolmen, the friars and the crusaders, any more than the
Buddhist records of missionary travel from China one thousand years
before. The religious passion which had set the crusaders in motion,
would keep Catholics as long as it might from the Jews, Turks, infidels,
and heretics they conquered and among whom they settled.
But with the final loss of Jerusalem by the Latins, and the overthrow of
the Bagdad Caliphate by the Mongol Tartars (1258), the barrier of
fanatic hatred was weakened, and Central Asia became an attraction to
Christendom instead of a dim horror, without form and void, except for
Huns and Turks and demons. The Papal court sent mission after mission to
convert the Tartars, who were wavering, as men supposed, between Islam
and the Church, and with the first missionaries to the House of Ghenghiz
went the first Italian merchants who opened the court of the Great Khan
to Venice and to Genoa.
As early as 1243 an Englishman is noticed as living among the Western
Horde, the conquerors of Russia; but official intercourse begins in 1246
with John de Plano Carpini. This man, a Franciscan of Naples, started in
1245 as the Legate of Pope Innocent IV. to the Tartars, took the
northern overland route through Germany and Poland, reached Kiev, "the
metropolis of Russia," through help of the Duke of Cracow, and at last
appeared in the camp of Batou, on the Volga. Hence by the Sea of Aral,
"of moderate size with many islands," to the court of Batou's brother,
the Great Khan "Cuyuc" himself, where the Christian stranger found
himself one of a crowd of four thousand envoys from every part of Asia
(1246).
After sixteen months Carpini made his way back by the same route, "over
the plains" and through Kiev, to give at Rome the first genuine account
of Tartary, in its widest sense, from the Dnieper to China (1247).
The great rivers and lakes and mountains of Russia and Turkestan, the
position and distribution of the land and its peoples, "even from the
Caspian to the Northern Ocean, where men are said to have dogs' faces,"
are now first described by an honest and clear-headed and keen-eyed
observer, neither timid nor credulous.
Carpini really begins the reliable western map of Further Asia. His
personal knowledge did not reach China or India, but in his _Book of the
Tartars_, Europe was told nearly the whole truth, and almost nothing but
the truth, about the vast tract and the great races between the
Carpathians and the Gobi Desert. In the same was included the first fair
account of the manners and history of the "Mongols whom we call
Tartars," and the simple truthfulness of the Friar stands out in all the
allusions that make his work so human;--his interviews with the Tartar
Chiefs and with brother-travellers, his dangers and difficulties from
Lettish robbers and abandoned or guarded ferries, his passage of the
Dnieper on the ice, his last three weeks on "trotting"[24] hacks over
the steppes.
[Footnote 24: "_Tartari fecerunt equos nostros trotare._"]
We have gone a good way from Abbot Daniel, for in John de Plano Carpini
Christian Europe has at last a real explorer, a real historian, a
genuine man of science, in the service of the Church and of discovery.
Carpini was followed after six years by William de Rubruquis, a Fleming
sent by St. Louis of France on the same errand of conversion and
discovery (1253), but by a different route, through the Black Sea, and
Cherson, over the Don "at the Head of Azov, that divides Europe and
Asia, as the Nile divides Asia and Africa," to the great camp on the
Volga, "the greatest river I had ever seen, which comes from Great
Bulgaria in the north and falls into a lake (the Caspian Sea), that
would take four months to journey round." Higher in their course the Don
and the Volga "are not more than ten days' journey apart, but diverge as
they run south." The Caspian is "made out of the Volga and the rivers
that flow into it from Persia." Thence through the Iron Gates of
Derbend, between the Caspian and the Caucasus, "which Alexander made to
shut the barbarians out of Persia." Helped by a Nestorian, who possessed
influence at the Tartar Court, like so many of his Church, Rubruquis
reached the "Alps" of the Altai country, where he found a small
Nestorian lordship, governed like the Papal States, by a priest, who was
at least one original of the great mediæval phantom--Prester John.
Crossing the great steppes of eastern "Tartary," "like the rolling sea
to look at," Rubruquis at last reached the Mongol headquarters at
Caracorum, satisfied on the way that the Caspian had no northern
outlet, as Strabo and Isidore had imagined. Thence he made his way home
without much fresh result.
