rnmtHlIM FPT The DlSCCVERERS is a vivid, sweeping, and original history of mans greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him— the relationship of the heavens to his own planet, the elusive and mysterious dimension of time, the vast and colorful range of plants and animals, the intricate workings of his own body, the surprising variety of human societies past and present-by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Americans, now the Librarian of Congress. His flair for the vivid anecdote, for fresh points of view, and for the dramatic relationship of ideas has made him the most readable of our eminent historians. Daniel J. Boorstins story of our world is not the usual succession of battles and empires and political leaders, but a tale of discoveries and beginnings. In this book the long human quest for what man does not yet know becomes a mystery story played by a vast cast on an ever- changing stage. Boorstin sees every discovery as an episode of biography. The heroes of this saga are men with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and the courage to venture into the unknown. He puts flesh on many familiar names-Herodotus, Thucydides, Ptolemy, Galen, Marco Polo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Marx, Freud— and resurrects from almost forgotten history some truly remarkable figures. His narrative reveals not only mankind’s imaginative leaps forward in its search for knowledge, but the obstacles that had to be overcome: the illusions we held about the continents and the seas before Columbus and (continued on back flap) BOOKS BY DANIEL i. BOORSTIN The Discoverers • The Americans: The Colonial Experience The Americans: The National Experience The Americans: The Democratic Experience • The Mysterious Science of the Law The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson The Genius of American Politics America and the Image of Europe The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America The Decline of Radicalism The Sociology of the Absurd Democracy and Its Discontents The Republic of Technology The Exploring Spirit A History of the United States (with Brooks M. Kelley) DANIEL J. BOORSTIN And take upon 's the mystery of things. As if we were God's spies. — Shakespeare, King Lear, v, 3 RANDOM HOUSE • NEW YORK Copyright © 1983 by Daniel J. Boorstin All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Boorstin, Daniel J. (Daniel Joseph), 1914— The discoverers. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Civilization — History. 2. Discoveries (in geography) 3. Science — History. I. Title. CB69.B66 1983 909 83-42766 ISBN 0-394-40229-4 This book is printed on acid-free paper for durability. Manufactured in the United States of America Book design by Bernard Klein FOR RUTH Nay, the same Solomon the king, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of service and attendance, of fame and renown, and the like, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith expressly, “The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out”; as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s play-fellows in that game. — Francis bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605) A Personal Note to the Reader xv BOOK ONE: TIME PART I: THE HEAVENLY EMPIRE i. The Temptations of the Moon 4 2. The Week: Gateway to Science 12 3. God and the Astrologers 19 PART II: FROM SUN TIME TO CLOCK TIME 4. Measuring the Dark Hours 26 5. The Rise of the Equal Hour 36 6. Making Time Portable 46 PART III: THE MISSIONARY CLOCK 7. Open Sesame to China 36 8. Mother of Machines 64 9. Why It Happened in the West 72 BOOK TWO: THE EARTH AND THE SEAS PART IV: THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINATION jo. The Awe of Mountains 82 11. Charting Heaven and Hell 86 CONTENTS xii 12. The Appeal of Symmetry 92 13 . The Prison of Christian Dogma 100 14. A Flat Earth Returns 107 PART V: PATHS TO THE EAST 15. Pilgrims and Crusaders 116 16. How the Mongols Opened the Way 124 17. Missionary Diplomats 128 18. The Discovery of Asia 134 19. The Land Curtain Comes Down 139 PART VI: DOUBLING THE WORLD 20. Ptolemy Revived and Revised 146 21. Portuguese Sea Pioneers 136 22. Beyond the Threatening Cape 163 23. To India and Back 172 24. Why Not the Arabs? 178 23. The Chinese Reach Out 186 26. An Empire without Wants 193 PART VII: THE AMERICAN SURPRISE 27. The Wandering Vikings 204 28. Dead End in Vinland 209 29. The Power of the Winds 217 30. “ The Enterprise of the Indies" 224 31. Fair Winds, Soft Words, and Luck 231 32. Paradise Found and Lost 233 33. Naming the Unknown 244 PART VIII: SEA PATHS TO EVERYWHERE 34. A World of Oceans 236 33. The Reign of Secrecy 267 36. Knowledge Becomes Merchandise 271 37. The Ardors of Negative Discovery 278 Contents xiii BOOK THREE: NATURE PART IX: SEEING THE INVISIBLE 38. Into "the Mists of Paradox ” 294 39. The Witness of the Naked Eye 303 40. A Vision Troubled and Surprised 312 41. Caught in the Cross Fire 322 42. New Worlds Within 327 43. Galileo in China 332 PART X: INSIDE OURSELVES 44. A Mad Prophet Points the Way 338 43. The Tyranny of Galen 344 46. From Animals to Man 351 47. Unseen Currents Within 361 48. From Qualities to Quantities 368 49. “ The Microscope of Nature" 376 PART XI: SCIENCE GOES PUBLIC jo. A Parliament of Scientists 386 31. From Experience to Experiment 394 32. “ God Said, Let Newton Be!" 401 33. Priority Becomes the Prize 408 PART XII: CATALOGUING THE WHOLE CREATION 34. Learning to Look 420 33. The Invention of Species 429 36. Specimen Hunting 436 37. Stretching the Past 446 38. In Search of the Missing Link 437 39. Paths to Evolution 464 XIV CONTENTS BOOK FOUR: SOCIETY PART XIII: WIDENING THE COMMUNITIES OF KNOWLEDGE 60. The Lost Arts of Memory 480 61. Empire of the Learned 489 62. The Duplicating Impulse 498 63. “ The Art of Artificial Writing ” 310 64. Communities of the Vernacular 317 63. Transforming the Book 324 66. Books Go Public 533 67. The Island of Islam 539 68. Toward a World Literature 347 PART XIV: OPENING THE PAST 69. The Birth of History 338 jo. Christianity Gives Direction 366 ji. Revising the Record 374 72. Explorers among the Ruins 381 73. "To Wake the Dead ” 588 74. Latitudes of Time 396 73. The Discovery of Prehistory 603 76. Hidden Dimensions: History as Therapy 613 PART XV: SURVEYING THE PRESENT 77. "All Mankind Is One ” 626 78. The Shock of the Primitive 636 79. A Science of Culture 646 80. An Expanding Universe of Wealth 632 81. Learning from Numbers 667 82. The Infinite and the Infinitesimal 673 Some Reference Notes 683 Acknowledgments 713 Index 719 A Personal Note to the Reader My hero is Man the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate West — the vistas of time, the land and the seas, the heavenly bodies and our own bodies, the plants and animals, history and human societies past and present — had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous. As we come closer to the present they emerge into the light of history, a cast of characters as varied as human nature. Discoveries become episodes of biography, unpredictable as the new worlds the discoverers opened to us. The obstacles to discovery — the illusions of knowledge — are also part of our story. Only against the forgotten backdrop of the received common sense and myths of their time can we begin to sense the courage, the rashness, the heroic and imaginative thrusts of the great discoverers. They had to battle against the current “facts” and dogmas of the learned. I have tried to recapture those illusions — about the earth, the continents and the seas before Columbus and Balboa, Magellan and Captain Cook, about the heavens before Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler, about the human body before Paracelsus and Vesalius and Harvey, about plants and animals before Ray and Linnaeus, Darwin and Pasteur, about the past before Petrarch and Winckelmann, Thomsen and Schliemann, about wealth before Adam Smith and Keynes, about the physical world and the atom before Newton and Dalton and Faraday, Clerk Maxwell and Einstein. I have asked some unfamiliar questions. Why didn’t the Chinese “dis- cover” Europe or America? Why didn’t the Arabs circumnavigate Africa and the world? Why did it take so long for people to learn that the earth goes around the sun? Why did people begin to believe that there are “spe- cies” of plants and animals? Why were the facts of prehistory and the discovery of the progress of civilization so slow in coming? I have included the story of only a few crucial inventions — the clock, the compass, the telescope and the microscope, the printing press and movable type — which have been essential instruments of discovery. I have not told the story of the shaping of governments, the waging of wars, the rise and fall of empires. I have not chronicled culture, the story of Man the Creator, of architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and literature, much as these XVI A PERSONAL NOTE TO THE READER have multiplied the delights of human experience. My focus remains on mankind’s need to know — to know what is out there. The plan of the book as a whole is chronological. In detail it is a shingle scheme. Each of the fifteen Parts overlaps chronologically with its predeces- sor as the story advances from antiquity to the present. I begin with Time, the most elusive and mysterious of the primitive dimensions of experience. Then I turn to Western man’s widening vistas of the Earth and the Seas. On to Nature — the physical objects in the heavens and on earth, plants and animals, the human body and its processes. Finally to Society, finding that the human past was not what had been imagined, to the self-discovery of Man the Discoverer, and to the Dark Continents in the atom. This is a story without end. All the world is still an America. The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita — unknown territory. BOOK ONE Time is the greatest innovator. — FRANCIS BACON, “OF INNOVATIONS” (1625) The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of expe- rience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature. The flow of shadows, sand, and water, and time itself, translated into the clock’s staccato, became a useful measure of man’s movements across the planet. The discoveries of time and of space would become one continuous dimen- sion. Communities of time would bring the first communi- ties of knowledge, ways to share discovery, a common frontier on the unknown. PART ONE God did not create the planets and stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but that they, like other creatures, should obey and serve him. — Paracelsus, Concerning the Nature of Things (c. 1541) The Temptations of the Moon From far-northwest Greenland to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, peo- ple hail the new moon — a time for singing and praying, eating and drinking. Eskimos spread a feast, their sorcerers perform, they extinguish lamps and exchange women. African Bushmen chant a prayer: “Young Moon! . . . Hail, hail, Young Moon!” In the light of the moon everyone wants to dance. And the moon has other virtues. The ancient German communities, Tacitus reported nearly two thousand years ago, held their meetings at new or full moon, “the seasons most auspicious for beginning business.” Everywhere we find relics of mythic, mystic, romantic meanings — in “moonstruck” and “lunatic” (Latin luna means moon), in “moonshine,” and in the moonlight setting of lovers’ meetings. Even deeper is the primeval connection of the moon with measuring. The word “moon” in English and its cognate in other languages are rooted in the base me meaning measure (as in Greek metron, and in the English meter and measure), reminding us of the moon’s primitive service as the first universal measurer of time. Despite or because of its easy use as a measure of time, the moon proved to be a trap for naive mankind. For while the phases of the moon were conve- nient worldwide cycles which anybody could see, they were an attractive dead end. What hunters and farmers most needed was a calendar of the seasons — a way to predict the coming of rain or snow, of heat and cold. How long until planting time? When to expect the first frost? The heavy rains? For these needs the moon gave little help. True, the cycles of the moon had an uncanny correspondence with the menstrual cycle of women, be- cause a sidereal month, or the time required for the moon to return to the same position in the sky, was a little less than 28 days, and a pregnant woman could expect her child after ten of these moon-months. But a solar year — the proper measure of days between returning seasons — measures 365 !4 days. The cycles of the moon are caused by the moon’s movement around the earth at the same time that the earth is moving around the sun. The moon’s orbit is elliptical, and departs by an angle of about five degrees from the earth’s orbit about the sun. This explains why eclipses of the sun do not occur every month. The discomfiting fact that the cycles of the moon and the cycles of the sun are incommensurate would stimulate thinking. Had it been possible to calculate the year, the round of seasons, simply by multiplying the cycles of the moon, mankind would have been saved a lot of trouble. But we might The Heavenly Empire 5 also have lacked the incentive to study the heavens and to become math- ematicians. The seasons of the year, as we now know, are governed by the movements of the earth around the sun. Each round of the seasons marks the return of the earth to the same place in its circuit, a movement from one equinox (or solstice) to the next. Man needed a calendar to find his bearings in the seasons. How to begin? The ancient Babylonians started with the lunar calendar and stayed with it. Their obstinacy in sticking with moon cycles for their calendar-making had important consequences. In search of a way to measure the cycle of the seasons in multiples of moon cycles, they eventually discovered, probably around 432 B.c., the so-called Metonic cycle (after an astronomer Meton) of nineteen years. They found that if they used a nineteen-year cycle, assigned to seven of the years thirteen months, and assigned to the other twelve years only twelve months, they could continue to use the conven- iently visible phases of the moon as the basis of their calendar. Their “intercalation,” or insertion of extra months, avoided the inconvenience of a “wandering” year in which the seasons wandered gradually through the lunar months, so that there was no easy way of knowing which month would bring the new season. This Metonic calendar with its nineteen-year clusters was too complicated for everyday use. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., illus- trated these complications in a famous passage when he reported how the wise Solon answered the rich and irascible Croesus, who asked him who was the happiest of mortals. To impress on Croesus the vast unpredictability of fortune, he calculated according to the Greek calendar then in use the number of days in the seventy years which he regarded as the limit of the life of man. “In these seventy years,” he observed, “are contained, without reckoning intercalary months, 25,200 days. Add an intercalary month to every other year, that the seasons may come round at the right time, and there will be, besides the seventy years, thirty-five such months, making an addition of 1,050 days. The whole number of the days contained in the seventy years will thus be 26,250, whereof not one but will produce events unlike the rest. Hence man is wholly accident. For yourself, Croesus, I see that you are wonderfully rich, and the lord of many nations; but with respect to your question, I have no answer to give, until I hear that you have closed your life happily.” The Egyptians somehow escaped the temptations of the moon. So far as we know, they were the first to discover the length of the solar year and to define it in a useful, practical fashion. As with many other crucial human 6 TIME achievements, we know the what, but remain puzzled still about the why, the how, and even the when. The first puzzle is why it was the Egyptians. They had no astronomical instruments not already well known to the ancient world. They showed no special genius for mathematics. Their as- tronomy remained crude compared with that of the Greeks and others in the Mediterranean and was dominated by religious ritual. But it seems that by about 2500 b.c. they had figured out how to predict when the rising or setting sun would gild the tip of any particular obelisk, which helped them add a glow to their ceremonies and anniversaries. The Babylonian scheme, which kept the lunar cycles and tried to adjust them to the seasonal or solar year by “intercalation,” was inconvenient. Local whims prevailed. In Greece, fragmented by mountains and bays and fertile in landscape loyalties, each city-state made its own calendar, arbitrarily “intercalating” the extra month to mark a local festival or to suit political needs. The result was to defeat the very purpose of a calen- dar— a time scheme to hold people together, to ease the making of com- mon plans, such as agreements on the planting of crops and the delivery of goods. The Egyptians, even without the Greek yen for mathematics, solved the practical problem. They invented a calendar that served everyday needs throughout their land. As early as 3200 B.c., the whole Nile Valley was united with the Nile Delta into a single kingdom which lasted for three thousand years, until the Age of Cleopatra. Political unity was reinforced by nature. Like the heavenly bodies themselves, the Nile displayed a regular but more melodramatic natural rhythm. The longest river in Africa, the Nile stretches four thousand miles from its remote headstream, gathering the rainfall and snowmelt of the Ethiopian highlands and all the northeast- ern continent into a single grand channel to the Mediterranean. The phar- aoh’s realm was aptly called the Empire of the Nile. The ancients, taking Herodotus’ cue, called Egypt “the gift of the Nile.” The search for the sources of the Nile, like the search for the Holy Grail, had mystic overtones, which stirred death-defying explorers into the nineteenth century. The Nile made possible the crops, the commerce, and the architecture of Egypt. Highway of commerce, the Nile was also a freightway for the materials of colossal temples and pyramids. A granite obelisk of three thousand tons could be quarried at Aswan and then floated two hundred miles down the river to Thebes. The Nile fed the cities that clustered along its banks. No wonder that the Egyptians called the Nile “the sea” and in the Bible it is “the river.” The rhythm of the Nile was the rhythm of Egyptian life. The annual rising of its waters set the calendar of sowing and reaping with its three seasons: inundation, growth, and harvest. The flooding of the Nile from the The Heavenly Empire 7 end of June till late October brought down rich silt, in which crops were planted and grew from late October to late February, to be harvested from late February till the end of June. The rising of the Nile, as regular and as essential to life as the rising of the sun, marked the Nile year. The primitive Egyptian calendar, naturally enough, was a “nilometer” — a simple vertical scale on which the flood level was yearly marked. Even a few years’ reckon- ing of the Nile year showed that it did not keep in step with the phases of the moon. But very early the Egyptians found that twelve months of thirty days each could provide a useful calendar of the seasons if another five days were added at the end, to make a year of 365 days. This was the “civil” year, or the “Nile year,” that the Egyptians began to use as early as 4241 B.c. Avoiding the seductively convenient cycle of the moon, the Egyptians had found another sign to mark their year: Sirius, the Dog Star, the bright- est star in the heavens. Once a year Sirius rose in the morning in direct line with the rising sun. This “heliacal rising” of Sirius, which occurred every year in the midst of the Nile’s flood season, became the beginning of the Egyptian year. It was marked by a festival, the five “epagomenal days” (days outside the months), celebrating in turn the birthday of Osiris, of his son Horus, of his Satanic enemy, Set, of his sister and wife, Isis, and of Nephthys, the wife of Set. Since the solar year, of course, is not precisely 365 days, the Egyptian year of 365 days would, over the centuries, become a “wandering year” with each named month gradually occurring in a different season. The discrepancy was so small that it took many years, far longer than any one person’s lifetime, for the error to disturb daily life. Each month moved through all the seasons in fourteen hundred and sixty years. Still, this Egyptian calen- dar served so much better than any other known at the time that it was adopted by Julius Caesar to make his Julian calendar. It survived the Middle Ages and was still used by Copernicus in his planetary tables in the sixteenth century. While the Egyptians for their everyday calendar succeeded in declaring their independence of the moon, the moon retained a primeval fascination. Many peoples, including the Egyptians themselves, kept the lunar cycle to guide religious festivals and mystic anniversaries. Even today people domi- nated by their religion let themselves be governed by the cycles of the moon. The daily inconvenience of living by a lunar calendar becomes a daily witness to religious faith. The Jews, for example, preserve their lunar calendar, and each Jewish month still begins with the appearance of a new moon. To keep their lunar calendar in step with the seasonal year the Jews have added an extra month for each leap year, and the Jewish calendar has become a focus of esoteric 8 TIME rabbinical learning. The Jewish year was made to comprise twelve months, each of 29 or 30 days, totaling some 354 days. In order to fill out the solar year, Jewish leap years — following the Metonic cycle of Babylonia — add an extra month in the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth year of every nineteen-year period. Other adjustments are required occasionally to make festivals occur in their proper seasons — for example, to ensure that Passover, the spring festival, will come after the vernal equinox. In the Bible most of the months retain their Babylonian, rather than the Hebrew, names. Christianity, following Judaism for most religious anniversaries, has kept its tie to the lunar calendar. “Movable feasts” in the Church were moved around in the solar calendar because of the effort to keep festivals in step with the cycles of the moon. They still remind us of the primeval charm of the most conspicuous light in the night sky. The most important of these Christian, moon-fixed festivals is, of course, Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. “Easter-Day,” prescribes the English Book of Com- mon Prayer, “is always the first Sunday after the Full Moon which happens upon, or next after the Twenty-first day of March; and if the Full Moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter-Day is the Sunday after.” At least a dozen other Church festivals are fixed by reference to Easter and its lunar date, with the result that Easter controls about seventeen weeks in the ecclesiasti- cal calendar. The fixing of the date of Easter — in other words, the calendar — became a great issue and a symbol. Since the New Testament recounted that Jesus was crucified on the Passover, the anniversary of the Easter resurrection would obviously be tied to the Jewish calendar. The inevitable result was that the date of Easter would depend on the complicated lunar calculations by which the highest Jewish council, the Sanhedrin, defined the Passover. Many of the early Christians, following their own literal interpretation of the Bible, fixed the death of Jesus on a Friday, and the Easter resurrection on the following Sunday. But if the anniversary of the festival was to follow the Jewish lunar calendar, there was no assurance that Easter would occur on a Sunday. The bitter quarrel over the calendar led to one of the earliest schisms between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Church of Rome. The Eastern Christians, holding to the lunar calendar, continued to observe Easter on the fourteenth day of the lunar month, regardless of the day of the week. At the very first ecumenical (worldwide) council of the Christian Church, held at Nicaea in Asia Minor in 325, one of the world-unifying questions to be decided was the date of Easter. A uniform date was fixed in such a way as both to stay with the traditional lunar calendar and to assure that Easter would always be observed on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the matter. For community planning someone The Heavenly Empire 9 still had to predict the phases of the moon and locate them on a solar calendar. The Council of Nicaea had left this task to the bishop of Alex- andria. In that ancient center of astronomy he was to forecast the phases of the moon for all future years. Disagreement over how to predict those specified cycles led to a division in the Church, with the result that different parts of the world continued to observe Easter on different Sundays. The reform of the calendar by Pope Gregory XIII was needed because the year that Julius Caesar had borrowed from the Egyptians, and which had ruled Western civilization since then, was not a precise enough measure of the solar cycle. The actual solar year — the time required for the earth to complete an orbit around the sun — is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. This was some n minutes and 14 seconds less than the 365*4 days in the Egyptian year. As a result, dates on the calendar gradually lost their intended relation to solar events and to the seasons. The crucial date, the vernal equinox, from which Easter was calculated, had been fixed by the First Council of Nicaea at March 21. But the accumulating inaccuracy of the Julian calendar meant that by 1582 the vernal equinox was actually occurring on March 11. Pope Gregory XIII, though notorious now for his public Thanksgiving for the brutal massacre of Protestants in Paris on Saint Bartholomew’s Day (1572), was in some matters an energetic reformer. He determined to set the calendar straight. Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15. This meant, too, that in the next year the vernal equinox would occur, as the solar calendar of seasons required, on March 21. In this way the seasonal year was restored to what it had been in 325. The leap years of the old Julian calendar were readjusted. To prevent the accumulation of another 11-minute-a-year discrepancy, the Gregorian calendar omitted the leap day from years ending in hundreds, unless they were divisible by 400. This produced the modern calendar by which the West still lives. Simply because the reform had come from Rome, Protestant England and the Protestant American colonies obstinately refused to go along. Not until 1752 were they persuaded to make the change. The Old Style calendar year that governed them till then had begun on March 25, but the New Style year began on January 1. When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1751, Old Style, became February 22, 1752, New Style. Back in 1582, when Pope Gregory took ten days out of the calendar, there had been grumbling and confusion. Servants demanded their usual full monthly pay for the abridged month; employers refused. People objected to having their lives shortened by papal decree. But when Britain and the 10 TIME American colonies finally got around to making the change, Benjamin Franklin, aged forty-six when he lost the ten days of his life, with his usual cheery ingenuity gave readers of his Poor Richard’s Almanack something to be thankful for: Be not astonished, nor look with scorn, dear reader, at such a deduction of days, nor regret as for the loss of so much time, but take this for your consolation, that your expenses will appear lighter and your mind be more at ease. And what an indulgence is here, for those who love their pillow to lie down in peace on the second of this month and not perhaps awake till the morning of the fourteenth. The world never entirely accepted the Gregorian reform. The Eastern Orthodox Church, wary of subjecting itself to any Romish rule, has kept the Julian calendar for its own calculation of Easter. And so the Christian world, supposedly held together by a Prophet of Peace, has not been able to agree even on the date to celebrate the resurrection of their Savior. Still, for everyday secular affairs, the whole Christian world has shared a solar calendar which serves the convenience of the farmer and the mer- chant. But Islam, insisting on literal obedience to the words of the prophet Muhammad and to the dictates of the holy Koran, continues to live by the cycles of the moon. The crescent, the sign of the new moon, appears on the flag of Muslim nations. Despite scholarly dispute about the origin of the crescent symbol, there can be no doubt of its appropriateness for the peoples who have obediently submitted the schedule of their lives to the divinely commanded measure of the moon. And it is doubly significant as a conspicuous excep- tion to the Muslim ban on representing natural objects. At least as early as the thirteenth century, the crescent became the military and religious sym- bol of the Ottoman Turks. There is reason to believe that its adoption and its survival as a sign of Islam came from the dominance of the new moon, which not only is a signal of the beginning and end of the month-long Muslim season of fasting, but is the regular punctuation for the whole calendar. The new moons, declares the Koran, “are fixed times for the people and for the pilgrimage.” The Muslim world, with orthodox scrupulosity, has tried to live by the moon. Just as Caesar had decisively committed his world to the convenience of the solar year, with the months serving as indices of the seasons, so Muhammad committed his everyday world to the cycles of the moon. These lunar cycles would guide the faithful to the divinely ordained dates for the prime religious duties — the pilgrimage to Mecca and the Ramadan month of fasting. The Muslim year consists of twelve lunar The Heavenly Empire ii months, of alternately 29 and 30 days. The fractional correction to keep the months in step with the moon was secured by varying the length of the twelfth month in the year. A cycle of thirty Muslim years was defined, in nineteen of which the final month had 29 days, with 30 days in the others. Since the Muslim calendar contains only 354 or 355 days, the months have no regular relation to the seasons. Ramadan, the ninth month — the month of fasting, the observance which marks the true Muslim — and Dhu’l-Hijja, the twelfth month, during the first two weeks of which the faithful are to make their pilgrimage to Mecca, may occur in summer or in winter. In each year the festival of Ramadan and the Pilgrimage occur ten or eleven days earlier than in the previous year. The everyday inconveni- ences of this kind of calendar are simply another reminder of the good Muslim’s surrender to the will of Allah. The calendar itself, for others a mere schedule of worldly affairs, the Muslim makes an affirmation of faith. The Muslim’s literal submission to the moon cycle has had some interest- ing consequences. To live by the God-given visible phases of the moon (and not by some human calculation of when the new moon is expected) has meant, of course, that celebration of a festival must await the actual sight of the moon. Most Muslims hold to this view, following a traditionally accepted utterance of the prophet Muhammad, “Do not fast until you see the new moon, and do not break the fast until you see it; but when it is hidden from you [by cloud or mist] give it its full measure.” If clouds or mist prevent the new moon from being seen in certain villages, those villages will observe the beginning and the end of Ramadan at different times from their neighbors. One of the most hotly debated issues in Islam is whether it is permissible to define the beginning and end of festivals not by observation but “by resorting to calculation.” The members of the Ismaili sect, who separated themselves in this way, failed to persuade most of their fellow Muslims, who still stand by the need to observe, that is, actually to see the new moon. Strict adherence to the lunar calendar has become a touchstone of loyalty to traditional Islam. “Resort to calculation” — the appeal to the sophisticated mathematics of a solar year rather than to the simple, visible dictates of the lunar cycle — has marked the modern revolts against tradition. In 1926, when Kemal Atatiirk (Mustapha Kemal) proclaimed the end of the sultan- ate in Turkey and “modernized” the nation by adopting a new code of laws, by making civil marriage compulsory, and by abolishing the fez for men and the veil for women, he also abandoned the lunar calendar of Islam and adopted the solar calendar of the West. While for many in the West the calendar may seem nothing more than a system of chronological bookkeeping, it has proved to be one of the most rigid of human institutions. That rigidity comes partly from the potent 12 TIME mystic aura of sun and moon, partly from the fixed boundaries of the seasons. Revolutionaries have frequently tried to remake the calendar, but their success has been short-lived. The National Convention of the French Revolution set up a committee on calendar reform — made up of mathemati- cians, an educator, a poet, and the great astronomer Laplace — which pro- duced a new calendar of charming rational symmetry. In 1792 their decimal calendar replaced the 7-day week by a 10-day week called a decade, each day of which was given a Latin numerical name, three of which comprised a month. The day was divided into ten hours, each consisting of 100 min- utes, each minute of 100 seconds. In addition to the 360 days of these twelve months, the extra 5 or 6 days were given edifying names: Les Vertus, Le Genie, Le Travail, L’Opinion, Les Recompenses, with a leap day called Sans-culottide dedicated to holidays and sports. This calendar, designed to loosen the grip of the Church on daily life and thought, lasted uneasily for only thirteen years. When Napoleon became ruler of France, he restored the Gregorian calendar with its traditional saint’s days and holidays, for which he received the Pope’s blessing. In China the Revolution of 1911 brought a reform, which introduced the calendar of the West, alongside the traditional Chinese calendar. In 1929 the Soviet Union, aiming to dissolve the Christian year, replaced the Gregorian with a Revolutionary calendar. The week was to have 5 days, 4 for work, the fifth free, and each month would consist of six weeks. The extra days needed to make up each year’s complement of 365 or 366 would be holidays. The Gregorian names of the months were kept, but the days of the week were simply numbered. By 1940 the Soviet Union had returned to the familiar Gregorian calendar. The Week: Gateway to Science So long as man marked his life only by the cycles of nature — the changing seasons, the waxing or waning moon — he remained a prisoner of nature. If he was to go his own way and fill his world with human novelties, he would have to make his own measures of time. And these man-made cycles would be wonderfully varied. The Heavenly Empire 13 The week — or something very like it — was probably the earliest of these artificial time clusters. Our English word “week” seems to come from an Old High German word meaning to change, or turn about (like the English “vicar” and the German Wechsel). But the week is no Western invention, nor has it everywhere been a cluster of seven days. Around the world, people have found at least fifteen different ways, in bunches of 5 to 10 days each, of clustering their days together. What is planet-wide is not any particular bouquet of days but the need and the desire to make some kind of bouquet. Mankind has revealed a potent, pressing desire to play with time, to make more of it than nature has made. Our own Western 7-day week, one of the most arbitrary of our institu- tions, came into being from popular need and spontaneous agreement, not from a law or the order of any government. How did it happen? Why? When? Why a seven- day week? The ancient Greeks, it seems, had no week. Romans lived by an 8-day week. Farmers who worked in the fields for 7 days came to town for the eighth day — the market day (or nundinae). This was a day of rest and festivity, a school holiday, the occasion for public announcements and for entertaining friends. When and why the Romans fixed on 8 days and why they eventually changed to a 7-day week is not clear. The number seven almost everywhere has had a special charm. The Japanese found seven gods of happiness, Rome was set on seven hills, the ancients counted seven wonders of the world, and medieval Christians enumerated seven deadly sins. The Roman change from eight to seven seems not to have been accomplished by any official act. By the early third century a.d. Romans were living with a 7-day week. There must have been some popular new ideas afloat. One of these was the idea of the Sabbath, which appears to have come to Rome through the Jews. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,” says the Second Commandment. “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:8-11). Every week God’s creatures reen- acted His Creation. The Jews made their week a memorial too of their liberation from slavery. “And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:15). 