[Sidenote: Earl Sinclair.]

[Sidenote: Bardsen's "Description of Greenland."]

The identification of "Frislanda" with the Faeroe islands was put beyond doubt by the discovery that the "Zichmni" of the narrative means Henry Sinclair; and, in order to make this discovery, it was only necessary to know something about the history of the Orkneys; hence old Pinkerton, as above remarked, got it right. The name "Zichmni" is, no doubt, a fearful and wonderful bejugglement; but Henry Sinclair is a personage well known to history in that corner of the world, and the deeds of "Zichmni," as recounted in the narrative, are neither more nor less than the deeds of Sinclair. Doubtless Antonio spelled the name in some queer way of his own, and then young Nicolo, unable to read his ancestor's pot-hooks where—as in the case of proper names—there was no clue to guide him, contrived to make it still queerer. Here we have strong proof of the genuineness of the narrative. If Nicolo had been concocting a story in which Earl Sinclair was made to figure, he would have obtained his knowledge from literary sources, and thus would have got his names right; the earl might have appeared as Enrico de Santo Claro, but not as "Zichmni." It is not at all likely, however, that any literary knowledge of Sinclair and his doings was obtainable in Italy in the sixteenth century. The Zeno narrative, moreover, in its references to Greenland in connection with the Chevalier Nicolo's visit to the East Bygd, shows a topographical knowledge that was otherwise quite inaccessible to the younger Nicolo. Late in the fourteenth century Ivar Bardsen, steward to the Gardar bishopric, wrote a description of Greenland, with sailing directions for reaching it, which modern research has proved to have been accurate in every particular. Bardsen's details and those of the Zeno narrative mutually corroborate each other. But Bardsen's book did not make its way down into Europe until the very end of the sixteenth century,[288] and then amid the dense ignorance prevalent concerning Greenland its details were not understood until actual exploration within the last seventy years has at length revealed their meaning. The genuineness of the Zeno narrative is thus conclusively proved by its knowledge of Arctic geography, such as could have been obtained only by a visit to the far North at a time before the Greenland colony had finally lost touch with its mother country.

[Footnote 288: It was translated into Dutch by the famous Arctic explorer, William Barentz, whose voyages are so graphically described in Motley's United Netherlands, vol. iii. pp. 552-576. An English translation was made for Henry Hudson. A very old Danish version may be found in Rafn's Antiquitates Americanae, pp. 300-318; Danish, Latin, and English versions in Major's Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, etc., pp. 39-54; and an English version in De Costa's Sailing Directions of Henry Hudson, Albany, 1869, pp. 61-96.]

[Sidenote: The monastery of St. Olaus and its hot spring.]

The visit of the Chevalier Nicolo, therefore, about 1394, has a peculiar interest as the last distinct glimpse afforded us of the colony founded by Eric the Red before its melancholy disappearance from history. Already the West Bygd had ceased to exist. Five and forty years before that time it had been laid waste and its people massacred by Eskimos, and trusty Ivar Bardsen, tardily sent with a small force to the rescue, found nothing left alive but a few cattle and sheep running wild.[289] Nicolo Zeno, arriving in the East Bygd, found there a monastery dedicated to St. Olaus, a name which in the narrative has become St. Thomas. To this monastery came friars from Norway and other countries, but for the most part from Iceland.[290] It stood "hard by a hill which vomited fire like Vesuvius and Etna." There was also in the neighbourhood a spring of hot water which the ingenious friars conducted in pipes into their monastery and church, thereby keeping themselves comfortable in the coldest weather. This water, as it came into the kitchen, was hot enough to boil meats and vegetables. The monks even made use of it in warming covered gardens or hot-beds in which they raised sundry fruits and herbs that in milder climates grow out of doors.[291] "Hither in summertime come many vessels from ... the Cape above Norway, and from Trondheim, and bring the friars all sorts of comforts, taking in exchange fish ... and skins of different kinds of animals.... There are continually in the harbour a number of vessels detained by the sea being frozen, and waiting for the next season to melt the ice."[292]

[Footnote 289: So he tells us himself: "Quo cum venissent, nullum hominem, neque christianum neque paganum, invenerunt, tantummodo fera pecora et oves deprehenderunt, ex quibus quantum naves ferre poterant in has deportato domum redierunt." Descriptio Groenlandiae, apud Major, p. 53. The glacial men had done their work of slaughter and vanished.]

[Footnote 290: "Ma la maggior parte sono delle Islande." Mr. Major is clearly wrong in translating it "from the Shetland Isles." The younger Nicolo was puzzled by the similarity of the names Islanda and Eslanda, and sometimes confounded Iceland with the Shetland group. But in this place Iceland is evidently meant.]

[Footnote 291: This application of the hot water to purposes of gardening reminds us of the similar covered gardens or hot-beds constructed by Albertus Magnus in the Dominican monastery at Cologne in the thirteenth century. See Humboldt's Kosmos, ii. 130.]

[Footnote 292: Major, op. cit. p. 16. The narrative goes on to give a description of the skin-boats of the Eskimo fishermen.]

[Sidenote: Volcanoes of the north Atlantic ridge.]

[Sidenote: Fate of Gunnbjoern's Skerries, 1456.]

[Sidenote: Volcanic phenomena in Greenland.]

This mention of the volcano and the hot spring is very interesting. In the Miocene period the Atlantic ridge was one of the principal seats of volcanic activity upon the globe; the line of volcanoes extended all the way from Greenland down into central France. But for several hundred thousand years this activity has been diminishing. In France, in the western parts of Great Britain and the Hebrides, the craters have long since become extinct. In the far North, however, volcanic action has been slower in dying out. Iceland, with no less than twenty active volcanoes, is still the most considerable centre of such operations in Europe. The huge volcano on Jan Mayen island, between Greenland and Spitzbergen, is still in action. Among the submerged peaks in the northern seas explosions still now and then occur, as in 1783, when a small island was thrown up near Cape Reykianes, on the southern coast of Iceland, and sank again after a year.[293] Midway between Iceland and Greenland there appears to have stood, in the Middle Ages, a small volcanic island discovered by that Gunnbjoern who first went to Greenland. It was known as Gunnbjoern's Skerries, and was described by Ivar Bardsen.[294] This island is no longer above the surface, and its fate is recorded upon Ruysch's map of the world in the 1508 edition of Ptolemy: "Insula haec anno Domini 1456 fuit totaliter combusta,"—this island was entirely burnt (i. e. blown up in an eruption) in 1456; and in later maps Mr. Major has found the corrupted name "Gombar Scheer" applied to the dangerous reefs and shoals left behind by this explosion.[295] Where volcanic action is declining geysers and boiling springs are apt to abound, as in Iceland; where it has become extinct at a period geologically recent, as in Auvergne and the Rhine country, its latest vestiges are left in the hundreds of thermal and mineral springs whither fashionable invalids congregate to drink or to bathe.[296] Now in Greenland, at the present day, hot springs are found, of which the most noted are those on the island of Ounartok, at the entrance to the fiord of that name. These springs seem to be the same that were described five hundred years ago by Ivar Bardsen. As to volcanoes, it has been generally assumed that those of Greenland are all extinct; but in a country as yet so imperfectly studied this only means that eruptions have not been recorded.[297] On the whole, it seems to me that the mention, in our Venetian narrative, of a boiling spring and an active volcano in Greenland is an instance of the peculiar sort—too strange to have been invented, but altogether probable in itself—that adds to the credit of the narrative.

[Footnote 293: Daubeny, Description of Active and Extinct Volcanoes, London, 1848, pp. 307; cf. Judd, Volcanoes, London, 1881, p. 234.]

[Footnote 294: "Ab Snefelsneso Islandiae, qua brevissimus in Gronlandiam trajectus est, duorum dierum et duarum noctium spatio navigandum est recto cursu versus occidentem; ibique Gunnbjoernis scopulos invenies, inter Gronlandiam et Islandiam medio situ interjacentes. Hic cursus antiquitus frequentabatur, nunc vero glacies ex recessu oceani euroaquilonari delata scopulos ante memoratos tam prope attigit, ut nemo sine vitae discrimine antiquum cursum tenere possit, quemadmodum infra dicetur." Descriptio Groenlandiae, apud Major, op. cit. p. 40.]

[Footnote 295: Op. cit. p. lxxvi. See below, vol. ii. p. 115, note B.]

[Footnote 296: Judd, op. cit. pp. 217-220.]

[Footnote 297: My friend, Professor Shaler, tells me that "a volcano during eruption might shed its ice mantle and afterward don it again in such a manner as to hide its true character even on a near view;" and, on the other hand, "a voyager not familiar with volcanoes might easily mistake the cloud-bonnet of a peak for the smoke of a volcano." This, however, will not account for Zeno's "hill that vomited fire," for he goes on to describe the use which the monks made of the pumice and calcareous tufa for building purposes.]

Thus far, in dealing with the places actually visited by Nicolo or Antonio, or by both brothers, we have found the story consistent and intelligible. But in what relates to countries beyond Greenland, countries which were not visited by either of the brothers, but about which Antonio heard reports, it is quite a different thing. We are introduced to a jumble very unlike the clear, business-like account of Vinland voyages in the Hauks-bok. Yet in this medley there are some statements curiously suggestive of things in North America. It will be remembered that Antonio's voyage with Sinclair (somewhere about 1400) was undertaken in order to verify certain reports of the existence of land more than a thousand miles west of the Faeroe islands.

[Sidenote: Estotiland.]

