Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 5

[Footnote 19: Unless White Man's Land and Great Ireland are the Canaries. See above, p. 63.]

[Footnote 20: Camoens, _Lusiads_, (Barton's trans.).]

But Russia, that is, Old Russia round Novgorod and Kiev, the White Sea, the North Cape and Finland coasts, as well as the more outlying parts of Scotland and Ireland, were first clearly known to Europe through the Northmen. The same race did much to open up the modern Lithuania and Prussia, and the conversion of the whole of Scandinavia, mother country and colonies alike, in the tenth and eleventh centuries added our Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, with all the Viking settlements, to the civilised world and church of Rome.

First, on the eastern side, it was in 862 that the Russians invited help from their less dreaded neighbours around Upsala against their more vexatious neighbours around Kiev, and in September of the same year Ruric arrived at Novgorod and founded the Mediaeval Kingdom of Russia, which in the tenth century under Oleg, Igor, and Vladimir was first the plunderer, then the open enemy, and finally the ally in faith and in arms of the Byzantine Empire.

All through this time and afterwards, till the time of the Tartar deluge, the intercourse of Swedes, Danes, and Northmen with Gardariki was constant and close, and not least in the time of the Vinland voyages, when Vladimir and Jaroslav reigned at Novgorod, and the two Olafs, the son of Trygve and the Saint, found refuge at their court before and after their hard rule in Norway.

Olaf Trygveson's uncle had grown old in exile at Novgorod when young Olaf and his mother fled from Norway to join him there and were captured by Vikings in the Baltic and kept six years in the Gulf of Riga before they got to Holmgard (972).

In 1019 Ingigerd of Sweden was married to Jaroslav; ten years later St.

Olaf was driven from Norway by revolt, and flying into Russia, was offered a Kingdom called Volgaria--the modern Casan, whose old metropolis of Vulghar was known to the Arab travellers of the ninth century, and whose ruins can still be seen. Olaf hesitated between this and a pilgrim's death in Jerusalem and at last preferred to fight his way back to Norway.

The next King of the Nors.e.m.e.n, Magnus the Good, came from Novgorod by Ladoga to Trondhjem, when Olaf's son Harold Hardrada fled back to his father's refuge, to the court of Jaroslav; while Magnus had been in exile, men had asked news of him from all the merchants that traded to Novgorod.

Last of these earlier kings, Harold Hardrada, during all the time of his wild romance in East and South, before he went to Miklagard, and after his flight, and all the time of his service in the Varangian Guard of the Empress Zoe, made Novgorod his home. His pilgrim relics from Holy Land and his war spoils from Serkland--Africa and Sicily--were all sent back to Jaroslav's care till their master could come and claim them, and when he came at last, flying from Byzantine vengeance across the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov and "all round the Eastern Realm" of Kiev, he found his wealth untouched and Princess Elizabeth ready to be his wife and to help him with Russian men and money to win back Norway and to die at Stamford Bridge for the Crown of England (1066).

Harold is the type of all Vikings, of the Norse race in its greatest, most restless energy. William the Conqueror, or c.n.u.t the Great, or Robert Guiscard, or Roger of Sicily, are all greater and stronger men, but there is no "ganger," no rover, like the man who in fifty years, after fighting in well-nigh every land of Christians or of the neighbours and enemies of Christendom, yet hoped for time to sail off to the new-found countries and so fulfil his oath and promise to perfect a life of unmatched adventure by unmatched discovery. He had fought with wild beasts in the Arena of Constantinople; he had bathed in the Jordan and cleared the Syrian roads of robbers; he had stormed eighty castles in Africa; he had succoured the Icelanders in famine and lived as a prince in Russia and Northumberland; by his own songs he boasts that he had sailed all round Europe; but he fell, the prototype of sea-kings like Drake or Magellan, without one discovery. Men of his own nation and time had been before him everywhere, but he united in himself the work and adventures, the conquests and discoveries of many. He was the incarnation of Northern spirit, and it was through the lives and records of such as he that Europe became filled with that new energy of thought and action, that new life and knowledge, which was the ground and impulse of the movement led by Henry the Navigator, by Columbus, and the Cabots.

Harold's wars kept him from becoming a great explorer, but Norse captains who took service under peaceful kings did something of what he aimed at doing.

We must retrace our steps to the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan under King Alfred about the year 890, about the time when a Norse King, Harold Fair-hair, was first seen in the Scotch and Irish seas. Their discovery of the White Sea, the North Cape, and the gulfs of Bothnia and Finland was followed up by many Nors.e.m.e.n, such as Th.o.r.er Hund under St. Olaf, in the next one hundred and fifty years,[21] but Ohthere's voyage was the first and chief of these adventures both in motive and result.

