344 
NATURE 
[FEBRUARY 7, 1907 
century were out of date to the men of the thirteenth, 
especially in the Mediterranean lands, where a re- 
public of merchants had deposed an Emperor and 
parcelled out his lands, using the ery of the Faith 
as a cloak for their own ambition. And now neither 
the merchants of Venice nor those of Genoa would 
give up their fondaci of Alexandria or Cairo, and their 
lucrative trade with the land of the Soldan, the head- 
centre of Islam, at the bidding of a Sanuto in order 
to restore Jerusalem to the temporal dominion of 
their faith. The days of the Crusaders were over; 
the Viking spirit from the North that had impelled 
the warriors of the Cross to set out to battle with the 
Paynim followers of Mahound was exhausted, and 
the men of the later day seemed to love the bezant 
as much as they venerated the Rood. So the Western 
Tartars turned to Mohammedanism; the light of the 
Roman missions in the lands of the Ilkhanate 
flickered and died out, and the only result of this 
second phase in the intercourse between the Frankish 
West and the East was the increased geographical 
knowledge which, in conjunction with the commercial 
ventures of the time, it brought about. Many ran to 
and fro, and knowledge was increased. 
Many ran far in those days. A journey to Cathay 
in the thirteenth century must have seemed almost 
as tremendous as a voyage to the moon would now, 
and the stories which the travellers brought back of 
the Chinese must have seemed almost as incredible 
to their stay-at-home friends as stories of Selenites. 
Mr. Beazley describes the journeys of the Polos at 
length, and gives a most interesting epitome of 
Messer Marco’s description of the land of the Great 
Cham, Kublai. The civilised power, in comparison 
with which Europe was a den of savages, the posts, 
the banknotes, the great seaport of Zayton (Arabic 
Zétin, the modern Amoy) ; the enormous city of Hang- 
chau; the mighty Khanbalik or Peking, Coleridge’s 
Xanadu, the city of Kubla Khan himself; the distant 
isles of Zipangu or Japan; all must have sounded 
incredibly wonderful to the Western ear. Yet that 
the Milioni were not liars was proved by many a 
witness, contemporary and following shortly after; 
Monte Corvino the first Roman Archbishop of Peking, 
Odoric the Friar, Marignolli the Bishop of Bisignano, 
and many a simple Genoese trader besides. Of all 
these Odoric is the most interesting, and seems to have 
gone furthest. For if Marco Polo visited Szechuen, 
Yunnan, and Burma in, his official capacity as a 
Chinese Futai, and was the first to acquaint Europe 
with these regions, the humble missionary brought 
back knowledge of the Philippines and of the isles 
beyond Borneo, and was the first European to visit 
Lhasa. His description, too, of Cathay is second in 
interest to that of Polo only. And few things in this 
description are more interesting than his account of 
how he, with the Bishop and other missionaries, met 
the Great Khan (a successor of Kublai) upon the high 
road and went forth to meet him, the Bishop in cope 
and mitre, with cross upraised on high, all singing 
the Veni Creator; and how the Emperor raised him- 
self in his palanquin reverently to kiss the sign of 
salvation; and how Brother Odoric, mindful of the 
injunction Non apparebis in conspectu meo vacuus, 
tendered to Majesty his humble trencher of apples, 
whereof the Emperor took one and deiened to eat it. 
The Tartar Emperors of the Yuen always treated 
the Frank Christians with courtesy and showed in- 
terest in their religion; it was not until the national 
Chinese uprising and their replacement by the Ming 
that Christianity was oppressed, and, very shortly, 
China was shut to them as completely as two hundred 
vears later Japan was shut to Christian endeavour 
bv the policy of the Tokugawa Shoguns. Just as the 
NO. 1945, VOL. 75 | 
Nearer East was barred by the conversion of the 
Persian Tartars to Islam, so was the Further East 
barred by the accession of a national dynasty to the 
throne of China. No more Franks visited China 
until the coming of the ships of Portugal and Holland 
in the sixteenth century. Here also the progress of 
geographical knowledge was brought to a_ halt 
and the promise of the dawn, temporarily at least, 
belied. 
In the opposite field of operations, however, pro- 
gress, though slower, was never stayed. As was 
natural, on account of the then superior state of their 
civilisation to that of the Franks, the Maghrabi 
Mohammedans were the first to explore the coasts 
beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and even discovered 
Madeira and the Canaries. This we know from the 
voyage of the Eight Maghriirin, or ‘‘ Deceived Ones,” 
of Lisbon, then (before 1147 A.D.; on p. 411 Mr. 
Beazley says 1154 A.D.) a Moslem city. These worthies 
set forth in a manner strongly reminiscent of the 
Wise Men of Gotham, who went to Sea in a Bowl, 
and found Madeira, which they called, not ‘ Al 
Ghanam’”’ (as Mr. Beazley has it in his note on 
p- 532: this would mean ‘‘ the Sheep ’’), but Geziret 
al-Ghanam, ‘‘ The Isle of Sheep.’’? Afterwards they 
found the Canaries and eventually got back to Lisbon, 
where the stay-at-home Gothamites mocked at them 
for ‘* Maghrdrin,’? and probably for Majniinin, 
“‘lunaties,’? also. However, their isles existed, and 
in the thirteenth century the Canaries were discovered 
by the Genoese Lancelot Malocello, from whom 
Lanzarote took its name. 
Mr. Beazley describes the gradual progress of know- 
ledge of these Western isles, the discovery of Madeira 
by Portuguese under Genoese admiralty, the voyages 
of Portuguese, Catalans, and French beyond Cape 
Nun to Bojador, and the French expeditions of 
Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle to the Canaries 
at the end of the fourteenth century, which, perhaps, 
are the origin of the unsubstantiated French claim to 
have discovered Guinea long before the sailors of 
Prince Henry the Navigator. Mr. Beazley is not 
indistinctly of opinion that the claim of the seven- 
teenth-century writer de Bellefond that Dieppois 
sailors (we object to Mr. Beazley’s ‘‘ Dieppese ’’) 
traded with the Guinea coast as early as 1364 is un- 
founded, to say the least of it. He does not enter 
much into the question of the MS. of ‘‘ Mr. William 
Carter,’’ describing these voyages, which, according 
to M. Margry, in his ‘‘ Navigations frangaises .. . 
d’aprés les documents inédits ’’ (Paris, 1867), was lent 
to M. de Rosny in 1852 or 1853, and has not since 
been traced. ‘Mr. William Carter”? is a French- 
man’s name for a typical Englishman; it savours of 
“’ Miss Mary Smith,’’ or the British ‘“‘M. Jules 
Dupont’? for a Frenchman. But it should not be 
difficult to ascertain whether there existed sixty years 
ago a gentleman bearing this name who would have 
been lilkely to have possessed such a manuscript. In 
any case, however, even if found, it would probably 
turn out to be of seventeenth-century date, and as 
worthless for history as de Bellefond’s own testimony 
or the ridiculous rubbish of the Zeni (pp. 456-60) 
about their ‘‘ voyages”? to the North, in which these 
heroes confuse Friesland with Iceland, and bestow 
upon ‘‘Frisland’’ a king called “ Zichmni,’’ and 
so on. 
Mr. Beazley gives an interesting sketch of Genoese 
maritime activity, and shows that the Genoese were 
the founders of map-making with their wonderfully 
accurate portolani, of which he gives several illus- 
trations, all of them extremely good with the one 
exception of that of the ‘‘ Veschonte’’ map of 1311 
(p. 513), which is marred by an ugly band stretched 
