 Chapter 2 of Prince Henry the Navigator, The Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Prince Henry the Navigator by Charles Raymond Beasley Chapter 2 Vikings or Northmen, Circa 787-1066 The discoveries and conquests and colonies of the Norse Vikings, from the White Sea to North America, are the first glimpses of light on the Sea of Darkness round the little island of the known world that made up Christendom. And from the needs of the time these were the natural, the only natural, beginnings of European expansion. From the rise of Islam, Saracens controlled the great trade routes of the South and East. It was only on the West and North that the coast was clear, of all but natural dangers. In the Muslim caliphate men were now busy in following up the old lines of trade, the immemorial traditions of the East, or as in Southern Africa, extending the sphere of commercial activity and so of civilization. Men of science were commenting on the ancient texts of Greeks and Latins, or adopting them to enlarged knowledge. But in Christendom, in the atrophy both of mental and physical activity, broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals of Charles the Great, of the Isarian emperors, of Otto the First, of Alfred and his house, the practical energy of heathen enemies, for the Northmen were not seriously touched by Christianity till about the end of the first millennium, was the first sign of lasting resurrection. After the material came the spiritual revival. The whole life of the Middle Ages awoke on the conversion of the northern nations and of Hungary. But in the abundant and brilliant energy of the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, we must recognize the offspring of the irrepressible Norsemen as well as of the Irish and Frank and English missionaries, who in the Dark Ages of Christendom were working out the Empire of Innocent the Third. In exploration especially, it was true that theory followed achievement. Flavio Giocha, of Amalfi, did not apply the magnet to navigation, did not give sailors the use of the magnet till navigation itself had begun to venture into the unknown Atlantic. The history of geographical advance in the earlier Middle Ages is thus rather a chronicle of adventure than of science. But the Norse discoveries are not only the first, they are the leading achievements of Western travel and enterprise in the true unknown between the time of Constantine and the Crusades. The central fact of European expansion in the Dark Ages, from the seventh to the eleventh century, is the advance of the Vikings to the Arctic continent and to America about the year one thousand. All that precedes this in the same line is doubtful and unimportant. Four of the other voyages to the West in the sixth, the eighth, the tenth centuries, which on Columbus's success turned into prior claims to the finding of the New World, there is not one that deserves notice. Saint Brandon in 565, the seven Spanish bishops in 734, the Basques in 990, may or may not have sighted their islands of Antilia, of Atlantis, of the seven cities. They cannot be verified or valued any more than the journeys of the enchanted horse or the third calendar. We only know for certain a few unimportant half-accidental facts, such as the visits of Irish hermits to Iceland and the Faroes during the eighth century and the traces of their cells and chapels in bells and ruins and crosses found by the Northmen in the ninth. It was in 787 that the Vikings first landed in England. By the opening of the next century they were threatening the whole coastline of Christendom from Galicia to the Elbe. In 874 they began to colonize Iceland. In 877 they sighted Greenland. In 922 Rolf the Ganger won his Normandy from Charles the Simple by the Treaty of Clairsur Epte. As early as 840 was founded the first Norse or Ostman kingdom in Ireland. And in 878 the Norse Erldum of the Orkneys, while about the same time the first Vikings seemed to have reached the White Sea and the extreme north of Europe. This advance is almost as rapid as that of the early Saracens, within a hundred years from the first disturbance of Danes and Northmen by the growing, all including power of the new national kingdoms, within three generations of health in the black, first the flying rebels and then the royalists in pursuit of them had reached the farthest western and northern limits of the known world, from Finister in Spanland to Cape Farewell in Greenland, from the North Cape in Finland to the northwest capes of Irland, from Novgorod or Holmgard in Russia to Valend between the Geron and the Loire. The chief lines of northern advance were three, by the northwest, southwest and northeast, but each of these divided after a time with important results. The first sea path running by Cape Ness, Orkneys, Shetlands and Faroes reached Iceland, Greenland and at last Vinland on the North American continent. But from the settlements on the coasts and islands of northern Scotland a fresh wave of pirate colonists swept down southwest into the narrow seas of St. George's Channel and beat upon the east and north and south of Ireland and the western coasts of England and of Bretland. The second invasion ran along the north German coast and on reaching the Straits of Dover fell upon both sides of the English Channel, according as the resistance was stronger or weaker in Wessex or in Franklin. The advanced guard reunited with Ostman and Orkneyers in the Silly Isles and in Cornwall and pressed on to the plunder of the Bay of Biscay and its coasts. The most restless of all were not long in finding out the wealth of the Muslim caliphate of Cordova and trying to force their way up to the Douro and the Tagus. The expansion on this side was not to stop till it had founded from the Norman colony on the Sun a Norman kingdom of England and a dominion in the two Sicilies but this was the work of the 11th century, the time of organization and settled empire. On the third side of northern expansion to east and northeast there were two separate roads from the first one taking the Baltic for its track and dividing northwards to Finland up the Gulf of Botnia, eastwards to Russia and Novgorod, Gadariki and Holmgard, the other coasting along Hologa land to Bjarma land along Lapland to Perm and the archangel of later time. Of these three lines of movement by far the most vital to our subject is the first, which is also the earliest, the second to south and south west hardly gives any direct results for our story and the third to east and north is mainly concerned with Russian history. While King Alfred was yet unborn, north settlements had been permanently founded in the outlying points, coasts and islands of Scotland and Ireland and in the years of his boyhood about 860 Nadad the Faroway Yarl sided Iceland which had been touched at by the Irish monks in 795 but was now to be first added as a lasting gain to Europe as a new country, Snowland, something more than a hermitage for religious exiles from the world. Four years later in 864 Gadar the Swede reached this new Ultima Thule and renamed it from himself, Gadar's home. Yet another Viking, Raymond Floak, followed the track of the first explorer in 1867 before Iceland got its final name and earliest colonization from the Norsemen in gulf and leaf and the sheep farmers of the Faroes in 874 the third year of Alfred's reign in Wessex. Three years later, 887 to 8, at the very time of the farthest Danish advance in England, when Guthrum had driven the English king to the Isle of Athelney, the Norsemen reached their farthest point of northern advance in Europe. Goonbjorn cited a new land to the northwest which he called White