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he special interest of the life and work of Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) lies in the relation it bears to the general expansion of Europe and Christendom—an expansion that had been slowly gathering strength since the eleventh century. But even before the tide had turned in the age of Hildebrand and the First Crusade, even from the time that Constantine founded the Christian Empire of Rome, the Christian Capital on the Bosphorus, and the State Church of the Western World—pilgrimage, trade, conquest, and colonisation had been successively calling out the energies of the moving races, "the motor muscles" of Europe. It is through the "generous Henry, Prince of Portugal," that this activity is brought to its third and triumphant stage—to the time of Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan—but it is only by tracing the earlier progress of that outward movement, which has made Europe the ruling civilisation of the world, that we can fairly grasp the import of that transition in which Henry is the hero.

More than any other single man he is the author of the discovering movement of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries—and by this movement India has been conquered, America repeopled, the world made clear, and the civilisation which the Roman Empire left behind has conquered or utterly overshadowed every one of its old rivals and superiors—Islam, India, China, Tartary.

But before the fifteenth century, before the birth of Prince Henry, Christendom, Greek and Latin, was at best only one of the greater civilising and conquering forces struggling for mastery; before the age of the Crusades, before the eleventh century, it was plainly weaker than the Moslem powers; it seemed unable to fight against Slav or Scandinavian Heathendom; it was only saved by distance from becoming a province of China; India, the world's great prize, was cut off from it by the Arabs. Even before the rise of Islam, under Constantine or Theodosius or Justinian, the Church-State of the Byzantine Cæsars, though then ruling in almost every province of Trajan's empire, was in a splendid but sure decline from the exhaustion of the southern races. Our story then begins naturally with the worst time and climbs up for a thousand years, from the Heathen and Mohammedan conquests of the fifth and seventh centuries, to the reversal of that judgment, of those conquests, in the fifteenth. The expansion of Europe is going on all this time, but at our beginning, in the years before and after Pope Gregory the Great, even the legacy of Greece and Rome, in wide knowledge of the world and practical exploring energy, seemed to have passed from sight.

And in the decline of the old Empire, while Constantine and Justinian are said to receive and exchange embassies with the Court of China, there is no real extension of geographical knowledge or outlook. Christian enterprise in this field is mainly one of pilgrimage, and the pilgrims only cease to be important when the Northmen, first Heathen, then Christian, begin to lead, in a very different manner, the expansion of Europe. Into this folk-wandering of the Vikings, the first great outward movement of our Europe in the Middle Ages, is absorbed the reviving energy of trade, as well as the ever-growing impulse of pilgrimage. The Vikings are the highest type of explorers; they do not merely find out new lands and trade with them, but conquer and colonise them. They extend not merely the knowledge, but the whole state and being of Europe, to a New World.

Lastly, the partial activity of commerce and religion made universal and "political" by the leading western race—for itself only—is taken up by all Christendom in the Crusades, borrowed in idea from Spain, but borrowed with the spirit of the Norse rovers, and made universal for the Latin world, for the whole federation of Rome. In the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries we have the preparation for the discovery and colonisation of the outside world by Europeans in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era.

From the conversion of Constantine to the Reformation the story of Christendom is unbroken; the later Roman Empire is the Church-State of a Christian Prince, as modern Europe is the Church-State of a nominally Christian society. Mediæval Europe thought of itself as nothing but the old world-state under religion; from Spain to Russia men were living under a Holy Roman Empire of an Italian, or Teutonic, or Byzantine, or independent type. England and Russia were not parts of the Germanic revival of Charlemagne, but they had just the same two elements dominant in their life: the classical tradition and the Christian Church.

And so throughout this time, the expansion of this society—by whatever name we may call it, discovery, exploration, geographical knowledge—has a continuous history. But before the rise of Islam, in the seventh century, throws Christendom into its proper mediæval life, before the new religion begins the really new age, at the end of which lived Henry himself, we are too far from our subject to feel, for instance in the fourth and fifth-century pilgrims and in Cosmas Indicopleustes, anything but a remote preparation for Henry's work. It is only with the seventh century, and with the time of our own Bede and Wilfrid, that the necessary introduction to our subject really begins.

