Part 2 (2/2)
Marco Polo's is thus one of the greatest names in the history of geography; it may, indeed, be doubted whether any other traveller has ever added so extensively to our detailed knowledge of the earth's surface. Certainly up to the time of Mr. Stanley no man had on land visited so many places previously unknown to civilised Europe. But the lands he discovered, though already fully populated, were soon to fall into disorder, and to be closed to any civilising influences. Nothing for a long time followed from these discoveries, and indeed almost up to the present day his accounts were received with incredulity, and he himself was regarded more as ”Marco Millione”
than as Marco Polo.
Extensive as were Marco Polo's travels, they were yet exceeded in extent, though not in variety, by those of the greatest of Arabian travellers, Mohammed Ibn Batuta, a native of Tangier, who began his travels in 1334, as part of the ordinary duty of a good Mohammedan to visit the holy city of Mecca. While at Alexandria he met a learned sage named Borhan Eddin, to whom he expressed his desire to travel.
Borhan said to him, ”You must then visit my brother Farid Iddin and my brother Rokn Eddin in Scindia, and my brother Borhan Eddin in China. When you see them, present my compliments to them.” Owing mainly to the fact that the Tatar princes had adopted Islamism instead of Christianity, after the failure of Gregory X. to send Christian teachers to China, Ibn Batuta was ultimately enabled to greet all three brothers of Borhan Eddin. Indeed, he performed a more extraordinary exploit, for he was enabled to convey the greetings of the Sheikh Kawan Eddin, whom he met in China, to a relative of his residing in the Soudan. During the thirty years of his travels he visited the Holy Land, Armenia, the Crimea, Constantinople (which he visited in company with a Greek princess, who married one of the Tatar Khans), Bokhara, Afghanistan, and Delhi. Here he found favour with the emperor Mohammed Inghlak, who appointed him a judge, and sent him on an emba.s.sy to China, at first overland, but, as this was found too dangerous a route, he went ultimately from Calicut, via Ceylon, the Maldives, and Sumatra, to Zaitun, then the great port of China. Civil war having broken out, he returned by the same route to Calicut, but dared not face the emperor, and went on to Ormuz and Mecca, and returned to Tangier in 1349. But even then his taste for travel had not been exhausted. He soon set out for Spain, and worked his way through Morocco, across the Sahara, to the Soudan. He travelled along the Niger (which he took for the Nile), and visited Timbuctoo. He ultimately returned to Fez in 1353, twenty-eight years after he had set out on his travels. Their chief interest is in showing the wide extent of Islam in his day, and the facilities which a common creed gave for extensive travel. But the account of his journeys was written in Arabic, and had no influence on European knowledge, which, indeed, had little to learn from him after Marco Polo, except with regard to the Soudan. With him the history of mediaeval geography may be fairly said to end, for within eighty years of his death began the activity of Prince Henry the Navigator, with whom the modern epoch begins.
Meanwhile India had become somewhat better known, chiefly by the travels of wandering friars, who visited it mainly for the sake of the shrine of St. Thomas, who was supposed to have been martyred in India. Mention should also be made of the early spread of the Nestorian Church throughout Central Asia. As early as the seventh century the Syrian Christians who followed the views of Nestorius began spreading them eastward, founding sees in Persia and Turkestan, and ultimately spreading as far as Pekin. There was a certain revival of their missionary activity under the Mongol Khans, but the restricted nature of the language in which their reports were written prevented them from having any effect upon geographical knowledge, except in one particular, which is of some interest. The fate of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel has always excited interest, and a legend arose that they had been converted to Christianity, and existed somewhere in the East under a king who was also a priest, and known as Prester John. Now, in the reports brought by some of the Nestorian priests westward, it was stated that one of the Mongol princes named Ung Khan had adopted Christianity, and as this in Syriac sounded something like ”John the Cohen,” or ”Priest,” he was identified with the Prester John of legend, and for a long time one of the objects of travel in the East was to discover this Christian kingdom. It was, however, later ascertained that there did exist such a Christian kingdom in Abyssinia, and as owing to the erroneous views of Ptolemy, followed by the Arabs, Abyssinia was considered to spread towards Farther India, the land of Prester John was identified in Abyssinia. We shall see later on how this error helped the progress of geographical discovery.
The total addition of these mediaeval travels to geographical knowledge consisted mainly in the addition of a wider extent of land in China, and the archipelago of j.a.pan, or c.i.p.angu, to the map of the world.
The accompanying map displays the various travels and voyages of importance, and will enable the reader to understand how students of geography, who added on to Ptolemy's estimate of the extent of the world east and west the new knowledge acquired by Marco Polo, would still further decrease the distance westward between Europe and c.i.p.angu, and thus prepare men for the voyage of Columbus.