Shirt from its snowfields and which read Eric a century later renamed Greenland, for there is nothing like a good name to attract settlers. By this the Old World had come nearer than ever before to the discovery of a new one. Geographically this side of the Arctic continent falls to the share of North America and once its fjords had been made in their turn, centers of colonization and of further progress, the actual reaching of Newfoundland and Cape Cod was naturally enough. The real voyage lay between Cape Farewell and the European mainland. It was a stormy and dangerous passage from the Greenland Bays to Labrador but not a long one and as far as can be judged from scanty records neither so cold nor so icebound as at present. But exploration had outrun settlement. It was not until 986, more than 100 years after Goonbjorn's discovery, that Eric the Red, one of the chiefs of the Iceland colonists, led a band of followers and friends into a permanent exile in the unknown land. The beginnings of several villages were made in the first few years and the first American discoveries followed at once. About 989, one Bjarni Hjölfsson, following his father from Iceland to Eric's fjord in Greenland, was driven west by storms first to a flat, well-wooded country, then to a mountainous island covered with glaciers. He bore away with a fresh breeze and reached his home in Eric's fjord in four days. But his report roused great interest. The time had come and the men and Norse rovers, who after so much of the past were ready to dare anything in the future, eagerly volunteered to follow up the new route. Bjarni himself, visiting Norway and telling his story, was blamed for his slackness, and when he went back to Greenland, there was, quote, much talk of finding unknown lands, end quote. In the year 1000, Lief, a son of Red Eric, started with a definite purpose of discovery. He bought Bjarni's ship, manned it with five and twenty men, and put out. First they came to the land Bjarni had sighted last and went on shore. There was no grass to be seen, but great snowy ridges far inland, quote, and all the way from the coast to these mountains was one field of snow and it seemed to them a land of no profit, end quote. So they left, calling it Heluland or Slate land, perhaps the Labrador of the sixteenth century. They put out to sea again and found another land, flat and wooded, with a white sand shore, low lying towards the sea. This said, Lief, we will call after its nature, Markland, Woodland. Then, striving for two days before a northeast wind, they came to an island where they landed to wait for good weather. They tasted the dew on the grass and thought they had never known anything so sweet. Sailing on again into a sound between the island and a nest, they reached a place where a river came out of a lake. Into this they towed the ship and anchored, carrying their beds out on the shore and setting up their tents, with a large hut in the middle, and made all ready for wintering there. There was no want of fish food, quote, the largest salmon in the lake they had ever seen, end quote, and the country seemed to them so good that they would need no fodder for cattle in the winter. There was no frost, the grass seemed fresh enough all the year round and day and night were more equal than in Iceland or in Greenland. The crew were divided in two parts, one worked at the huts and the other explored the country, returning every night to the camp. From the wild vines found by the foragers the whole district was called Vinland, and samples of these, enough to fill the sternboat and of the trees and self-sewn wheat found in the fields, were taken back to Erics Fjord. Thereafter leaf was called the Lucky, and got much wealth and fame, but Thorwald Ericsson, his brother, thought he had not explored enough, and determined to be talked about even more than the first settler of Vinland. He put to sea with thirty men, and came straight to leaf's booths in Vinland, where he stayed the winter. On the first signs of spring Thorwald ordered his vessel to be rigged, and sent his longboat on ahead to explore. All alike thought the land beautiful and well-wooded. They noticed that the distance was small between the forest and the sea, that the beach was all of white sand, and that there were many islands off the shore and very shallow water. But they saw no trace of man or beast, except a wooden corn barn on an island far to the west. After coasting all the summer they came back in the autumn to the booths. The next spring Thorwald went eastwards, and, quote, towards the north along the land they drove upon a cape, and broke their keel, and stayed long to repair, and called the place Kiel Ness, Kiel Ar Ness, from this, end quote. Then they sailed away eastwards along the country, everywhere thickly wooded, till at one place Thorwald drew up his ships to the land, and laid out gangways to the shore, saying, I would gladly set up my farm here. But now they came upon the first traces of other men. Far off upon the white sandy beach three specks were sighted, three skin boats of the screelings or eskimos, with three men hiding under each. Thorwald's men captured and killed eight of them, but one escaped, quote, to where within the fjord were several dwellings like little lumps on the ground, end quote. A heavy drowsiness now fell upon the Norsemen, in the saga, till, quote, sudden scream came to them, and a countless host from up the fjord came in skin boats, and laid themselves along side, end quote. The Vikings put up their shield wall along the gunnel, and kept off the arrows of the eskimos till they had shot them all away, end quote, fled off as fast as they could, end quote, leaving Thorwald with a mortal wound under the arm. He had time just to bid his men, quote, carry him to the point he had wished to dwell at, for it was true that he would stay there a while, but with a cross at head and feet, and so died and was buried as he had said, end quote. The place was called Cross Ness from the dead chief, but the crew stayed all the winter and loaded the ship with vines and grapes, and in the spring came back to Eric in Greenland. And now, after the first mishap, discovery became more serious, not to be undertaken but by strong and well-armed fleets. It was this that checked the expansion of these arctic colonies. At their best they were too small to do more than hold their own against nature and the screeling savages in their tiny settlements along the coast, where the ice fields have long since pushed man slowly but surely into the sea, with his painfully won patches of hay and corn and pasture ridge. But the colonists would never say die till they were utterly worn out. Now they only roused themselves to conquer the new lands they had found and found disputed. First a third son of red Eric, Thorstein, befought him to go into Vinland for his brother Thorwald's body. He put to sea and lost all sight of land, beating about in the ocean the whole summer till he came back to Greenland in the first week of winter, 1004 to 6. He was followed by the greatest of the Vinland sailors, Thorfinn Carlsfinn, who really took in hand the founding of a new settlement over the western sea. He came from Norway to Iceland soon after Thorwald's death in 1004, passed on to Greenland about 1005, quote, when as before much was talked about a Vinland voyage, end quote, and in 1006 made ready to start with 160 men and five women in three ships. They had with them all kinds of cattle, meaning to settle in the land if they could, and they made an agreement, Carlsfinn and his people, that each should have an equal share in the gain. Leaf lent them his houses in