14 TIME When the Jews observed the Sabbath, they dramatized the Again-and- Again quality of their world. There were other, less theological forces at work, such as the human need to refresh body and mind. The idea of a seventh day of rest, the very name Sabbath (from the Babylonian Sabattu), appears to have survived from the years when the Jews were in Babylonian captivity. The Babylonians ob- served certain enumerated days — the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the month — when specific activities were forbidden to their king. We find another clue in the name Saturday, which the Jews and the Romans and others after them came to use for their Sabbath day. Among the Romans, Saturn’s Day, or Saturday, was a day of evil omen when all tasks were ill-starred, a day when battles should not be fought, nor journeys begun. No prudent person would want to risk the mishaps that Saturn might bring. According to Tacitus, the Sabbath was observed in honor of Saturn because “of the seven stars which rule human affairs Saturn has the highest sphere and the chief power.” By the third century the seven-day week had become common in private life throughout the Roman Empire. Each day was dedicated to one of the seven planets. Those seven, according to the current astronomy, included the sun and the moon, but not the earth. The order in which planets governed the days of the week was: sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. This order was not that of their then supposed distance from the earth, which was the “normal” order in which Dante, for example, later described the zones in the heavens, and in which the names of the planets were recited in the schools down to the time of Copernicus. Our familiar order of the names for the days of the week came from this order of the planets that the Romans thought “governed” the first hour of each day in turn. The astrologers of the day did make use of the “order” of the planets according to their supposed distance from the earth, to calculate the “influence” of each planet on worldly affairs. They believed that each planet would govern an hour, then in the next hour would give way to the influence of the next planet nearer the earth, and so on through the cycle of all seven planets. After each cycle of seven hours, the planetary influences would begin all over again in the same order. The “governing” planet for each day, then, was the planet that happened to preside over the first hour of that day, and each day of the week thus took its name from the planet that governed its first hour. The result of this way of calculating was to name the days of the week in their now familiar order. The days of our week remain a living witness to the early powers of astrology. We easily forget that our days of the week really are named after The Heavenly Empire 15 the “planets” as they were known in Rome two thousand years ago. The days of the week in European languages are still designated by the planets’ names. The survival is even more obvious in languages other than English. Here, with the dominant planet, are some examples: English French Italian Spanish Sunday (Sun) dimanche domenica domingo Monday (Moon) lundi lunedi lunes Tuesday (Mars) mardi martedi martes Wednesday (Mercury) mercredi mercoledi miercoles Thursday (Jupiter) jeudi giovedi jueves Friday (Venus) vendredi venerdi viernes Saturday (Saturn) samedi sabato sabado hen peoples have tried to extinguish ancient idolatry, they have replaced the planetary names with simple numbers. So the Quakers call their days First Day, Second Day, and so on up to Seventh Day. They hold their religious meetings not on Sunday but on First Day. In modern Israel, too, the days of the week are given ordinal numbers. One of the more unexpected examples of the power of the planetary idea is the Christian change of the Sabbath from Saturday, or Saturn’s day, to Sunday, or Sun’s day. When Christianity first took root in the Roman Empire, pious Church Fathers worried over the survival of the pagan gods in the names of the planets that governed the Christian week. The Eastern Church had some success in exterminating this pagan influence: the names of the days in both modern Greek and Russian ceased to be planetary. But Western Christianity proved more willing to turn Roman beliefs and preju- dices to their own purpose. The Church Father Justin Martyr (c. 100-c. 165) shrewdly explained to the Emperor Antoninus Pius and his sons (c. 150) why the Christians chose their particular day for Gospel reading and to celebrate the Eucharist. “It is on what is called the Sun’s day that all who abide in the town or the country come together. . . . and we meet on the Sun’s day because it is the first day on which God formed darkness and mere matter into the world and Jesus Christ our saviour rose from the dead. For on the day before Saturn’s day they crucified him, and on the day after Saturn’s day which is the Sun’s day he appeared to his apostles and disciples and taught them.” Saturn’s day, the traditionally unlucky day when the Jews found it wise to abstain from work, somehow remained the pivot around which the weekly auspices would revolve. But there were still other influences. The Mithraists, followers of the Persian mystery religion who worshipped the sun-god Mithras, which was one of the strongest competitors of Christianity i6 TIME in the Roman Empire, adopted a seven-day week. They naturally felt special reverence for what everybody then called the Sun’s day. The Christians fixed their Lord’s day, then, so that every week’s passing would relive the drama of Jesus Christ. By taking Communion, every Christian would somehow become one of the Disciples at the Last Supper. The script for this mystic drama was, of course, the liturgy of the mass. The Eucharist, like the other sacraments, became a repeat performance of a crucial symbolic event in the history of the Church. What a happy coinci- dence that the Sun’s day was already known as a day of joy and renewal! “The Lord’s day is reverenced by us,” a Church Father, Maximus of Turin, explained in the fifth century, “because on it the Savior of the world like the rising sun, dispelling the darkness of hell, shone with the light of resurrection, and therefore is the day called by men of the world the Sun’s day, because Christ the sun of righteousness illumines it.” The Sun’s day, like the first David, prefigured the dazzling light of the sun in the true Savior. The Church Fathers made this coincidence further evidence that the world had long been preparing itself for the Savior’s coming. The making of our week was another forward step in man’s mastery of the world, in his reach toward science. The week was man’s own cluster, not dictated by the visible forces of nature, for the planetary influences were invisible. By seeking astral regularities, by imagining that regularly recur- ring forces at a distance, forces that could be judged only by their effects, might govern the world, mankind was preparing a new arsenal of thought, an escape from the prison of Again-and-Again. The planets, unworldly forces, would lead mankind out into the world of history. The planetary week was a path into astrology. And astrology was a step toward new kinds of prophecy. The earlier forms of prophecy can give us a hint of why astrology was a step forward into the world of science. Ancient rituals brought with them a complicated “science” for using parts of a sacrificed animal to foretell the future of the person who offered the sacrifice. Osteomancy, for example, prophesied by examining a bone of the sacrificed animal. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sir Richard Burton re- ported from Sindh, in the valley of the Indus, the elaborate technique still widely used for divining from the shoulder blade of a sacrificed sheep. The osteomancers divided the bone into twelve areas, or “houses,” each answer- ing a different question about the future. If in the first “house” the bone was clear and smooth, the omen was propitious and the consulter would prove to be a good man. If, in the second “house,” which pertained to herds, the bone was clear and clean, the herds would thrive, but if there were layers of red and white streaks, robbers must be expected. And so it went. Hepatoscopy, which predicted by examining the sac- The Heavenly Empire 17 rificed animal’s liver, was one of the earliest popular techniques of prophecy among the Assyro-Babylonians. It seems to have been used in China in the Bronze Age. Then the Romans and many others continued the practice. The liver impressed the diviners by its large size, its interesting shape, and its heavy burden of blood. An elaborate bronze model of a sheep’s liver, which survives from Piacenza, Italy, is covered with inscriptions indicating what was to be foretold by the condition of each part. Every conceivable human activity or experience — from the knotting of strings to the interpre- tation of dreams — has become an oracle, witnessing man’s desperate eager- ness for clues to his future. By contrast with these other kinds of prophecy, astrology was progres- sive. Astrology differed in asserting the continuous, regular force of a power at a distance. The influences of heavenly bodies on the events on earth it described as periodic, repetitious, invisible forces like those that would rule the scientific mind. It is not surprising that earliest man was awed by the heavens and enticed by the stars. These first night-lights which inspired the priests of ancient Babylonia also sparked the popular fancy. The changelessness of the rhythm of life on earth made the shifting fireworks of the sky into melodrama. The coming and going of the stars, their rising and falling, their moving about the heavens, became the conflicts and the adventures of the gods. If the rising and setting of the sun made so much difference on earth, why not also the movement of the other heavenly bodies? The Babylonians made the whole sky a stage for their mythological imagination. Like the rest of nature, the heavens were a scene of living drama. Like the entrails of sacrificial victims, the heavens were divided into zones and then peopled with fantastic figures. The evening star, later called the planet Venus — the brightest heavenly object next to the sun and moon — became a luminous lion roaming the sky from east to west. The great god El, jealous of so bright and high-rising a luminary, put the lion to death again at every dawn. The Old Testament presents this fantasy in the vision of Lucifer cut down for his pride: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! . . . For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. ... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High” (Isaiah, 14:12-14) This diurnal assassination was accomplished by the messenger of El, Michael (meaning “Who is like El”?). In the sky the gods fought battles, made love, formed alliances, and hatched conspiracies. How inconceivable that these cosmic events should not affect life on earth! Every farmer knew that the clouds in the sky, the warmth of the sun, and the heavenly gift of rain decided the fate of crops and so really governed his own life. Of course, the subtler, more obscure heavenly events required proper interpretation by priests. i8 TIME This lure of the skies produced a fertile lore of the skies. The powers of sun and rain, the correspondence between happenings in the heavens and happenings on earth, stirred the search for other correspondences. The Babylonians were among the first who elaborated a mythological frame for these universal correspondences. Their vivid imaginings would be per- petuated by Greeks, Jews, Romans, and others over the following centuries. The theory of correspondences became astrology, which sought new links between space and time, between the movements of physical bodies and the unfolding of all human experience. The growth of science would depend on man’s willingness to believe the improbable, to cross the dictates of common sense. With astrology man made his first great scientific leap into a scheme for describing how unseen forces from the greatest distance, from the very depth of the heavens, shaped everyday trivia. The heavens, then, were the laboratory of mankind’s first science, just as the interior of the human body, the intimate inward realm of his consciousness, and the Dark Continents in the atom, would be the scenes for his latest sciences. Man sought to use his growing knowledge of the patterns of repeating experience in his never- ending struggle to break the iron ring of repetition. Social or wholesale prophecy flourished in Babylonia. It forecast the large events — battles, droughts, plagues, harvests — which affected the whole community. For centuries such astrology remained a lore rather than a doctrine. The Greeks made a science of it. Personal astrology — “judicial” astrology, or genethlialogy — which cast a person ’s fortune from the position of the heavenly bodies at the moment of his birth, developed more slowly. The person was called the “native,” and the prophecy came to be called a “nativity,” or horoscope. The Greeks, too, were tom between wanting to know the good news and fearing to know the bad. Their medical astrologers divided the whole sky according to the signs of the zodiac, then assigned a particular stellar force to each part of the body. Then Greek anti-astrologers attacked the whole dogma of astral forces with arguments that would last into modern times. The names assigned to the stars, the anti-astrologers argued, were quite accidental. Why should this planet be called Mars and that Saturn or Venus? And why did the astrologers limit their horoscopes to human be- ings? Would not the same astral fortunes govern all animals? And how could astrologers explain the different fortunes of twins? The Epicureans, whose philosophy was built on the belief in each man’s freedom to shape his destiny, attacked astrology as a way of making men think they were mere slaves of the stars. In ancient Rome, astrology attained an influence seldom equaled in later centuries. Astrologers — called Chaldaei after the Chaldean or Babylonian origins of the science, or Mathematici from their astronomical calculations The Heavenly Empire 19 — were a recognized profession whose repute varied with the turbulent times. Under the Roman Republic they became so powerful and so unpopu- lar that in 139 b.c. they were expelled not only from Rome but from all Italy. Afterwards, under the empire, when their dangerous prophecies had brought several astrologers to trial for treason, they were repeatedly ban- ished. But the same emperor who would banish some astrologers for their ominous forebodings, would employ others to guide his imperial household. Some areas were declared off limits. In the late empire, even when astrolo- gers were tolerated or encouraged, they were forbidden to make prophecies about the life of the emperor. Christian emperors failed in their efforts to discourage astrology. “There are many,” the historian Ammianus Marcellinus recounted in the late fourth century after Constantine officially converted the empire to Christi- anity, “who do not presume either to bathe, or to dine, or to appear in public, till they have diligently consulted, according to the rules of astrol- ogy, the situation of Mercury and the aspect of the moon. It is singular enough that this vain credulity may often be discovered among the profane sceptics, who impiously doubt or deny the existence of a celestial power.” By that time the powers of the seven planets were attested by the quiet transformation of the eight-day week into the week of seven days, with each day now subordinate to one of the seven planets. When Romans attended the imperial circus, the astral powers were seen everywhere. Over each of the twelve stalls from which the chariots started their race, there appeared a sign of one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. Each of the seven tracks of the racecourse was intended to represent a heavenly circuit of one of the seven planets. God and the Astrologers Astrology married the human needs which later centuries would divorce into science and religion. Was astrology in ancient Rome, as historians commonly say, simply a superstitious fatalism, a triumph of the irrational? There is no denying that awe of the stars — those “visible gods” — inspired an awe of astrologers. “He to whom the gods themselves reveal the future,” 20 TIME observed Arellius Fuscus, an eminent rhetorician of the Augustan Age, “who imposes his will even on kings and peoples, cannot be fashioned by the same womb which bore us ignorant men. His is a superhuman rank. Confident of the gods, he is himself divine. ... let us lift up our minds by means of the science which reveals to us the future, and before the appointed hour of death let us taste the pleasures of the Blest.” But astral religion was not to be separated from astral science. The leading scientists took for granted the influence of the stars on human events. They disagreed only over how the stars exerted their powers. The great scientific encyclopedia of the age, Pliny’s Natural History, propagated the rudiments of astrology by showing the influence of the stars everywhere. Seneca’s only complaint was that the astrologers were not comprehensive enough. “What? Think you so many thousand stars shine on in vain? What else, indeed, is it which causes those skilled in nativities to err than that they assign us to a few stars, although all those that are above us have a share in the control of our fate? . . . But even those stars that are motionless, or because of their speed keep equal pace with the rest of the universe and seem not to move, are not without rule and dominion over us.” The most influential of all ancient Roman scientists proved to be the most durable authority on astrology. Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alex- andria) provided the solid treatise which would give substance and respecta- bility to this science for the next thousand years. But his reputation has suffered from the overadvertised fate of two of his crucially erroneous theories. Both were current in his time, both were developed and per- petuated in his writings. The geocentric, or Ptolemaic, theory of the uni- verse would become a modem byword for astronomical error. Similarly, the land-dominant view, the view that dry land comprised most of the earth’s surface, became a byword for geographic error. These two popular miscon- ceptions were destined to obscure Ptolemy’s colossal achievements. But never since Ptolemy has anyone provided so comprehensive a survey of the whole scientific knowledge of an age. Yet the life of this encyclopedic genius remains a mystery. Probably descended from Greek immigrants, Ptolemy (90-168) lived in Egypt during the reigns of Emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. His Alexandria had continued to be a great center of learning even after its famous library was burned by Caesar in 48 B.c. Ptolemy dominated the popular and literary view of the universe throughout the Middle Ages. The world as depicted in Dante’s Divine Comedy came right out of Ptolemy’s Almagest. In many ways Ptolemy spoke as a prophet. For he enlarged the uses of mathematics in the service of science. While he drew on the best observations made before him, he emphasized the need for repeated, increasingly precise observation. In fact, The Heavenly Empire 21 Ptolemy was a harbinger of the scientific spirit, an unsung pioneer of the experimental method. In trigonometry, for example, his table of chords has been found accurate to five decimal places. In spherical geometry he offered an elegant solution to the problems of sundials, which had special signifi- cance in that age before mechanical clocks. There was no branch of physical science that he did not survey and organize into newly usable forms. Geog- raphy, astronomy, optics, harmonics — each he expounded in a system. The best known of these was his treatise on astronomy, the Almagest. His Geography, which aimed to map the whole known world, pioneered in listing places systematically by latitude and longitude. There, too, he offered his own improved method for projecting spherical surfaces on flat maps. In view of the scanty factual reports available to him, Ptolemy’s maps of his “known world,” the Roman Empire, were a remarkable accomplishment. He showed the crucial scientific talents — shaping theories to fit available facts and testing old theories by new facts. The Arabs appreciated the grandeur of Ptolemy’s work and brought him to the West. His astronomy was destined to bear an Arabic name {Almagest, from al majisti, “the greatest compilation”), and his Geography was trans- lated into Arabic early in the ninth century. The Tetrabiblos, his four books on astrology, which Ptolemy regarded as the companion to his Almagest, also came West through the Arabic. “Mortal as I am,” wrote Ptolemy, “I know that I am born for a day, but when I follow the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth; I ascend to Zeus himself to feast me on ambrosia, the food of the gods.” He helped others find a refuge from earthly cycles into heavenly mysteries. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos became the leading textbook of astrology, one of our best guides to science in the Middle Ages. While his Almagest predicted the changing positions of heavenly bodies, his astrology predicted their influences on earthly events. Did not the cycles of the sun and the moon obviously affect happenings on earth? Then why should not lesser celestial bodies also affect events down here? If illiterate sailors could forecast the weather from the sky, could not learned astrolo- gers use the data of the heavens to forecast human events? Ptolemy saw the astral influence as purely physical, as only one of many forces. He conceded that astrology was of course no more foolproof than any other science. But that was no reason why careful observation of the correspondence of earthly events with celestial events should not produce some useful, though not mathematically certain, predictions. In this practical spirit, Ptolemy laid the foundation of the most durable of the occult sciences. Of the four books of his Tetrabiblos, the first two, on “astrological geography” and weather prediction, cover the influences of celestial bodies on earthly physical events, and the last two cover their 22 TIME influence on human events. Ptolemy expounds the science of horoscopes, the prediction of human destinies from the position of the stars at the moment of a person’s birth. Although Ptolemy’s work did become the leading textbook of astrology for a thousand years, because he ignored “catarchic” — the technique of answering questions about the future by the position of heavenly bodies at the time the question was asked — his work did not fully satisfy the needs of astrological practitioners. Ptolemy’s adventure into the occult world of astrology would even out- live his magisterial works in the more familiar realms of modem science. Copernicus’ epoch-making De Revolutionibus (1543), which changed the center of the solar system, still confirmed in its form and much of its content the dominant influence of Ptolemy’s Almagest. Not until a half century later, when Tycho Brahe’s Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica (1598) displaced Ptolemy’s star catalogue with a new catalogue based en- tirely on independent observations, did Ptolemy’s data, as well as his the- ory, finally become obsolete. Ptolemy’s geographic speculations about terra incognita, and about other parts of the world remote from Europe, had already begun to be out of date when his Geography, translated from Greek into Latin, reached Western Europe in 1406. Still, Ptolemy’s Geog- raphy long remained popular as the best guide to the “known world” in the West. Maps published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, includ- ing Mercator’s own great map of Europe that appeared in 1554, were commonly based on Ptolemy, whose technique of map projection con- tinued to stimulate cartography throughout the sixteenth century. Mean- while, Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos remained the bible of astrology. It was republished twice — once in England, once in Germany — during World War II, when it still was thought useful. Astrology expressed a crucial transformation of human feelings in the land-bound age. There was a world of difference between the old wine- inspired Dionysiac intoxication that Euripides describes in his Bacchae and the new star-inspired ecstasy, the new astral mysticism. Now, as the histo- rian of religion Franz Cumont observes, “it is with pure light that reason quenches her thirst for truth; and ‘the abstemious intoxication,’ which exalts her to the stars, kindles in her no ardour save a passionate yearning for divine knowledge. The source of mysticism is transferred from earth to heaven.” The popular claims of pagan astrologers disturbed the early prophets of Christianity. Church Fathers who declared their own power to forecast everyman’s fate in the next world begrudged the powers of prophecy to those who pretended to know any man’s destiny on earth. If the astrologers’ horoscopes meant what they said, where was the room for free will, for The Heavenly Empire 23 freedom to choose good over evil, to forsake Mammon or Caesar for Jesus Christ? The very struggle to become a Christian — to abandon pagan superstition for Christian free will — seemed to be a struggle against astrology. Saint Augustine (354-430) recalls in his Confessions: “Those impostors then, whom they style Mathematicians [Astrologers], I consulted without scru- ple; because they seemed to use no sacrifice, nor to pray to any spirit for their divinations.” And he was tempted by the astrologers’ counsel: “The cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven; this did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars: That man, forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corrup- tion, might be blameless; while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars is to bear the blame.” Saint Augustine struggled to reject “the lying divinations and impious dotages of the astrologers.” Two acquaintances reminded him “that there was no such art whereby to foresee things to come, but that men’s conjec- tures were a sort of lottery, and that out of many things which they said should come to pass, some actually did, unawares to them who spake it, who stumbled upon it, through their oft speaking.” At this providential moment of his burgeoning doubts, God “provided then a friend for me, no negligent consulter of the astrologers; nor yet well skilled in those arts, but ... a curious consulter with them, and yet knowing something which he said he had heard of his father, which how far it went to overthrow the estimation of that art, he knew not.” A story told by this friend, Firminus, shook the young Augustine from his pagan faith. Firminus’ father, an earnest experimenter in astrology, always noted the positions of the stars and even “took care with the most exact diligence to know the birth of his very puppies.” Firminus’ father learned that one of his women-servants was to be delivered of a child at about the same time that Firminus’ mother was expecting. “Both were delivered at the same instant; so that both were constrained to allow the same constellations, even to the minutest points, the one for his son, the other for his new-born slave. For so soon as the women began to be in labour, they each gave notice to the other what was fallen out in their houses, and had messengers ready to send to one another, so soon as they had notice of the actual birth, of which they had easily provided, each in his own province, to give instant intelligence. Thus then the messengers of the respective parties met, he averred, at such an equal distance from either house, that neither of them could make out any difference in the position of the stars, or any other minutest points; and yet Firminus, bom in a high estate in his parents’ house, ran his course through the gilded paths of life, was increased in riches, raised to honours; whereas that slave continued to serve his masters, without any relaxation of his yoke, as Firminus, who *4 TIME knew him, told me.” The diverse destiny of twins struck Augustine as the most obvious and appealing argument against astrology. Not only in the autobiographical Confessions but even in his great theo- retical work, The City of God, he labors lengthily against the astrologers. The Roman Empire, and all other kingdoms, he warns, have their destiny shaped not by the stars but by the will of God. His clinching Biblical argument is the example of Jacob and Esau — “two twins bom so near together that the second held the first by the heel; yet in their lives, manners, and actions, was such a disparity, that that very difference made them enemies one to another.” And he elaborates on the cases of other twins. Astrology remained the bete noire of the Christian Church Fathers. Faith in a star-written destiny had dissuaded Romans, such as Emperor Tiberius, from paying homage even to their pagan gods. Tertullian (c. 160-c. 230) warned against astrology because “men, presuming that we are disposed of by the immutable arbitrament of the stars, think on that account that God is not to be sought after.” Shrewd Christian theologians of the Middle Ages managed to find holy uses for the widespread belief in astral powers. Both Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas admitted the strong governing influence of the stars, but they insisted that man’s freedom was his very power to resist that influence. Even if astrologers often did make true predictions, Aquinas explains, these usually concerned events in which large numbers of men were involved. In such cases the passions of the many would prevail against the rational wisdom of the few; but the individual Christian’s free will had not been exercised. The great medieval theologians earnestly enlisted the prevailing belief in astrology to reinforce the truths of Christianity. They liked to recall the astrological prediction of the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ was not Himself subject to the rule of the stars, the stars did give signs of His coming. What else was the Star of Bethlehem? Was it not likely that those wise enough to follow that star, the Magi, were actually learned astrologers? PART TWO The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, Who in this place set up a sun-dial. To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions. — PLAUTUS (c. 200 B.C.) 4 Measuring the Dark Hours So long as mankind lived by raising crops and herding animals there was not much need for measuring small units of time. The seasons were all- important — to know when to expect the rain, the snow, the sun, the cold. Why bother with hours and minutes? Daylight time was the only important time, the only time when men could work. To measure useful time, then, was to measure the hours of the sun. No change in daily experience is more emptying than the loss of the sense of contrast between day and night, light and dark. Our century of artificial light tempts us to forget the meaning of night. Life in a modem city is always a time of mixed light and darkness. But for most of the human centuries night was a synonym for the darkness that brought all the menace of the unknown. “Never greet a stranger in the night,” warned the Talmud (c. 200 B.c.), “for he may be a demon.” “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day,” announced Jesus (John 9:4-5), “the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Few subjects have been more enticing to the literary imagination. “In the dead vast and middle of the night” was when Shakespeare and other dramatists placed their crimes. O comfort-killing night, image of Hell; Dim register and notary of shame; Black stage for tragedies and murders fell; Vast sin-concealing chaos, nurse of blame. The first step in making night more like day was taken long before people became accustomed to artificial lighting. It came when man, playing with time, began measuring it off into shorter slices. While the ancients measured the year and the month, and set the pattern for our week, the shorter units of time remained vague and played little part in the common human experience until the last few centuries. Our precise uniform hour is a modem invention, while the minute and the second are still more recent. Naturally enough, when the working day was the sunlit day, the first efforts to divide time measured the passing of the sun across the heavens. For this purpose sundials, or shadow clocks, were the first measuring devices. The original meaning of our English word “dial,” which From Sun Time to Clock Time 27 since has taken on so many other meanings (from the Latin dies, or day; medieval Latin dialis), was sundial. Primitive societies noticed that the shadow of an upright post (or gnomon, from the Greek “to know”) became shorter as the sun rose in the heavens, and lengthened again as the sun set. The ancient Egyptians used such a device, and we can still see one that survives from the time of Thutmose III (c. 1500 B.C.). A horizontal bar about a foot long had a small T-shaped structure at one end which would cast a shadow on the calibration on the horizontal bar. In the morning the bar was set with the T facing east; at noon the device was reversed with the T facing west. When the prophet Isaiah promised to cure King Hezekiah by making time go backward, he announced that he would do so by making the sun’s shadow recede. For centuries the sun’s shadow remained the universal measure of time. And this was a handy measure, since a simple sundial could be made anywhere by anybody without special knowledge or equipment. But the cheery boast “I count only the sunny hours,” inscribed on modern sundials, announces the obvious limitation of the sundial for measuring time. A sundial measures the sun’s shadow: no sun, no shadow. A shadow clock was useful only in those parts of the world where there was lots of sunlight, and then it served only when the sun was actually shining. Even when the sun shone bright, the movement of the sun’s shadow was so slow that it would be small help in marking minutes and useless for signaling seconds. The dial that marked the day’s passing in any one place was ill suited to measure a universal standard unit, such as our hour of sixty minutes. For everywhere except on the equator the length of daylight hours varies from one day to the next and around the seasons. To use the sun’s shadow in any place to define the hour according to Greenwich Mean Time requires a combined knowledge of astronomy, geography, mathematics, and mechanics. Not until about the sixteenth century could sundials be marked with these true hours. When this “science of dialing” was devel- oped, it became fashionable to carry a pocket sundial. But by then the clock and the watch existed and were more convenient and useful in every way. The early sundials had other limitations. The horizontal instrument of Thutmose III could not record the earliest hour in the morning or the latest hour of the afternoon because the shadow of the horizontal T-bar would stretch to infinite length and so not register on the scale. The great ancient advance in sundial design, while no help in describing universal time, did make it easier to divide the daylight hours into equal parts. This was a sundial shaped into a hemicycle, the interior of a half-sphere, with the pointer extended from one side to the center and the opening facing upward. The shadow path during any day, then, would be a perfect replica of the sun’s path in the hemisphere of the sky above. This arc traced by the sun 28 TIME and marked inside the hemicycle was divided into twelve equal parts. After paths were drawn for different dates, the twelve “hour” divisions for each date were joined with curves, indicating the varying twelfth of the daylight hours. The Greeks, adept at geometry, succeeded in making many advances in sundial design. One delightful example survives in the Tower of the Winds in Athens. On this eight-sided tower, each of the eight principal directions is personified in its winds, and each face bears a sundial, so that an Athenian could read the time on at least three faces at once. The sundial became so common a Roman fixture that the architect Vitruvius, in the first century B.c., could list thirteen kinds of sundials. But the many beautiful monumen- tal sundials that the Romans looted abroad to decorate their villas were nearly useless as timepieces in the Roman latitude. If we believe Plautus (d. 184 B.C.), the Romans relied on sundials to fix their mealtimes: The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, Who in this place set up a sun-dial, To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions. When I was a boy. My belly was my sun-dial; one more sure, Truer, and more exact than any of them. This dial told me when 'twas proper time To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat. But now-a-days, why even when I have, I can’t fall-to, unless the sun give leave. The greater part of its inhabitants, Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets! Even after the sundial was designed to divide the daylight time into equal segments, it was not much help in comparing times from one season to another. Summer days were long, so too were summer hours. Roman soldiers, in the reign of Emperor Valentinian I (364-375), were drilled to march “at the rate of 20 miles in five summer hours.” An “hour” — one- twelfth of the daylight — on a particular day in one place would be quite different from that on another day or in another place. The sundial was an elastic yardstick. How was mankind liberated from the sun? How did we conquer the night, making it part of the intelligible world? Only by escaping the sun’s tyranny would we ever learn to measure out our time in universally uniform spoon- fuls. Only then could the recipes for action, for making and doing be understood anywhere anytime. Time was, in Plato’s phrase, “a moving From Sun Time to Clock Time 29 image of eternity.” No wonder that measuring its course tantalized man- kind all over the planet. Anything that would flow, that would be consumed or would consume has been tried somewhere or another as a measure of time. All were efforts to escape the tyranny of the sun, to grasp time more firmly, more predicta- bly and bring it into the service of man. The simple universal measure needed every day, the measure of life itself, would have to be something better than the whimsical, fleeting, slow-moving, often obscured shadow. Man must find something better than the Greeks’ “timepiece they call Hunt-the-Shadow.” Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet — which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which gives our planet a special character — made possible man’s first small successes in measuring the dark hours. Water, which could be captured in any small bowl, was more manageable than the sun’s shadow. When mankind began to use water to serve him for a timepiece, he took another small step forward in making the planet into his household. Man could make the captive water flow fast or slow, day and night. He could measure out its flow in regular, constant units, which would be the same at the equator or on the tundra, winter or summer. But perfecting this device was long and difficult. By the time the water clock was elaborated into a more or less precision instrument, it had already begun to be supplanted by something far more convenient, more precise, and more interesting. Yet, for most of history, water provided the measure of time when the sun was not shining. And until the perfection of the pendulum clock about 1700, the most accurate timepiece was probably the water clock. During all those centuries, the water clock ruled man’s daily — or, rather, his nightly — experience. Man discovered very early that he could measure the passage of time by the amount of water that dripped from a pot. Within five hundred years after their first sundials, the ancient Egyptians were using water clocks. In their sunny country, the sundial well served their needs by day, but they needed the water clock to measure off hours of night. Their god of the night, Thoth, who was also god of learning, of writing, and of measurement, presided over both outflow and inflow models of water clocks. The outflow type was an alabaster vessel with a scale marked inside and a single hole near the bottom from which the water dripped. By noting the drop in the water level inside from one mark to the next mark below on the scale, the passage of time was measured. The later inflow type, which marked the passing time by the rise of water in the vessel, was more complicated, as it required a constant source of regulated supply. Even such simple devices were not without their problems. In cold climates the changing viscosity of 30 TIME the water would be troublesome. But, in any climate, to keep the clock at constant speed, the hole through which the water poured must not become clogged or worn larger. The outflow clocks posed another minor problem because the speed of flow depended on the water pressure, and that always varied with the amount of water left in the bowl. The Egyptians therefore slanted the walls of the vessel so that, as the amount of water decreased, the pressure remained constant by being concentrated on a smaller area. The problem of designing a useful water clock was simple enough so long as its only purpose was like that of a modem egg timer, which marks the passage of short uniform units of time. But to use the water clock as an instrument for dividing the hours of daylight or of darkness into equal segments posed a difficult problem of calibration. The winter night in Egypt was, of course, longer than the night in summer. The water clock at Thebes required, according to Egyptian measures, that the summer night be mea- sured by only twelve fingers of water, while the winter night required fourteen. These variant “hours” — equal subdivisions of the total hours of daylight or darkness — were not really chronometric hours. They came to be called “temporary hours” or “temporal” hours, for they had meaning that was only temporary and did not equal an hour the next day. It would have been much simpler to make a water clock measure off a fixed, unchang- ing unit. But centuries passed before abstracted time was captured by a machine that measured something other than a fragment of daylight or darkness. The Greeks, who had perfected the sundial to measure their daylight, also used the water clock as an everyday timer. Their picturesque name, klepsy- dra, meaning water-thief, would designate the device for centuries to come. They used their water clock to limit the times for pleading in Athenian courts. The surviving court clocks flow for about six minutes. Demosthenes in his legal speeches, referring to the time running out in the water clock, often asked that the flow of the water be stopped while he read from laws or depositions so that his speaking time would not be used up. The elegant Tower of the Winds had attached to it a circular cistern as a reservoir for a water clock. Ctesibius of Alexandria (second century B.c.), the ingenious Greek physicist and inventor, who also devised a hydraulic organ and an air gun, contrived a water clock with a floating indicator to mark the time on a vertical scale set above. Adept though they were at engineering and mechanics, the Romans relied on the water clock as their only mechanical device, apart from the sundial, for measuring time. Latinizing klepsydra to clepsydra — or the horologium ex aqua — they elaborated and popularized it into an everyday convenience. They made miniature sundials measuring only one and a half inches across for carrying about in the pocket. At the same time the Roman From Sun Time to Clock Time 3i feeling for the grandiose was displayed on the Campus Martius in the great obelisk of Montecitorio, serving as gnomon for a giant sundial whose shadow was measured on lines of bronze in the surrounding marble pave- ment. The Romans showed a similar versatility with their water clocks. Like other practical, commercial people, they were alert to the value of time. But only gradually, and then only crudely, did they divide their day into smaller parts. They never invented a mechanical clock that would conveniently subdivide the hours. Even at the end of the fourth century B.c. they formally divided their day into only two parts: before midday ( ante meridiem, a.m.) and after midday (post meridiem, P.M.). An assistant to the consul was assigned to notice when the sun crossed the meridian, and to announce it in the Forum, since lawyers had to appear in the courts before noon. Eventually they made finer subdivisions. First by dividing each half of the day into two parts: early morning (mane) and forenoon (ante meridiem); afternoon (de meridie) and evening (suprema). Then they took to marking the “temporary” hours according to a sundial that had been brought from Catana in Sicily. Made for a different latitude, it was hardly precise. Finally in 164 B.c. the censor Q. Marcius Philippus earned popularity by setting up a sundial properly oriented for Rome. Beside the sundial a waterclock was installed to tell time on foggy days and at night. The Romans used their sundials to calibrate and set the water clocks, which had become the common timepiece in imperial Rome. The water clocks still offered only “temporary” hours, with daylight and darkness measurements for all the days of a month lumped together, though these really varied from day to day. Since no one in Rome could know the exact hour, promptness was an uncertain, and uncelebrated, virtue. It was as impossible to find agreement among the clocks of Rome, the wit Seneca (c. 4 b.c.