About six and twenty years ago, said Antonio in a letter to Carlo, four small fishing craft, venturing very far out upon the Atlantic, had been blown upon a strange coast, where their crews were well received by the people. The land proved to be an island rather smaller than Iceland (or Shetland?), with a high mountain whence flowed four rivers. The inhabitants were intelligent people, possessed of all the arts, but did not understand the language of these Norse fishermen.[298] There happened, however, to be one European among them, who had himself been cast ashore in that country and had learned its language; he could speak Latin, and found some one among the shipwrecked men who could understand him. There was a populous city with walls, and the king had Latin books in his library which nobody could read.[299] All kinds of metals abounded, and especially gold.[300] The woods were of immense extent. The people traded with Greenland, importing thence pitch(?), brimstone, and furs. They sowed grain and made "beer." They made small boats, but were ignorant of the loadstone and the compass. For this reason, they held the newcomers in high estimation.[301] The name of the country was Estotiland.

[Footnote 298: They were, therefore, not Northmen.]

[Footnote 299: Pruning this sentence of its magniloquence, might it perhaps mean that there was a large palisaded village, and that the chief had some books in Roman characters, a relic of some castaway, which he kept as a fetish?]

[Footnote 300: With all possible latitude of interpretation, this could not be made to apply to any part of America north of Mexico.]

[Footnote 301: The magnetic needle had been used by the mariners of western and northern Europe since the end of the thirteenth century.]

There is nothing so far in this vague description to show that Estotiland was an American country, except its western direction and perhaps its trading with Greenland. The points of unlikeness are at least as numerous as the points of likeness. But in what follows there is a much stronger suggestion of North America.

[Sidenote: Drogio.]

For some reason not specified an expedition was undertaken by people from Estotiland to a country to the southward named Drogio, and these Norse mariners, or some of them, because they understood the compass, were put in charge of it.[302] But the people of Drogio were cannibals, and the people from Estotiland on their arrival were taken prisoners and devoured,—all save the few Northmen, who were saved because of their marvellous skill in catching fish with nets. The barbarians seemed to have set much store by these white men, and perhaps to have regarded them as objects of "medicine." One of the fishermen in particular became so famous that a neighbouring tribe made war upon the tribe which kept him, and winning the victory took him over into its own custody. This sort of thing happened several times. Various tribes fought to secure the person and services of this Fisherman, so that he was passed about among more than twenty chiefs, and "wandering up and down the country without any fixed abode, ... he became acquainted with all those parts."

[Footnote 302: "Fanno nauigli e nauigano, ma non hanno la calamita ne intendeno col bossolo la tramontana. Per ilche questi pescatori furono in gran pregio, si che il re li spedi con dodici nauigli uerso ostro nel paese che essi chiamano Drogio." Major, op. cit. p. 21.]

[Sidenote: Inhabitants of Drogio and the countries beyond.]

And now comes quite an interesting passage. The Fisherman "says that it is a very great country, and, as it were, a new world; the people are very rude and uncultivated, for they all go naked, and suffer cruelly from the cold, nor have they the sense to clothe themselves with the skins of the animals which they take in hunting [a gross exaggeration]. They have no kind of metal. They live by hunting, and carry lances of wood, sharpened at the point. They have bows, the strings of which are made of beasts' skins. They are very fierce, and have deadly fights amongst each other, and eat one another's flesh. They have chieftains and certain laws among themselves, but differing in the different tribes. The farther you go southwestwards, however, the more refinement you meet with, because the climate is more temperate, and accordingly there they have cities and temples dedicated to their idols, in which they sacrifice men and afterwards eat them. In those parts they have some knowledge and use of gold and silver. Now this Fisherman, having dwelt so many years in these parts, made up his mind, if possible, to return home to his own country; but his companions, despairing of ever seeing it again, gave him God's speed, and remained themselves where they were. Accordingly, he bade them farewell, and made his escape through the woods in the direction of Drogio, where he was welcomed and very kindly received by the chief of the place, who knew him, and was a great enemy of the neighbouring chieftain; and so passing from one chief to another, being the same with whom he had been before, after a long time and with much toil, he at length reached Drogio, where he spent three years. Here, by good luck, he heard from the natives that some boats had arrived off the coast; and full of hope of being able to carry out his intention, he went down to the seaside, and to his great delight found that they had come from Estotiland. He forthwith requested that they would take him with them, which they did very willingly, and as he knew the language of the country, which none of them could speak, they employed him as their interpreter."[303]

[Footnote 303: Major, op. cit. pp. 20-22.]

[Sidenote: The Fisherman's return to "Frislanda."]

Whither the Fisherman was first carried in these boats or vessels, Antonio's letter does not inform us. We are only told that he engaged in some prosperous voyages, and at length returned to the Faeroes after these six and twenty years of strange adventures. It was apparently the Fisherman's description of Estotiland as a very rich country (paese ricchissimo) that led Sinclair to fit out an expedition to visit it, with Antonio as his chief captain. As we have already seen, the Fisherman died just before the ships were ready to start, and to whatever land they succeeded in reaching after they sailed without him, the narrative leaves us with the impression that it was not the mysterious Estotiland.

To attempt to identify that country from the description of it, which reads like a parcel of ill-digested sailors' yarns, would be idle. The most common conjecture has identified it with Newfoundland, from its relations to other points mentioned in the Zeno narrative, as indicated, with fair probability, on the Zeno map. To identify it with Newfoundland is to brand the description as a "fish story," but from such a conclusion there seems anyway to be no escape.

[Sidenote: Was the account of Drogio woven into the narrative by the younger Nicolo?]

With Drogio, however, it is otherwise. The description of Drogio and the vast country stretching beyond it, which was like a "new world," is the merest sketch, but it seems to contain enough characteristic details to stamp it as a description of North America, and of no other country accessible by an Atlantic voyage. It is a sketch which apparently must have had its ultimate source in somebody's personal experience of aboriginal North America. Here we are reminded that when the younger Nicolo published this narrative, in 1558, some dim knowledge of the North American tribes was beginning to make its way into the minds of people in Europe. The work of Soto and Cartier, to say nothing of other explorers, had already been done. May we suppose that Nicolo had thus obtained some idea of North America, and wove it into his reproduction of his ancestors' letters, for the sake of completeness and point, in somewhat the same uncritical mood as that in which the most worthy ancient historians did not scruple to invent speeches to put into the mouths of their heroes? It may have been so, and in such case the description of Drogio loses its point for us as a feature in the pre-Columbian voyages to America. In such case we may dismiss it at once, and pretty much all the latter part of the Zeno narrative, relating to what Antonio heard and did, becomes valueless; though the earlier part, relating to the elder Nicolo, still remains valid and trustworthy.

[Sidenote: Or does it represent actual experiences in North America?]

But suppose we take the other alternative. As in the earlier part of the story we feel sure that young Nicolo must have reproduced the ancestral documents faithfully, because it shows knowledge that he could not have got in any other way; let us now suppose that in the latter part also he added nothing of himself, but was simply a faithful editor. It will then follow that the Fisherman's account of Drogio, reduced to writing by Antonio Zeno about 1400, must probably represent personal experiences in North America; for no such happy combination of details characteristic only of North America is likely at that date to have been invented by any European. Our simplest course will be to suppose that the Fisherman really had the experiences which are narrated, that he was bandied about from tribe to tribe in North America, all the way, perhaps, from Nova Scotia to Mexico, and yet returned to the Faeroe islands to tell the tale! Could such a thing be possible? Was anything of the sort ever done before or since?

[Sidenote: The case of David Ingram, 1568.]

Yes: something of the sort appears to have been done about ten years after the Zeno narrative was published. In October, 1568, that great sailor, Sir John Hawkins, by reason of scarcity of food, was compelled to set about a hundred men ashore near the Rio de Minas, on the Mexican coast, and leave them to their fate. The continent was a network of rude paths or trails, as it had doubtless been for ages, and as central Africa is to-day. Most of these Englishmen probably perished in the wilderness. Some who took southwestern trails found their way to the city of Mexico, where, as "vile Lutheran dogges," they were treated with anything but kindness. Others took northeasterly trails, and one of these men, David Ingram, made his way from Texas to Maine, and beyond to the St. John's river, where he was picked up by a friendly French ship and carried to France, and so got home to England. The journey across North America took him about eleven months, but one of his comrades, Job Hortop, had no end of adventures, and was more than twenty years in getting back to England. Ingram told such blessed yarns about houses of crystal and silver, and other wonderful things, that many disbelieved his whole story, but he was subjected to a searching examination before Sir Francis Walsingham, and as to the main fact of his journey through the wilderness there seems to be no doubt.[304]

[Footnote 304: Ingram's narrative was first published in Hakluyt's folio of 1589, pp. 557-562, but in his larger work, Principal Navigations, etc., London, 1600, it is omitted. As Purchas quaintly says, "As for David Ingram's perambulation to the north parts, Master Hakluyt in his first edition published the same; but it seemeth some incredibilities of his reports caused him to leaue him out in the next impression, the reward of lying being not to be beleeued in truths." Purchas his Pilgrimes, London, 1625, vol. iv. p. 1179. The examination before Walsingham had reference to the projected voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which was made in 1583. Ingram's relation, "w^{ch} he reported vnto S^{r} Frauncys Walsinghm, Knight, and diuers others of good judgment and creditt, in August and Septembar, A^{o} Dni, 1582," is in the British Museum, Sloane MS. No. 1447, fol. 1-18; it was copied and privately printed in Plowden Weston's Documents connected with the History of South Carolina, London, 1856. There is a MS. copy in the Sparks collection in the Harvard University library. See the late Mr. Charles Deane's note in his edition of Hakluyt's Discourse concerning Westerne Planting, Cambridge, 1877, p. 229 (Collections of Maine Hist. Soc., 2d series, vol. ii.); see, also, Winsor, Narr. and Crit. Hist., iii. 186.]