Vinland, quote, for he would not give them outright, end quote, and they sailed first to Hellerland, Labrador, where they found a quantity of foxes, then to Markland, well stocked with forest animals, then to an island at the mouth of a fjord, unknown before, covered with idre docks. They called the new discoveries Stream Island and Stream Fjord, from the current that here ran out into the sea, and sent off a party of eight men, in search of Vinland, in a stern boat. This was driven by Westerly Gales back to Iceland, but Thorfinn, with the rest, sailed south till he came to Leif Ericsson's, quote, river that fell into the sea from a lake, with islands lying off the mouth of the stream, low grounds covered with wheat growing wild, and rising grounds clad with vines, end quote. Here they settled, renamed the country Hope, from the good hope they had of it, and began to fell the wood to pasture their cattle in the upland and to gather the grapes. After the first winter the screelings came upon them, at first to traffic with furs and sables against milk and dairy produce, and then to fight, for as neither understood the other, and the natives tried to force their way into Thorfinn's houses, and to get hold of his men's weapons, a quarrel was bound to come. Fearing this, Carlsfinn put a fence round the settlement, and made all ready for battle, quote, and at this very time was a child born to him in the village, called Snorri, of Goodrid his wife, the widow of Thorstein Eric's son, whom he had brought with him, end quote. Then the Eskimos came down upon them, quote, many more than before, and there was a battle, and Thorfinn's men won the day and saved the cattle, end quote, and their enemies fled into the forest. Thorfinn stayed all the winter, but toward spring he grew tired of his enterprise and returned to Greenland, taking much goods, vines, wood for timber, and skinwares, and so came back to Eric's fjord in the summer of 1008. Thus ends the story of the last serious effort to colonize Vinland, and the saga, while giving no definite cause for this failure upon failure, seems to show that even the trifling annoyance of the screelings was enough to turn the scale. Natural difficulties were so immense, men were so few, that a pygmy enemy had all the power of the last straw in a load, the odd man in a council. The actual resistance of American natives to European colonists was never very serious in any part of the continent, but the distance from the starting point and the difficulties of life in the new country were able, even in the time of Raleigh and De Soto, to keep in check men who far more readily founded and kept up European empires in the Indian seas. So now, though on Thorfinn's return the, quote, talk began to turn again upon a Vinland voyage, as both gainful and honorable, end quote, and a daughter of red Eric, named Freitas, talked men over, especially two brothers Helga and Finboga, to a fresh attempt in the country where all the house of Eric had tried and failed. Though leaf lent his booths as before, and sixty able-bodied men, besides women, were found willing to go, the colony could never be firmly planted. Freitas and her allies sailed in ten eleven, reached the settlement, which was now for the third time recolonized, and wintered there, but jealousies soon broke up the camp, Helga and Finboga were murdered with all their followers, and the rest came back in ten thirteen to Greenland, quote, where Thorfinn Carlsfinn was just ready for sailing back to Norway, and it was common talk that never did a richer ship leave Eric's fjord than that which he steered, end quote. And was that same Carlsfinn, who gave the fullest account of all his travels, concludes the saga. But whether Thorfinn ever returned to Vinland, whether there were any more attempts to settle at leaf's booths or elsewhere, whether the account we have of these voyages is really an Eric saga, only telling the deeds of red Eric and his house, for after Bjarne almost every Vinland leader is of this family, we cannot tell. We can only fancy that all these suggestions are probable, by the side of the few additional facts known to the Norse scalds or bards. The first of these is, that in 983-4, R.A. Marson of Reykjanes in Iceland was driven by storms far west to Whitemans land, where he was followed by Bjarne Asperinson in 999, and by Goodleaf Goodlinson in 1029. This was the tale of his friend Raffin, the limerick trader, and of R.A. Freud, his great great grandson, who called the unknown land great Ireland. Footnote, by some supposed to be South Carolina, by others the Canaries, and footnote. True or untrue, in whatever way, this would be a later discovery than those of Eric and his sons, if the news of it did not come into Iceland or Norway till after Thorfinn Carlsfinn's voyage, as is generally supposed. Again, the length of the voyage is a difficulty, and the whole matter has a doubtful look, in attempt to start a rival to the Eric saga by a more brilliant success a few years earlier. We seem to be on more certain ground in our next and last chapter of Viking exploration in the Northwest, in the fragmentary notices of Greenland and Vinland voyages to the middle of the 14th century, and in the fairly clear and continuous account of the two Greenland settlements of the Western and Eastern Bays. We hear, for instance, of Bishop Eric going over from Eric's fjord to Vinland in 1121, of clergy from the Eastern Bay Diocese of Gardar sailing to lands in the West, far north of Vinland, in 1266, of the two Helgesons discovering a country west of Iceland in 1285, of a voyage from Greenland to Markland in 1347, by a crew of seventeen men, recorded in 1354. Unless these are pure fabrications, they would seem to prove something of constant intercourse between the mother and daughter colonies of Northwest Europe and Northeast America, and something of a permanent Christian settlement of Northmen in the New Continent is made probable by assuming such intercourse. During 981-1000, both Iceland and Greenland had become Catholic in name and Christian in surname. In 1126 the line of bishops of Gardar begins with Arnold, and the clergy would hardly have ventured on the Vinland voyage to convert screelings in an almost deserted country. The later stories of the Greenland colonies, interesting as it is and traceable to the year 1418, is not part of the expansion but of the contraction of Europe and Christendom, and the voyages of the Zeni in 1380-95 to Greenland and the western islands Estotaland and Drogeo, belonging to another part. They are the last achievements of medieval discovery before Henry of Portugal begins his work, and form the natural end of an introduction to that work. But it is curious to notice that just as the ice and the eskimos between them are bringing to an end the last traces of North settlement in the Arctic Continent, and just as all intercourse between Vinland, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway entirely ceases, at any rate to record itself, the Portuguese sailors taking up the work of Eric and Leif and Thorfinn on another side were rounding Cape Verde and nearing the southern point of Africa, and so providing for the mind of Columbus suggestions which resulted in the lasting discovery of the world that the Vikings had sighted and colonized but were not able to hold. The Venetian, Welsh, and Arabic claims to have followed the Norsemen invisits to America earlier than the voyage of 1492 belong rather to the minute history of geographical controversy. It is a fairly certain fact that the northwest line of Scandinavian migration reached about 81,000 to Cape Cod and the coasts of Labrador. It is