Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 2

The impulse given by Almamoun did not die with him. About 850 Alkendy made a fresh version of Ptolemy; as early as 840 the Caliph Vatek-Billah sent to explore the countries of Central Asia, and his results have been preserved by Edrisi. A few years later (_c._ 890) Ibn-Khordadbeh, "Son of the Magi," described the princ.i.p.al trade-routes, the Indian by the Red Sea from Djeddah to Scinde, the Russian by the Volga and North Caspian, the Persian by way of Balkh to China. It was by this last that some have thought the envoys of the English King Alfred went in 883, till they turned south to seek India and the Christians of San Thome.

The early scientific movement in Islam reached its height in Albateny and Ma.s.soudy at the beginning of the tenth century. The former determined, more exactly than before, various problems of astronomical geography.[12] The latter visited every country from Further India to Spain;--even China and Madagascar seem to have been within the compa.s.s of his later travels; and his voyages in the Indian Ocean bring us to the real Sinbad Saga of the tenth century.

[Footnote 12: "The Obliquity of the Ecliptic, the Eccentricity of the Sun, the Precession of the Equinoxes."]

Sinbad, as his story appears in the _Arabian Nights_, has been traced to an original in the Indian tales of _The Seven Sages_, in the voyages of the age of Chosroes Nus.h.i.+rvan or of Haroun-Al-Ras.h.i.+d, but the tale appears to be an Arabic original, the real account, with a little more of mystery and exaggeration than usual, of the ninth-and tenth-century travellers, from Solyman to Ma.s.soudy, reproduced in form of a series of novels.[13]

[Footnote 13: "With the Sinbad story is connected the historical extension of the Arab settlements in the East African coast through the enterprise of the Emosaid family."]

With Ma.s.soudy begins also the formal discussion of geographical problems affecting Islam. Was the Caspian a land-locked sea? Did it connect with the Euxine? Did either or both of these join the Arctic Ocean? Was Africa an island? If so, was there also an unknown Southern Continent?

What was the shape of South-Eastern Asia? Was Ptolemy's longitude to be wholly accepted, and if not, how was it to be bettered? By a use of Strabo and of Albateny rather than of Ptolemy, Ma.s.soudy arrived at fairly accurate and very plausible results. His chief novelties were the long river channel from the Sea of Azov to the North Sea, and the strait between South Africa and the shadowy Southern Continent. On his scheme the Indian Ocean, or Sea of Habasch, contains most of the water surface of the world, and the Sea of Aral appears for the first time in Moslem geography. Lastly his account of the Arab coasting voyages from the Persian Gulf to Socotra and Madagascar proves, implicitly, that as yet there was no use of the compa.s.s.

Ma.s.soudy cut down the girth of the world even more than Ptolemy. The latter had left an ocean to the west of Africa: the former made the Canaries or Fortunate Islands, the limit of the known Western world, abut upon India, the limit of the Eastern.

The first age of Arabic geography ends with Ma.s.soudy, its greatest name, in the middle of the tenth century. The second age is summed up in the work of the Eastern sage Albyrouny and of Edrisi, the Arabic Ptolemy (A.D. 1099-1154), who found a home at the Christian Court of Roger of Sicily. In the far East and West alike, in Spain and Morocco, in Khora.s.san and India, Moslem science was now driven to take refuge among strangers on the decay of the Caliphates of Bagdad and Cordova. The Ghaznevides Mahmoud and Ma.s.soud in the first half of the eleventh century, attracted to their Court not only Firdusi and Avicenna, but Albyrouny, whose "Canon" became a text-book of Mohammedan science, and who, for the range of his knowledge and the trained subtlety of his mind, stands without a rival for his time.[14] The Spanish school, as resulting directly in Edrisi, half Moslem, half Christian, like his teachers, is of still more interest. One of its first traces may be found in the Latin translation of the Arab _Almanack_ made by Bishop Harib of Cordova in 961. It was dedicated and presented to Caliph Hakem--one of our clearest proofs of the conscious interworking of Catholic and Mahometan philosophy in the age of Pope Sylvester II. and of our own St. Dunstan. A century later, on the recapture of Toledo by Alfonso VI. (1084), an observatory was built, served by Jews and Moslems, who had been steadily producing, through the whole of the eleventh century, astronomical and geographical tables and dictionaries.