[Illustration: THE PSALTER MAP OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. (SEE LIST
OF MAPS)]
Though Rubruquis is well called the most brilliant and literary of the
mediæval travellers, his mission was fruitless, and the interest of his
work lay rather in recording custom and myth--in sociology--than in
adding anything definite to the geographical knowledge of the West. John
de Plano had already been over the ground to Caracorum, and recorded all
the main characteristics of the lands west of the Gobi Desert. The
further advance, east to China, south to India, was yet to come.
But while Rubruquis was still among the Tartars, Nicolo and Matteo Polo,
the uncles of the more famous Marco, were trading (1255-65) to the
Crimea and the districts of southern Russia that were now under the
Western Horde,--and soon after, following the caravans to Bokhara, they
were drawn on to the court of Kublai Khan, then somewhere near the wall
of China. After a most friendly reception they were sent back to Europe
with presents and a letter to Pope Clement IV., offering a welcome and
maintenance to Christian teachers. Kublai "had often questioned the
Polos of the Western lands," and now he asked for one hundred "Latins,
to shew him the Christian faith, for Christ he held to be the only God."
Furnished with the imperial passport of the Golden Tablet, our merchants
made their way back to Acre in April, 1269.
They found the old pope dead, Gregory X. in his place, and he shewed a
coolness in answering the Khan's requests, but in 1271 they set out on
their second journey to the furthest East, taking with them two friar
preachers and their nephew Marco, now nineteen years of age.
In Armenia the friars took alarm at the troubled state of the nearer
East and turned back, just as Augustine of Canterbury tried to find a
way out of the mission to the English that Pope Gregory I. laid upon him
in 597. For the Church it was perhaps as momentous a time now as then;
the thirteenth century, if it had ended in the Christianising of the
Mongol Empire, would have turned the Catholic victory of the fourth and
sixth centuries in the West, the victory that had been worked out in the
next seven hundred years to fuller and fuller realisation, into a world
empire,--which did come at last for European civilisation, but not for
Christendom.
The Polos however kept on their way north-east for more than "one
thousand days," three years and a half, till they stood in the presence
of Kublai Khan; beyond Gobi and the Great Wall and the mountain barriers
of China, in Cambaluc or Pekin, "princess encrowned of cities capital."
Their journey was first through Armenia Lesser and Greater, then through
Mosul (Nineveh) to Bagdad, where the last "Caliph and Pope of the
Saracens" had been butchered by Holgalu and his Tartars, sewn in a sack
and thrown into the Tigris by one account, walled up alive by another,
in 1258. But though the stories in Marco's journal are a main interest
of his work, as a summary and reflection of the science and history and
general culture of the Christian world of his time, we must not here
look outside his geography. And his first place-note of value is on the
Caspian, "which containeth in circuit twenty-eight hundred miles and is
like a lake, having no union with other seas and in which are many
islands, cities, and castles." The extent of the Nestorian missions,
"through all parts of India and to Cairo and Bagdad, and wherever
Christians dwell," strikes him even now at the beginning of his
travels--much more when he finds their churches on the Hoang Ho and the
Yang-Tse-Kiang--declining indeed, but still living to witness to the
part which that great heresy had played as an intermediary between the
further and the nearer East--a part which history has never yet worked
out. Entering Persia as traders, the Polos went naturally to Ormuz,
already the great mart of Islam for the Indian trade, where Europeans
really entered the third, and, to them, unknown belt of the world, after
passing from a zone of known home-land through one of enemies' country,
known and only known as such. Failing to take the sea route at Ormuz for
China, as they had hoped, our Italians were obliged to strike back
north-east, through Persia and the Pamir, the Kashgar district and the
Gobi steppes, to Cathay and the pleasure domes of Kublai, visiting
Caracorum and the Altai country on the way, by a turn due north. In 1275
they were in Shang-tu, the Xanadu[25] of Coleridge--the summer capital
of Kublai Khan--and not till 1292 did they get leave to turn their faces
to the West once more.
[Footnote 25:
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sacred sea.
COLERIDGE: _Kublai Khan_.]
Here the Polos became what may be called consulting engineers to the
Mongol Court; Marco was even made in 1277 a commissioner of the Imperial
Council, and soon after sent upon government missions to Yunnan in
extreme south-west China and to Yangchow city.
