Long before the great period of discoveries Italians contributed to the increase of geographical knowledge by travel and narratives of travel over the world as it was already known, but only known vaguely and by dim report. Down to the middle of the thirteenth century the total knowledge of the lands and waters of the globe possessed by the educated men of Europe was not appreciably greater than it had been a thousand years earlier. The disintegration of the old Roman world, the more stationary habits of life, and the narrower interests of men during the early Middle Ages were unfavorable to travel.
The later Middle Ages were not lacking in keen intellect, in large knowledge, in powers of systematization and elaboration of what has already been acquired; but they had neither the material equipment nor the mental temperament to carry the boundaries of knowledge further. What was known of the world to Ptolemy in the second century made up the sum of knowledge possessed by the geographers of all the following centuries to the thirteenth. Indeed, the mediaeval tendency to establish symmetrical measurements, to adopt fanciful explanations, and to find analogies in all things, obscured earlier knowledge and made geographers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries less correct in their knowledge of the world than were those of the second or the third. [Footnote: Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography.]
The discoveries, conquests, and settlements of the Northmen in the north of Europe and the northern Atlantic were so detached from the knowledge of the south and came to a pause so early in time that notwithstanding their potential value they contributed practically nothing to the general geographical knowledge of Europe. Nor did Christian, Jewish, or Arabic accounts of Eastern lands written by travellers of the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries become widely known or influential. [Footnote: Ibid., II., chaps, i.- iv.] Even the knowledge brought home by the Crusaders was of a restricted territory, most of it already comparatively familiar; and therefore they added little to the common stock.
About the middle of the thirteenth century, however, began a series of journeys which were more fully recorded in narratives more widely circulated and in a more receptive period. Three incentives habitually carry men into distant and unknown lands—missionary zeal, desire for trade, and curiosity. Actuated by one or other of these influences, an increasing number of Europeans visited lands far beyond the eastern terminations of the trade-routes, and some of them brought back reports of which the influence was wide and lasting.
Among the earliest and most observant were a succession of Franciscan friars, sent after 1245 on missionary journeys to the court of the ruler of the great Tartar Empire, which was then so rapidly overspreading Asia and eastern Europe. The first of these was John de Piano Carpini, a native of Naples, who belonged to a Franciscan house near Perugia. He went through Bohemia, Poland, southern Russia, and the vast steppes of Turkestan, and found the Khan at Karakorum, in Mongolia. He was two years on the journey, and after his return wrote an exact and interesting account of his observations and experiences. [Footnote: Travels of John de Piano Carpini (D'Avezac's ed.).]
A few years afterwards William de Rubruquis—a Fleming in this case, not an Italian—was sent to visit the Mongol emperor by Louis IX. when he was in the East. He followed a more southerly route than Carpini, skirting the northern shores of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Sea of Aral, and then passing northward to Karakorum. Returning he crossed the Caucasus and passed through Persia and the lands of the Turks, finally reaching the Mediterranean through Syria. The account which he wrote of his adventures was much fuller than that of Piano Carpini, and gives descriptions of China as well as of the central Asiatic lands. [Footnote: Travels of William de Rubruquis (D'Avezac's ed).]
Just at the beginning of the next century two other travellers, John de Monte Corvino [Footnote: Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, II, chap v.] and Odoric de Pordenone, [Foornote: Travels of Odoric de Pordenone (D'Avezac's ed)] both Italians, made journeys through Persia, India, southern Asia, and China, and later wrote accounts of these more southern lands quite as full as were those already mentioned concerning the northern parts of the great eastern continent. The most famous of all mediaeval travellers in the East were the Venetian merchants Nicolo and Matteo Polo and their nephew Marco. These enterprising traders, leaving their warehouses in Soldaia on the Crimea, in two successive journeys made their way along the northern and central trade-routes to Pekin, in northern China, or Cathay, which had become the capital of the Great Khan. For almost twenty years the Polos were attached to the court of Kublai Khan, the nephew, Marco, rising higher and higher in the graces of that ruler.
Marco Polo was one of the well-known type of Italian adventurers who appeared at foreign courts, and, with the versatility of their race, made themselves useful, and indeed indispensable, to their masters. He learned the languages of the East, and went upon missions for the Great Khan to all parts of his vast empire. When, in 1292, the Polos obtained permission to return home they followed the longest and most important of the three main trade-routes which have been described. They sailed from Zaiton, a seaport of China, and passing along the shores of Tonquin, Java, and farther India, made their way from port to port, through the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon, then to the Malabar coast of India, along which they passed to Cambay, and thence through the Red Sea to Cairo, and so to Venice. Their journey homeward from China, with its long detentions in the East Indies, took almost three years.
All the world knows of Marco Polo's subsequent experiences in Venice, his capture and imprisonment in Genoa, the stories of his travels with which he whiled away the weary days of his captivity, and the gathering of these into a book which spread widely through Europe within the next few years and has been eagerly read ever since. [Footnote: Marco Polo (Yule's ed,), Introduction.]
Neither the travels of Marco Polo nor those of his predecessors or immediate successors disclosed any lands the existence of which was not before known to Europeans; but they gave fuller knowledge of many countries and nations of which the names only were known; and they gave this knowledge with astonishing freshness, minuteness, and accuracy. The writers of these books travelled over many thousands of miles, and they described, in the main, what they saw, although, of course, they repeated, with more or less of exaggeration, much which they only knew from conversation or from hearsay. Besides the written stories of such experiences, other Europeans who accompanied these travellers, or who made independent journeys to various parts of Asia, spread knowledge of the same things. The author of a later popular volume of travels, passing under the name of Sir John Mandeville, managed, by making use of a slight acquaintance with Asia, of a fuller knowledge of the writings of other travellers, and, most of all, of the resources of a fertile imagination, to weave a tissue of mendacious description which really lessened knowledge. [Footnote: Travels of Sir John Mandeville (ed. of 1900).]