[Sidenote: The case of Cabeza de Vaca, 1528-36.]

Far more important, historically, and in many ways more instructive than the wanderings of David Ingram, was the journey of Cabeza de Vaca and his ingenious comrades, in 1528-36, from the Mississippi river to their friends in Mexico. This remarkable journey will receive further consideration in another place.[305] In the course of it Cabeza de Vaca was for eight years held captive by sundry Indian tribes, and at last his escape involved ten months of arduous travel. On one occasion he and his friends treated some sick Indians, among other things breathing upon them and making the sign of the cross. As the Indians happened to get well, these Spaniards at once became objects of reverence, and different tribes vied with one another for access to them, in order to benefit by their supernatural gifts. In those early days, before the red men had become used to seeing Europeans, a white captive was not so likely to be put to death as to be cherished as a helper of vast and undetermined value.[306] The Indians set so much store by Cabeza de Vaca that he found it hard to tear himself away; but at length he used his influence over them in such wise as to facilitate his moving in a direction by which he ultimately succeeded in escaping to his friends. There seems to be a real analogy between his strange experiences and those of the Fisherman in Drogio, who became an object of reverence because he could do things that the natives could not do, yet the value of which they were able to appreciate.

[Footnote 305: See below, vol. ii. p. 501.]

[Footnote 306: In the first reception of the Spaniards in Peru, we shall see a similar idea at work, vol. ii. pp. 398, 407.]

Now if the younger Nicolo had been in the mood for adorning his ancestors' narrative by inserting a few picturesque incidents out of his own hearsay knowledge of North America, it does not seem likely that he would have known enough to hit so deftly upon one of the peculiarities of the barbaric mind. Here, again, we seem to have come upon one of those incidents, inherently probable, but too strange to have been invented, that tend to confirm the story. Without hazarding anything like a positive opinion, it seems to me likely enough that this voyage of Scandinavian fishermen to the coast of North America in the fourteenth century may have happened.

[Sidenote: There may have been unrecorded instances of visits to North America.]

It was this and other unrecorded but possible instances that I had in mind at the beginning of this chapter, in saying that occasional visits of Europeans to America in pre-Columbian times may have occurred oftener than we are wont to suppose. Observe that our scanty records—naturally somewhat perplexed and dim, as treating of remote and unknown places—refer us to that northern Atlantic region where the ocean is comparatively narrow, and to that northern people who, from the time of their first appearance in history, have been as much at home upon sea as upon land. For a thousand years past these hyperborean waters have been furrowed in many directions by stout Scandinavian keels, and if, in aiming at Greenland, the gallant mariners may now and then have hit upon Labrador or Newfoundland, and have made flying visits to coasts still farther southward, there is nothing in it all which need surprise us.[307]

[Footnote 307: The latest pre-Columbian voyage mentioned as having occurred in the northern seas was that of the Polish pilot John Szkolny, who, in the service of King Christian I. of Denmark, is said to have sailed to Greenland in 1476, and to have touched upon the coast of Labrador. See Gomara, Historia de las Indias, Saragossa, 1553, cap. xxxvii.; Wytfliet, Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum, Douay, 1603, p. 102; Pontanus, Rerum Danicarum Historia, Amsterdam, 1631, p. 763. The wise Humboldt mentions the report without expressing an opinion, Examen critique, tom. ii. p. 153.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The pre-Columbian voyages made no real contributions to geographical knowledge;]

[Sidenote: and were in no true sense a Discovery of America.]

Nothing can be clearer, however, from a survey of the whole subject, than that these pre-Columbian voyages were quite barren of results of historic importance. In point of colonization they produced the two ill-fated settlements on the Greenland coast, and nothing more. Otherwise they made no real addition to the stock of geographical knowledge, they wrought no effect whatever upon the European mind outside of Scandinavia, and even in Iceland itself the mention of coasts beyond Greenland awakened no definite ideas, and, except for a brief season, excited no interest. The Zeno narrative indicates that the Vinland voyages had practically lapsed from memory before the end of the fourteenth century.[308] Scholars familiar with saga literature of course knew the story; it was just at this time that Jon Thordharson wrote out the version of it which is preserved in the Flateyar-bok. But by the general public it must have been forgotten, or else the Fisherman's tale of Estotiland and Drogio would surely have awakened reminiscences of Markland and Vinland, and some traces of this would have appeared in Antonio's narrative or upon his map. The principal naval officer of the Faeroes, and personal friend of the sovereign, after dwelling several years among these Northmen, whose intercourse with their brethren in Iceland was frequent, apparently knew nothing of Leif or Thorfinn, or the mere names of the coasts which they had visited. Nothing had been accomplished by those voyages which could properly be called a contribution to geographical knowledge. To speak of them as constituting, in any legitimate sense of the phrase, a Discovery of America is simply absurd. Except for Greenland, which was supposed to be a part of the European world, America remained as much undiscovered after the eleventh century as before. In the midsummer of 1492 it needed to be discovered as much as if Leif Ericsson or the whole race of Northmen had never existed.

[Footnote 308: Practically, but not entirely, for we have seen Markland mentioned in the "Elder Skalholt Annals," about 1362. See above, p. 223.]

As these pre-Columbian voyages produced no effect in the eastern hemisphere, except to leave in Icelandic literature a scanty but interesting record, so in the western hemisphere they seem to have produced no effect beyond cutting down a few trees and killing a few Indians. In the outlying world of Greenland it is not improbable that the blood of the Eskimos may have received some slight Scandinavian infusion. But upon the aboriginal world of the red men, from Davis strait to Cape Horn, it is not likely that any impression of any sort was ever made. It is in the highest degree probable that Leif Ericsson and his friends made a few voyages to what we now know to have been the coast of America; but it is an abuse of language to say that they "discovered" America. In no sense was any real contact established between the eastern and the western halves of our planet until the great voyage of Columbus in 1492.



CHAPTER III.

EUROPE AND CATHAY.

[Sidenote: Why the voyages of the Northmen were not followed up.]

The question has sometimes been asked, Why did the knowledge of the voyages to Vinland so long remain confined to the Scandinavian people or a portion of them, and then lapse into oblivion, insomuch that it did not become a matter of notoriety in Europe until after the publication of the celebrated book of Thormodus Torfaeus in 1705? Why did not the news of the voyages of Leif and Thorfinn spread rapidly over Europe, like the news of the voyage of Columbus? and why was it not presently followed, like the latter, by a rush of conquerors and colonizers across the Atlantic?

Such questions arise from a failure to see historical events in their true perspective, and to make the proper allowances for the manifold differences in knowledge and in social and economic conditions which characterize different periods of history. In the present case, the answer is to be found, first, in the geographical ignorance which prevented the Northmen from realizing in the smallest degree what such voyages really signified or were going to signify to posterity; and, secondly, in the political and commercial condition of Europe at the close of the tenth century.

[Sidenote: Ignorance of geography.]

In the first place the route which the Norse voyagers pursued, from Iceland to Greenland and thence to Vinland, was not such as to give them, in their ignorance of the shape of the earth, and with their imperfect knowledge of latitude and longitude, any adequate gauge wherewith to measure their achievement. The modern reader, who has in his mind a general picture of the shape of the northern Atlantic ocean with its coasts, must carefully expel that picture before he can begin to realize how things must have seemed to the Northmen. None of the Icelandic references to Markland and Vinland betray a consciousness that these countries belong to a geographical world outside of Europe. There was not enough organized geographical knowledge for that. They were simply conceived as remote places beyond Greenland, inhabited by inferior but dangerous people. The accidental finding of such places served neither to solve any great commercial problem nor to gratify and provoke scientific curiosity. It was, therefore, not at all strange that it bore no fruit.

[Sidenote: Lack of instruments for ocean navigation.]

Secondly, even if it had been realized, and could have been duly proclaimed throughout Europe, that across the broad Atlantic a new world lay open for colonization, Europe could not have taken advantage of the fact. Now and then a ship might make its way, or be blown, across the waste of waters without compass or astrolabe; but until these instruments were at hand anything like systematic ocean navigation was out of the question; and from a colonization which could only begin by creeping up into the Arctic seas and taking Greenland on the way, not much was to be expected, after all.

[Sidenote: Europe in the year 1000.]

But even if the compass and other facilities for oceanic navigation had been at hand, the state of Europe in the days of Eric the Red was not such as to afford surplus energy for distant enterprise of this sort. Let us for a moment recall what was going on in Europe in the year of grace 1000, just enough to get a suggestive picture of the time. In England the Danish invader, fork-bearded Swend, father of the great Cnut, was wresting the kingship from the feeble grasp of Ethelred the Redeless. In Gaul the little duchy of France, between the Somme and the Loire, had lately become the kingdom of France, and its sovereign, Hugh Capet, had succeeded to feudal rights of lordship over the great dukes and counts whose territories surrounded him on every side; and now Hugh's son, Robert the Debonair, better hymn-writer than warrior, was waging a doubtful struggle with these unruly vassals. It was not yet in any wise apparent what the kingdoms of England and France were going to be. In Germany the youthful Otto III., the "wonder of the world," had just made his weird visit to the tomb of his mighty predecessor at Aachen, before starting on that last journey to Rome which was so soon to cost him his life. Otto's teacher, Gerbert, most erudite of popes,—too learned not to have had dealings with the Devil,—was beginning to raise the papacy out of the abyss of infamy into which the preceding age had seen it sink, and so to prepare the way for the far-reaching reforms of Hildebrand. The boundaries of Christendom were as yet narrow and insecure. With the overthrow of Olaf Tryggvesson in this year 1000, and the temporary partition of Norway between Swedes and Danes, the work of Christianizing the North seemed, for the moment, to languish. Upon the eastern frontier the wild Hungarians had scarcely ceased to be a terror to Europe, and in this year Stephen, their first Christian king, began to reign. At the same time the power of heretical Bulgaria, which had threatened to overwhelm the Eastern Empire, was broken down by the sturdy blows of the Macedonian emperor Basil. In this year the Christians of Spain met woful defeat at the hands of Almansor, and there seemed no reason why the Mussulman rule over the greater part of that peninsula should not endure forever.

