The Thirteenth Part 36

But quite apart from the poetry of them, from the practical side much can be said which even the most matter of fact of men will appreciate.

Here, for instance, are a series of paragraphs from the history of the Middle Ages by George Was.h.i.+ngton Greene, which he confesses to have taken chiefly from the French, [Footnote 33] which will make clear something of the place these great expeditions should be considered as holding in the history of democracy and of liberty:

[Footnote 33: New York, Appleton, 1867.]

"Christendom had not spent in vain its treasures and its blood in the holy wars. Its immense sacrifices were repaid by immense results, and the evils which these great expeditions necessarily brought with them were more than compensated for by the advantages which they procured for the whole of Europe.

"The Crusades saved Europe from the Mussulman invasion and this was their immediate good. Their influence was felt, too, in a manner less direct, but not less useful. The Crusades had been preached by a religion of equality in a society divided by odious distinctions.

All had taken part in them, the weak as well as the strong, the serf and the baron, man and woman, and it was by them that the equality of man and woman, which Christianity taught, was made a social fact.

St. Louis declared that he could do nothing without the consent of his queen, his wife. It was from this period that we must date that influence of woman which gave rise to chivalric courtesy, the first step towards refinement of manners and civilization. The poor, too, were the adopted children of the Christian chivalry of the Crusades.

The celebrated orders of Palestine were inst.i.tuted for the protection of poor pilgrims. The Knights of the hospitals called the poor their masters. Surely no lesson was more needed by these proud barons of the Middle Ages than that of charity and humility.

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"These ideas were the first to shake the stern despotism of feudality, by opposing to it the generous principles of chivalry which sprang all armed from the Crusades. Bound to the military orders by a solemn vow--and in the interests of all Christendom--the knight felt himself free from feudal dependence, and raised above national limits, as the immediate warrior and servant of the united Christendom and of G.o.d. Chivalry founded not upon territorial influence, but upon personal distinction, necessarily weakened n.o.bility by rendering it accessible to all, and diminis.h.i.+ng the interval which separated the different cla.s.ses of society. Every warrior who had distinguished himself by his valor could kneel before the king to be dubbed a knight, and rise up the equal, the superior even, of powerful va.s.sals. The poorest knight could sit at the king's table while the n.o.ble son of a duke or prince was excluded, unless he had won the golden spurs of knighthood. Another way by which the Crusades contributed to the decay of feudalism was by favoring the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of serfs, even without the consent of their masters. Whoever took the cross became free, just as every slave becomes free on touching the soil of England or France.

"The communities whose development is to be referred to the period of the Crusades, multiplied rapidly; the n.o.bility gladly granting charters and privileges in exchange for men and money. With the communities the royal power grew, and that of the aristocracy decreased. The royal domain was enlarged, by the escheating of a great number of fiefs which had been left vacant by the death of their lords. The kings protected the communities, favored their enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, and employed them usefully against insubordinate va.s.sals. The extension of the royal power favored the organization of the nation, by establis.h.i.+ng a principle of unity, for till then, and with that mult.i.tude of masters, the nation had been little else than an agglomeration of provinces, strangers to one another, and dest.i.tute of any common bond or common interest. The great va.s.sals, themselves, often united under the royal banner, became accustomed during these distant expeditions to submission and discipline, and learned to recognize a legitimate authority; and if they lost by this submission a part of their {391} personal power, they gained in compensation the honorable distinctions of chivalry.

"But it was not the national feeling alone which was fostered by the Crusades. Relations of fraternity, till then wholly unknown, grew up between different nations, and softened the deep-rooted antipathy of races. The knights, whom a common object united in common dangers, became brothers in arms and formally formed permanent ties of friends.h.i.+p. That barbarous law which gave the feudal lord a right to call every man his serf who settled in his domains was softened.

Stranger and enemy seemed to be synonymous, and 'the Crusaders,' say the chroniclers of the times, 'although divided by language, seemed to form only one people, by their love for G.o.d and their neighbor.'

And without coloring the picture too warmly, and making all due allowance for the exaggerations which were so natural to the first recorders of such a movement, we may say that human society was founded and united and Europe began to pa.s.s from the painful period of organization, to one of fuller and more rapid development."

Here in reality modern democracy had its rise, striking its roots deep into the disintegrating soil of the old feudalism whence it was never to be plucked, and though at times it languished it was to remain ever alive until its luxuriant growth in recent times.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

ANIMALS FROM BESTIARIUM, THIRTEENTH CENTURY MS.

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XXV

GREAT EXPLORERS AND THE FOUNDATION OF GEOGRAPHY.