equally certain that on this side the Norsemen never made any further advance, lasting or recorded. Against all other medieval discoveries of a western continent, one only verdict can stand, not proven. The other lines of northern advance, though marked by equal daring and far greater military exploits, have less of original discovery. There was fighting in plenty, the giving and taking of hard knocks with every nation from Archangel to Cordova and from Limerick to Constantinople, and the Vikings, as they reached fresh ground, renamed most of the capes and coasts the rivers and islands and countries of Europe, of North Africa, of Western Asia. Liberia became Span land, Galicia, Jacobs land, Gallia, Frank land, Britannia, England, Scotland, Brett land, Hibernia, Ireland, Islam, outside Span land, passed into Cirque land or Saracen land. Greece was Gric land, Russia, Gadariki. The pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar, were Norva's Sound, which later days derived from the first Northmen who passed through them. The city of Constantine was the great town, Mykla Garde. Novgorod was Holmgaard, the town of all others that most touched and influenced the earlier, the Viking Age of Northern Expansion. For was it not their own proudest and strongest city-state, and, quote, who can stand before God or the great Novgorod, end quote, except the men who had built it, and would rush to sack it if it turned against them. But all this was only the passing of a more active race over ground which had already been well known to Rome and to Christendom, even if much of this was now being forgotten. Ireland was only in upland Russia, and in the farthest north, that the Norsemen sensibly enlarged the western world to east or northeast, as they did through their Iceland settlements on the northwest. On the south and southwest no Vikings or royalist followers of Vikings, like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Cirque land, and as pilgrims, traders, travelers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was, of course, not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Muslim incubus on southern Europe. They visited the holy sites, quote, when Sigurd Hyrosoloma they'd relived, and fed their eyes on Jordan's holy flood, which the dear body of the Lord God had lavid, and, quote, they fought as Varangian bodyguards in the armies of the great Byzantines, Nicheferos Fokas, John Tomiscus, Basil II, or Maniacus, but in all this they discovered for themselves rather than for Europe. 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 10th and 11th centuries, added our Norway, Sweden, and Denmark with all the Viking settlements to the civilized world and the Church of Rome. First, on the eastern side, it was in 862 that the Russians invited help from their less dreaded neighbors around Uppsala against their more vexatious neighbors around Kiev, and in September of the same year Rurik arrived at Novgorod and founded the medieval kingdom of Russia, which in the 10th 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 Garderikey was constant and close, and not least in the time of the Vinland voyages when Vladimir and Yaroslav reigned at Novgorod, and the two Olaf's, the son of Trigva and the Saint, found refuge at their court before and after their hard rule in Norway. Olaf Trigvason'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 home guard, 872. In 1019 Ingegurt of Sweden was married to Yaroslav, ten years later St. Olaf was driven from Norway by revolt, and flying into Russia was offered a kingdom called Volgaria, the modern Khasan, whose old metropolis of Volgar was known to the Arab travelers of the 9th 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 Norsemen, Magnus the Good, came from Novgorod by Ladoga to Tradheim, when Olaf's son, Harold Hardrada, fled back to his father's refuge to the court of Yaroslav, 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 Mykla guard, 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 Cerkland, Africa and Sicily, were all sent back to Yaroslav'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 around 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 Newt the Great, or Robert Gwiskard, 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 neighbors and enemies of Christendom, yet hoped for time to sail off to the newfound countries and so fulfill 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 suckered 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 Caboes. 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 Other and Wolfstan under King Alfred about the year 890, about the time when a Norse king, Harold Fairhair, was first seen in the Scotch and Irish seas. Their discovery of the White Sea, the North Cape, and the Gulfs of Bathnia and Finland, was followed up by many Norsemen such as Thorer Hund under St. Olaf in the next one hundred and fifty years, but Other's voyage was the first and chief of these adventures both in motive and result. He told his lord, King Alfred, that he dwelt northmost of all Norsemen 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 waist. So he went right north near the land. For three days he left the wasteland on the right and the wide sea on the left, as far as the whale-hunters ever go, end quote, and still he kept north three days more, to the North Cape of Europe, quote. Then the land bent right east, and with a west wind he sailed four days to the land bent south, and he sailed by it five days more to the Great River, the Dwyna, that lay up into the land, and where beyond the river it was all inhabited, end quote, the modern country of perm and archangel. Here he trafficked with the people the first he had met except the Fin-hunters since leaving his fjord. Besides his wish to see the country he was looking for walrus ivory and hides. The Finns and Bjarma men, men of archangel, it seemed to him spoke nearly the same language, but between his home and this Bjarma land no human being lived in any fixed dwelling, and all the North man's land was long and narrow and thinly peopled, decreasing in breath as it stretched northward from sixty to three days' journey. John Alfred told how O'there, 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, quote, where a great sea runs up into the land so vast that no man can see across it, end quote, whence in five days more he reached the coast, quote, from which the English came to Britain, end quote. Wolfstan, in the service of the same king, told him how he sailed in seven days from Sleswick to Trusso and the Vistula, having Vendland, or Pomerania and Prussia, on his right all the way. He described, quote, Fitland near the Vistula and Estland and Vendland and Estmir and the Ilfing running from the Trusso lake into Eastmir, end quote. 