A whole tribe of commentators on place-names, on the climates and constellations, and on geographical instruments was at work in this last age of the Spanish Caliphate, and their results are brought together by Abou Hamid of Granada and by Edrisi.

[Footnote 14: The school of Persian mathematicians who produced the maps of Alestakliry-Ibn-Hankal, the book of lat.i.tudes and longitudes, ascribed by Abulfeda to Alfaraby the Turk, was the immediate descendant of Albyrouny.]

Born at Ceuta in 1099, this great geographer travelled through Spain, France, the Western Mediterranean, and North Africa before settling at the Norman Court of Palermo. Roger, the most civilised prince in Christendom, the final product of the great race of Robert Guiscard and William the Conqueror, valued Edrisi at his proper worth, refused to part with him, and employed men in every part of the world to collect materials for his study. Thus the Moor gained, not only for the Moslem world but for Southern Europe as well, an approximate knowledge even of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the coasts of the White Sea. His work, dedicated to Roger and called after him, _Al-Rojary_, was rewarded with a peerage, and it was as a Sicilian Count that he finished his Celestial Sphere and Terrestrial Disc of silver, on which "was inscribed all the circuit of the known world and all the rivers thereof."

Each of his great Arabic predecessors, along with Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and Strabo, was welded into his system--the result of fifteen years of abstract study, following some thirty of practical activity in travel.[15]

[Footnote 15: The world he divided by climates in the Greek manner, taking no account of political divisions, or of those resting on language or religion. Each climate was further subdivided into ten sections. In the shape of Africa he followed Ptolemy.]

A special note may be made on Edrisi's account of the voyage of the Lisbon "Wanderers" ("Maghrurins") some time before 1147, the date of the final Christian capture of the Portuguese capital. For this is the earliest recorded voyage, since the rise of Islam, definitely undertaken on the Western Ocean to learn what was on it and what were its limits.

The Wanderers, Edrisi tells us, were eight in number, all related to one another. They built a transport boat, took on board water and provisions for many months, and started with the first east wind. After eleven days, they reached a sea whose thick waters exhaled a fetid odour, concealed numerous reefs, and were but faintly lighted. Fearing for their lives, they changed their course, steered southwards twelve days, and so reached an island, possibly Madeira,--which they called El Ghanam from the sheep found there, without shepherd or anyone to tend them. On landing, they found a spring of running water and some wild figs. They killed some sheep, but found the flesh so bitter that they could not eat it, and only took the skins. Sailing south twelve more days, they found an island with houses and cultivated fields, but as they neared it they were surrounded, made prisoners, and carried in their own boats to a city on the sea-sh.o.r.e, to a house where were men of tall stature and women of great beauty. Here they stayed three days, and on the fourth came a man, the King's interpreter, who spoke Arabic, and asked them who they were and what they wanted. They replied they were seeking out the wonders of the ocean and its limits. At this the King laughed heartily, and said to the interpreter: "Tell them my father once ordered some of his slaves to venture out on that sea and after sailing across the breadth of it for a month, they found themselves deprived of the light of the sun and returned without having learnt anything." Then the Wanderers were sent back to their prison till a west wind arose, when they were blindfolded and put on board a boat, and after three days reached the mainland of Africa. Here they were put ash.o.r.e, with their hands tied, and so left. They were released by the Berbers, and after their reappearance in Spain, a "street at the foot of the hot bath in Lisbon," concludes Edrisi, "took the name of Street of the Wanderers."

On the other extremity of the Moslem world, on the south-east coast of Africa, there was more real progress. By Edrisi's day that important addition of Arabic travellers and merchants to the geographical knowledge of the world, by the remarkable trade-ventures of the Emosaids, had been already made.

It had taken long in the making.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO EDRISI. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

About A.D. 742, ten years after the battle of Tours, the Emosaid family, descended from Ali, cousin and son-in-law of Mahomet, tried to make Said, their clan-chieftain, Ali's great-grandson, Caliph at Damascus.

The attempt was foiled, and the whole tribe fled, sailed down the Red Sea and African coast, and established themselves as traders in the Sea of India. First of all, Socotra seems to have been their mart and capital, but before the end of the tenth century they had founded merchant colonies at Melinda, Mombasa, and Mozambique, which, in their turn, led to settlements on the opposite coasts of Asia. Thus the trade of the Indian Ocean was secured for Islam, the first Moslem settlements arose in Malabar, and when the Portuguese broke into this _mare clausum_, in 1497-8, they found a belt of "Moorish" coast towns, from Magadoxo to Quiloa, controlling both the Indian and the inland African trades, as Ibn Batuta had found in 1330.