Geography is usually considered to be quite a modern subject. The idea that great contributions were made to it in the Thirteenth Century would ordinarily not be entertained. America was discovered at the end of the Fifteenth Century. Knowledge of the East was obtained during the Sixteenth Century. Africa was explored in the Nineteenth and a detailed knowledge of Asia came to us in such recent years that the books are still among the novelties of publication. Our knowledge of Persia, of Northern India, of Thibet, and of the interior of China are all triumphs of Nineteenth Century enterprise and exploration. As a matter of fact, however, all portions of the East were explored, the Capital and the dominions of Jenghis Khan described, Lhasa was entered and the greater part of China thoroughly explored by travelers of the Thirteenth Century, whose books still remain as convincing evidence of the great work that they accomplished. This chapter of Thirteenth Century accomplishment is, indeed, one of the most interesting and surprising in the whole story of the time.

It is usually considered that the teaching, supposed to have been more or less generally accepted, that the Antipodes did not exist, prevented any significant development of geography until comparatively modern times. While the question of the existence of antipodes was discussed in the schools of the Middle Ages, and especially of the Thirteenth Century when men's minds were occupied with practically all of the important problems even of physical science, and while many intelligent men accepted the idea that there could not be inhabitants on the other side of the world because of physical difficulties which supposedly made it impossible, it would be a mistake to think that this idea was universally accepted. We have already called attention to the fact in the chapter on "What was Taught at the {393} Universities," that Albertus Magnus, for instance, ridiculed the notion that men could not live with their heads down, as was urged against the doctrine of the existence of antipodes, by suggesting very simply that for those on the other side of the earth what we call down was really not down but up. This expresses, of course, the very heart of the solution of the supposed difficulty.

As a matter of fact it seems clear that many of the great travelers and explorers of the later Middle Ages harbored the notion that the earth was round. As we shall note a little later in mentioning Sir John Mandeville's work, the writer, whomever he was who took that pseudonym, believed thoroughly in the rotundity of the earth and did not hesitate to use some striking expressions--which have been often quoted--that he had heard of travelers who by traveling continually to the eastward had come back eventually to the point from which they started. While in the schools, then, the existence of antipodes may have been under discussion, there was a practical acceptance of their existence among those who were better informed with regard to countries and peoples and all the other topics which form the proper subject matter of geography.

It must be realized, moreover, that though the existence of the Antipodes is an important matter in geography, at this early period it was a mere theory, not a condition antecedent to progress. It was really a side issue as compared with many other questions relating to the earth's surface and its inhabitants with which the medieval mind was occupied. To consider that no knowledge of geography could be obtained until there was a definite acceptance of the right view of the earth's surface, would be to obliterate much precious knowledge.

The argument as to the existence of antipodes, as it was carried on, was entirely outside of geography properly so-called. It never influenced in the slightest degree the men who were consciously and unconsciously laying deep and broad the foundations of modern geography. To consider such a matter as vital to the development of as many sided a subject as geography, ill.u.s.trates very typically the narrowness of view of so many modern scholars, who apparently can see the value of nothing which does not entirely accord with modern knowledge. The really {394} interesting historian of knowledge, however, is he who can point out the beginnings of what we now know, in unexpected quarters in the medieval mind.

As the story of these travels and explorations is really a glorious chapter in the history of the encouragement of things intellectual, as well as an interesting phase of an important origin whose foundations were laid broad and deep in the Thirteenth Century, it must be told here in some detail. Our century was the great leader in exploration and geography as in so many other matters in which its true place is often unrecognized.

The people of the time are usually considered to have had such few facilities for travel that they did not often go far from home, and that what was known about distant countries, therefore, was very little and mainly legendary. Nothing could be more false than any such impression as this. The Crusades during the previous century had given the people not only a deep interest in distant lands, but the curiosity to go and see for themselves. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land were frequent, ecclesiastics often traveled at least as far as Italy, and in general the tide of travel in proportion to the number of population must have been not very much less in amount than in our own day. After the establishment of the religious orders, missionary expeditions to the East became very common and during the Thirteenth Century, as we shall see, the Franciscans particularly, established themselves in many parts of the Near East, but also of the Far East, especially in China. Many of those wrote accounts of their travels, and so the literature of travel and exploration during the Thirteenth Century is one of the most interesting chapters of the literature of these times, while the wonderfully deep foundations that were laid for the science of geography, are worthy to be set beside the great origins in other sciences and in the arts, for which the century is so noteworthy.

