Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery Part 6

His own way, by Monopoli, Corfu, Corinth, and Athens, took him to Rhodes "which once had the Idol called Colossus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but destroyed by the Persians, with nearly all the land of Roumania, on their way to Spain. These were the Colossians to whom St.

Paul wrote."

Thence to Myra in Lycia, "the port of the Adriatic as Constantinople is of the aegean."

Landing at Jaffa, after a sail of thirteen weeks, Saewulf was soon among the wonders of Jerusalem, that had not grown less since Arculf's day. At the head of the Sepulchre Church was the famous Navel of the Earth, "now called Compas, which Christ measured with his own hands, working salvation in the midst, as say the Psalms." For the same legends were backed by the same texts as in the sixth or seventh century.

Going down to the Jordan, "four leagues east of Jericho," Arabia was seen beyond "hateful to all who wors.h.i.+p G.o.d, but having the Mount whence Elias was carried into Heaven in a chariot of fire."

Eighteen days journey from the Jordan is Mount Sinai, by way of Hebron, where "Abraham's Holm Oak" was still standing, and where, as pilgrims said, he "sat and ate with G.o.d," but Saewulf himself did not go outside Palestine, on this side. After travelling through Galilee and noting the House of Saint Archi-Triclin (Saint "Ruler-of-the-Feast"), at Cana, he made his way to Byzantium by sea, escaping the Saracen cruisers and weathering the storms that wrecked in the roads of Jaffa before his eyes some twenty of the pilgrim and merchant fleet then lying at anchor. But not only can we see from this how the religious and commercial traffic of the Mediterranean had been increased by the Crusades; the main lines of that traffic had been changed. Since the Moslem conquest, visitors had mostly come to Palestine through Egypt; the Christian conquest of Syria re-opened the direct sea route as the conversion of Hungary and north-east Europe had re-opened the direct land route one hundred years before (_c._ 1000-1100). The lines of the Danube valley and of the "Roman Sea" were both cleared, and the West again poured itself into the East as it had not done since Alexander's conquest, since the Oriental reaction had set in about the time of the Christian era, rising higher and higher into the full tide of the Persian and Arabian revivals of Asiatic Empire.

Among the varied cla.s.ses of pilgrim-crusaders in Saewulf's day were student-devotees like Adelard and Daniel from the two extremes of Christendom, England and Russia, Bath and Kiev; northern sea-kings like Sigurd, or Robert of Normandy; even Jewish travellers, rabbis, or merchants like Benjamin of Tudela. All these, as following in the wake of the First Crusade, and for the most part stopping at the high-water mark of its advance, belong to the same group and time and impulse as Saewulf himself, and are clearly marked off from the great thirteenth century travellers, who acted as pioneers of the Western Faith and Empire rather than as camp-followers of its armies.

But except Abbot Daniel (_c._ 1106) and Rabbi Benjamin (_c._ 1160-73) who stand apart, none of our other pilgrim examples of twelfth century exploration have anything original or remarkable about them.

Adelard or Athelard, the countryman of Saewulf and Willibald, is still more the herald of Roger Bacon and of Neckam. He is a theorist far more than a traveller, and his journey through Egypt and Arabia (_c._ 1110-14) appears mainly as one of scientific interest. "He sought the causes of all things and the mysteries of Nature," and it was with "a rich spoil of letters," especially of Greek and Arab ma.n.u.scripts, that he returned to England to translate into Latin one of the chief works of Saracen astronomy, the Kharizmian tables. We have already met with him in trying to follow the transmission of Greek and Indian geography or world-science through the Arabs to Europe and to Christendom.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SPANISH-ARABIC MAP OF 1109. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

Abbot Daniel of Kiev in himself is a very ordinary and rather mendacious traveller, a harmless, devout pilgrim, as careless in all matters of fact as Antonine the Martyr. But, as representing the beginnings of Russian expansion, he is of almost unique interest and value. His tract upon the Holy Road is one of the first proofs of his people's interest in the world beyond their steppes, and of that nation's readiness and purpose to expand Christian civilisation in the East as the Franks, after breaking through the Western Moslems, were now doing. Mediaeval Russia, Russia before the Tartars, after the Northmen, was now a very different thing from the "people fouler than dogs" of the Arab explorers. The House of Ruric had guided and organised a nation second to none in Europe, till it had fallen into the general lines of Christian development. Jury trial and justices in a.s.size it had taken from the West; its church and faith and architecture, its manners and morals came to it from the court of the Roman Empire on the Bosphorus.

