Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Information arrived slowly and in dribbles. For a short time during the 13th century the Mongol conquests made it possible for travellers to cross the overland routes to China in relative safety. Men like the French cleric William of Rubruk and the Venetian merchant Marco Polo spent several years in the Far East, returning with astounding tales of the wealth it contained. But with the disintegration of the Mongol Empire the Far East became inaccessible, and for more than a hundred years Europe’s only recourse was conjecture. The reports of travellers like Polo (themselves of dubious accuracy) were greeted with the same approval as those of Sir John Mandeville, whose fictitious 14th-century Travels described men with heads in their chests and eyes in their foreheads. In an age of hypothesis nothing could be ruled out.

  By the dawn of the 15th century Europe occupied a position of unique geographical ignorance. Islamic merchants had already established colonies as far afield as Madagascar and China, using maps and navigational instruments far more advanced than those in Europe. The Chinese, in turn, thanks to a series of expeditions under Admiral Zheng He during the early 1400s, had created a maritime network that extended from Japan (and possibly America) to East Africa, across which they sailed in the largest, most sophisticated ships in the world. To these two civilizations the concept of exploration was, if not exactly meaningless, something that did not concern them overmuch, for the simple reason that they knew, more or less, where everything was and where to obtain the goods they needed. In the grand scheme of things Europe was a crude and impoverished outpost of the known world – a fact of which its rulers and merchants were painfully aware. It was this sense of combined inferiority and frustration that made ‘discovery’ a peculiarly European phenomenon.

  The first problem European explorers faced was a basic one: where were they? Navigators had mapped the Mediterranean, the coasts of northern Europe and the Black Sea, using compasses to produce surprisingly accurate charts intersected by rhumb lines. Of the lands beyond these shores, however, they had minimal information. Where the rhumb lines stopped theology started, giving rise to mappaemundi, or ‘maps of the world’, that had nothing to do with cartography and everything to do with the Bible. Typically they followed a T-O pattern, the O being the circle of the globe, within which swam three continents: Asia (at the top), with Europe and Africa lying beneath it. The T was the waterways that separated them: the upright, between Europe and Africa, was the Mediterranean; the crosspieces were the rivers Nile and Don. Each of the continents was supposed to belong to one of Noah’s three sons and, to reinforce the point, Asia was often portrayed with a mountain atop which balanced a tiny ark. The schematic simplicity fooled nobody: Europe’s captains recognized that the earth was spherical and that if one sailed beyond a certain distance one would not fall off the edge. But for all they knew about their place in the world, they might as well have relied on the mappaemundi. It was commonly held, for example, that anyone venturing south of the equator would be boiled alive.

  Europe’s notion of discovery was tightly focused. Its rulers were intrigued by the theories of mapmakers and by reports of travellers such as Polo and Mandeville, but they had no particular desire to find new lands; what they wanted to do was reach the old; all they wanted from them was spice. A trader’s handbook of the time listed more than 288 luxury substances, ranging from silk and cotton to sugar and wax, precious stones, dyes and perfumes, but it was spice that commanded the highest premium – and not because it was a luxury but because it was an essential. Thanks to a shortage of winter fodder, Europeans had to kill most of their livestock before Christmas and, despite salting, the carcases soon became putrid. Spices were necessary to disguise the meat’s rank flavour, Indian pepper being the most basic requirement, followed by mace from Ceylon and cinnamon, mace and nutmeg from the Moluccas, in present-day Indonesia. These things were available from Venice and Genoa, which had a monopoly on trade with Egypt; Egypt, in turn, controlled all trade from the Far East. The mark-up was incredible: spices that sold for 3 Venetian ducats in India fetched 68 in Cairo and twice that much by the time it reached Venice. If mariners could bypass the middlemen and take a short-cut to China their fortunes were assured. All they had to do was find where that short-cut was.

  Surprisingly, the answer was supplied by the Middle East. For centuries the repository of classical learning, in 1406 or thereabouts it divulged Ptolemy’s Geography. A geographer of the second century AD, Claudius Ptolemaeus – to give him his Latin name – had not only drawn a map of the known world but had given it a scale, flattening the globe into a series of east-west lines (latitude) and north-south lines (longitude). His map was accurate within the Mediterranean but fuzzy thereafter; and although navigators could follow his latitude, they had no means of calculating the longitude. Nevertheless, armed with his map, Europe saw ways of avoiding the Muslim stranglehold. They were threefold: one could sail north over the Pole; west across the Atlantic; or east via a point where Africa might or might not end. Following the Aristotelian argument that 51 per cent of the world’s surface had to be above water to stop it from sinking, and that a southern landmass must therefore exist to keep the globe in balance, Ptolemy had connected Africa to a continent that reached to the South Pole. While accepting everything else Ptolemy said, Europeans were sceptical about his view of Africa. They agreed that a southern continent might exist, but they preferred that it be separate and that Africa be a large blob, extending not very far south, around which they could sail to China, avoiding the ‘torrid zones’ below the equator. One nation in particular thought the African route held promise: Portugal.