-a.d. 65) observed, as to find agreement among Roman philoso- phers. The “hours” of their daily lives — their temporary “hour” was one- twelfth the time of daylight or of darkness on that day — were more elastic than we can now imagine. At the winter solstice, even if the sun shone all day there would be, by our modern measures, only 8 hours, 54 minutes of sunlight, leaving a long night of 15 hours, 6 minutes. At the summer solstice the time, by our modern hours, was exactly reversed. But from the Romans’ point of view both day and night always had precisely 12 hours year round. In Rome at the winter solstice the first hour of their day (hora prima) began at what we would call 7:33 A.M. and lasted only till 8:17 a.m., while the twelfth hour (hora duodecimo) began at 3:42 p.m. and expired at 4:27 p.m., when the longer night hours began. What a problem for the clockmakers! We must be amazed not that they did not provide a more precise timepiece, 32 TIME but that under these circumstances they were able to provide an instrument that served daily needs at all. By elaborate systems of calibration they made their water clocks indicate the shifting lengths of hours from month to month. It was far too compli- cated to mark the shifting increments from day to day. This meant, too, that there was no accepted way of subdividing each day’s passing hours. When daily needs required shorter standard units, a simple water clock served them with all the precision of an egg timer. In the Roman courtroom, for example, where the lawyers of opposing parties were supposed to have equal time, the simple water clock worked well. For this purpose they followed the Athenian example, using a bowl with a hole near the bottom. This timer emptied in about twenty minutes. A lawyer might ask the judge to grant him an additional “six clepsydrae,” or about two of our modem hours, to make his case. A particularly long-winded advocate was once actually granted sixteen water clocks — five hours! While the Romans doubt- less shared our view that “time is money,” they often equated time with water. In Rome the phrase aquam dare, “to grant water,” meant to allot time to a lawyer, while aquam perdere, “to lose water,” meant to waste time. If a speaker in the Senate spoke out of turn or talked too long, his colleagues would shout that his water should be taken away. Under other circumstances they might petition that more water be allowed. Lawyers were no less wordy then than they are today. One especially tiresome advocate inspired the Roman wit Martial (c. 40-c. 102) to suggest: Seven water-clocks’ allowance you asked for in loud tones, Caecilianus, and the judge unwillingly granted them. But you speak much and long, and with back- tilted head, swill tepid water out of glass flasks. That you may once for all sate your oratory and your thirst, we beg you, Caecilianus, now to drink out of the water-clock! For every bowlful of water the lawyer drank he would reduce the judge’s boredom by twenty minutes. The simple water clock challenged the Romans’ ingenuity. To prevent the escape hole from wearing away or being clogged, the hole was fashioned from a gem, much as later mechanical clockmakers used “jewels.” Some of the Roman water clocks described by the architect Vitruvius were fitted with elaborate floats which announced the Roman “hour” by tossing peb- bles— or eggs — into the air, or by blowing a whistle. The water clock, like the piano in middle-class European households in the nineteenth century, became a symbol of status. “Has he not got a clock in his dining-room?” observed the admirers of the parvenu Trimalchio in the Age of Nero. “And From Sun Time to Clock Time 33 a uniformed trumpeter to keep telling him how much of his life is lost and gone?” In later centuries people everywhere, after their fashion, found ways to use water to mark off the portions of life. The Saxons in the ninth century characteristically used a bowl of strong and rustic elegance. The bowl, with a small hole in the bottom, was floated on water and sank as it filled, always marking the same period. The Chinese, who had their own simple water clocks from remote antiquity, returned home from Western travels with astonishing tales of complicated striking water clocks. They especially ad- mired a giant water clock that ornamented the east gate of the Great Mosque at Damascus. At each “hour” of the day or night two weights of brightly shining brass fell from the mouths of two brazen falcons into brazen cups, perforated to allow the balls to return into position. Above the falcons was a row of open doors, one for each “hour” of the day, and above each door was an unlighted lamp. At each hour of the day, when the balls fell, a bell was struck and the doorway of the completed hour was closed. Then, at nightfall, the doors all automatically opened. As the balls fell announcing each “hour” of the night, the lamp of that hour was lit, giving off a red glow, so that finally by dawn all the lamps were illuminated. With the coming of daylight the lamps were extinguished and the doors of day- time hours resumed their cycle. It required the full time of eleven men to keep this machine in working order. Not the flowing waters of time but the falling sands of time have given modem poets their favorite metaphor for the passing hours. In England, sandglasses were frequently placed in coffins as a symbol that life’s time had run out. “The sands of time are sinking,” went the hymn. “The dawn of heaven breaks.” But the hourglass, measuring time by dripping sand, comes late in our story. Sand was, of course, less fluid than water, and hence less adapted to the subtle calibration required by the variant “hours” of day and night in early times. You could not float an indicator on it. But sand would flow in climates where water would freeze. A practical and precise sandglass re- quired the mastery of the glassmaker’s art. We hear of sand hourglasses in Europe in the eighth century, when legend credits a monk at Chartres with their invention. As glassmaking progressed it became possible to seal the hourglass to keep out the moisture that slowed the fall of the sand. Elaborate processes dried the sand before it was inserted in the glass. A medieval treatise prescribed in place of sand a fine-ground black-marble dust, boiled nine times in wine. At each boiling, the scum was skimmed off, and finally the dust was dried in the sun. 34 TIME Sandglasses were ill adapted for daylong timekeeping. Either they had to be made too large for convenience — like the sandglass Charlemagne or- dered which was so large that it had to be turned only once in twelve hours — or, if they were small, they had to be turned frequently at the precise moment when the last grain had dropped. Some had a little dial attached with a pointer that could be advanced with each turn of the glass. But the sandglass did serve better than a water clock for measuring the shortest intervals when no other device was yet known. Columbus on his ships noted the passing time by a half-hour sandglass that was turned as it emptied to keep track of the seven “canonical” hours. By the sixteenth century the sandglass was already being used to measure short intervals in the kitchen. Or to help a preacher (and his congregation!) regulate the length of his sermon. An English law of 1483 was said to require clocks to be placed over pulpits, since congregations could not otherwise see the “sermon-glass.” The House of Commons kept a two-minute glass to time the ringing of bells to announce divisions for voting. Stonemasons and other craftsmen used a glass to count their hours of work. Teachers brought their hourglass along to measure the duration of their lecture or the length of the students’ prescribed study period. An Oxford don in Elizabethan times once threat- ened his idle pupils “that if they did not doe their exercise better he would bring an Hower-glasse two howers long.” The unique use of the sandglass, after the sixteenth century, was measur- ing a ship’s speed. Knots were tied at seven-fathom intervals on a line tied to a log chip that would float astern. A sailor dropped the log chip off the end of the speeding ship and counted off the number of knots paid out while a small sandglass measured a half-minute. If five knots passed in the inter- val, the ship was making five nautical miles an hour. Throughout the nineteenth century, sailing vessels still “heaved the log” every hour to keep track of the speed. In the long run the sandglass was not much use in measuring the hours of the night, for it was inconvenient to keep the glass turning. From time to time, as a way of solving this problem, people tried to combine a time- piece with a lighting device. For centuries, ingenuity was lavished on the effort to use the fire that illuminated the night also to measure the passing hours of darkness. The inventions, however original, were not practical. They were costly, sometimes dangerous, and never succeeded in aligning night hours with day hours. So long as “hours” remained elastic, a fire clock, like a sandglass, would measure off a short, fixed unit but could not be widely used for daylong timekeeping. A famous candle clock was that reputedly designed to help the pious Alfred the Great (849-899), king of the West Saxons, keep the vow he made From Sun Time to Clock Time 35 when he was a fugitive from his native country. He swore that if his kingdom was restored, he would devote a full third of each day to the service of God. According to legend, when he was back in England he ordered a candle clock. From seventy-two pennyweight of wax, six twelve- inch candles were made, all uniform in thickness, each marked in one-inch divisions. The candles were lit in rotation, and the six candles were said to last a full twenty-four hours. They were protected by transparent horn panels set into wooden frames to prevent the light from being extinguished by a draft. If King Alfred devoted the time of two full candle lengths to his religious duties, he could be assured that he was fulfilling his vow. Other sovereigns who could afford to use candles or lamp oil for the purpose of timekeeping — King Alfonso X of Castile (c. 1276), King Charles V of France (the Wise, 1337-1380), King Philip I of Spain (1478-1506) — experimented with clock lamps. The search for a practical portable clock lamp led a Milanese physician, Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), to invent a fountain-feeding device that used the principle of the vacuum to draw in a constant flow of oil. Cardano’s lamp provided a convenient and popular lighting device until the late eighteenth century. Even after mechanical clocks came into general use, restless inventors continued to try all sorts of expedients — some using the flame of an oil lamp to propel the mechanism of a clock, others using the consumption of oil indicated on a calibrated transparent container, still others using the chang- ing shadow of a diminishing candle cast on a scale that marked the changing night hours — to conquer both night and time with the same device. In China, Japan, and Korea, the use of fire to measure time took quite another turn. The custom of burning incense gave them a clue to a range of ingenious and beautiful devices. These produced a pleasing aroma while a continuous trail of powdered incense was burned in an elaborate seal. The time was indicated by the place within the seal that was reached by the fire. One of the most intricate of these— the “hundred-gradations incense seal” — was invented in China in 1073, when a drought had dried up the wells and so made it impossible to use the customary water clocks. The Chinese aromatic clock, in turn, inspired later generations to find newly vivid and elaborate ways to use a fire clock to measure time into temporary hours, which varied with the seasons. The charming intricacy of the Chinese designs was a delightful by-product of the effort to make a virtue of the variant hour. There seems no end to the desperate ingenuity spent on ways to count the passing hours of the night before inexpensive artificial illumination became universal. After the invention of the mechanical clock the striking hour was the obvious way of conquering darkness. A clever French inventor 36 TIME in the late seventeenth century, M. de Villayer, tried using the sense of taste. He designed a clock so arranged that when he reached for the hour hand at night, it guided him to a small container with a spice inserted in place of numbers, a different spice for each hour of the night. Even when he could not see the clock, he could always taste the time. The Rise of the Equal Hour While man allowed his time to be parsed by the changing cycles of daylight he remained a slave of the sun. To become the master of his time, to assimilate night into the day, to slice his life into neat, usable portions, he had to find a way to mark off precise small portions — not only equal hours, but even minutes and seconds and parts of seconds. He would have to make a machine. It is surprising that machines to measure time were so long in coming. Not until the fourteenth century did Europeans devise mechanical timepieces. Until then, as we have seen, the measuring of time was left to the shadow clock, the water clock, the sandglass, and the miscellaneous candle clocks and scent clocks. While there was remarkable progress five thousand years ago in measuring the year, and useful week clusters of days were long in use, the subdivided day was another matter. Only in modern times did we begin to live by the hour, much less by the minute. The first steps toward the mechanical measurement of time, the beginnings of the modem clock in Europe, came not from farmers or shepherds, nor from merchants or craftsmen, but from religious persons anxious to per- form promptly and regularly their duties to God. Monks needed to know the times for their appointed prayers. In Europe the first mechanical clocks were designed not to show the time but to sound it. The first true clocks were alarms. The first Western clockworks, which set us On the way to clockmaking, were weight-driven machines which struck a bell after a measured interval. Two kinds of clocks were made for this purpose. Proba- bly the earlier were small monastic alarms, or chamber clocks — called horologia excitatoria, or awakening clocks — for the cell of the custos horolo- gii, or guardian of the clock. These rang a small bell to alert a monk to From Sun Time to Clock Time 37 summon the others to prayer. He would then go up to strike the large bell, usually set high in a tower, so that all could hear. About the same time much larger turret clocks began to be made and placed in the towers, where they would ring the large bell automatically. These monastic clocks announced the canonical hours, the times of day prescribed by the Church’s canons, or rules, for devotion. The number of these hours varied, of course, with the changing canons of the Church, with the varied customs from place to place, and with the rules of particular orders. In the sixth century, after Saint Benedict, the canonical hours were standardized at seven. Distinct prayers were specified to be said at the first light or dawn (Matins or Lauds), with the sunrise (Hora Prima), at mid- morning (Hora Tertia), at noon (Hora Sexta or Meridies), at midafternoon (Hora Nona), at sunset (Vespers, or Hora Vesperalis), and at nightfall (Compline, or Completorium). The number of strokes of the bell varied from four at sunrise to one at noon and back to four again at nightfall. The precise hour, by our modem calculation, for each of these prayers depended in any given place on the latitude and the season. Despite the complexity of the problem, monastic clocks were adjusted to vary the time between bells according to the season. Efforts to adapt earlier timekeeping devices to the making of sounds had never been quite successful. A clever Parisian fitted a lens into his sundial to act as a burning glass which precisely at noon focused on the touchhole of a small cannon, and so automatically saluted the sun at its apex. This elegant cannon clock, installed by the Duke of Orleans in the garden of the Palais Royal in 1786, is said to have fired the shot that started the French Revolution. Centuries before, complicated water clocks had been designed to mark passing time by tossing pebbles or blowing whistles. Some such devices were probably tried in monasteries. But a new kind of timepiece, a mechanical timepiece that was a true clock, would be much better adapted to the new mechanical needs. The very word “clock” bears the mark of its monastic origins. The Middle English clok came from the Middle Dutch word for bell and is a cognate of the German Glocke, which means bell. Strictly speaking, in the beginning a timepiece was not considered to be a clock unless it rang a bell. It was only later that it came to mean any device that measured passing time. These first mechanical clocks came into an age when sunlight circum- scribed the times of life and movement, when artificial lights had not yet begun to confuse night with day. Medieval striking clocks remained silent during the dark hours. After the four strokes which announced Compline, the prayers at nightfall, the next bell was not sounded until the time for Matins, the prayers at sunrise the next morning. But in the long run the unintended consequence of the making of mechanical clocks, and a hidden 38 TIME imperative of the machine itself, was to incorporate both hours of darkness and hours of sunlight into a single equal-houred twenty-four-hour day. The monastic clock, specially designed for sounding the time, pointed the way to a new way of thinking about time. The sundial, water clock, and hourglass were all designed primarily to show the passing time, by the visible gradual flow of a shadow across a dial, of water from a bowl, of sand through a glass. But the mechanical clock, in its monastic origins, was made for a decisive mechanical act, a stroke of a hammer on a bell. The needs of mechanical timekeeping, the logic of the machine itself, imposed a new feeling. Instead of being synonymous with repeated cycles of the sun, which varied as the cycles of the seasons com- manded, or with the shorter cycles of other flowing media, time now was to be measured by the staccato of a machine. Making a machine to sound the canonical hours required, and achieved, mechanical novelties which would be the foundation of clockmaking for centuries to come. The force that moved the arm that struck the bell was provided by falling weights. What made the machine truly novel was the device that prevented the free fall of the weights and interrupted their drop into regular intervals. The sundial had shown the uninterrupted movement of the sun’s shadow, and the sandglass operated by the free-falling of water or sand. What gave this new machine a longer duration and measured off the units was a simple enough device, which has remained almost uncelebrated in history. It was called an escapement, since it was a way of regulating the “escape” of the motive power into the clock, and it held revolutionary import for human experience. With the simplicity of the greatest inventions, the “escapement” was nothing more than an arrangement that would regularly interrupt the force of a falling weight. The interruptor was so designed that it would alternately check and then release the force of the weight on the moving machinery of the clock. This was the basic invention that made all modern clocks possi- ble. Now a weight falling only a short distance could keep a clock going for hours as the regular downward pull of the falling weights was translated into the interrupted, staccato movement of the clock’s machinery. The earliest simple form was the “verge” escapement. An unknown mechanical genius first imagined a way of connecting the falling weight by intersecting cogged wheels to a vertical axle which carried a horizontal bar, or verge, with weights attached. These weights regulated the movement. When they were moved outward, the clock beat slower; when moved in- ward, the clock went faster. The back-and-forth movement of the bar (moved by the large falling weights) would alternately engage and disengage the cogs on the clock’s machinery. These interrupted movements eventually measured off the minutes and, later, the seconds. When, in due course, From Sun Time to Clock Time 39 clocks became common, people would think of time no longer as a flowing stream but as the accumulation of discrete measured moments. The sover- eign time that governed daily lives would no longer be the sunlight’s smooth-flowing elastic cycles. Mechanized time would no longer flow. The tick-tock of the clock’s escapement would become the voice of time. Such a machine plainly had nothing to do with the sun or the movements of the planets. Its own laws provided an endless series of uniform units. The “accuracy” of a clock — which meant the uniformity of its measured units — would depend on the precision and regularity of the escapement. The canonical hours, which had measured out the daylight into the appro- priate elastic units between divine services, were registered on clocks until about the fourteenth century. It was around 1330 that the hour became our modern hour, one of twenty-four equal parts of a day. This new “day” included the night. It was measured by the time between one noon and the next, or, more precisely, what modern astronomers call “mean solar time.” For the first time in history, an “hour” took on a precise, year-round, everywhere meaning. There are few greater revolutions in human experience than this move- ment from the seasonal or “temporary” hour to the equal hour. Here was man’s declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings. Only later would it be revealed that he had accomplished this mastery by putting himself under the dominion of a machine with imperious demands all its own. The first clocks did not have dials or hands at all. They did not need them, since their use was simply to sound the hour. An illiterate populace that might have trouble reading a dial would not mistake the sound of bells. With the coming of the “equal” hour, replacing the “temporary” or “canonical” hour, the sounding of hours was ideally adapted for measure- ment by a simple machine. Sun time was translated into clock time. By the fourteenth century in Europe large turret clocks in the belfries of churches and town halls were sounding the equal hours, heralding a new time-consciousness. Church towers, built to salute God and to mark man’s heavenward aspirations, now became clock towers. The torre became the campanile. As early as 1335, the campanile of the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin in Milan was admired by the chronicler Galvano della Fiamma for its wonderful clock with many bells. “A very large hammer . . . strikes one bell twenty-four times according to the number of the twenty-four hours of the day and night; so that at the first hour of the night it gives one sound, at the second, two strokes, at the third, three, and at the fourth, four; and thus it distinguishes hour from hour, which is in the highest degree neces- sary for all conditions of men.” Such equal-hour clocks became common 40 TIME in the towns of Europe. Now serving the whole community, they were a new kind of public utility, offering a service each citizen could not afford to provide himself. People unwittingly recognized the new era when, noting the time of day or night, they said it was nine “o’clock” — a time “of the clock.” When Shakespeare’s characters mentioned the time, “of the clock,” they recalled the hour they had heard last struck. Imogen, Cymbeline’s daughter, ex- plains that a faithful lover is accustomed “to weepe ’twixt clock and clock” for her beloved. While the populace now began to know the “hour,” several centuries passed before they could talk of “minutes.” During the whole fourteenth century, dials were seldom found on clocks, for the clocks’ function was still to sound the hours. They are not found on the Italian campaniles, though there may have been one on St. Paul’s Cathedral (1344) in London. Early dials were not like ours. Some showed hours only from I to VI with hands that moved around the dial four times in twenty-four hours. Others, like the famous work of Giovanni de’ Dondi (1318-1389), enumerated the full twenty-four hours. It was not too difficult to improve clocks that already struck the hour so that they could strike the quarter-hour. A dial, marked 1 to 4, was some- times added to indicate the quarters. Later these were replaced by the figures 15, 30, 45, and 60 to indicate minutes. There was still no minute hand. By 1500 the clock at Wells Cathedral in England was striking the quarter- hours, but had no way to mark the minutes. To measure minutes you still had to use a sandglass. A separate concentric minute hand, in addition to the hour hand, did not come into use until the pendulum was successfully applied to clocks. The pendulum also made it possible to indicate seconds. By 1670 it was not unusual for clocks to have a second hand whose move- ments were controlled by a 39-inch pendulum with a period of just one second. More than any earlier invention the mechanical clock began to incorpo- rate the dark hours of night into the day. In order to show the right time at daybreak this time machine had to be kept going continuously all night. When does a “day” begin? Answers to this question have been almost as numerous as those to the question of how many days should be in a week. “The evening and the morning were the first day,” we read in the first chapter of Genesis. The very first “day” then was really a night. Perhaps this was another way of describing the mystery of Creation, leaving God to perform his miraculous handiwork in the dark. The Babylonians and the early Hindus calculated their day from sunrise. The Athenians, like the Jews, began their “day” at sunset, and carried on the practice through the nineteenth century. Orthodox Muslims, literally following Holy Script, From Sun Time to Clock Time 4i continue to begin their day at sunset, when they still set their clocks at twelve. As we have seen, for most of history, mankind did not think of a day as a unit of twenty-four hours. Only with the invention and diffusion of the mechanical clock did this notion become common. The early Saxons di- vided their day into “tides” — “momingtide,” “noontide,” and “evening- tide” — and some of the earliest English sundials are so marked. Other widespread ways of dividing the day were much simpler than the system of “temporary” hours, which subdivided daylight and darkness. The seven canonical hours marked the passing time for Columbus and his crew. Even after the arrival of the mechanical clock the sun left its mark on the measuring of the hours. The “double-twelve” system, by which Ameri- cans count the hours, is such a relic. When the daylight hours were mea- sured off and subdivided, in contrast to the hours of night, the hours of each of the two parts were numbered separately. And so it remained, even after a machine required that time be measured continuously. The first 24-hour clocks — while substituting equal mechanical hours for the elastic canonical or “temporary” hours — still remained curiously tied to the sun. They nor- mally used sunset as the end of the twenty-fourth hour. To ask how we came to our day, hour, minute, and second takes us deep into the archaeology of everyday life. Our English word “day” (no relation to the Latin dies) comes from an old Saxon word “to burn,” which also meant the hot season, or the warm time. Our “hour” comes from Latin and Greek words meaning season, or time of day. It meant one-twelfth part of the sunlight or the darkness — the “temporary,” or seasonal, hour — varying with season and latitude, long before it acquired its modern meaning of one twenty-fourth part of the equinoctial day. Why the twenty-four? Historians do not help us much. The Egyptians did divide their day into twenty-four “hours” — “temporary,” of course. Appar- ently they chose this number because they used the sexagesimal system of numbers, based on multiples of six, which had been developed by the Babylonians. This pushes the mystery back into earlier centuries, for we have no clear explanation of why the Babylonians built their arithmetic as they did. But their use of the number sixty seems to have had nothing to do with astronomy or the movement of heavenly bodies. We have seen how the Egyptians fixed 360 days as the regular days of their year — 12 months of 30 days each, supplemented by 5 additional days at the end of each year. They also marked off 360 degrees in a circle, perhaps by analogy to the yearly circuit of the sun. Sixty, being one-sixth of the 360 and so a natural subdivision in their sexagesimal system, became a convenient subdivision of the circle, and also of each “degree” or each hour. Perhaps the Chaldean Babylonians, noticing five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and 42 TIME Saturn — multiplied 12 (the number of the months, and a multiple of 6) by the planetary 5, and so arrived at the significant 60. An everyday relic of the primitive identification of the circuit of the sun with the full circle is our sign for a “degree.” The tiny circle we now use to designate a degree is probably a hieroglyph for the sun. If the degree sign ° was a picture of the sun, then 360° — a full circle — would also properly mean a cycle of 360 days, or a full year. The degree as a way of dividing the circle was first applied by ancient Babylonian and Egyptian astronomers to the circle of the zodiac to designate the stage or distance traveled by the sun each day, just as a sign described for them the astronomical space passed through in a month. Our “minute,” from the medieval Latin pars minuta prima (first min- ute or small part), originally described the one-sixtieth of a unit in the Babylonian system of sexagesimal fractions. And “second,” from partes minutae secundae, was a further subdivision on the base of sixty. Since the Babylonian arithmetic was based on that unit, it was their version of a decimal and was easier to handle in their scientific calculations than other “vulgar fractions” (minutae) would have been. Ptolemy used this sixty-unit system for subdividing the circle, and he also used it to divide the day. Not until much later, perhaps in the thirteenth century with the arrival of the mechanical clock, did the minute become a division of the hour. The language, again, is a clue to the needs and capacities of time- keeping machinery. The “second” was at first an abbreviation for “second minute,” and originally described the unit resulting from the second oper- ation of sexagesimal subdivision. Long used for subdivisions of a circle, seconds were not applied to timekeeping until clockmaking was refined in the late sixteenth century. The clock did not entirely liberate itself from the sun, from the dictates of light and darkness. In Western Europe the hours of the clock continued to be numbered from noon, when the sun was at the meridian, or from midnight midway between two noons. In most of Europe and in America a new day still begins at midnight by the clock. The archaeology of our everyday life leads us all over the world. The 365 days of our year acknowledge our debt to ancient Egyptian priests, while the names of months — January, February, March — and of the days of our seven-day week — Saturday, Sunday, Monday — remain our tie to the early Hebrews and to Greek and Roman astrologers. When we mark each hour of our 24-hour day, and designate the minutes after the hour, we are living, as a historian of ancient science reminds us, by “the results of a Hellenistic modification of an Egyptian practice combined with Babylonian numerical procedures.” From Sun Time to Clock Time 43 The broadcasting medium of the medieval town was bells. Since the human voice could not reach all who needed to hear a civic announcement, bells told the hours, summoned help to extinguish a fire, warned of an approach- ing enemy, called men to arms, brought them to work, sent them to bed, knelled public mourning at the death of a king, sounded public rejoicing at the birth of a prince or a coronation, celebrated the election of a pope or a victory in war. “They may ring their bells now,” Sir Robert Walpole observed in 1739 on hearing bells rung in London to announce the declara- tion of war against Spain, “before long they will be wringing their hands.” Americans treasure a relic of that age of bells in the Liberty Bell, which announced Independence in Philadelphia. There was supposed to be power and therapy in the sound of the bells that were rung to ward off an epidemic or to prevent a storm. Citizens of Lyons, France, in 1481 petitioned their town council that they “sorely felt the need for a great clock whose strokes could be heard by all citizens in all parts of the town. If such a clock were to be made, more merchants would come to the fairs, the citizens would be very consoled, cheerful and happy and would live a more orderly life, and the town would gain in decoration.” Community pride was a pride of bells. Churches, monasteries, and whole towns were judged by the reach and resonance of the peals from their towers. An inscription on an old bell boasted, “I mourn death, I disperse the lightening, I announce the Sabbath, I rouse the lazy, I scatter the winds, I appease the bloodthirsty” (Funera plango, fulmina frango. Sabbath pango, Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos). Paul Revere, the messenger of the American Revolution, made a reputation, and a fortune, as a caster of bells for proud New England towns. The art of bell-casting and experiments with bell-ringing devices advanced the art of the clockmaker and encour- aged the elaboration of clocks. Widespread illiteracy helps explain why dials were slow to appear on the exterior of public clocks. Not everybody could read even the simple num- bers on a clockface. The very same factors that delayed the production of calibrated dials also encouraged experiment, ingenuity, and playfulness with clockwork performances. The great public clocks of the Middle Ages did not much advance the precision of clockworks, which, before the pendu- lum, lost or gained as much as an hour a day. It was technically difficult to improve the escapement hidden inside the machinery, and that regulated the accuracy of the movement. But it was easy to add wheels to wheels to improve the automated public display. Nowadays the calendrical or astronomical indicators on antique clocks 44 TIME seem superfluous ornaments on a machine that should only show us hours, minutes, and seconds. For at least two centuries after the great mechanical clocks began to be built in Europe, it was quite otherwise. The magnificent clock made about 1350 for the Cathedral of Strasbourg served the public as both a calendar and an aid to astrology. Also an instructive and entertaining toy, it performed a variety show as it tolled the hours. In addition to a moving calendar and an astrolabe with pointers marking the movement of sun, moon, and planets, in its upper compartment the Three Magi bowed in procession before a statue of the Virgin Mary while a tune played on the carillon. At the end of the procession of the Magi, an enormous cock made of wrought iron with a copper comb and set on a gilded base opened its beak and stuck out its tongue, crowing as it flapped its wings. When rebuilt in 1574, the Strasbourg clock included a calendar showing movable feasts, a Copernican planetarium with revolutions of the planets, phases of the moon, eclipses, apparent and sidereal times, precession of the equinoxes, and equations for translating sun and moon indicators into local time. A special dial showed the saint’s days. Each of the four quarters of each hour was struck by a figure showing one of the Four Ages of Man: Infancy, Adolescence, Manhood, and Old Age. Every day at noon the twelve Apos- tles passed before Christ to receive His blessing. The days of the week were indicated by chariots among clouds, each carrying the appropriate pagan god. The burghers of Strasbourg boasted that they had produced one of the Seven Wonders of Germany. In the late nineteenth century, German immi- grant clockmakers in the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside produced Americanized versions of these “apostolic clocks” which added to the traditional procession of Magi and Apostles a patriotic parade of presidents of the United States. The most popular dramas of the Middle Ages did not occur on a theater stage, nor even at the fairs or in the courtyards of churches, but were broadcast from clock towers. When the great turret clocks were in full display, they performed every hour on the hour, and every day, including Sundays and holidays. The Wells Cathedral clock, first built in 1392 and improved in the following centuries, offered a widely appealing show. Dials indicated the hour, the age and phases of the moon. Opposite the moon was a figure of Phoebus, for the sun, weighted to remain upright. Another dial showed a minute hand concentric with an hour hand that carried an image of the sun which made a full circle each twenty-four hours. In a niche above, two pairs of armored knights circled around in combat in opposite direc- tions. As the bell struck the hour one of them was unhorsed and then, when out of view, regained his saddle. A conventional uniformed figure, “Jack Blandifet,” struck each hour with a hammer but sounded the quarter-hours on two smaller bells with his heels. From Sun Time to Clock Time 45 Clockmakers lost no opportunity for drama. In place of a clapper hidden in the bell, they preferred vivid automata to strike the hours and the quarters. The striking figure became personified as “Jack,” derived from Jacquemart, a shortened form of Jacques combined with marteau (ham- mer). This word later became generalized into “jack,” meaning a tool that saved labor. A pair of such Jacks, two robust men of bronze, dating from 1499, still perform for us on the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Here was something for everyone. As the chronicler at Parma observed in 1431, to the whole populace (“al popolo”) the town clock told only the simple hours, while to the few who could understand (“agli intelligenti”) it showed the phases of the moon and all sorts of astronomical subtleties. The clock dial, a convenience for the literate, and the first mechanical device for registering time visibly rather than aurally, is said to have been invented by Jacopo de’ Dondi of Chioggia, Italy, in 1344. For this he was honored with the title of the Horologist (Del Orologio), which became his family name. “Gracious Reader,” his epitaph boasted, “advised from afar from the top of a high tower how you tell the time and the hours, though their number changes, recognize my invention. . . .” His son, Giovanni de’ Dondi, completed in 1364 one of the most complicated clockworks ever built, combining a planetarium and a timepiece. Although the clock itself has disappeared, Dondi left detailed descriptions and complete drawings from which this famous “astrarium” has been reconstructed, and can now be viewed in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. An elegant heptagonal machine of brass activated by falling weights, it stands about five feet high. In many respects it was centuries ahead of its time, for it took account of such subtleties as the slightly elliptical orbit of the moon. On its numerous dials, it recorded the mean hour and minute, the times of the setting and rising of the sun, conversion of mean time to sidereal time, the “temporary” hours, the day of the month and month of the year, the fixed feasts of the Church, the length of daylight for each day, the dominical letter of the year, the solar and lunar cycles, the annual movement of the sun and moon in the ecliptic, and the annual movements of the five planets. In addition, Dondi provided the means to predict eclipses, indicated the mov- able feasts of the Church, and devised a perpetual calendar for Easter. People from everywhere came to Padua to see the clock and meet the genius who had spent sixteen years making it. In that age the boundary was much less sharp than it would become later between the data of the heavens and the needs of everyday life. Night was more threatening, and darker, and the modern mechanical antidotes to darkness, heat, and cold had not yet been invented. For people on the seacoast or on a river the tide times were crucial. Over everybody and everything, the influence of the planets — the astral powers — governed. The 46 TIME Strasbourg clock of 1352 used the data of the heavens to provide the commu- nity also with medical advice. A conventional human figure was surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. Lines were drawn from each sign to the parts of the body over which it ruled and which should be treated only when that sign was dominant. The clock then offered information about the changing dominance of the signs, helping citizens and doctors to choose the best times for medical treatment. The astrological indications on the public clock in Mantua, Italy, impressed a visitor in 1473 with its display of “the proper time for phlebotomy, for surgery, for making dresses, for tilling the soil, for undertaking journeys, and for other things very useful in this world.” Making Time Portable In 1583 Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), a youth of nineteen attending prayers in the baptistery of the Cathedral of Pisa, was, according to tradition, distracted by the swinging of the altar lamp. No matter how wide the swing of the lamp, it seemed that the time it took the lamp to move from one end to the other was the same. Of course Galileo had no watch, but he checked the intervals of the swing by his own pulse. This curious everyday puzzle, he said, enticed him away from the study of medicine, to which his father had committed him, to the study of mathematics and physics. In the baptis- tery he had discovered what physicists would call the isochronism, or equal time of the pendulum — that the time of a pendulum’s swing varies not with the width of the swing but with the length of the pendulum. This simple discovery symbolized the new age. Astronomy and physics at the University of Pisa, where Galileo was enrolled, had consisted of lectures on the texts of Aristotle. But Galileo’s own way of learning, from observing and measuring what he saw, expressed the science of the future. His discovery, although never fully exploited by Galileo himself, opened a new era in timekeeping. Within three decades after Galileo’s death the average error of the best timepieces was reduced from fifteen minutes to only ten seconds per day. A clock that kept perfect step with countless other clocks elsewhere made time a measure transcending space. Citizens of Pisa could know what time From Sun Time to Clock Time 47 it was in Florence or in Rome at that very moment. Once such clocks were synchronized they would stay synchronized. No longer a mere local conve- nience for measuring the craftsman’s hours or fixing the time for worship or the town council’s meeting, henceforth the clock was a universal yard- stick. Just as the equal hour standardized the units of day and night, summer and winter, in any particular town, so now the precision clock standardized the units of time all over the planet. Certain peculiarities of our planet made this magic possible. Because the earth turns on its axis, every place on earth experiences a 24-hour day with each full 360-degree turn. The meridians of longitude mark off these de- grees. As the earth turns, it brings noon successively to different places. When it is noon in Istanbul, it is still only 10 a.m. westward at London. In one hour the earth turns 15 degrees. Therefore we can say that London is 30 degrees longitude, or two hours, west of Istanbul, which makes those degrees of longitude measures of both space and time. If you have an accurate clock set to the time at London and carry it to Istanbul, by comparing the time on the clock you have carried with the local time in Istanbul, you will also know precisely how far you have traveled eastward, or how far east Istanbul is from London. If you are a long-distance traveler and want to know precisely where you are, you are apt to find it much harder on sea than on land. On land you can get your bearings by landmarks — mountains and rivers, buildings, roads and towns. But seamarks are few, and mostly discernible only to the skilled observer who has been there before. The emptiness and homogeneity of the sea, the vast sameness of the oceans on the surface naturally drove sailors to seek their bearings in the heavens, in the sun and moon and stars and constellations. They sought skymarks to serve for seamarks. It is no wonder that astronomy became the handmaiden of the sailor, that the Age of Columbus ushered in the Age of Copernicus. With the aid of the newly invented telescope fixed on the heavens, with Galileo’s new vision of the moon, Jupiter, and Venus, men discovered the seas, charted the oceans, and defined new continents. When people set out to explore the oceans, they found it more than ever necessary to know the heavens. They had to locate themselves both on latitude north or south of the equator and on longitude east or west of some agreed point. But it was always much more difficult to determine longitude (east-west relations) than latitude (north-south relations) — which helps us understand why the New World lay so long undiscovered, why Columbus had the courage to go on his voyage of discovery, and why “East” and “West” were so long separated. To locate his east-west position on the planet the navigator had to measure the difference between the time, for example, when the sun was at noon in different places. 