How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (34 page)

Europe’s Knowledge of Geography

The Greeks knew the earth was round, as did the Scholastics. The existence of climate zones also was well known. But over the centuries there was considerable disagreement as to the earth’s circumference and hence the distance from Europe’s Atlantic coast to the Indies. The actual circumference of the earth is 24,902 miles. Plato guessed that the distance was about 40,000 miles and Archimedes estimated it to be about 34,000 miles. Marinus of Tyre, another Greek, set the distance at about 18,000 miles. His estimate became extremely influential because in the second century the great Greek astronomer and cartographer Ptolemy based his maps on that figure. Roger Bacon repeated Ptolemy’s circumference figure, which misled Columbus into believing that his voyage to the Indies would need to cover only three or four thousand miles, instead of about fourteen thousand. It was not until the sixteenth century that the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published a map giving the proper distance around the equator.

Asian Vistas

If there were doubts about the route westward to the Indies, Europeans were fully aware of the existence of Africa and the basic geography of the Eurasian landmass. European merchants had traveled east over the Silk Roads to China since the days of the ancient Greeks, and Alexander the Great had marched victoriously as far as the Indus River in modern Pakistan. The fabulously rich Roman elite offered a nearly insatiable market for luxury goods from the East—“spices, pearls, perfumes, gums, ivory and precious stones,” as one author put it.
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Roman traders used both the Silk Roads and a sea route to reach India. The latter involved following the coast from the Egyptian shores of the Red Sea to northern India. Apparently, Roman merchants did not go beyond India, even though Chinese silk was one of their most valued imports: Pliny the Elder (23–79), who objected to the drain on Roman wealth, complained in his famous
Natural History
that “toil [had] to be multiplied; so have the ends of the earth to be traversed; and all that a Roman dame may exhibit her charms in transparent gauze.”
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After the fall of Rome, the demand for Eastern luxury goods plummeted, as did trade with Asia. But by the time of the Carolingians a brisk commerce in silk and other Eastern products had resumed, mostly by
land despite the impediment of Muslim settlements. Then, beginning in the thirteenth century, a series of Christian missionaries made the journey all the way to Mongolia and China and returned to write about their travels.

One of the first to go was Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, also known as Joannes de Plano (1182–1252), an original Franciscan and personal friend of St. Francis of Assisi.
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At the age of sixty-five, Giovanni was chosen by Pope Innocent IV to lead a mission to the Great Khan in Mongolia. The group left Lyon on Easter Day 1245 and rode to the Mongol camp on the Volga River. From there it was directed to proceed to the court of the Khan in Mongolia, about three thousand miles farther east. Upon arrival, Giovanni obtained an audience with the Khan and presented him with a letter from the pope—which, among other things, invited the Khan to become a Christian. In response, the Khan gave Giovanni a letter for the pope demanding that Innocent and all the kings of Europe come and swear allegiance to him. After Giovanni’s slow and dangerous journey home, the pope appointed his emissary archbishop of Antivari, a city on the Balkan Peninsula across the Adriatic from Bari, Italy. Giovanni’s careful account of his trip, known as the
Tartar Relation
—at that time Europeans mistakenly identified the Mongols as Tartars—offers an excellent description of the Mongols’ manners and customs and provides a fine assessment of Mongol military capacity and tactics, with suggestions of how to defeat them.

Next was William of Rubrouck (ca. 1215–ca. 1295).
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In 1248 William, also a Franciscan, accompanied the French king Louis IX (later to become Saint Louis) on the Seventh Crusade. Then, in 1253, as directed by the king, Rubrouck set out with several companions to convert the Mongols. Their journey covered thousands of miles before they arrived at the Khan’s court in Karakorum, Mongolia. The Khan received Rubrouck courteously but did not convert. During his stay, Rubrouck also encountered some Europeans, many of them Nestorian Christians. In July 1254 he began his journey back, taking a year to get home. Rubrouck was an acute observer and accurate reporter whose account of his journey was especially valuable as to geographical matters—for instance, that the Caspian was an inland sea rather than being an extension of the Arctic Ocean, as many in Europe had believed. An English translation of
The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts
was published in 1900.