Daniel and the other Russians, who pa.s.sed through that Empire in the age of Nestor for trade or for religion, were the vanguard of a great national and race expansion that is now just beginning to "bestride the world."

In 1022 and 1062 two monks of Kiev are recorded, out of a crowd of the unknown, as visitors to Syria, and about 1106, probably through the news of the Frankish conquest, Daniel left his native river, the Snow, in Little Russia, and pa.s.sed through Byzantium and by way of the Archipelago and Cyprus to Jaffa and Jerusalem, describing roughly in versts or half-miles the whole distance and that of every stage.

His tone is much like Saewulf's and his mistakes are quite as bad, though he tells of "nothing but what was seen with these self-same eyes." The "Sea of Sodom exhales a burning and fetid breath that lays waste all the country, as with burning sulphur, for the torments of h.e.l.l lie under it." This, however, he did not see; Saracen brigands prevented him, and he learnt that "the very smell of the place would make one ill."

His measurements of distance are all his own. Capernaum is "in the desert, not far from the Great Sea (Levant) and eight versts (four miles) from Caesarea," half the distance given in the next chapter as between Acre and Haifa, and less than half the breadth of the Sea of Tiberias. The Jordan reminds Daniel of his own river, the Snow, especially in its sheets of stagnant water.

Samaria, or "Sebastopol," he confuses with Nablous; Bethshan with Bashan; Lydda with Ramleh; Caesarea Philippi with the greater Caesarea on the coast. Not far from Capernaum and the Jordan is "another large river that comes out of the Lake of Gennesaret, and falls into the Sea of Tiberias, pa.s.sing by a large _town_ called Decapolis." From Mt. Lebanon "six rivers flow east into the Lake of Gennesaret and six west towards great Antioch, so that this is called Mesopotamia, or the land between the rivers, and Abraham's Haran is between these rivers that feed the Lake of Gennesaret."

Daniel has left us also an account of his visits to Mar Saba Convent in the Kedron gorge near the Dead Sea, to Damascus in the train of Prince Baldwin, and to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, to witness the miracle of the Holy Fire, noticed by Bernard the Wise, as a sort of counterpart to the wonder of Beth-Horon, also retold by Daniel "when the sun stood still while Joshua conquered King Og of Bashan."

It is not in outlook nor in knowledge nor even in the actual ground traversed that these later pilgrims shew any advance on the chief of the earlier travellers; it is in the new life and movement, in the new hope they give us of greater things than these. This is the interest--to us--in King Sigurd of Norway (1107-11), a Crusader-Norseman in the new age that owed so much of its very life to the Northmen, but who is only to be noticed here as a possible type of the explorer-chief--possible, not actual--for his voyage added nothing definite to the knowledge or expansion of Christendom. His campaign in Jacob's Land or Gallicia, and his attack on Moslem Lisbon, some forty years before it became the head and heart of Portugal, like his exploits in the Balearics, shew us a point in the steady decline of western Islam, and so far may be called a preparation for Prince Henry's work, but properly as a chapter of Portuguese, not of general European, growth.

There were many others like Sigurd,--Robert of Normandy, G.o.dric the English pirate, who fought his way through the Saracen fleets with a spear-shaft for his banner, Edgar the aetheling, grandson of Edmund Ironside, the Dartmouth fleet of 1147 which retook Lisbon,--but the Latin conquest of Syria has now brought us past the Crusades, in the narrower sense, to their results, in the exploration of the Further East.

The first great name of this time, of our next main chapter of Preparation, is Benjamin of Tudela, but standing as he does well within the earlier age, when the primary interest was the Holy War itself, he is also the last of the Palestine travellers--of those Westerns whose real horizon was the sacred East of Syria. He is a little before the awakening of universal interest in the unknown world, for the Christian Northmen lost with the new definiteness of the new faith much of their old infinite unrest and fierce inquisitive love of wandering, and their spirit, though related to the whole Catholic West by the crusading movement, was not fully realised till the world had been explored and made known, till the men of Europe were at home in every country and on every sea.

Benjamin, as a Jew and a rabbi, has the interest of a sectary, and his work was not of a kind that would readily win the attention of the Christian world. So the value of his travels was hidden till religious divisions had ceased to govern the direction of progress. He visited the Jewish communities from Navarre to Bagdad, and described those beyond from Bagdad to China, but he wrote for his own people and none but they seem to have cared about him. What he discovered (_c._ 1160-73) was for himself and for Judaism, and only his actual place in the twelfth century makes him a fore-runner of the Polos or of Prince Henry. We may see this from his hopeless strangeness and confusion in Rome, like a Frank in Pekin or Delhi. "The Church of St. Peter is on the site of the great palace of Julius Caesar, near which are eighty Halls of the eighty Kings called Emperors from Tarquin to Pepin the father of Charles, who first took Spain from the Saracens.... In the outskirts of the city is the palace of t.i.tus, who was deposed by three hundred senators for wasting three years over the siege of Jerusalem which he should have finished in two."

