Exploration

Sources

Geography. Having been influenced by traders’ successes, especially the exploits of Far Eastern merchants, explorers became the foremost proponents by the end of the Middle Ages of a connection with other lands. Their background as warriors or merchants and their love for adventurous travel formed their belief that exploring would be useful for their lives and their society. To that end they envisioned a new kind of formal outing that would reveal the world’s future boundaries. Until 1492, however, what Ptolemy had displayed in his Geography (second century C.E.)—a world limited to the Mediterranean basin and its adjacent hinterlands, northern Africa, and parts of Asia—would not be extended. Drawn in about 1300, England’s Hereford Mappa Mundi included nothing farther away than Eden, at the eastern extreme from Britain.

Roman Legacy. The medieval Christians’ ideas departed little from the fundamental geography of the earlier Roman imperial military and intellectual boundaries. In his natural historical work, the Roman Pliny had speculated broadening that conception by adding another patch of land, to balance those already known. Imaging “Paradise,” “the island of unknown men,” and “Gog and Magog”—places that even they thought might be metaphorical—and employing symmetry as the guide to configuration, mapmakers seemed to base their medieval creations on imagination rather than affirmed information. Their maps could not guide travelers to places in Africa, Antarctica, or to any spot other than the ones classical and biblical education had prepared them to represent, such as the Tanais (Don) River, the Nile, and the Mediterranean Sea, or the four rivers flowing from Eden. Although map-makers considered it important to show an earthly and possible location for Paradise, for example, exact coordinate representation was not the organizing focus of their efforts.

Viking Adventurers. With the exception of the fearless Irish monks, the Vikings were the earliest medieval explorers. In the guise of traders and warriors from Scandinavia, they raided and later settled in parts of northern Europe, Iceland, and North America between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. The Vikings’ ideas of successful exploration were realized first in 874, when Iceland was discovered; by 900 twenty-five thousand Norwegians had settled there. The new discovery introduced further exploration possibilities: one was via the traditional Viking sea voyage, offering the chance of being blown off course to discover a previously unknown island; the other was the maritime explorer’s way in which adventurers would take specific preparatory steps to settle a new land, such as loading supplies for permanent settlement elsewhere, recording sightings of land and sea routes, and taking women along. For the second approach, Snaebjorn, Erik Thorvaldson (known as Erik the Red), and Leif Eriksson formed the core of the Viking explorers, each wanting to find land for new colonies in which they could live and thrive. Snaebjorn saw Greenland, found earlier by his great-grandfather, Gunnb-jorn, as an extremely important site to establish a settlement. Later in the tenth century, Erik the Red would lead a voyage of exploration to the west coast of Greenland, once, and then again eventually to settle there.

Transplants. Erik the Red continued his explorations from Greenland. Although he did not become the first Viking to sit on American soil, he planned the expedition of his son Leif, remaining behind only because of a horse-fall injury. Having purchased a ship whose owner Bjarni Herjolfsson had originally spotted North America, Leif, as set forth in Eiriks Saga, which described the discovery of the New World, happened on “lands which he did not even know existed.” The Viking explorations are the favorite example of many historians who seek in the Middle Ages an instance of medieval people venturing into the unknown. But the Vikings were most interested in colonial settlement, each one wanting his to succeed. Intuit presence on the Newfoundland coast overpowered the Vikings’ initial settlement attempts, and their colony in Vineland collapsed under the threat of the more numerous local inhabitants whom they called Skraelings. In a few centuries the Vikings were removed as colonists of Vineland and Greenland, but they maintained a presence in Iceland from that era forward. It was not until almost a millennium later that the Vikings’ maritime discoveries were affirmed by archaeological findings in North America; in 1968 a Viking settlement was unearthed at L’Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland, one of many Viking archaeological finds that based its searches on some of the Old Norse sagas of the improbable sounding Vikings’ maritime explorations.

Marco Polo. In 1271 Marco Polo of Venice began his travels across Asia to China, visiting Hangzhou, the Song

dynasty’s rich second capital of one million merchants, artisans, officials, scholars, servants, and slaves. From 1275 to 1292 he worked for the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, returning to Venice in 1295. In 1299 Rustichello of Pisa took the idea of the travels of Marco Polo and wrote Divisament dou monde (Description of the World), adapting some of the descriptions recounted to him by Marco Polo in jail to give a more exotic and Eastern perspective in this new travelogue. Omissions in the work, such as no reference to the Great Wall of China, have been cautiously explained as elliptical, to shelter the Mongols’ world from crudely explicit descriptions. Nevertheless, Rustichello’s significant detail has brought much credence to his work. He recounted the splendors of China, including evocative specifics about the seaport Zaiton, the court of Kublai Khan, the sounds of the Gobi Desert, and the mores of Chinese women. Also new were the accounts of Java, Sumatra, polar Russia, East Africa, and Japan. To Marco Polo belonged twin distinctions. He became known for the many exaggerations about his travels, earning the nickname “Mr. Thousands.” On the other hand, he respected the distinctiveness of pagan Eastern cultures. Although impractical and much less concrete than the accounts of John of Plano Carpini (1245–1247), William of Rubruck (1253–1255), and Francesco Balducci de Perlotti (flourished 1340), Marco Polo’s description was the broadest and most intriguing. His travels stimulated the explorations later undertaken by Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century.

Ibn Battuta. About the same time that Marco Polo was writing his last will, ibn Battuta was thinking and talking about new places to see. Born in Morocco and educated in the way of the Maliki legal school, ibn Battuta arrived in Mecca in 1325 and, after consulting a holy man there, proceeded to Russia, India, and China. From ibn Battuta’s travel stories ibn Juzayy wrote an elaborately detailed compilation titled Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa-’aja’ib al-asfar (Precious Gift to Those Interested in the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling), or al-Rihla (The Journey). His “classical” travelogue model was ibn Jubayr’s twelfth-century travels to Mecca, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Sicily, and his practical orientation was that of a pilgrim traveling to holy sites and Islamic countries. Like Marco Polo’s Chinese adventure, this was a rare instance. Ibn Battuta had also advised the Sultan of Delhi in matters of Islamic law and record keeping. Ibn Battuta wrote his notes possibly with the hope that he would be acknowledged as a candidate for quadi (adviser) to his own Marinid sultan in Morocco, but he was not eligible until he became a sedentary scholar in 1357. His travels so impressed the sultan Abu ’Inan, however, that he sent ibn Juzayy to compile the notes for ibn Battuta, whom he invited to become quadi in a provincial Moroccan town. Ibn Battuta accepted the position. Thus, for the twenty-seven years from 1325, when, under the terms of Islamic law, he went on the hajj (pilgrimage), until five years after becoming quadi of Delhi and of the Maldive Islands of Sri Lanka, ibn Battuta traveled to become the Arab world’s most renowned explorer.

Sources

Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the 14^thCentury (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (Philadelphia: University of California Press, 1986).

Marcia Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretative Frames,” Word and Image, 10 (1994): 262-288.

Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travellers: The Rich and Restless (London: Hamilton, 1982).

Arthur Percival Newton, ed., Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968).

J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Marco Polo, The Travels, translated by Ronald Latham (London: Penguin, 1958).

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (London: Athlone Press, 1987).

Marjorie Rowling, Everyday Life of Medieval Travellers (London: B. T. Batsford, 1971).

G.V. Scammell, The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Empires, c 800–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

Kristen A. Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca. AD 1000–1500 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Bertold Spuler, History of the Mongols, Based on Eastern and Western Accounts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, translated by H. and S. Drummond (London: Routledge, 1972).