Europe and Cathay

THE questions have 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 Torfæus 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.

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.

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.

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 the 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. 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.

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 insure 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.

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 mediæval 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 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, 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.

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. 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 Phœnician 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. 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 woolen 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. Detailed accounts of these commercial transactions and of the wealth of personal experiences that must have been connected with them are exceedingly 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 great work of Claudius Ptolemy, written 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 book 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 “ Sinse ” 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 “V inland, while the Spaniards called their part “ Florida.”The name “ Seres ” was given to northwestern China by traders who came to it through the highlands of central Asia from Samarcand; while “ Sinæ ’ 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 got to China by sea before the Portuguese, in 1517. The name “ Sinæ ” 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, 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 silkworm, 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.

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 learned much about 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 ; 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.

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, 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.”

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 appear 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.

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 mediæval 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 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 mediæval 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. 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.

In the days of its strength the Eastern Empire was the stanch 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 reorganization 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 ; 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 Nicæa and actually had their outposts on the Marmora, it was high time for Christendom to rise en masse in self-defense. 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 labor 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. 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 Racon.

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. 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.

The general effect of the Crusades upon Oriental commerce was to increase the amount of traffic through Egypt ancl Syria. Of this lucrative trade Venice got the lion’s share, and while she helped to 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 Palæologus at Nicæa, 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.” 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 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 Ægean and southern Mediterranean. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their city was the most splendid and luxurious in all Christendom.

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 unrivaled 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 armor from Milan, Austrian yew-wood for English longbows, 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 feverstricken Florence.

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 (12061227) 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 it 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. 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.” 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 precise news constituted the first important leap of geographical knowledge to the eastward since the days of Ptolemy, who supposed that beyond the “ Seres and SinÑ ” lay an unknown land of vast extent, “ full of reedy and impenetrable swamps.” 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 hounded on the east, just as Europe was bounded on the west, by an ocean.

Here we arrive at a notable landmark in the history of the discovery of America. Here from the camp of hustling 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. 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. 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 than ever accessible by land, 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.

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 Nicolò 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 u Tartarean’s,” and at the last moment refused to go. Nicolò and his brother then set out in the autumn of 1271 to return to China, taking with them Nicolò’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 traveled 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.

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 serviceHis name is mentioned in the Chinese annals of 1277 as a newly appointed commissioner of the privy council. 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 sea-dog, 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 early in 1292, and after long delays on the coasts of Sumatra and Hindustan, in order to avoid unfavorable 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 befell them as befell 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 travelers 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.” >Three years afterward, in 1298, Marco commanded a galley in the great naval battle with the Genoese near Curzola. Ihe Venetians were totally defeated, and Marco was one of the seven thousand 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.

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 traveler 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.

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.” 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 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,” and we may lie 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 he readily assimilated.

Nevertheless, in the Catalan map, made in 1375, and now to he 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 from the publication of Marco’s narrative several adventurous travelers had found their way to Cathay. There was Friar Odortc, of Pordenone, who, during the years 1316— 1330 visited Hindustan, Sumatra, Java, Cochin China, the Chinese Empire, and Thibet. 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. 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 travelers on the overland route to that country. Between 1338 and 1353 Giovanni Marignolli spent some years at Peking as papal legate from Benedict XI. to the Great Khan, and also traveled in Ceylon and in Hindustan. 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.

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 a few Europeans 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 the earliest time 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 be forced to reflect upon the value of what they were losing, and to consider if there were any feasible method of recovering it.

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 much 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 was also seriously imperiled. 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 the 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 that began in the fifteenth century, 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.

John Fiske.