By Edrisi's day, moreover, the steady persistence and self-evident results of Arabic overland exploration had become recognised by a sort of "Traveller's Doctorate." It was not enough for the highest knowledge to study the Koran, and the Sunna, and the Greek philosophers at home; for a perfect education, a man must have travelled at least through the length and breadth of Islam. All the successors of Edrisi, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, shew this mingling of science and religion, of practical and speculative energy.

Tradition still governed Moslem thought, but there had come into being a sort of half-acknowledged appendix to tradition, made up of real observations on men and things. And in these observations, geographical interest was the main factor.

The Life of Al Heravy of Herat (1173-1215), the "Doctor Ubiquitus" of Islam in the age of the Crusades, gives us a picture of another Ma.s.soudy. The friend of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, the "first man among Christians," Heravy seems able in his own person to break down the part.i.tion wall of religious feud by the common interest of science. In 1192 he was offered the patronage of the Crusading princes, and Richard Coeur de Lion begged for the favour of an interview, and begged in vain. Heravy, who had been on one of his exploring journeys, angrily refused to see the King whose men had broken his quiet and wasted his time. Before his death, he had run over the world (men said) from China to the Pyrenees and from Abyssinia to the Danube, "scribbling his name on every wall," and his survey of the Eastern Empire was the single matter in which Turks and "Romans" made common cause,--for Greeks and Latins at Byzantium alike read Heravy, like a Christian doctor. Another example of the same catholic spirit is "Yacout the Roman,"[16] whose _Dictionary_, finished in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, was a summary of geographical advance since Edrisi, like the similar work of Ibn Said, of the same period.

[Footnote 16: Yacout "the ruby," originally a Greek slave, who made a brave but fruitless attempt to change his name into Yacoub or Jacob, became one of the greatest of Arab encyclopaedists, was checked by the hordes of Genghiz-Khan in his exploration of Central Asia, and died 1229.]

But as a matter of fact, the balance both of knowledge and power was now s.h.i.+fting from Islam to Christendom. The most daring and successful travellers after the rise of the Mongols were the Venetian Marco Polo and the Friar Preachers who revived Chinese Christianity (1270-1350); Madeira and the Canaries (off Moslem Africa) were finally rediscovered not by Arabic enterprise, but by the Italian Malocello in 1270, by the English Macham in the reign of our Edward III., and by Portuguese s.h.i.+ps under Genoese captains in 1341; in 1291 the Vivaldi ventured beyond Cape Bojador, where no Moor had ever been, except by force of storm, as in the doubtful story of Ibn Fatimah, who "first saw the White Headland,"

Cape Blanco, between Cape Bojador and Cape Verde.

In the fourteenth century the map of Edrisi was superseded by the new Italian plans and coast-charts, or Portolani. As the Moslem world fell into political disorder, its science declined. "Judicial astrology"

seemed gaining a stronger and stronger hold over Islam, and the irruption of the Turks gradually resulted in the ruin of all the higher Moslem culture. Superst.i.tion and barbarism shared the honour and the spoils of this victory.

But two great names close the five hundred years of Arab learning.

1. Ibn Batuta (_c._ 1330), who made himself as much at home in China as in his native Morocco, is the last of Mohammedan travellers of real importance. Though we have only abridgments of his work left to us, Colonel Yule is well within his rights in his deliberate judgment, "that it must rank at least as one of the four chief guide books of the Middle Ages," along with the _Book of Ser Marco Polo_ and the journals of the two Friar-travellers, Friar Odoric and Friar William de Rubruquis.

2. With _Abulfeda_ the Eastern school of Moslem geography comes to an end, as the Western does with Ibn Batuta. In the early years of the fourteenth century he rewrote the "story and description of the Land of Islam," with a completeness quite encyclopaedic. But his work has all the failings of a compilation, however careful, in that, or any, age. It is based upon information, not upon inspection; it is in no sense original.

As it began in imitation, so it ended. If it rejects Ptolemy, it is only to follow Strabo or someone else; on all the mathematical and astronomical data its doctrine is according to the Alexandrians of twelve hundred years before, and this last _precis_ of the science of a great race and a great religion can only be understood in the light of its model--in Greek geography.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS.

CIRCA 333-867.

