Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
through mostly Muslim lands that were usually closed to Christian trav-
elers. An exceptional window opened to the East with the Mongol con-
quests of much of Asia; during this time Marco Polo, his father, and his
uncle traveled the Silk Road to China. Polo left Venice in 1271, at the age of
17, and returned 24 years later with a story that would astonish the whole
of Europe. He learned Tatar languages; he met Kublai Khan, who ap-
pointed him an ambassador to outlying regions; he saw the wealth and
extent of China—cities, palaces, bridges, canals, and ocean-going junks.
His story was nearly never told: in a Genoese jail after returning home, he
was persuaded by a fellow prisoner named Rusticiano or Rustichello, him-
self a writer, to publish a book.
Travels
was a great success, but at first many
readers did not believe what they read or assumed that Polo was exaggerat-
ing. On his deathbed in 1324 Polo said, ''I have not told one half of what I
saw.'' His book became very influential; for example, portolan charts and
an important map of 1459 incorporated features from his
Travels
.
1
Kublai Khan's death closed the Silk Road for a time. Later, that road was
barred to Europeans with the fall of Christian Constantinople to the bur-
geoning Ottoman Empire. However, the genie had been let out of the
bottle. Europeans knew that China and India were fabulously wealthy and
that spices came from somewhere over there. Because they could not reach
the Spice Islands or any of the Eastern trading ports by land, the maritime
nations of Western Europe made determined e√orts over the next 300
years to reach them by sea. The spiceries, as the Moluccan Islands came to
be called, provided the initial stimulus for all the subsequent exploration in
the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. All the expeditions and
explorers that you have heard of from those days, and all their extraordi-
nary e√orts, were aimed at reaching the spiceries, trading with the local
rulers for exclusive deals, and bringing riches in the form of spices back
to Europe.
2
Columbus, da Gama, Dias, Magellan, Cartier, Hudson, Barents—all
1. The 1459 map is the Fra Mauro map, now on display at the Biblioteca Nazionale
Marciana in Venice. Interestingly, another pre-Columbus map, the Pizzigano Chart of 1424,
portrays a reasonably accurate delineation of Europe, with the odd addition of two substan-
tial (and entirely fictitious) islands out in the Atlantic named Antilia and Satanazes. Some
historians think that these islands represent the findings of mariners who had earlier
crossed the Atlantic and returned with news of distant lands.
2. For details on the European search for the Spice Islands, and for the Age of Explora-
tion, see Bedini (1998); Bergreen (2007); Boorstin (1983);
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, s.vv.
''Vasco da Gama,'' ''Ferdinand Magellan''; Brown (2003);
Encarta Encyclopedia
, s.v. ''Magel-
lan''; Haase and Reinhold (1993); Milton (1999); Owen (1979); and Ravenstein (1998).