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 Wolfstan and O'there, 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 northeast 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 saved by Norsemen, 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, quote, went and fought with the folk on the banks of the Dhuina, end quote, and plundered them, and in 1026 Thorer 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, northwest and northeast, the Norsemen could and did make a definite advance into the unknown. Even the southwest 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 civilized west, through the Viking earldums in Cathnes, in the Orkneys and the Shetlins, 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 11th century, when a series of great defeats, by Brian Borru at Clontarf in 1014, by Godwine and Herald 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 colonized, but ruled and reorganized a good half of the British Isles. By the time of Alfred, the Viking principalities 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 AD 900, the pioneer of the Norse kings, Harold Fairhair, pursued his traitors, first to Shetlins and Orkneys, then to Cathnes, the Hebrides, and Man. His son, Eric, who followed him, ranged the northern seas from Archangel to Bordeaux, and so hackened the good in 936, and other Norse princes in 946, 961, 965, above all the two great kings Olaf, in 985 to 9, and 1009 to 14, fought and triumphed through most of the world as known to the Northmen. Thus, Frankland, England, Ireland, Scotland were brought into 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 reawakened 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 passed their time of migration, and where the Vikings could not, as in the far northeast and northwest, extend the area of civilization 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 seamanship. But from the Peace of Wedmore, 878, Alfred first of all began to build an English navy capable to meet and chase and run down the Viking keels, then established a yearly pilgrimage and almsgiving 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 Sigihelm and Ethelstan bore Alfred's gifts and letters to Jerusalem and to India, to the Christians of Santomé. The corresponding triumph of the King's scientific exploration, the discoveries of the White Sea and the Baltic, seemed to have happened nearer the end of the rain, somewhere before 895. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of Prince Henry the Navigator, the hero of Portugal and of modern discovery. This is a LibriVox recording. A LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dion Giants, Salt Lake City, Utah. Prince Henry the Navigator, by Charles Raymond Beasley, Chapter 3. The Crusades and Land Travel, Circa 1100 to 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 the first 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, 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 invisible 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 11th 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 Norsemen who, as pirates or conquerors or brothers, had settled among them. The long crusade that had gone on for 400 years in Spain and in southern Italy and in the Levant, which had raged round the islands of the Mediterranean or the passes of the Alps and Pyrenees, or the banks of the Loire and the Tiber, was now in 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 defense 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 Muslim champions threatened an ab 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 colonization. One, from the eleventh century, from the beginning of this period, all the greater pilgrims, Sir Wolf, the English merchant, King Sigurd of Norway, Abbott 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, too. 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 unrealized 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 Other, or Thor-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 Muslim rule. But the missionaries and merchants and travelers who followed the crusading armies to the Euphrates and crept along the caravan routes to Ceylon and the China Sea added further in Central Asia, Thessari, Arabum, Etdividas, India, 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 Trayhan 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 even larger share of their profits. Three, there was another side of the same problem, a still brighter hope for men who could dare to try it by finding a seapath to the Indian storehouse 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 gained 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 Baghdad to Cathay that the Vivaldi left Genoa to find an ocean way around Africa in 1281 to 91 with the hope of going to the parts of the Indies that Malicello 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 organized and pressed on to achievement by Henry and his Portuguese, 1412 to 1497. Four. 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 realized 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 13th century and the discoveries of Amalfi. But to return we must trace more definitely the preparation which has been generally described for the work of Prince Henry I in the pilgrim warriors and the travelers of the new age, merchants or preachers or sightseers who follow out the eastern land routes, next in the seaman 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 classes 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 seamanship 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 travelers of the 12th and 13th and 14th centuries who laid open that golden east to Europe and added inspiring knowledge to a dream and a tradition. And of these land travelers the first worth notice are Seywolf of Ustashur, Adelard of Bath and Daniel of Kiev, three of that host of peaceful pilgrims who followed the conquerors of the first crusade, 1096 to 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 Eldred of Ustashur and York who crowned William the Conqueror or Swen Godwinson or Thor Hund whose visits are all mere visits of penitents. 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 medieval Christendom had been formed and religious passion was more steady and less unworldly, the discoverer and observer blends with the pilgrim in all the records left to us. Seywolf was a layman and a traitor who went on a pilgrimage 1102 and became a monk at the instance of his confessor Wolfstein, Bishop of Ustashur. But though his narrative has been called an immense advance on all earlier guidebooks, it ends with the holy land and does not touch even the outlying pilgrim sites in Mesopotamia or Egypt visited and described by Sylvia or Fidelis. Starting some three years after the Latin capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the English traveler 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. His own way by monopoly 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 Romania on their way to Spain. These were the Colossians to whom St. Paul wrote. Thanks to Myra in Lycia, the port of the Adriatic as Constantinople is of the Aegean. Landing at Jaffa after a sail of 13 weeks, Seywolf was soon among the wonders of Jerusalem that had not grown less since Arkolf's day. At the head of the sepulcher church was the famous naval of the earth, now called Compass, which Christ measured with his own hands, working salvation in the myths 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 worship God, 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 home oak was still standing and where as pilgrims said, he sat and ate with God. But Seywolf himself did not go outside Palestine on this side. After traveling through Galilee and noting the house of St. Archie Triclin, St. 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 Muslim conquest, visitors had mostly come to Palestine through Egypt. The Christian conquest of Syria reopened the direct sea route as the conversion of Hungary and northeast Europe had reopened the direct land route one hundred years before, circa one thousand to eleven hundred. 