RISE OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. The new influences awakened by the Revival of Learning found expression in other directions. One of these was geographical discovery, itself an outgrowth of that series of movements known as the Crusades, with the accompanying revival of trade and commerce. These led to travel, exploration, and discovery. By the latter part of the thirteenth century the most extensive travel which had taken place since the days of ancient Rome had begun, and in the next two and a half centuries a great expansion of the known world took place.
[Illustration: FIG. 75. THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO CHRISTIAN EUROPE BEFORE
COLUMBUS]
Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville made extended travels to the Orient, and returning (Polo returned, 1295) described to a wondering Europe the new lands and peoples they had seen. The Voyages of Polo and the Travels of Mandeville were widely read. By the beginning of the fourteenth century the compass had been perfected, in Naples, and a great era of exploration had been begun. In 1402 venturesome sailors, out beyond the "Pillars of Hercules," discovered the Canary Islands; in 1419 the Madeira Islands were reached; in 1460 the Cape Verde Islands were found; in 1497 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the southern tip of Africa; and in 1497 Vasco da Gama discovered the long-hoped-for sea route to India. Five years later, sailing westward with the same end in view, Columbus discovered the American continent. Finally, in 1519-22, Magellan's ships circumnavigated the globe, and, returning safely to Spain, proved that the world was round. In 1507 Waldenseemüller published his Introduction to Geography, a book that was widely read, and one which laid the foundations of this modern study.
The effect of these discoveries in broadening the minds of men can be imagined. The religious theories and teachings of the Middle Ages as to the world were in large part upset. New races and new peoples had been found, a round earth instead of a flat one had been proved to exist, new continents had been discovered, and new worlds were now ready to be opened up for scientific exploration and colonization.
ABOUT 1500 A STIMULATING TIME. The latter part of the fifteenth century and the earlier part of the sixteenth was a stimulating period in the intellectual development of Christian Europe. The Turks had closed in on Constantinople (1453) and ended the Eastern Empire, and many Greek scholars had fled to the West. Though the Revival of Learning had culminated in Italy, its influence was still strongly felt in such cities as Florence and Venice, while in German lands and in England the reform movement awakened by it was at its height. Greek and Hebrew were now taught generally in the northern universities. Everywhere the old scholastic learning and methods were being overturned by the new humanism, and scholastic teachers were being displaced from their positions in the universities and schools. The new humanistic university at Wittenberg, founded in 1502, was exerting large influence among German scholars and attracting to it the brightest young minds in German lands. Erasmus was the greatest international scholar of the age, though ably seconded by distinguished humanistic scholars in Italy, France, England, the Low Countries, and German lands. The court schools of Italy (R. 135) and the municipal colleges of France (R. 136) were marking out new lines in the education of the select few. Colet was founding his reformed grammar school (1510) at Saint Paul's, in London (R. 138), the first of a long line of English humanistic grammar schools. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo were adding new fame to Italy, and carrying the Renaissance movement over into that art which the world has ever since treasured and admired.
The Italian cities, particularly Genoa and Venice, had become rich from their commerce, as had many cities in northern lands. Everywhere the cities were centers for the new life in western Christendom. England was rapidly changing from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation. The serf was evolving into a free man all over western Europe. Italian navigators had discovered new sea routes and lands, and robbed the ocean of its terrors. Columbus had discovered a new world, soon to be peopled and to become the home of a new civilization. Magellan had shown that the world was round and poised in space, instead of flat and surrounded by a circumfluent ocean. The printing-press had been perfected and scattered over Europe, and was rapidly multiplying books and creating a new desire to read (R. 134). The Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been in the past, or soon was to be for centuries to come. All of these new influences and conditions combined to awaken thought as had not happened before since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about ready for rapid advances in many new directions, and great progress in learning, education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed almost within grasp. Unfortunately the promise was not to be fulfilled, and the progress that seemed possible in 1500 was soon lost amid the bitterness and hatreds engendered by a great religious conflict, then about to break, and which was destined to leave, for centuries to come, a legacy of intolerance and suspicion in all lands.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. In what way was the fact that Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in Italian instead of Latin an evidence of large independence?
2. Was it a good thing for peace and civilization that the modern languages arose, instead of all speaking and writing Latin? Why?
3. Of what value to one is a "sense of the past behind him, and a conception of the possibilities of the future before him," by way of giving perspective and self-confidence? Do we have many mediaeval-type people to-day?