Yet as an illustration of the general idea, that discovery is an early and natural outlet of any vigorous society and is in proportion to the universal activity of the State, it is not without interest to note that Christian Pilgrimage begins with Constantine. This, the first department of exploring energy, at once evidences the new settlement of religion and politics. Helena, the Emperor's mother, helped, by her visit to Palestine, her church at Bethlehem, and her discoveries of relics in Jerusalem, to make a ruling fashion out of the custom of a few devotees; and eight years after the council of Nicæa, in 333, appeared the first Christian geography, as a guide-book or itinerary, from Bordeaux to the Holy Places of Syria, modelled upon the imperial survey of the Antonines. The route followed in this runs by North Italy, Aquileia, Sirmium, Constantinople, and Asia Minor, and upon the same course thousands of nameless pilgrims journeyed in the next three hundred years, besides some eight or nine who have left an account mainly religious in form, but containing in substance the widest view of the globe then possible among Westerns.

Most of the pilgrims, like Jerome's friend Paula, Bishop Eucherius, and Melania, tread the same path and stop at the same points, but three or four of them distinctly add some fresh knowledge to the ordinary results.

St. Silvia, of Aquitaine (c. 385), not only travels through Syria, she visits Lower Egypt and Stony or Sinaitic Arabia, and even Edessa in Northern Mesopotamia, on the very borders of hostile and heathen Persia. "To see the monks" she wanders through Osrhöene, comes to Haran, near which was "the home of Abraham and the farm of Laban and the well of Rachel," to the environs of Nisibis and Ur of the Chaldees, lost to the Roman Empire since Julian's defeat; thence by "Padan-aram" back to Antioch. When crossing the Euphrates the pilgrims saw the river "rush down in a torrent like the Rhone, but greater," and on the way home by the great military road, then untravelled by Saracens, between Tarsus and the Bosphorus, Silvia makes a passing note on the strength and brigand habits of the Isaurian mountaineers, who in the end saved Christendom from the very Arabs with whom our pilgrim couples them.

Again, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the time of Justinian, is at the end, as Silvia is at the beginning, of a definite period, the period of the Christian empire of Rome, while still "Cæsarean" and not merely Byzantine, "patrician" and not papal, "consular" and not Carolingian.

And contemporary with Cosmas are two of the chief among the earlier or primitive pilgrims, Theodosius and Antoninus the Martyr. The first-named indulges in a few excursions—in fancy—beyond his known ground of Palestine, going as far east as Susa and Babylon, "where no one can live for the serpents and hippo-centaurs," and south to the Red Sea and its two arms, "of which the eastern is called the Persian Gulf," and the western or Arabian runs up to the "thirteen cities of Arabia destroyed by Joshua,"—but, for the rest, his knowledge is not extensive or peculiar. Antoninus of Placentia, on the other hand, is very interesting, a sort of older Mandeville, who mixes truth and its opposite in fairly even proportions and with a sort of resolute partiality to favourite legends.

He tells us how Tripolis has been ruined by the late earthquake (July 9, 551); how silk and various woven stuffs are sold at Tyre; how the pilgrims scratched their names on the relics shewn in Cana of Galilee—"and here I, sinner that I am, did inscribe the names of my parents"; how Bethshan, the metropolis of Galilee, "is placed on a hill," though really in the plain; how the Samaritans hate Christians and will hardly speak to them; "and beware of spitting in their country, for they will never forgive it"; how "the dew comes down upon Hermon the Little, as David says, 'The dew of Hermon that fell upon the hill of Zion'"; how nothing can live or even float in the Dead Sea, "but is instantly swallowed up"—as exact an untruth as was ever told by traveller; how the Jordan opens a way for pilgrims "and stands up in a heap every year at the Epiphany during the baptism of Catechumens, as David told, 'The sea saw that and fled, Jordan was driven back'"; how at Jericho there is a Holy Field "sown by the Lord with his own hand." A report had been spread that the salt pillar of Lot's wife had been "lessened by licking"; "it was false," said Antoninus, the statue was just the same as it had always been.