The greater part of Marco's own memoirs is taken up with his account of
the thirty-four provinces of the Tartar Empire that centred round the
"six parts of Cathay and the nine parts of Mangi," the districts of
northern and southern China as we know them,--an account of the roads,
rivers, and towns, the trade, the Court and the Imperial Ports, the
customs and manner of life among the subject peoples in that Empire,
perhaps the largest ever known. Especially do the travellers dwell on
the public roads from Pekin or Cambaluc through all the provinces, the
ten thousand Royal inns upon the highways, the two hundred thousand
horses kept for the public service, the wonderful speed of transit in
the Great Khan's embassages, "so that they could go from Pekin to the
wall of China in two days."
But scarcely less is said about the great rivers--the arteries of
Chinese commerce, even more than the caravan routes,--above all, the
Yang-Tse-Kiang, "the greatest stream in the world, like an arm of the
sea, flowing above one hundred days' journey from its source into the
ocean, and into which flow countless others, making it so great that
incredible quantities of merchandise are brought by this river. It
flows," exclaims Marco, "through sixteen provinces, past the quays of
two hundred cities, at one of which I saw at one time five thousand
vessels, and there are other marts that have more."
The breadth and depth and length and merchandise of the Pulisangan and
the Caramaran are only less than the Kiang's; from the point where Marco
crossed the second of these, there was not another bridge till it
reached the ocean, hundreds of miles away, "by reason of its exceeding
greatness."
Lastly Pekin, the capital of the Empire, with Quinsai and the other
provincial capitals of Mangi and Cathay, call out the unbounded
admiration of the Polos as of every other Western traveller, from the
Moslem Ibn Batuta to the Christian friars of the fourteenth century.
Pekin, two days' journey from the ocean, the residence of the Court in
December, January, and February, in the extreme north-east of Cathay,
had been lately rebuilt in a "central square of twenty-four miles in
compass, and twelve suburbs, three or four miles long, adjoining each of
the twelve gates," where merchants and strangers lived, each nation with
separate "burses" or store-houses, where they lodged. From this centre
to the land of Gog and Magog and the champaign-land of Bargu, the Great
Khan travelled every year in midsummer for the fresh air of the plateau
country of central Asia, as well as for a better view of the great
Russian and Bactrian sub-kingdoms of his House. The six months of spring
and autumn were spent in slow progresses through central and southern
China to Thibet on one side, and to Tonquin on the other. But greater
even than Pekin, Quinsai, or Kansay, the City of Heaven, in southern
China, though no longer the capital even of a separate Kingdom of Mangi,
was the crowning work of Chinese civilisation. It surpassed the other
cities of Kublai, as much as these overshadowed the Rome or Venice of
the thirteenth century.
"In the world there is not its like, for by common report it is one
hundred miles in circuit, with a lake on one side and a river on the
other, divided in many channels and upon these and the canals adjoining
twelve thousand bridges of stone; there are ten market places, each half
a mile square; great store-houses of stone, where the Indian merchants
lay by their goods; palaces and gardens on both sides of the main
street, which, like all the highways in Mangi, is paved with stone on
each side, and in the midst full of gravel, with passages for the water,
which keeps it always clean." Salt, silk, fruit, precious stones, and
cloth of gold are the chief commodities; the paper money of the Great
Khan is used everywhere; all the people, except a few Nestorians and
Moslems, are "idolaters, so luxurious and so happy that a man would
think himself in Paradise."
It was only in recent years that Kublai, or his general, Baian, had
captured Quinsai and driven out the King of Mangi with his seraglio and
his friends. The exile till then had only thought of pleasure, of wine,
women, and song, the "sweet meat which cost him the sour sauce ye have
heard," on the approach of danger, had fled on board the ships he had
prepared to "certain impregnable isles in the ocean," and if these
impregnable islands may be identified with Zipangu or Japan, the
conquerors pursued him even here. There is nothing more interesting in
Polo's book than his story of the Mongol failure in the Eastern islands,
fifteen hundred miles from the coast of Mangi, now first discovered to
Christian knowledge.