[Footnote 21: And a certain number of Viking sailors seem to have preceded Ohthere on his voyage to the Dwina.]

"He told his lord King Alfred that he dwelt northmost of all Northmen on the land by the Western Sea and he wished to find how far the land lay right north, or whether any man dwelt north of the waste. So he went right north near the land;--for three days he left the waste land on the right and the wide sea on the left, as far as the whale hunters ever go"; and still he kept north three days more (to the North Cape of Europe).

"Then the land bent right east, and with a west wind he sailed four days till the land bent south, and he sailed by it five days more to a great river--the Dwina--that lay up into the land, and where beyond the river it was all inhabited"--the modern country of Perm and Archangel.

Here he trafficked with the people, the first he had met, except the Finn hunters, since leaving his fiord. Besides his wish to see the country, he was looking for walrus-ivory and hides.

The Finns and Biarma-men (men of Archangel), it seemed to him, spoke nearly the same language, but between his home and this Biarmaland no human being lived in any fixed dwelling, and all the Northman's land was long and narrow and thinly peopled, decreasing in breadth as it stretched northward, from sixty to three days' journey.

Again Alfred told how Ohthere, sailing south for a month from his house, having _Ireland_ on his right and coasting Norway all the time on his left, came to Jutland, "where a great sea runs up into the land, so vast that no man can see across it," whence in five days more he reached the coast, "from which the English came to Britain."

Wulfstan, in the service of the same king, told him how he sailed in seven days from Sleswick to Truso and the Vistula, having Wendland (or Pomerania and Prussia) on his right all the way. He described "Witland near the Vistula and Estland and Wendland and Estmere and the Ilfing running from the Truso lake into Eastmere," but neither the king nor his captains knew enough to contradict the old idea, found in Ptolemy and Strabo, of Scandinavia as one vast island.

Thus it was for the satisfaction of their Saxon Lord that Wulfstan and Ohthere, by their voyages along the coasts of Norway and Lapland, of Pomerania and Prussia, round the White Sea and the Gulf of Riga and southern Finland, added a more coherent view of north-east Europe, and specially of the Baltic Gulf, to Western geography; but these Norse discoveries, though in the service of an English king, were scarcely used save by Nors.e.m.e.n, and they must partly go to the credit of Vikings, as well as of Alfred the Great. Thus in 965 King Harold Grayskin of Norway "went and fought with the folk on the banks of the Dwina," and plundered them, and in 1026 Th.o.r.er Hund joined himself to a fleet sent by St. Olaf to the White Sea, pillaged the temple of the idol Jomala, and destroyed his countrymen by treachery on their way home. Where two expeditions are recorded they may well stand for twenty unknown and uneventful ones, and the same must be equally granted as to the gradual advance of knowledge through the unceasing attacks of the Norse kings and pirates on the lands to the south of the Baltic, where lived the Wends.

Thus on the west and east, north-west and north-east, the Northmen could and did make a definite advance into the unknown; even the south-west lines of Northern invasion and settlement, though they hardly yield any general results to discovery, certainly led to a more thorough inclusion of every part of the British isles in the civilised West, through the Viking earldoms in Caithness, in the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in Man and the Hebrides, and on the coast of Ireland, where the Ostman colonies grew into kingdoms. From about 840, when the first of these settlements was fairly and permanently started, to the eleventh century, when a series of great defeats,--by Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014, by G.o.dwine and Harold in England from 1042 to 1066, and by the Norman and Scottish kings in the next generation,--practically destroyed the Norse dominion outside the Orkneys,--for those two hundred years, Danes and Northmen not only pillaged and colonised, but ruled and reorganised a good half of the British isles.

By the time of Alfred the Viking princ.i.p.alities were scattered up and down the northern and western coasts of the greater of our two islands, and were fringing three sides of the lesser. About A.D. 900 the pioneer of the Norse kings, Harold Fair-hair, pursued his traitors, first to Shetlands and Orkneys, then to Caithness, the Hebrides, and Man. His son Eric, who followed him, ranged the Northern seas from Archangel to Bordeaux, and so Hakon the Good in 936 and other Norse princes in 946, 961, 965, above all, the two great Kings Olaf in 985-9 and 1009-14, fought and triumphed through most of the world as known to the Northmen.

Thus, Frankland, England, Ireland, Scotland were brought into a closer unity through the common danger, while as the sea-kings founded settled states, and these grew by alliance, first with one another and then with their older Christian victims, as the Norse kingdoms themselves became parts of Latin Christendom, after Latin Christendom had itself been revived and re-awakened by their attacks, the full value of the time of trial came out on both sides, to conquered and to conquerors.