In Jerusalem the pilgrims first went up the Tower of David, "where he sang the Psalter," and into the Basilica of Sion, where among other marvels they saw the "Corner-stone that the builders rejected," which gave out a "sound like the murmuring of a crowd."

We come back again to fact with rather a start when told in the next section of the Hospitals for 3000 sick folk near the Church of St. Mary, close to Sion; then with the footprints and relics of Christ, and the miraculous flight of the Column of Scourging—"carried away by a cloud to Cæsarea," we are taken through a fresh set of "impressions."

The same wild notions of place and time and nature follow the Martyr through Galilee to Gilboa, "where David slew Goliath and Saul died, where no dew or rain ever falls, and where devils appear nightly, whirled about like fleeces of wool or the waves of the sea"—to Nazareth, where was the "Beam of Christ the Carpenter"—to Elua, where fifteen consecrated virgins had tamed a lion and trained it to live with them in a cell—to Egypt, where the Pyramids become for him the "twelve Barns of Joseph," for the legend had not yet insisted that the actual number should be made to fit the text of the seven years of plenty.

But with all this Antoninus now and then gives us glimpses of a larger world. In Jerusalem he meets Æthiopians "with nostrils slit and rings about their fingers and their feet." They were so marked, they told him, by the Emperor Trajan "for a sign."

In the Sinai desert he tells us of "Saracen" beggars and idolaters; in the Red Sea ports he sees "ships from India" laden with aromatics; he travels up the Nile to the Cataracts and describes the Nilometer at Assouan, and the crocodiles in the river; Alexandria he finds "splendid but frivolous, a lover of pilgrims but swarming with heresies."

But far more wonderful than the practical jumble of Antoninus Martyr is the systematic nonsense of Cosmas, who invented or worked out a theory and scheme of the world, a "Christian topography," which required nothing more than a complete disuse of human reason. His assurance was equal to his science.

It may have been his voyage to India, or his monastic profession, or his study of Scripture, or something unknown that made him take up the part of a Christian Aristotle; in any case he felt himself called into the field to support the cause of St. Augustine against infidelity, and to refute the "anile fable" of the Antipodes. Cosmas referred men back to Revelation on such matters, and his system was "demonstrated from Scripture, concerning which a Christian is not allowed to doubt." Man by himself could not understand the world, but in the Bible it was all clear enough. And from the Bible this much was beyond dispute.

The universe is a flat parallelogram; and its length is exactly double of its breadth. In the centre of the universe is our world surrounded by the ocean, and by an outer world or ring where men lived before the Flood. Noah and his Ark came over sea from this to the present earth.

To the north of our world is a great hill, like the later Moslem and older Hindu "Cupola of the Earth," which perhaps was Cosmas' own original. Round this the sun and moon revolve, making day and night as they appear or disappear behind it.

The sky consists of four walls meeting in the "dome of heaven" over the floor on which we live, and this sky is "glued" to the edges of the outer world, the world of the Patriarchs.

But this heaven is also cut in two by the firmament, lying between our atmosphere and that "New Heaven and New Earth wherein dwelleth Righteousness"; and the floor of this upper world is covered by the "waters that be above the firmament"; above this is Paradise, and below the firmament live the angels, as "ministers" and "flaming fires" and "servants of God to men."

The proofs of this are simple, mainly resting on some five texts from the Old Testament and two passages of St. Paul.