Thus, from end to end, Europe was a scene of direst confusion, and though, as we now look back upon it, the time seems by no means devoid of promise, there was no such cheering outlook then. Nowhere were the outlines of kingdoms or the ownership of crowns definitely settled. Private war was both incessant and universal; the Truce of God had not yet been proclaimed.[309] As for the common people, their hardships were well-nigh incredible. Amid all this anarchy and misery, at the close of the thousandth year from the birth of Christ, the belief was quite common throughout Europe that the Day of Judgment was at hand for a world grown old in wickedness and ripe for its doom.

[Footnote 309: The "Truce of God" (Treuga Dei) was introduced by the clergy in Guienne about 1032; it was adopted in Spain before 1050, and in England by 1080. See Datt, De pace imperii publica, lib. i. cap. ii. A cessation of all violent quarrels was enjoined, under ecclesiastical penalties, during church festivals, and from every Wednesday evening until the following Monday morning. This left only about eighty days in the year available for shooting and stabbing one's neighbours. The truce seems to have accomplished much good, though it was very imperfectly observed.]

[Sidenote: The condition of things was not such as to favour colonial enterprise.]

It hardly need be argued that a period like this, in which all the vital energy in Europe was consumed in the adjustment of affairs at home, was not fitted for colonial enterprises. Before a people can send forth colonies it must have solved the problem of political life so far as to ensure stability of trade. It is the mercantile spirit that has supported modern colonization, aided by the spirit of intellectual curiosity and the thirst for romantic adventure. In the eleventh century there was no intellectual curiosity outside the monastery walls, nor had such a feeling become enlisted in the service of commerce. Of trade there was indeed, even in western Europe, a considerable amount, but the commercial marine was in its infancy, and on land the trader suffered sorely at the hands of the robber baron. In those days the fashionable method of compounding with your creditors was, not to offer them fifty cents on the dollar, but to inveigle them into your castle and broil them over a slow fire.

[Sidenote: The outlook of Europe was toward Asia.]

In so far as the attention of people in Europe was called to any quarter of the globe outside of the seething turbulence in which they dwelt, it was directed toward Asia. Until after 1492, Europe stood with her back toward the Atlantic. What there might be out beyond that "Sea of Darkness" (Mare Tenebrosum), as it used commonly to be called, was a question of little interest and seems to have excited no speculation. In the view of mediaeval Europe the inhabited world was cut off on the west by this mysterious ocean, and on the south by the burning sands of Sahara; but eastward it stretched out no one knew how far, and in that direction dwelt tribes and nations which Europe, from time immemorial, had reason to fear. As early as the time of Herodotus, the secular antagonism between Europe and Asia had become a topic of reflection among the Greeks, and was wrought with dramatic effect by that great writer into the structure of his history, culminating in the grand and stirring scenes of the Persian war. A century and a half later the conquests of Alexander the Great added a still more impressive climax to the story. The struggle was afterward long maintained between Roman and Parthian, but from the fifth century after Christ onward through the Middle Ages, it seemed as if the Oriental world would never rest until it had inflicted the extremities of retaliation upon Europe. Whether it was the heathen of the steppes who were in question, from Attila in the fifth century to Batu Khan in the thirteenth, or the followers of the Prophet, who tore away from Christendom the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and held Spain in their iron grasp, while from age to age they exhausted their strength in vain against the Eastern Empire, the threatening danger was always coming with the morning sun; whatever might be the shock that took the attention of Europe away from herself, it directed it upon Asia. This is a fact of cardinal importance for us, inasmuch as it was directly through the interest, more and more absorbing, which Europe felt in Asia that the discovery of the western hemisphere was at last effected.

[Sidenote: Routes of trade between Europe and Asia.]

[Sidenote: Claudius Ptolemy.]

[Sidenote: Early mention of China.]

It was not only in war, but in commerce, that the fortunes of Europe were dependent upon her relations with Asia. Since prehistoric times there has always been some commercial intercourse between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the peninsula of Hindustan. Tyre and Sidon carried on such trade by way of the Red Sea.[310] After Alexander had led his army to Samarcand and to the river Hyphasis, the acquaintance of the Greeks with Asia was very considerably increased, and important routes of trade were established. One was practically the old Phoenician route, with its western terminus moved from Tyre to Alexandria. Another was by way of the Caspian sea, up the river Oxus, and thence with camels to the banks of the Indus.[311] An intermediate route was through Syria and by way of the Euphrates and the Persian gulf; the route which at one time made the greatness of Palmyra. After the extension of Roman sway to the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Euxine, these same routes continued to be used. The European commodities carried to India were light woollen cloths, linens, coral, black lead, various kinds of glass vessels, and wine. In exchange for these the traders brought back to Europe divers aromatic spices, black pepper, ivory, cotton fabrics, diamonds, sapphires, and pearls, silk thread and silk stuffs.[312] Detailed accounts of these commercial transactions, and of the wealth of personal experiences that must have been connected with them, are excessively scant. Of the Europeans who, during all the centuries between Alexander and Justinian, made their way to Hindustan or beyond, we know very few by name. The amount of geographical information that was gathered during the first half of this period is shown in the map representing Claudius Ptolemy's knowledge of the earth, about the middle of the second century after Christ. Except for the Scandinavian world, and some very important additions made to the knowledge of Asia by Marco Polo, this map fairly represents the maximum of acquaintance with the earth's surface possessed by Europeans previous to the great voyages of the fifteenth century. It shows a dim knowledge of the mouths of the Ganges, of the island of Ceylon, and of what we sometimes call Farther India. A very dim knowledge, indeed; for the huge peninsula of Hindustan is shrunk into insignificance, while Taprobane, or Ceylon, unduly magnified, usurps the place belonging to the Deccan. At the same time we see that some hearsay knowledge of China had made its way into the Roman world before the days of Ptolemy. The two names by which China was first known to Europeans were "Seres" or "Serica," and "Sinae" or "Thin." These two differing names are the records of two different methods of approach to different parts of a vast country, very much as the Northmen called their part of eastern North America "Vinland," while the Spaniards called their part "Florida." The name "Seres" was given to northwestern China by traders who approached it through the highlands of central Asia from Samarcand, while "Sinae" was the name given to southeastern China by traders who approached it by way of the Indian ocean, and heard of it in India, but never reached it. Apparently no European ships ever reached China before the Portuguese, in 1517.[313] The name "Sinae" or "Thin" seems to mean the country of the "Tchin" dynasty, which ruled over the whole of China in the second century before Christ, and over a portion of it for a much longer time. The name "Seres," on the other hand, was always associated with the trade in silks, and was known to the Romans in the time of the Emperor Claudius,[314] and somewhat earlier. The Romans in Virgil's time set a high value upon silk, and every scrap of it they had came from China. They knew nothing about the silk-worm, and supposed that the fibres or threads of this beautiful stuff grew upon trees. Of actual intercourse between the Roman and Chinese empires there was no more than is implied in this current of trade, passing through many hands. But that each knew, in a vague way, of the existence of the other, there is no doubt.[315]

[Footnote 310: Diodorus Siculus, i. 70.]

[Footnote 311: Strabo, xi. 7, Sec. 3.]

[Footnote 312: Robertson, Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, Dublin, 1791, p. 55. I never have occasion to consult Dr. Robertson without being impressed anew with his scientific habit of thought and the solidity of his scholarship; and in none of his works are these qualities better illustrated than in this noble essay.]

[Footnote 313: The Polos sailed back from China to the Persian gulf in 1292-94; see below, p. 282.]

[Footnote 314: The name "Seres" appears on the map of Pomponius Mela (cir. A. D. 50), while "Sinae" does not. See below, p. 304.

Jam Tartessiaco quos solverat aequore Titan In noctem diffusus equos, jungebat Eois Littoribus, primique novo Phaethonte retecti Seres lanigeris repetebant vellera lucis. Silius Italicus, lib. vi. ad init.]

[Footnote 315: For this whole subject see Colonel Sir Henry Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, London, 1866, 2 vols.,—a work of profound learning and more delightful than a novel.]

[Sidenote: Cosmas Indicopleustes.]

[Sidenote: Shape of the earth, according to Cosmas.]

In the course of the reign of Justinian, we get references at first hand to India, and coupled withal to a general theory of cosmography. This curious information we have in the book of the monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, written somewhere between A. D. 530 and 550. A pleasant book it is, after its kind. In his younger days Cosmas had been a merchant, and in divers voyages had become familiar with the coasts of Ethiopia and the Persian gulf, and had visited India and Ceylon. After becoming a monk at Alexandria, Cosmas wrote his book of Christian geography,[316] maintaining, in opposition to Ptolemy, that the earth is not a sphere, but a rectangular plane forming the floor of the universe; the heavens rise on all four sides about this rectangle, like the four walls of a room, and, at an indefinite height above the floor, these blue walls support a vaulted roof or firmament, in which God dwells with the angels. In the centre of the floor are the inhabited lands of the earth, surrounded on all sides by a great ocean, beyond which, somewhere out in a corner, is the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were expelled. In its general shape, therefore, the universe somewhat resembles the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, or a modern "Saratoga trunk." On the northern part of the floor, under the firmament, is a lofty conical mountain, around which the sun, moon, and planets perform their daily revolutions. In the summer the sun takes a turn around the apex of the cone, and is, therefore, hidden only for a short night; but in the winter he travels around the base, which takes longer, and, accordingly, the nights are long. Such is the doctrine drawn from Holy Scripture, says Cosmas, and as for the vain blasphemers who pretend that the earth is a round ball, the Lord hath stultified them for their sins until they impudently prate of Antipodes, where trees grow downward and rain falls upward. As for such nonsense, the worthy Cosmas cannot abide it.