To most people it will come as a distinct surprise to learn that the travelers and explorers of the Thirteenth Century--merchants, amba.s.sadors, and missionaries--succeeded in solving many of the geographical problems that have been of deepest interest to the generations of the last half of last century. {395} The eastern part of Asia particularly was traveled over and very thoroughly described by them. Even the northern part of India, however, was not neglected in spite of the difficulties that were encountered, and Thibet was explored and Lhasa entered by travelers of the Thirteenth Century. Of China as much was written as had been learned by succeeding generations down practically to our own time. This may sound like a series of fairy-tales instead of serious science, but it is the travelers and explorers of the modern time who have thought it worth while to comment on the writings of these old-time wanderers of the Thirteenth Century, and who have pointed out the significance of their work. These men described not only the countries through which they pa.s.sed, but also the characters of the people, their habits and customs, their forms of speech, with many marvelous hints as regards the relations.h.i.+p of the different languages, and even something about the religious practises of these countries and their att.i.tude toward the great truths of Christianity when they were presented to them.

Undoubtedly one of the greatest travelers and explorers of all times was Marco Polo, whose book was for so long considered to be mainly made up of imaginary descriptions of things and places never seen, but which the development of modern geographical science by travels and expeditions has proved to be one of the most valuable contributions to this department of knowledge that has ever been made. It took many centuries for Marco Polo to come to his own in this respect but the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries have almost more than made up for the neglect of their predecessors. Marco Polo suffered the same fate as did Herodotus of whom Voltaire sneered "father of history, say, rather, father of lies." So long as succeeding generations had no knowledge themselves of the things of which both these great writers had written, they were distrusted and even treated contemptuously.

Just as soon, however, as definite knowledge began to come it was seen how wonderfully accurate both of them were in their descriptions of things they had actually seen, though they admitted certain over-wonderful stories on the authority of others. Herodotus has now come to be acknowledged as {396} one of the greatest of historians. In his lives of celebrated travelers, James Augustus St. John states the change of mind with regard to Marco Polo rather forcibly:

"When the travels of Marco Polo first appeared, they were generally regarded as fiction; and as this absurd belief had so far gained ground, that when he lay upon his death bed, his friends and nearest relatives, coming to take their eternal adieu, conjured him as he valued the salvation of his soul, to retract whatever he had advanced in his book, or at least many such pa.s.sages as every person looked upon as untrue; but the traveler whose conscience was untouched upon that score, declared solemnly, in that awful moment, that far from being guilty of exaggeration, he had not described one-half of the wonderful things which he had beheld. Such was the reception which the discoveries of this extraordinary man experienced when first promulgated. By degrees, however, as enterprise lifted more and more the veil from Central and Eastern Asia the relations of our traveler rose in the estimation of geographers; and now that the world--though containing many unknown tracts--has been more successfully explored, we begin to perceive that Marco Polo, like Herodotus, was a man of the most rigid veracity, whose testimony presumptuous ignorance alone can call in question."

There is many a fable that clings around the name of Marco Polo, but this distinguished traveler needs no fict.i.tious adornments of his tale to make him one of the greatest explorers of all time. It is sometimes said that he helped to introduce many important inventions into Europe and one even finds his name connected with the mariner's compa.s.s and with gunpowder. There are probably no good grounds for thinking that Europe owes any knowledge of either of these great inventions to the Venetian traveler. With regard to printing there is more doubt and Polo's pa.s.sage with regard to movable blocks for printing paper money as used in China may have proved suggestive.

There is no need, however, of surmises in order to increase his fame for the simple story of his travels is quite sufficient for his reputation for all time. As has been well said most of the modern travelers and explorers have only been developing what Polo indicated at least in outline, and they have been {397} scarcely more than describing with more precision of detail what he first touched upon and brought to general notice. When it is remembered that he visited such cities in Eastern Turkestan as Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan, which have been the subject of much curiosity only satisfied in quite recent years, that he had visited Thibet, or at least had traveled along its frontier, that to him the medieval world owed some definite knowledge of the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia and all that it was to know of China for centuries almost, his merits will be readily appreciated. As a matter of fact there was scarcely an interesting country of the East of which Marco Polo did not have something to relate from his personal experiences. He told of Burmah, of Siam, of Cochin China, of j.a.pan, of Java, of Sumatra, and of other islands of the great Archipelago, of Ceylon, and of India, and all of these not in the fabulous dreamland spirit of one who has not been in contact with the East but in very definite and precise fas.h.i.+on. Nor was this all. He had heard and could tell much, though his geographical lore was legendary and rather dim, of the Coast of Zanzibar, of the vast and distant Madagascar, and in the remotely opposite direction of Siberia, of the sh.o.r.es of the Arctic Ocean, and of the curious customs of the inhabitants of these distant countries.