First the Book of Genesis declared itself to be the "Book of the Generation of the Heaven and the Earth"—that is, of everything in the heavens, and the earth. But the "old wives' fable of the Antipodes" would make the heaven surround and contain the earth, and God's word would have to be changed "These are the generations of the sky." For the same truth—the twofold and independent being of heaven and earth—Cosmas quotes the additional testimony of Abraham, David, Hosea, Isaiah, Zachariah, and Melchisedek, who clenched the case against the Antipodes. "For how indeed could even rain be said to 'fall' or to 'descend,' as in the Psalms and the Gospels, in those regions where it could only be said to 'come up'?"

Again, the world cannot be a globe, or sphere, or be suspended in mid-air, or in any sort of motion, for what say the Scriptures? "Earth is fixed on its foundations"; "Thou hast laid the foundations of the earth and it abideth"; "Thou hast made the round world so sure, that it cannot be moved"; "Thou hast made all men to dwell upon the face of the whole earth"—not "upon every face," or upon any more than one face—"upon the face," not the back or the side, but the broad flat face we know. "Who then with these passages before him, ought even to speak of Antipodes?"

So much against false doctrine; to establish the truth is simpler still. For the same St. Paul, who disposes of science falsely so called, does not he speak, like David, like St. Peter and St. John, of our world as a tabernacle? "If our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved," "We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened," which points to the natural conclusion of enlightened faith, that Moses' tabernacle was an exact copy of the universe. "See thou make all things according to the pattern shewn thee in the Mount." So the four walls, the covered roof, the floor, the proportions of the Tent of the Wilderness, shewed us in small compass all that was in nature.

If any further guidance were needed, it was ready to hand in the Prophet Isaiah and the Patriarch Job. "That stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in"; "Also can any understand the spreadings of the clouds or the noise of his tabernacle?"

The whole reasoning is like the theological arguments on the effects of man's fall upon the stars and the vegetable world, or the atmospheric changes due to angels.

But though Cosmas states his system with the claims of an article of faith, there were not wanting men, and even saints, who stood out on the side of reason in geography in the most traditional of times. Isidore of Seville, and Vergil, the Irish missionary of the eighth century, both maintained the old belief of Basil and Ambrose, that the question of the Antipodes was not closed by the Church, and that error in this point was venial and not mortal. For the positive tabernacle-system of "the man who sailed to India" there was never much support; his work was soon forgotten, though it has been called by some paradox-makers "the great authority of the Middle Ages"—in the face of the known facts, that this was the real position of Ptolemy and Strabo, that no one can speak of the "Middle Ages" in this unqualified way any more than of the Modern or Ancient worlds; and that Cosmas is almost unnoticed in the great age of mediæval science, from the twelfth century.

And whatever we may think of Cosmas and his Christian System of the Whole World, Evolved out of Holy Scripture, he is of interest to us as the last of the old Christian geographers, closing one age which, however senile, had once been in the truest sense civilised, and preparing us to enter one that in comparison is literally dark. From the age of Justinian, and from the rise of Islam in the early years of the seventh century, the geographical knowledge of Christendom is on a par with its practical contraction and apparent decline. There are travellers; but for the next five hundred years there are no more theorists, cosmographers, or map-makers of the Universe or Habitable Globe.

From the time that Islam, after a century of world-conquest, began to form itself into an organised state, or federation of states, in the later eighth and earlier ninth centuries a.d.—thus making itself until the thirteenth century the principal heir of the older Eastern culture—Christendom was content to take its geography, its ideas of the world in general, from the Arabs, who in their turn depended upon the pre-Christian Greeks.

The relation of Ptolemy and Strabo to modern knowledge is best seen through the work of the Arabic geographers, but the Saracens did much to destroy before they began to build up once more. As the northern barbarians of the fifth century interrupted the hope of a Christian revival of Pagan literature and science, so the Moslems of the seventh and eighth cut short the Catholic and Roman revival of Justinian and Heraclius, in which the new faith and the old state had found a working agreement.

