Ideas

by Peter Watson

  In Roman times, knowledge was advanced mainly as a result of trade. The Roman demand for silk meant that both the overland Silk Road and the sea routes to China were discovered and expanded. How much so may be judged from a navigational guidebook written by an anonymous Greek merchant from Alexandria around AD 100. Known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the text describes exploration of the east coast of Africa, as far south as Raphta (about 1,500 miles), then the northern shores of the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea to the Indus, and then on to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where, further east, the information becomes vague. But the anonymous Greek showed himself as aware of the Ganges and of Thinae, the land of silk (in other words, China), beyond. Silk, as was mentioned earlier, was responsible for much of the increased geographical knowledge of the world and this prompted constant updatings. The next, after Eratosthenes, was Claudius Ptolemy in AD 140.

  Though Ptolemy had much more information at his fingertips than Eratosthenes, not all of it was accurate and he too was responsible for some of the misconceptions that Columbus took with him on his voyages. It was Ptolemy who introduced the idea of longitude, even though there was no real way at that time of calculating where the lines should go. His idea was to divide the world into equal squares that would aid exact location. In addition to China in his maps he also included more information about the Atlantic, where the Fortunate Islands were rumoured to be located off the coast of Africa.14

  After Ptolemy, geography suffered a decline, as did many areas of thought during the era of Christian fundamentalism. In the sixth century Cosmas, a seafaring merchant and monk, argued that the earth was a rectangle. He did this on the basis of the book of Exodus in which God called Moses up to Mount Sinai and revealed to him many secrets. Instructing Moses to build a tabernacle, he said it should be a copy of the figure of the world, which to Cosmas implied that the world was tabernacle-shaped.15 This in time led to a ‘Christian topography’ where earth was joined to heaven at its rim, with Paradise in the east, across the sea, on a ‘sunburst’ island near heaven.16 In fact, said Cosmas, the earth, though flat, was slanting, which explained the mountains, and why the sun disappeared at night (the earth, he said, was only forty-two miles across). He said it also explained why rivers running north flowed more slowly than those running south (they were going uphill). Cosmas said the earth must be flat because if it were round people on the other side would be living upside down, a self-evident impossibility. But he didn’t find it impossible that, under his system, the Nile was actually flowing uphill.

  To early Christians–the Church Fathers in particular–the location of Paradise was of major importance. Since, according to Christian belief, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers originated in Paradise, the location and layout of the two rivers had to be accommodated to the early belief that Paradise was itself situated at the eastern end of the world. One solution was to argue that the rivers of Eden flowed under the earth for some way before surfacing. But this was no real help because it meant that man could not follow the rivers to Paradise.17 Another problem was the whereabouts of the monstrous races described in the scriptures, in particular the races of Gog and Magog who had invaded the ancient world from the north and, according to tradition, would reappear. Where exactly were they? Yet another difficulty was the centre of the earth. Two psalms and two references in the book of Ezekiel identified Jerusalem as that centre and this is how the city is portrayed in many medieval maps.18 It soon became clear that the centrality of Jerusalem was difficult to maintain.

  The first major adventurer of the Atlantic, after Pytheas, and the first Christian explorer in history, was the Irish monk known as St Brendan the Navigator. Born about 484 near Tralee and ordained priest in 512, Brendan grew up with the tradition that many Irish fishermen had been blown out to sea and returned with stories about islands off to the west in the ocean.19 Brendan, we are told, was more deliberate. Seeking the ‘Land Promised of the Saints’, he and sixteen fellow monks embarked in 539 or thereabouts on an epic voyage of voyages. ‘The story of his travels was not written down for another four hundred years, during which time many other voyages were made into the Atlantic by other monks. Yet Brendan’s reputation was such that the voyages of the others were attributed to him…[He and his companions] had no compass but knew the stars and watched the birds on migration. They sailed west for fifty-two days when they came to an island where they disembarked. There was only a dog to welcome them but it led them to a building where they rested. As they were leaving, an islander appeared who gave them food. They were blown about in all directions before coming to an island with herds of pure white sheep and streams full of fish. They decided to winter there and were made welcome at a monastery. They moved on to a small barren island but as they cooked their meal the island shook and, as they scrambled for their boat, sank. As Brendan explained, it was a whale.’20

  Over the next seven years Brendan visited many other islands in the Atlantic. There was the Island of Strong Men, covered with a carpet of white and purple flowers; they sailed around a great crystal column floating in the sea; and passed a nearby island peopled with ‘gigantic smiths’ who hurled lumps of burning slag at them. (This, they decided, was the outer boundary of Hell.) On one of their northern trips they caught sight of a mountain that shot flames and smoke into the sky.21 But nowhere could they find the Land of Promise that was the object of their voyages. At length, the procurator on the Island of Sheep agreed to take them to the Land of Promise. It took forty days, through a bank of dense fog or cloud. They went ashore and explored the land for another forty days before coming to a river that was too deep to cross. Returning to their boats, they voyaged back through the cloud bank, and then on home.

