rpose from the Norsemen,
who, as pirates, or conquerors, or brothers, had settled among them. The
long crusade that had gone on for four hundred years in Spain and in
southern Italy and in the Levant, which had raged round the islands of
the Mediterranean, or the passes of the Alps and Pyrenees, or the banks
of the Loire and the Tiber,--was now, on the eve of the first Syrian
Crusade of 1096, rapidly tending to decisive victory. Toledo was won
back in 1084; the Norman dominion in the Two Sicilies had already taken
the place of a weak and halting Christian defence against Arab emirs;
pilgrims were going in thousands where there had been tens or units by
the reopened land route through Hungary; only in the far East the first
appearance of the Turks as Moslem champions,[23] threatened an ebb of
the tide. Christendom had seen a wonderful expansion of the Heathen
North; now that it had won the Northmen to itself, it was ready to
imitate their example. The deliberate purpose of the Popes only gave
direction to the universal feeling of restless and abundant energy
longing for wider action. But it was not the crusading movement itself
which brought so much new light, so much new knowledge of the world, to
Europe, as the _results_ of that impulse in trade, in travel, and in
colonisation.

[Footnote 22: As completed about A.D. 1000-1040.]

[Footnote 23: As in 1071, when they crushed Romans and the Byzantines in
the battle of Manzikert.]

[Illustration: THE TURIN MAP OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

(1) From the eleventh century, from the beginning of this period, all
the greater pilgrims, Saewulf the English-merchant, King Sigurd of
Norway, Abbot Daniel of Kiev, and their followers, have something more
in view than piety; they have a general interest in travel; some of them
a special interest in trade; most of them go to fight as well as to
pray.

(2) But as the warlike spirit of the Church Militant seems to grow
tired, and its efforts at founding new kingdoms--in Antioch, in
Jerusalem, in Cyprus, in Byzantium--more and more fruitless, the direct
expansion of European knowledge, begins in scientific travel. Vinland
and Greenland and the White Sea and the other Norse discoveries were
discoveries made by a great race for itself; unconnected as they were
with the main lines of trade or with religious sentiment, they were
unrealised by the general consciousness of the West. A full account of
the Norse voyages to Am