Between Cosmas and the Viking-Age, "Christian," "Roman," "Western" exploration falls within very narrow limits: the few pilgrims whose recollections represent to us the whole literature of travel in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, add nothing fresh even of practical discovery; theory and theoretical work has ceased altogether, and the first stirrings of the new life in the commerce and voyages of Amalphi, and in the sudden and splendid outburst of Norse life in its age of piracy, are not yet, are not really before the world until the time of Alfred of England, of Charles the Bald, of Pope Nicholas I. "the Great." Yet such as it is, this pilgrim stage of European development stands for something. Religion, as it is the first agent in forming our modern nations, is the first impulse towards their expansion. And to us there is a special interest.

For the best known of western travellers in this darkest of the Christian ages (600–870 a.d.), Arculf and Willibald, are both connected with England and the beginnings of English science in the age of Bede.

Arculf, a Frank or Gallican Bishop, who about 690 visited, first of "Latin" writers since the Mohammedan conquest, Jerusalem, the Jordan valley, Nazareth, and the other holy places of Syria, was driven by storms on his return to the great Irish monastery of Iona. There he described his wonders to the Abbot Adamnan, who then sat in the seat of the Irish Apostles Patrick and Columba, and by Adamnan this narrative was presented and dedicated to Aldfrith the Wise, last of the great Northumbrian Kings, in his Court at York (c. a.d. 701). Not only does the original remain to us, but we have also two summaries of it, one longer, another shorter, made by Baeda, the Venerable Bede, as a useful manual for Englishmen, Concerning the Holy Sites. We are again reminded by this how constantly fresh life is growing up under an appearance of death. The conversion of England, which Gregory the Great, Theodore, and the Irish monks had carried through in the seventh, that darkest of Christian centuries, was now bearing its fruit in the work of Bede, who was really the sign of a far more permanent intellectual movement than his own, and in that of Boniface, Wilbrord, and Willibald, who began to win for Christendom in Germany more than a counterpoise for her losses in the South and East, from Armenia to Spain.

Arculf is full of the mystical unscientific spirit of the time. He notes in Jerusalem "a lofty column, which at mid-day casts no shadow, thus proving itself to be the centre of the earth for as David says, 'God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.'"

"At the roots of Lebanon" he comes to the place "where the Jordan has its rise from two fountains Jor and Dan, whose waters unite in the single river Jordan." In the Dead Sea a lighted lamp would float safely, and no man could sink if he tried; the bitumen of this place was almost indissoluble; the only fruit here about were the apples of Sodom, which crumbled to dust in the mouth.

The three churches on the top of Tabor were "according to the three tabernacles described by Peter."

From Damascus Arculf made for the port of Tyre, and so came by Jaffa to Egypt. Alexandria he found so great that he was one entire day in merely passing through. Its port he thought "difficult of access and something like the human body in shape, with a narrow mouth and neck, then stretching out far and wide."

The great Pharos tower was still lit up every night with torches. Here was the "Emporium of the whole world"; "countless merchants from all parts": the "country rainless and very fertile."

The Nile was navigable to the Town of Elephants; beyond this, at the Cataracts, the river "runs in a wild ruin down a cliff." Its embankments, its canals, and even its crocodiles, "not so large as ravenous," are all described, and Arculf, returning home by Constantinople, concludes with an account of the capital of Christendom, "beyond doubt the metropolis of the Roman Empire, and by far the greatest city therein"; lastly, as the pilgrim sails by Sicily he sees the "isle of Vulcan vomiting smoke by day and flame by night, with a noise like thunder, which is always fiercer on Fridays and Saturdays."