[_Authorities:_ Sir Henry Yule, _Cathay and the Way Thither_, 1865; _The Book of Ser Marco Polo_, 1875.]
CHAPTER V
ROADS AND COMMERCE
We have now conducted the course of our inquiries through ancient times and the Middle Ages up to the very eve of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and we have roughly indicated what men had learned about the earth during that long period, and, how they learned it. But it still remains to consider by what means they arrived at their knowledge, and why they sought for it. To some extent we may have answered the latter question when dealing with the progress of conquest, but men did not conquer merely for the sake of conquest. We have still to consider the material advantages attaching to warfare. Again when men go on their wars of discovery, they have to progress, for the most part, along paths already beaten for them by the natives of the country they intend to conquer; and often when they have succeeded in warfare, they have to consolidate their rule by creating new and more appropriate means of communication.
To put it shortly, we have still to discuss the roads of the ancient and mediaeval worlds, and the commerce for which those roads were mainly used.
A road may be, for our purposes, most readily defined as the most convenient means of communication between two towns; and this logically implies that the towns existed before the roads were made; and in a fuller investigation of any particular roads, it will be necessary to start by investigating why men collect their dwellings at certain definite spots. In the beginning, a.s.semblies of men were made chiefly or altogether for defensive purposes, and the earliest towns were those which, from their natural position, like Athens or Jerusalem, could be most easily defended. Then, again, religious motives often had their influence in early times, and towns would grow round temples or cloisters. But soon considerations of easy accessibility rule in the choice of settlements, and for that purpose towns on rivers, especially at fords of rivers, as Westminster, or in well-protected harbours like Naples, or in the centre of a district, as Nuremberg or Vienna, would form the most convenient places of meeting for exchange of goods. Both on a river, or on the sea-sh.o.r.e, the best means of communication would be by s.h.i.+ps or boats; but once such towns had been established, it would be necessary to connect them with one another by land routes, and these would be determined chiefly by the lie of the land. Where mountains interfered, a large detour would have to be made--as, for example, round the Pyrenees; if rivers intervened, fords would have to be sought for, and a new town probably built at the most convenient place of pa.s.sage. When once a recognised way had been found between any two places, the conservative instincts of man would keep it in existence, even though a better route were afterwards found.
The influence of water communication is of paramount importance in determining the situation of towns in early times. Towns in the corners of bays, like Archangel, Riga, Venice, Genoa, Naples, Tunis, Ba.s.sorah, Calcutta, would naturally be the centre-points of the trade of the bay. On rivers a suitable spot would be where the tides ended, like London, or at conspicuous bends of a stream, or at junctures with affluents, as Coblentz or Khartoum. One nearly always finds important towns at the two ends of a peninsula, like Hamburg and Lubeck, Venice and Genoa; though for naval purposes it is desirable to have a station at the head of the peninsula, to command both arms of the sea, as at Cherbourg, Sevastopol, or Gibraltar. Roads would then easily be formed across the base of the peninsula, and to its extreme point.
At first the inhabitants of any single town would regard those of all others as their enemies, but after a time they would find it convenient to exchange some of their superfluities for those of their neighbours, and in this way trade would begin. Markets would become neutral ground, in which mutual animosities would be, for a time, laid aside for the common advantage; and it would often happen that localities on the border line of two states would be chosen as places for the exchange of goods, ultimately giving rise to the existence of a fresh town. As commercial intercourse increased, the very inaccessibility of fortress towns on the heights would cause them to be neglected for settlements in the valleys or by the river sides, and, as a rule, roads pick out valleys or level ground for their natural course. For military purposes, however, it would sometimes be necessary to depart from the valley routes, and, as we shall see, the Roman roads paid no regard to these requirements.
The earliest communication between nations, as we have seen, was that of the Phoenicians by sea. They founded factories, or neutral grounds for trade, at appropriate spots all along the Mediterranean coasts, and the Greeks soon followed their example in the aegean and Black Seas. But at an early date, as we know from the Bible, caravan routes were established between Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and later on these were extended into Farther Asia. But in Europe the great road-builders were the Romans. Rome owed its importance in the ancient world to its central position, at first in Italy, and then in the whole of the Mediterranean. It combined almost all the advantages necessary for a town: it was in the bend of a river, yet accessible from the sea; its natural hills made it easily defensible, as Hannibal found to his cost; while its central position in the Latian Plain made it the natural resort of all the Latin traders. The Romans soon found it necessary to utilise their central position by rendering themselves accessible to the rest of Italy, and they commenced building those marvellous roads, which in most cases have remained, owing to their solid construction.
