Beginnings of the American People | Page 9

successors of Kublai Khan no

longer ruled in China; while the Ilkhans of Persia, having long since
adopted Mohammedanism, were now as ill-disposed as formerly they
had been friendly toward Christian states. Eastern and central Asia was
indeed once more closing to Europeans: its rulers no longer sought
alliance with Christian princes; no longer requested the service of papal
missionaries; no longer welcomed traders and travelers. And in the
Levant itself ominous changes were portending: the Ottoman Turks,
pressing upon the Greek Empire from Asia Minor and the Balkan
Peninsula, were already well advanced upon their career of blighting
conquest which was destined to throw Christendom upon the defensive
for more than two centuries. At the opening of the fifteenth century,
although the trade routes had not been closed by the Turks, the Drang
nach Osten--the hope of cutting through the Moslem barrier in order to
establish direct connection with India--was at an end. Unless a new
way to the East could be found, the better part of the treasure of the
Orient was lost to Europe.
IV
Long before the fifteenth century many men had thought it possible to
reach India by sailing around Africa. Since classical times geographers
had both asserted and denied the possibility. During the Middle Ages
the Ptolemaic theory was in the ascendant; but the observations of
thirteenth-century travelers gave powerful support to the ideas of
Eratosthenes. Europeans who had sailed from Malacca to Hormos, or
had read the book of Marco Polo or Friar Oderic, knew well that no
impenetrable swamp guarded the southern approaches to Asia; while
those who had seen or heard of Arab ships clearing from Calicut for
Aden could scarcely avoid the inference that a wider sweep to the south
might have brought the same ships to Lisbon or Venice.
This inference, the alert and practical Italian intellect, unhampered by
scientific tradition or ecclesiastical prejudice, had unhesitatingly drawn.
The famous Laurentian Portolano, a sailing chart constructed in 1351,
was precisely such a map as Marco Polo, had he turned cartographer,
might have drawn: the first map in which Africa appears familiar to
modern eyes; with the point of the continent foreshortened, and the

Atlantic and Indian Oceans joined at last, it held out to all future
explorers the prospect of successful voyages from Venice to Ceylon.
Sixty years earlier, even before Polo returned from China, the heroic
attempt had been made; Tedisio Doria and the Vivaldi, venturous
Genoese seamen, passing the Rock of Gibraltar, pointed their galleys to
the south in order "to go by sea to the ports of India to trade there."
They never returned, nor were ever heard of beyond Cape Non in
Barbary, but the memory of their hapless venture was perpetuated in
legends of the fourteenth century which credited them with sailing "the
sea of Ghinoia to the City of Ethiopia."
To go by sea to the ports of India was an undertaking not to be
achieved by unaided Italian effort, or in a single generation. The skill
and daring of many captains might find the way, but discovery was
futile unless backed by conquest, for which the support of a powerful
government was essential. Not from Italian states, weak and distracted
by inter-city wars, or absorbed in established and profitable Levantine
trade, was such support to come, but from the rising nations of the
Atlantic, which profited least by the established commercial system.
Lying at the extreme end of the old trade routes, the merchants of
France, England, Spain, and Portugal were mulcted of the major profits
of Oriental trade. Here prices were lowest and money most scarce. Yet
the future of these countries, consolidated under centralized monarchies
in alliance with a moneyed class, depended upon a full royal treasury
and thriving industry. "The king," said Cardinal Morton, addressing the
English Commons, "wishes you to arrest the drain of money to foreign
countries. The king wishes to enrich you; you would not wish to make
him poor. Consider that the kingdoms which surround us grow
constantly stronger, and that it cannot be well that the king should find
himself with an empty treasury." To replenish the royal treasury by
enriching the bourgeois class was the basic motive which enlisted the
Western monarchs in maritime exploration and discovery.
Yet not to the greater states of the West was reserved the honor of first
reaching the Indies by sea. The Kingdom of Portugal, first to venture,
was first to reach the goal. Looking out over Africa and the South
Atlantic, effectively consolidated under King John of Good Memory

while its neighbors were still involved in foreign wars or the problems
of internal organization, the little state enjoyed advantages denied to
England before the accession of Henry Tudor, or to Spain before the
conquest of Granada. And to these advantages