GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE IN CHRISTENDOM FROM THE FIRST CRUSADES.
CIRCA 1100-1460.
Before the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the
scientific geography of Christendom, as we have seen, was mainly a
borrowed thing. From the ninth century to the time of the Mediæval and
Christian Renaissance, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth
centuries, the Arabs were the recognised heirs of Greek science, and
what Franks or Latins knew of Ptolemy or Strabo was either learnt or
corrected in the schools of Cordova and Bagdad.
But when the Northmen and the Holy War with Islam had once thoroughly
aroused the practical energies of Christendom, it began to expand in
mind as well as in empire, and in the time of Prince Henry, in the
fifteenth century, a Portuguese could say: "Our discoveries of coasts
and islands and mainland were not made without foresight and knowledge.
For our sailors went out very well taught, and furnished with
instruments and rules of _astrology_ and geometry, things which all
mariners and map-makers must know."
[Illustration: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MARINO SANUTO. C. 1306.
(SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
In fact, compass, astrolabe, timepiece, and charts, were all in use on
the Mediterranean about 1400, just as they were to be found among the
Arab traders of the Indian Ocean.
In this section it will be enough to glance hastily at the later and
growingly independent science of Christendom, from the time that it
ceased merely to follow the lead of Islam, and thought and even invented
for itself. In another chapter we have seen something of the lasting and
penetrating influence of Greek and Moslem and Hindu tradition upon the
Western thought, which has conquered by absorbing all its rivals; we
must not forget that some original self-reliant work in geographical
theory not less than in practical exploration is absolutely needed to
explain the very fact of Prince Henry and his life--a student's life,
far more even than a statesman's. And after all, the invention of
instruments, the drawing of maps and globes, the reckoning of distances,
is not less practical than the most daring and successful travel. For
navigation, the first and prime demand is a means of safety, some power
of knowing where you stand and where to go, such as was given to sailors
by the use of the magnet.
"Prima dedit nautis usum magnetis Amalphis," says Beccadelli of Palermo,
but the earliest mention of the "Black ugly stone" in the West is traced
to an Englishman. Alexander Neckam, a monk of St. Albans, writing about
1180 on "The Natures Of Things," tells us of it as commonly used by
sailors, not merely as the secret of the learned. "When they cannot see
the sun clearly in cloudy weather, or at night, and cannot tell which
way their prow is tending, they put a Needle above a Magnet which
revolves till its point looks North and then stops." So the satirist,
Guyot de Provins, in his _Bible_ of about 1210, wishes the Pope were as
safe a point to steer by in Faith as the North Star in sailing, "which
mariners can keep ahead of them, without sight of it, only by the
pointing of a needle floating on a straw in water, once touched by the
Magnet."
It might be supposed from this not merely that the magnet was in use at
the end of the twelfth century, but that it had been known to a few
_savants_ much earlier; yet when Dante's tutor, Brunetto Latini, visits
Roger Bacon at Oxford about 1258, and is shown the black stone, he
speaks of it as new and wonderful, but certain, if used, to awake
suspicion of magic. "It has the power of drawing iron to it, and if a
needle be rubbed upon it and fastened to a straw so as to swim upon
water, the needle will instantly turn towards the Pole-Star. But no
master mariner could use this, nor would the sailors venture themselves
to sea under his command if he took an instrument so like one of
infernal make."
[Illustration: SKETCH-MAP OF DULCERT'S PORTOLANO OF 1339. (SEE
LIST OF MAPS)]
It was possibly after this that the share of Amalphi came in; it may
have been Flavio Gioja, or some other citizen of that earliest
commercial republic of the Middle Ages, which filled up so large a
part of the gap between two great ages of progress, who fitted the
magnet into a box, and by connecting it with the compass-card, made it
generally and easily available. This it certainly was before Prince
Henry's earliest voyages, where he takes its use for granted even by
merchant coasters, "who, beyond hugging the shore, know nothing of chart
or needle." In any case it would seem that prejudice was broken down,
and the mariner's compass taken into favour, at least by Italian seamen
and their Spanish apprentices, in the early years of the fourteenth
century, or the last years of the thirteenth, and that when the Dorias
set out for India by the ocean way in 1291, and the Lisbon fleet sailed
for the western islands in 1341, they had some sort of natural guide
with them, besides the stories of travellers and their own imaginings.
About the same time (_c._ 1350) mathematics and astronomy began to be
studied in Portugal, and two of Henry's brothers, King Edward and the
Great Regent Pedro, left a name for observations and scientific
research. Thus Pedro, in his travels through most of Christendom,
collected invaluable materials for discovery, especially an original of
Marco Polo and a map given him at Venice, "which had all the parts of
the earth described, whereby Prince Henry was much furthered."
Good maps indeed were almost as valuable to him as good instruments, and
they are far clearer landmarks of geographical knowledge. There are at
least seven famous charts (either left to us or described for us) of
the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which give a pretty clear
idea of what Henry's own age and his father's thought and knew of the
world--some of which we believe to have been used by the Prince himself,
and each of which follows some advance in actual exploration.
First of all comes the Venetian map of Marino Sanuto, drawn about 1306,
and putting into map-form the ideas that inspired the first Italian
voyages in the Atlantic. On this the south of Africa is washed by the
sea as the Vivaldi had hoped to find it, but the old story of a central
zone "uninhabitable from the heat" still finds a place, helping to keep
up the notion of the Tropical Seas, "always kept boiling by the sun,"
that held its own so long. Besides this, in Sanuto's map there is no
evidence that anyone had really been coasting Africa; Henry is not
anticipated and can hardly have been much helped by this very
hypothetical leap in the dark.