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 classes of pilgrim crusaders in Seywolf's day were student devotees like Adelaard 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 travelers, 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 belonged to the same group and time and impulse as Seywolf himself and are clearly marked off from the great 13th century travelers who acted as pioneers of the western faith and empire rather than as camp followers of its armies. But except Abbot Daniel, circa 1106 and Rabbi Benjamin, circa 1160 to 73 who stand apart, none of our other pilgrim examples of 12th century exploration have anything original or remarkable about them. Abelard or Ethelard, the countryman of Seywolf and Willibald is still more the herald of Roger Bacon and of Neckam. He is a theorist far more than a traveler and his journey through Egypt and Arabia circa 1110 to 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 manuscripts that he returned to England to translate into Latin one of the chief works of Saracen astronomy, the Charismian 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. Abbot Daniel of Kiev in himself is a very ordinary and rather mendacious traveler, a harmless devout pilgrim as careless in all matters of fact as Antonin 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 steps and of that nation's readiness and purpose to expand Christian civilization in the East as the Franks after breaking through the Western Muslims were now doing medieval Russia, Russia before the Tartars after the North men was now a very different thing from the people fowler than dogs of the Arab explorers. The House of Rurik had guided and organized a nation second to none in Europe till it had fallen into the general lines of Christian development, jury trial and justices in a 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 passed 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 passed through Byzantium and by way of the Archipelago and Cyprus to Jaffa and Jerusalem describing roughly in verse or half miles the whole distance and that of every stage. His tone is much like say wolves 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 sulfur for the torments of hell lie under it. This however he did not see. Saracen Brigands prevented him and he learned 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 verse for miles from Caesarea half the distance given in the next chapter as between Auker 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 Nablus, Bethshen with Bashaun, Lydia with Romley, 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 Genesaret and falls into the sea of Tiberias passing by a large town called Decapolis from Mount Lebanon. Six rivers flow east into the lake of Genesaret and six west towards great Antioch so that this is called Mesopotamia or the land between the rivers and Abraham's Huron is between these rivers that feed the lake of Genesaret. Daniel has left us also an account of his visits to Marsaba 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 Bath Huron also retold by Daniel when the sun stood still while Joshua conquered King Og of Bashaun. It is not in outlook nor in knowledge nor even in the actual ground traversed that these later pilgrims show any advance on the chief of the earlier travelers. 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 to 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 Galicia and his attack on Muslim Lisbon some 40 years before it became the head and heart of Portugal like his exploits in the balleric show 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 are many others like Sigurd Robert of Normandy Godric the English pirate who fought his way through the Saracen fleets with a spear shaft for his banner Edgar the affluent grandson of Edmund Ironside the Dartmouth fleet of 1147 which we took 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 travelers 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 North men 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 realized 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 secretary 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 Baghdad and described those beyond from Baghdad to China but he wrote for his own people and none but they seem to have cared about him what he discovered circa 1160 to 73 was for himself and for Judaism and only his actual place in the 12th century makes him a forerunner 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 80 halls of the 80 kings called emperors from Tarquin to Peppen the father of Charles who first took Spain from the Saracens in the outskirts of the city is the palace of Titus who was deposed by 300 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 it's Hebrew trophies to 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 how to razor when he fled before King David with the old Roman tunnel between Naples and Pazewole built by Romulus who fear David and Joab with Apulia which is from King pool of Assyria in all this we have as it were Catholic mythology turned inside out David put into Italy when the West put Treyhan 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 school men the friars and the crusaders any more than the Buddhist records of missionary travel from China 1000 years before the religious passion 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 overflow of the Baghdad Caliphate by the Mongol Tardars 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 hounds and Turks and demons the papal court sent mission after mission to convert the Tardars who were wavering as men supposed between Islam and the church and with the first missionaries to the house of Genzies went the first Italian merchants who opened the court of the great Khan to Venice and Genoa as early as 1243 and Englishman is noticed as living among the Western Horde the conquerors of Russia but official intercourse begins in 1246 with John Diplano Carpini this man a Franciscan of Naples started in 1245 as the legate of Pope innocent the fourth to the Tardars took the northern overland route through Germany and Poland reached Kiev the metropolis of Russia through help of the Duke of Krakow and at last appeared in the camp of Beto on the Volga hence by the sea of Aral of moderate size with many islands to the court of Beto's brother the great Khan Kuiak himself where the Christian stranger found himself one of a crowd of 4000 envoys from every part of Asia 1246 after 16 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 Tardary in its widest sense from the Nipur 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 Tardars 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 Tardars and the simple truthfulness of the friar stands out in all the illusions that make his work so human his interviews with the Tardar chiefs and with brother travelers his dangers and difficulties from lettuce robbers and abandoned or guarded fairies his passage of the Nipur on the ice his last three weeks on trotting hacks over the steps we have gone a good way from Abbott 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 Rubroquiz of 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 Charsen over the dawn 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 dawn 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 sense through the iron gates of Durban 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 Rubroquiz reached the Alps of the Altei country where he found a small Nestorian lordship governed like the papal states by a priest who was at least one original of the great medieval phantom Prestor John crossing the great steps of eastern Tartary like the rolling sea to look at Rubroquiz at last reached the Mongol headquarters at Karakorum satisfied on the way that the Caspian had no northern outlet as Strabo and Isadora had imagined thence he made his way home without much fresh result though Rubroquiz is well called the most brilliant and literary of the medieval travelers 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 Karakorum 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 