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I
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EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS. CIRCA 333-867
The 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 Caesars, 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. Medieval 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 medieval 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 Nicaea, 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 Osrhoène, 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 “Caesarean”
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 Caesarea”,
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 Ethiopians “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 “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 medieval 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 Boethius
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.
Bernard’s account closes with the Roman churches—the
Lateran, where the “keys of the whole city are given every night into the hands
of the Apostolic Pope”, and St. Peter’s on the “West side of Rome, that for
size has no rival in the world”.
At the same time, or a little earlier than the Breton traveller (c. 808-850), another Latin had written a short
tract On the Houses of God in Jerusalem, which, with Bernard’s note-book, is
our last geographical record before the age of the Northmen.
A new time was coming—a time not of timid creeping
pilgrims only, but of sea-kings and seamen, who made the ocean their home, and,
for the North of Europe at least, broke the tradition of land journeys and
coasting voyages.
But the early pilgrims after all have their place. It
is of no use insisting that the mental outlook of these men is infantile;—that
is best proved by their own words, their own scale of things; but it is
necessary to insist that in these travellers we have
comparatively enlarged experience and knowledge; and as comparison is the only
test of any age, or of any man therein, the very blunders and limitations of
the past, as we see them to be, have a constant, as well as an historical,
value to us. That is, we are always being reminded, first, how we have come to
the present mastery over nature, over ourselves, over all being; and, secondly,
how imperfect, how futile, our work is still, and seems always doomed to be, if
judged from a really final standpoint, or rather from our own dreams of the
ultimately possible.
So if in the case of our medieval travellers their interests are the very reverse of ours; if they take delight in brooding
over thoughts which to us do not seem worth the thinking; if their minds seem
to rest as much on fable implicitly accepted as on the little amount of
experienced fact necessary for a working life, it will not be for us to judge,
or to pity, or to despise the men who were making our world for us, and through
whose work we live.
Especially we cannot afford to forget this as we reach
the lowest point of the fortunes, the mental and material work and position and
outlook, of Europe and Christendom. A half-barbarised world had entered upon the inheritance of a splendid past, but it took
centuries before that inheritance was realised by the
so altered present. In this time of change we have men writing in the language
of Caesar and Augustine, of Alexander and Plato and Aristotle, who had been
themselves, or whose fathers had been, pirates, brigands, nomades,—
“wolves of the land or of the sea”—to Greeks or Romans of the South; who had
been even to the Romanised provincials of the North,
as in Britain, mere “dogs”, “whelps from the kennel of barbarism”, the
destroyers of the order of the world. The boundless credulity and servile
terror, the superstition and feudal tyranny of the earlier Middle Ages, mark
the first stage of the reconstruction of society, when savage strong men who
had conquered were set down beside the overworked and outworn masters of the
Western world, to learn of them, and to make of them a more enduring race.
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