J. R. S. Phillips

Phillips sets out to determine the extent and nature of relations between western Europe and the continents of Asia, Africa and America between late antiquity and the 16th c., and examines how information about the outside world was absorbed into medieval scholarly theory and popular conceptions. This is a work of professional scholarship which acknowledges the key areas of dispute and the limits of what can be ascertained and draws attention to the depth of its sources in extensive bibliographical essays for each chapter.

Knowledge of the most important classical geographical theories survived into the early medieval period, writes Phillips, and some Europeans continued to travel (especially as pilgrims and missionaries) even after Roman administration collapsed. European expansion after Rome was also internal: population growth and the activities of new religious orders like the Cluniac houses and the Cistercians pushed into new territories. Hodges and Whitehouse placed Charlemagne’s empire at the center of an expanding commercial network from England to Scandinavia to Mesopotamia, but the Mediterranean became the locus of European trade after the Carolingian collapse.

By the 11th c., naval action by Venice and Genoa against Muslim raiders and bases had secured trade routes to the east through old Byzantine connections and new Egyptian channels, and the political stability of Fatimid Egypt helped divert commerce from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. The schism of 1054 marked the beginning of a new aggressiveness by the papacy, and the kings of Europe sought new outlets for the disruptive energies of a restless peasantry and surplus members of knightly families. Phillips’ fascinating chapter on commerce and the crusades provides a picture of the role that European colonies in Syria and Palestine played in extending Europeans’ reach, though the crusader states were not great resources in themselves; when the crusades ended, European merchants found the attractions of trade with the Muslim world and the spoils of the dismembered Byzantine empire greater than those of the Holy Land.

The Mongol conquest of China and the lands to its west were to provide unprecedented opportunities for European diplomats, missionaries and merchants, but first western Europe reacted in horror and despair as Mongols laid siege to Hungary and Austria in the early 1240s. The abrupt withdrawal of Mongol armies upon news of the death of the Great Khan Ögedei (which drew the Mongol commanders home for contentious succession ceremonies) seemed miraculous to the western Europeans, who knew nothing of internal Mongol affairs, and so began a period of deliberate inquiry on the part of European leaders to find out more about the people to the east. Pope Innocent IV sent two Franciscan emissaries, Giovanni di Piano Carpini and William of Rubruck, whose accounts of Mongol lands antedated that of Marco Polo by a half century. Both Franciscan accounts revealed the existence of scattered groups of Christians throughout China and India and the religious diversity of the Mongol court. By the late 13th c., the Mongol conquests represented not danger but opportunity for Europeans in lands that had been closed to them since classical antiquity.

Missionaries and merchants went out along ancient trade routes to ancient cities from Iran to China. Gold acquired in trade through Byzantium and Egypt opened new commercial opportunities for Europeans, and merchant families served important roles as emissaries between the Khans and European courts. The Khans dispatched Nestorian Christians as envoys to the West. Pope Clement V established an archdiocese in Peking/Khanbalik that survived the expulsion of the Mongols from China in 1368, but the resurgence of Islam in the aftermath of Tamerlane’s conquests disrupted Christian missions in Asia, and by the end of the 15th c. the only known places of activity by western Christians were at Caffa, where the liturgy was maintained after 1475 by the expedient of purchasing priests in the slave markets of Constantinople. Phillips’ presentation of the search for allies and shifting allegiances among and between Europeans, Muslims and Mongols makes for a fascinating look at medieval geopolitical machinations.

The Italians and the Portuguese sailed the waters around Africa, but Europeans were largely ignorant of the continent’s interior. Travel narratives of the time, says Phillips, were more literary than factual, and the major consequence of medieval European contacts with Africa was a growing interest in the waters of the Atlantic (and of what lay beyond the Europeans had no idea). There was little knowledge of North America in late medieval Europe, and the few excursions beyond Ireland were colored by Scandinavian mythology. The Vinland sagas and map are unreliable at best and most likely forgeries, according to Phillips.

In a book packed with information and insight, the best stuff here is the exploration of what medieval Europeans knew and when they knew it. (That spectacular bibliography.) Phillips begins by acknowledging the brilliant but truncated picture of the outside world that Europeans inherited from classical antiquity and spends much of the second half of the book examining the geographical ideas and perceptions of the world which were current in Europe at the end of the 15th c. The ‘European world view’ then (such as it was) was a mixture of theories and marvelous tales carried over from classical and biblical sources together with recently rediscovered classical material such as the Geography of Ptolemy and reports composed by 13th- and 14th-century travelers. More than a thousand examples of medieval mappae mundi have survived (I’d like to see those), depicting a world both real and imaginary in schematic form, which could be easily appended upon the discovery of new sources of geographic information. The development of printing technology and improvements in cartography and navigational instrumentation both reflected and enabled the acquisition of better information that would radically alter European perceptions as the 16th century broke.

Phillips shows that the extent of medieval European contacts with other continents was much greater and more persistent than is generally realized. The history of the 15th and 16th c. expansion of Europe—the expeditions of Prince Henry, the 'great discoveries’ of Columbus and da Gama—has usually been written with scant regard for its medieval antecedents. Thanks to Phillips, we have a fuller picture of those antecedents.… (más)