dge and theory about the
world which the Roman Empire bequeathed to Christendom, and which in the
earlier Middle Ages was worked upon by the Arabs, and we gained some
idea, from the sayings of Moslem geographers and from the doings of
Moslem warriors, of the hindrance as well as of the help that Islam gave
to European expansion. We saw that during the great struggle of
Christianity and of the old Order with barbarism, the chief energy of
our Western world in discovery or extension of any sort took the shape
of pilgrimage. Then, as time went on, it was possible to see that the
Saracens, who had begun as destroyers in the South, were acting as
teachers and civilisers upon Europe, and that the Vikings, who as
pirates in the North seemed raised up to complete the ruin of Latin
civilisation, were really waking it into a new activity.

In the Crusades this activity, which had already founded the kingdom of
Russia on one side and touched America on the other, seemed to pass from
the Northern seamen into every Christian nation and every class of
society, and with the conversion of the Northmen their place as the
discoverers and leaders of the Christian world fitted in with the other
movements of Mediterranean commerce and war and devotion. Even the
pilgrims of the Crusading Age were now no longer distinctive: they were
often, as individuals, members of other classes, traders, fighters, or
travellers who, after gaining a firm foothold in Syria, began the
exploration of the further East.

The three great discovering energies of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries--in land-travel, navigation, and science--were all seen to be
results, in whole or in part, of the Crusades themselves, and in
following the more important steps of European travel and trade and
proselytism from the Holy Land to China, it became more and more evident
that this practical finding out of the treasures of Cathay and the
Indies was the necessary preparation for the attempts of Genoese and
Portuguese to open up the sea route as another and a safer way to the
source of the same treasures.

Lastly, the intermittent and uncertain ventures of the
fourteenth-century seamen, Italian, Spanish, French, or English, to
coast round Africa or to find the Indies by the Southern route--to reach
a definite end without any clear plan of means to that end--and the
revival in theoretical geography, which was trying at the same time to
fill up the gaps of knowledge by tra