The special interest of the life and work of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) lies in the relation it bears to the general expansion of Europe and Christendom--an expansion that had been slowly gathering strength since the eleventh century. But even before the tide had turned in the age of Hildebrand and the First Crusade, even from the time that Constantine founded the Christian Empire of Rome, the Christian Capital on the Bosphorus, and the State Church of the Western World,--pilgrimage, trade, conquest, and colonisation had been successively calling out the energies of the moving races, "the motor muscles" of Europe. It is through the "generous Henry, Prince of Portugal," that this activity is brought to its third and triumphant stage--to the time of Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan,--but it is only by tracing the earlier progress of that outward movement, which has made Europe the ruling civilisation of the world, that we can fairly grasp the import of that transition in which Henry is the hero.

More than any other single man he is the author of the discovering movement of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries,--and by this movement India has been conquered, America repeopled, the world made clear, and the civilisation which the Roman Empire left behind has conquered or utterly overshadowed every one of its old rivals and superiors--Islam, India, China, Tartary.

But before the fifteenth century, before the birth of Prince Henry, Christendom, Greek and Latin, was at best only one of the greater civilising and conquering forces struggling for mastery; before the age of the Crusades, before the eleventh century, it was plainly weaker than the Moslem powers; it seemed unable to fight against Slav or Scandinavian Heathendom; it was only saved by distance from becoming a province of China; India, the world's great prize, was cut off from it by the Arabs. Even before the rise of Islam, under Constantine or Theodosius or Justinian, the Church-State of the Byzantine Caesars, though then ruling in almost every province of Trajan's empire, was in a splendid but sure decline from the exhaustion of the southern races. Our story then begins naturally with the worst time and climbs up for a thousand years, from the Heathen and Mohammedan conquests of the fifth and seventh centuries, to the reversal of that judgment, of those conquests, in the fifteenth. The expansion of Europe is going on all this time, but at our beginning, in the years before and after Pope Gregory the Great, even the legacy of Greece and Rome, in wide knowledge of the world and practical exploring energy, seemed to have pa.s.sed from sight.

And in the decline of the old Empire, while Constantine and Justinian are said to receive and exchange emba.s.sies with the Court of China, there is no real extension of geographical knowledge or outlook.

Christian enterprise in this field is mainly one of pilgrimage, and the pilgrims only cease to be important when the Northmen, first Heathen, then Christian, begin to lead, in a very different manner, the expansion of Europe. Into this folk-wandering of the Vikings, the first great outward movement of our Europe in the Middle Ages, is absorbed the reviving energy of trade, as well as the ever-growing impulse of pilgrimage. The Vikings are the highest type of explorers; they do not merely find out new lands and trade with them, but conquer and colonise them. They extend not merely the knowledge, but the whole state and being of Europe, to a New World.

Lastly, the partial activity of commerce and religion made universal and "political" by the leading western race--for itself only--is taken up by all Christendom in the Crusades, borrowed in idea from Spain, but borrowed with the spirit of the Norse rovers, and made universal for the Latin world, for the whole federation of Rome. In the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries we have the preparation for the discovery and colonisation of the outside world by Europeans in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era.

From the conversion of Constantine to the Reformation the story of Christendom is unbroken; the later Roman Empire is the Church-State of a Christian Prince, as modern Europe is the Church-State of a nominally Christian society. Mediaeval Europe thought of itself as nothing but the old world-state under religion; from Spain to Russia men were living under a Holy Roman Empire of an Italian, or Teutonic, or Byzantine, or independent type. England and Russia were not parts of the Germanic revival of Charlemagne, but they had just the same two elements dominant in their life: the cla.s.sical tradition and the Christian Church.

And so throughout this time, the expansion of this society--by whatever name we may call it, discovery, exploration, geographical knowledge--has a continuous history. But before the rise of Islam, in the seventh century, throws Christendom into its proper mediaeval life, before the new religion begins the really new age, at the end of which lived Henry himself, we are too far from our subject to feel, for instance in the fourth and fifth-century pilgrims and in Cosmas Indicopleustes, anything but a remote preparation for Henry's work. It is only with the seventh century, and with the time of our own Bede and Wilfrid, that the necessary introduction to our subject really begins.