But the Florentine map of 1351, called the Laurentian Portolano, is to
all appearance a record of the actual discoveries of 1341 and 1346, and
a wonderful triumph of guess-work if it is nothing better. For Africa is
not only made an island, but the main outline of its coast is fairly
drawn; in its western corner the headlands, bays, and rivers are laid
down as far as Bojador, and the three groups of Atlantic islands,
Azores, Canaries, and Madeira, appear together for the first time.
Beyond this names grow scarce, and on the great indent of the Gulf of
Guinea, enormously exaggerated as it is, there is nothing to show for
certain any past discovery, which suggests that this map was made for
two purposes. First, to record the results of recent travel; secondly,
and chiefly, to put forward geographical theories based upon tradition
and inference, what men of old had told and what men of the present
could fancy.
Long after the Italian leadership in exploration had passed westward,
Italian science kept control of geographical theory; the Venetian maps
of the brothers Pizzigani in 1367, and of the Camaldolese convent at
Murano in 1380 and 1459, and the work of Andrea Bianco in 1436 and 1448,
are the most important of mediæval charts, after the Laurentian, and
along with these must be reckoned that mentioned above as given in
1425-8 to Henry's brother, Don Pedro, on his visit to Venice. This
treasure has disappeared, but it was said by men of Henry's day and
aftertime, who saw it in the monastery of Alçobaça, to show "as much or
more discovered in time past than now." If their account is even an
approach to the truth, it was in itself proof sufficient of the
supremacy and almost monopoly of Italians in geographical theory.
With 1375 and the Catalan map of that year, which specially refers to
the Catalan voyage of 1346 and may be taken as one result of the same,
we come to Spanish parallels; but until the death of Henry in 1460,
Italian draughtsmen were in possession, and Fra Mauro's great map of
1459, the evidence and result, in great measure, of the Navigator's
work, could only be drawn by Venetians for the men whose discoveries it
recorded.
But there is one other point in Italian map-science which is worth
remembering. At a time when most schemes of the world were covered with
monsters and legends, when cartography was half mythical and half
miscalculated, the coasting voyagers of the Mediterranean had brought
their _Portolani_ or sea charts to a very different result. And how was
this? Did they get right, as it were, by chance? "They never had for
their object," says the great Swedish explorer and draughtsman, Baron
Nordenskjold, "to illustrate the ideas of some classical author, of some
learned prelate, or the legends and dreams of feats of Chivalry within
the Court circle of some more or less lettered feudal lord." They were
simply guides to mariners and merchants in the Mediterranean seaports;
they were seldom drawn by learned men, and small enough, in return, was
the attention given them by the learned geographers, the men of theory,
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
But these plans of practical seamen are a wonderful contrast in their
almost present-day accuracy to the results of theory let loose, as we
see them in Ptolemy and the Arabian geographers, and in such fantastics
as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, so well known in England. Map-sketches of
this sort, were unknown to Greeks and Romans, as far as we can tell. The
old Peripli were sailing directions, not drawn but written, and the only
Arabian coast-chart known to us was copied from an Italian one. But from
the opening of the twelfth century, if not before, the western
Mediterranean was known to Christian seamen--to those at least concerned
in the trade and intercourse of the great inland sea,--by the help of
these practical guides.
[Illustration: THE LAURENTIAN PORTOLANO OF 1351. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
From the middle of the thirteenth century, when the use of the compass
began on the coasts of southern Europe, the Portolani began to be drawn
with its aid, and by the end of the same century, by the time of our
Hereford map (_c._ 1300), these charts had reached the finish that we
see and admire in those left to us from the fourteenth century. For, of
the 498 specimens of this kind of practical map now left to us, there is
not one of earlier date than the year 1311. Among these specimens not
merely the mass of materials, but the most important examples, not
merely 413 out of 498, but all the more famous and perfect of the 498
are Italian. The course begins with Vesconte's chart, of the year 1311,
and with Dulcert's of 1339, and the outlines of these two are faithfully
reproduced, for instance, in the great Dutch map of the Barentszoons
(_c._ 1594), for the type once fixed in the fourteenth century, recurs
steadily throughout the fifteenth, and sixteenth. The type was so
permanent because it was so reliable; every part of the Mediterranean
coast was sketched without serious mistake or disproportion, even from a
modern point of view, while the fulness and detail of the work gave
everything that was wanted by practical seamen. Of course this detail
was in the coast lines, river mouths, and promontories; it only touched
the land features as they touched the seas. For the Portolani were never
meant to be more than mariners' charts, and became less and less
trustworthy if they tried to fill up the inland spaces usually left
blank. For this, we must look to the highest class of mediæval
theoretical maps, those founded on Portolani, but taking into their view
land as well as water and coast line. And such were the celebrated
examples[29] we have noticed already.
[Footnote 29: _Of_ 1306, 1351, 1367, 1375, 1380, 1436, 1448, 1459.]
* * * * *
NOTE.--It was a man of theory, Raymond Lulli (1235-1315), of Majorca,
the famous Alchemist, who is credited with the first suggestion of the
idea of seeking a way to India by rounding Africa on the West and South.