[Footnote 316: Its title is [Greek: Christianon biblos, hermeneia eis ten Oktateuchon], i. e. against Ptolemy's Geography in eight books. The name Cosmas Indicopleustes seems merely to mean "the cosmographer who has sailed to India." He begins his book in a tone of extreme and somewhat unsavory humility: [Greek: Anoigo ta mogilala kai bradyglossa cheile ho hamartolos kai talas ego]—"I, the sinner and wretch, open my stammering, stuttering lips," etc.—The book has been the occasion of some injudicious excitement within the last half century. Cosmas gave a description of some comparatively recent inscriptions on the peninsula of Sinai, and because he could not find anybody able to read them, he inferred that they must be records of the Israelites on their passage through the desert. (Compare the Dighton rock, above, p. 214.) Whether in the sixth century of grace or in the nineteenth, your unregenerate and unchastened antiquary snaps at conclusions as a drowsy dog does at flies. Some years ago an English clergyman, Charles Forster, started up the nonsense again, and argued that these inscriptions might afford a clue to man's primeval speech! Cf. Bunsen, Christianity and Mankind, vol. iii. p. 231; Mueller and Donaldson, History of Greek Literature, vol. iii. p. 353; Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene, vol. ii. p. 177.]

I cite these views of Cosmas because there can be no doubt that they represent beliefs current among the general public until after the time of Columbus,[317] in spite of the deference paid to Ptolemy's views by the learned. Along with these cosmographical speculations, Cosmas shows a wider geographical knowledge of Asia than any earlier writer. He gives a good deal of interesting information about India and Ceylon, and has a fairly correct idea of the position of China, which he calls Tzinista or Chinistan. This land of silk is the remotest of all the Indies, and beyond it "there is neither navigation nor inhabited country.... And the Indian philosophers, called Brachmans, tell you that if you were to stretch a straight cord from Tzinista through Persia to the Roman territory, you would just divide the world in halves. And mayhap they are right."[318]

[Footnote 317: Such views have their advocates even now. There still lives, I believe, in England, a certain John Hampden, who with dauntless breast maintains that the earth is a circular plane with centre at the north pole and a circumference of nearly 30,000 miles where poor misguided astronomers suppose the south pole to be. The sun moves across the sky at a distance of about 800 miles. From the boundless abyss beyond the southern circumference, with its barrier of icy mountains, came the waters which drowned the antediluvian world; for, as this author quite reasonably observes, "on a globular earth such a deluge would have been physically Impossible." Hampden's title is somewhat like that of Cosmas,—The New Manual of Biblical Cosmography, London, 1877; and he began in 1876 to publish a periodical called The Truth-Seeker's Oracle and Scriptural Science Review. Similar views have been set forth by one Samuel Rowbotham, under the pseudonym of "Parallax," Zetetic Astronomy. Earth not a Globe. An experimental inquiry into the true figure of the earth, proving it a plane without orbital or axial motion, etc., London, 1873; and by a William Carpenter, One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe, Baltimore, 1885. There is a very considerable quantity of such literature afloat, the product of a kind of mental aberration that thrives upon paradox. When I was superintendent of the catalogue of Harvard University library, I made the class "Eccentric Literature" under which to group such books,—the lucubrations of circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, inventors of perpetual motion, devisers of recipes for living forever without dying, crazy interpreters of Daniel and the Apocalypse, upsetters of the undulatory theory of light, the Bacon-Shakespeare lunatics, etc.; a dismal procession of long-eared bipeds, with very raucous bray. The late Professor De Morgan devoted a bulky and instructive volume to an account of such people and their crotchets. See his Budget of Paradoxes, London, 1872.]

[Footnote 318: Cosmas, ii. 138. Further mention of China was made early in the seventh century by Theophylactus Samocatta, vii. 7. See Yule's Cathay, vol. i. pp. xlix., clxviii.]

[Sidenote: The Nestorians.]

In the fourth and following centuries, Nestorian missionaries were very active in Asia, and not only made multitudes of converts and established metropolitan sees in such places as Kashgar and Herat, but even found their way into China. Their work forms an interesting though melancholy chapter in history, but it does not seem to have done much toward making Asia better known to Europe. As declared heretics, the Nestorians were themselves almost entirely cut off from intercourse with European Christians.

[Sidenote: Effects of the Saracen conquests.]

[Sidenote: Constantinople in the twelfth century.]

The immediate effect of the sudden rise of the vast Saracen empire, in the seventh and eighth centuries, was to interpose a barrier to the extension of intercourse between Europe and the Far East. Trade between the eastern and western extremities of Asia went on more briskly than ever, but it was for a long time exclusively in Mussulman hands. The mediaeval Arabs were bold sailors, and not only visited Sumatra and Java, but made their way to Canton. Upon the southern and middle routes the Arab cities of Cairo and Bagdad became thriving centres of trade; but as Spain and the whole of northern Africa were now Arab countries, most of the trade between east and west was conducted within Mussulman boundaries. Saracen cruisers prowled in the Mediterranean and sorely harassed the Christian coasts. During the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, Europe was more shut in upon herself than ever before or since. In many respects these were especially the dark ages of Europe,—the period of least comfort and least enlightenment since the days of pre-Roman barbarism. But from this general statement Constantinople should be in great measure excepted. The current of mediaeval trade through the noble highway of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus was subject to fluctuations, but it was always great. The city of the Byzantine emperors was before all things a commercial city, like Venice in later days. Until the time of the Crusades Constantinople was the centre of the Levant trade. The great northern route from Asia remained available for commercial intercourse in this direction. Persian and Armenian merchants sent their goods to Batoum, whence they were shipped to Constantinople; and silk was brought from northwestern China by caravan to the Oxus, and forwarded thence by the Caspian sea, the rivers Cyrus and Phasis, and the Euxine sea.[319] When it was visited by Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century, Constantinople was undoubtedly the richest and most magnificent city, and the seat of the highest civilization, to be found anywhere upon the globe.

[Footnote 319: Robertson, Historical Disquisition, p. 93; Pears, The Fall of Constantinople, p. 177,—a book of great merit.]

[Sidenote: The Crusades.]

[Sidenote: Barbarizing character of Turkish conquest.]

[Sidenote: General effects of the Crusades.]

In the days of its strength the Eastern Empire was the staunch bulwark of Christendom against the dangerous assaults of Persian, Saracen, and Turk; alike in prosperity and in calamity, it proved to be the teacher and civilizer of the western world. The events which, at the close of the eleventh century, brought thousands upon thousands of adventurous, keen-witted people from western Europe into this home of wealth and refinement, were the occasion of the most remarkable intellectual awakening that the world had ever witnessed up to that time. The Crusades, in their beginning, were a symptom of the growing energy of western Europe under the ecclesiastical reformation effected by the mighty Hildebrand. They were the military response of Europe to the most threatening, and, as time has proved, the most deadly of all the blows that have ever been aimed at her from Asia. Down to this time the Mahometanism with which Christendom had so long been in conflict was a Mahometanism of civilized peoples. The Arabs and Moors were industrious merchants, agriculturists, and craftsmen; in their society one might meet with learned scholars, refined poets, and profound philosophers. But at the end of the tenth century, Islam happened to make converts of the Turks, a nomad race in the upper status of barbarism, with flocks and herds and patriarchal families. Inspired with the sudden zeal for conquest which has always characterized new converts to Islam, the Turks began to pour down from the plains of central Asia like a deluge upon the Eastern Empire. In 1016 they overwhelmed Armenia, and presently advanced into Asia Minor. Their mode of conquest was peculiarly baleful, for at first they deliberately annihilated the works of civilization in order to prepare the country for their nomadic life; they pulled down cities to put up tents. Though they long ago ceased to be nomads, they have to this day never learned to comprehend civilized life, and they have been simply a blight upon every part of the earth's surface which they have touched. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Asia Minor was one of the most prosperous and highly civilized parts of the world;[320] and the tale of its devastation by the terrible Alp Arslan and the robber chiefs that came after him is one of the most mournful chapters in history. At the end of that century, when the Turks were holding Nicaea and actually had their outposts on the Marmora, it was high time for Christendom to rise en masse in self-defence. The idea was worthy of the greatest of popes. Imperfectly and spasmodically as it was carried out, it undoubtedly did more than anything that had ever gone before toward strengthening the wholesome sentiment of a common Christendom among the peoples of western Europe. The Crusades increased the power of the Church, which was equivalent to putting a curb upon the propensities of the robber baron and making labour and traffic more secure. In another way they aided this good work by carrying off the robber baron in large numbers to Egypt and Syria, and killing him there. In this way they did much toward ridding European society of its most turbulent elements; while at the same time they gave fresh development to the spirit of romantic adventure, and connected it with something better than vagrant freebooting.[321] By renewing the long-suspended intercourse between the minds of western Europe and the Greek culture of Constantinople, they served as a mighty stimulus to intellectual curiosity, and had a large share in bringing about that great thirteenth century renaissance which is forever associated with the names of Giotto and Dante and Roger Bacon.

[Footnote 320: "It is difficult for the modern traveller who ventures into the heart of Asia Minor, and finds nothing but rude Kurds and Turkish peasants living among mountains and wild pastures, not connected even by ordinary roads, to imagine the splendour and rich cultivation of this vast country, with its brilliant cities and its teeming population." Mahaffy, The Greek World under Roman Sway, London, 1890, p. 229.]