  There has been much speculation about these ‘discoveries’. The Faeroes derive their name from a Danish word for sheep.22 The Island of Strong Men with its purple and white flowers appears to have been the Canaries, or maybe the West Indies. The crystal column can only have been an iceberg, the nearby Land of Giant Smiths could have been Iceland, while the flame-spouting island in the north fits with tiny Jan Mayen island. And the Land of Promise? Given the cloud banks, it could just have been North America. In any event, this story was told and retold till the Land of Promise became St Brendan’s Isle, which in turn became a persistent feature of maps of the Atlantic down to 1650, though its exact position was never settled.23

  In the tenth century the Norwegians had a different perspective. If you draw a line west of the Norwegian mainland you find the Shetlands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin island. Iceland had been discovered early on, and not just by Irish monks–it was the Norwegian practice to banish recalcitrants to Iceland as exiles. Anyone blown off course on their way to Iceland had a chance of seeing Greenland, which was settled around 986. There they raised cattle and sheep and hunted walrus and polar bears. They also explored some lands to the south, though ‘explore’ is perhaps too deliberate a word for Bjarni Herjolfsson, a young Icelandic merchant, who was blown off course on his way back from Greenland and driven south, through a dense fog. He came to a hilly land, green with forests, that was nothing like Greenland or Iceland. After Bjarni had made it back to Greenland, and excited others with what he had seen, a young man called Leif Eiriksson set out to emulate him in 1001.

  He came first to barren lands–what he called Helluland, Flatstone Land, or Slab-Land. Farther south he rediscovered the forest landscape Bjarni had seen–this he called Markland, or Forest Land. And further south still he came to a grape- or berry-bearing land, which he called Vinland, where he wintered. Others followed Leif, but they all found the natives, which they called Skraelings, hostile and were eventually either killed or driven back. Adam of Bremen’s account of Vinland, written in 1070, is regarded as authentic and, in 1117, a papal legate from Greenland visited Vinland, which implies that a community of souls existed there, at least for a time (in 1960 buildings were excavated in Newfoundland that resembled those in Greenland and were dated by C1
4 to the eleventh century). Papal records at Rome indicate the memory of Greenland existed there at the end of the fifteenth century.24

  In the other direction Asia was being fleshed out. ‘The most popular notion about Asia was that somewhere in this great continent there was a powerful Christian ruler named Prester John, who was believed to be so great that kings waited upon him at table.’ But he was never found, despite many epic voyagers of explorers and travellers (some think this was a corrupted legend originating with Alexander the Great). The first of the three great travelogues of the Middle Ages was by John of Plano Carpini, whose History of the Mongols begins in 1245, at Easter. Setting out from Lyons, John travelled on behalf of the pope. As far as Kiev he travelled in a steady, even stately way–he was overweight and riding wasn’t easy. From Kiev, however, he found that the Mongols had established a highly efficient communications system, with post stations along the road that enabled them to change horses five or six times a day.25 In this fashion he travelled by way of the Crimea, the Don, Volga and Ural rivers, north of the Aral Sea and then across Siberia to Karakorum, south of lake Baikal, where the Great Khan held his court. John was well received, had an audience with the Khan, and was presented with a fox-skin coat by the Khan’s mother, very useful on his return journey, since the roads were often covered in deep snow and they had to sleep in the open air. When he arrived home, his book based on his travels was a great success though, as he was at pains to point out, he had found no mention anywhere of Prester John.

  Nonetheless, his journey added a great deal to knowledge about the East and the History of the Mongols was circulated throughout Europe (the English word ‘horde’, often used in connection with the Mongols, derives from the Turkish ordu, meaning ‘camp’). For his part, the pope decided to send a preacher to Karakorum, in the hope of converting the Great Khan. The man chosen, William of Rusbruck, set out in 1253 and was disappointed to find that the Khan had no interest whatsoever in being converted.26 However, while he was in Karakorum he observed several other Europeans, including a goldsmith from Paris, a French woman who had been abducted from Hungary and an Englishman, plus several Russians and some travellers from Damascus and Jerusalem. John of Plano Carpini had stimulated an interest in Asia among Europeans.

  That interest was greatest in Venice, for its merchants had traditionally maintained good links with Arab/Muslim traders, who received goods from further east. This is why the Polo brothers, Nicolo and Maffeo, decided to make their way across Asia in 1260. This first trip was a great success because the Mongol ruler of the time, the great Kublai Khan, was as interested in Europe as they were in Asia and sent them back as his ambassadors. When they returned east, in 1271, they took with them Marco, the seventeen-year-old son of Nicolo. This journey turned into one of the great epic voyages of all time. They followed the old Silk Road–fifty-two days of travel–until they reached Kashgar and Yarkand on the edges of China. There they crossed the desert and finally reached Kanbalu (the modern Beijing), where the Khan’s capital had moved to, from Karakorum. Marco Polo was entranced by Kanbalu; he described the city as ‘greater than the mind can comprehend…no fewer than a thousand carriages and pack horses, loaded with raw silk, make their entry daily; and gold tissues and silks of various kinds are manufactured to an immense extent.’27