And so on--with the "Hall of Galba, three miles round and having a window for each day in the year," with St. John Lateran and its Hebrew trophies, "two copper pillars from the temple of Solomon, that sweat at the anniversary of the burning of the Temple," and the "statues of Samson and of Absalom" in the same place. So with Sorrento, "built by Hadarezer when he fled before King David," with the old Roman tunnel between Naples and Pozzuoli, "built by Romulus who feared David and Joab," with Apulia, "which is from King Pul of a.s.syria"--in all this we have as it were Catholic mythology turned inside out, David put into Italy when the West put Trajan at the sources of the Nile. It was not likely that writing of this sort would be read in the society of the Popes and the Schoolmen, the friars and the crusaders, any more than the Buddhist records of missionary travel from China one thousand years before. The religious pa.s.sion which had set the crusaders in motion, would keep Catholics as long as it might from the Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics they conquered and among whom they settled.

But with the final loss of Jerusalem by the Latins, and the overthrow of the Bagdad Caliphate by the Mongol Tartars (1258), the barrier of fanatic hatred was weakened, and Central Asia became an attraction to Christendom instead of a dim horror, without form and void, except for Huns and Turks and demons. The Papal court sent mission after mission to convert the Tartars, who were wavering, as men supposed, between Islam and the Church, and with the first missionaries to the House of Ghenghiz went the first Italian merchants who opened the court of the Great Khan to Venice and to Genoa.

As early as 1243 an Englishman is noticed as living among the Western Horde, the conquerors of Russia; but official intercourse begins in 1246 with John de Plano Carpini. This man, a Franciscan of Naples, started in 1245 as the Legate of Pope Innocent IV. to the Tartars, took the northern overland route through Germany and Poland, reached Kiev, "the metropolis of Russia," through help of the Duke of Cracow, and at last appeared in the camp of Batou, on the Volga. Hence by the Sea of Aral, "of moderate size with many islands," to the court of Batou's brother, the Great Khan "Cuyuc" himself, where the Christian stranger found himself one of a crowd of four thousand envoys from every part of Asia (1246).

After sixteen months Carpini made his way back by the same route, "over the plains" and through Kiev, to give at Rome the first genuine account of Tartary, in its widest sense, from the Dnieper to China (1247).

The great rivers and lakes and mountains of Russia and Turkestan, the position and distribution of the land and its peoples, "even from the Caspian to the Northern Ocean, where men are said to have dogs' faces,"

are now first described by an honest and clear-headed and keen-eyed observer, neither timid nor credulous.

Carpini really begins the reliable western map of Further Asia. His personal knowledge did not reach China or India, but in his _Book of the Tartars_, Europe was told nearly the whole truth, and almost nothing but the truth, about the vast tract and the great races between the Carpathians and the Gobi Desert. In the same was included the first fair account of the manners and history of the "Mongols whom we call Tartars," and the simple truthfulness of the Friar stands out in all the allusions that make his work so human;--his interviews with the Tartar Chiefs and with brother-travellers, his dangers and difficulties from Lettish robbers and abandoned or guarded ferries, his pa.s.sage of the Dnieper on the ice, his last three weeks on "trotting"[24] hacks over the steppes.

[Footnote 24: "_Tartari fecerunt equos nostros trotare._"]

We have gone a good way from Abbot Daniel, for in John de Plano Carpini Christian Europe has at last a real explorer, a real historian, a genuine man of science, in the service of the Church and of discovery.

Carpini was followed after six years by William de Rubruquis, a Fleming sent by St. Louis of France on the same errand of conversion and discovery (1253), but by a different route, through the Black Sea, and Cherson, over the Don "at the Head of Azov, that divides Europe and Asia, as the Nile divides Asia and Africa," to the great camp on the Volga, "the greatest river I had ever seen, which comes from Great Bulgaria in the north and falls into a lake (the Caspian Sea), that would take four months to journey round." Higher in their course the Don and the Volga "are not more than ten days' journey apart, but diverge as they run south." The Caspian is "made out of the Volga and the rivers that flow into it from Persia." Thence through the Iron Gates of Derbend, between the Caspian and the Caucasus, "which Alexander made to shut the barbarians out of Persia." Helped by a Nestorian, who possessed influence at the Tartar Court, like so many of his Church, Rubruquis reached the "Alps" of the Altai country, where he found a small Nestorian lords.h.i.+p, governed like the Papal States, by a priest, who was at least one original of the great mediaeval phantom--Prester John.

