Note Back to Main Text — Chapter III · EUROPE AND CATHAY.

Here we arrive at a notable landmark in the history of the Discovery of America. Here from the camp of bustling heathen at Karakorum there is brought to Europe the first announcement of a geographical fact from which the poetic mind of The data were thus prepared for Columbus; Christopher Columbus will hereafter reap a wonderful harvest. This is one among many instances of the way in which, throughout all departments of human thought and action, the glorious thirteenth century was beginning to give shape to the problems of which the happy solution has since made the modern world so different from the ancient.[328] Since there is an ocean east of Cathay and an ocean west of Spain, how natural the inference—and albeit quite wrong, how amazingly fruitful—that these oceans are one and the same, so that by sailing westward from Spain one might go straight to Cathay! but as yet nobody reasoned from these data to a practical conclusion. The data for such an inference were now all at hand, but it does not appear that any one as yet reasoned from the data to the conclusion, although we find Roger Bacon, in 1267, citing the opinions of Aristotle and other ancient writers to the effect that the distance by sea from the western shores of Spain to the eastern shores of Asia cannot be so very great.[329] In those days it took a long time for such ideas to get from the heads of philosophers into the heads of men of action; and in the thirteenth century, when Cathay was more accessible by land than at any time before or since, there was no practical necessity felt for a water route thither. Europe still turned her back upon the Atlantic and gazed more intently than ever upon Asia. Stronger and more general grew the interest in Cathay.