Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume I.
complete book, e-book

Nové Literární doupě!

Literární doupě bylo modernizováno a přechází pod novou doménu literdo.com!.

Nový web LD vám přínáší ještě více knih s možností výhodného stahování většího množství e-knih podle vlastního výběru (tedy nejen jednotlivých knih nebo balíčků podle autorů) ve formátech ePub , PDF  a MOBI.

 Přejít na nový web Literární doupě

 

XIII. NATURE OF POLO'S INFLUENCE ON GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE.

[Sidenote: Tardy operation, and causes thereof.]

79. Marco Polo contributed such a vast amount of new facts to the knowledge of the Earth's surface, that one might have expected his book to have had a sudden effect upon the Science of Geography: but no such result occurred speedily, nor was its beneficial effect of any long duration.

No doubt several causes contributed to the slowness of its action upon the notions of Cosmographers, of which the unreal character attributed to the Book, as a collection of romantic marvels rather than of geographical and historical facts, may have been one, as Santarem urges. But the essential causes were no doubt the imperfect nature of publication before the invention of the press; the traditional character which clogged geography as well as all other branches of knowledge in the Middle Ages; and the entire absence of scientific principle in what passed for geography, so that there was no organ competent to the assimilation of a large mass of new knowledge.

Of the action of the first cause no examples can be more striking than we find in the false conception of the Caspian as a gulf of the Ocean, entertained by Strabo, and the opposite error in regard to the Indian Sea held by Ptolemy, who regards it as an enclosed basin, when we contrast these with the correct ideas on both subjects possessed by Herodotus. The later Geographers no doubt knew his statements, but did not appreciate them, probably from not possessing the evidence on which they were based.

[Sidenote: General characteristics of Mediaeval Cosmography.]

80. As regards the second cause alleged, we may say that down nearly to the middle of the 15th century cosmographers, as a rule, made scarcely any attempt to reform their maps by any elaborate search for new matter, or by lights that might be collected from recent travellers. Their world was in its outline that handed down by the traditions of their craft, as sanctioned by some Father of the Church, such as Orosius or Isidore, as sprinkled with a combination of classical and mediaeval legend; Solinus being the great authority for the former. Almost universally the earth's surface is represented as filling the greater part of a circular disk, rounded by the ocean; a fashion that already existed in the time of Aristotle and was ridiculed by him.[1] No dogma of false geography was more persistent or more pernicious than this. Jerusalem occupies the central point, because it was found written in the Prophet Ezekiel: "Haec dicit Dominus Deus: Ista est Jerusalem, in medio gentium posui eam, et in circuitu ejus terras;"[2] a declaration supposed to be corroborated by the Psalmist's expression, regarded as prophetic of the death of Our Lord: "Deus autem, Rex noster, ante secula operatus est salutem in medio Terrae" (Ps. lxxiii. 12).[3] The (...)

(......)