48 TIME Defining latitude is much simpler, for the altitude of the sun above the horizon is the crucial fact. At the equator in all seasons the sun at noon is directly above or at altitude 90 degrees, while at the North Pole the sun is totally invisible in winter and always visible in summer. In between, the altitude of the sun above the horizon at noon can be noted, then compared with astronomical tables in national almanacs that tell us how far we are north or south of the equator. For this purpose the only device needed is a simple sighting instrument to measure in degrees the altitude of the sun above the horizon. The Greeks’ way of determining latitude — by merely noting the elevation of the circumpolar stars — actually required no instru- ment at all. The astronomical tables in medieval nautical manuals were already so accurate that a person who had properly determined the declina- tion of the sun could fix his latitude to within half a degree or less. For the necessary latitude observations, medieval sailors used the simple cross-staff, or Jacob’s Staff. Two rods hinged at one end could measure the angle of declination when the observer leveled the bottom rod on the horizon and the upper on the sun or star. The principle of the cross-staff, known to the ancient Greeks as dioptra and to the Arabs as kamal, was applied in western Europe at least as early as 1342. An Englishman, John Davis, devised in 1595 the handier backstaff, or English quadrant, which allowed the observer to stand with the sun behind him and avoid being dazzled. Seafarers, reaching out into the vast oceans, began to discover how little they knew of the planet. They had to solve the problem of longitude. From the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands Galileo heard about the urgent need of that seagoing people to solve this problem. As early as 1610 he suggested to the States General that the longitude could be determined at sea by observation of the four satellites of Jupiter that he had discovered earlier that year. But this required observations over an extended period through a long telescope resting on the shifting deck of a ship at sea, which obviously made it impractical. He then devised a helmet with a telescope attached which the observer could wear while seated in a chair set in gimbals, like those used to keep the ship’s compass horizontal. Al- though this method would eventually prove practical for surveying on land, it never worked at sea. Finally he recommended the making of an accurate seagoing timepiece. After he had found the pendulum to be a simple natural timekeeper, he reflected that if it could time the human pulse, perhaps it could also provide an accurate marine clock. Not until the last ten years of his life in enforced retirement did Galileo himself explore this possibility, and then his blindness prevented him from putting together the clock he had designed. The Dutch, who now had outposts far eastward on Asian shores, more From Sun Time to Clock Time 49 than ever felt the need for better defining longitude, the need for a seafaring clock. The brilliant young Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), set out to solve the problem. From the age of twenty-seven when he devised his first pendu- lum clock, he tried again and again. But he never quite succeeded, because a pendulum would not keep accurate time on a surging, rocking ship. Before there was an accurate seafaring clock, the sailor seeking his bear- ings had to be a trained mathematician. The accepted way to find longitude at sea was by precise observations of the moon, which required refined instruments and subtle calculations. An error as small as 5' in observing the moon meant an error of 2 Vi degrees of longitude, which on the ocean could be as much as 150 miles — enough to wreck a ship on treacherous shoals. Fatal miscalculation might come from a crude instrument, from an error in the nautical tables, or from the rocking motion of the ship. This made the problem of longitude an educational as well as a technolog- ical problem. The great seafaring nations optimistically organized mathe- matics courses for common sailors. When Charles II set up a mathematics course for forty pupils at Christ’s Hospital, the famous “Bluecoat” charity school in London, teachers found it hard to satisfy both the sailors and the mathematicians. The governors of the school, noting that Drake, Hawkins, and other great sailors had done well enough without mathematics, asked whether future sailors really needed it. On the side of mathematics, Sir Isaac Newton argued that the old rule of thumb was no longer good enough. “The Mathematicall children, being the flower of the Hospitall, are capable of much better learning, and when well instructed and bound out to skilful Masters may in time furnish the Nation with a more skilful sort of Sailors, builders of Ships, Architects, Engineers, and Mathematicall Artists of all sorts, both by Sea and Land, than France can at present boast of.” Samuel Pepys, then Secretary to the Admiralty, had already set up a naval lieuten- ant’s examination which included navigation and, following Newton’s ad- vice, naval schoolmasters were actually put on board ships to instruct the crew in mathematics. Still, the calculations to find longitude from the moon were discouragingly complicated. Some method, preferably a machine, had to be found to give semiliterate crews their bearings. In 1604 King Philip III of Spain offered a prize of 10,000 ducats for a solution, and later Louis XIV of France offered 100,000 florins. And the Dutch States General announced the prize to which Galileo had responded. In England the urgent impulse to solve the problem of longitude came not from the needs of sailors on distant oceans but from an avoidable catastrophe just off Land’s End on the southwest coast. In 1707 an English fleet foundered on the rocks of the Scilly Islands, a cluster of a hundred and 50 TIME forty islets not forty miles offshore. Down with the crew went their admiral, Sir Clowdisley Shovell, the very model of a heroic sea captain. In the glorious heyday of the British navy, the loss of so many seamen so close to home, and not from enemy action, was humiliating. The public conscience was stricken. Two eminent mathematicians declared publicly that the wreck could have been prevented if only the seamen had not been ignorant of their longitude. What was needed, then, was some way to find longitude that was “easy to be understood and practis’d by ordinary seamen, without the necessity of any puzzling calculations in astronomy.” Stirred by this event, Parliament in 1714 passed an act “For providing a Publick Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea.” A Board of Longitude, including seamen and scholars, would grant sums up to £2,000 to support promising experiments and then could award a prize of £20,000 for solving the problem. This was, of course, an invitation to eccentrics. As late as 1736 in the madhouse that Hogarth shows us in his Rake's Progress, we see an inmate earnestly trying to solve the puzzle of longitude. One proposal was to locate sunken ships in known positions all over the world and then send up signals from them. Another was to publish a worldwide table of the tides, then use a portable barometer so that a seaman could locate his position by the expected rise and fall at that particular place. Still another suggested using lighthouses to flash the needed time signals on to clouds. Many claimed to have techniques that they dared not reveal publicly for fear someone else would get the reward. To qualify for the prize the method had to prove its success on a voyage to the West Indies and back with a round-trip error of less than 30' or 2 minutes of time. It was obvious that the prize could not be won by a weight-driven pendulum-escapement clock. To keep precisely measured pace on a pitch- ing, dipping, rolling ship there must be some other way. The clock must be freed of weights and pendulums. It had occurred to someone that if a thin piece of metal was coiled into a spring, it could propel the machine as it unwound. The Italian architect Brunelleschi seems to have made a spring-driven clock about 1410. Within a century a German locksmith was making small clocks driven by springs. But the spring had its own problems. While a descending weight exerted the same force whether at the beginning or at the end of its descent, an uncoiling spring exerted a decreasing force as it unwound. An ingenious solution to this problem was the “fusee,” a conical spool so designed that as the spring unwound and so uncoiled the connecting cord, the shape of the spool itself exerted an increasing force on the machine. This device was borrowed from the military engineers who had invented a conical axle to From Sun Time to Clock Time 5i ease the job of spanning the cord on a heavy crossbow. And before clock- makers began to call it a fusee, military men, drawing on their own wide experience, had already christened it “the virgin” because, they said, it offered the least resistance when the bow was slack and the most when it was taut. At first the shapes of these newly portable clocks were as whimsical as the dramatic performances of the early public clocks. They took the forms of skulls, eggs, prayer books, crucifixes, dogs, lions, or pigeons. And some were designed to provide astronomical calendars, showing the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars. But these early spring-driven clocks were no more accurate than the weight-driven models they replaced. At first the dial was put horizontally on top, and there was only an hour hand. Until the early seventeenth century the works were not enclosed or protected from dust and moisture. After the works were set upright, with the dial facing out, they began to be enclosed in cases made of brass. Still, as long as they relied on the primitive verge escapement, their inaccuracy was proverbial. While Cardi- nal Richelieu was showing his collection of clocks, a careless visitor dropped two of them at once on the floor. The imperturbable Cardinal observed, “That’s the first time they’ve both gone together!” A more accurate portable clock would require a more accurate regulator. Neither the old verge escapement nor Galileo’s pendulum escapement would serve the new purpose. An ingenious anchorsmith turned clock- maker, William Clement, devised an “anchor” escapement adapted from the flukes of an inverted anchor. He used the pendulum to move these flukes back and forth, releasing one tooth at a time the teeth of an escape-wheel. He made a clock of this design for King’s College, Cambridge, in 1671. The verge escapement had required a swing of 40 degrees, but the anchor limited the swing of the pendulum to a small arc of 3 or 4 degrees. In this small arc the pendulum’s free swing exactly coincided with the truly isochronous cycloidal arc. Still, Clement’s anchor escapement could not solve the sea- farer’s problem. A seafaring clock would have to be independent of gravity not only for its motive force but also for its regulator. If the force of a spring could be used to drive the clock, could not the resilience of a spring also be used in place of a pendulum to regulate the works? This was Robert Hooke’s simple idea. Before Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was ten, he saw a clock taken apart and then built one for himself out of wood. At Christ Church, Oxford, where he was older than other students, he joined a scientific discussion group which included the pioneer economist William Petty, the architect Christo- 52 TIME pher Wren, and the physicist Robert Boyle. Hooke made the machines to test the theories that the others were developing. When the Royal Society was founded in 1662, they wisely chose Hooke, still only twenty-seven, for the novel post of Curator of Experiments, assigned to try the experiments suggested by members. “The truth is” — Hooke in his Micrographia (1665) sounded the keynote of the new age — “the science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the brain and the fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of observa- tions on material and obvious things.” In 1658, when he was only twenty-three, Hooke had already conjectured that the regulator for a marine clock might be made by the “use of Springs instead of Gravity for the making of a Body vibrate in any Posture.” A spring attached to a balance wheel could make the wheel oscillate back and forth around its own center of gravity, thus providing the periodic move- ment needed to stop and start the clockworks, and so mark the units of time. This crucial insight would make possible the marine clock. If his device had been patented, it might have made Hooke’s fortune. Fellow scientists, including Robert Boyle and William Brouncker, the first president of the Royal Society, both wealthy men, wanted to back the project. But Hooke retreated when they could not satisfy every last one of his demands. In 1674, when his Dutch competitor, Huygens, actually made a watch with a balance spring, Hooke was outraged and accused Huygens of stealing his invention. To assert his priority, Hooke made a watch the next year to present to the king, inscribed with the assertion that Hooke had invented the crucial device back in 1658. Hooke became the undisputed author of Hooke’s Law: Ut tensio sic vis — a spring when stretched resists with a force proportionate to its extension. But his primacy for nearly every one of his many specific inventions, including the balance spring, was widely disputed. Whoever may have been their “first inventor,” the combination of a mainspring for motive power and a balance spring as regulator eventu- ally provided a marine clock. Government prizes and the evolving law of patents were beginning to give public and profitable rewards to the first inventor. One of the most effective uses of public funds to advance science and technology was the prize that, as we have seen, was announced by the British Parliament in 1714, for a practical way of finding longitude at sea. The lucky winner was John Harrison (1693-1776), the skillful and persistent son of a Yorkshire carpen- ter. He had promptly responded to the British Parliament’s offer, and after repeated efforts financed by an interest-free loan from George Graham, the famous London instrument maker, Harrison finally succeeded. In 1761 his Model No. 4 seemed to meet the test. On a nine-week trip to Jamaica his clock lost only five seconds, or about 1.25 minutes of longitude, which was From Sun Time to Clock Time 53 well within the margin of 30 minutes of longitude which the Board of Longitude had allowed. A second trial confirmed the clock’s accuracy, and brought him £10,000, which was half the prize. Until cheaper marine clocks were produced, captains continued to use the lunar method. But in the long run it would be easier to provide cheap clocks than to turn out mathematically educated sailors. It was not only sailors who would have convenient new access to time, for Harrison’s marine clock was really a large watch. The spring mechanism brought portability on land as well as on sea. The new sense of time which came with the portable clock — ever smaller, gravity-free, in a pocket or on the wrist — would fill all the interstices of life. PART THREE TH i: D One need not be astonished that the Chinese sages did not make these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all. — ALBERT EINSTEIN (1953) 7 Open Sesame to China Now it was technically possible for people everywhere to find their bearings on the planet, and return to the new places they would discover. But what was possible technically was not always possible socially. Tradition, custom, institutions, language, a thousand little habits — ways of thinking and behaving — became barriers. The drama of the clock in the West was not reenacted in the East. In 1577, at the Jesuit College in Rome, when the twenty-five-year-old priest Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) met a Father returning from the Jesuit outpost in India, he decided to join the missions on that side of the world “to garner into the granaries of the Catholic Church a rich harvest from this sowing of the gospel seed.” The young Ricci had already shown the independence of spirit which would make him one of the greatest of missionaries. His father had sent him to Rome at the age of seventeen to study law. Fearing that Matteo might be tempted into the priesthood, his father expressly ordered him to avoid religious subjects. Despite his father’s efforts he en- tered the Society of Jesus before he was twenty, then wrote his father for approval. When the elder Ricci, hastening to Rome to withdraw his son from the Jesuit novitiate, fell sick en route, he was persuaded that this was a sign from God that Matteo should be allowed to follow his call. Matteo Ricci then left Rome for Genoa, where he sailed for Portugal, to take passage in one of the annual trading ships for India. Arriving in Goa, a Portuguese enclave on the southwest coast, in September 1578, he spent four years studying and teaching theology. Then his Jesuit superiors assigned him to the mission at Macao, where he set about learning Chinese. Across the bay from the great commercial city of Canton, Macao seemed an ideal jumping-off place for missionaries. Ricci and his fellow priest, Michele Ruggieri, stayed for seven years in Chao-ch’ing, a town west of Canton. They built a mission house, and despite popular suspicion and occasional hails of rocks from the hostile populace, they were accepted as men of learning. On the wall of the mis- sion’s reception room Ricci mounted his map of the world. As Ricci himself reported: Of all the great nations, the Chinese have had the least commerce, indeed, one might say that they have had practically no contact whatever, with outside The Missionary Clock 57 nations, and consequently they are grossly ignorant of what the world in gen- eral is like. True, they had charts somewhat similar to this one, that were supposed to represent the whole world, but their universe was limited to their own fifteen provinces, and in the sea painted around it they had placed a few islands to which they gave the names of different kingdoms they had heard of. All of these islands put together would not be as large as the smallest of the Chinese provinces. With such a limited knowledge, it is evident why they boasted of their kingdom as being the whole world, and why they call it Thienhia, meaning, everything under the heavens. When they learned that China was only a part of the great east, they considered such an idea, so unlike their own, to be something utterly impossible, and they wanted to be able to read about it, in order to form a better judgment. . . . We must mention here another discovery which helped to win the good will of the Chinese. To them the heavens are round but the earth is flat and square, and they firmly believe that their empire is right in the middle of it. They do not like the idea of our geographies pushing their China into one corner of the Orient. They could not comprehend the demonstrations proving that the earth is a globe, made up of land and water, and that a globe of its nature has neither beginning nor end. The geographer was therefore obliged to change his design and, by omitting the first meridian of the Fortunate Islands, he left a margin on either side of the map, making the Kingdom of China to appear right in the center. This was more in keeping with their ideas and it gave them a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction. Really, at that time and in the particular circumstances, one could not have hit upon a discovery more appropriate for disposing this people for the reception of the faith. . . . Because of their ignorance of the size of the earth and the exaggerated opinion they have of themselves, the Chinese are of the opinion that only China among the nations is deserving of admiration. Relative to the grandeur of empire, of public administration and of reputation for learning, they look upon all other people not only as barbarous but as unreasoning animals. To them there is no other place on earth that can boast of a king, of a dynasty, or of culture. The more their pride is inflated by this ignorance, the more humiliated they become when the truth is revealed. Ricci’s learning and tact did not allay the fears of the townspeople. One night they stoned the mission, denounced Ricci for conspiring to bring in the Portuguese to sack the town, accused him of knowing alchemy yet refusing to tell the people its secrets, and then destroyed his house. Father Ricci moved on northward, toward Peking and the headquarters of the Emperor. By tradition, the Chinese emperors kept themselves hidden from their subjects. In these last decadent years of the Ming dynasty, Emperor Wan-li, a pathological recluse, had imprisoned himself inside the “Great Within,” the Forbidden City, with his wives and scores of concubines, attended by uncounted eunuchs. Even his highest officials seldom saw him, and had to send messages by the palace eunuchs. 5» TIME As Ricci and his fellow Jesuits approached Peking, they were arrested and their possessions seized. The magistrate especially warned Ricci “to reduce to dust, and if possible to annihilate every sample they had in their possession of the man who was nailed to the cross.” Chinese officials were horrified by the bleeding figure being crucified, which they feared as an instrument of black magic. For six months the imprisoned Jesuit Fathers, seeing no other hope, “turned their thoughts toward God and prepared themselves resolutely and joyfully to meet any difficulty, even death itself, in the cause they had undertaken.” For twenty years Father Ricci had been trying to reach the Emperor, who alone could open the way for the Gospel, and he began to fear that his mission would end in a prison cell in Peking. Then out of the blue came a call from the Emperor to approach the palace, and be sure to bring his presents from Europe. The surprising explanation, according to Ricci, was that “one day, the King, of his own prompting, suddenly remembered a certain petition that had been sent in to him and said, ‘Where is that clock, I say, where is that clock that rings of itself; the one the foreigners were bringing here to me, as they said in their petition?’ ” So Ricci was released from prison, his presents were delivered to the palace, and a gun was fired announcing that the Emperor had just received tribute. The gifts had been sent first to the Board of Rites for their advice, which was as follows: The western ocean countries have had no relations with us, and do not accept our laws. The images and paintings of the Lord of Heaven and of a virgin which Li Ma-tou [Ricci] offers as tribute are not of great value. He offers a purse in which he says there are the bones of immortals, as if the immortals, when they ascend to heaven did not take their bones with them. On a similar occasion Han Yii [an anti-Buddhist scholar, who had been counseled on the offering of a reputed finger of Buddha] said that one should not allow such novelties to be introduced into the palace for fear of bringing misfortune. We advise, therefore, that his presents should not be received, and he should not be permitted to remain in the capital. He should be sent back to his country. In spite of this, the Emperor received the gifts and summoned Ricci to the Great Within. Ricci’s presents included two elegant timepieces of the latest Italian design — a large clock driven by weights and a small clock driven by a spring. Both had been delivered to the palace a few days before Ricci’s arrival, and when Ricci was summoned, the smaller clock was still running. The large clock had stopped because its weights had reached bottom. The “self-ringing bells,” which had so delighted the Emperor, ceased to ring. The Missionary Clock 59 The Emperor, a child with a broken toy, through his chief eunuch gave Ricci three days to get the clock running. Luckily, when Ricci, back in Rome, had trained for his exotic mission, he took care to be well instructed in the clockmaker’s craft. Now he was prepared to give a short course in clock repair. By dint of hard work, the four mathematicians who were assigned to the clocks finally acquired sufficient knowledge to regulate them and for fear that something might go wrong, they wrote out every detail of the instruction and of the mecha- nism of the clocks. For a eunuch to make a mistake in the presence of the King is equivalent to placing his life in danger. They say the sovereign is so rigid with them in this respect that even for a slight fault the poor unfortunates are some- times beaten to death. Their first care was to ask for the names, in Chinese, of all the wheels, springs and accessories, all of which Ricci gave them in Chinese characters, because if any parts were missing, the names of the parts would be readily forgotten. . . . The three days assigned for instructions had not passed before the King called for the clocks. They were brought to him at his order and he was so pleased with them that he immediately promoted the eunuchs and raised their wages. This they were delighted to report to the Fathers and particularly so because, from that day on, two of them were permitted to enter the presence of the King, to wind the small clock, which he always kept before him, because he liked to look at it and to listen to it ringing the time. These two became very important figures in the royal palace. The Emperor ordered a wooden tower built for the big clock in one of the inner courtyards where only His Majesty and a few privileged dignitaries were admitted. The Emperor wanted to see the strangers who had brought these ma- chines with self-ringing bells. Yet he dared not break his custom of never appearing in the company of anyone save his immediate family, his wives, concubines, and eunuchs. Least of all could he favor foreigners over his own magistrates. Instead of calling the Fathers into his presence, he sent two of his best artists to paint their full-length portraits. During the next nine years Father Ricci became a quite different kind of emissary than he had intended. The Emperor’s clock “struck all the Chinese dumb with astonishment,” Ricci explained, simply because it was “a work the like of which had never been seen, nor heard, nor even imag- ined, in Chinese history.” But Ricci was wrong. Although the Fathers did not know it, the mechanical clock already had a long and remarkable history in China. Five hundred years before the Jesuits arrived there a few privileged Chinese courtiers were dazzled by a spectacular astronomical clock. By the time the Jesuit Fathers arrived in China that Heavenly 6o TIME Clockwork survived only as a legend known to a handful of antiquarian scholars. The building of Su Sung’s Heavenly Clockwork was itself a saga. In 1077 Su Sung, a learned civil servant, was sent by the Sung emperor of North China to offer birthday congratulations to a “barbarian” emperor in the farther north. That year the barbarian emperor’s birthday happened to fall on the winter solstice. When Su Sung arrived at his destination, he found to his dismay that he was a day early. The barbarian calendar, it seemed, was more accurate than the Chinese. Since Su Sung dared not admit the inferiority of his own emperor’s calendar, he persuaded his hosts to allow him to accomplish his diplomatic mission on the day he had originally intended. Back home in China, the issuing of a calendar, like the royal minting of coins in Europe, declared a new dynasty’s authority. To counterfeit the calendar or use an unauthorized calendar was lese majeste. An inaccurate calendar could also spell disaster for the farmer. Astronomy and mathemat- ics had to be confined to authorized persons, for others might use their astrology with help from these sciences to note when the stars were propi- tious to overthrow the regime. The Emperor was responsible for pleasing heaven by his ordering of earthly events. When the Emperor asked his returned emissary whether the Chinese or the barbarian calendar was right, “Su Sung told him the truth,” reads the Chinese chronicle, “with the result that the officials of the Astronomical Bureau were all punished and fined.” Su Sung then received the Emperor’s order to design an astronomical clock more useful and more beautiful than any before seen. Su Sung’s purpose was not to make a timepiece for public convenience but to create a calendar machine, a private “heavenly clockwork,” for the Son of Heaven: According to your servant’s opinion there have been many systems and designs for astronomical instruments during past dynasties all differing from one another in minor respects. But the principle of the use of water-power for the driving mechanism has always been the same. The heavens move without ceasing but so also does water flow [and fall]. Thus if the water is made to pour with perfect evenness, then the comparison of the rotary movements [of the heavens and the machine] will show no discrepancy or contradiction; for the unresting follows the unceasing. His “New Design for a Mechanized Armillary Sphere and Celestial Globe” was so detailed that working drawings have been prepared from it and functioning models have been made. The Missionary Clock 61 The thirty-foot-high astronomical clock tower was a five-story pagodalike structure. On the topmost platform reached by a separate outside staircase was a huge bronze power-driven armillary sphere within which there rotated automatically a celestial globe. Outside each of the five stories a procession of manikins carrying bells and gongs was programmed to ring at appropriate hours. Inside the main tower, reaching three-stories upward from the ground, was a huge clockwork, driven by water flowing at ground level and alternately filling and emptying the scoops on a vertical rotating wheel. Every quarter-hour the whole structure reverberated to bells and gongs, the splashing of water, the creaking of giant wheels, the marching of mani- kins. The escapement that stopped and started the machine as it marked off the units of time was, of course, the crucial element. Su Sung’s ingenious water escapement made use of the fluid qualities of water — as Hooke and Huygens later would use the elastic properties of metal — to provide the staccato motion required in a mechanical timepiece. Those few who were privileged to view Su Sung’s Heavenly Clockwork witnessed a mechanical fantasy, which Su Sung himself described: There are ninety-six jacks. They are arranged to correspond in timing with the sounding of “quarters” on the bell-and-drum floor of this belfry. . . . At sunset a jack wearing red appears to report, and then after two and a half “quarters” there comes another in green to report darkness. The night-watches each contain five subdivisions. A jack wearing red appears at the beginning of the night-watch, marking the first subdivision, while for the remaining four subdivi- sions the jacks are all in green. In this way there are twenty-five jacks for the five night-watches. When the time of waiting for dawn comes, with its ten “quarters,” a jack in green comes out to report this. Then dawn with its two and a half “quarters” is marked by another jack wearing green, and sunrise is reported by a jack wearing red. All these jacks appear in the central doorway. In 1090 this machine was ready to entertain and instruct the Emperor and a few high officials in the palace grounds. When a new emperor came to power in 1094, his minions, following custom, declared the previous emperor’s calendar to be faulty. No longer under the imperial protection, Su Sung’s Heavenly Clockwork became a quarry of bronze for vandals, and it dissolved from the memories of the learned. When Ricci arrived in Peking, Chinese scholars of the court were dazzled by the wonderful “European” invention, which they considered something new under the sun. Ricci and Jesuit missionaries who came after him used their knowledge of astronomy and the calendrical sciences to secure influence within the Chi- nese government. On his arrival, Ricci noted that the Chinese lunar calen- 62 TIME dar was in error, as it had been for centuries. The Imperial Astronomers had repeatedly erred in predicting the eclipse of the sun, which, of course, cast suspicion on the Emperor’s power to obey the will of heaven. The great opportunity for the Jesuits came when an eclipse was ex- pected on the morning of June 21, 1629. The Imperial Astronomers pre- dicted that the eclipse would occur at 10:30 and would last for two hours. The Jesuits forecast that the eclipse would not come until 11:30 and would last only two minutes. On the crucial day, as 10:30 came and went the sun shone in full brilliance. The Imperial Astronomers were wrong, but were the Jesuits right? Then, just at 11:30, the eclipse began and lasted for a brief two minutes, as the Jesuits had predicted. Their place in the Em- peror’s confidence was now secure, and the door of China which Ricci had set ajar was opened to the science of the West. The Imperial Board of Rites begged the Emperor to command revision of the calendar, and on September 1 the Emperor ordered the Jesuits to begin the work. Inciden- tally, with their Chinese collaborators they translated Western books on mathematics, optics, hydraulics, and music, and they began building tele- scopes for China. At the very moment when, in Rome, Galileo was being tried by the Pope for his heresies, Jesuits in Peking were preaching the Galilean gospel. The skill and tact of a succession of Jesuit missionary-astronomers made them intimates of the Sons of Heaven. They attained a power never equaled by foreigners there until the European advisers of Asian potentates came in the nineteenth century. It was their understanding of the calendar that opened the Jesuits’ way to the imperial court. Yet it was not the calendar but the clock that opened a new commerce between West and East. In the West the clock soon became an everyday convenience, while in China it long remained a toy. During the eighteenth century, clocks, watches, and clockwork toys became a treasured currency in European dealings with the Chinese impe- rial court. The young Emperor K’ang-hsi, the patron of Father Ferdinand Verbiest, was delighted to receive from the Jesuit Father Gabriel de Magal- haen a soldier-automaton motivated by clockwork, which flourished a sword in one hand while holding a shield in the other, and another clock, which played a melody after each hour was struck. The brilliant French missionary Father Jean Matthieu de Ventavon produced for the Emperor a legendary clockwork-automaton that could write in Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan. By the 1760’s the Jesuit Father in charge of the Emperor’s collection reported that the imperial palace was “stuffed with clocks . . . watches, carillons, repeaters, organs, spheres and astronomical clocks of all kinds and description — there are more than four thousand pieces from the best masters of Paris and London.” The Missionary Clock 63 Chinese emperors established their own factories and workshops for these charming toys. By the mid-eighteenth century the imperial clock- works employed a hundred workers, but their product was not up to Euro- pean standards. Because the Chinese could not make high-quality clock springs they remained back in the age of weight-driven clocks. The first