Crossing the great steppes of eastern "Tartary," "like the rolling sea to look at," Rubruquis at last reached the Mongol headquarters at Caracorum, satisfied on the way that the Caspian had no northern outlet, as Strabo and Isidore had imagined. Thence he made his way home without much fresh result.

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

Though Rubruquis is well called the most brilliant and literary of the mediaeval travellers, his mission was fruitless, and the interest of his work lay rather in recording custom and myth--in sociology--than in adding anything definite to the geographical knowledge of the West. John de Plano had already been over the ground to Caracorum, and recorded all the main characteristics of the lands west of the Gobi Desert. The further advance, east to China, south to India, was yet to come.

But while Rubruquis was still among the Tartars, Nicolo and Matteo Polo, the uncles of the more famous Marco, were trading (1255-65) to the Crimea and the districts of southern Russia that were now under the Western Horde,--and soon after, following the caravans to Bokhara, they were drawn on to the court of Kublai Khan, then somewhere near the wall of China. After a most friendly reception they were sent back to Europe with presents and a letter to Pope Clement IV., offering a welcome and maintenance to Christian teachers. Kublai "had often questioned the Polos of the Western lands," and now he asked for one hundred "Latins, to shew him the Christian faith, for Christ he held to be the only G.o.d."

Furnished with the imperial pa.s.sport of the Golden Tablet, our merchants made their way back to Acre in April, 1269.

They found the old pope dead, Gregory X. in his place, and he shewed a coolness in answering the Khan's requests, but in 1271 they set out on their second journey to the furthest East, taking with them two friar preachers and their nephew Marco, now nineteen years of age.

In Armenia the friars took alarm at the troubled state of the nearer East and turned back, just as Augustine of Canterbury tried to find a way out of the mission to the English that Pope Gregory I. laid upon him in 597. For the Church it was perhaps as momentous a time now as then; the thirteenth century, if it had ended in the Christianising of the Mongol Empire, would have turned the Catholic victory of the fourth and sixth centuries in the West, the victory that had been worked out in the next seven hundred years to fuller and fuller realisation, into a world empire,--which did come at last for European civilisation, but not for Christendom.

The Polos however kept on their way north-east for more than "one thousand days," three years and a half, till they stood in the presence of Kublai Khan; beyond Gobi and the Great Wall and the mountain barriers of China, in Cambaluc or Pekin, "princess encrowned of cities capital."

Their journey was first through Armenia Lesser and Greater, then through Mosul (Nineveh) to Bagdad, where the last "Caliph and Pope of the Saracens" had been butchered by Holgalu and his Tartars, sewn in a sack and thrown into the Tigris by one account, walled up alive by another, in 1258. But though the stories in Marco's journal are a main interest of his work, as a summary and reflection of the science and history and general culture of the Christian world of his time, we must not here look outside his geography. And his first place-note of value is on the Caspian, "which containeth in circuit twenty-eight hundred miles and is like a lake, having no union with other seas and in which are many islands, cities, and castles." The extent of the Nestorian missions, "through all parts of India and to Cairo and Bagdad, and wherever Christians dwell," strikes him even now at the beginning of his travels--much more when he finds their churches on the Hoang Ho and the Yang-Tse-Kiang--declining indeed, but still living to witness to the part which that great heresy had played as an intermediary between the further and the nearer East--a part which history has never yet worked out. Entering Persia as traders, the Polos went naturally to Ormuz, already the great mart of Islam for the Indian trade, where Europeans really entered the third, and, to them, unknown belt of the world, after pa.s.sing from a zone of known home-land through one of enemies' country, known and only known as such. Failing to take the sea route at Ormuz for China, as they had hoped, our Italians were obliged to strike back north-east, through Persia and the Pamir, the Kashgar district and the Gobi steppes, to Cathay and the pleasure domes of Kublai, visiting Caracorum and the Altai country on the way, by a turn due north. In 1275 they were in Shang-tu, the Xanadu[25] of Coleridge--the summer capital of Kublai Khan--and not till 1292 did they get leave to turn their faces to the West once more.

[Footnote 25:

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sacred sea.

COLERIDGE: _Kublai Khan_.]