  In the 15th century Portugal was one of the smallest, most impoverished countries in Europe. It had barely one million inhabitants, of whom only 200 or so could be called educated. Yet it had a seafaring tradition and, above all, rulers of vision. Prince Henry the Navigator, and later Kings John II and Manoel I, pursued a policy of expansion that made it, for a while, the world’s greatest mercantile nation. Portuguese trading stations sprouted along the coast of Africa, west, south and east; they flourished in Arabia, India and, above all, the spice islands of the East Indies, disrupting the Muslim monopoly that had hitherto prevailed. The wealth that accrued was unbelievable. Pepper, for example, sold in Lisbon for 40 times its price in India, and up to 2,900 tons of the stuff arrived every year. However, fortune came at a cost: roughly half the 2,400 men who sailed annually for the east died either along the way or from tropical diseases once they had arrived. By some calculations, a tenth of the country’s population – or more than half its able-bodied workforce – perished in the quest. But the potential gain was worth the risk. According to the feudal system that operated not only in Portugal but in the whole of Iberia, a man had little chance of obtaining land unless he was an eldest son or a court favourite. For those favoured neither by birth nor position, the colonies were the only escape.

  While benefiting from spices, Portuguese merchants also instigated a less palatable trade in slaves. Seized in Africa, they were auctioned locally before being transported either to Portugal or to one of its overseas possessions. At first they were deposited on Madeira to work the island’s sugar plantations; but after the discovery and colonization of Brazil they were shipped to the other side of the Atlantic. Even hardened travellers were upset by the process. One man wrote vividly of the way in which families were divided to suit the tastes and wallets of prospective bidders: ‘As often as they had placed them in one part the sons, seeing their fathers in another, rose with great energy and rushed over to them; the mothers clasped their other children in their arms, and threw themselves flat on the ground with them; receiving blows with little pity for their own flesh, if only they might not be torn from them.’ But abhorrence could not be allowed to stand in the way of profit. From 1448, when the first group of 200 Africans came under the hammer, Portugal’s imperial and domestic economy relied on slave labour for almost 400 years. Other nations followed suit, Britain, France and Spain in particular
making free use of Africa’s population. It was not until the 1800s, by which time sailors could smell a slave ship long before they saw it, that popular revulsion brought the trade to an end.

  Spain, no less than Portugal, was determined to reach China, but it chose a different route. In 1492 Christopher Columbus took one of the greatest risks ever: he sailed west across the Atlantic. To explorers of every nationality, Arab and European alike, the Atlantic was horrible – the ‘green sea of darkness’, it was called. Using Ptolemy’s map, and his own calculations, Columbus decided that China could be no more than a few weeks’ journey from Spain. He found instead the West Indies – which he thought was an offshoot of Japan. Revered today as the discoverer of America, Columbus was in fact nothing of the sort. The nearest he came to the mainland was when he saw, from a distance, the mouth of the Orinoco. The true discoverers were the hundreds of conquistadores who came in his wake: men like Cortés in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, De Soto and Coronado in Texas and Louisiana, who surged inland in search of gold and silver.

  The Spanish conquest of America was swift, brutal and extremely profitable. It was also never-ending and, to some, frankly tiresome. As one 16th-century chronicler wrote, ‘Oh God, what excessive labours for a life as short as man’s!’ But God smiled upon the conquistadores because, as they thought, they were doing His work. Their aims – and those of Europe as a whole – were encapsulated by Bernal Díaz, a conquistador who wrote openly about the reasons he went to America: ‘to serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in the darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do’. Here was the be-all and end-all of exploration: to make money and to spread the word.

  Evangelism was pronounced in the Americas, large tracts of land being handed to missionaries from one of the many Holy Orders in which Europe abounded, but it was no less urgent elsewhere. In the 12th century a letter had reached the Pope, purporting to come from a Christian ruler named Prester John. Without explaining precisely where his kingdom was, other than somewhere to the east, John wrote that he commanded a powerful army and was willing to combat the Muslim threat. It was a hoax, emanating probably from a Greek or Byzantine cleric, but it pandered artfully to Europe’s sense of insecurity. One of the first signs of Europe’s rebirth came in the 12th century, when its rulers formed an alliance to seize the Holy Land for Christianity. Initially they were successful, conquering the entire eastern Mediterranean seaboard. But the occupation of Outremer, as they called it, was short-lived. Bit by bit, the Muslims regained control of the lost territory until, by the time Marco Polo left for China in 1271, there was only one small Crusader kingdom clinging to Jerusalem; when he returned in 1295 that too had been overwhelmed. The loss was not easily forgotten: every captain who sailed east thereafter did so in the hope of finding Prester John. When Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, for example, he was asked why he had made the long journey. ‘We come,’ he replied, ‘in search of Christians and spices.’ But Prester John was not to be found in India or Asia. In the end, with some disappointment, explorers decided that the only possible candidate was the king of Ethiopia, who was indeed a Christian, although an impoverished and powerless one. They gave the puzzled man a medal to confirm his status and let the matter drop.

