to Bauduin, who thinks they are mocking him. him as a saint, and strive to touch his old coat. consents to pray along with the whole congregation. They treat At last he The Caliph is in his palace with his princes, taking his ease at a window. Suddenly he starts up exclaiming: 666 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 !'" 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: 66 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. exclaims: "Madame, fu-jou chou qui sui le vous subgis?' Et li dist: Bauduins, vous estes mes amis !'" Bauduin The Old One is vexed, but speaks pleasantly to his daughter, who replies with frightfully bad language, and declares herself *Vol. I. p. 150. 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 of the napkin of St. Veronica, which I have quoted at p. 218 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 Tardy operation, and KNOWLEDGE. 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 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 competent 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 cor rect ideas on both subjects possessed by Herodotus. The later Geographers no doubt knew his statements, but did not appreciate them, probably from not possessing the evidence on which they were based. racteristics Cosmogra 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, as sanctioned by some Father of the Church, such as Orosius or Isidore, as sprinkled with a combination of classical and medieval legend; Solinus being the great authority for the former. Almost universally the earth's surface is represented as filling the greater part of a circular disk, rounded by the ocean; a fashion that already existed in the time of Aristotle and was ridiculed by him.* No dogma of false geography was more persistent or more pernicious than this. Jerusalem occupies the central point, because it was found written in the Prophet Ezekiel: "Haec dicit Dominus Deus: Ista est Jerusalem, in medio gentium posui eam, et in circuitu ejus terras;"† a declaration supposed to be corroborated by the Psalmist's expression, regarded as prophetic of the death of Our Lord: "Deus autem, Rex noster, ante secula operatus est salutem in medio Terrae" (Ps. lxxiii. 12). The * 66 'They draw nowadays the map of the world in a laughable manner, for they draw the inhabited earth as a circle; but this is impossible, both from what we see and from reason."-(Meteorolog. Lib. II. cap. 5). + In Dante's Cosmography, Jerusalem is the centre of our oikovμévn, whilst the Mount of Purgatory occupies the middle of the Antipodal hemisphere :— The belief, with this latter ground of it, is alluded to in curious verses by Jacopo Alighieri, Dante's son : Though the general meaning of the second couplet is obvious, the expression 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 north-east, 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 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. These maps were known to St. Augustine. ‡ Roger ; a great O 81. Even Ptolemy seems to have been almost unknown; and indeed had his Geography been studied it might, with all its errors, have tended to some greater endeavours Bacon as a after accuracy. 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 geographer. il colco dell' Emme, "the couch of the M," is puzzling. The best solution that occurs to me is this: In looking at the world-map of Marino Sanudo, noticed on page 128, as engraved by Bongars in the Gesta Dei per Francos, you find geometrical lines laid down, connecting the N.E., N.W., S.E., and S.W. points, and thus forming a square inscribed in the circular disk of the Earth, with its diagonals passing through the Central Zion. The eye easily discerns in these a great M inscribed in the circle, with its middle angular point at Jerusalem. Gervasius of Tilbury (with some confusion in his mind between tropic and equinoxial, like that which Pliny makes in speaking of the Indian Mons Malleus) says that " some are of opinion that the Centre is in the place where the Lord spoke to the woman of Samaria at the well, for there, at the summer solstice, the noonday sun descends perpendicularly into the water of the well, casting no shadow; a thing which the philosophers say occurs at Syene"! (Otia Imperialia, by Liebrecht, p. 1.) *This circumstance does not however show in the Vulgate. "Veggiamo in prima in general la terra Come resicde, e come il mar la serra. Un T dentro ad un O mostra il disegno Come in tre parti fu diviso il Mondo, E la superiore è il maggior regno ASIA chiamata: il gambo ritto è segno De Civ. Dei, xvi. 17, quoted by Peschel, 92. 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 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. He did attempt a map with mathematical determination of places, but it has not been preserved.† It may be said with general truth that the world-maps current up to the end of the 13th century had more analogy to the mythical cosmography of the Hindus than to any thing properly geographical. Both no doubt were originally based in the main on real features. In the Hindu cosmography these genuine features are symmetrized as in a kaleidoscope; in the European cartography they are squeezed together in a manner that one can only compare to a pig in brawn. Here and there some feature strangely compressed and distorted is just recognizable. A splendid example of this kind of map is that famous one at Hereford, executed about A.D. 1275, of which a facsimile has lately been published, accompanied by a highly meritorious illustrative Essay.‡ 82. Among the Arabs many able men, from the early days of Islám, took an interest in Geography, and devoted labour to geographical compilations, in which they often made use of their own observations, of the itineraries of travellers, and of other fresh knowledge. But somehow or other their maps were always far behind their books. Though they appear to have had an early translation of Ptolemy, and elaborate Tables of Latitudes and Longitudes form a prominent feature in many of their geographical treatises, there appears to be no Arabic map in existence, laid down with meridians and parallels; Opus Majus, Venice ed. pp. 142, seqq. † Peschel, p. 195. This had escaped me. By the Rev. W. L. Bevan, M.A., and the Rev. H. W. Phillips, M.A. In Asia, they point out, the only name showing any recognition of modern knowledge is Samarcand. |