CHAPTER I. THE AGE OF DISCOVERY, by Edward John Payne
AMONG the landmarks which divide the Middle Ages from modern times the most conspicuous is the discovery of America by the Genoese captain Cristoforo Colombo in 1492. We shall discuss in the next chapter the nature and consequences of this discovery; the present deals briefly with the series of facts and events which led up to and prepared for it, and with the circumstances in which it was made. For Colombo’s voyage, the most daring and brilliant feat of seamanship on record, though inferior to some others in the labour and difficulty involved in it, was but a link in a long chain of maritime enterprise stretching backward from our own times, through thirty centuries, to the infancy of Mediterranean civilisation. During this period the progress of discovery was far from uniform. Its principal achievements belong to its earliest stage, having been made by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians before the Mediterranean peoples fell under the dominion of Rome. By that time, the coasts of Southern Europe and Asia, and of Northern Africa, together with one at least-perhaps more-among the neighbouring island groups in the Atlantic, were known in their general configuration, and some progress had been made in the task of fixing their places on the sphere, though their geographical outlines had not been accurately ascertained, and the longitude of the united terra firma of Europe and Asia was greatly over-estimated. In consequence of this excessive estimate Greek geographers speculated on the possibility of more easily reaching the Far East by a western voyage from the Pillars of Hercules; and this suggestion was occasionally revived in the earlier days of the Roman Empire. Yet from the foundation of that Empire down to the thirteenth century of our era, such a voyage was never seriously contemplated; nor was anything substantial added to the maritime knowledge inherited by the Middle Ages from antiquity. About the beginning of the twelfth century maritime activity recommenced, and by the end of the fifteenth a degree of progress had been reached which forced the idea of a westward voyage to the Far East into prominence, and ultimately brought it to the test of experience. These four centuries, the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, constitute what is called the Age of Discovery. The fifteenth century marks its greatest development; and in the last decade of that century it enters on its final stage, consequent on the discovery of America.
This period was an Age of Discovery in a wider sense than the word denotes when associated with maritime enterprise only. It beheld signal discoveries in the arts and sciences-the result of a renewed intellectual activity contrasting vividly with the stagnation or retrogression of the ten centuries preceding. It witnessed the rise and development of Gothic architecture, in connexion with the foundation or rebuilding of cathedrals and monasteries; the beginnings of modern painting, sculpture, and .music; the institution of universities; the revival of Greek philosophy and Roman law; and some premature strivings after freedom of thought in religion, sternly repressed at the time, but destined finally to triumph in the Reformation. All these movements were in fact signs of increased vitality and influence on the part of Roman Christianity; and this cause stimulated geographical discovery in more than one way. Various religious and military Orders now assumed, and vigorously exercised, the function of spreading Christianity beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. By the end of the tenth century, the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Poles, and Hungarians had already been partly converted. During the twelfth century, the borders of the Roman faith were greatly enlarged. Missionary enterprise was extended to the Pomeranians and other Slavonic peoples, the Finns, Lieflanders, and Esthonians. The Russians had already been christianised by preachers of the Greek Church; Nestorians had penetrated Central Asia, and converted a powerful Khan who himself became a priest, and whose fame rapidly overspread Christendom under the name of Presbyter or “Prester” John. Prester John was succeeded by a son, or brother, who bore the name of David; but Genghis Khan attacked him, and towards the end of the twelfth century put an end to the Christian Khanate. In the thirteenth century, Roman missionaries sought to recover the ground thus lost, and Roman envoys made their way through Central Asia, though the Catholic faith never obtained in these Eastern parts more than an imperfect reception and a precarious footing. Traders and other travellers brought the Far East into communication with Europe in other ways; and Marco Polo, a Venetian adventurer who had found employment at the Great Khan’s court, even compiled a handbook to the East for the use of European visitors.
While inland discovery and the spread of Christianity were thus proceeding concurrently in the North of Europe and Central Asia, a process somewhat similar in principle, but different in its aspect, was going on in the South, where the Mediterranean Sea divided the Christian world from the powerful “Saracens,” or Mohammadans of Northern Africa. The conquests of this people, of mixed race, but united in their fanatical propagation of the neo-Arab religion, had been made when Southern Europe, weak and divided, still bore the marks of the ruin which had befallen the Western Empire. The greater part of Spain had fallen into their hands, and they had invaded, though fruitlessly, France itself. Charles the Great had begun the process of restoring the Christian West to stability and influence, and under his successors Western Christendom recovered its balance. Yet the Saracen peoples still preponderated in maritime power. They long held in check the rising maritime power of Venice and Genoa; they overran Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands. Nor was the domination of these vigorous peoples confined to the Mediterranean. In the Red Sea and on the East coast of Africa, frequented by them as far south as Madagascar, they had no rivals. Eastward from the Red Sea they traded to, and in many places settled on, the coasts of India, and the continental shores and islands of the Far East. That branch which held Barbary and Spain was not likely to leave unexplored the Western coast of Africa and the Canary Islands. It was on this coast that the principal work achieved in the Age of Discovery had its beginnings; and although maritime enterprise flourished at Constantinople and Venice, there can be little doubt that these beginnings are due to the Saracens. The Moors, or Saracens of North-west Africa, must have made great progress in ship-building and navigation to have been able to hold the Mediterranean against their Christian rivals. Masters of North Africa, they carried on a large caravan trade across the Sahara with the negro tribes of the Soudan. It is certain that at the beginning of the Age of Discovery they were well acquainted with the dreary and barren Atlantic coast of the Sahara, and knew it to be terminated by the fertile and populous tract watered by the Senegal river; for this tract, marked “Bilad Ghana” or “Land of Wealth,” appears on a map constructed by the Arab geographer Edrisi for Roger II, the Norman King of Sicily, about the year 1150. That they habitually or indeed ever visited it by sea, is improbable, since it was more easily and safely accessible to them by land; and the blank sea-board of the Sahara offered nothing worthy of attention. The Italians and Portuguese, on the contrary, excluded from the African trade by land, saw in Bilad Ghana a country which it was their interest to reach, and which they could only reach by sea. Hence, the important events of the Age of Discovery begin with the coasting of the Atlantic margin of the Sahara-first by the Genoese, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then by the Portuguese, in the first half of the fifteenth-and with the slave-raiding expeditions of the latter people on the voyage to and in Bilad Ghana itself. The name Ghana became known to the Genoese and Portuguese as “Guinea,” and the negroes who inhabited it-a pure black race, easily distinguishable from the hybrid wanderers, half Berber and half black, of the Western Sahara—were called “Guineos.” Hitherto the Portuguese and Spaniards had purchased blacks from the Moors; by navigating the African coast they hoped to procure them at first hand, and largely by the direct process of kidnapping.
While we know nothing of any voyages made by the Moors to Bilad Ghana, and very little of the expeditions of the Genoese explorers who followed them, we possess tolerably full accounts of the Portuguese voyages from their beginning; and these accounts leave us in no