Here the Polos became what may be called consulting engineers to the Mongol Court; Marco was even made in 1277 a commissioner of the Imperial Council, and soon after sent upon government missions to Yunnan in extreme south-west China and to Yangchow city.

The greater part of Marco's own memoirs is taken up with his account of the thirty-four provinces of the Tartar Empire that centred round the "six parts of Cathay and the nine parts of Mangi," the districts of northern and southern China as we know them,--an account of the roads, rivers, and towns, the trade, the Court and the Imperial Ports, the customs and manner of life among the subject peoples in that Empire, perhaps the largest ever known. Especially do the travellers dwell on the public roads from Pekin or Cambaluc through all the provinces, the ten thousand Royal inns upon the highways, the two hundred thousand horses kept for the public service, the wonderful speed of transit in the Great Khan's emba.s.sages, "so that they could go from Pekin to the wall of China in two days."

But scarcely less is said about the great rivers--the arteries of Chinese commerce, even more than the caravan routes,--above all, the Yang-Tse-Kiang, "the greatest stream in the world, like an arm of the sea, flowing above one hundred days' journey from its source into the ocean, and into which flow countless others, making it so great that incredible quant.i.ties of merchandise are brought by this river. It flows," exclaims Marco, "through sixteen provinces, past the quays of two hundred cities, at one of which I saw at one time five thousand vessels, and there are other marts that have more."

The breadth and depth and length and merchandise of the Pulisangan and the Caramaran are only less than the Kiang's; from the point where Marco crossed the second of these, there was not another bridge till it reached the ocean, hundreds of miles away, "by reason of its exceeding greatness."

Lastly Pekin, the capital of the Empire, with Quinsai and the other provincial capitals of Mangi and Cathay, call out the unbounded admiration of the Polos as of every other Western traveller, from the Moslem Ibn Batuta to the Christian friars of the fourteenth century.

Pekin, two days' journey from the ocean, the residence of the Court in December, January, and February, in the extreme north-east of Cathay, had been lately rebuilt in a "central square of twenty-four miles in compa.s.s, and twelve suburbs, three or four miles long, adjoining each of the twelve gates," where merchants and strangers lived, each nation with separate "burses" or store-houses, where they lodged. From this centre to the land of Gog and Magog and the champaign-land of Bargu, the Great Khan travelled every year in midsummer for the fresh air of the plateau country of central Asia, as well as for a better view of the great Russian and Bactrian sub-kingdoms of his House. The six months of spring and autumn were spent in slow progresses through central and southern China to Thibet on one side, and to Tonquin on the other. But greater even than Pekin, Quinsai, or Kansay, the City of Heaven, in southern China, though no longer the capital even of a separate Kingdom of Mangi, was the crowning work of Chinese civilisation. It surpa.s.sed the other cities of Kublai, as much as these overshadowed the Rome or Venice of the thirteenth century.

"In the world there is not its like, for by common report it is one hundred miles in circuit, with a lake on one side and a river on the other, divided in many channels and upon these and the ca.n.a.ls adjoining twelve thousand bridges of stone; there are ten market places, each half a mile square; great store-houses of stone, where the Indian merchants lay by their goods; palaces and gardens on both sides of the main street, which, like all the highways in Mangi, is paved with stone on each side, and in the midst full of gravel, with pa.s.sages for the water, which keeps it always clean." Salt, silk, fruit, precious stones, and cloth of gold are the chief commodities; the paper money of the Great Khan is used everywhere; all the people, except a few Nestorians and Moslems, are "idolaters, so luxurious and so happy that a man would think himself in Paradise."

It was only in recent years that Kublai, or his general, Baian, had captured Quinsai and driven out the King of Mangi with his seraglio and his friends. The exile till then had only thought of pleasure, of wine, women, and song, the "sweet meat which cost him the sour sauce ye have heard," on the approach of danger, had fled on board the s.h.i.+ps he had prepared to "certain impregnable isles in the ocean," and if these impregnable islands may be identified with Zipangu or j.a.pan, the conquerors pursued him even here. There is nothing more interesting in Polo's book than his story of the Mongol failure in the Eastern islands, fifteen hundred miles from the coast of Mangi, now first discovered to Christian knowledge.

This country of j.a.pan, "very great, the people white, of gentle manners, idolaters in religion, under a King of their own," was attacked by Kublai's fleet in 1264 for the gold they had, and had in such plenty that "the King's house, windows, and floors were covered with it, as churches here with lead, as was reported by merchants--but these were few and the King allowed no exportation of the gold."