John of Montecorvino (1247–1328), also a Franciscan missionary,
was in China at about the same time as Marco Polo.
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Unlike Polo or his Franciscan predecessors, Montecorvino went by boat from India and reached Peking in 1294. Upon his arrival he discovered that the great Kublai Khan had just died. But that did not deter Montecorvino: he was not a messenger to the Khan but was committed to a serious effort of conversion. He built a number of churches, bought many young Chinese boys from their parents and raised them as Christians, is credited with making about six thousand converts, and served as the first Bishop of Peking. He also translated the New Testament into Uyghur (a Mongol language). When Montecorvino died in Peking in 1328, the Christian mission seemed bound for considerable success—centers had been established in three additional Chinese cities. But then, in 1368, the Chinese drove the Mongols out of China and the obsessively isolationist Ming Dynasty expelled or killed Christians.

But it was too late to close the door. Europeans had a good working knowledge of the geography as well as the riches of Asia.

The Western Hemisphere?

Controversy continues as to what fifteenth-century Europeans might have known about the existence of the Western Hemisphere. The English merchants who funded John Cabot’s voyage may have been aware that their local fishing fleet had been sailing to and from the Great Banks fishery off the coast of Newfoundland for many years. Of course, there is nothing to suggest that they thought this was anything more than a large island, like Iceland and Greenland. As for the latter two, the Danes surely knew of them, as did the Vatican—the pope had been appointing Bishops of Iceland since 1056, and in 1126 Greenland had become an official diocese. Even so, knowledge of these two islands offered no hint that beyond them lay two continents stretching nearly from pole to pole. As for the Viking knowledge of Vinland, there is a fascinating dispute over the authenticity of the so-called Vinland map. Found in 1957 bound in a fifteenth-century copy of Giovanni’s
Tartar Relation
, it is a map of the world that shows Iceland and Greenland and beyond them another substantial island identified as
Vinilanda Insula
. When Yale University published the map in 1965, along with an extensive set of studies affirming the map’s authenticity, a swarm of angry academics pounced, denouncing it as a modern forgery. In early days the critics seemed to carry the day with various pieces of evidence including chemical analysis.
Since then, the supporters of the map’s authenticity have rallied,
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and there is no current consensus as to whether the map is genuine.

If the Vinland map is authentic, it is a charming historical artifact. But it is irrelevant to the larger historical picture in that it played no role in prompting voyages west. Even had Columbus seen it, he would not have taken Vinland for the Indies, let alone for a new continent—on the map it appears to be just another northern island.

Navigational Technology

Aside from the Vikings, until late in the fifteenth century sailors around the world had pretty much navigated by following coastlines or island hopping. This approach was sufficient for sailing the Mediterranean, which is densely packed with islands and has narrow north-south dimensions, putting most locations in sight of land.
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But technological developments from the twelfth century onward made sailing across empty oceans possible.

The first major achievement was the magnetic compass.
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Like so many other medieval inventions, the magnetic compass is generally attributed to the Chinese. The Chinese may have been the first to discover that a magnetized needle floating in liquid points north. But the Chinese found this phenomenon to be of interest primarily for performing magical rites; they may not have used this device aboard ships until long after Europeans were doing so. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the knowledge that a floating magnetized needle points north reached Europe from China. The magnetic properties of naturally occurring lodestones were widely known in the ancient world—they were noted by the Greek philosopher Thales in the sixth century BC. In any event, a floating arrow pointing north is a far cry from a useful navigational instrument. The invention of the magnetic compass actually occurred when medieval Europeans added the compass card. That is, Europeans were the first to place a circular card directly beneath the magnetized compass needle, marked off into a thirty-two-point scale with north at zero. This not only allowed mariners to know which way was north but also enabled them to set an accurate course in
any
direction—expressed in points from north: “Helmsman, hold steady at 24 points.” Such a course could be followed even in the dark and without any need for landmarks. The first recorded
use of a compass in the West was in 1187, but it probably had been used for some time before then.

