Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. / With an Account of Geographical Progress Throughout the Middle Ages As the Preparation for His Work.

by C. Raymond Beazley

His tone is much like Sæwulf's and his mistakes are quite as bad, though he tells of "nothing but what was seen with these self-same eyes." The "Sea of Sodom exhales a burning and fetid breath that lays waste all the country, as with burning sulphur, for the torments of Hell lie under it." This, however, he did not see; Saracen brigands prevented him, and he learnt that "the very smell of the place would make one ill."

His measurements of distance are all his own. Capernaum is "in the desert, not far from the Great Sea (Levant) and eight versts (four miles) from Cæsarea," half the distance given in the next chapter as between Acre and Haifa, and less than half the breadth of the Sea of Tiberias. The Jordan reminds Daniel of his own river, the Snow, especially in its sheets of stagnant water.

Samaria, or "Sebastopol," he confuses with Nablous; Bethshan with Bashan; Lydda with Ramleh; Cæsarea Philippi with the greater Cæsarea on the coast. Not far from Capernaum and the Jordan is "another large river that comes out of the Lake of Gennesaret, and falls into the Sea of Tiberias, passing by a large town called Decapolis." From Mt. Lebanon "six rivers flow east into the Lake of Gennesaret and six west towards great Antioch, so that this is called Mesopotamia, or the land between the rivers, and Abraham's Haran is between these rivers that feed the Lake of Gennesaret."

Daniel has left us also an account of his visits to Mar Saba Convent in the Kedron gorge near the Dead Sea, to Damascus in the train of Prince Baldwin, and to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, to witness the miracle of the Holy Fire, noticed by Bernard the Wise, as a sort of counterpart to the wonder of Beth-Horon, also retold by Daniel "when the sun stood still while Joshua conquered King Og of Bashan."

It is not in outlook nor in knowledge nor even in the actual ground traversed that these later pilgrims shew any advance on the chief of the earlier travellers; it is in the new life and movement, in the new hope they give us of greater things than these. This is the interest—to us—in King Sigurd of Norway (1107-11), a Crusader-Norseman in the new age that owed so much of its very life to the Northmen, but who is only to be noticed here as a possible type of the explorer-chief—possible, not actual—for his voyage added nothing definite to the knowledge or expansion of Christendom. His campaign in Jacob's Land or Gallicia, and his attack on Moslem Lisbon, some forty years before it became the head and heart of Portugal, like his exploits in the Balearics, shew us a point in the steady decline of western Islam, and so far may be called a preparation for Prince Henry's work, but properly as a chapter of Portuguese, not of general European, growth.

There were many others like Sigurd,—Robert of Normandy, Godric the English pirate, who fought his way through the Saracen fleets with a spear-shaft for his banner, Edgar the Ætheling, grandson of Edmund Ironside, the Dartmouth fleet of 1147 which retook Lisbon,—but the Latin conquest of Syria has now brought us past the Crusades, in the narrower sense, to their results, in the exploration of the Further East.

The first great name of this time, of our next main chapter of Preparation, is Benjamin of Tudela, but standing as he does well within the earlier age, when the primary interest was the Holy War itself, he is also the last of the Palestine travellers—of those Westerns whose real horizon was the sacred East of Syria. He is a little before the awakening of universal interest in the unknown world, for the Christian Northmen lost with the new definiteness of the new faith much of their old infinite unrest and fierce inquisitive love of wandering, and their spirit, though related to the whole Catholic West by the crusading movement, was not fully realised till the world had been explored and made known, till the men of Europe were at home in every country and on every sea.

Benjamin, as a Jew and a rabbi, has the interest of a sectary, and his work was not of a kind that would readily win the attention of the Christian world. So the value of his travels was hidden till religious divisions had ceased to govern the direction of progress. He visited the Jewish communities from Navarre to Bagdad, and described those beyond from Bagdad to China, but he wrote for his own people and none but they seem to have cared about him. What he discovered (c. 1160-73) was for himself and for Judaism, and only his actual place in the twelfth century makes him a fore-runner of the Polos or of Prince Henry. We may see this from his hopeless strangeness and confusion in Rome, like a Frank in Pekin or Delhi. "The Church of St. Peter is on the site of the great palace of Julius Cæsar, near which are eighty Halls of the eighty Kings called Emperors from Tarquin to Pepin the father of Charles, who first took Spain from the Saracens.... In the outskirts of the city is the palace of Titus, who was deposed by three hundred senators for wasting three years over the siege of Jerusalem which he should have finished in two."

And so on—with the "Hall of Galba, three miles round and having a window for each day in the year," with St. John Lateran and its Hebrew trophies, "two copper pillars from the temple of Solomon, that sweat at the anniversary of the burning of the Temple," and the "statues of Samson and of Absalom" in the same place. So with Sorrento, "built by Hadarezer when he fled before King David," with the old Roman tunnel between Naples and Pozzuoli, "built by Romulus who feared David and Joab," with Apulia, "which is from King Pul of Assyria"—in all this we have as it were Catholic mythology turned inside out, David put into Italy when the West put Trajan at the sources of the Nile. It was not likely that writing of this sort would be read in the society of the Popes and the Schoolmen, the friars and the crusaders, any more than the Buddhist records of missionary travel from China one thousand years before. The religious passion which had set the crusaders in motion, would keep Catholics as long as it might from the Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics they conquered and among whom they settled.

But with the final loss of Jerusalem by the Latins, and the overthrow of the Bagdad Caliphate by the Mongol Tartars (1258), the barrier of fanatic hatred was weakened, and Central Asia became an attraction to Christendom instead of a dim horror, without form and void, except for Huns and Turks and demons. The Papal court sent mission after mission to convert the Tartars, who were wavering, as men supposed, between Islam and the Church, and with the first missionaries to the House of Ghenghiz went the first Italian merchants who opened the court of the Great Khan to Venice and to Genoa.