The work of Marco Polo is the high-water mark of mediæval land travel; the extension of Christendom after him was mainly by the paths of the sea; the Roman missions to the Tartars and to Malabar, vigorously and stubbornly pressed as they were, ended in unrelieved collapse; only by the revolt and resurrection of the Russian kingdom did the European world permanently and markedly expand on the side of Asia. But a crowd of missionaries followed the first traders to Cathay and to Mangi—Friar Odoric, John de Monte Corvino, John de Cora; statesmen like Marignolli the Papal Legate, sight-seers like Mandeville followed these; Bishop Jordanus of Capua worked for years in Coulam near Cape Comorin (c. 1325-35); the martyrdom of four friars on April 1, 1322, at Tana, in India, became one of the great commemorations of the Latin Church; there seemed no cause why Christian missions which had won north and north-east Europe should not win central and eastern Asia, whose peoples seemed as indifferent, as agnostic, as our own Norse or English pagans.
"The fame of the Latins," says Jordanus, about 1330—and he is borne out by Marino Sanuto—"is greater in India than among ourselves. Here our arrival is always looked for, and said to be predicted in their books. Once gain Egypt and launch a fleet even of two galleys on this sea and the battle is won." As Egypt could not be gained by arms, it was turned by seamanship. Before Polo returned from China, the coasting of Africa had begun, and Italian mariners were already in search of the longer way to the East.
But there is no work of land travel after that of Messer Marco which really adds anything decisive to European knowledge before the fifteenth century; the advance of trade intercourse between India and the Italian Republics, the gradual liberation of Russia the use made of the caravan routes by some of the most active of the Western clergy, are the chief notes of the time between the Polos and Prince Henry; and the flimsy fabrications of Mandeville—"of all liars that type of the first magnitude"—would be fairly left without a word even in a minute history of discovery, if he had not, like Ktesias with Herodotus, won a hearing for himself and drawn men's minds away from the truth-telling original that he travestied, by the sheer force of impudence.
The Indian travels of the Italian Nicolo Conti and the Russian merchant Athanasius Nikitin belong to a later time, to the age of the Portuguese voyages; they are not part of the preparation for our central subject, they are only a somewhat obscure parallel to that subject.
For in the later Middle Ages the chief interest lies elsewhere. The expansion of Christendom in the fourteenth century, and still more in the fifteenth (Prince Henry's own), is the story of the ventures and the successes, not so much of landsmen, as of mariners.