How wonderfully acute and yet how thoroughly practical some of Polo's observations were can be best appreciated by some quotations from his description of products and industries as he saw them on his travels.

We are apt to think of the use of petroleum as dating from much later than the Thirteenth Century, but Marco Polo had not only seen it in the Near East on his travels, but evidently had learned much of the great rock-oil deposits at Baku which const.i.tute the basis for the important Russian petroleum industry in modern times. He says:

"On the north (of Armenia) is found a fountain from which a liquor like oil flows, which, though unprofitable for the seasoning of meat, is good for burning and for anointing camels afflicted with the mange. This oil flows constantly and copiously, so that camels are laden with it."

He is quite as definite in the information acquired with regard, to the use of coal. He knew and states very confidently that {398} there were immense deposits of coal in China, deposits which are so extensive that distinguished geologists and mineralogists who have learned of them in modern times have predicted that eventually the world's great manufacturing industries would be transferred to China.

We are apt to think that this mineral wealth is not exploited by the Chinese, yet even in Marco Polo's time, as one commentator has remarked, the rich and poor of that land had learned the value of the black stone.

"Through the whole Province of Cathay," says Polo, "certain black stones are dug from the mountains, which, put into the fire, burn like wood, and being kindled, preserve fire a long time, and if they be kindled in the evening they keep fire all the night."

Another important mineral product which even more than petroleum or coal is supposed to be essentially modern in its employment is asbestos. Polo had not only seen this but had realized exactly what it was, had found out its origin and had recognized its value. Curiously enough he attempts to explain the origin of a peculiar usage of the word salamander (the salamander having been supposed to be an animal which was not injured by fire) by reference to the incombustibility of asbestos. The whole pa.s.sage as it appears in The Romance of Travel and Exploration deserves to be quoted. While discoursing about Dsungaria, Polo says:

"And you must know that in the mountain there is a substance from which Salamander is made. The real truth is that the Salamander is no beast as they allege in our part of the world, but is a substance found in the earth. Everybody can be aware that it can be no animal's nature to live in fire seeing that every animal is composed of all the four elements. Now I, Marco Polo, had a Turkish acquaintance who related that he had lived three years in that region on behalf of the Great Khan, in order to procure these salamanders for him. He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was taken and crushed, and when so treated it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry these fibres were pounded in a copper mortar and then washed so as to remove all the earth and to leave only the fibres, like {399} fibres of wool. These were then spun and made into napkins." Needless to say this is an excellent description of asbestos.

It is not surprising, then, that the Twentieth Century so interested in travel and exploration should be ready to lay its tributes at the feet of Marco Polo, and that one of the important book announcements of recent years should be that of the publication of an annotated edition of Marco Polo from the hands of a modern explorer, who considered that there was no better way of putting definitely before the public in its true historical aspect the evolution of modern geographical knowledge with regard to Eastern countries.

It can scarcely fail to be surprising to the modern mind that Polo should practically have been forced into print. He had none of the itch of the modern traveler for publicity. The story of his travels he had often told and because of the wondrous tales he could unfold and the large numbers he found it frequently so necessary to use in order to give proper ideas of some of his wanderings, had acquired the nickname of Marco Millioni. He had never thought, however, of committing his story to writing or perhaps he feared the drudgery of such literary labor. After his return from his travels, however, he bravely accepted a patriot's duty of fighting for his native country on board one of her galleys and was captured by the Genoese in a famous sea-fight in the Adriatic in 1298. He was taken prisoner and remained in captivity in Genoa for nearly a year.

It was during this time that one Rusticiano, a writer by profession, was attracted to him and tempted him to tell him the complete story of his travels in order that they might be put into connected form.

Rusticiano was a Pisan who had been a compiler of French romances and accordingly Polo's story was first told in French prose. It is not surprising that Rusticiano should have chosen French since he naturally wished his story of Polo's travels to be read by as many people as possible and realized that it would be of quite as much interest to ordinary folk as to the literary circles of Europe. How interesting the story is only those who have read it even with the knowledge acquired by all the other explorers since his time, can properly appreciate. It lacks entirely the egotistic quality that usually characterizes an explorer's account of his travels, and, indeed, {400} there can scarcely fail to be something of disappointment because of this fact. No doubt a touch more of personal adventure would have added to the interest of the book. It was not a characteristic of the Thirteenth Century, however, to insist on the merely personal and consequently the world has lost a treat it might otherwise have had. There is no question, however, or the greatness of Polo's work as a traveler, nor of the glory that was shed by it on the Thirteenth Century. Like nearly everything else that was done in this marvelous century he represents the acme of successful endeavor in his special line down even to our own time.