Next came the astrolabe, a device for determining one’s latitude from the position of major heavenly bodies.
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The basic theory on which the astrolabe was based was well known to the ancient Greeks, who used crude devices for locating one’s latitude, though not at sea. The real breakthrough came in 1478, when a Spanish rabbi, Abraham Zacuto (1452–ca. 1514), combined a precise metal astrolabe with a set of astronomical tables showing the positions of the sun, the moon, and five planets at different dates. This combination allowed navigators to easily calculate their latitude with great accuracy. In addition to serving local Jewish congregations, Zacuto taught astronomy at the universities of Zaragoza and Cartagena.
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When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, Zacuto went to Portugal, where he was appointed Royal Astronomer.
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Zacuto’s astrolabe and tables were quickly adopted—Vasco da Gama used them on his first trip to India.
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Even with a compass and an astrolabe, to follow a course it was necessary to know one’s speed. By the fifteenth century a ship’s speed was calculated by throwing overboard a slab of wood attached to a bridle of three lines connected to a single line. The single line was knotted at regular intervals. With tension on the line, the slab of wood remained (roughly) in place in the water, so the length of line—the number of knots—let out over a timed period (usually measured by an hourglass) could be translated into the distance traveled in the time period, and hence the boat’s speed. Eventually speed came to be expressed in terms of the number of knots per hour, which remains the nautical standard.
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Finally, given the ability to determine where a ship was and where it had been, navigators began to keep records to make a voyage easy to retrace. These records, which the French called “routiers” (the English corrupted the word to
rutters
), were simply a set of written directions for sailing from one particular place to another. For example, “Leaving this harbor, sail a course of [so many] points until reaching the [whatever] degree of latitude and then turn west and sail along this degree of latitude for three hundred nautical miles.” Sailing instructions were eventually replaced with charts that depicted a particular area, accurately oriented as to compass headings and having an accurate distance scale.

It was now feasible to go exploring.

The Rise of Portugal

Portugal is said to have been founded in 1128, when Dom Afonso Henriques proclaimed himself Prince of Portugal after defeating forces led by his mother in the Battle of São Mamede. Subsequent Portuguese princes slowly drove the Moors from the southern areas, completing the reconquest by 1250 (Moors remained in southern Spain until 1492). Nevertheless, a fully independent Portugal was not achieved until 1385, when John of Avis defeated the Castilians and became King John I.

The new Kingdom of Portugal became a major maritime power and the leader in oceanic explorations. The first step was the conquest of Ceuta, a major Muslim port city in North Africa directly across from Gibraltar. In 1415 a Portuguese force led by King John I and his sons, including Prince Henry (soon to be known as Henry the Navigator), attacked Ceuta from the sea and by nightfall had routed the Muslim defenders. Despite several attempts to retake the city over the years, Muslims did not regain control of Ceuta until Morocco was granted independence from Spain in 1956. With Ceuta in hand, the Portuguese turned their attention westward to the Atlantic.

Henry the Navigator

A thrilling romantic tale once surrounded Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460). For centuries historians credited him as “a precocious genius and innovator” who established and directed an advanced school of navigation, nautical astronomy, and mapmaking somewhere along the barren cliffs of Sagres, near Cape St. Vincent.
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There, it was said, a group of experts worked in secrecy to gather knowledge and direct expeditions of discovery. It was believed that these experts assembled a vast amount of information and developed a set of navigational techniques far ahead of anyone else but that it all was lost because of excessive secrecy at the time and later generations’ negligent destruction of the records. It is true that various European authorities and investors often kept navigational knowledge and voyages secret. But, alas, the rest of the story about Prince Henry’s school seems to have been made up by early biographers, each of whom kept adding to the legend.
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