This country of Japan, "very great, the people white, of gentle manners,
idolaters in religion, under a King of their own," was attacked by
Kublai's fleet in 1264 for the gold they had, and had in such plenty
that "the King's house, windows, and floors were covered with it, as
churches here with lead, as was reported by merchants--but these were
few and the King allowed no exportation of the gold."
The expedition was as disastrous a failure as the old Athenian attack
upon Sicily, and was not repeated, although fleets were sent by the
Great Khan after this into the Southern Seas, which were supposed to
have made a discovery of Papua, if not of the Australian Continent. "In
this Sea of China, over against Mangi," Marco reported, from hearsay "of
mariners and expert pilots, are 7440 islands, most of them inhabited,
whereon grows no tree that yields not a pleasant smell--spices,
lignum-aloes, and pepper, black and white." The ships of Zaitum (the
great Chinese mart for Indian trade) knew this sea and its islands, "for
they go every winter and return every summer, taking a year on the
voyage, and all this though it is far from India and not subject to the
Great Khan."
But not only did Polo in these sections of his Guide Book or Memories of
Travel, record the main features of a coast and ocean scarcely guessed
at by Europeans, and flatly denied by Ptolemy and the main traditional
school of Western geography. In his service under Kublai, and in his
return by sea to Aden and Suez, he opened up the eight provinces of
Thibet, the whole of south-east Asia from Canton to Bengal, and the
great archipelago of further India.
Four days' journey beyond the Yang-Tse-Kiang, Marco entered "the wide
country of Thibet, vanquished and wasted by the Khan for the space of
twenty days' journey, and become a wilderness wanting inhabitants, where
wild beasts are excessively increased." Here he tells us of the Yak-oxen
and great Thibetan dogs as great as asses, of the musk deer, and spices,
"and salt lakes having beds of pearls," and of the cruel and bestial
idolatry and social customs of the people.
Still farther to the south-west, Commissioner Polo came to the Cinnamon
river, called Brius, on the borders of the province of Caindu, to the
porcelain-making districts of Carazan, governed by Kublai's son, and so
to Bengal, "which borders upon India," and where Marco laughs at the
tattoo customs of "flesh embroidery for the dyeing of fools' skins."
Thence back to China, the richest and most famous country of all the
East, where was "peace so absolute that shops could be left open full of
wares all night and travellers and strangers could walk day and night
through every part, untouched and fearing none."
But the Polos wearied even of the Court favours and their celestial
home; they longed to come back to earth, to Frankland and Christendom,
where life was so rough, and poor, and struggling, but for whose sake
they had come so far and braved so much. But the Khan was hurt at the
least hint of their wishes, and it was only a fortunate chance that
restored them to Europe. Twenty years after their outward start, they
were dismissed for a time and under solemn promise of return, as the
guides of an embassy in charge of a Mongol bride for a Persian Khan,
living at Tabrez and related to Kublai himself. So, in 1292, they
embarked for India at Zaitum, "one of the fairest ports in the world,
where is so much pepper that what comes by Alexandria to the West is
little to it, and, as it were, one of a hundred." Then striking across
the Gulf of Cheinan, for fifteen hundred miles, and passing "infinite
islands, with gold and much trade,"--a gulf "seeming in all like another
world"--they reached Ziambar and, after another run of the same
distance, Java, then supposed by mariners to be the greatest island in
the world, "above three thousand miles round and under a king who pays
tribute to none, the Khan himself not offering to subject it, because of
the length and danger of the voyage."
One hundred miles south-east the fleet touched at Java the Less "in
compass about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices,
ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be
seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great
fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals
and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced to stay for
five months by stress of weather--till they got away into the Bay of
Bengal, the extreme point of European knowledge until this time, "where
there are savages living in the deep sea islands with dogs' heads and
teeth, as I was told, all naked, both men and women, and living the life
of beasts (Andamans)."[26]
[Footnote 26: Probably the Andamans.]
Sailing hence a thousand miles to the west, adds Marco, is Ceylon, "the
finest island in the world, 2400 miles in circuit, and once 3600, as is
seen in old maps, but the north winds have made great part of it sea."
Again west for sixty miles, to Malabar, "which is firm continent in
India the Greater," and where the Polos re-entered as it were the
horizon of Western knowledge, at the shrine of St. Thomas, the Apostle
of India.