Rubroquiz was still among the Tartars Nicolo and Mateo Polo the uncles of the more famous Marco were trading twelve fifty five to sixty five 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 Kubla Khan then somewhere near the wall of China after a most friendly reception they were sent back to Europe with presence and a letter to Pope Clement IV offering a welcome and maintenance to Christian teachers Kubla had often questioned the polos of the western lands and now he asked for one hundred latins to show him the Christian faith for Christ he held to be the only God furnished with the imperial passport of the golden tablet our merchants made their way back to Acre in April twelve sixty nine they found the old Pope dead Gregory the 10th in his place and he showed a coolness in answering the cons requests but in twelve seventy one 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 near east and turned back just as Augustine of Canterbury tried to find a way out of the mission to the English that Pope Gregory the first laid upon him in five ninety seven for the church it was perhaps as momentous a time now as then the thirteenth century if it had ended in the Christianizing 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 realization into a world empire which did come at last for European civilization but not for Christendom the Polos however kept on their way northeast for more than one thousand days three years and a half till they stood in the presence of Kubla Khan beyond Gobi and the Great Wall and the mountain barriers of China in Cambalac or Pecan princess and crowned of city's capital their journey was first through Armenia lesser and greater then through Mosul Nineveh to Baghdad 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 twelve fifty eight 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 hear 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 Baghdad and wherever Christians dwell strikes him even now at the beginning of his travels much more when he finds their churches on the Hwang Ho and the Yangtze King declining indeed but still living to witness to the part which that great heresy had played as an intermediary between the further and the near east apart which history has never yet worked out entering Persia as traders the polos went naturally to or moves 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 passing from a zone of known home land through one of the enemies country known and only known as such failing to take the sea route at or moves for China as they had hoped our Italians were obliged to strike back northeast through Persia and the Pamir the cash guard district and the Gobi steps to Cathay and the pleasure domes of Kubla visiting Karakoram and the Altai country on the way by a turn due north in twelve seventy five they were in shank too the Zanidu of Coleridge the summer capital of Kubla Khan and not till twelve ninety two did they get leave to turn their faces to the west once more here at the polos became what might be called consulting engineers to the Mongol court Marco was even made in twelve seventy seven a commissioner of the imperial council and soon after sent upon government missions to union in extreme southwest China and to Yang Chao 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 centered round the six parts of Cathay and the nine parts of Mengi 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 due the travelers dwell on the public roads from Pekin or combo look through all the provinces the ten thousand royal ends upon the highways the two hundred thousand horses kept for the public service the wonderful speed of transit in the great cons and passages 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 test king 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 quantities 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 pull a singin and the caramaran are only less than the kings 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 Quincy and the other provincial capitals of Mengi and Cathay call out the unbounded admiration of the polos as of every other western traveler from the Muslim Ibn Battuta to the Christian friars of the fourteenth century Pekin two days journey from the ocean the residents of the court in December January and February in the extreme northeast of cafe had been lately rebuilt into a central square of twenty four miles in compass and twelve suburbs three or four miles long adjoining each of the twelve gates where merchants and strangers lived each nation with separate verses or storehouses where they lodged from this center to the land of Gog and Magog and the champagne land of Bargu the great con traveled every year in mid summer 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 Tibet on one side and to Tongquan on the other but greater even than Pekin Quincy or can say the city of heaven in southern China though no longer the capital even of a separate kingdom of Mengi was the crowning work of Chinese civilization it surpassed the other cities of Kubla as much as these overshadowed the Rome or Venice of the 13th century in the world there is not it's 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 canals adjoining twelve thousand bridges of stone there are ten marketplaces each half a mile square great storehouses 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 Mengi is paved with stone on each side and in the mess full of gravel with passages 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 con is used everywhere all the people except a few Nestorians and Muslims are idolaters so luxurious and so happy that a man would think himself in paradise it was only in recent years that Kubla or his general by and had captured Quincy and driven out the king of Mengi with his surroglio 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 you have heard on the approach of danger had fled on board the ships he had prepared to certain impregnable aisles in the ocean and if these impregnable islands may be identified with Zimpangu or Japan 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 1500 miles from the coast of Mengi now first discovered to Christian knowledge this country of Japan very great the people white of gentle manners idolaters in religion under a king of their own was attacked by Kubla'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 the expedition was as disastrous a failure as the old Athenian attack upon Sicily and was not repeated although fleets were sent by the great Khan after this into the southern seas which were supposed to have made a discovery of Papua if not of the Australian continent in this sea of China over against Mengi Marco reported from hearsay of mariners and expert pilots are 7,440 islands most of them inhabited where on grows no tree that yields not a pleasant smell spices lignum aloes and pepper black and white the ships of Zaitum the great Chinese mark for Indian trade knew this sea and its islands for they go every winter and return every summer taking a year on the voyage and all this though it is far from India and not subject to the great Khan but not only did Polo in these sections of his guidebook or memories of travel record the main features of a coast and ocean scarcely guest at by Europeans and flatly denied by Ptolemy and the main traditional school of Western geography in his service under Kubla and in his return by sea to Aden and Suez he opened up the eight provinces of Tibet the whole of southeast Asia from Kenton to Bengal and the great archipelago of further India four days journey beyond the Yang Sea King Marco entered the wide country of Tibet they inquished and wasted by the Khan for the