sitting on a stone he still avows his faith, and confesses that even then he has not received his deserts. He goes to beg in the Christian quarter, and no one gives to him; but still his faith and love to God hold out : 66 Ensement Bauduins chelle rue cherqua Bauduin le regarde, c'onques mot ne parla." The cobler is charitable, gives him bread, shoes, and a grey coat that was a foot too short. He then asks Bauduin if he will not learn his trade; but that is too much for the knightly stomach: "Et Bauduin respont, li preus et li membrus, The Caliph now in his Council expresses his vexation about the miracle, and says he does not know how to disprove the faith of the Christians. A very sage old Saracen who knew Hebrew, and Latin, and some thirty languages, makes a suggestion, which is, in fact that about the moving of the Mountain, as related by Marco Polo.* Master Thomas is sent for again, and told that they must transport the high mountain of Thir to the valley of Joaquin, which lies to the westward. He goes away in new despair and causes his clerk to sonner le clocke for his people. Whilst they are weeping and wailing in the church, a voice is heard desiring them to seek a certain Holy man who is at the good cobler's, and to do him honour. God at his prayer will do a miracle. They go in procession to Bauduin, who thinks they are mocking him. They treat him as a saint, and strive to touch his old coat. At last he consents to pray along with the whole congregation. The Caliph is in his palace with his princes, taking his ease at a window. Suddenly he starts up exclaiming : 66 6 Seignour! Par Mahoumet que j'aoure et tieng cher, Le Mont de Thir enportent le deable d'enfer !' Li Calife s'écrie: ‘Seignour, franc palasin, Voiés le Mont de Thir qui ch'est mis au chemin ! Ja bientot le verrons ens ou val Joaquin !'" * Vol. i. pp. 65, seqq. The virtuous cobler is not left out, but is made to play second fiddle to the hero Bauduin. The Caliph is converted, releases Polibans, and is baptized, taking the name of Bauduin, to whom he expresses his fear of the Viex de la Montagne with his Hauts-Assis, telling anew the story of the Assassin's Paradise, and so enlarges on the beauty of Ivorine that Bauduin is smitten, and his love heals his malady. Toleration is not learned however: "Bauduin, li Califes, fist baptiser sa gent Et qui ne voilt Dieu croire li teste on li pourfent!" The Caliph gives up his kingdom to Bauduin, proposing to follow him to the Wars of Syria. And Bauduin presents the Kingdom to the Cobler. Bauduin, the Caliph, and Prince Polibans then proceed to visit the Mountain of the Old Man. The Caliph professes to him that they want help against Godfrey of Bouillon. The Viex says he does not give a bouton for Godfrey; he will send one of his Hauts-Assis straight to his tent, and give him a great knife of steel between fie et poumon! After dinner they go out and witness the feat of devotion which we have quoted elsewhere.* They then see the Paradise and the lovely Ivorine, with whose beauty Bauduin is struck dumb. The lady had never smiled before; now she declares that he for whom she had long waited was come. Bauduin exclaims: The Old One is vexed, but speaks pleasantly to his daughter, who replies with frightfully bad language, and declares herself to be a Christian. The father calls out to the Caliph to kill her. The Caliph pulls out a big knife and gives him a blow that nearly cuts him in two. The amiable Ivorine says she will go with Bauduin : "Se mes pères est mors, n'en donne un paresis !'” We need not follow the story further, as I did not trace beyond this point any distinct derivation from our Traveller, with the exception of that allusion to the incombustible covering * Vol. i. p. 137. of the napkin of St. Veronica, which I have quoted at pp. 194, 195 of this volume. But including this, here are at least seven different themes borrowed from Marco Polo's book, on which to be sure his poetical contemporary plays the most extraordinary variations. XIII. NATURE OF POLO'S INFLUENCE ON GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE. Tardy ope 79. Marco Polo contributed such a vast amount of new facts to the knowledge of the Earth's surface, that one might have expected his book to have had a sudden effect upon the Science of Geography: but no such result ration, and occurred speedily, nor was its beneficial effect of any long duration. causes thereof. No doubt several causes contributed to the slowness of its action upon the notions of Cosmographers, of which the unreal character attributed to the Book, as a collection of romantic marvels rather than of geographical and historical facts, may have been one, as Santarem urges. But the essential causes were no doubt the imperfect nature of publication before the invention of the press; the traditional character which clogged geography as well as all other branches of knowledge in the Middle Ages; and the entire absence of scientific principle in what passed for geography, so that there was no organ equal to the assimilation of a large mass of new knowledge. Of the action of the first cause no examples can be more striking than we find in the false conception of the Caspian as a gulf of the Ocean, entertained by Strabo, and the opposite error in