of the Further
East.

The first great name of this time, of our next main chapter of
Preparation, is Benjamin of Tudela, but standing as he does well within
the earlier age, when the primary interest was the Holy War itself, he
is also the last of the Palestine travellers--of those Westerns whose
real horizon was the sacred East of Syria. He is a little before the
awakening of universal interest in the unknown world, for the Christian
Northmen lost with the new definiteness of the new faith much of their
old infinite unrest and fierce inquisitive love of wandering, and their
spirit, though related to the whole Catholic West by the crusading
movement, was not fully realised till the world had been explored and
made known, till the men of Europe were at home in every country and on
every sea.

Benjamin, as a Jew and a rabbi, has the interest of a sectary, and his
work was not of a kind that would readily win the attention of the
Christian world. So the value of his travels was hidden till religious
divisions had ceased to govern the direction of progress. He visited the
Jewish communities from Navarre to Bagdad, and described those beyond
from Bagdad to China, but he wrote for his own people and none but they
seem to have cared about him. What he discovered (_c._ 1160-73) was for
himself and for Judaism, and only his actual place in the twelfth
century makes him a fore-runner of the Polos or of Prince Henry. We may
see this from his hopeless strangeness and confusion in Rome, like a
Frank in Pekin or Delhi. "The Church of St. Peter is on the site of the
great palace of Julius Caesar, near which are eighty Halls of the eighty
Kings called Emperors from Tarquin to Pepin the father of Charles, who
first took Spain from the Saracens.... In the outskirts of the city is
the palace of Titus, who was deposed by three hundred senators for
wasting three years over the siege of Jerusalem which he should have
finished in two."

And so on--with the "Hall of Galba, three miles round and having a
window for each day in the year," with St. John Lateran and its Hebrew
trophies, "two copper pillars from the temple of Solomon, that sweat at
the anniversary of the burning of the Temple," and the "statues of
Samson and of Absalom" in the same place. So with Sorrento, "built by
Hadarezer when he fled before King David," with the old Roman tunnel
between Naples and Pozzuoli, "built by Romulus who feared David and
Joab," with Apulia, "which