CHAPTER II.

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS.

Early Christian Pilgrims.

From the time of the Emperor Constantine, whose mother, St. Helena, had founded a church at Bethlehem, thousands of nameless pilgrims from Europe visited the Holy Places of Syria. The route generally followed, took them through North Italy, Aquileia, Sirmium, Constantinople, and Asia Minor. Of these multitudes perhaps fewer than a dozen have left any valuable record of the journey to the Levant. Etheria, a Spanish nun, long believed to have been Sylvia of Aquitaine, (about 385) travelled not only through Syria but in Lower Egypt, in the Sinaitic peninsula, and in Northern Mesopotamia. From the Euphrates her party returned toward the coast and thence by the military road which connected Tarsus with the Bosphorus. In the thirteenth and the succeeding centuries, when greater and more enlightened travellers went into Central Asia and even as far as China these travellers were forgotten.

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CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS

II

For five hundred years afterward there was indeed much travel but little of geographical theory. The semi-barbarous conquerors of the Empire of the West had not yet come to appreciate the civilization which they had nearly destroyed. In the seventh century the victorious Saracens, still engaged chiefly in destruction, did not encourage European travellers to come amongst them. Even in this memorable era there were men like Isidore of Seville, and Vergil, an Irish missionary of the eighth century, who held to a more scientific geography. Though little had been discovered that was new, yet the knowledge of the Greeks had not perished. The religious influence was the first agency in the formation of modern nations. It was also "the first impulse towards their expansion."1

Arculf and Willibald.

To this epoch (600-970 A. D.) belong Arculf and Willibald, names more familiar in Englishspeaking countries. The Eastern adventures of the former were written by Abbot Adamnan, to whose great monastery of Iona, Arculf had been driven by storms. This narrative (about A. D. 701) was presented and dedicated to Aldfrith the Wise, in his court at York. As a useful manual for Englishmen, Concerning the Holy

1Beazley, Prince Henry the Navigator, p. 42.

Sites, the account was summarized by the Venerable Bede. Willibald, a nephew of St. Boniface, spent in oriental and other travels a period of ten years. This included many of the countries between places as far apart as Southampton and Damascus.

Fidelis and Bernard the Wise.

To the same age belongs Fidelis, who travelled in Egypt about the year 750. More than a century later, 867, Bernard the Wise of Mont St. Michel mentions a circumstance which shows the undoubted supremacy of the Saracens at that time. The Emir of Bari forwarded Bernard's party of pilgrims in a fleet of transports that was carrying 9,000 Christian slaves to Alexandria. Other travellers and writers in the age succeeding are known to us, but they made few important contributions to geographical learning. The haughty science of to-day characterizes the narratives of the pilgrims of those distant ages as infantile. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that they had comparatively large knowledge and experience. However, when we come to examine the travels and the narratives of the Franciscan friars of the thirteenth and the following centuries, we become conscious of an immense advance.

IRISH MISSIONARIES

The Irish in Iceland.

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In the epoch at which we have arrived popular fancy regards the Norsemen as the sole voyagers in the Arctic seas. This opinion, so in harmony with circumstances, is almost literally, but not absolutely true. In Iceland they were anticipated by a race that they were destined to meet in their endeavor to conquer the maritime parts of western Europe. The succession of triumphs which attended their arms is a commonplace of school histories; an enumeration of Norse defeats is less familiar reading. From the death of St. Patrick scarcely half a century had passed when Irish missionaries were engaged in the war that paganism was waging against the Christian world. The conversion of northern England is chiefly to be ascribed to the zeal of Aidan and his countrymen; Irish missionaries crossed to Flanders and to Burgundy; they penetrated even into Italy and Switzerland, where the canton of St. Gall commemorates the labors of an Irish monk. In their apostolic journeys they left valuable manuscripts along the Danube and the Rhine. These wanderings, it is true, were not discoveries, but the zeal which sustained the disciples of Patrick and Columba in such undertakings drove them into all the neighboring lands where there were souls to save. This zeal it was that in the year 795, from Feb

ruary to August 1, led Irish hermits to Iceland.

On the return of these missionaries they reported the marvel of perpetual day in Thule (Iceland), where there was then "no darkness to hinder one from doing what one would." On their arrival in Iceland they found the ocean ice-free for one day's sail; after that they came to an ice-wall. Memorials of this, and perhaps of other religious settlements were found by Scandinavian colonists when, in the ninth century, they came to take permanent possession of the island.

Dicuil, an Irish Geographer.

The earliest unquestioned mention of the European discovery and the European settlement of Iceland is to be found in De Mensura orbis terrae, finished in 825.1 The same essay, of which the author was the Irish monk and geographer Dicuil, also contains the first definite Western reference to the old fresh water canal between the Nile and the Red Sea. This was finally blocked up in 767. Dicuil learned of this from Brother Fidelis, probably another Irish monk, who in going to Jerusalem sailed along the Nile into the Red Sea, passing on his way

"The best text is that of G. Parthey, Berlin, 1870.