manual of clockmaking finally appeared in Chinese in 1809, when there were enough secondhand clocks in China to occupy hundreds of repairmen. As soon as Europeans learned of the seductive appeal of clockwork in China, they set about to meet the demand. Clockwork toys of every conceiv- able shape and performing every imaginable trick poured into China. “I have been appointed by the Emperor as clockmaker,” the Jesuit Father Jean Matthieu de Ventavon complained in 1769, “but I should rather say that I am here as a machinist because the Emperor expects me to produce not really clocks but curious machines and automata.” The ambassador of the Dutch East India Company in Peking at the end of the eighteenth century sent back to Holland advice that “one should bring to Peking especially those playthings that European boys use to amuse themselves. Such objects will be received here with much greater interest than scientific instruments or objets d’art. ” The situation stirred the ingenuity — and the knavery — of European mer- chants and sounded the keynote for future Western relations with China. John Barrow (1764-1848), founder of the Royal Geographical Society, a self-made man who became one of the great explorers of his age, in his Travels in China (1804) helps us understand why Western merchants would be held in low esteem in China. The gaudy watches of indifferent workmanship, fabricated purposely for the China market and once in universal demand, are now scarcely asked for. One gentleman in the Honourable East India Company’s employ took it into his head that cuckoo clocks might prove a saleable article in China, and accordingly laid in a large assortment, which more than answered his most sanguine expectations. But as these wooden machines were constructed for sale only, and not for use, the cuckoo clocks became all mute long before the second arrival of this gentle- man with another cargo. His clocks were now not only unsaleable, but the former purchasers threatened to return theirs upon his hands, which would certainly have been done, had not a thought entered his head, that not only pacified his former customers but procured him also other purchasers for his second cargo; he convinced them by undeniable authorities, that the cuckoo was a very odd kind of bird which sung only at certain seasons of the year, and assured them that whenever the proper time arrived, all the cuckoos they had purchased would once again “tune their melodious throats.” After this it would only be fair to allow the Chinese sometimes to trick the European purchaser with a wooden ham instead of a real one. 64 TIME In China the man who could afford to gratify his taste for these “curious baubles” was not satisfied to have only one. If he possessed a clock at all, he was likely to be a collector. And he was unlikely to use it as a time marker. When there were so few public clocks and so few people carrying watches, a timepiece was not much use in daily intercourse. One Jesuit watchmaker stationed in Peking reported the Chinese gentlemen’s custom of carrying several watches, which they were anxious should always harmo- nize. A grandson of the Emperor, in Barrow’s time, had collected at least a dozen watches. In the mid-nineteenth century a British doctor in China noted that clocks were seldom seen, except in public offices, where it was not uncommon to see as many as a half-dozen clocks in a row — with few if any in working order. Mother of Machines Precisely because the clock did not start as a practical tool shaped for a single purpose, it was destined to be the mother of machines. The clock broke down the walls between kinds of knowledge, ingenuity, and skill, and clockmakers were the first consciously to apply the theories of mechanics and physics to the making of machines. Progress came from the collabora- tion of scientists — Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, and others — with craftsmen and mechanics. Since clocks were the first modem measuring machines, clockmakers became the pioneer scientific-instrument makers. The enduring legacy of the pioneer clockmakers, though nothing could have been further from their minds, was the basic technology of machine tools. The two prime examples are the gear (or toothed wheel) and the screw. The introduction of the pendulum, by Galileo and then by Huygens, made it possible for clocks to be ten times more accurate than they had been, but this could be accomplished only by precisely divided and precisely cut toothed wheels. Clockmakers developed new, simpler, more precise techniques both for dividing the circumference of a circular metal plate into equal units and for cutting the gear teeth with an efficient profile. Clocks also required precision screws, which in turn required the improvement of the metal lathe. The Missionary Clock 65 Gears were, of course, the essential connective tissue in a mechanical clock. The teeth in the wheels within the clock were not apt to be accurately spaced or cleanly cut if they were hand-hewn. The first gear-cutting ma- chine of which we have any record is the work of an Italian craftsman, Juanelo Torriano of Cremona (1501-1575), who went to Spain in 1540 to make an elegant large planetary clock for Emperor Charles V. Torriano spent twenty years planning a timepiece with eighteen hundred gear wheels and then three and a half years building it. “So every day (not counting holidays),” his friend reported, “he had to make . . . more than three wheels that were different in size, number and shape of teeth, and in the way in which they are placed and engaged. But in spite of the fact that this speed is miraculous, even more astounding is a most ingenious lathe that he invented ... to carve out with a file iron wheels to the required dimension and degree of uniformity of the teeth ... no wheel was made twice because it always came out right the first time.” During Torriano’s lifetime his “lathe” was already being used by other clockmakers. It appears to have become the model for the “wheel-cutting engines” used by English and French clockmakers in the seventeenth century, when timepieces were reaching a wider market. Without such a device it would have been impossi- ble for clocks to be made in large numbers for the commercial market. With such a gear-cutting machine, it was possible to make countless other ma- chines and scientific instruments. The screw, like the gear, was essential for a new world of machines. Its prototypes, like those of the gear, go back to the time of Archimedes or before. An ancient Greek scientist, Hero, may have devised a screw-cutting tool. But making a simple screw long remained a difficult operation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, when finally screws were made with points, it was always necessary in advance to prepare a hole for the full length of the screw. During the Middle Ages, metal screws were rare. For centuries the screw was used in the winepress and for irrigation before it was applied to printing and to the pressing of coins. The wooden-threaded barrels of winepresses were laboriously made: first the diagonal channels were marked, then cut by hand. The earliest recorded mechanical device for threading a screw was the work of clockmakers. By about 1480 a German clockmaker had devised a remarkable little lathe, operated by a crank handle and equipped with what was later known as a compound slide rest. The first all-metal lathes were made by clockmakers and for clockmakers. Later lathes, basic for the machine-tool industry, were little more than elaborations of the clockmakers’ early design. The pioneer clockmakers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved to be the pioneer lathe- makers. 66 TIME Improvements in the clock required improvements in the lathe. For example, the spring-driven clock used a special kind of conical screw device — a fusee — as the gear to compensate for the varying force exerted by the driving spring as it unwound. But the spiral groove in this fusee was difficult to cut by hand with the required accuracy. By 1741 French clockmakers had invented a “fusee machine” that cut the spiral groove on the tapered barrel, and so made it possible to produce clocks and watches in larger numbers for the commercial market. This fusee cutting machine still required skill to direct the tool that cut the channel as the barrel was turned. In 1763 the famous Swiss clockmaker Ferdinand Berthoud made a fully automatic fusee machine, which, incidentally, was one of the earliest examples of “building the skill into the machine.” The next step was taken by Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800), an English instrument-maker with a celebrated passion for precision. He drew on the techniques of the early clockmakers to make a lathe that produced the master screw required for his “dividing engine,” which made it possible to turn out countless other new scientific instru- ments— sextants, theodolites, micrometers, balances, barometers, micro- scopes, and telescopes. The great Salisbury clock (1380), the oldest clock still operating in En- gland and said to be the oldest surviving mechanical clock in the world, was made without the use of a single screw thread. Its iron frame was held together by rivets or wedges. Much of its construction was the work of a blacksmith who must have made the holes for the arbor pivots, rivets, and wedge bolts by punching through the hot metal. The diffusion of clocks came only with the making of smaller, portable clocks. If clocks were to be supplied not only to monasteries and town halls and noble palaces but to individual citizens, they had to be made in sizes suitable for a modest house or a craftsman’s shop. This required scaling down the design, which brought a whole new technology of precision-machine craftsmanship. A small clock obviously could not be hammered together or forged by a blacksmith. To assemble it without knocking it apart, screws were needed. Smallness required screws, and then screws made possible a host of other portable machines. Of course smaller clocks appealed to a wider market, and the demands of this wider market in turn were incentives to making cheaper clocks that people could afford to buy. By the seventeenth century clockmakers had advanced spectacularly ahead of the other technology of the age, and had begun to apply the principle of division of labor. In 1763 Ferdinand Berthoud could list sixteen different sorts of workmen involved in producing clocks, and twenty-one making watches. Among these were makers of the movement, finishers, borers, makers of springs, engravers of brass needles, pendulum makers, engravers of dials, polishers of brass parts, enamelers of dials, silverers of The Missionary Clock 67 brass dials, engravers of cases, bronze gilders, painters to imitate gilding in colors, founders of wheels, turners and polishers of bells. The clock stimulated new talents, new kinds of understanding and imagi- nation. In the age of the French Revolution, Condorcet, the mathematician- philosopher and encyclopedist, while praising an inventor of improvements in silk-weaving machinery, observed: Generally speaking, people have a very erroneous idea of the type of talent proper to the ideal mechanician. He is not a geometrician who, delving into the theory of movement and the categories of phenomena, formulates new mechanical prin- ciples or discovers unsuspected laws of nature. . . . In most other branches of science are to be found constant principles; a multi- tude of methods offer to the genius inexhaustible possibilities. If a scholar poses himself a new problem, he can attack it fortified by the pooled knowledge of all his predecessors. No elementary textbook contains the principles of this [new] science; no one can learn its history. The workshops, the machines themselves, show what has been achieved, but results depend on individual effort. To under- stand a machine it has to be divined. This is the reason why talent for mechanics is so rare, and can so easily go astray, and this is why it is hardly ever manifested without that boldness and the errors which, in the infancy of science, characterize genius. The clock enticed men across boundaries of religion, language, and poli- tics. Even before the vast colonial migrations and the settlement of the New World, the movements of skilled craftsmen exerted an influence far out of proportion to their numbers. Before power-driven transportation, before the rise of mass production, it was often the craftsmen themselves, rather than their product, that traveled. When clocks were gigantic machines built into the tops of public towers, these had to be erected where they would be used. At first there was no demand for more than one clock to a community, which meant, of course, that the professional clockmaker had to be a traveler. A clockmaker came from Basel to build the Strasbourg cathedral clock in the early 1350’s, then went on to construct the first public clock in Lucerne. A German clockmaker made the first clock in the royal palace in Paris. A Paris clockmaker journeyed to Avignon in 1374 to make a clock for the Pope. While it was unusual to build a large clock in one place for use in another, there were a few famous exceptions. Genoa’s first mechani- cal public clock was actually made in Milan in 1353 and the elegant clock we can still see on the Piazza San Marco in Venice was brought there from Reggio. After clocks were scaled down into small fragile machines, there were new reasons for making them near their customers. Centuries passed in Europe before there were enough clockmakers in any one place to form a guild to protect their monopoly. The earliest clockmak- 68 TIME ers were drawn from blacksmiths, locksmiths, or gun founders. A clock- makers’ guild was begun in 1544 in Paris and in 1601 in Geneva. Not until 1630 was a Clockmakers’ Company chartered in England— a result of com- plaints in 1627 that “the Clockmakers Freemen of this Cittie . . . are exceedingly oppressed by intrusion of Clockmakers straingers.” By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the local market in European metropo- lises supported settled groups of clockmakers who organized to enforce their monopoly against foreigners. The market for their product attracted some. Political and religious upheaval and epidemics pushed out others. In the fifteenth century Italy had been a Mecca for craftsmen who came to serve Lorenzo the Magnificent (de’ Medici; 1449-1492) in Florence, and others in Milan, Genoa, Rome, or Naples. In the sixteenth century skilled craftsmen, victims of religious persecution in Germany, went out to enrich metropolises elsewhere. In France it seems that a considerable number of clockmakers had become Protestants, and so were targets of Catholic regimes that forced them to move on. Before the end of the fifteenth century there were no great centers of clockmaking in Europe. For a while Augsburg and Nuremberg flourished by building on their traditions of metalworking. Peter Henlein, clockmaker of Augsburg, was given legendary credit for inventing the pocket watch. But the chaos of the Thirty Years War (1618—1648) dispersed Augsburg and Nuremberg clockmakers all over Europe. By the eighteenth century the most precise and most elegant timepieces were being made in Geneva and in London. The future of the pioneer machine lay in two islands — in Switz- erland, isolated by mountain barriers, and in seagirt England. Here were safe gathering places where mobile craftsmen from all Europe could meet, combine, and exchange their talents. London and Geneva would reap the fruits of persecution by others. The Protestant Reformation, which divided Western Christendom, had brought a new era of upheaval, persecution— and mobility. In 1517 Luther nailed up his provocative 95 Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, and so opened the Reformation in Germany. Within two years Zwingli was preaching reformation in Zurich. Within another decade Cal- vin announced the Reformation in France. Banished from Paris, Calvin took refuge in Basel, where he published his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), the first textbook of Protestant Christianity. In the next decades the thousands who followed Calvin to Geneva made that city a center for European refugees. Just as, four centuries later, the Nazi and Fascist persecutions would make the United States a world center of atomic physics, so independent Geneva profited in the science and technology of its day, and speedily The Missionary Clock 69 became a world center of clockmaking. In both eras a few refugees with specialized skills could make all the difference. In 1515, when the clock in Geneva’s Cathedral of St. Pierre needed repairing, there still was no qual- ified clockmaker in the city. But soon after 1550, as the persecution of Protestants heated up in France and elsewhere, the clockmakers arrived. To Geneva they came not only from France but also from the Low Countries, from Germany, and from Italy. By 1600 Geneva counted some twenty-five master clockmakers, in addition to an unrecorded number of apprentices and workmen. Before the seventeenth century was over, more than one hundred masters and some three hundred workers there were turning out five thousand clocks a year. Protestant England also became a place of refuge, and the rise of English clockmaking was a measure of the persecutions across the channel. In the earliest era of mechanical clocks, England was not a land of pioneers. But it offered a vacuum of skills into which the enterprising foreigners gladly flowed. When Henry VIII needed repairs on the clock in Nonsuch Palace, he still had to import Frenchmen. Queen Elizabeth, too, used French clockmakers. There is no record of an English-made watch before 1580, and those made in the next two decades were slavish copies of French or German models. In due time the growing number of native English clock- makers complained of “the manie straingers invadinge this Realme,” and argued that they needed a royally chartered guild monopoly, which was finally granted in 1631. One of these troublesome strangers was Lewis Cuper, whose family moved from Germany to become eminent among the clockmakers of Blois, in France, before emigrating to London about 1620. In the early seventeenth century, England continued to live on borrowed talents. The Fromanteel family of London, still famous among clock collectors, came from the Netherlands. They were the first to make pendulum clocks in England — an art that John Fromanteel had gone to the Netherlands to learn from Huygens and Coster. But before the end of the century an Englishman, Robert Hooke, was making epochal improvements in clock design, and by the early eighteenth century London took its place beside Geneva. In England watchmaking was showing the advantages of specialization and the division of labor. The Clerkenwell district of London housed vari- ous groups of workmen who called themselves escapement makers, engine turners, fusee cutters, secret springers, or finishers. The Clockmakers’ Com- pany reported to the Board of Trade in 1786 that they were exporting about eighty thousand clocks and watches each year to Holland, Flanders, Ger- many, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, the East and West Indies, China, and elsewhere. In the tolerant interval after the Edict of Nantes (1598) granted the 70 TIME French Huguenots freedom of worship, and before it was revoked in 1685, French clockmaking seems to have been growing. But the French guilds still excluded new talent, inhibited movement into new lines of work, and enforced countless narrow monopolies. While in England, makers of new scientific instruments — depending on whether their main interests were mechanical or optical — could join either the Clockmakers’ Company or the Spectacle-makers’ Company, some managed to pursue their craft without joining either, and many joined the Grocers’ Company. In France, guild membership was strictly enforced. When the making of mathematical in- struments was first listed among French monopolies, in 1565, it was assigned to the cutlery engravers, with King Charles IX’s express prohibition that, except for members of that guild, “no one may make shears or scissors . . . nor surgical instruments of metal, nor cases for falconry or any other cases furnished with astrological and geometrical instruments.” As it turned out, fine scientific instruments had to be made of brass, and the smelting of copper necessary for making brass was reserved only for the founders’ guild. The result was lengthy and acrimonious disputes over who held this particular monopoly. At the end of the seventeenth century, when barometers and thermometers were being made commercially in France, they came under the monopoly of the enamelers simply because the gradua- ted scale was inscribed on an enameled metal plate. During the eighteenth century, an age of innovation in Europe, while French guilds were imposing exorbitant dues on their own members, and restricting the numbers of apprentices and of workshops, the guilds themselves were also being exorbi- tantly taxed by a domineering government. French instrument-makers, at the same time, were snubbed by men of science, who thought them no better than manual workers or tradesmen, and kept them out of the learned societies. From time to time, the French government made strenuous but futile efforts to invigorate the craft. The famous English clockmaker and horolo- gist Henry Sully (1680-1728) was imported to be clockmaker to the Duke of Orleans. But all of Sully’s efforts, even his importation of sixty skilled English craftsmen, could not overbalance the retarding forces in French society, and his workshops at Versailles and St. Germain were soon aban- doned. Life in England — looser guild restrictions, and the increasing demands of a growing prosperous middle class for clocks and watches — was much more favorable to the clockmakers’ crafts. Competition increased and the market widened. It is not surprising that when seamen of the expanding worldwide empires required seafaring clocks and better scientific instru- ments of all sorts, English clockmakers were pioneers. The Missionary Clock 7' Philosophers were always looking for new handles on the universe — new similes, new metaphors, new analogies. Despite their scorn for those who cast the Creator of the Universe in man’s image, the theologians never ceased to scrutinize man’s own handiwork as their clues to God. Now man was a proud clockmaker, a maker of self-moving machines. Once set in motion, the mechanical clock seemed to tick with a life of its own. Might not the universe itself be a vast clock made and set in motion by the Creator Himself? This interesting possibility, not conceivable until the mechanical clock was on the scene, would be a main way station toward modem physics. The older view of the movement of physical bodies, as expounded by Aristotle, was that nothing moved unless it was constantly being pushed by some outside force. But by the time the first mechanical clocks were striking in the town belfries of Europe, an interest in predictable regularities was growing — toward a new theory of motion. Now, it was argued, things kept moving because of forces originally imprinted on them (vis impresa) that simply continued to operate. De’ Dondi’s elegant model of a clockwork universe, recently completed, was already astounding the scholarly world. In the late fourteenth century an influential French popularizer of science, Bishop Nicole d’Oresme (13307-1382), created the unforgettable metaphor: a clockwork universe, God the perfect clockmaker! And “if anyone should make a mechanical clock,” Oresme asked, “would he not make all the wheels move as harmoniously as possible?” This metaphor guided and inspired scientists like the great astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). “My aim,” he observed in 1605, “is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.” And Descartes, too, the philosopher-mathematician, made the clock his prototypical machine. His doctrine of dualism — that mind and body operated independently — was explained in a famous clock metaphor. Suppose there are two clocks, Descartes’s Dutch disciple Geulincx sug- gested, both of which keep perfect time. When one points to the hour, the other always strikes. If you did not know about their machinery and how they were made, you might mistakenly assume that the movements of the one caused the other to strike. This is the way both the mind and the body function. God the Clockmaker created each quite independently of the other, then wound up both of them and set them going so they are in perfect harmony. When I decide to lift my arm, I may think that my mind is acting on my body. But really both move independently, each a part of God’s perfectly harmonized clockwork. This fertile mother of machines was the missing link between man’s own efforts to master his physical universe and his awed reverence before his Creator. In the seventeenth century the pioneer Puritan physicist and foun- 72 TIME der of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle (1627-1691), saw the universe as “a great piece of clock work,” and his Catholic contemporary Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) agreed that the universe was just that. The Newtonian universe soon elevated God from a clockmaker to a master engineer and mathematician. Now the universal laws that governed the smallest portable watch also governed the movements of the earth, the sun, and all the planets. Even after the clock ceased to be the master metaphor of the universe, it became more than ever master of daily life on this planet. The clock made it possible for Europeans to be “on time.” By the late seventeenth century, when clocks were not uncommon among the literate and wealthy, the word “punctual” — which formerly had described a person who insisted upon points (from the Latin punctus, “points”) or details of conduct — came to describe a person who was exactly observant of an appointed time. By the late eighteenth century the word “punctuality” appeared in our language to describe the habit of being in good time. “O, madam,” Joseph in Sheri- dan’s School for Scandal (1777) reproached, “punctuality is a species of constancy — a very unfashionable custom among ladies.” The clock brought its own morality. “Punctuality”— creature of the clock— was still not listed among the dozen virtues in which Benjamin Franklin aimed to make him- self perfect. By 1760, when Laurence Sterne wrote his mock-heroic Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, he opened his saga with the most modem possible interruption of his hero’s conception. At the crucial moment, when Tristram’s mother and father were in bed and Tristram was about to be conceived: “Pray, my dear,” quoth my mother, “have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” “Good God!” cried my father. “Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?” Why It Happened in the West In Europe the clock very early became a public machine. Churches ex- pected communicants to assemble regularly and repeatedly for prayers, and flourishing cities brought people together to share a life of commerce and entertainment. When clocks took their places in church steeples and town The Missionary Clock 73 belfries, they entered on a public stage. There they proclaimed themselves to rich and poor, awakening the interest even of those who had no personal reason to mark the hours. Machines that began as public instruments gradually became some of the most widely diffused private instruments. But instruments that began their lives in private might never become diffused into the wants and needs of the whole community. The first advertisement for the clock was the clock itself, performing for new publics all over Europe. No self-respecting European town would be without its public clock, which tolled all citizens together to defend, to celebrate, or to mourn. A community that could focus its resources in a dazzling public clock was that much more a community. The bell tolled for all and each, as the poet John Donne noted in 1623, and the tolling of the community’s bells was a re- minder that “I am involved in mankind.” Many communities, even before they had organized sewage disposal or a water supply, offered the town clock as a public service. In due course each citizen wanted his own private clocks — first for his household, then for his person. When more people had their private timepieces, more other people needed timepieces to fulfill their neighbors’ expectations at worship, at work, and at play. All the while, the clock was being secularized — another way of saying it was being publicized. The first European clocks, as we have seen, alerted cloistered monks for their regular prayers, but when the clock moved into the church steeple and then into the town belfry, it moved out to a secular world. This larger public soon required the clock for the whole schedule of daily life. In Europe the artificial hour, the machine-made hour, took the calculations of time out of the calendar-universe, out from the penumbra of astrology, into the bright everyday light. When steam power, electric power, and artificial illumination kept factories going around the clock, when night was assimilated into day, the artificial hour, the clock-marked hour became the constant regimen for everyone. The story of the rise of the clock in the West, then, is the story of new modes and widening arenas of publicity. The contrast to China is dramatic and illuminating. There, circumstances conspired to prevent publicity. The first spectacular mechanical clockworks in China, as we have seen, were made not to mark the hour but to mark the calendar. And the science of the calendar — both of its making and of its meaning — was hedged in by government secrecy. Each Chinese dynasty was symbolized, served, and protected by its own new calendar. Between the first unification of the empire in the third century b.c. (c. 221) and the end of the Ch’ing, or Manchu, dynasty in 1911, about one hundred different calendars were issued, with a name identifying it with a particular dynasty 74 TIME or emperor. These were not required by advances in astronomy or in the technology of observation, but were needed to put the cachet of the heavens on the authority of a new emperor. Private calendar-making was punished as a kind of counterfeiting — as both a threat to the security of the emperor and an act of lese majeste. The French Jesuit and translator of Ricci, Nicholas Trigault, reported in the early seventeenth century that the Ming emperors “forbad any to learn this Judiciall Astrology but those which by Hereditary right are thereto disigned, to prevent Innovations.” To find clues to why the mother of machines proved so unfertile there, we must recall some of the large features of life in ancient China. One of the first, most remarkable of Chinese achievements was a well-organized centralized government. As early as 221 B.c. the “Chinese Caesar,” the precocious King Cheng, who had ascended the throne of Ch’in at the age of thirteen, had managed within twenty-five years to unify a half-dozen Chinese provinces into a single great empire, with a vast hierarchy of bureaucrats. He standardized the laws and the written language, established uniform weights and measures, and even fixed the length for carriage axles so they would fit into the wheel ruts. The Chinese kings, as we have seen, had regulated the calendar, the state religion remained emphatically tied to the round of the seasons, and astron- omy became “the secret science of priest-kings.” Chinese farming depended on irrigation, and successful irrigation required predicting the rhythms of the monsoon rains and the melting of the snows to flood the rivers and fill the canals. From earliest times in China an astronomical observatory was an essen- tial part of the cosmological temple, the ruler’s ritual headquarters. As the central government became stronger and better organized, Chinese astron- omy, by contrast with astronomy in ancient Greece or medieval Europe, became more and more official and governmental. This meant, of course, that Chinese astronomy became increasingly bureaucratic and esoteric. There the technology of the clock was the technology of astrological indica- tors. Just as in the West the machinery for minting coins, for printing paper money, or for manufacturing gunpowder was tightly controlled, so in China were calendrical timepieces. The imperial rites that survive from the era of the Chinese Caesar re- quired the emperor to define the four cardinal points — north, south, east, and west — by observations of the polestar and the sun. The Imperial As- tronomer, one of the highest-ranking hereditary officials, was expected to keep watch at night from the emperor’s observatory tower. He “concerns himself with the twelve years [the sidereal revolutions of Jupiter], the twelve months, the twelve [double] hours, the ten days, and the positions of the twenty-eight stars. He distinguishes them and orders them so that he can The Missionary Clock 75 make a general plan of the state of the heavens. He takes observations of the sun at the winter and summer solstices, and of the moon at the spring and autumn equinoxes, in order to determine the succession of the four seasons.” Another high hereditary official, the Imperial Astrologer, interpreted the message of the heavens for the destiny of the people. He concerns himself with the stars in the heavens, keeping a record of the changes and movements of the planets, the sun and the moon, in order to examine the movements of the terrestrial world, with the object of distinguishing good and bad fortune. He divides the territories of the nine regions of the empire in accordance with their dependence on particular celestial bodies. All the fiefs and principalities are connected with distinct stars, and from this their prosperity or misfortune can be ascertained. He makes prognostications, according to the twelve years [of the Jupiter cycle], of good and evil in the terrestrial world. From the colours of the five kinds of clouds, he determines the coming of floods or drought, abundance or famine. From the twelve winds he draws conclusions about the state of harmony of heaven and earth, and takes note of the good or bad signs which result from their accord or disaccord. Incidentally these state astrologers produced the most remarkable continu- ous record of celestial phenomena before the rise of modern astronomy. The Chinese record of an eclipse in 1361 B.c. is probably the earliest verifiable eclipse reported by any people. Other Chinese records cover long periods for which we have no other accurate chronicle of celestial events. Twen- tieth-century radio-astronomers still use these records in their study of novae and supernovae. While these state records survive, most of the ancient Chinese literature on astronomy has disappeared. Because astronomy was so state-oriented, so security-bound, and so secret, the old astronomy books have left few traces. By contrast, the early books on mathematics, which were used by merchants, directors of public works, and military commanders, have sur- vived in considerable numbers. Repeated imperial edicts enforced state security for calendrical science, astronomy, and astrology. In a.d. 840, for example, when the empire had recently been disturbed by the appearance of several comets, the Emperor ordered all observers in the imperial observ- atory to keep their business secret. “If we hear of any intercourse between the astronomical officials or their subordinates and officials of other govern- ment departments or miscellaneous common people, it will be regarded as a violation of security regulations which should be strictly adhered to. From now onwards, therefore, the astronomical officials are on no account to mix with civil servants and common people in general. Let the Censorate look to it.” The security concerns which so notoriously plagued atomic research 76 TIME centers at Los Alamos and Harwell in World War II had their Chinese antecedents. The famous Heavenly Clockwork of Su Sung could not have been con- structed if Su Sung had not been a high imperial official authorized to help the Emperor view the astrological destinies. This explains, too, why, within a few years, Su Sung’s spectacular achievement had become only a dim legend. If Su Sung had built his clockwork not for the private garden of a Chinese emperor but for a European town hall, he would have been hailed as a heroic public benefactor. His work would have become a monument to civic pride — the object of widespread emulation. The Emperor himself had an especially intimate need for calendrical time- keepers. For every night the Emperor in his bedchamber had to know the movements and positions of the constellations at every hour — in precisely the way Su Sung’s Heavenly Clockwork made possible. In China the ages of individuals and their astrological destinies were calculated not from the hour of birth but from the hour of conception. When Su Sung constructed his imperial clock, the Emperor had as at- tendants a large number of wives and concubines of various ranks. These women totaled 121 (one-third of 365, to the nearest round number), includ- ing one empress, three consorts, nine spouses, twenty-seven concubines, and eighty-one assistant concubines. Their rotation of duty, as described in the Record of the Rites of the Chou dynasty, was as follows: The lower-ranking [women] come first, the higher-ranking come last. The assist- ant concubines, eighty-one in number, share the imperial couch nine nights in groups of nine. The concubines, twenty-seven in number, are allotted three nights in groups of nine. The nine spouses and the three consorts are allotted one night to each group, and the empress also alone one night. On the fifteenth day of every month the sequence is complete, after which it repeats in reverse order. By this arrangement, the women of highest rank would lie with the Em- peror on the nights nearest to the full moon, when the Yin, or female, influence would be most potent, and so best able to match the potent Yang, or male, force of the Son of Heaven. So timely a combination, it was believed, would assure the strongest virtues in the children then conceived. The main function of the women of lower ranks was to nourish the Em- peror’s Yang with their Yin. A corps of secretarial ladies kept the records of the Emperor’s cohabita- tions with their brushes dipped in imperial vermilion. The proper order of these proceedings in the imperial bedchamber was believed essential to the larger order and well-being of the empire. In the disorderly days of the ninth The Missionary Clock 77 century, writers lamented that the ancient tradition of “nine ordinary com- panions every night, and the empress for two nights at the time of the full moon” was no longer respected, with the result that “alas, nowadays, all the three thousand [palace women] compete in confusion.” The need for an accurate calendrical clock, to show the position of the heavenly bodies at each moment of the day or night, was then obvious, to ensure the best-qualified succession of emperors. The ruling houses of China did not follow the rule of primogeniture. In theory, only the sons of the empress could become emperor, but this usually left the emperor with a number of young princes from whom to choose his heir. A prudent emperor was bound to give close attention to the astrological omens at the precise moment when each prince was conceived. To record these facts accurately was the duty of the secretarial ladies with their vermilion brushes. The astronomical observations and mechanical calculations of Su Sung’s Heav- enly Clockwork provided the data for these records and prognostications, and so were of great political significance. But these curiosities of the imperial court had little to do with a farmer’s life. The community as a whole was not expected, and did not dare, to plumb the depths of state astrology, nor to profit from the data of calendrical timepieces. By contrast, the spread of the clock in the West came from community needs — which meant the need for publicity and portability. The crucial development, as we have seen, was the advance from the weight-driven to the spring-driven clock. Heavy weights and their accompanying pendulum rooted a clock in the site where it was first placed. But a portable spring- driven clock was versatile in its habitat. For Europeans the seafaring clock in the eighteenth century was an exploring machine — a catalyst to cartogra- phers, travelers, merchants, botanists, and navigators, a device that encour- aged sailors to go farther, helped them know where they were, and made it possible to come back again. Eventually the pocket watch, and then the wristwatch, would put a timepiece on the person of millions. The first great Chinese clock, incarcerated in the precincts of the imperial court, was driven by a stream of water. Su Sung’s escapement, the heart of his “heavenly clockwork,” required a continuous stream of water, which, of course, firmly attached the machine to one site. To confirm that there was nothing “Oriental” or “Asiatic” about the