regard to the Indian Sea held by Ptolemy, who regards it as an enclosed basin, when we contrast these with the correct ideas on both subjects possessed by Herodotus. racteristics 80. As regards the second cause alleged, we may say that down nearly to the middle of the 15th century cosmographers, as a rule, made scarcely any attempt to reform their General chamaps by any elaborate search for new matter, or by of Medieval lights that might be collected from recent travellers. phy. Their world was in its outline that handed down by the traditions of their craft, and sanctioned by some Father of the church, Cosmogra such as Orosius or Isidore, and sprinkled with a combination of classical and medieval legend. Almost universally the earth's surface is represented as filling the greater part of a circular disk, rounded by the ocean. Jerusalem occupies the central point, because it was found written in the Prophet Ezekiel : "Haec dicit Dominus Deus: Ista est Ferusalem, in medio gentium posui eam, et in circuitu ejus terras." The Terrestrial Paradise was represented as occupying the extreme East, because it was found in Genesis that the Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden.* Gog and Magog were set in the far north or northeast, because it was said again in Ezekiel: "Ecce Ego super te Gog Principem capitis Mosoch et Thubal . . . et ascendere te faciam de lateribus Aquilonis," whilst probably the topography of those mysterious nationalities was completed by a girdle of mountains out of the Alexandrian Fables. The loose and scanty nomenclature was mainly borrowed from Pliny or Mela through such Fathers as we have named; whilst vacant spaces were occupied by Amazons, Arimaspians, and the realm of Prester John. A favourite representation of the inhabited earth was this ; a great O enclosing a T, which thus divides the circle in three parts; the greater or half-circle being Asia, the two quarter circles Europe and Africa.† Roger geographer. 81. Even Ptolemy seems to have been almost unknown; and indeed had his Geography been studied it might have tended to some greater endeavours after accuracy. Bacon as a And Roger Bacon, whilst lamenting the exceeding deficiency of geographical knowledge in the Latin world, and purposing to essay an exacter distribution of countries, says he will not attempt to do so by latitude and longitude, for that is a system of which the Latins have learned nothing. He himself, whilst still somewhat burdened by the authoritative dicta of "saints and sages" of past times, ventures at least to criticize some of the latter, such as Pliny and Ptolemy, and declares his intention to have recourse to the *This circumstance does not however show in the Vulgate. +"Veggiamo in prima in general la terra Come resiede, e come il mar la serra. Un T dentro ad un O mostra il disegno ASIA chiamata: il gambo ritto è segno -La Sfera, del Dati, Lib. iii. st. 11. information of those who have travelled most extensively over the Earth's surface. And judging from the good use he makes, in his description of the northern parts of the world, of the Travels of Rubruquis, whom he had known and questioned, besides diligently studying his narrative, we might have expected much in Geography from this great man, had similar materials been available to him for other parts of the earth. I do not gather, however, that he actually constructed any map.* Elder. 82. The Map of Marino Sanuto the Elder, constructed between 1300 and 1320, may be regarded as an exceptionally favourable specimen of the cosmography in vogue, Marino for the author was a diligent investigator and com- Sanuto the piler, and evidently took a considerable interest in Geography. Nor is the map without some result of these characteristics. His representation of Europe, Northern Africa, Syria, Asia Minor, Arabia and its two gulfs, is a fair approximation to general facts; his collected knowledge has enabled him to locate, with more or less of general truth, Georgia, the Iron Gates, Cathay, the Plain of Moghan, Euphrates and Tigris, Persia, Bagdad, Kais, Aden (though on the wrong side of the Red Sea), Abyssinia (Habesh), Zangibar (Zinz), Jidda, (Zede), &c. But after all the traditional forms are too strong for him. Jerusalem is still the centre of the disk of the habitable earth, so that the distance is as great from Syria to Gades in the extreme West, as from Syria to the India Interior of Prester John which terminates the extreme East. And Africa beyond the Arabian Gulf is carried, according to the Arabian modification of Ptolemy's misconception, far to the Eastward until it almost meets the prominent shores of India. The Catalan Map of 1375, complete the most 83. The first genuine medieval attempt at a geographical construction that I know of, free from the traditional idola, is the Map of the known World from the Portulano Mediceo (in the Laurentian Library), of which an extract is engraved in the atlas of Baldello-Boni's Polo. I need not describe it, however, because I cannot satisfy myself that it makes much use of Polo's contributions, and Geography. its facts have been embodied in a more ambitious work of the next generation, the celebrated Catalan Map of 1375 in the *See Opus Majus, Venice ed. pp. 142, seqq. medieval embodiment of |