The Discovery of America Part 20

[Sidenote: The Nestorians.]

In the fourth and following centuries, Nestorian missionaries were very active in Asia, and not only made mult.i.tudes 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 seem 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.

[Sidenote: Effects of the Saracen conquests.]

[Sidenote: Constantinople in the twelfth century.]

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 mediaeval 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 sorely hara.s.sed 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 mediaeval trade through the n.o.ble 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.[319] 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.

[Footnote 319: Robertson, _Historical Disquisition_, p. 93; Pears, _The Fall of Constantinople_, p. 177,--a book of great merit.]

[Sidenote: The Crusades.]

[Sidenote: Barbarizing character of Turkish conquest.]

[Sidenote: General effects of the Crusades.]

In the days of its strength the Eastern Empire was the staunch bulwark of Christendom against the dangerous a.s.saults 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 reformation 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;[320] 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 Nicaea and actually had their outposts on the Marmora, it was high time for Christendom to rise _en ma.s.se_ in self-defence. 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 labour 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.[321] 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 a.s.sociated with the names of Giotto and Dante and Roger Bacon.

[Footnote 320: "It is difficult for the modern traveller who ventures into the heart of Asia Minor, and finds nothing but rude Kurds and Turkish peasants living among mountains and wild pastures, not connected even by ordinary roads, to imagine the splendour and rich cultivation of this vast country, with its brilliant cities and its teeming population." Mahaffy, _The Greek World under Roman Sway_, London, 1890, p. 229.]

[Footnote 321: The general effects of the Crusades are discussed, with much learning and sagacity, by Choiseul-Daillecourt, _De l'Influence des Croisades sur l'etat des peuples de l'Europe_, Paris, 1809.]

[Sidenote: The Fourth Crusade.]

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 r.e.t.a.r.ding 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.[322] 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.

[Footnote 322: They were taken from Chios in the fourth century by the emperor Theodosius, and placed in the hippodrome at Constantinople, whence they were taken by the Venetians in 1204. The opinion that "the results of the Fourth Crusade upon European civilization were altogether disastrous" is ably set forth by Mr. Pears, _The Fall of Constantinople_, London, 1885, and would be difficult to refute. Voltaire might well say in this case, "Ainsi le seul fruit des chretiens dans leurs barbares croisades fut d'exterminer d'autres chretiens. Ces croises, qui ruinaient l'empire auraient pu, bien plus ais.e.m.e.nt que tous leurs predecesseurs, cha.s.ser les Turcs de l'Asie."

_Essai sur les Moeurs_, tom. ii. p. 158. Voltaire's general view of the Crusades is, however, very superficial.]

[Sidenote: Rivalry between Venice and Genoa.]

The general effect of the Crusades upon Oriental commerce was to increase the amount of traffic through Egypt and Syria. Of this lucrative trade Venice got the lion's share, and while she helped 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 Palaeologus, at Nicaea, 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."[323] 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[324] 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 aegean and eastern Mediterranean. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their city was the most splendid and luxurious in all Christendom.

[Footnote 323: Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. lxxi.]

[Footnote 324: A papal dispensation was necessary before a commercial treaty could be made with Mahometans. See Leibnitz, _Codex Jur. Gent. Diplomat._, i. 489.]

[Sidenote: Centres and routes of mediaeval trade.]

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 unrivalled 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 armour from Milan, Austrian yew-wood for English long-bows, 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 fever-stricken Florence.

[Sidenote: Effects of the Mongol conquests.]

[Sidenote: Cathay.]

[Sidenote: Carpini and Rubruquis.]

[Sidenote: First knowledge of an eastern ocean beyond Cathay.]

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 (1206-1227) 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 that country 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.[325] 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."[326]

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 information const.i.tuted the first important leap of geographical knowledge to the eastward since the days of Ptolemy, who supposed that beyond the "Seres and Sinae" lay an unknown land of vast extent, "full of reedy and impenetrable swamps."[327] 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 bounded on the east, just as Europe was bounded on the west, by an ocean.

[Footnote 325: Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. p. cxvi.; _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. xlii.]

[Footnote 326: Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p. cx.x.x.; cf.

Humboldt, _Examen critique_, tom. i. p. 71. The complete original texts of the reports of both monks, with learned notes, may be found in the _Recueil de Voyages et de Memoires, publie par la Societe de Geographie_, Paris, 1839, tom. iv., viz.: _Johannis de Plano Carpini Historia Mongolorum quos nos Tartaros appellamus_, ed. M. d'Avezac; _Itinerarium Willelmi de Rubruk_, ed. F. Michel et T. Wright.]

[Footnote 327: Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. p. x.x.xix.; Ptolemy, i.

17. Cf. Bunbury's _History of Ancient Geography_, London, 1883, vol. ii. p. 606.]

[Sidenote: The data were thus prepared for Columbus;]

[Sidenote: but as yet n.o.body reasoned from these data to a practical conclusion.]

Here we arrive at a notable landmark in the history of the Discovery of America. Here from the camp of bustling 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.[328] 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 sh.o.r.es of Spain to the eastern sh.o.r.es of Asia cannot be so very great.[329] 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 accessible by land than at any time before or since, 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.

[Footnote 328: See my _Beginnings of New England_, chap. i. How richly suggestive to an American is the contemporaneity of Rubruquis and Earl Simon of Leicester!]

[Footnote 329: Roger Bacon, _Opus Majus_, ed. Jebb, London, 1733, p. 183.]

[Sidenote: The Polo brothers.]

[Sidenote: Kublai Khan's message to the Pope.]

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 Nicol 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 "Tartareans," and at the last moment refused to go. Nicol and his brother then set out in the autumn of 1271 to return to China, taking with them Nicol'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 travelled through Kerman, Khora.s.san, 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.

[Sidenote: Marco Polo and his travels in Asia.]

[Sidenote: First recorded voyage of Europeans around the Indo-Chinese peninsula, 1292-94.]

[Sidenote: Return of the Polos to Venice.]

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 service. His name is mentioned in the Chinese Annals of 1277 as a newly-appointed commissioner of the privy council.[330] 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 seadog, 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 from the port of Zaiton (Chinchow) early in 1292, and after long delays on the coasts of Sumatra and Hindustan, in order to avoid unfavourable 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 befel them as befel Ulysses, who, when he returned to his native Ithaca, was recognized by n.o.body." Their kinsfolk had long since given them up for dead; and when the three wayworn travellers 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 ident.i.ty. 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 st.i.tched up in those dresses in so artful a fashion that n.o.body 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."[331]

[Footnote 330: Pauthier's _Marco Polo_, p. 361; Yule's _Marco Polo_, p. li.]

[Footnote 331: Ramusio, _apud_ Yule's _Marco Polo_, vol. i. p.

x.x.xvii.]

[Sidenote: Marco Polo's book written in prison at Genoa, 1299.]