sterility of the clock in China, we have the interesting contrast of Japan. For while the Chinese remained obstinate isolationists, stubbornly suspicious of anything from outside, the Japanese combined a determination to preserve their own arts and institutions with a remarkable capacity for imitating and incorporating whatever came from abroad. Before the end of the seven- teenth century the Japanese were producing their own copies of European 7« TIME clocks. In the next century the Japanese began to develop a clockmaking industry, turning out clocks of their own design with an adjustable “hour” plate and fixed hands. They perfected a double-escapement clock with one balance for the hours of the day and a second for the hours of the night, since the “hours” of day and night were unequal. Until 1873 the Japanese retained the “natural” sunlight day divided into six equal hours between sunrise and sunset. Their “hour” still varied from day to day, but they succeeded in making a clock that accurately marked these unequal hours throughout the year. Since the paper walls of Japanese houses were too fragile to hold up a heavy European wall clock, they devised a “pillar clock,” which hung from the timber framing of a Japanese room and marked the hours on a vertical scale. Sliding indicators on a vertical scale could be readily moved to mark the proper changing intervals of the variable hour from day to day. The Japanese retention of a system long since abandoned in Europe actually proved an incentive to their inge- nuity. The difficulty of making mainsprings delayed the manufacture of spring- driven clocks in Japan until the 1830’s. Before long the Japanese were making their own elegant inro watches to fit into the traditional Japanese inro, or pillbox case, which was attached to a cord, to be worn with the pocketless Japanese costume, around the neck or tucked into the obi. Since the Japanese customarily sat on the floor, they did not develop long-case, or “grandfather,” clocks. The congestion of Japan, with its flourishing urban centers and enterpris- ing merchants, encouraged the publicity of arts and crafts, and kept people and things in motion. Numerous ports and a network of well-traveled roads circulated all sorts of commodities. Clockmaking developed earlier in Japan than in China. Local lords, daimyos and shoguns ordered clocks for their castles, but the public taste for clocks and the opportunity for the millions to buy them did not come until the nineteenth century. BOOK TWO There is no sea innavigable, no land uninhabitable. — ROBERT THORNE, MERCHANT AND GEOGRAPHER (1527) To discover the planet, mankind would have to be liber- ated from ancient hopes and fears, and open the gateways of experience. The largest dimensions of space, the conti- nents and the oceans, were only slowly revealed. The West proved a vantage point, and for most of history the West would be the discoverer, the East the discovered. The first reaches from the West to another half of the planet came from laborious and lonely overland travelers. But the full extent of the planet could be glimpsed only by organized communities of adventure on the sea, which became a highway to grand surprises. Would to God your horizon may broaden every day I The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling. — IVAN TURGENEV TO LEO TOLSTOY (1856) The Awe of Mountains Long before men thought of conquering the mountains, the mountains had conquered men. Castle of the Higher Powers, the mountain long remained, in the words of Edward Whymper, the first conqueror of the Matterhorn, “an affront to man’s conquest of nature.” Every high mountain was idolized by people who lived in its shadow. Inspired by the Himalayas that they gazed at in awe, the people of north India imagined a still higher mountain farther north, which they called Mt. Meru. Hindus and, later, Buddhists made that mythical 84,000-mile-high mountain-above-the-mountains the dwelling place of their gods. Mt. Meru, central mountain of the universe and vertical axis of the egg-shaped cosmos, was surrounded by seven con- centric mountain rings around which revolved the sun, the moon, and the planets. Between the seventh and an outer eighth ring were the continents of the earth. On Mt. Meru, according to the sacred Hindu scriptures, “there are rivers of sweet water running in it, and beautiful golden houses inhabited by the spiritual beings, the Deva, by their singers the Gandharva, and their harlots the Apsaras.” The later Buddhist tradition held “that Meru lies between four worlds in the four cardinal directions; that it is square at the bottom and round at the top; that it has the length of 80,000 yojana, one half of which rises into heaven, whilst the other half goes down into the earth. That side which is next to our world consists of blue sapphires, which is the reason why heaven appears to us blue; the other sides are of rubies, yellow and white gems. Thus Meru is the centre of the earth.” The divine Himalaya — a range 1,600 miles long and 150 miles wide — were all that could be seen of the High Places. Peaks over 25,000 feet, including Everest, Kanchen- junga, Godwin Austen, Dhaulagiri, Nanga Parbat, and Gosainthan, defied human climbers even after the age of mountain climbing had arrived. They also inspired gratitude, for hidden high among them (prosaic geographers of a later age would call them the “watershed”) were the secret sources of the life-giving Indus, the sacred Ganges, and the Brahmaputra. The Japanese, too, had their Fujiyama, a goddess who dominated their landscape and never ceased to be celebrated in their art. Hokusai, the master of the popular Ukiyo-e prints, made Thirty-six Views of Fuji (1823-29), which showed the many faces of the sacred heights. In the West, the Greeks had their Olympus, rising a sudden 9,000 feet The Geography of the Imagination 83 above the Aegean. Often shrouded in clouds, the veiled summit of Olympus gave gods their privacy. Only between the clouds could mortals glimpse an amphitheater of tiers of boulders where the gods sat in council. “Never is it swept by the winds nor touched by snow,” wrote Homer, “a purer air surrounds it, a white clarity envelops it and the gods there taste of a happiness which lasts as long as their eternal lives.” The Greeks were confident that Olympus was the highest mountain on earth. In the begin- ning, after Cronus had completed his creation of the world, his sons drew lots to partition his empire, and Zeus won the ethereal heights, Poseidon received the sea, and Hades was awarded the dark depths of the earth. While Hades remained alone below, Zeus allowed the other gods to share his residence on Olympus. On the heights of Mt. Sinai the God of the Jews gave Moses the tablets of the Law. And on the third day in the morning, there was thunder and lightning and a dark cloud upon the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, and all the people who were in the camp trembled. And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God and they assembled at the foot of the mountain. And Mount Sinai was all smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln. And all the people trembled greatly. And as the trumpet blast grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and the Lord an- swered him in thunder. And Yahweh came down upon Mount Sinai to the top of the mountain. And Yahweh called Moses to the top of the mountain and Moses went up. . . . [Exodus 19:16-20] Where there were no natural mountains, people built artificial mountains. The oldest surviving examples are the stepped pyramids — the “ziggurats” — of ancient Mesopotamia, which go back to the twenty-second century b.c. “Ziggurat” meant both the summit of a mountain and a man-made stepped tower. The vast pyramidal pile in Babylon, 295 feet square and 295 feet high, became notorious as the Tower of Babel. While the effect from a distance was that of a stepped pyramid, the ziggurat, as Herodotus de- scribed it about 460 B.c., was a pile of solid towers, each slightly smaller than the one on which it rested. “In the topmost tower there is a great temple, and in the temple is a great bed richly appointed, and beside it a golden table. No idol stands there. No one spends the night there save a woman of that country, designated by the god himself, so I was told by the Chaldeans, who are the priests of that divinity.” When the ancient ziggurats were crumbling in the fourth century, an Egyptian reported the tradition that the ziggurat “had been built by giants who wished to climb up to heaven. For this impious folly some were struck 84 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS by thunderbolts; others, at God’s command, were afterwards unable to recognize each other; all the rest fell headlong into the island of Crete, whither God in His wrath had hurled them.” A ziggurat, according to the sacred Babylonian texts, was a “Link of Heaven and Earth.” The Tower of Babel became a symbol of man’s effort to reach the heavens, to trespass on the territory of the gods. The ziggurat was said to be the earthly shape of the ladder that the patriarch Jacob, grandson of the Mesopotamian Abraham, saw. “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” All across flat Mesopotamia people felt the need for an artificial mountain to reach up to the gods, and to allow gods more easily to reach down to men. Every major city had at least one high-reaching ziggurat, probably the highest, as it was the most impressive, structure to be seen. Remains of thirty-three survived into the twentieth century. Perhaps the ziggurat was a burial mound from which the God-King Marduk could be resurrected. Or perhaps it was only a stairway from which the God could descend to the city, and on which people could ascend to make their requests. In the Nile Valley in lower Egypt we can still see some of the most durable artificial mountains. The primeval hill, the place of the creation of life, was especially vivid to the Egyptians. Every year when the Nile flood receded, mounds of newly silted mud fertile with new life appeared above the water, and so every year Egyptians relived the story of the Creation. The earliest Egyptian pyramid was a stepped pyramid, similar to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. The great pyramid of Zoser (first king of the third dynasty: c. 2980 B.c.), at Sakkara in Lower Egypt, showed six steps. “A staircase to heaven is laid for him [the king] so that he may mount up to heaven thereby.” The Egyptian word “to ascend” included the sign of a stepped pyramid. The later pyramids showed no steps, but took on the smooth pyramidal slope, the sacred sign of the sun-god. The God-King Pepi, the ancient Egyptians explained, “has put down this radiance as a stairway under his feet. . . . stairs to the sky are laid for him.” In Tibet, the lamas every day offered the Buddhas their own model of the earth: their little mound of rice was Mt. Meru. The Buddha instructed that his bones, after cremation, should be placed in a mound at the crossing of four highways, to symbolize the universal reign of his teachings. During the long rule of Hinduism, countless “stupas” — artificial-moun- tain replicas of Mt. Meru — had symbolized the vertical axis of the egg- shaped universe. When the emperor Asoka, who reigned from c. 273 to 232 B.c, made Buddhism the religion of his vast empire, he simply transformed the Hindu stupa into a stupa for Buddhists. Two of Asoka’s stupas remain The Geography of the Imagination 85 — the Great Stupa at Sanchi in central India and the Bodhnath Stupa at Katmandu in Nepal. Like the Mesopotamian ziggurat, the Buddhist stupa was a model of the cosmos. Above a square or circular base rose the solid hemispherical dome, a replica of the dome of heaven enclosing the world-mountain that rose from earth to the sky. The world-mountain stuck up through the dome of heaven in the form of a small balcony at the summit; at the center of the dome arose a mast, the axis of the world, extending all the way up from the watery depths imagined to lie beneath. The most impressive, largest, and most intricate of these artificial Bud- dhist mountains is the great stupa of Borobudur (c. eighth century a.d.) in Java. Above five walled rectangular terraces rise three round platforms bearing seventy-two small bell-shaped stupas, each containing a Buddha, and a larger solid capstone stupa surmounting all. We share the feeling of the Buddhist epic poet of Ceylon on the completion of the great stupa there: “Thus are the Buddhas incomprehensible, and incomprehensible is the nature of the Buddhas, and incomprehensible is the reward of those who have faith in the incomprehensible.” After Buddhism ebbed away from India and the Hindu faith returned, many great shrines were painted white to make more obvious their symbolic identity with the sacred snowcapped Himalaya. Hindu temples, like the Mesopotamian ziggurat, the Egyptian pyramids, and other reconstructions of the primal mountain, but unlike the Christian cathedral, were not shel- ters within which the faithful could gather. The artificial mountain, like the natural mountain, was an object of worship, the sacred earth at its most eminent, up which the faithful could ascend. The builder, who had imitated what the gods had made, was possessed of magical power. The Hindu dynasties produced their many ornate versions of the prime- val mountain — dome, spire, hexagonal or octagonal tower. The surfaces and panels, the niches and friezes of these stone monuments, bubble with images of plants, of monkeys and elephants, and of men and women in all conceivable postures. The grandest of them, the Hindu temple Kailasa (“Shiva’s paradise”) at Ellora, in south-central India, ingeniously used the mountain itself to make the effigy of a divine mountain. A mountain-carved- out-of-a-mountain, Kailasa was constructed by first cutting a trench into the mountain to isolate a mass of rock 276 feet long, 154 feet wide, and 100 feet high. By working from the top of the mass down, the rock cutters avoided the need for scaffolding. The product of two hundred years’ labor was a worthy replica of Shiva’s paradise, Mount Kailasa in the Himalaya. Hindu architects and sculptors down to their latest efforts, as at Khajraho in central India (c. 1000), never gave up their rebuilding of Mt. Meru, and spent their energy with ever greater profligacy in carving erotic images of 86 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS the reunion of man and his gods. The sikhara, or spire, which topped the Hindu stupa also meant mountain peak. Perhaps the most gigantic religious monument in the world is the stupa- temple complex of Angkor Wat, built by the Cambodian king Suryavarman II (1113-1150) as his sepulcher and the temple of his divinity. The stupa there, fantastically elaborated and multiplied, is a vast filigreed stepped pyramid, a sculptured mountain. On the other side of the world simpler, starker pyramids were rising, symbols of the universal awe of mountains. In the Valley of Mexico, the Toltecs piled up their Pyramid of the Sun, two-thirds the height of the Tower of Babel, at Teotihuacan. On the flat peninsula of Yucatan, the Mayas set up their pyramid-temples at Uxmal and Chichen Itza. Charting Heaven and Hell The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses. Villagers who themselves feared to ascend the mountaintops located their departed ones on the impenetrable heavenly heights. The heavenly bodies were conspicuous examples of disappearance and rebirth. The sun died every night and was reborn every morning, while the moon was newborn every month. Was this moon the same heavenly body that reappeared at each “rebirth”? Were the stars that were newly lit at each sunset actually the same as those extinguished every dawn? Perhaps, like them, each of us could be extinguished and yet be reborn. It is not surprising that the heavenly bodies, and especially the moon, were widely associated with the resurrection of the dead. We will illustrate these notions from ancient Greece and Rome with some reminders that such notions were not confined to the Mediterranean or the European world. In earliest Greek antiquity, Hecate, goddess of the moon, was summoner of ghosts, queen of the infernal regions. The cold damp rays of the moon, according to a popular Eastern astrology, corrupted the flesh of the dead The Geography of the Imagination 87 and so helped dislodge the soul, which then was freed from its earthly prison to reach the heavens. The ancient Syrians tried to accelerate this process by sacrifices at their tombs on the night when the moonbeams were most potent. In the Eastern Church the dates of the rituals for the dead were fixed to exploit these hopes. “All who leave the earth go to the moon,” declared an Upanishad, an ancient Hindu text, “which is swollen by their breath during the first half of the month.” The Manichaean followers of the Persian sage Manes (a.d. 2167-276?) gave the moon a brilliant role in their mystic doctrines, and so compounded the doctrines of Zoroastrianism and of Christianity into an appealing new sect that tempted many early Christians, including Saint Augustine. The moon takes a crescent shape, they explained, when it is being swelled by the luminous souls that it has drawn up from the earth. The moon wanes when it has transferred these souls to the sun. Every month the boat of the moon that sails across the skies takes on a new load of souls, which it regularly passes on to the larger vessel of the sun. The crescent moon, symbol of immortality, adorned funeral monuments of the ancient Babylonians and in Celtic countries, and across Africa. In republi- can Rome the shoes of senators were decorated with ivory crescents, taken as a symbol of their pure spirits, since noble souls after death were trans- ported to the heavens, where they walked on the moon. The flight of souls to the moon was no mere metaphor. According to the Stoics, a zone of special physical qualities surrounded the moon. The soul, a burning breath, naturally rose through the air toward the fires of the sky. In the neighborhood of the moon, it found this “Porch” of ether, a sub- stance so like the soul’s own essence that the soul stayed floating there in equilibrium. Each soul was a globe of fire endowed with intelligence, and all souls together were a perpetual chorus around the luminous moon. In this case the Elysian Fields would not, as the Pythagoreans had insisted, be on the moon but in the ether surrounding the moon, into which only suitably pure souls could penetrate. According to popular astronomy, the lowest of the seven planetary spheres was the moon, whose ether was nearest the earth’s impure atmo- sphere. Pythagoreans and Stoics imagined souls returning to earth just after they had crossed the circle of the moon. Therefore “sublunary” (beneath the moon) came to describe everything terrestrial, mundane, or ephemeral. Perhaps, as European folklore suggested, each person had his own star — bright or dull, according to his station and his destiny — which was il- luminated at his birth and disappeared at his death. A shooting star, then, might signify some person’s death. “Were there then only two stars at the time of Adam and Eve,” wondered Bishop Eusebius of Alexandria in the fifth century, “and only eight after the Flood when Noah and seven other 88 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS persons alone were saved in the Ark?” Everyone was born under either a lucky or an unlucky star. The Latin astrosus (ill-starred) meant unlucky, and today we still thank our “lucky stars.” If, as many people have thought, the departing soul becomes a bird fleeing from this earth, would not souls naturally alight on the heavenly bodies? And the multitude of the stars could be explained by the countless genera- tions of the dead. The Milky Way, which some believed was the highway for departed souls, was such a gathering of innumerable departed spirits. Ovid recounts how Venus swooped down invisibly into the Senate and carried Caesar’s soul from his bleeding body into the heavens, and how the soul took flame and flew beyond the moon to become a trailing comet. Families consoled themselves with the thought that their members departed from earth had become stars to illuminate the heavens. The Emperor Ha- drian, grieving over his favorite Antinous, professed to believe that his friend had become a star which had just appeared. According to Cicero, “nearly the whole heaven is filled with mankind.” Millennia before the discovery of gravitation, the sun, that most potent of heavenly bodies, was said to govern the others, and to be somehow “the heart of the world, source of new-born souls.” According to the Py- thagoreans (second century B.c.) the sun was Apollo Musagetes, chorus master of the Muses, whose music was the harmony of the spheres. People who could agree on few other facts about remote regions of the earth somehow agreed on the geography of the afterworld. Even while the shape of most of the earth’s surface was still unknown, the Nether World was described in vivid detail. The practice of burying the dead in the earth made it quite natural that people should think that the dead inhabited the Nether World. A subterranean topography seemed to make that afterlife possible and even plausible. Tradition reported that the Romans, at the foundation of their city, followed an old Etruscan custom and dug a pit in the city’s center so that ancestors in the Nether World could more easily communi- cate with the world of the living. Into this pit were thrown gifts — the first fruits of the harvest and a clod of earth from the place whence the city’s settlers had come — to ease the lives of the departed and to ensure the continuity of the generations. A vertical shaft ended in a chamber with a roof curved like the heavens, which justified calling this lower-realm a world (mundus). The keystone of this vault (the lapis Manalis; the stone of the departed spirits) was raised three times a year, on the holidays when the dead could freely return to earth. In the beginning, life in the Nether World was simply an extension of life above. Which explains why among so many peoples the warrior was buried with his chariot, his horses, his weapons, and his wives, why his tools The Geography of the Imagination 89 accompanied the craftsman to the grave, and why the housewife went with her weaving implements and cooking vessels. And so earth-life could go on beneath the earth. In Greece there arose a sect that named itself after Orpheus, the mythical poet, whose efforts to rescue his beloved wife, Eurydice, from the under- world had made him an expert in the perils of the journey in both directions. About the sixth century B.c. these Orphic Greeks and the Etruscans who followed them developed a mythology of judgment day, an appealing es- chatology that we can still see elegantly depicted on their black-figured vases. The books of many peoples on the Descent into Hades, while varying in the cast of characters, somehow agree on the topography of the infernal regions almost as if they were describing a nearby landscape. The Greeks provided the outlines — an underground realm bounded by the river Styx and governed by Pluto and Proserpina. There were the judges Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus, the executioners Erinyes (the Furies), and a high-walled prison, Tartarus. Since there was no bridge across the Styx, all the deceased had to be ferried by Charon, a grisly old man in a dark sailor’s cloak, who charged an obolos for the service, a coin that it became the custom to put in the mouth of the dead to ensure passage. Once across the Styx, all took a common road to the court of judgment. Such judging of the dead was, of course, familiar to the Egyptians and is commonly depicted on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the Greek Nether World the judges, from whom there was no appeal and from whom nothing could be concealed, sent the wicked to the left across a river of fire to the dark tortures of Tartarus and sent the virtuous along the right-hand road toward the Elysian Fields. There were some nice problems of physics here. If, as the Stoics taught, every soul was an upward-tending burning breath, none could descend into the earth. But the Elysian Fields were relocated in the heavens above, and wicked spirits were consigned to the Inferno below. Was the earth large enough to contain a Tartarus for all those since the beginning of time who had ever deserved its punishments? Perhaps the infernal regions should be found not under the earth but on the lower half of the terrestrial globe, in the southern hemisphere. Virgil followed the traditional geography of the Nether World when he related the descent of Aeneas into Hades. But enlightened Romans like Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch probably had ceased to believe the mythic chart of Hades. The hardheaded Pliny, for example, noted how strange it was that miners who dig deep pits and broad galleries underground had never come upon the infernal regions. It seems that in ancient Greece and Rome the traditional topography of the Nether World was widely accepted by the populace or, at least, not 90 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS actively disbelieved. We cannot be sure how many tomb inscriptions were mere metaphor. “I shall not wend mournfully to the floods of Tartarus,” read the tomb of a young Roman of the Age of Augustus, announcing that he had become a celestial hero who sent this message from the ether, “I shall not cross the waters of Acheron as a shade, nor shall I propel the dusky boat with my oar; I shall not fear Charon with his face of terror, nor shall old Minos pass sentence on me; I shall not wander in the abode of gloom nor be held prisoner on the bank of the fatal waters.” Sarcophagi commonly depicted the mythic characters with their accustomed places on the map of Hades. Although Platonism and Christianity contradicted each other on count- less dogmas, both in different ways confirmed the traditional maps of heaven and of hell. When Neoplatonists in the third century revived Plato’s teachings as a sacred text, they defended his vivid description of how souls lived in the bowels of the earth. Porphyry (a.d. 2327-304?), a potent antago- nist of Christianity, explained that although each soul was by nature a “fiery breath” tending to rise to the heavens, yet as a soul lowered into the earthly atmosphere it tended to become damp and heavy. During a soul’s life on earth, as it became encumbered with the clay of sensual life, it became still denser, until it was naturally dragged into the earthly depths. “It is true,” argued Proclus (4107-485), the last of the great Greek Neoplatonists, and a still vigorous opponent of Christianity, “that the soul by force of its nature aspires to rise to the place which is its natural abode, but when passions have invaded it they weigh it down and the savage instincts which develop in it attract it to the place to which they properly belong, that is, the earth.” So it was quite understandable that wicked souls should be consigned to the Nether World. Hell, then, was no mere metaphor, but a vast underground network of rivers and islands, prisons and torture chambers, irrigated by the earth’s effluvia and never brightened by the sun. During the next millennium Christianity gave new credibility and new vividness to the ancient topography of heaven and hell. Few visions were more compelling than those of the strong-willed Saint Hildegard of Bingen (1099-1179), who at the age of eight had been consigned to a nunnery with all the last rites of the dead to signify that she was buried to the world. She wrote eloquent lives of the saints, works on natural history, medicine, and the mysteries of Creation. She saw and described precisely what happened to impenitent sinners: I saw a well deep and broad, full of boiling pitch and sulphur, and around it were wasps and scorpions, who scared but did not injure the souls of those therein; which were the souls of those who had slain in order not to be slain. Near a pond of clear water I saw a great fire. In this some souls were burned The Geography of the Imagination 9i and others were girdled with snakes, and others drew in and again exhaled the fire like a breath, while malignant spirits cast lighted stones at them. And all of them beheld their punishments reflected in the water, and thereat were the more afflicted. These were the souls of those who had extinguished the substance of the human form within them, or had slain their infants. And I saw a great swamp, over which hung a black cloud of smoke, which was issuing from it. And in the swamp there swarmed a mass of little worms. Here were the souls of those who in the world had delighted in foolish merriment. It was not only in Saint Hildegard’s visions but in many others that hell’s vivid chambers of horrors became so much more interesting than the bland delights of heaven. The most persuasive Christian geographer of heaven and hell was, of course, the greatest of Italian poets, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). His jour- ney to the afterworld was a pilgrimage, a return to anciently familiar scenes. The power of his Divine Comedy was multiplied because, unlike most of the polite literature of Europe in its day, it was written not in Latin or another scholars’ language, but in Italian, a language “lowly and humble, because it is the vulgar tongue, in which even housewives hold converse.” The dominant emotional experience of his life was the death in 1290 of his beloved Beatrice when he was only twenty-five, which induced him to spend most of his active life writing an epic of the afterworld where she had gone. Dante’s great work was a travel epic recounting the author’s journey through the realms of the dead. One hundred cantos (14,233 lines) covered “the state of souls after death” in Dante’s guided tour through Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. He began writing it about 1307 and was still working on it on the day he died. The last thirteen cantos of his completed work would have been lost if after his death Dante had not appeared in a dream to his son Jacopo to explain where they were hidden. Dante translated medieval learning into a panorama of the afterlife. Virgil, whose scheme of the Nether World Dante accepts, guides him through the Inferno; Beatrice guides him through Paradise, giving way to Saint Bernard only when the presence of God is reached. His geography of the underworld is traditional. Down across the nine chasms of the under- world Virgil guides him, at each level showing the punishments of another category of the damned, until they finally reach Satan himself. Ascending a tunnel to the foot of Mount Purgatory, they climb its seven levels, each level one of the seven deadly sins, on the way to Paradise, where there are nine heavens. The tenth is where God and his angels dwell. 92 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS The Appeal of Symmetry More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing. And it is not surprising that human imagination has given the earth the simplest symmetrical shapes. One of the most attractive forms for the earth was an egg. Ancient Egyptians saw the whole earth as an egg guarded at night by the moon, “a great white bird . . . like a goose brooding over her egg.” The Gnostics, Christian mystics of the first and second centuries, also saw heaven and earth as a World Egg in the womb of the universe. Entwining the egg was a giant serpent, which warmed, guarded, hatched, and sometimes fed on it. “The Earth is an element placed in the middle of the world,” the Venerable Bede wrote in the seventh century, “as the yolk in the middle of an egg; around it is the water, like the white surrounding the yolk; outside that is the air, like the membrane of the egg; and around all is the fire, which closes it in as the shell does.” A thousand years later the English divine Thomas Burnet (16357-1715) combined Platonic theology, science, and Alpine-travel experience into a celebrated Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684) of his own. But he had to admit “that this notion of the Mundane Egg or that the World was Oviform, hath been the sence and language of all antiquity, Latins, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and others. ” Burnet’s “sacred theory” described the making and remaking of the earth’s surface in four phases: Creation, Deluge, Conflagra- tion, and Consummation. In the present stage, after the Deluge and prepar- ing for the Conflagration, the sun has dried out the planet, and internal changes have been readying the whole earth for burning. After the Confla- gration comes the millennium with a new heaven and a new earth; and after the millennium, when the earth will be changed into a bright star, all Scripture prophecies will be fulfilled. No ancient Greek maps have survived, but Greek literature describes a search for symmetry. Long before the Greeks began to believe that the earth was a sphere, they were debating what other simple form the earth might have taken. Herodotus ridiculed the Homeric notion that the earth was a The Geography of the Imagination 93 circular disk surrounded by the river Oceanus. It seemed obvious to him that the earth must be surrounded by a great desert. Belief in some kind of “equator” — a division of the earth into two equal parts— came even before the general belief that the earth was a sphere. The Nile and the Danube, according to Herodotus, lay symmetrically about a median line that ran through the Greek maps. A neat parallelogram was the image of the known world accepted by Aeschylus, the historian Ephorus, and other Greek writers. This “equator,” which followed the longitudinal axis of the Mediterranean in Ionian maps, seemed to explain many things. It showed that Asia Minor, which lay along that axis, and hence midway between the extreme points of the summer and winter risings and settings of the sun, naturally had the ideal climate. A square earth, too, appealed to many people. Ancient Peruvians imagined a boxlike world with a ridge-shaped roof where the great God lived. The Aztecs cast their universe in five squares — a central square and one extend- ing from each side. Each contained one of the four cardinal points reaching out from the Middle Place, the dwelling place of the fire god Xiuhtecutli, the mother and father of the gods, who dwelt in the navel of the earth. Other peoples have seen the universe as a wheel, or even as a tetrahedron. Grand myths and metaphors everywhere have helped make the universe seem intelligible, beautiful, and rational. The characters cast in the leading roles of Upholders of the World have been wonderfully varied. The Atlas of Greek lore, bearing the earth on his shoulders, is familiar to Europeans. In Mexico there were at least four heaven-bearing gods, of whom Quetzal- coatl was the most prominent. An ancient Hindu figure showed the hemi- spherical earth supported on the backs of four elephants standing on the hemispherical shell of a giant tortoise which floated on the world waters. One of the most appealing and most universal of these protomaps of the universe was the World-Tree. The Vedic poet explained that if a little tree could lift a rock as it grew, surely a great enough tree could support the heavens. So there grew images of the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge, like that in the Garden of Eden, and many peoples had their sacred tree. The Norse Eddas sang of the Cosmic Ash Yggdrasil, their World-Tree: The chief and most holy seat of the gods. . . . There the gods meet in council every day. It is the greatest and best of all trees. Its branches spread over the world and reach above heaven. Three roots sustain the tree and stand wide apart; one is with Asa. . . . under the second root, which extends to the Frost giants is the well of Mimir, wherein knowledge and wisdom are concealed. The third root of the Ash is in Heaven, and beneath it is the most sacred fountain of Urd. Here the gods have their doomstead. 94 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS Very early, by the fifth century b.c., Greek scholars saw that the earth was a globe. The first firm evidence is in Plato’s Phaedo. Then serious Greek thinkers ceased thinking of the earth as a flat disk floating on the waters. The Pythagoreans and Plato based their belief on aesthetic grounds. Since a sphere is the most perfect mathematical form, the earth must of course have that shape. To argue otherwise would be to deny order in the Creation. Aristotle (384-322 B.c.) agreed for reasons of pure mathematics, and he added some physical evidence. At the center of the universe the earth would naturally become and remain a sphere. Since all falling bodies tend toward the center, the particles of earth would form a sphere as they came together from all sides. “Furthermore the sphericity of the earth is proved by the evidence of our senses, for otherwise lunar eclipses would not take such forms; for whereas in the monthly phases of the moon the segments are of all sorts — straight, gibbous, and crescent — in eclipses the dividing line is always rounded. Consequently, if the eclipse is due to the interposition of the earth, the rounded line results from its spherical shape.” In Aristotle’s lifetime, mathematical geography made remarkable ad- vances among the Greeks. They still did not have enough observed detail about the surface of the earth to draw a useful world map, but by using pure mathematics and astronomy, they arrived at some surprisingly accurate estimates. Classical writers after Aristotle, not only the great philosopher- scientists like Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23-79) and Ptolemy (a.d. 90-168) but even the popular encyclopedists, assumed and elaborated on the sphericity of the earth. This discovery was to be one of the most important legacies of classical learning to the modern world. A spherical earth offered irresistible opportunities for the aesthetic imagi- nation. A sphere could be symmetrically, even beautifully, subdivided in so many ways! The ancient philosopher-geographers were not slow to find them. The first temptation was to see the sphere neatly encircled by parallel lines. If these were marked off in some regular way, might not the spaces between have a special significance? So the Greeks drew these lines around the whole sphere, dividing the earth into parallel subdivisions, which they called climata. These zones, unlike modern “climates,” had a geographical or astronomical, not a meteorological, significance. The length of the long- est day was roughly the same for all lands within a zone. Climata came from the Greek word clima, meaning “inclination,” since the length of the day was always determined by the inclination of the sun as it was seen in each place. In the zone near the pole the longest day of the year lasted over 20 hours, while near the equator daylight never lasted more than 12 hours. In between were zones where the longest day lasted all the various increments. Ancient writers disagreed over how many such zones ought to be distin- The Geography of the Imagination 95 guished. Some thought there were as few as three, others saw ten or more. The symmetry of such arrangements was disturbed because the zone where the longest day lasted from 14 to 15 hours would be 632 miles wide, while the zone where the longest day lasted from 19 to 20 hours would be only 173 miles wide. The most popular scheme was Pliny’s division of the part of the earth well known to the Greeks and Romans (that is, to 46° north latitude) into seven parallel segments all north of the equator. He indicated three more zones for the “wilderness” farther north. Ptolemy increased the number to 21 parallel segments for the whole northern hemisphere. Such arbitrary lines in the long run would have great significance for man’s grasp of the surface of the planet. But not what ancient writers expected. The influential Strabo (64 b.c.?