It has sometimes been said that Marco Polo's work greatly influenced Columbus and encouraged him in his attempt to seek India by sailing around the globe. Of this, however, there is considerable doubt. We have learned in recent times, that a very definite tradition with regard to the possibility of finding land by sailing straight westward over the Atlantic existed long before Columbus' time. [Footnote 34]

Polo's indirect influence on Columbus by his creation of an interest in geographical matters generally is much clearer. There can be no doubt of how much his work succeeded in drawing men's minds to geographical questions during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries.

[Footnote 34: My learned friend, Father DeRoo, of Portland, Ore., who has written two very interesting volumes on the History of America before Columbus, does not hesitate to say that Columbus may even have met in his travels and spoken with sailors who had touched on some portions of the American Continent, and that, of course, the traditions with regard to Greenland were very clear.]

After Marco Polo, undoubtedly, the most enterprising explorer and interesting writer on Travel in the Thirteenth Century was John of Carpini, the author of a wonderful series of descriptions of things seen in Northern Asia. Like so many other travelers and explorers at this time John was a Franciscan Friar, and seems to have been one of the early companions and disciples of St. Francis of a.s.sisi, whom he joined when he was only a young man himself. Before going on his missionary and amba.s.sadorial expedition he had been one of the most prominent men in the order. He had much to do with its {401} propagation among the Northern nations of Europe, and occupied successively the offices of custos or prior in Saxony and of Provincial in Germany. He seems afterwards to have been sent as an organizer into Spain and to have gone even as far as the Barbary coast.

It is not surprising, then, that when, in 1245, Pope Innocent IV.

(sometime after the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe and the disastrous battle of Legamites which threatened to place European civilization and Christianity in the power of the Tartars) resolved to send a mission to the Tartar monarch, John of Carpini was selected for the dangerous and important mission.

At this time Friar John was more than sixty years of age, but such was the confidence in his ability and in his executive power that everything on the emba.s.sy was committed to his discretion. He started from Lyons on Easter Day, 1245. He sought the counsel first of his old friend Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia, and from that country took with him another friar, a Pole, to act as his interpreter. The first stage in his journey was to Kiev, and from here, having crossed the Dnieper and the Don to the Volga, he traveled to the camp of Batu, at this time the senior living member of Jenghis Khan's family. Batu after exchanging presents allowed them to proceed to the court of the supreme Khan in Mongolia. As Col. Yule says, the stout-hearted old man rode on horseback something like three thousand miles in the next hundred days. The bodies of himself and companion had to be tightly bandaged to enable them to stand the excessive fatigue of this enormous ride, which led them across the Ural Mountains and River past the northern part of the Caspian, across the Jaxartes, whose name they could not find out, along the Dzungarian Lakes till they reached the Imperial Camp, called the Yellow Pavilion, near the Orkhon River.

There had been an interregnum in the empire which was terminated by a formal election while the Friars were at the Yellow Pavilion, where they had the opportunity to see between three and four thousand envoys and deputies from all parts of Asia and Eastern Europe, who brought with them tributes and presents for the ruler to be elected.

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It was not for three months after this, in November, that the Emperor dismissed them with a letter to the Pope written in Latin, Arabic, and Mongolian, but containing only a brief imperious a.s.sertion that the Khan of the Tartars was the scourge of G.o.d for Christianity, and that he must fulfill his mission. Then sad at heart, the amba.s.sadors began their homeward journey in the midst of the winter. Their sufferings can be better imagined than described, but Friar John who does not dwell on them much tells enough of them to make their realization comparatively easy. They reached Kiev seven months later, in June, and were welcomed there by the Slavonic Christians as though arisen from the dead. From thence they continued their journey to Lyons where they delivered the Khan's letter to the Pope.

Friar John embodied the information that he had obtained in this journey in a book that has been called Liber Tartarorum (the Book of the Tartars or according to another ma.n.u.script, History of the Mongols whom we call Tartars). Col. Yule notes that like most of the other medieval monks' itineraries, it shows an entire absence of that characteristic traveler's egotism with which we have become abundantly familiar in more recent years, and contains very little personal narrative. We know that John was a stout man and this in addition to his age when he went on the mission, cannot but make us realize the thoroughly unselfish spirit with which he followed the call of Holy Obedience, to undertake a work that seemed sure to prove fatal and that would inevitably bring in its train suffering of the severest kind. Of the critical historical value of his work a good idea can be obtained from the fact, that half a century ago an educated Mongol, Galsang Gombeyev, in the Historical and Philological Bulletin of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, reviewed the book and bore testimony to the great accuracy of its statements, to the care with which its details had been verified, and the evident personal character of all its observations.