A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [116]
Most medieval myths were set in Asia, which fascinated men then. Until the Tatar Peace of the mid-thirteenth century, no European had traveled east of Baghdad. The crusades and pilgrimages had provided some grasp of Palestine and Syria, but the Orient —“Cathay”—was considered magical, fantastic, and endowed with incredible wealth. Paradise was thought to be there somewhere, and it says much for medieval knowledge of the mysterious East that long after the first reports of Genghis Khan’s terrible campaigns reached the Continent in 1221, he was believed to be a great Christian monarch who was devoting his life to the conversion of infidels.
Thus credulous men swallowed whole the stories of the giants Gog and Magog, of a jungle race with long teeth and hairy bodies, of griffins, of storks who fought with pygmies, of people who created their own shade by lying down and blotting out the sun with an enormous single foot, of men with dogs’ heads who barked and snarled, and of the opulent patria of Ophir, in whose storehouse lay King Solomon’s jewels and gold. Ophir was only one of many fabulous lands which existed only in fantasy. Others were the lost continent of Atlantis, a legend dating back to Plato; El Dorado; Rio Doro, the River of Gold; the Empire of Monomotapa; the Island of the Seven Cities of Cibola, said to have been discovered in the Atlantic by seven bishops, fugitives from Moorish Spain; and St. Brendan’s Isle, based on the implausible tale of Saint Brendan, who was said to have found an enchanted land in the waters northwest of Ireland. In Magellan’s time many of these places could be found in atlases. Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator encountered a sea captain who said he had landed on the Island of the Seven Cities. As late as 1755 St. Brendan’s Isle was believed to be situated five degrees west of the Canary Islands, and Brazil Rock, also imaginative, was not stricken from Britain’s admiralty charts until 1873.
These were typical of the phantoms which confused and misled explorers sailing into unknown waters. Given the state of maps then, it is hardly surprising that so many ships failed to return; the wonder is that any of them found anything. Africa was shown as adjacent to India. The Indian Ocean and the Red Sea were small bodies of water. Egypt was placed in Asia; so was Ethiopia. Navigators poring over charts found such bewildering legends as “India Ethiope” and “India Egyptii,” and the fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas, which may be seen today in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, is a farrago of distortions and inventions, including islands of griffins, the realm of Gog and Magog, a land of pygmies placed between India and China, an island called “Iana” where Malaya should be, and another island, “Trapabona,” where there is nothing but open sea.
ALTHOUGH the rest of Europe was unaware of them, a few adventurous souls living on the western and northern edges of the continent had been venturing into the unknown since the Dark Ages. Beginning in the sixth century, Irishmen had first visited, and then settled, the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe islands. Undoubtedly the Irish reached farther than that, for Vikings occupying Iceland in the ninth century found them already there. Then the Norsemen took over. After a thousand-mile voyage through some of the most dangerous seas in the world, Norway’s Erik the Red landed on Greenland at the end