[Footnote 321: The general effects of the Crusades are discussed, with much learning and sagacity, by Choiseul-Daillecourt, De l'Influence des Croisades sur l'etat des peuples de l'Europe, Paris, 1809.]

[Sidenote: The Fourth Crusade.]

There can be no doubt that in these ways the Crusades were for our forefathers in Europe the most bracing and stimulating events that occurred in the whole millennium between the complicated disorders of the fifth century and the outburst of maritime discovery in the fifteenth. How far they justified themselves from the military point of view, it is not so easy to say. On the one hand, they had much to do with retarding the progress of the enemy for two hundred years; they overwhelmed the Seljukian Turks so effectually that their successors, the Ottomans, did not become formidable until about 1300, after the last crusading wave had spent its force. On the other hand, the Fourth Crusade, with better opportunities than any of the others for striking a crushing blow at the Moslem, played false to Christendom, and in 1204 captured and despoiled Constantinople in order to gratify Venice's hatred of her commercial rival and superior. It was a sorry piece of business, and one cannot look with unmixed pleasure at the four superb horses that now adorn the front of the church of St. Mark as a trophy of this unhallowed exploit.[322] One cannot help feeling that but for this colossal treachery, the great city of Constantine, to which our own civilization owes more than can ever be adequately told, might, perhaps, have retained enough strength to withstand the barbarian in 1453, and thus have averted one of the most lamentable catastrophes in the history of mankind.

[Footnote 322: They were taken from Chios in the fourth century by the emperor Theodosius, and placed in the hippodrome at Constantinople, whence they were taken by the Venetians in 1204. The opinion that "the results of the Fourth Crusade upon European civilization were altogether disastrous" is ably set forth by Mr. Pears, The Fall of Constantinople, London, 1885, and would be difficult to refute. Voltaire might well say in this case, "Ainsi le seul fruit des chretiens dans leurs barbares croisades fut d'exterminer d'autres chretiens. Ces croises, qui ruinaient l'empire auraient pu, bien plus aisement que tous leurs predecesseurs, chasser les Turcs de l'Asie." Essai sur les Moeurs, tom. ii. p. 158. Voltaire's general view of the Crusades is, however, very superficial.]

[Sidenote: Rivalry between Venice and Genoa.]

The general effect of the Crusades upon Oriental commerce was to increase the amount of traffic through Egypt and Syria. Of this lucrative trade Venice got the lion's share, and while she helped support the short-lived Latin dynasty upon the throne at Constantinople, she monopolized a great part of the business of the Black Sea also. But in 1261 Venice's rival, Genoa, allied herself with the Greek emperor, Michael Palaeologus, at Nicaea, placed him upon the Byzantine throne, and again cut off Venice from the trade that came through the Bosphorus. From this time forth the mutual hatred between Venice and Genoa "waxed fiercer than ever; no merchant fleet of either state could go to sea without convoy, and wherever their ships met they fought. It was something like the state of things between Spain and England in the days of Drake."[323] In the one case as in the other, it was a strife for the mastery of the sea and its commerce. Genoa obtained full control of the Euxine, took possession of the Crimea, and thus acquired a monopoly of the trade from central Asia along the northern route. With the fall of Acre in 1291, and the consequent expulsion of Christians from Syria, Venice lost her hold upon the middle route. But with the pope's leave[324] she succeeded in making a series of advantageous commercial treaties with the new Mameluke sovereigns of Egypt, and the dealings between the Red Sea and the Adriatic soon came to be prodigious. The Venetians gained control of part of the Peloponnesus, with many islands of the AEgean and eastern Mediterranean. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their city was the most splendid and luxurious in all Christendom.

[Footnote 323: Yule's Marco Polo, vol. i. p. lxxi.]

[Footnote 324: A papal dispensation was necessary before a commercial treaty could be made with Mahometans. See Leibnitz, Codex Jur. Gent. Diplomat., i. 489.]

[Sidenote: Centres and routes of mediaeval trade.]

Such a development of wealth in Venice and Genoa implies a large producing and consuming area behind them, able to take and pay for the costly products of India and China. Before the end of the thirteenth century the volume of European trade had swelled to great proportions. How full of historic and literary interest are the very names of the centres and leading routes of this trade as it was established in those days, with its outlook upon the Mediterranean and the distant East! Far up in the North we see Wisby, on the little isle of Gothland in the Baltic, giving its name to new rules of international law; and the merchants of the famous Hansa towns extending their operations as far as Novgorod in one direction, and in another to the Steelyard in London, where the pound of these honest "Easterlings" was adopted as the "sterling" unit of sound money. Fats and tallows, furs and wax from Russia, iron and copper from Sweden, strong hides and unrivalled wools from England, salt cod and herring (much needed on meagre church fast-days) from the North and Baltic seas, appropriately followed by generous casks of beer from Hamburg, were sent southward in exchange for fine cloths and tapestries, the products of the loom in Ghent and Bruges, in Ulm and Augsburg, with delicious vintages of the Rhine, supple chain armour from Milan, Austrian yew-wood for English long-bows, ivory and spices, pearls and silks from Italy and the Orient. Along the routes from Venice and Florence to Antwerp and Rotterdam we see the progress in wealth and refinement, in artistic and literary productiveness. We see the early schools of music and painting in Italy meet with prompt response in Flanders; in the many-gabled streets of Nuremberg we hear the voice of the Meistersinger, and under the low oaken roof of a Canterbury inn we listen to joyous if sometimes naughty tales erst told in pleasant groves outside of fever-stricken Florence.

[Sidenote: Effects of the Mongol conquests.]

[Sidenote: Cathay.]

[Sidenote: Carpini and Rubruquis.]

[Sidenote: First knowledge of an eastern ocean beyond Cathay.]

With this increase of wealth and culture in central Europe there came a considerable extension of knowledge and a powerful stimulus to curiosity concerning the remote parts of Asia. The conquering career of Jenghis Khan (1206-1227) had shaken the world to its foundations. In the middle of that century, to adopt Colonel Yule's lively expression, "throughout Asia and eastern Europe, scarcely a dog might bark without Mongol leave, from the borders of Poland and the coast of Cilicia to the Amur and the Yellow Sea." About these portentous Mongols, who had thus in a twinkling overwhelmed China and Russia, and destroyed the Caliphate of Bagdad, there was a refreshing touch of open-minded heathenism. They were barbarians willing to learn. From end to end of Asia the barriers were thrown down. It was a time when Alan chiefs from the Volga served as police in Tunking, and Chinese physicians could be consulted at Tabriz. For about a hundred years China was more accessible than at any period before or since,—more even than to-day; and that country now for the first time became really known to a few Europeans. In the northern provinces of China, shortly before the Mongol deluge, there had reigned a dynasty known as the Khitai, and hence China was (and still is) commonly spoken of in central Asia as the country of the Khitai. When this name reached European ears it became Cathay, the name by which China was best known in Europe during the next four centuries.[325] In 1245, Friar John of Plano Carpini, a friend and disciple of St. Francis, was sent by Pope Innocent IV. on a missionary errand to the Great Khan, and visited him in his camp at Karakorum in the very depths of Mongolia. In 1253 the king of France, St. Louis, sent another Franciscan monk, Willem de Rubruquis, to Karakorum, on a mission of which the purpose is now not clearly understood. Both these Franciscans were men of shrewd and cultivated minds, especially Rubruquis, whose narrative, "in its rich detail, its vivid pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong good sense ... has few superiors in the whole library of travel."[326] Neither Rubruquis nor Friar John visited China, but they fell in with Chinese folk at Karakorum, and obtained information concerning the geography of eastern Asia far more definite than had ever before been possessed by Europeans. They both describe Cathay as bordering upon an eastern ocean, and this piece of information constituted the first important leap of geographical knowledge to the eastward since the days of Ptolemy, who supposed that beyond the "Seres and Sinae" lay an unknown land of vast extent, "full of reedy and impenetrable swamps."[327] The information gathered by Rubruquis and Friar John indicated that there was an end to the continent of Asia; that, not as a matter of vague speculation, but of positive knowledge, Asia was bounded on the east, just as Europe was bounded on the west, by an ocean.

[Footnote 325: Yule's Cathay, vol. i. p. cxvi.; Marco Polo, vol. i. p. xlii.]

[Footnote 326: Yule's Marco Polo, vol. i. p. cxxx.; cf. Humboldt, Examen critique, tom. i. p. 71. The complete original texts of the reports of both monks, with learned notes, may be found in the Recueil de Voyages et de Memoires, publie par la Societe de Geographie, Paris, 1839, tom. iv., viz.: Johannis de Plano Carpini Historia Mongolorum quos nos Tartaros appellamus, ed. M. d'Avezac; Itinerarium Willelmi de Rubruk, ed. F. Michel et T. Wright.]

[Footnote 327: Yule's Cathay, vol. i. p. xxxix.; Ptolemy, i. 17. Cf. Bunbury's History of Ancient Geography, London, 1883, vol. ii. p. 606.]

[Sidenote: The data were thus prepared for Columbus;]

[Sidenote: but as yet nobody reasoned from these data to a practical conclusion.]