For the effects--formative, invigorative, provocative,--of the Northern invasions had a most direct bearing on the expansion that was to come in the next age even for those staid and sober Western countries, England and France and Italy, which had long pa.s.sed through their time of migration, and where the Vikings could not, as in the far north-east and north-west, extend the area of civilisation or geographical knowledge.

Lastly, the new start made by England in exploration, and trade, and even in pilgrimage, is plainly the result--in action and reaction--of the Norse and Danish attacks, waking up the old spirit of a kindred race, of elder cousins that had sunk into lethargy and forgotten their seamans.h.i.+p.

But from the Peace of Wedmore (878) Alfred first of all began to build an English navy able to meet and chase and run down the Viking keels; then established a yearly pilgrimage and alms-giving at the Threshold of the Apostles in Rome; then sent out various captains in his service to explore as much of the world as was practicable for his new description of Europe. His crowning effort in religious extension was in 883, when Sigehelm and Athelstan bore Alfred's gifts and letters to Jerusalem and to India, to the Christians of San Thome; the corresponding triumph of the King's scientific exploration, the discoveries in the White Sea and the Baltic, seem to have happened nearer the end of the reign, somewhere before 895.

CHAPTER III.

THE CRUSADES AND LAND TRAVEL.

CIRCA 1100-1300.

The pilgrims were the pioneers of the growth of Europe and of Christendom until Charlemagne, in one sense, in another and a broader sense until the Crusades.

Their original work, as far as it can be called original at all, was entirely overshadowed by the Vikings, who made real discoveries of the first importance in hunting for new worlds to conquer; but when first the Viking rovers themselves, and then the Northmen, settled in the colonies and the old home, took up Christianity as the Arabs had taken up Islam, the pilgrim spirit was translated, as it were, into new and more powerful forms. Through the conversion of Hungary and of Scandinavia,[22]--Europe, Christian Europe, was compacted together in a stronger Empire than that of Constantine or of Charlemagne--a spiritual federation, not a political unity--one and undivided not in visible subordination, but in a common zeal for a common faith. This was the state of the Latin world, and in a measure of the Greek and Russian world as well, by the middle of the eleventh century, when the Byzantine Emperors had broken the strength of the Eastern Caliphate, and recovered most of the realm of Heraclius; when the Roman Papacy under Leo IX., Hildebrand, and Urban began its political stage, aiming, and in great part successfully aiming, at an Imperial Federation of Europe under religion; when on every side, in Spain, in France, in England, in Germany, and in Italy, the nations that had been slowly built into that _Domus Dei_ were filled with fresh life and purpose from the Nors.e.m.e.n, who, as pirates, or conquerors, or brothers, had settled among them. The long crusade that had gone on for four hundred years in Spain and in southern Italy and in the Levant, which had raged round the islands of the Mediterranean, or the pa.s.ses of the Alps and Pyrenees, or the banks of the Loire and the Tiber,--was now, on the eve of the first Syrian Crusade of 1096, rapidly tending to decisive victory. Toledo was won back in 1084; the Norman dominion in the Two Sicilies had already taken the place of a weak and halting Christian defence against Arab emirs; pilgrims were going in thousands where there had been tens or units by the reopened land route through Hungary; only in the far East the first appearance of the Turks as Moslem champions,[23] threatened an ebb of the tide. Christendom had seen a wonderful expansion of the Heathen North; now that it had won the Northmen to itself, it was ready to imitate their example. The deliberate purpose of the Popes only gave direction to the universal feeling of restless and abundant energy longing for wider action. But it was not the crusading movement itself which brought so much new light, so much new knowledge of the world, to Europe, as the _results_ of that impulse in trade, in travel, and in colonisation.

[Footnote 22: As completed about A.D. 1000-1040.]

[Footnote 23: As in 1071, when they crushed Romans and the Byzantines in the battle of Manzikert.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TURIN MAP OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

(1) From the eleventh century, from the beginning of this period, all the greater pilgrims, Saewulf the English-merchant, King Sigurd of Norway, Abbot Daniel of Kiev, and their followers, have something more in view than piety; they have a general interest in travel; some of them a special interest in trade; most of them go to fight as well as to pray.