”Building” is the proper word to use, for a Roman road is really a broad wall built in a deep ditch so as to come up above the level of the surface. Scarcely any amount of traffic could wear this solid substructure away, and to this day throughout Europe traces can be found of the Roman roads built nearly two thousand years ago. As the Roman Empire extended, these roads formed one of the chief means by which the lords of the world were enabled to preserve their conquests. By placing a legion in a central spot, where many of these roads converged, they were enabled to strike quickly in any direction and overawe the country. Stations were naturally built along these roads, and to the present day many of the chief highways of Europe follow the course of the old Roman roads. Our modern civilisation is in a large measure the outcome of this network of roads, and we can distinctly trace a difference in the culture of a nation where such roads never existed--as in Russia and Hungary, as contrasted with the west of Europe, where they formed the best means of communication. It was only in the neighbourhood of these highways that the fullest information was obtained of the position of towns, and the divisions of peoples; and a sketch map like the one already given, of the chief Roman roads of antiquity, gives also, as it were, a skeleton of the geographical knowledge summed up in the great work of Ptolemy.
But of more importance for the future development of geographical knowledge were the great caravan routes of Asia, to which we must now turn our attention. Asia is the continent of plateaux which culminate in the Steppes of the Pamirs, appropriately called by their inhabitants ”the Roof of the World.” To the east of these, four great mountain ranges run, roughly, along the parallels of lat.i.tude--the Himalayas to the south, the Kuen-Iun, Thian Shan, and Altai to the north. Between the Himalayas and the Kuen-lun is the great Plateau of Tibet, which runs into a sort of cul-de-sac at its western end in Kashmir. Between the Kuen-lun and the Thian Shan we have the Gobi Steppe of Mongolia, running west of Kashgar and Yarkand; while between the Thian Shan and the Altai we have the great Kirghiz Steppe. It is clear that only two routes are possible between Eastern and Western Asia: that between the Kuen-lun and the Thian Shan via Kashgar and Bokhara, and that south of the Altai, skirting the north of the great lakes Balkash, Aral, and Caspian, to the south of Russia. The former would lead to Ba.s.sorah or Ormuz, and thence by sea, or overland, round Arabia to Alexandria; the latter and longer route would reach Europe via Constantinople.
Communication between Southern Asia and Europe would mainly be by sea, along the coast of the Indies, taking advantage of the monsoons from Ceylon to Aden, and then by the Red Sea. Alexandria, Ba.s.sorah, and Ormuz would thus naturally be the chief centres of Eastern trade, while communication with the Mongols or with China would go along the two routes above mentioned, which appear to have existed during all historic time. It was by these latter routes that the Polos and the other mediaeval travellers to Cathay reached that far-distant country. But, as we know from Marco Polo's travels, China could also be reached by the sea voyage; and for all practical purposes, in the late Middle Ages, when the Mongol empire broke up, and traffic through mid Asia was not secure, communication with the East was via Alexandria.
Now it is important for our present inquiry to realise how largely Europe after the Crusades was dependent on the East for most of the luxuries of life. Nothing produced by the looms of Europe could equal the silk of China, the calico of India, the muslin of Mussul.
The chief gems which decorated the crowns of kings and n.o.bles, the emerald, the topaz, the ruby, the diamond, all came from the East--mainly from India. The whole of mediaeval medical science was derived from the Arabs, who sought most of their drugs from Arabia or India. Even for the incense which burned upon the innumerable altars of Roman Catholic Europe, merchants had to seek the materials in the Levant. For many of the more refined handicrafts, artists had to seek their best material from Eastern traders: such as sh.e.l.lac for varnish, or mastic for artists' colours (gamboge from Cambodia, ultramarine from lapis lazuli); while it was often necessary, under mediaeval circ.u.mstances, to have resort to the musk or opopanax of the East to counteract the odours resulting from the bad sanitary habits of the West. But above all, for the condiments which were almost necessary for health, and certainly desirable for seasoning the salted food of winter and the salted fish of Lent. Europeans were dependent upon the spices of the Asiatic islands. In Hakluyt's great work on ”English Voyages and Navigations,” he gives in his second volume a list, written out by an Aleppo merchant, William Barrett, in 1584, of the places whence the chief staples of the Eastern trade came, and it will be interesting to give a selection from his long account.
Cloves from Maluco, Tarenate, Amboyna, by way of Java.
Nutmegs from Banda.
Maces from Banda, Java, and Malacca.
Pepper Common from Malabar.
Sinnamon from Seilan (Ceylon).
Spicknard from Zindi (Scinde) and Lahor.
Ginger Sorattin from Sorat (Surat) within Cambaia (Bay of Bengal).
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