Willibald, a nephew of St. Boniface and related through his mother to King Ina of Wessex, started for the East about 721, passed ten years in travel, and on his return followed his countrymen to mission work and to death among the heathen of Upper Germany. He went out by Southampton and Rouen, by Lucca and the Alps, to Naples and Catania, "where is Mount Etna; and when this volcano casts itself out they take St. Agatha's veil and hold it towards the fire, which ceases at once." Thence by Samos and Cyprus to Antaradus and Emesda, "in the region of the Saracens," where the whole party, who had escaped the Moslem brigands of Southern Gaul, were thrown into prison on suspicion of being spies. A Spaniard made intercession for them and got their release; but Willibald went up country one hundred miles, and cleared himself of all suspicion before the Caliph at Damascus. "We have come from the West, where the sun has his setting, and we know of no land beyond—nothing but water." This was too far for spies, he pleaded, and the Caliph agreed, and gave him a pass for all the sites of Palestine, with which he traversed the length and breadth of the Holy Land four times, finding the same trouble in leaving as he had found in entering. Like Arculf, he saw the fountains of Jor-Dan, the "glorious church" of Helena at Bethlehem, the tombs of the Patriarchs at Hebron, the wonders of Jerusalem. Especially was he moved at the sight of the columns in the Church of the Ascension on Olivet, "for that man who can creep between those columns and the wall is freed from all his sins." Tyre and Sidon he passed again and again "on the coast of the Adriatic Sea (as he calls the Levant), six miles from one another"; at last he got away to Constantinople, with some safely smuggled trophies of pilgrimage, and some "balsam in a calabash, covered with petroleum," but the customs officers would have killed all of them if the fraud had been found out—so Willibald believed. After two years of close intercourse with the Greek Christians of New Rome, living in a "cell hollowed out of the side of a church" (possibly Saint Sophia), the first of English-born travellers returned to Old Rome, as Arculf had done, by sea, noticing, like him, "Theodoric's Hell" in the Liparis. He could not get up the mountain, though curious to see "what sort of a hell it was" where the Gothic "Tyrant" was damned for the murder of Böethius and Symmachus, and for his own impenitent Arianism. But though he could not be seen or heard, all the pilgrims remarked how the "pumice that writers use was thrown up by the flame from the hell, and fell into the sea, and so was cast upon the shore and gathered up."

Such was the philosophy of Catholicism about the countries of the known world in the eighth century, for Willibald's account was published with the imprimatur of Gregory III., and, with Arculf's, took rank as a satisfactory comment on the old Bordeaux Itinerary of four hundred years ago.

Again, the impression given by our two chief Guide-Books, Arculf and Willibald, is confirmed by the monk Fidelis, who travelled in Egypt about 750, and by Bernard the Wise of Mont St. Michel, who went over all the pilgrim ground a century later (867). Fidelis, sailing up the Nile, was astonished at the sight of the "Seven Barns of Joseph, (the Pyramids) looking like mountains, but all of stone, square at the base, rounded in the upper part and twisted at the summit like a spire. On measuring a side of one of them, it was found to be four hundred feet." From the Nile Fidelis sailed by the freshwater canal of Necho, Hadrian, and Amrou, not finally blocked up till 767, direct to the Red Sea, "near where Moses crossed with the Israelites." The pilgrim wanted to go and look for Pharaoh's chariot-wheels, but the sailors were obstinate, and took him round the Peninsula of Sinai, down one arm of the sea and up another, to Eziongeber and Edom.

Bernard, "the French Monk" of Mont St. Michel, took the straight route overland by Rome to Bari, then a Saracen city, whose Emir forwarded the pilgrims in a fleet of transports carrying some nine thousand Christian slaves to Alexandria. Here, like Willibald, Bernard found himself "suspect"—thrown into prison till Backsheesh had been paid, then only allowed to move stage by stage as fees were prompt and sufficient, for a traveller must pay, as an infidel, not only the ordinary tribute of the subject Christians of Egypt, but the "money of the road" as well. Islam has always made of strangers a fair mark for extortion.

Safe at last in Jerusalem, the party (Bernard himself and two friends, one a Spaniard, the other a monk of Beneventum) were lodged "in the Hostel of the glorious Emperor Charles, founded for all the pilgrims who speak the Roman tongue," and after making the ordinary visits of devotion, and giving us their account of the Easter Miracle of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Sepulchre, they took ship for Italy, and landed at Rome after sixty days of misery at sea.