space of 20 days journey and become a wilderness wanting inhabitants where wild beasts are excessively increased here he tells us of the yak oxen and great Tibetan dogs as great as asses of the musk deer and spices and salt lakes having beds of pearls and of the cruel and beast steel idolatry and social customs of the people still farther to the southwest commissioner polo came to the cinnamon river called brias on the borders of the province of kendo to the porcelain making districts of kerosene governed by Kubla sun and so to Bengal which borders upon India and where Marco laughs at the tattoo customs of flesh embroidery for the dying of full skins that's back to China the richest and most famous country of all the east where was peace so absolute that shops could be left open full of wares all night and travelers and strangers could walk day and night through every part untouched and fearing none but the polos worried even of the court favors and their celestial home they longed to come back to earth to frankland and christened them where life was so rough and poor and struggling but for whose sake they had come so far and braved so much but the con was hurt at the least hint of their wishes and it was only a fortunate chance that restored them to Europe 20 years after their outward start they were dismissed for a time and under solemn promise of return as the guides of an embassy in charge of a mongol bride for a Persian con living at to brezz and related to Kubla himself so in 1292 they embarked for India at Zaitam one of the fairest ports in the world where is so much pepper that what comes by Alexandria to the west is little to it and as it were one of a hundred then striking across the gulf of chinan for fifteen hundred miles and passing infinite islands with gold and much trade a gulf seeming in all like another world they reached the amber and after another run of the same distance java then supposed by mariners to be the greatest island in the world above three thousand miles round and under a king who pays tribute to none the con himself not offering to subject it because of the length and danger of the voyage one hundred miles southeast the fleet touched at java the less encompass about two thousand miles with abundance of treasure and spices ebony and brazil and so far to the south that the north star cannot be seen and none of the stars of the great bear here they were in great fear of those prudish man eaters with whom they traded for victuals and camfire and spices and precious stones being forced to stay for five months by stress of weather till they got away into the bay of Bengal the extreme point of european knowledge until this time where there are savages living in the deep sea islands with dogs heads and teeth as i was told all naked both men and women and living the life of beasts and amends sailing hence a thousand miles to the west adds marco is salon the finest island in the world twenty four hundred miles in circuit and once thirty six hundred as is seen in old maps but the north winds have made great part of it see again west four sixty miles to Malabar which is firm continent in india the greater and where the polos re entered as it were the horizon of western knowledge at the shrine of saint thomas the apostle of india here we must leave the venetians with only a bare mention of their homeward route from malabar by more filly and the valley of diamonds by kamari where they had a glimpse of the poll star once more and by guzzarat and cambe to socketra where marco in his stay heard and wrote down the first news ever brought to europe of the great isle magaster or madagascar and of zanzibar or zanzibar of polo's account of hindu customs self-immolation and especially sati of cast of the brahminical thread with one hundred and four beads by which to pray of their etiquette in eating drinking birth marriage and death only the simple fact can be noticed here that the first serious and direct christian account of india as of china is also among the most accurate and well judged and that both in what he says and what he leaves and said master marco is a true herodotus of the middle ages but not only does his account discover for europe the extreme east and south of asia in his last chapter he returns to the charters and after adding a few words on the nomads of the central plains gives us our first latin account of ciberia where are found great white bears black foxes and sables and where are great lakes frozen except for a few months in the year and crossed in sludges by the fur traders beyond this the obscure land reaches to the furthest north near which is russia where for the most of winter the sun appears not and the air is thick and dark as betimes in the morning with us where the men are pale and squat and live like the beasts and where on the east men come again to the ocean side and the islands of the falcons the work of marco polo is the high water mark of medieval land travel the extension of christendom after him was mainly by the paths of the sea the roman missions to the charters and to malabar vigorously and stubbornly pressed as they were ended in unrelieved collapse only by the revolt and resurrection of the russian kingdom did the european world permanently and markedly expand on the side of asia but a crowd of missionaries followed the first traitors to kathay and to mangy fryer odorick john da montay corvino john de cora statesman like marignoli the papal legate sightseers like mandeville followed these bishop jordanus of capua worked for years in kulam near cape comorran circa 1325 to 35 the martyrdom of four friars on april 1 1322 at tana in india became one of the great commemorations of the latin church there seemed no cause why christian missions which had won north and northeast europe should not win central and eastern asia whose people seemed as indifferent as agnostic as our own norse or english pagans the fame of the latin's says jordanus about 1330 and he is born out by marino sanuto is greater in india than among ourselves here our arrival is always looked for and said to be predicted in their books once gain egypt and launch a fleet even of two galleys on this sea and the battle is one as egypt could not be gained by arms it was turned by seamanship before polo returned from china the coasting of africa had begun and italian mariners were already in search of the longer way to the east but there is no work of land travel after that of mesur marco which really adds anything decisive to european knowledge before the 15th century the advance of trade intercourse between india and the italian republics the gradual liberation of russia the use made of the caravan routes by some of the most active of the western clergy are the chief notes of the time between the polos and prince henry and the flimsy fabrications of mandeville of all liars that type of the first magnitude would be fairly left without a word even in a minute history of discovery if he had not like tessius with herodotus won a hearing for himself and drawn men's minds away from the truth telling original that he travesty by the sheer force of impudence the indian travels of the italian nicolo conty and the russian merchant athanasius nicotin belong to a later time to the age of the portuguese voyages they are not part of the preparation for our central subject they are only a somewhat obscure parallel to that subject for in the later middle ages the chief interest lies elsewhere the expansion of christendom in the 14th century and still more in the 15th prince henry's own is the story of the ventures and the successes not so much of landsmen as of mariners end of chapter three