Here we arrive at a notable landmark in the history of the Discovery of America. Here from the camp of bustling heathen at Karakorum there is brought to Europe the first announcement of a geographical fact from which the poetic mind of Christopher Columbus will hereafter reap a wonderful harvest. This is one among many instances of the way in which, throughout all departments of human thought and action, the glorious thirteenth century was beginning to give shape to the problems of which the happy solution has since made the modern world so different from the ancient.[328] Since there is an ocean east of Cathay and an ocean west of Spain, how natural the inference—and albeit quite wrong, how amazingly fruitful—that these oceans are one and the same, so that by sailing westward from Spain one might go straight to Cathay! The data for such an inference were now all at hand, but it does not appear that any one as yet reasoned from the data to the conclusion, although we find Roger Bacon, in 1267, citing the opinions of Aristotle and other ancient writers to the effect that the distance by sea from the western shores of Spain to the eastern shores of Asia cannot be so very great.[329] In those days it took a long time for such ideas to get from the heads of philosophers into the heads of men of action; and in the thirteenth century, when Cathay was more accessible by land than at any time before or since, there was no practical necessity felt for a water route thither. Europe still turned her back upon the Atlantic and gazed more intently than ever upon Asia. Stronger and more general grew the interest in Cathay.

[Footnote 328: See my Beginnings of New England, chap. i. How richly suggestive to an American is the contemporaneity of Rubruquis and Earl Simon of Leicester!]

[Footnote 329: Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, ed. Jebb, London, 1733, p. 183.]

[Sidenote: The Polo brothers.]

[Sidenote: Kublai Khan's message to the Pope.]

In the middle of the thirteenth century, some members of the Polo family, one of the aristocratic families of Venice, had a commercial house at Constantinople. Thence, in 1260, the brothers Nicolo and Maffeo Polo started on a trading journey to the Crimea, whence one opportunity after another for making money and gratifying their curiosity with new sights led them northward and eastward to the Volga, thence into Bokhara, and so on until they reached the court of the Great Khan, in one of the northwestern provinces of Cathay. The reigning sovereign was the famous Kublai Khan, grandson of the all-conquering Jenghis. Kublai was an able and benevolent despot, earnest in the wish to improve the condition of his Mongol kinsmen. He had never before met European gentlemen, and was charmed with the cultivated and polished Venetians. He seemed quite ready to enlist the Roman Church in aid of his civilizing schemes, and entrusted the Polos with a message to the Pope, asking him for a hundred missionary teachers. The brothers reached Venice in 1269, and found that Pope Clement IV. was dead and there was an interregnum. After two years Gregory X. was elected and received the Khan's message, but could furnish only a couple of Dominican friars, and these men were seized with the dread not uncommonly felt for "Tartareans," and at the last moment refused to go. Nicolo and his brother then set out in the autumn of 1271 to return to China, taking with them Nicolo's son Marco, a lad of seventeen years. From Acre they went by way of Bagdad to Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian gulf, apparently with the intention of proceeding thence by sea, but for some reason changed their course, and travelled through Kerman, Khorassan, and Balkh, to Kashgar, and thence by way of Yarkand and Khotan, and across the desert of Gobi into northwestern China, where they arrived in the summer of 1275, and found the Khan at Kaipingfu, not far from the northern end of the Great Wall.

[Sidenote: Marco Polo and his travels in Asia.]

[Sidenote: First recorded voyage of Europeans around the Indo-Chinese peninsula, 1292-94.]

[Sidenote: Return of the Polos to Venice.]

It has been said that the failure of Kublai's mission to the Pope led him to apply to the Grand Lama, at Thibet, who responded more efficiently and successfully than Gregory X., so that Buddhism seized the chance which Catholicism failed to grasp. The Venetians, however, lost nothing in the good Khan's esteem. Young Marco began to make himself proficient in speaking and writing several Asiatic languages, and was presently taken into the Khan's service. His name is mentioned in the Chinese Annals of 1277 as a newly-appointed commissioner of the privy council.[330] He remained in Kublai's service until 1292, while his father and uncle were gathering wealth in various ways. Marco made many official journeys up and down the Khan's vast dominions, not only in civilized China, but in regions of the heart of Asia seldom visited by Europeans to this day,—"a vast ethnological garden," says Colonel Yule, "of tribes of various race and in every stage of uncivilization." In 1292 a royal bride for the Khan of Persia was to be sent all the way from Peking to Tabriz, and as war that year made some parts of the overland route very unsafe, it was decided to send her by sea. The three Polos had for some time been looking for an opportunity to return to Venice, but Kublai was unwilling to have them go. Now, however, as every Venetian of that day was deemed to be from his very cradle a seasoned seadog, and as the kindly old Mongol sovereign had an inveterate land-lubber's misgivings about ocean voyages, he consented to part with his dear friends, so that he might entrust the precious princess to their care. They sailed from the port of Zaiton (Chinchow) early in 1292, and after long delays on the coasts of Sumatra and Hindustan, in order to avoid unfavourable monsoons, they reached the Persian gulf in 1294. They found that the royal bridegroom, somewhat advanced in years, had died before they started from China; so the young princess became the bride of his son. After tarrying awhile in Tabriz, the Polos returned, by way of Trebizond and the Bosphorus, to Venice, arriving in 1295. When they got there, says Ramusio, after their absence of four and twenty years, "the same fate befel them as befel Ulysses, who, when he returned to his native Ithaca, was recognized by nobody." Their kinsfolk had long since given them up for dead; and when the three wayworn travellers arrived at the door of their own palace, the middle-aged men now wrinkled graybeards, the stripling now a portly man, all three attired in rather shabby clothes of Tartar cut, and "with a certain indescribable smack of the Tartar about them, both in air and accent," some words of explanation were needed to prove their identity. After a few days they invited a party of old friends to dinner, and bringing forth three shabby coats, ripped open the seams and welts, and began pulling out and tumbling upon the table such treasures of diamonds and emeralds, rubies and sapphires, as could never have been imagined, "which had all been stitched up in those dresses in so artful a fashion that nobody could have suspected the fact." In such wise had they brought home from Cathay their ample earnings; and when it became known about Venice that the three long-lost citizens had come back, "straightway the whole city, gentle and simple, flocked to the house to embrace them, and to make much of them, with every conceivable demonstration of affection and respect."[331]

[Footnote 330: Pauthier's Marco Polo, p. 361; Yule's Marco Polo, p. li.]

[Footnote 331: Ramusio, apud Yule's Marco Polo, vol. i. p. xxxvii.]

[Sidenote: Marco Polo's book written in prison at Genoa, 1299.]

Three years afterward, in 1298, Marco commanded a galley in the great naval battle with the Genoese near Curzola. The Venetians were totally defeated, and Marco was one of the 7,000 prisoners taken to Genoa, where he was kept in durance for about a year. One of his companions in captivity was a certain Rusticiano, of Pisa, who was glad to listen to his descriptions of Asia, and to act as his amanuensis. French was then, at the close of the Crusades, a language as generally understood throughout Europe as later, in the age of Louis XIV.; and Marco's narrative was duly taken down by the worthy Rusticiano in rather lame and shaky French. In the summer of 1299 Marco was set free and returned to Venice, where he seems to have led a quiet life until his death in 1324.

[Sidenote: Its great contributions to geographical knowledge.]

"The Book of Ser Marco Polo concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East" is one of the most famous and important books of the Middle Ages. It contributed more new facts toward a knowledge of the earth's surface than any book that had ever been written before. Its author was "the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia;" the first to describe China in its vastness, with its immense cities, its manufactures and wealth, and to tell, whether from personal experience or direct hearsay, of Thibet and Burmah, of Siam and Cochin China, of the Indian archipelago, with its islands of spices, of Java and Sumatra, and of the savages of Andaman. He knew of Japan and the woful defeat of the Mongols there, when they tried to invade the island kingdom in 1281. He gave a description of Hindustan far more complete and characteristic than had ever before been published. From Arab sailors, accustomed to the Indian ocean, he learned something about Zanzibar and Madagascar and the semi-Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. To the northward from Persia he described the country of the Golden Horde, whose khans were then holding Russia in subjection; and he had gathered some accurate information concerning Siberia as far as the country of the Samoyeds, with their dog-sledges and polar bears.[332]

[Footnote 332: Yule's Marco Polo, vol. i. p. cxxxi.]

[Sidenote: Prester John.]

[Sidenote: The "Arimaspians."]

Here was altogether too much geographical knowledge for European ignorance in those days to digest. While Marco's book attracted much attention, its influence upon the progress of geography was slighter than it would have been if addressed to a more enlightened public. Many of its sober statements of fact were received with incredulity. Many of the places described were indistinguishable, in European imagination, from the general multitude of fictitious countries mentioned in fairy-tales or in romances of chivalry. Perhaps no part of Marco's story was so likely to interest his readers as his references to Prester John. In the course of the twelfth century the notion had somehow gained possession of the European mind that somewhere out in the dim vastness of the Orient there dwelt a mighty Christian potentate, known as John the Presbyter or "Prester."[333] At different times he was identified with various known Asiatic sovereigns. Marco Polo identified him with one Togrul Wang, who was overcome and slain by the mighty Jenghis; but he would not stay dead, any more than the grewsome warlock in Russian nursery lore. The notion of Prester John and his wealthy kingdom could no more be expelled from the European mind in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than the kindred notion of El Dorado in the sixteenth. The position of this kingdom was shifted about here and there, as far as from Chinese Tartary to Abyssinia and back again, but somewhere or other in people's vague mental picture of the East it was sure to occur. Other remote regions in Asia were peopled with elves and griffins and "one-eyed Arimaspians,"[334] and we may be sure that to Marco's readers these beings were quite as real as the polished citizens of Cambaluc (Peking) or the cannibals of the Andaman islands. From such a chaos of ideas sound geographical knowledge must needs be a slow evolution, and Marco Polo's acquisitions were altogether too far in advance of his age to be readily assimilated.

[Footnote 333: "But for to speake of riches and of stones, And men and horse, I trow the large wones Of Prestir John, ne all his tresorie, Might not unneth have boght the tenth partie." Chaucer, The Flower and the Leaf, 200.