  Like his father before him, Marco was an astute trader, with a keen market sensibility, and like his father he became a favourite of the Khan ruler. For fifteen years he was sent as an ambassador all over China and the East.28 In fact, the Polos only returned home when a marriage contract was arranged between Kublai Khan and the ruler of Persia under the terms of which a young bride was to be sent west. A convoy of fourteen ships was made ready and the Polos were part of the bride’s protective party. The ships left from Zaiton (modern Amoy) on the Pacific coast (which the Polos thought extended around the world to Europe) but first they travelled via Kinsai, modern Hangchow, which was another fantastic experience–a hundred miles in circumference, with ten major markets and twelve thousand bridges. ‘Every day forty-three loads of pepper, each weighing 243 pounds, moved through the markets of Kinsai.’29 From the sailors on the ships of the convoy, Marco heard about Zipangu (Japan), which, he was told, was about 1,500 miles off the mainland (in fact it is 600 miles from Shanghai and 200 miles from Korea). When the Polos finally reached home, their friends were astonished, imagining that they had been long dead. After Marco wrote up his account of his travels, The Description of the World, no one at first believed him, and he was given the nickname Il Milione, because of the ‘tall tales’ he had fallen into the habit of telling (in fact he had a ghost writer, Rustichello of Pisa). And yet, the limits of Asia had been reached by the Polos, and they had seen a vast new ocean.

  The third great traveller of the Middle Ages was the Arab, Ibn Battuta. He left his home in Tangier in 1325 aiming, in the first instance, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Once there, however, he decided to keep going. He travelled down the coast of east Africa, then up into Asia Minor, before cutting through central Asia to Afghanistan and India. Well received in India (as a qadi, a kind of judge, he was an educated man), Ibn Battuta lived there for seven years and, like Marco Polo before him, was appointed as an ambassador, in his case to the sultan of Delhi. On his behalf Ibn Battuta undertook a trip to China. He had many adventures along the way, including being attacked, robbed and left for dead, but he arrived in China in either 1346 or 1347, where he found many Muslims in the port cities, who were not at all surprised to see him. Returning home, he next travelled in Spain, then took off into west Africa, as far as the Niger river, where again he was well received by the Muslim Negroes. His travels became the basis for geographical, astronomical and navigational studies taught in the Muslim centres of learning in Cordova and Toledo. These traditions played a big role in shaping the ideas of Columbus.30

  Columbus’ mental horizon was thus determined at least in part by these experiences of early travellers. Travel was arduous, and frequently dangerous, but long–very long–journeys were made, and knowledge about the world was expanding sufficiently to whet the appetite of people like the Genoese general. However, there were many other influences on Columbus’ mind besides the voyages of his predecessors. Foremost among them were the mappae mundi, or Christian maps of the world. In Columbus’ entry in his journal for 24 October 1492, he writes of Cuba: ‘The Indians of these islands and those whom I carry with me in the ships give me to understand by signs, for I do not know their language, it is the island of Cipangu, of which marvellous things are recounted; and in the spheres which I have seen and in the drawing of mappemondes, it is this region.’31 These mappae mundi arrived with Christianity–indeed, they were one of the agents in the spread of the religion. In the gospel of St Matthew, for example, the Apostles were commanded to preach ‘to all the nations’ and so geography was given a religious importance. As Valerie Flint says, mappae mundi were, ‘for the greater part, less geographical descriptions than religious polemics; less maps than a species of morality’.32 These maps took passages from Revelation, the gospels, the Psalter and other books of the Bible as their principal guides. ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ in the book of Ezekiel, ‘This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries round about her.’ Jerusalem was therefore placed at the physical centre of the world. In the same way, east was placed at the top of the map because that privileged position contained Paradise which, according to Genesis, was in the east, with the four rivers of Eden pouring out of it.33 The habitable world was divided into three continents, in accordance with God’s ‘delivery’ of the dry land to Noah three days after the Flood.34 These lands were often drawn as a circle, surrounded by ocean, in which the main inland waterways were in the form of a capital T. Leonardo Dati (1360–1425) was the first to describe these as ‘T-O’ maps, in his poem, La Sfera.35 Other matters that needed to be included in the mappae mundi were the Magi, who came from somewhere in the east, Prester John, and the monstrous
races, which were to become extremely popular among mapmakers. India, in particular, was seen as home to many monsters. There could be found people with the heads of dogs, whose feet faced backwards, whose eyes, noses and mouths were in their chests, or who had three rows of teeth. India was also renowned for having ‘a great pepper forest’. As time went by, mapmakers appear to have shown some awareness of the discoveries of travellers. The Caspian Sea, for example, no longer opens into a great northern ocean but is completely surrounded by land. The number of islands off the mainland of China also increased, in deference to the report of Marco Polo. The so-called Catalan Atlas, drawn up in 1375, pictured the islands of the Atlantic–Madeira and the Azores–with tolerable accuracy, India is clearly a peninsula, and some of the larger islands in the Indian Ocean are marked. China is in the extreme east, with some of its cities shown.