Arthur Newton - Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages

THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

The History of Civilization is a landmark in early twentieth Century publishing. The aim of the general editor, C. K. Ogden, was to summarise in one comprehensive synthesis the most recent findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists and all conscientious students of civilization. The History, which includes titles in the French series LEvolution de lHumanit, was published at a formative time in the development of the social sciences, and during a period of significant historical discoveries.

A list of the titles in the series can be found at the end of this book.

First published in 1926 by Routledge, Trench, Trubner

Reprinted in 1996, by Routledge

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Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

1996 Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or utilized in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

ISBN: 0-415-15605-X

ISBN: 978-1-136-20385-5 (ePub)

ISBN European Civilization (11 volume set): 0-415-15616-5

ISBN History of Civilization (50 volume set): 0-415-14380-2

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

T HE substance of the contributions here collected was comprised in a course of Public Lectures in the Departments of History and Geography in Kings College, London, delivered in the Lent Term of 1925, Several of the contributions have been re-written and amplified with material that could not be included in the lectures, and I have added an entirely fresh chapter, but the book does not profess to be a complete survey of the fascinating field of which it treats. Those who are moved to explore further by the glimpses that alone are here revealed must betake themselves to the authorities that are mentioned in our footnotes and especially to the scholarly pages of Professor C. R. Beazley, Sir Henry Yule, M. Henri Cordier, and M. Ch. Schemer. There they will find the full apparatus of maps and documents wherewith alone can justice be done to the ideas and achievements of medieval geographers. This brief conspectus of certain aspects of the subject may, however, be of interest to the general reader, summarizing as it does some of the more recent work done in the field, and it will be of value to the increasing number of students in English and American universities who, as a part of their geographical courses, are concerning themselves with the history of travel.

My warm thanks are due to the collaborators who have accepted so kindly my suggestions of subjects for treatment, and have facilitated my task in every way. For the planning and arrangement of the book I alone must accept responsibility.

3rd December, 1925.

By Professor ARTHUR PERCIVAL NEWTON, M.A., D.LIT., B. SC., F.S.A.

T HE essays here collected have been arranged to show something of the way in which the men of the Latin Westin the course of a thousand yearsgradually modified their conceptions of the physical world in which they lived. These conceptions differed widely from those of the Ancients, though they derived many of their components from the ideas of Classical times. They also differed from those formed on a wider base of knowledge in subsequent centuries, but they have contributed much to our everyday phraseology and to the imagery of our poets. While rejecting the ideas of medieval men, we have kept their names and phrases. Many of them are very persistent, but they have quite changed their meaning. At one time they were accurate descriptions of what men thought about the world, and might form the basis of argument. To-day they are mere poetic figures.

The contributions are arranged in roughly chronological order, and each discusses in some detail the concepts of the world and the conditions of travel and exploration of a particular period or associated with particular sources of ideas which have made material additions to the development of thought and knowledge.

The thousand years between the break-up of the ancient world and the period of the great discoveries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century falls in this, as in many other respects, into three main periods. The first stretches from the sixth to the eleventh century and is marked by the loss of the ancient scientific concepts of the world and their replacement by uncritical cosmogonies, based largely upon the crude ideas of the Hebrews as set out in the Scriptures. It can hardly be claimed that in this period there was any conception of the world generally held among educated and thinking men. Almost every writer who deals with cosmogony interprets the Scriptural phrases in his own way, and only the very ablest, like the Venerable Bede, who still were familiar with the remains of ancient learning, give us anything that remotely corresponds with reality. The second period includes the time from about A.D. 1000 to the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is the period of the Crusades, a time of rapid development in the realm of ideas and of critical power, as well as in material achievement. Men are no longer wholly dependent for their conceptions upon the Scriptures and a trickle of little understood survivals from the ancients. They can drink at the founts of Greek and Roman knowledge through new channels. Arabic thought and learning greatly influence them. Immense results flowed thence, and the time is marked not only by great advance in the sphere of thought and scientific criticism, but also by a large extension of exploration and a growth in practical knowledge of the land-mass of Eurasia such as had never been possessed even in ancient times. Alongside, but flowing in a separate stream, were the achievements of the men of the North. Their practical accomplishment was astonishing, but its influence upon the development of European thought was comparatively slight and indirect. It was not until a very much later age that the travels of the Vikings became known throughout Western Europe, and their story is rather an appendix to our main theme than an integral part of it.

The third and culminating period of the Middle Age includes the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a period of great practical achievement. It was marked not only by a more systematic shaping of the typical medieval ideas, but also by immense improvements in navigation and the means of maritime exploration. These two lines of development, the theoretical and the practical, gradually approached one another, and the second absorbed or replaced the first.

For the earlier Middle Ages down to the middle of the thirteenth century material is comparatively scanty, but from thence onwards we have geographical treatises of a detailed and scholarly character, and we can summarize the ideas of the time with much more certainty. Possibly it was only in the period between the time of Roger Bacon (