  Iberia’s successes left northern Europe at a disadvantage. Excluded by papal decree from encroaching on either the West or East Indies, England, Holland and France sought their own routes to China. Three possible avenues presented themselves: the first, and shortest, was to sail directly over the North Pole, following the widely held belief that it comprised an open, temperate sea surrounded by ice. Should the pack ice prove impenetrable (as it did), there remained two other possibilities: to follow its southern fringes either east or west. The North-East Passage, running above Siberia, was for a while considered the most promising. After several disastrous attempts, however, navigators and merchants went in search of the North-West Passage.* This too eluded them, but it produced an unexpected side benefit: the colonization of North America. In 1609, after a remarkable journey in search of both the North-East and North-West Passages, the English navigator Henry Hudson claimed the future New York for his Dutch paymasters. His discovery prompted others to sail west, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, who established a colony on the east coast at a place he named Virginia. The colony failed, but it was soon replaced by others. In the interim Europe was transformed by exotic plants – tobacco, pumpkins and potatoes – that Raleigh had transplanted from the New World. After a while northern Europeans gave not a fig for the papal decree that had split the world between Spain and Portugal. They went forth and conquered. Soon it was hard to distinguish between explorers and buccaneers, men like Sir Francis Drake not only circumnavigating the world but shelling every Iberian settlement and ship they encountered.

  By the 17th century Europeans had ascertained the presence and rough outline of every habitable continent – including Australia, whose southern coast, along with the northern tip of New Zealand, was charted by Abel Janszoon Tasman between 1642 and 1644 – and, thanks to the printing press, had made their discoveries available to anyone who could read. No longer were they the ignoramuses of the world; they were its masters. In the past 300 years their continent had experienced a revival so comprehensive that it was hard to equate it with the place that had believed in men with no heads and a self-basting equator. They had asserted their authority in every discipline from art to astronomy, and in large measure they had done so because of explorers. The wealth, the knowledge and even the plants that early travellers brought home contributed to Europe’s revival. Encapsulating the mood of what would later be dubbed the Renaissance, an Italian scholar wrote: ‘Thank God it has been permitted to us to be born in this new age, so full of hope and promise.’

  TO THE HEART OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE

  Marco Polo (1271–95)

  ‘The greatest joy a man can have is victory: to conquer one’s enemy’s armies, to pursue them, to deprive them of their possessions, to reduce their families to tears, to ride on their horses, and to make love to their wives and daughters.’ Whether Genghis Khan actually said these words is uncertain. There is no doubt, however, that they represented a philosophy to which he subscribed wholeheartedly. In 1207 he led his horsemen out of Mongolia on the most ambitious and brutal programme of conquest the world has ever seen. The rapidity with which the Mongols advanced was astonishing: by 1223 they had overrun Persia and were ensconced in the Crimean Peninsula; by 1241 they had conquered Moscow, defeated the Poles, swept through Moravia and Silesia, and occupied Hungary; by 1261 they had taken Syria and were at the borders of Egypt; 19 years later, turning in their tracks, they completed the conquest of China, bringing a nation of 90 million people under their control. In due course they occupied northern India, and were only prevented from taking Japan – where they deployed gunpowder artillery for the first time in history – by a storm that wrecked their fleet and entered Japanese legend as the ‘Divine Wind’, or kamikaze.

  The Mongols relied for their success on mobility, tactical skill and, above all, ferocity. Wherever they went they slaughtered indiscriminately, casualties rising as they drove a terrified populace before them: 700,000 died at Merv, 1,600,000 at Herat, 1,747,000 at Nishapur. No quarter was given, no prisoners taken. At Nishapur the survivors were decapitated, and pyramids made of their skulls – one each for men, women and children. Even the dogs and cats were killed. Then the buildings were razed. The city simply ceased to exist. If the numbers of dead were exaggerated, it served the Mongols’ needs very satisfactorily, for this was a holocaust based on fear. There was no refuge to be found even in religion: when Baghdad fell, among the two million deaths recorded by one 14th-century historian was that of the Caliph, spiritual leader of Islam. As Genghis sneered, ‘I am the flail of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.’

  By 1260 the Mongols had created the largest land-based empire in the history of the world, st
retching from the Pacific to the Dnieper River and from Siberia to the Straits of Malacca. It was not a particularly cohesive empire, being divided into autonomous khanates, the two largest being the Ilkhanate of Persia and the Empire of the Great Khan, which comprised China and the Mongolian heartland. Nor did it last very long: by the 14th century the various khans had asserted their independence, adopted the customs of the civilizations they had overrrun, and soon all was much as it had been before. For a short while in the mid-13th century, however, Asia was united in a terror-inspired Pax Mongolica that allowed unprecedented freedom of movement. It was now possible for Europeans to travel unhindered to the easternmost parts of the continent – an opportunity they did not hesitate to seize. Among the first were two Franciscan missionaries, Giovanni di Piano Carpini, who left for the Empire of the Great Khan in 1245, and William of Rubruk, who followed him eight years later. They made no converts and found, to their surprise, that the Mongols already knew about Christianity, there being a sizeable community of Nestorians, as well as several Europeans who had either been taken captive or had made their own way to the Khan’s court,* but they did return with written records of their journey. Possibly inspired by these accounts, two Venetian merchants, the brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, embarked in 1260 for the Far East.