Yet as an ill.u.s.tration of the general idea, that discovery is an early and natural outlet of any vigorous society and is in proportion to the universal activity of the State, it is not without interest to note that Christian Pilgrimage begins with Constantine. This, the first department of exploring energy, at once evidences the new settlement of religion and politics. Helena, the Emperor's mother, helped, by her visit to Palestine, her church at Bethlehem, and her discoveries of relics in Jerusalem, to make a ruling fas.h.i.+on out of the custom of a few devotees; and eight years after the council of Nicaea, in 333, appeared the first Christian geography, as a guide-book or itinerary, from Bordeaux to the Holy Places of Syria, modelled upon the imperial survey of the Antonines. The route followed in this runs by North Italy, Aquileia, Sirmium, Constantinople, and Asia Minor, and upon the same course thousands of nameless pilgrims journeyed in the next three hundred years, besides some eight or nine who have left an account mainly religious in form, but containing in substance the widest view of the globe then possible among Westerns.

Most of the pilgrims, like Jerome's friend Paula, Bishop Eucherius, and Melania, tread the same path and stop at the same points, but three or four of them distinctly add some fresh knowledge to the ordinary results.

St. Silvia, of Aquitaine (_c._ 385), not only travels through Syria, she visits Lower Egypt and Stony or Sinaitic Arabia, and even Edessa in Northern Mesopotamia, on the very borders of hostile and heathen Persia.

"To see the monks" she wanders through Osrhoene, comes to Haran, near which was "the home of Abraham and the farm of Laban and the well of Rachel," to the environs of Nisibis and Ur of the Chaldees, lost to the Roman Empire since Julian's defeat; thence by "Padan-aram" back to Antioch. When crossing the Euphrates the pilgrims saw the river "rush down in a torrent like the Rhone, but greater," and on the way home by the great military road, then untravelled by Saracens, between Tarsus and the Bosphorus, Silvia makes a pa.s.sing note on the strength and brigand habits of the Isaurian mountaineers, who in the end saved Christendom from the very Arabs with whom our pilgrim couples them.

Again, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the time of Justinian, is at the end, as Silvia is at the beginning, of a definite period, the period of the Christian empire of Rome, while still "Caesarean" and not merely Byzantine, "patrician" and not papal, "consular" and not Carolingian.

And contemporary with Cosmas are two of the chief among the earlier or primitive pilgrims, Theodosius and Antoninus the Martyr. The first-named indulges in a few excursions--in fancy--beyond his known ground of Palestine, going as far east as Susa and Babylon, "where no one can live for the serpents and hippo-centaurs," and south to the Red Sea and its two arms, "of which the eastern is called the Persian Gulf," and the western or Arabian runs up to the "thirteen cities of Arabia destroyed by Joshua,"--but, for the rest, his knowledge is not extensive or peculiar. Antoninus of Placentia, on the other hand, is very interesting, a sort of older Mandeville, who mixes truth and its opposite in fairly even proportions and with a sort of resolute partiality to favourite legends.

He tells us how Tripolis has been ruined by the late earthquake (July 9, 551); how silk and various woven stuffs are sold at Tyre; how the pilgrims scratched their names on the relics shewn in Cana of Galilee--"and here I, sinner that I am, did inscribe the names of my parents"; how Bethshan, the metropolis of Galilee, "is placed on a hill," though really in the plain; how the Samaritans hate Christians and will hardly speak to them; "and beware of spitting in their country, for they will never forgive it"; how "the dew comes down upon Hermon the Little, as David says, 'The dew of Hermon that fell upon the hill of Zion'"; how nothing can live or even float in the Dead Sea, "but is instantly swallowed up"--as exact an untruth as was ever told by traveller; how the Jordan opens a way for pilgrims "and stands up in a heap every year at the Epiphany during the baptism of Catechumens, as David told, 'The sea saw that and fled, Jordan was driven back'"; how at Jericho there is a Holy Field "sown by the Lord with his own hand." A report had been spread that the salt pillar of Lot's wife had been "lessened by licking"; "it was false," said Antoninus, the statue was just the same as it had always been.

In Jerusalem the pilgrims first went up the Tower of David, "where he sang the Psalter," and into the Basilica of Sion, where among other marvels they saw the "Corner-stone that the builders rejected," which gave out a "sound like the murmuring of a crowd."

We come back again to fact with rather a start when told in the next section of the Hospitals for 3000 sick folk near the Church of St. Mary, close to Sion; then with the footprints and relics of Christ, and the miraculous flight of the Column of Scourging--"carried away by a cloud to Caesarea," we are taken through a fresh set of "impressions."