(2) But as the warlike spirit of the Church Militant seems to grow tired, and its efforts at founding new kingdoms--in Antioch, in Jerusalem, in Cyprus, in Byzantium--more and more fruitless, the direct expansion of European knowledge, begins in scientific travel. Vinland and Greenland and the White Sea and the other Norse discoveries were discoveries made by a great race for itself; unconnected as they were with the main lines of trade or with religious sentiment, they were unrealised by the general consciousness of the West. A full account of the Norse voyages to America was lying at the Vatican when Columbus was searching for proofs of land within reach,--of India, as he expected, in the place where he found an unknown continent and a new world. But no one knew of these; even the Greenland colony had been lost and forgotten in the fifteenth century; in 1553 the English sailors reached the land of Archangel without a suspicion that Ohthere or Th.o.r.er Hund had been there six hundred years before; Russia from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries was almost out of sight and mind under the Tartar and Moslem rule; but the missionaries and merchants and travellers who followed the crusading armies to the Euphrates, and crept along the caravan routes to Ceylon and the China Sea, added Further and Central Asia--"Thesauri Arab.u.m et divitis Indiae"--to the knowledge of Christendom.

And as this knowledge was bound up with gain; as the Polos and their companions had really opened to the knowledge of the West those great prizes of material wealth which even the Rome of Trajan had never fully grasped, and which had been shared between Arabs and natives without a rival for so long; it was not likely to be easily forgotten. From that time, at the end of the thirteenth century, to the success of the Portuguese on another road, at the end of the fifteenth, European interest was fairly engaged in pressing in upon the old land-routes and getting an ever larger share of their profits.

(3) There was another side of the same problem, a still brighter hope for men who could dare to try it. By finding a sea-path to the Indian store-house, mariners like the Venetians and Genoese, or their Spanish pupils, might cut into the treasuries of the world at their very source, found a trade-empire for their country, and gain the sole command of heaven on earth, of the true terrestrial paradise.

Then masters of the wealth of the East and of the fighting power of the West, the Christian nations might crush their old enemy, Islam, between two weights, hammer and anvil; might fairly strike for the rule of the entire habitable globe.

It was with thoughts of this kind, vaguely inspired by the Crusades and their legacy of discovery from Bagdad to Cathay, that the Vivaldi left Genoa to find an ocean way round Africa in 1281-91, "with the hope of going to the parts of the Indies"; that Malocello reached the Canary Islands about 1270; and that volunteers went on the same quest nearly twenty times in the next four generations before their spasmodic efforts were organised and pressed on to achievement by Henry and his Portuguese (1412-1497).

(4) Lastly, the renaissance of Europe in the crusading age was not only practical but spiritual. Science was at last touched and changed by the new life scarcely less than the art of war, or the social state of the towns, or the trade of the commercial republics. And geography and its kindred were not long in feeling some change, though it was very slowly realised and made useful. The first notice of the magnet in the West is of about 1180; the use of this by sailors is perhaps rightly dated from the thirteenth century and the discoveries of Amalphi.

But to return. We must trace more definitely the preparation which has been generally described for the work of Prince Henry first in the pilgrim-warriors, and the travellers of the New Age, merchants or preachers or sight-seers, who follow out the Eastern land-routes; next in the seamen who begin to break the spell of the Western Ocean and to open up the high seas, the true high-roads of the world; lastly in the students who most of all, in their maps and globes and instruments and theories, are the trainers and masters and spiritual ancestors of the Hero of Discovery.

The first of these cla.s.ses supplied the matter, the attractions and rewards of the exploring movement; the others may be said to provide the form by which success was reached, genius in seamans.h.i.+p.

And the one was as much needed as the other.

Human reason did its work so well because of a reasonable hope; men crept round Africa in face of the Atlantic storms because of the golden East beyond.

It was as we have seen the land travellers of the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who laid open that golden East to Europe, and added inspiring knowledge to a dream and a tradition. And of these land travellers the first worth notice are Saewulf of Worcester, Adelard of Bath, and Daniel of Kiev, three of that host of peaceful pilgrims who followed the conquerors of the First Crusade (1096-9). All of these left their recollections and all of them are of the new time, in sharp contrast with the hordes of earlier pilgrims, even the most recent, like Bishop Ealdred of Worcester and York, who crowned William the Conqueror, or Sweyn G.o.dwineson or Th.o.r.er Hund, whose visits are all mere visits of penitence. Every fresh conversion of the Northern nations brought a fresh stream of devotees to Italy and to Syria, a fresh revival of the fourth century habit of pilgrimage; but when mediaeval Christendom had been formed, and religious pa.s.sion was more steady and less unworldly, the discoverer and observer blends with the pilgrim in all the records left to us.

Saewulf was a layman and a trader, who went on a pilgrimage (1102), and became a monk at the instance of his confessor, Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester. But though his narrative has been called an immense advance on all earlier guide-books, it ends with the Holy Land and does not touch even the outlying pilgrim sites, in Mesopotamia or Egypt, visited and described by Silvia or Fidelis.

Starting some three years after the Latin capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the English traveller takes us up six different routes from Italy to Syria, evidence of the vast development of Mediterranean intercourse and of practical security against pirates, gained very largely since the second millennium began.