The fabulous kingdom of Prester John is ably treated in Yule's Cathay, vol. i. pp. 174-182; Marco Polo, vol. i. p. 204-216. Colonel Yule suspects that its prototype may have been the semi-Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. This is very likely. As for its range, shifted hither and thither as it was, all the way from the upper Nile to the Thian-Shan mountains, we can easily understand this if we remember how an ignorant mind conceives all points distant from its own position as near to one another; i. e. if you are about to start from New York for Arizona, your housemaid will perhaps ask you to deliver a message to her brother in Manitoba. Nowhere more than in the history of geography do we need to keep before us, at every step, the limitations of the untutored mind and its feebleness in grasping the space-relations of remote regions.]

[Footnote 334: These Arimaspians afford an interesting example of the uncritical statements of travellers at an early time, as well as of their tenacious vitality. The first mention of these mythical people seems to have been made by Greek travellers in Scythia as early as the seventh century before Christ; and they furnished Aristeas of Proconnesus, somewhat later, with the theme of his poem "Arimaspeia," which has perished, all except six verses quoted by Longinus. See Mure's Literature of Antient Greece, vol. iv. p. 68. Thence the notion of the Arimaspians seems to have passed to Herodotus (iii. 116; iv. 27) and to AEschylus:—

[Greek: oxystomous gar Zenos akrageis kynas grypas phylaxai, ton te mounopa straton Arimaspon hippobamon', hoi chrysorrhyton oikousin amphi nama Ploutonos porou; toutois sy me pelaze.] Prometheus, 802.

Thence it passed on to Pausanias, i. 24; Pomponius Mela, ii. 1; Pliny, Hist. Nat., vii. 2; Lucan, Pharsalia, iii. 280; and so on to Milton:—

"As when a gryphon through the wilderness, With winged course o'er hill or moory dale, Pursues the Arimaspian who by stealth Had from his wakeful custody purloined The guarded gold." Paradise Lost, ii. 944.]



[Sidenote: Other visits to China.]

[Sidenote: Overthrow of the Mongol dynasty, and shutting up of China.]

Nevertheless, in the Catalan map, made in 1375, and now to be seen in the National Library at Paris, there is a thorough-going and not unsuccessful attempt to embody the results of Polo's travels. In the interval of three quarters of a century since the publication of Marco's narrative, several adventurous travellers had found their way to Cathay. There was Friar Odoric, of Pordenone, who, during the years 1316-30 visited Hindustan, Sumatra, Java, Cochin China, the Chinese Empire, and Thibet.[335] It was from this worthy monk that the arrant old impostor, "Sir John Mandeville," stole his descriptions of India and Cathay, seasoning them with yarns from Pliny and Ktesias, and grotesque conceits of his own.[336] Several other missionary friars visited China between 1302 and 1330, and about ten years after the latter date the Florentine merchant, Francesco Pegolotti, wrote a very useful handbook for commercial travellers on the overland route to that country.[337] Between 1338 and 1353 Giovanni Marignolli spent some years at Peking, as papal legate from Benedict XI. to the Great Khan, and also travelled in Ceylon and Hindustan.[338] That seems to have been the last of these journeys to the Far East. In 1368, the people of China rose against the Mongol dynasty and overthrew it. The first emperor of the native Ming dynasty was placed upon the throne, and the Chinese retorted upon their late conquerors by overrunning vast Mongolia and making it Chinese Tartary. The barriers thrown down by the liberal policy of the Mongol sovereigns were now put up again, and no more foreigners were allowed to set foot upon the sacred soil of the Flowery Kingdom.

[Footnote 335: Odoric mentions Juggernaut processions and the burning of widows; in Sumatra he observed cannibalism and community of wives; he found the kingdom of Prester John in Chinese Tartary; "but as regards him," says wise Odoric, "not one hundredth part is true of what is told of him as if it were undeniable." Yule's Cathay, vol. i. pp. 79, 85, 146.]

[Footnote 336: Colonel Yule gives a list of fourteen important passages taken bodily from Odoric by Mandeville. Op. cit. i. 28. It is very doubtful if that famous book, "Sir John Mandeville's Travels," was written by a Mandeville, or by a knight, or even by an Englishman. It seems to have been originally written in French by Jean de Bourgogne, a physician who lived for some years at Liege, and died there somewhere about 1370. He may possibly have been an Englishman named John Burgoyne, who was obliged some years before that date to flee his country for homicide or for some political offence. He had travelled as far as Egypt and Palestine, but no farther. His book is almost entirely cribbed from others, among which may be mentioned the works of Jacques de Vitry, Plano Carpini, Hayton the Armenian, Boldensele's Itinerary, Albert of Aix's chronicle of the first crusade, Brunetto Latini's Tresor, Petrus Comestor's Historia scholastica, the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvais, etc., etc. It is one of the most wholesale and successful instances of plagiarism and imposture on record. See The Buke of John Mandevill, from the unique copy (Egerton MS. 1982) in the British Museum. Edited by G. F. Warner. Westminster, 1889. (Roxburghe Club.)]

[Footnote 337: One piece of Pegolotti's advice is still useful for travellers in the nineteenth century who visit benighted heathen countries afflicted with robber tariffs: "And don't forget that if you treat the custom-house officers with respect, and make them something of a present in goods or money, they will behave with great civility and always be ready to appraise your wares below their real value." Op. cit. ii. 307.]

[Footnote 338: The works of all the writers mentioned in this paragraph, or copious extracts from them, may be found in Yule's Cathay, which comprises also the book of the celebrated Ibn Batuta, of Tangier, whose travels, between 1325 and 1355, covered pretty much the whole of Asia except Siberia, besides a journey across Sahara to the river Niger. His book does not seem to have attracted attention in Europe until early in the present century.]

[Sidenote: First rumours of the Molucca islands and Japan.]

Thus, for just a century,—from Carpini and Rubruquis to Marignolli,—while China was open to strangers as never before or since, a few Europeans had availed themselves of the opportunity in such wise as to mark the beginning of a new era in the history of geographical knowledge. Though the discoveries of Marco Polo were as yet but imperfectly appreciated, one point, and that the most significant of all, was thoroughly established. It was shown that the continent of Asia did not extend indefinitely eastward, nor was it bounded and barricaded on that side, as Ptolemy had imagined, by vast impenetrable swamps. On the contrary, its eastern shores were perfectly accessible through an open sea, and half a dozen Europeans in Chinese ships had now actually made the voyage between the coast of China and the Persian gulf. Moreover, some hearsay knowledge—enough to provoke curiosity and greed—had been gained of the existence of numerous islands in that far-off eastern ocean, rich in the spices which from time immemorial had formed such an important element in Mediterranean commerce. News, also, had been brought to Europe of the wonderful island kingdom of Japan (Cipango or Zipangu) lying out in that ocean some hundreds of miles beyond the coast of Cathay. These were rich countries, abounding in objects of lucrative traffic. Under the liberal Mongol rule the Oriental trade had increased enough for Europe to feel in many ways its beneficial effects. Now this trade began to be suddenly and severely checked, and while access to the interior of Asia was cut off, European merchants might begin to reflect upon the value of what they were losing, and to consider if there were any feasible method of recovering it.

[Sidenote: The accustomed routes of Oriental trade cut off by the Ottoman Turks.]

[Sidenote: Necessity for finding an "outside route to the Indies."]

It was not merely the shutting up of China by the first Ming emperor, in 1368, that checked the intercourse between Europe and Asia. A still more baleful obstacle to all such intercourse had lately come upon the scene. In Asia Minor the beastly Turk, whose career had been for two centuries arrested by the Crusades, now reared his head again. The Seljukian had been only scotched, not killed; and now he sprang to life as the Ottoman, with sharper fangs than before. In 1365 the Turks established themselves in the Balkan peninsula, with Adrianople as their capital, and began tightening their coils about the doomed city of Constantine. Each point that they gained meant the strangling of just so much Oriental trade; for, as we have seen, the alliance of Constantinople with Genoa since 1261 had secured to the latter city, and to western Europe, the advantages of the overland routes from Asia, whether through the Volga country or across Armenia. When at length, in 1453, the Turks took Constantinople, the splendid commercial career of Genoa was cut with the shears of Atropos. At the same time, as their power was rapidly extending over Syria and down toward Egypt, threatening the overthrow of the liberal Mameluke dynasty there, the commercial prosperity of Venice also was seriously imperilled. Moreover, as Turkish corsairs began to swarm in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean, the voyage became more and more unsafe for Christian vessels. It was thus, while the volume of trade with Asia was, in the natural course of things, swelling year by year, that its accustomed routes were being ruthlessly cut off. It was fast becoming necessary to consider whether there might not be other practicable routes to "the Indies" than those which had from time immemorial been followed. Could there be such a thing as an "outside route" to that land of promise? A more startling question has seldom been propounded; for it involved a radical departure from the grooves in which the human mind had been running ever since the days of Solomon. Two generations of men lived and died while this question was taking shape, and all that time Cathay and India and the islands of Spices were objects of increasing desire, clothed by eager fancy with all manner of charms and riches. The more effectually the eastern Mediterranean was closed, the stronger grew the impulse to venture upon unknown paths in order to realize the vague but glorious hopes that began to cluster about these remote countries. Such an era of romantic enterprise as was thus ushered in, the world has never seen before or since. It was equally remarkable as an era of discipline in scientific thinking. In the maritime ventures of unparalleled boldness now to be described, the human mind was groping toward the era of enormous extensions of knowledge in space and time represented by the names of Newton and Darwin. It was learning the right way of putting its trust in the Unseen.