Here we must leave the Venetians, with only a bare mention of their
homeward route from Malabar by Murfili and the Valley of Diamonds, by
Camari, where they had a glimpse of the Pole-Star once more, and by
Guzerat and Cambay to Socotra, where Marco, in his stay, heard and wrote
down the first news ever brought to Europe of the "great isle Magaster,"
or Madagascar, and of Zensibar or Zanzibar.[27]
[Footnote 27: This new knowledge had been really gained from the gradual
spread of the Arab settlements down the south-east coast of Africa,
during four centuries, from Guardafui, the Cape of spices, to the
Channel of Mozambique.]
Of Polo's account of Hindu customs,--self-immolation and especially
Suttee, of Caste, of the Brahminical "thread with one hundred and four
beads by which to pray"; of their etiquette in eating, drinking, birth,
marriage, and death--only the simple fact can be noticed here, that the
first serious and direct Christian account of India, as of China, is
also among the most accurate and well judged, and that both in what he
says and what he leaves unsaid, Messer Marco is a true Herodotus of the
Middle Ages.
But not only does his account discover for Europe the extreme east and
south of Asia; in his last chapter he returns to the Tartars, and after
adding a few words on the nomades of the central plains, gives us our
first "Latin" account of Siberia, "where are found great white bears,
black foxes, and sables; and where are great lakes, frozen except for a
few months in the year, and crossed in sledges by the fur-traders."
Beyond this the Obscure Land reaches to the furthest North, "near which
is Russia, where for the most of winter the sun appears not, and the air
is thick and dark as betimes in the morning with us, where the men are
pale and squat and live like the beasts, and where on the East men come
again to the Ocean Sea and the islands of the Falcons."
The work of Marco Polo is the high-water mark of mediæval land travel;
the extension of Christendom after him was mainly by the paths of the
sea; the Roman missions to the Tartars and to Malabar, vigorously and
stubbornly pressed as they were, ended in unrelieved collapse; only by
the revolt and resurrection of the Russian kingdom did the European
world permanently and markedly expand on the side of Asia. But a crowd
of missionaries followed the first traders to Cathay and to Mangi--Friar
Odoric, John de Monte Corvino, John de Cora; statesmen like Marignolli
the Papal Legate, sight-seers like Mandeville followed these; Bishop
Jordanus of Capua worked for years in Coulam near Cape Comorin (_c._
1325-35); the martyrdom of four friars on April 1, 1322, at Tana, in
India, became one of the great commemorations of the Latin Church; there
seemed no cause why Christian missions which had won north and
north-east Europe should not win central and eastern Asia, whose peoples
seemed as indifferent, as agnostic, as our own Norse or English pagans.
"The fame of the Latins," says Jordanus, about 1330--and he is borne out
by Marino Sanuto--"is greater in India than among ourselves. Here our
arrival is always looked for, and said to be predicted in their books.
Once gain Egypt and launch a fleet even of two galleys on this sea and
the battle is won." As Egypt could not be gained by arms, it was turned
by seamanship. Before Polo returned from China, the coasting of Africa
had begun, and Italian mariners were already in search of the longer way
to the East.
But there is no work of land travel after that of Messer Marco which
really adds anything decisive to European knowledge before the fifteenth
century; the advance of trade intercourse between India and the Italian
Republics, the gradual liberation of Russia the use made of the caravan
routes by some of the most active of the Western clergy, are the chief
notes of the time between the Polos and Prince Henry; and the flimsy
fabrications of Mandeville--"of all liars that type of the first
magnitude"--would be fairly left without a word even in a minute history
of discovery, if he had not, like Ktesias with Herodotus, won a hearing
for himself and drawn men's minds away from the truth-telling original
that he travestied, by the sheer force of impudence.
The Indian travels of the Italian Nicolo Conti and the Russian merchant
Athanasius Nikitin belong to a later time, to the age of the Portuguese
voyages; they are not part of the preparation for our central subject,
they are only a somewhat obscure parallel to that subject.
For in the later Middle Ages the chief interest lies elsewhere. The
expansion of Christendom in the fourteenth century, and still more in
the fifteenth (Prince Henry's own), is the story of the ventures and the
successes, not so much of landsmen, as of mariners.