ads of Jaffa before his eyes
some twenty of the pilgrim and merchant fleet then lying at anchor. But
not only can we see from this how the religious and commercial traffic
of the Mediterranean had been increased by the Crusades; the main lines
of that traffic had been changed. Since the Moslem conquest, visitors
had mostly come to Palestine through Egypt; the Christian conquest of
Syria re-opened the direct sea route as the conversion of Hungary and
north-east Europe had re-opened the direct land route one hundred years
before (_c._ 1000-1100). The lines of the Danube valley and of the
"Roman Sea" were both cleared, and the West again poured itself into the
East as it had not done since Alexander's conquest, since the Oriental
reaction had set in about the time of the Christian era, rising higher
and higher into the full tide of the Persian and Arabian revivals of
Asiatic Empire.

Among the varied classes of pilgrim-crusaders in Saewulf's day were
student-devotees like Adelard and Daniel from the two extremes of
Christendom, England and Russia, Bath and Kiev; northern sea-kings like
Sigurd, or Robert of Normandy; even Jewish travellers, rabbis, or
merchants like Benjamin of Tudela. All these, as following in the wake
of the First Crusade, and for the most part stopping at the high-water
mark of its advance, belong to the same group and time and impulse as
Saewulf himself, and are clearly marked off from the great thirteenth
century travellers, who acted as pioneers of the Western Faith and
Empire rather than as camp-followers of its armies.

But except Abbot Daniel (_c._ 1106) and Rabbi Benjamin (_c._ 1160-73)
who stand apart, none of our other pilgrim examples of twelfth century
exploration have anything original or remarkable about them.

Adelard or Athelard, the countryman of Saewulf and Willibald, is still
more the herald of Roger Bacon and of Neckam. He is a theorist far more
than a traveller, and his journey through Egypt and Arabia (_c._
1110-14) appears mainly as one of scientific interest. "He sought the
causes of all things and the mysteries of Nature," and it was with "a
rich spoil of letters," especially of Greek and Arab manuscripts, that
he returned to England to translate into Latin one of the chief works of
Saracen astronomy, the Kharizmian tables. We have already met with him
in trying to follow the transmission of Greek and Indian geography or
world-science through the Arabs to Europe and to Christen