-a.d. 25?), for example, insisted that the torrid climata on both sides of the equator, where the sun stood directly overhead for half a month each year, had a characteristic flora and fauna. There, Strabo said, the parched sandy soils “produce nothing but silphium [the small terebinth tree, the source of turpentine] and some pungent fruits that are withered by the heat; for those regions have in their neighborhood no mountains against which the clouds may break and pro- duce rain, nor indeed are they coursed by rivers; and for this reason they produce creatures with woolly hair, crumpled horns, protruding lips, and flat noses (for their extremities are contorted by the heat).” The dark complexion of the Ethiopians was said to come from the scorching sun of the tropical climata, and the blondness and savagery of inhabitants of the extreme north from the frigidity of the arctic climata. Out of the search for climata and a quest for symmetry came a Ptolemaic System of the Earth. Though less widely acknowledged than the Ptolemaic System of the Heavens, which every schoolboy knows to be wrong, Ptol- emy’s scheme still gives us our bearings on this planet. Herodotus and other early Greeks, in their pursuit of symmetry, drew an east-west line through the Mediterranean, bifurcating their known world. This simple device, which they elaborated to fit the new spherical form that they discovered for the earth, was a crucial beginning. Eratosthenes (2767-195 B.c.?), perhaps the greatest of ancient geogra- phers, is known to us mostly by hearsay, and by the attacks on him from those who owed him most. Julius Caesar seems to have relied on his Geography. In Alexandria he served as the second librarian of the greatest library in the Western world. “A mathematician among geographers,” he developed a technique for measuring the circumference of the earth which is still in use. From travelers Eratosthenes had heard that at noon on June 21 the sun cast no shadow in a well at Syene (modern Aswan) and was thus directly overhead. He knew that the sun always cast a shadow at Alexandria. From 96 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS knowledge available to him he considered Syene to be due south of Alex- andria. The idea occurred to him that if he could measure the length of the shadow of the sun in Alexandria at the time when there was no shadow in Aswan, he could calculate the circumference of the earth. On June 21 he measured the shadow of an obelisk in Alexandria and by simple geometry he calculated that the sun was 7° 14' from overhead. This is one-fiftieth of the 360° that make a full circle. This measure was remarkably accurate, for the actual difference in latitude of Aswan and Alexandria, by our best modern calculation, is 7 0 14'. Thus the circumference of the earth was fifty times the distance from Syene to Alexandria. But how great was this dis- tance? From travelers he learned that camels needed 50 days to cover the trip and that a camel traveled 100 stadia in a day. The distance from Syene to Alexandria was thus calculated at 5,000 stadia (50 X 100). He then calculated the circumference of the earth to be 250,000 stadia (50 X 5,000). We are not sure about the conversion of stadia (originally 600 Greek feet) into modern measures, but the best estimates put the Greek stadium at about 607 English feet. The Greek “stadium” from which we take our modern name was a foot-race course of precisely that length. By this calcu- lation Eratosthenes arrived at a figure for the circumference of the earth of some 28,700 miles, which is about 15 percent too high. It is no wonder that his measurement of angles was more accurate than his measurement of distance. For most of the history of surveying, angles have been measured with much greater precision than distances. The accu- racy of Eratosthenes’ figure for the circumference of the earth would not be equaled until modern times. His fruitful combination of the theory of astronomy and geometry with the evidence of everyday experience provided a model too long forgotten after his time. More important even than Eratosthenes’ final calculations was his tech- nique for charting the earth’s surface. We know this from the attacks on him by Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 165-c. 127 B.c.), who was probably the greatest of Greek astronomers. Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes, catalogued 1,000 stars, and is generally conceded to be the inven- tor of trigonometry. But he was consumed by an odd personal dislike for Eratosthenes, who had died thirty years before he was born. Eratosthenes had subdivided the earth by parallel east-west lines and north-south lines, or meridians. He separated the habitable world into a Northern Division and a Southern Division by an east-west line parallel to the equator, run- ning through the island of Rhodes and bisecting the Mediterranean. Then he added a north-south line at right angles, running through Alexandria. On Eratosthenes’ map the other lines — east-west and north-south — were not laid down at regular intervals. Instead he drew his lines through ancient, familiar, and prominent places — Alexandria, Rhodes, Meroe (the capital of The Geography of the Imagination 97 ancient Ethiopian kings), the Pillars of Hercules, Sicily, the Euphrates River, the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the mouth of the Indus River, the tip of the Indian peninsula. The result was an irregular network, serving human convenience by superimposing a neat grid on the earth’s spherical surface. Hipparchus took the next step. Why not mark off all climata lines com- pletely around the sphere, all parallel to the equinoctial line and at equal intervals from the equator to the poles? Then also mark off other lines at right angles to these spaced equally at the equator. The result would be a regular grid covering the whole planet. The climata lines could do more than merely describe regions of the earth that received the sunlight at similar angles. If numbered, they would provide a simple set of coordinates for locating every place on earth. How easy then to tell anyone where to find any city, river, or mountain on the planet! Eratosthenes had vaguely seen the possibilities of such a scheme. But in his day most of the places that people were interested in finding on their maps had been located only by travelers’ tales and by tradition. He knew this was not good enough, but he did not possess sufficient accurate points of reference for his grid. Hipparchus went on to insist that each place be located by exact astronomical observation toward a worldwide grid of latitudes and longitudes. He not only had the right idea but saw how it could be applied in a precise, practical scheme. By using celestial phenomena common to the whole earth to locate places on the earth’s surface, he set the pattern for man’s cartographic mastery of this planet. Incidentally, Hipparchus invented the mathematical vocabulary still used in modern times. Eratosthenes had divided the earth sphere into sixty parts. But Hipparchus marked off the planet’s surface into 360 parts which became the “degrees” of modern geographers. He placed his meridian — or longitude — lines on the equator at intervals of about 70 miles, which re- mains roughly the dimension of a “degree.” By combining the traditional climata with these, he conceived a world map based on astronomical obser- vations of latitude and longitude. Latitude and longitude were to the measurement of space what the mechanical clock was to the measurement of time. They signaled man’s dominance over nature, discovering and marking the dimensions of experi- ence. They substituted precise units suiting human convenience for the accidental shapes of the Creation. A pity that Ptolemy — indisputable father of modern geography — would be indelibly identified with an obsolete astronomy! One reason why Ptolemy the geographer cuts so inconspicuous a figure in history is that we know so little about his life. A Greek Egyptian or an Egyptian Greek, he bore a name 98 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS common in Alexandrine Egypt, and incidentally that of one of Alexander the Great’s closest companions. Another Ptolemy became governor of Egypt on Alexander’s death, then proclaimed himself king and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt for three centuries (304-30 B.c.). But those Ptolemies were only kings, while this Ptolemy was a man of science. Ptolemy seems to have had a great talent for improving the works of others, for fitting myriad bits of knowledge into usable generalizations. His Almagest on astronomy, his Geography, his Tetrabiblos on astrology, as we have seen, together with his writings on music and optics, and his chrono- logical table of the kings of his whole known world summed up the best thinking of his day. For his geography he drew on Eratosthenes and Hippar- chus. Ptolemy frequently acknowledged his debt to the prolific Strabo, the Greek historian-geographer who used tradition, myth, and his own wide travels to survey the known world. What is most remarkable is how strong Ptolemy’s influence remains two millennia after his death. The framework and the vocabulary of our maps of the world are still shaped by Ptolemy. The grid system which he adopted and improved remains the basis of all modern cartography. He was the first to popularize, and may actually have invented, the expres- sions for latitude and longitude. To Ptolemy, however, these words seem to have had overtones, now lost, of the “width” and “length” of the known world. In his Geography he gave the latitudes and longitudes for eight thousand places. He established the convention, second nature to us today, of orienting maps with the north at the top and the east at the right. Perhaps this was because the better-known places in his world were in the northern hemisphere, and on a flat map these were most convenient to study if they were in the upper right-hand corner. He marked off his world map into twenty-six regions, changing the scale to give more detail to populous areas. He established the modern scholars’ distinction be- tween geography (mapping the earth as a whole) and chorography (map- ping particular places in detail). Following Hipparchus, he divided the circle and the sphere into 360 degrees, and subdivided each of these into partes minutae primae (“minutes”) and then each of these into partes minutae secundae (“seconds”) of the arc. Ptolemy had the courage to face the cartographic consequences of the spherical shape of the earth. And he developed a table of chords, based on the trigonometry of Hipparchus, to define the distance between places. He devised a way of projecting the spherical earth on a plane surface, a modified spherical projection of the habitable quadrant of the earth, which still has much to be said for it. Ptolemy’s errors did not come from any lack of a critical spirit. The best hypothesis, he said, was the simplest that would The Geography of the Imagination 99 comprehend the facts. He cautioned us to accept only data that had been subjected to the criticism of diverse witnesses. Ptolemy’s essential weakness was his desperate lack of facts. In the long run, raw materials for a satisfactory atlas of the world would have to come from qualified observers all over the world. It is not surprising that with his limited data he fell into some crucial errors. One of these was probably the most influential miscalculation in history. For the circumference of the earth, Ptolemy had rejected the surprisingly accurate estimate of Eratosthenes. Ptolemy calculated each degree of the earth to be only 50 miles instead of 70, and then following the Greek polymath Posidonius (c. 135-c. 51 b.c.) and Strabo, he declared the earth to be 18,000 miles around. Together with this providential underestimate, he made the mistake of stretching Asia out eastward to reach far beyond its real dimensions, for 180 degrees instead of its actual 130 degrees. On Ptolemy’s maps this had the effect of grossly reducing the extent of the unknown parts of the world between the eastern tip of Asia and the western tip of Europe. How long might the European encounter with the New World have been postponed if Ptolemy had followed not Strabo but Eratos- thenes? And then, if Columbus had known how large the world really was? But Columbus followed Ptolemy, than whom there then was no higher geographic authority. And he further improved his prospects by figuring a degree on the earth to be 10 percent smaller than Ptolemy’s calculation. Still, it is not only by his errors that Ptolemy must be given some credit for Columbus’ exploit. By using all available facts to confirm the spherical character of the earth, and then by establishing the latitude-longitude grid on which to hang increasing knowledge, Ptolemy had prepared Europe for world exploring. Ptolemy rejected the Homeric image of a known world surrounded by uninhabitable Ocean. Instead he suggested the vastness of lands still unknown and still to be discovered, and so opened minds for knowledge. It was far more difficult to imagine the unknown than to chart the outlines of what people imagined that they knew. Not only for Columbus, but for the Arabs and others who had put their faith in classical learning, Ptolemy remained the source, the standard, and the sovereign of world geography. If, in the millennium after Ptolemy, mariners and their royal sponsors had freely and adventurously carried on where Ptolemy had left off, the history of both the Old World and the New World might have been quite different. IOO THE EARTH AND THE SEAS The Prison of Christian Dogma Christian Europe did not carry on the work of Ptolemy. Instead the leaders of orthodox Christendom built a grand barrier against the progress of knowledge about the earth. Christian geographers in the Middle Ages spent their energies embroidering a neat, theologically appealing picture of what was already known, or was supposed to be known. Geography had no place in the medieval catalogue of the “seven liberal arts.” Somehow it fit neither into the quadrivium of mathematical disci- plines (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) nor into the trivium of logical and linguistic disciplines (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric). For a thousand years of the Middle Ages no common synonym for “geography” was in ordinary usage, and the word did not enter the English language until the mid-sixteenth century. Lacking the dignity of a proper discipline, geog- raphy was an orphan in the world of learning. The subject became a ragbag filled with odds and ends of knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, of Biblical dogma, travelers’ tales, philosophers’ speculations, and mythical imagin- ings. It is easier to recount what happened than to explain satisfactorily how it happened or why. After the death of Ptolemy, Christianity conquered the Roman Empire and most of Europe. Then we observe a Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia, which afflicted the continent from a.d. 300 to at least 1300. During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers. We no longer find Ptolemy’s careful outlines of shores, rivers, and mountains, handily overlaid by a grid constructed on the best-known astronomical data. In- stead, simple diagrams authoritatively declare the true shape of the world, though they are only pious caricatures. We have no lack of evidence of what the medieval Christian geographers thought. More than six hundred mappae mundi, maps of the world, survive from the Middle Ages. They come in all sizes — some like those in copies The Geography of the Imagination IOI of the seventh-century encyclopedia of Isidore of Seville, only two inches across, others like the map in Hereford Cathedral (a.d. 1275), five feet in diameter. In the days before the printing press, each of these, and the thousands of others that must have been lost, attest the willingness of individual craftsmen and patrons to invest in their special version of the world. What is most remarkable is that when all such maps were only imaginary there was so little variation in plans of the earth. The common form of these caricatures has led them to be called “wheel- maps” or “T-O” Maps. The whole habitable earth was depicted as a circular dish (an “O”), divided by a T-shaped flow of water. East was put at the top, which was what was then meant by “orienting” a map. Above the “T” was the continent of Asia, below to the left of the vertical was the continent of Europe, and to the right was Africa. The bar dividing Europe from Africa is the Mediterranean Sea; the horizontal bar dividing Europe and Africa from Asia is the Danube and the Nile, supposed to flow in a single line. All is surrounded by the “Ocean Sea.” These were Ecumenical maps, for they aimed to show the “Ecumene,” the whole inhabited world. Designed to express what orthodox Christians were expected to believe, they were not so much maps of knowledge as maps of Scriptural dogma. The very simplicity that offends the geographer tes- tifies to the simple clarity of Christian belief. According to Scripture, as Isidore of Seville explained, the inhabited earth had been divided among the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Asia was named after a Queen Asia “of the posterity of Shem, and is inhabited by 27 peoples . . . Africa is derived from Afer, a descendant of Abraham [Ham], and has 30 races of 360 towns,” while Europe, named after the Europa of mythol- ogy, “is inhabited by the 15 tribes of the sons of Japheth and has 120 cities.” At the center of each map was Jerusalem. “Thus saith the Lord God; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her” (Ezekiel 5:5). These words of the prophet Ezekiel over- ruled any trivial earthly needs for latitude or longitude. “Navel of the world” (umbilicus terrae) were the words of the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible. Medieval Christian geographers obstinately kept the Holy City right there. New conflicts between faith and knowledge would come when explorers expanded the map eastward, then westward. Dared Christians move their Jerusalem? Or could they ignore the discoveries? There was nothing new about putting the most sacred place at the center. As we have seen, that is where the Hindus placed their Mt. Meru, “the center of the earth.” The belief in a sacred mountain, a hill of creation, with variants in Egypt, Babylonia, and elsewhere, was simply another way of saying that the most prominent place on earth had been the navel of the 102 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS world. Eastern cities commonly placed themselves at the center. Babylon (Bab-ilani, “door of the gods”) was where the gods came down to earth. In Muslim tradition the Ka’bah was the highest point on earth, and the polestar showed that Mecca was opposite the center of the sky. The capital for a perfect Chinese sovereign was where the sundial cast no shadow at noon on the day of the summer solstice. It was not at all surprising that Christian geographers, too, put their Holy City at the center, making it the place of pilgrimage, and the destination of crusades. What was surprising was the Great Interruption. All people have wanted to believe themselves at the center. But after the accumulated advances of classical geography, it required amnesiac effort to ignore the growing mass of knowledge and retreat into a world of faith and caricature. We have already seen how the Chinese emperors produced Su Sung’s Heavenly Clockwork ahead of any comparable clock in the West, then sequestered the knowledge and the technology. The Great Interruption of geography that we are about to describe was a far more remarkable act of retreat. For the advancing geographic knowledge in the West had been widespread, reaching into the cultural interstices of a varied continent. Christian dogma and Biblical lore imposed other figments of the theologi- cal imagination on the map of the world. The maps themselves became guides to the Articles of Faith. Every episode and every place mentioned in Scripture required a location and became a tempting arena for Christian geographers. One of the most enticing of these was the Garden of Eden. In the eastern part of the world, then at the top of the map, medieval Christians commonly showed a Terrestrial Paradise with figures of Adam and Eve and the serpent all surrounded by a high wall or a mountain range. “The First place in the East is Paradise,” explained Isidore of Seville (560-636), reputed to be the most learned man of the age, “a garden famous for its delights, where man can never go, for a fiery wall surrounds it and reaches to the sky. Here is the tree of life which gives immortality, here the fountain which divides into four streams that go forth and water the world.” The trackless wastes that separated man from Paradise were infested with wild beasts and serpents. This orthodox view still left ample room for learned theological debate. To fill the whole world with the rudimentary Scripture-picture, it was necessary both to embroider the Sacred Word and to ignore the real shape of the world. It is easy to forget what these medieval Christian believers enjoyed, in exchange for the scientific progress that they condemned. A harvest of imaginary delights and terrors! Belief in Eden became a pleasure as well as a duty. In Hebrew, pious writers explained, “Eden” meant a place of delight. God had placed Eden The Geography of the Imagination 103 on a height, touching the circle of the moon’s orbit, so that Paradise would stay safe and dry above the waters of the Flood. Among the most popular medieval travel literature were the Journeys to Paradise. According to the Iter ad Paradisum, after Alexander the Great had conquered India he came upon a broad river, the Ganges, on which he embarked with five hundred men. A month later they arrived at a vast walled city where the souls of the just lived until the Last Judgment. That, of course, was the Terrestrial Paradise. Brave monks in quest of Paradise, like voyagers to outer space in later centuries, became popular heroes. Paradise fiction became a genre of sacred literature, just as space adventure would be a form of science fiction. Adam’s son, Seth, according to one popular story, brought back seeds from the Tree of Knowledge to plant in Adam’s mouth after Adam had died. A tree that sprouted from this seed provided the wood for the cross on which Christ was to be crucified. Another story told how three monks set out from their monastery between the Tigris and the Euphrates to seek the place where “the earth joins the sky.” Finally they reached the dark wildernesses of India, where they found dog-headed men, pygmies, and serpents, and saw the altars that had been set up by Alexander the Great to mark the outer- most boundaries of his own travels. Across fantastic landscapes peopled with giants and birds that talked, the monks plodded on until, about twenty miles from the Terrestrial Paradise, they came upon the aged Saint Macarius living in a cave with two friendly lions. He delighted them with stories of the wonders of Paradise, only to turn them back with his warning that Eden could never be entered by living men. But even on such basic matters as the location of Eden Christian geogra- phers were not unanimous. One of the most famous mortal travelers to Paradise was the brave Irish monk Saint Brendan (484-578). Believing that Paradise was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, he sailed westward until after terrifying adventures he came upon a beautiful island of unsurpassed fertility. Saint Brendan confidently asserted that this was Paradise, “Pro- mised Land of the Saints.” And even those who preferred to locate their Paradise elsewhere kept “Saint Brendan’s Island” on their maps and charts. The story of this heroic monk was told and retold in Latin, French, English, Saxon, Flemish, Irish, Welsh, Breton, and Scottish Gaelic. His sacred island remained plainly marked on maps for more than a thousand years, at least until 1759. And the pioneers of modern cartography and navigation duti- fully tried to find its place. The classic globe-maker Martin Behaim in 1492 put Saint Brendan’s Island close to the equator, west of the Canaries, while some found it nearer Ireland, and others saw it in the West Indies. Only after two centuries (1526-1721) of Portuguese expeditions searching for Saint 104 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS Brendan’s Terrestrial Paradise did believing Christians finally give up the quest. They had found a better location for their Eden elsewhere. Hardly less vivid than these delights of Eden were the menaces of Gog and Magog. Ezekiel had prophesied “against Gog, the land of Magog.” “And when the thousand years are expired,” the Book of Revelation had announced, “Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.” Just as Eden was usually placed at the end of the East, so Gog and Magog were generally located in the extreme north. While the existence of Gog and Magog became an article of faith, their precise north- ern location was long disputed, which made the source of barbarian inva- sion all the vaguer and all the more threatening. One popular chronicler, Aethicus of Istria, told how Alexander the Great had driven Gog and Magog “and twenty-two nations of evil men” far northward to the shores of the Northern Ocean. There they were held back on a peninsula beyond the Caspian Gates by a wall of iron that Alexander had built with God’s help — perhaps a confused reference to the Great Wall of China. Some said that the cement for this wall came from a bituminous lake at the mouth of hell. When would the frightful invasion come? And from where? The letters of the legendary Prester John were widely quoted, warning against Gog and Magog and other cannibal peoples who, in the days of Anti-Christ, would devastate all Christendom, including even the city of Rome. Roger Bacon, a medieval pioneer of science, urged the close study of geography so that by knowing the location of Gog and Magog, people could plan against the coming invasion. Since Gog and Magog were mentioned in the Koran, learned Muslims gave special attention to this problem. The great Arab geographer Al-Idrisi (1099-1166) reported an expedition to locate the wall that held back these pagan forces of the Apocalypse. Other Muslim writers identified Gog and Magog with the ruthless marauding Vikings. Locating the people and the place of Gog and Magog became a favorite pastime of Christian geogra- phers. Could they be found among the mysterious tribes of Central Asia? Were they perhaps the Lost Tribes of Israel? Or were they the “Goths and Magoths”? Despite these nagging doubts, the land of Gog and Magog, usually bounded by a great wall, was found clearly marked in some place or other on medieval Christian maps. Few adventures in pursuit of myth were more seductive than the quest for the mythical kingdom of Prester John. In the twelfth century, when Euro- pean Christendom was counting the years till the invasion of Gog and The Geography of the Imagination 105 Magog, the present threat of Saracens at the Holy Land stirred the quest for allies against the Muslim hordes. Tales came westward of the priest-king Prester John somewhere in the fabulous “Indies,” who had already reput- edly succeeded against the Muslims in his own realm. In the lands where Saint Thomas had been buried, he was said to combine shrewd military judgment, saintly piety, and the wealth of Croesus. Was he God’s messenger to shift the balance of forces and so forestall a Mongol invasion? A twelfth-century chronicle of Otto Bishop of Freising optimistically reported information to the papal court in 1145 that this Prester John was descended from the race of the Three Wise Men, and governed the lands he inherited from them with a scepter of solid emerald. “Not many years before, one John, king and priest who dwelt in the extreme Orient beyond Persia and Armenia. . . . advanced to fight for the Church at Jerusalem; but when he arrived at the Tigris and found no means of transport for his army, he turned northwards, as he had heard that the river in that quarter was frozen over in winter time. After halting on its banks for some years in expectation of a frost, he was obliged to return home.” By good fortune, about 1165, there mysteriously appeared in western Europe the verbatim text of a letter from Prester John to his friends the Byzantine emperor of Rome, Emanuel I, and the King of France promising to help them conquer the Holy Sepulcher. Scholars have never established who really wrote the letter, where or why. We do know that it was a forgery, though we do not know in what language it was originally written. “Prester John’s Letter” enjoyed enormous popularity across Europe. More than one hundred Latin manuscript versions have appeared, besides numerous others in Italian, German, English, Serbian, Russian, and Hebrew. The popularity of this ten-page manuscript booklet reminds us that, before newspapers or magazines, there was already a primitive yellow jour- nalism to satisfy the news-hungry. Was this the Emperor out of the East who would liberate the Holy Sepulcher? Would the mysterious Prester John be a decisive new force to help Christians block the expanding Muslim Empire? Prince Henry the Navigator himself took a personal interest in locating this ally for his maritime adventures. After 1488, when the Por- tuguese opened a new Eastern waterway to India around the tip of Africa, there were commercial reasons to hope that Prester John was real. Two centuries later, when the Russians developed their overland trade with India, to guide themselves they sought out copies of the Russian version of Prester John’s famous letter. The sensational letter from Prester John was concocted from reports of the missionary Apostle Saint Thomas, whose body lying in India had wrought more miracles than any other saint, and who, though dead for io6 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS eleven centuries, came back to preach in his Indian church every year. Tidbits were added from the romance of Alexander the Great and the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor: You should also know that we have birds called griffins who can easily carry an ox or a horse into their nest to feed their young. We have still another kind of birds who rule over all other fowl in the world. They are of fiery color, their wings are as sharp as razors, and they are called Yllerion. In the whole world there are but two of them. They live for sixty years, at the end of which they fly away to plunge into the sea. But first they hatch two or three eggs for forty days till the young ones come out. . . . Likewise, you would know that we have other birds called tigers who are so strong and bold that they lift and kill with ease an armored man together with his horse. Know that in one province of our country is a wilderness and that there live homed men who have but one eye in front and three or four in the back. There are also women who look similar. We have in our country still another kind of men who feed only on raw flesh of men and women and do not hesitate to die. And when one of them passes away, be it their father or mother, they gobble him up without cooking him. They hold that it is good and natural to eat human flesh and they do it for the redemption of their sins. This nation is cursed by God and it is called Gog and Magog and there are more of them than of all other peoples. With the coming of Antichrist they will spread over the whole world, for they are his friends and allies. His realm, Prester John explained, included forty-two kings who were all “mighty and good Christians,” the Great Feminie ruled by three queens and defended by one hundred thousand armed women, together with pygmies who fought an annual war against the birds, and bowmen “who from the waist up are men, but whose lower part is that of a horse.” Since certain remarkable worms could live only in fire, Prester John maintained forty thousand men to keep the fires alive. In the flames these worms spun threads similar to silk, and “whenever we wish to wash them, we put them into fire whence they come clean and fresh.” He described his magic mirrors, en- chanted fountains, and waters from underground rivers that turned to precious stones. The forged letter seemed to become more credible with every copying and with the passing centuries. We will never know how many true believers were seduced to search for the mythic kingdom. As late as 1573, on some of the best Dutch maps of the Great Age of Discovery we still see the empire of Prester John now moved to Abyssinia. The Geography of the Imagination 107 A Flat Earth Returns “Can any one be so foolish,” asked the revered Lactantius, “the Christian Cicero,” whom Constantine chose to tutor his son, “as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads, or places where things may be hanging downwards, trees growing backwards, or rain falling upwards? Where is the marvel of the hanging gardens of Babylon if we are to allow of a hanging world at the Antipodes?” Saint Augustine, Chrysostom, and others of their stature heartily agreed that the Antipodes (“anti”-“podes,” a place where men’s feet were opposite) could not exist. Classic theories of the Antipodes described an impassable fiery zone surrounding the equator which separated us from an inhabited region on the other side of the globe. This raised serious doubts in the Christian mind about the sphericity of the earth. The race that lived below that torrid zone of course could not be of the race of Adam, nor among those redeemed by the dispensation of Christ. If one believed that Noah’s Ark had come to rest on Mt. Ararat north of the equator, then there was no way for living creatures to have reached an Antipodes. To avoid heretical possibilities, faithful Christians preferred to believe there could be no Antipodes, or even, if necessary, that the earth was no sphere. Saint Augustine, too, was explicit and dogmatic, and his immense authority, compounded with that of Isi- dore, the Venerable Bede, Saint Boniface, and others, warned away rash spirits. The ancient Greek and Roman geographers had not been troubled by such matters. But no Christian could entertain the possibility that any men were not descended from Adam or could be so cut off by tropical fires that they were unreachable by Christ’s Gospel. “Yes, verily,” declared Romans 10:18, “their sound went forth all over the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world.” Neither Faith nor Scripture had any place for beings unknown to Adam or to Christ. “God forbid,” wrote a tenth-century interpreter of Boethius, “that anybody think we accept the stories of an- tipodes, which are in every way contradictory to Christian faith.” “Belief in Antipodes” became another stock charge against heretics prepared for io8 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS burning. Some few compromising spirits tried to accept a spherical earth for geographic reasons, while still denying the existence of Antipodean inhabitants for theological reasons. But their number did not multiply. It was a fanatical recent convert, Cosmas of Alexandria, who provided a full-fledged Topographia Christiana, which lasted these many centuries to the dismay and embarrassment of modern Christians. We do not know his real name, but he was called Cosmas on account of the fame of his geo- graphic work, and nicknamed Indicopleustes (Indian Traveler), because he was a merchant who traveled around the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and had traded in Abyssinia and as far east as Ceylon. After his conversion to Christianity about a.d. 548, Cosmas became a monk and retired to a cloister on Mt. Sinai where he wrote his memoirs and his classic defense of the Christian view of the earth. This massive illustrated treatise in twelve books gives us the earliest surviving maps of Christian origin. Cosmas rewarded the faithful with a full measure of vitriol against pagan error and a wonderfully simple diagram of the Christian universe. In his very first book he destroyed the abominable heresy of the sphericity of the earth. Then he expounded his own system, supported, of course, from Scripture, then from the Church Fathers, and finally from some non-Chris- tian sources. What he provided was not so much a theory as a simple, clear, and attractive visual model. When the apostle Paul in Hebrews 9:1-3, declared the first Tabernacle of Moses to be the pattern of this whole world, he conveniently provided Cosmas his plan in all necessary detail. Cosmas had no trouble translating Saint Paul’s words into physical reality. The first Tabernacle “had ordi- nances of divine service and a worldly sanctuary; for there was a Tabernacle made; the first wherein was the candlestick, and the table and the shew- bread, which is called the Sanctuary.” By a “worldly” sanctuary Saint Paul meant “that it was, so to speak, a pattern of the world, wherein was also the candlestick, by this meaning the luminaries of heaven, and the table, that is, the earth, and the shew-bread, by this meaning the fruits which it produces annually.” When Scripture said that the table of the Tabernacle should be two cubits long and one cubit wide, it meant that the whole flat earth was twice as long, east to west, as it was wide. In Cosmas’ appealing plan the whole earth was a vast rectangular box, most resembling a trunk with a bulging lid, the arch of heaven, above which the Creator surveyed his works. In the north was a great mountain, around which the sun moved, and whose obstructions of the sunlight explained the variant lengths of the days and the seasons. The lands of the world were, of course, symmetrical: in the East the Indians, in the South the Ethiops, in the West the Celts, and in the North the Scythians. And from Paradise flowed the four great rivers: the Indus or Ganges into India; the Nile The Geography of the Imagination 109 through Ethiopia to Egypt; and the Tigris and the Euphrates that watered Mesopotamia. There was, of course, only one “face” of the earth — that which God gave to us the descendants of Adam — which made any sugges- tion of Antipodes both absurd and heretical. Cosmas’ work is still very much worth consulting as a wholesome tonic for any who believe there may be limits to human credulity. After Cosmas came a legion of Christian geographers each offering his own variant on the Scriptural plan. There was Orosius, the Spanish priest of the fifth century who wrote a famous encyclopedia, Historiae adversum paganos, where he retailed the familiar threefold division of the world into Asia, Europe, and Africa, embellished by some generalizations of his own: Much more land remains uncultivated and unexplored in Africa because of the heat of the sun than in Europe because of the intensity of the cold, for certainly almost all animals and plants adapt themselves more readily and easily to great cold than to great heat. There is an obvious reason why Africa, so far as contour and population are concerned, appears small in every respect (i.e., when com- pared with Europe and Asia). Owing to her natural location the continent has less space and owing to the bad climate she has more desert land. Then the even more influential Christian encyclopedist Isidore Arch- bishop of Seville in the seventh century explained that the earth was known as orbis terrarum because of its roundness (orbis) like a wheel. “It is quite evident,” he observed, “that the two parts Europe and Africa occupy half the world and that Asia alone occupies the other half. The former were made into two parts because the Great Sea called the Mediterranean enters from the Ocean between them and cuts them apart.” Isidore’s “wheel maps” followed the convention of the time by putting east at the top: Paradise is a place lying in the eastern parts, whose name is translated out of the Greek into Latin as hortus [i.e., garden]. It is called in the Hebrew tongue Eden, which is translated in our language as Deliciae [i.e., place of luxury or delight]. Uniting these two gives us Garden of Delight; for it is planted with every kind of wood and fruit-bearing tree having also the tree of life. There is neither cold nor heat there but a continual spring temperature. From the middle of the Garden, a spring gushes forth to water the whole grove, and, dividing up, it provides the sources of four rivers. Approach to this place was barred to man after his sin, for now it is hedged about on all sides by a sword-like flame, that is to say it is surrounded by a wall of fire that reaches almost to the sky. Christian geographers who lacked facts to fill their landscapes found a rich resource in the ancient fantasies. While they were contemptuous of pagan science, which they considered a menace to Christian faith, their no THE EARTH AND THE SEAS prejudice did not include pagan myths. These were so numerous, so color- ful, and so contradictory that they could serve the most dogmatic Christian purposes. While Christian geographers feared the close calculations of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, they cheerfully embellished their pious Jerusalem-centered maps with the wildest ventures of pagan imagina- tion. Julius Solinus (fl. a.d. 250), surnamed Polyhistor, or “Teller of Varied Tales,” provided the standard source of geographic myth during all the years of the Great Interruption, from the fourth till the fourteenth centu- ries. Solinus himself was probably not a Christian. Nine-tenths of his Collec- tanea rerum memorabilium (Gallery of Wonderful Things), first published about a.d. 230-240, came straight out of Pliny’s Natural History, though Solinus does not even mention his name. And the rest was foraged from other classical authors. Solinus’ peculiar talent, as a recent historian of geography observes, was “to extract the dross and leave the gold.” It is doubtful if anyone else over so long a period has ever influenced geography “so profoundly or so mischievously.” Yet Solinus’ dross had wide appeal. Saint Augustine himself drew on Solinus, as did all the other leading Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages. The stories and fabulous images that Solinus retailed enlivened Christian maps right down to the Age of Discovery. They became an all-encompass- ing network of fantasy, replacing the forgotten rational gridwork of latitude and longitude, which had been Ptolemy’s legacy. Solinus found wonders near and far. From Italy he reported people who sacrificed to Apollo by dancing barefoot on burning coals, pythons that grew long and fat by feeding on the udders of milk cows, and lynxes whose urine congealed to “the hardness of precious stone, having magnetic powers and the color of amber.” Grasshoppers and crickets in Rhegium still dared make no sound because Hercules, irritated by their noise, had once ordered them to keep silent. Further afield were the dog-headed Simeans of Ethiopia, ruled by a dog-king. Along the Ethiopian coast were peoples with four eyes, while along the Niger were ants as big as mastiffs. In Germany there was a mule-like creature with such a long upper lip that “he cannot feed except walking backward.” Human monstrosities that were normal in remote parts of the world included tribes who had their eight-toed feet turned backwards, men with dogs’ heads and talons for fingers who “barked for speech,” people who had only one leg, but with a foot so large that it protected them from the hot sun by serving as a parasol. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of that age, so familiar that it has lost its significance for us, was “The Mediterranean.” The Romans had called that body of water — the whole chain of inland seas between Africa, Asia, and Europe — mare internum or mare nostrum. Solinus was one of the first The Geography of the Imagination iii to call these the “mediterranean” seas — seas in the middle of the earth. The celebrated Isidore of Seville converted “mediterranean” into a proper name, and the authority of Isidore was not to be gainsaid! While Christian geography in Europe was becoming this hodgepodge of fantasy and dogma, elsewhere people still advanced their knowledge of the earth, and their ability to chart earthly space. The Chinese had quite inde- pendently, without the aid of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, or Ptolemy, de- vised a grid pattern that they superimposed on the irregular surface of the earth. We have seen that what the clock did for time, the rectangular map-grid did for space, providing uniform receptacles in which the endless variety of land and water, mountain and desert, could be discerned, de- scribed, discovered, and rediscovered. While a spherical earth was the basis of the Greek cartography, a flat earth was the basis of the Chinese. By the time that Ptolemy had done his work in the West, Chinese cartographers had developed their own usable techniques of map-grids and a rich tradition of world cartography, which happily grew without the amnesiac Interruption that afflicted the West. The Greeks had developed their grid system along the lines of latitude and longitude so easily drawn around a sphere. But since it was so difficult to project a spherical surface on a flat sheet, in practice the Greek grid system of latitude and longitude was not substantially different from what it would have been if they had conceived the surface of the earth as flat. Since the Greek grid system grew out of the requirements of a spherical shape, the Chinese rectangular grid, which made their whole cartography possible, must have had quite other origins. What were they? From the earliest political records of the Ch’in era (221-207 b.c.), we find numerous references to maps and their uses. China, unified in 221 B.c., was both the creature and the creator of a vast bureaucracy, which had to know the features and the boundaries of its extensive regions. The Rites of Chou (1120-256 B.c.) had required the Director-General of the Masses to prepare maps of each feudal principality and register its populations. When the Chou emperor toured his realm, the Geographer-Royal was at his side explaining the topography and products of each part of the country. Under the Han dynasty (202 b.c.-a.d. 220) maps appear again and again as the indispensable apparatus of empire. The last two millennia in China display a galaxy of cartographic talent. During the heyday of religious cartography in Europe the Chinese were marching steadily ahead toward quantitative cartography. Even before Ptolemy had done his work in Alexandria, a Chinese pioneer Chang Heng (a.d. 78-139) had “cast a network of coordinates about heaven and earth, 112 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS and reckoned on the basis of it.” Within two centuries the Chinese Ptolemy, Phei Hsui, appointed in a.d. 267 as Minister of Works to the first emperor of the Chin dynasty (265-420), applied these techniques to make a detailed eighteen-sheet map of China. “The great Chin dynasty has unified space in all the six directions,” he explained, and it was only appropriate that map- makers should provide comprehensive maps, free of error, and drawn to scale, showing “mountains and lakes, the courses of rivers, the plateaus and plains, the slopes and marshes, the limits of the nine ancient provinces and the sixteen modern ones, . . . commanderies and fiefs, prefectures and cities . . . and lastly, inserting the roads, paths, and navigable rivers.” In the preface to his atlas, Phei Hsui gave simple directions for making a map to proper scale, with rectangular grids. “If one draws a map without having graduated divisions,” he warns, “there is no means of distinguishing between what is near and what is far. . . . But ... a true scale representation of the distances is fixed by the graduated divisions. So also the reality of the relative positions is attained by the use of paced sides of right-angled trian- gles; and the true scale of degrees and figures is reproduced by the determi- nations of high and low, angular dimensions, and curved or straight lines. Thus even if there are great obstacles in the shape of high mountains or vast lakes, huge distances or strange places, necessitating climbs and descents, retracing of steps or detours — everything can be taken into account and determined. When the principle of the rectangular grid is properly applied, then the straight and the curved, the near and the far, can conceal nothing of their form from us.” How did the Chinese develop so refined a technique for mastering the earth’s irregularities? From earliest times, it seems, they had made land allotments by a scheme of coordinates. From the times of the Ch’in dynasty, the emperor’s maps had been drawn on silk. The terms (ching and wei) which Phei Hsui used for the coordinates on his maps were the same words that had long been used for the warp and the weft in the weaving of textiles. Was the idea of a rectangular grid on a map suggested by finding that a place on a silken map could be located by following a warp and a weft thread to their meeting place? Or was the origin possibly in the diviner’s board of Han times that used a system of coordinates to represent the whole cosmos? Or was it connected, somehow, with the form of the early Chinese chessboard, which located pieces by their coordinates? Whatever the origins, the result is plain enough: a well-developed and widely used system of rectangular grids. In 801, during the T’ang dynasty (618-907), the emperor’s cartogra- pher completed a grid map of the whole empire on a scale of 1 inch to 100 // (one-third of a mile: 33 VS miles), which measured 30 feet long and 33 feet high. Maps became so popular that they were found even in the imperial baths. The Geography of the Imagination »3 Cartographers found ways to link geographical with celestial coordinates, and without interruption they continued to elaborate their grid system. While Christian cosmographers were fantasizing their maps to fit Scriptural texts, Chinese map-makers were making unprecedented advances. More and more the grid pattern imposed for human convenience domi- nates their design. By the Sung era (960-1279), they are regularly placing north at the top. The Mongol unification of Asia under Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century brought masses of new geographical information to imperial map-makers. With the passage of time, the grid becomes more rather than less prominent on the face of Chinese maps. A whole new cartography developed, called the Mongolian style, in which the map itself became simply a grid, with no effort to delineate the earth’s erratic shape, but with the names of places and tribes inserted in their proper squares. By the mid-twelfth century, even before the general revival of Ptolemy in Europe, when the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi made his world map in 1150 for Roger II, Norman king of Sicily, he too used a grid scheme which, like that on Chinese maps, makes no allowance for a curved earth. Perhaps, as Joseph Needham suggests, the long tradition of grid maps of China had reached the Arabs in Sicily through the Arab colony at Canton and through the increasing number of Arab travelers to the East. And so perhaps the Chinese played a part in ending the Great Interruption — setting European geographers once again on the path of knowledge, rediscovering the quan- titative tools that were the heritage from Greece and Rome. PART FIVE From the East, light. (Ex Oriente, lux.) — LATIN PROVERB Too far East is West. — ENGLISH PROVERB Pilgrims and Crusaders The same faith that had fantasized the landscape and imprisoned Chris- tians in dogmatic geography would lure pilgrims and crusaders from Europe on paths of discovery to the East. The Star of Bethlehem, which drew the Three Kings, guided countless faithful in later centuries to their Holy Land. Pilgrimage became a Christian institution and paths of faith would become paths of discovery. Within a century after the death of Jesus a few intrepid believers were journeying to Jerusalem for penance, for thanksgiving, or simply to walk the earth where their Savior had walked. After Emperor Constantine be- came a Christian, his mother, Empress Helena, went to Jerusalem in 327, turned archaeologist, found the Mount of Calvary, collected supposed pieces of the True Cross, and even uncovered the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus reputedly had been buried. There Constantine himself built the first Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The learned Saint Jerome settled in 386 in a monastery in Bethlehem provided by the noble Roman lady Saint Paula where he instructed pilgrims after they had visited the holy places. By the early fifth century there were two hundred monasteries and pilgrim hospices near Jerusalem. Saint Augustine and other Church Fathers warned that the Christian tourist to the Holy Land might be distracted from his journey to the Heavenly City. Still the stream of pilgrims grew, aided by countless handy guides and a chain of hospitable lodgings all along the way. The pilgrim, blessed by his priest before setting out, carrying staff and mussel shell, wearing his broad flat-crowned hat and bearing the badge of his destination, became a picturesque figure in the medieval panorama. The Latin peregrinatio came to mean any wandering, and peregrinus for pilgrim, became a synonym for stranger. But the pilgrim, properly speaking, was someone, whatever his regular occupation, on the way to a sacred destina- tion and the “palmer,” so called from the palm branches brought back from Rome, was a religious vagrant who might spend his whole life wandering from one holy place to another. The decline of the western Roman Empire, along with the rise of pirates, Vandals and others, made the pilgrim’s lot difficult and dangerous. The extensive Arab conquests around the Mediterranean, the rise of Islam, and the increase of Muslim pilgrims congested the Christian pilgrim routes and brought a bitter contest for Jerusalem. It was from the rock at the Temple Mount, site of the Temple of Solomon, that Muhammad had ascended into Paths to the East ii7 heaven. Some Muslim traditions made Jerusalem, and not Mecca, the cen- ter and the Navel of the Earth, “the highest of all countries and the nearest to heaven.” When the caliph Omar, riding on a white camel, entered a surrendered Jerusalem only six years after the death of Muhammad, he opened a millennial battle for the holy places. The great age of Christian pilgrimage had begun in the tenth century. Muslims were generally tolerant, if contemptuous, of these passionate “un- believers.” But as the distant Holy Land became less accessible, pious Christians found the balm of pilgrimage nearer home. They produced a hybrid literature of history, sociology, myth, and folklore. In the popular Guide de Pelerin one could read of the pilgrim who asked a woman in Villeneuve for a piece of the loaf of bread she was baking under hot ashes in her oven. She refused, and when she went for her loaf, she found only a round stone. Other pilgrims en route in Poitiers searched a whole street before they could find anyone to lodge them. That very night all houses in the street burned — except the one that had given them hospitality. Popular epics like the Chansons de Geste celebrated heroic pilgrims. Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain had become holy because of the miraculous discovery there, about 810, of the body of Saint James, who was known to have been executed in Jerusalem and presumably had been buried there. Charlemagne was reputed to be among the first of the pilgrims who flocked from all Europe. When the advancing Moors set about conquering Spain for Islam, the cult arose of Saint James the Moor-slayer, Santiago Matamoros. The great magnet for pilgrims in Europe was Rome, “threshold of the Apostles.” The Venerable Bede (673-735) reported the trek to Rome of Britons “noble and simple, layfolk and clergy, men and women alike” who yearned to spend some of their “earthly pilgrimage” in the vicinity of holy places, “hoping thereby to merit a warmer welcome from the saints in heaven.” From which, perhaps, was derived the English verb “to roam.” By 727 King Ina of Wessex had founded a special hostel there for Saxon pilgrims. The stream from Britain and elsewhere would broaden after the failure of crusaders to recapture Jerusalem. Meanwhile the monks of Cluny organized to assist pilgrims going east- ward. Able-bodied young Scandinavians journeyed all the way from Ice- land, Norway, or Denmark, spent a few years serving in the Emperor’s famous Varangian Guard in Constantinople, and then went on to Jerusalem before returning northward with their military earnings. A Danish prince, to expiate a murder, set out in the mid-eleventh century but never reached the Holy Place because he went barefoot for his sins, and died of exposure in the mountains on the way. Then at the height of the pilgrims’ enthusiasm Alp Arslan (1029-1072), ii8 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS the Seljuk sultan of Persia, whose Turkic-speaking people had spread across Asia to eastern Siberia, swept westward, defeated the forces of Byzantine Christians at Manzikert in 1071, and occupied most of Asia Minor, including the pathways to the holy places. Christian pilgrims and all Eastern Christi- anity faced new perils. At the same time forces farther west, a new commercial life, and a growing population were swelling the pilgrim tide. The Normans, descend- ants of the Norsemen who had swept in the tenth century into “Normandy” on the northern coast of France, were converted to Christianity, and sent their conquering force in all directions. William the Conqueror led them north to England in 1066. They roamed the Mediterranean, overran south- ern Italy and by 1130 had set up the Kingdom of Sicily, where Christians, Jews, and Arabs exchanged knowledge, arts, and ideas. When Urban II became pope in 1088, his Church was in dire need of reform — rotten with the buying and selling of pardons and church offices, and split by the claims of an anti-Pope. A muckraking reformer, he used his organizing talents and his eloquence to cleanse and to heal. Alexius Comnenus, the Eastern emperor, seeing the capital of his Byzantium threat- ened by militant Islam, sent envoys to Urban appealing for military aid. The energetic Urban saw this as an opportunity to unite the Churches of East and West while the holy places would be redeemed. To a historic Council at Clermont in south-central France he summoned French bishops and representatives of the faith from across Europe. When the Council met on November 18, 1095, became a mass meeting, too large for the cathedral, and moved to a field outside the eastern gates of the city. There in the open air the Pope stirred the crowd with an eloquence we can still savor from the report by Robert the Monk, who was there: Jerusalem is the navel of the world, a land which is more fruitful than any other, a land which is like another paradise of delights. This is the land which the Redeemer of mankind illuminated by his coming, adorned by his life, conse- crated by his passion, redeemed by his death, and sealed by his burial. This royal city, situated in the middle of the world, is now held captive by his enemies and is made a servant, by those who know not God, for the ceremonies of the heathen. It looks and hopes for freedom; it begs unceasingly that you will come to its aid. It looks for help from you, especially, because God has bestowed glory in arms upon you more than on any other nation. Undertake this journey, therefore, for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of "glory which cannot fade” in the kingdom of heaven. To rescue the holy places, all Christians were to go east as soon as the harvest was taken in the next summer, but not later than the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1096. God would be their guide, the white cross Paths to the East 119 their symbol, and their battle cry “Deus le volt!" (God wills it!). Back home their belongings would be under the protection of the Church. With this call to arms Pope Urban II marshaled the forces of Christian Europe to transform pilgrims into crusaders. As the medieval Latinist put it, while the pilgrimage was only a passagium parvum, a little journey by an individual, the crusade was to be a passagium generale, a communal or mass pilgrimage. People on the move could not help becoming discoverers. But, for the most part, they did not find what they went to seek, and they found much they had not imagined. The Crusades would be one of the most miscellaneous, most unruly move- ments in history. A portent of things to come was Peter the Hermit. He was appropriately miscalled the Hermit because he usually wore a hermit’s cape, but he was by no means a hermit, for he loved crowds and knew how to move them. Peter set up his own corps of recruiting agents and began gathering his motley pilgrim army in the county of Berry in central France. By the time he reached Cologne in western Germany on Holy Saturday, April 12, 1096, some fifteen thousand pilgrims of all ages, sexes, shapes, and sizes had joined his party. “All the West and all the barbarian tribes from beyond the Adriatic as far as the Pillars of Hercules,” a Byzantine princess, Anna Comnena, fearfully reported, “were moving in a body through Europe towards Asia, bringing whole families with them.” The arrival of Peter’s horde at Constantinople brought new troubles. There they joined forces with Walter the Penniless, and moved on toward the Holy City, plundering as they went. One group under Rainald, an Italian nobleman, sacked Christian villages en route, tortured their inhabi- tants, and were even reported to roast Christian babies on spits over open fires. The Byzantine emperor Alexius I tried to persuade adventuring knights to submit to his rule, but the more ambitious of them conquered and pillaged to establish new kingdoms of their own. These Christian forces defeated the Turks in several battles and entered Jerusalem in triumph in July 1099, so bringing to an end what came to be called the First Crusade. Jerusalem was speedily organized into a new Latin Kingdom. This was only the beginning of the hectic movement that lasted two centuries to make secure the way of the pilgrims. But in one sense, too, it was the end of the Crusades, for it was the last successful expedition to redeem the holy places. Later “Crusades” turned out to be only expeditions to help the Christians already established in the East. After the fall of Jerusalem to the Turkish Saladin in 1187, the more accessible holy destinations in the West attracted Christian pilgrims more than ever. For the faithful in Britain the most sacred place was Canterbury. It was in Canterbury Cathedral, where the second Saint Augustine (d. 604) had no THE EARTH AND THE SEAS been the first archbishop, that Thomas a Becket championed the church against King Henry II, and was martyred on December 29, 1170. King Henry II himself marked the pilgrim path when he journeyed there to do public penance. “As soon as he neared the city,” Roger of Hoveden, a contemporary chronicler, reported, “in sight of the Cathedral in which lay the body of the blessed martyr, he dismounted from his horse, and having taken off his shoes, with bare feet and dressed in woollen garments, he walked three miles to the tomb of the blessed martyr, with such meekness and repentance that it really may be held to have been the work of Him who looketh down on the earth and maketh it to tremble.” Chaucer gave the shrine of Saint Thomas at Canterbury literary immortality by his descrip- tion of thirty-one varieties of pilgrims. Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seeken straunge strondes, To feme halwes, couthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende . . . After the Crusades came to an end, pilgrimage still remained a living force in European Christendom, and for many Rome replaced Jerusalem. In 1300, in the spirit of Urban II, Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Jubilee Year, offered special indulgences to the faithful who visited Rome and attracted more than twenty thousand pilgrims. Jubilee Years with their attendant indulgences for pilgrims to Rome continued every fifty years till the Pope in 1470 reduced the interval to twenty-five years. In Islam, from its very beginning, pilgrimage was a holy duty. Every good Muslim was, and is, obliged, if he can afford it and can support his family in his absence, to visit Mecca at least once. During the hajj from the seventh to the tenth month of the Muslim year, the pilgrim wears two seamless white garments, symbols of equality before God. He neither shaves nor cuts his hair or nails during the ceremony, he must circumambulate the Ka’bah seven times, and follows certain other rites around Mecca before returning home. Forever after, the returned pilgrim is honored by the title of hajji. Mecca had been a place of pilgrimage for idolatrous Arabs centuries before Muhammad. They went for their annual festival to welcome the renewed year, to light bonfires to persuade the sun to rise, and to work charms to prevent drought. Mecca never ceased to be the Muslim pilgrim’s goal and in Western languages became a synonym for any goal of pilgrim- age. In the late twentieth century, the hajj was so popular that some Muslim countries annually limited the number of outgoing pilgrims to avoid fo- Paths to the East 121 reign-exchange problems. By 1965 some one and a half million pilgrims were visiting Mecca each year, about half from outside Arabia. Ibn Battuta (1304-1374), the greatest Muslim traveler of the Middle Ages, at the age of twenty-one left his home in Tangier at the northwest- ern tip of Africa as a pilgrim “swayed by an overmastering impulse . . . and a desire long-cherished to visit these illustrious sanctuaries.” His pop- ular chronicle of lifelong travels made him a kind of Muslim Marco Polo, celebrated as “the traveler of Islam.” Despite his rule “never to travel any road a second time,” he made four pilgrimages to Mecca. Altogether he covered some seventy-five thousand miles, probably more than any other recorded traveler before his day. He visited every Muslim country and neighboring lands, served as Muslim judge, or cadi, in Islamic communi- ties as far away as Delhi, the Maidive Islands, and Ceylon, and became an envoy from sultans to Chinese unbelievers. Still, his extensive travels were no enticement into the unknown, but a kind of encyclopedia of Muslim life and customs in various climates and terrains. He showed how much a devout Muslim man of curiosity and energy could discover of the world if he was willing to move around, to risk bandits, pirates, the Black Death, and the whims of despotic sultans. So he acquired a Muslim lib- eral education, but his imagination did not range far beyond Islam and his learning was inhibited by his faith. In the heart of Asia, too, faithful crowds seeking the balm of their own holy places, en route began to discover their world. No one knows exactly how, why, or when ancient Benares on the Ganges — some called it the most ancient city in the world — first became sacred, but by the seventh century the city held a hundred temples to Siva. In the eleventh century, the Muslim Alberuni reported how Hindus venerated Benares, “their anchorites wan- der to it and stay there for ever, as the dwellers of the Ka’ba stay for ever in Mecca. . . . that their reward after death should be the better for it. They say that a murderer is held responsible for his crime and punished with a punishment due to his guilt, except in case he enters the city of Benares, where he obtains pardon.” The Buddhists, too, taught that the Deer Park at Sarnath where the Buddha (c. 500 B.c.) had preached his first sermon was a rung on the ladder to heaven. The north Indian Emperor Asoka, who converted to Buddhism about 200 B.c., led pilgrimages to all the Buddhist sacred places. As he visited them he repaired old shrines, stupas, and built new ones. Wherever he went, he erected commemorative stone pillars, many still standing. From remote corners of Asia, men and women, noble and peasant, scholar and illiterate, followed Asoka’s footsteps. From the Chinese imperial capital of Sian on the Wei River in central China the Buddhist enthusiast Fah Hian, about a.d. 400, traversed deserts and mountain ranges to visit the Buddhist 122 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS shrines in north India, then crossed the peninsula to enjoy the sanctity of the tooth of Buddha in Ceylon. India became a land of sacred places. According to the Buddha, “all mountains, all rivers, holy lakes, places of pilgrimage, the dwellings of rsis, cow pens, and temples of the gods are places which destroy sin.” The cults of local spirits and countless local priesthoods multiplied till one traveler to Kashmir observed that there was “not a space as large as a grain of sesame seed without a place of pilgrimage.” The Lutheran Reformers’ declaration of faith, the Augsburg Confession (1530), condemned pilgrimages — along with set fasts, the worshipping of saints, and the counting of rosaries — as “childish and needless works.” But in retrospect, the Crusades of embattled pilgrims proved to be great awak- eners. They were both a symptom and a cause of a new vitality, a new curiosity, a new openness and mobility in the life of the West. Countless novelties came with and from the Crusades, by-products of people on the move. The Crusader states in the Eastern Mediterranean developed trade with the Muslim world. Italian banks flourished as they financed kings and popes, and lent funds to pious travelers. Returning crusaders brought back tales of Oriental splendor, along with tastes for damasks, silks, perfumes, and spices which gave Venice the exotic charm still visible in the Doges’ Palace and the Piazza San Marco. Yet the failure of the Crusades was in many ways a blessing for Christen- dom and a catalyst for European discovery of the Eastern world. The great organizing international institution of Islam remained the pilgrimage, what Ibn Battuta called “the annual congress of the Muslim world,” which continued to meet at Mecca, a familiar Arab-Muslim stronghold. But there was no counterpart place of Again-and-Again, no accessible site of obliga- tory return, for all Christians. With no prospect of recapturing Jerusalem and the pathways there, Western Christendom turned to missions. Pilgrim- age gathered the faithful, but missions reached out to the stranger even in unknown lands. The history of expanding Christianity was a history of missions. Of course, as we have seen, missions were an ancient institution for all world-reaching religions. King Asoka had sent Buddhist missionaries abroad in the second century B.C., and they were found across China in succeeding centuries. But missions played a greater role in Christianity than in any other world religion. As early as the second century, a missionary college was founded in Alexandria, and another in Constantinople in 404. Saint Patrick, Saint Augustine of Canterbury, and Saint Boniface who carried the gospel to Ireland, England, and Germany were missionaries, and lesser missionaries spread the word across the continent. In the high moun- Paths to the East 123 tains of Switzerland, in the Rhine Valley, in the Swedish forests, and in frigid Russia, monasteries became centers of civilization and of Christian preaching. By the time Europe was substantially Christianized in the sev- enth century, and the papacy was organizing and supporting professional missionaries and monks across the continent, Muhammad came with his competing faith. Militant Islam forced Christian retreat from the Near East, northern Africa, and the Iberian peninsula, and created its own empire where Christianity was sometimes tolerated but could not advance. Islam did not allow the propaganda of other faiths, and punished apostasy with death. But Nestorian Christian missions had extraordinary success in China beyond the reach of Islam. By the mid-seventh century they had translated the Scriptures into Chinese for the imperial library and were declared a tolerated religion by imperial edict. After the Crusades the crusading energies were channeled into missions. Missionary monks had accompanied crusaders on their way east, and when the Crusades came to an end, zealous Franciscan and Dominican friars, as we shall see, continued to reach out to the little-known farther East. The popes took a renewed interest in missions to distant parts. They issued papal bulls protecting and supporting the relentless missionary friars, and sent envoys to Mongol Khans and Chinese emperors to open their way. The friars would be the vanguard for Europe’s overland discovery of Asia. Of course Islam, beginning with the Prophet himself, was a vigorously proselytizing religion and every Muslim was declared to be a missionary. But Muslim missions never were so well organized or so widely diffused as those of Christianity. While Islam had its mullahs, these were teachers rather than a priesthood, and there was no Islamic institution like the missionary friars of Christendom. Nor were there Muslim missionary soci- eties until the late nineteenth century. The jihad, the religious duty to spread Islam by waging war, was long the primary authorized way of extending the empire of the Prophet. The all-embracing character of the Muslim faith, which saw no distinction between the realm of Caesar and the realm of God, made the reach of the faith coterminous with the reach of the sword. While Muslim swordsmen conquered for the faith, Christian missionaries were willing to explore tentatively on the frontiers of empire, hoping to bring the good news to even a few more souls. In Islam the pilgrim remained a devotee of the Faith fulfilling the pre- scribed ritual journey to a known holy destination. In the parlance of modern Christendom, a “pilgrim” was seldom on his way to Jerusalem, but every person “sojourning in the flesh” was passing through this earth to a mysterious state of future bliss. So, in familiar American usage, were the Pilgrim Fathers. “They knew they were but pilgrims,” wrote William Brad- ford in 1630, “and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes 124 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS to the heavens, their dearest countrey.” The Christian “Pilgrim’s Progress” was toward no earthly destination. In the West, the “crusade,” too, ceased to be a battle against unbelievers and acquired more exploratory overtones, as when Thomas Jefferson urged his good friend to “preach a crusade against ignorance.” How the Mongols Opened the Way The land-faring pioneers of Europe’s first Age of Discovery who went eastward in the mid-thirteenth century needed resources quite different from those of the later, the seafaring, age. Columbus would have to raise a large sum of money, find ships, enlist and organize a crew, secure supplies, keep the crew happy and unmutinous, and navigate a trackless ocean. Quite other talents were required of the earlier overland traveler. He could go with one or two companions along main-traveled roads — though the roads had not been frequented by Europeans before them. They could live off the land, finding food and drink along the way. While they did not need to be fund-raisers or master organizers, they had to be adaptable and affable. Columbus’ men became mutinous when the voyage stretched a few weeks beyond what they had expected, but the overland pioneers could extend their journey as long as necessary, by another month, another year, even another decade. While the seafarers went over long stretches of cultural emptiness, and at sea news usually meant trouble, the landfarers — mer- chants or missionaries — could practice their vocation along the way, learn- ing as they went. If the solitary landfarer took ship for some stages of his trip, he was a passenger. The vessel was usually commanded and supplied by someone of the region. The land-faring pioneer would be both more lonely and less lonely than his counterpart on the sea. For if he lacked the companionship and support of fellow countrymen, like those who went with Columbus on the Santa Maria, yet he had the opportunity for many novel, warm, and casual associations on his days and nights along the way. The perils of the sea were quite the same everywhere — wind and wave and storm, loss of bearings — but the perils of the land were as varied as the landscape, and helped make the journey interesting and suspenseful in Paths to the East 125 surprising ways. Were robbers lurking in this inn? Could you digest the local food? Should you wear your own or a native costume? Would you be allowed entry in this city gate? Could you crash the barriers of an unknown language to explain your wants and show that your mission was harmless? Overland travel was not an adventurous communal leap, but a laborious, individual trek. From that age came our English word “travel” — originally the same as “travail,” meaning labor, especially of a painful or oppressive nature — an accurate description of what it meant to go long distances overland. A few pioneers took up this travail and opened the way from Europe to Cathay. While Europeans were still plunged in the darkness of dogmatic geogra- phy, they had long been entertained by legends of the mysterious East. A few men and women enjoyed the exotic luxuries from that other end of the earth — sleek silk from China and sparkling diamonds from Golconda. In rooms draped with costly carpets from Persia, they feasted on dishes spiced from Ceylon and Java, and passed the hours with ebony chessmen from Siam. Yet the merchants of Venice, Genoa, or Pisa who prospered by selling these exotic Eastern commodities had themselves, of course, never seen India or China. Their Eastern contact was in the Levant ports in the eastern Mediterranean. Their precious stock had been brought by one of two main routes. One, the fabled Silk Road, was an all-land route from eastern China through central Asia, by way of Samarkand and Baghdad, finally reaching the coastal cities of the Black Sea or the eastern Mediterranean. The other came through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea, either up the Persian Gulf to Basra or up the Red Sea to Suez. To reach the European market these goods would still have to go overland, across Persia and Syria or else through Egypt. On either of these routes, Frankish and Italian merchants found their way blocked as soon as they tried to advance eastward from the Mediterranean ports. Muslims gladly traded with them at Alexandria or even in Aleppo or Damascus, but the Muslim Turks would not allow Europeans to advance a step farther. This was the Iron Curtain of the late Middle Ages. Then for a single century, from about 1250 to about 1350, that curtain was lifted, and there was direct human contact between Europe and China. During this interlude the bolder and more enterprising Italian merchants no longer had to wait until their exotic goods reached Aleppo, Damascus, or Alexandria. Now they themselves took caravans across the Silk Road to the cities of India and China, where they could hear Christian missionaries, Frankish and Italian friars, saying mass. What might have been the begin- ning of a continuous mutual enrichment, a widening and enlivening of the visions both of East and of West, proved to be only a brief and tempting 126 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS curtain-raising, an adventurous episode, after which the curtain again came down with a thud. This would prove to be another kind of interruption, an interlude of light in the darkness that for most of modern history blanketed both the Eastward and the Westward vision. Decades would pass before the discovery of the ocean would make it possible for Europeans once again to touch the coastal fringes of India and southeast Asia. Centuries would elapse before Europeans were again permitted to visit the ports of China. Central Asia would remain long unvisited, and inland China, after an entr’acte of only two centuries, would remain inhospitable or hostile to visitors from the West. It was not the march of Christian soldiers, nor the maneuvers of Euro- pean statesmen, that lifted the curtain. Like many other world-awakening events, it was a by-product. If credit must be given for opening the way to Cathay, it must go, surprisingly, to a people of the same stock as those Turks who so long blocked the way for Europeans— to a Mongol people from central Asia, the Tartars (or Tatars). A threat to Europe in the Middle Ages, they have been much maligned. Featured in our European historical pantheon as reckless destroyers, their very name has become an English synonym for barbarian. The word “horde,” which has come to mean a disorderly swarm, came from the Turkish ordu, which simply meant a “camp.” Their reputation has been fixed by European writers who knew, or who had heard of, the horrors of the first Tartar onslaughts on the West. But few of these writers had ever seen a Tartar, and they knew nothing of the remarkable solid achievements of the Tartar Khans. The Mongol empires were land empires, twice the size of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. Genghis Khan and his hordes came down from Mongolia to Peking in 1214. In the half-century after, they took nearly all eastern Asia, then turned westward across Russia, even into Poland and Hungary. When Kublai Khan came to the Mongol throne in 1259, his empire reached from the Yellow River in China to the shores of the Danube in eastern Europe and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf. The Mongol Khans, from Genghis Khan through his sons and grandsons — Batu Khan, Mangu Khan, Kublai Khan, and Hulagu — were as able a dynasty as ever ruled a great empire. They showed a combination of military genius, personal courage, administrative versatility, and cultural tolerance unequaled by any European line of hereditary rulers. They deserve a higher place and a different place than they have been given by the Western historian. Without the peculiar talents and special achievements of these Mongol rulers and their people, the way to Cathay would probably not have been opened when it was. When would there then have been a path for Marco Polo? Without Marco Polo and the others who stirred the European imagi- Paths to the East 127 nation with impatience to reach Cathay, would there have been a Christo- pher Columbus? In 1241 a swarm of Tartar horsemen ravaged Poland and Hungary, defeat- ing an army of Poles and Germans at the Battle of Lignitz in Silesia, while another of their armies defeated the Hungarians. Terror struck Europe. In the North Sea, even the courageous fishermen of Gothland and Friesland were frightened into staying away from their usual herring grounds off the coast of Yarmouth. The learned Holy Roman emperor Frederick II (1194- 1250), a patron of science and literature, who had led the successful Sixth Crusade (1228-29), had actually captured Jerusalem and then made a ten- year truce with the sultan of Egypt, now feared that the Tartar flood would overwhelm Christendom. He called on King Henry III of England and others to unite against this new “Scourge of God,” in the hope “that these Tartars would be driven finally down to their Tartarus” (ad sua Tartara Tartari detrudentur). Pope Gregory IX proclaimed a new crusade, this time against the Tartars. But because of the bad blood between the Pope and Frederick II, who had already been twice excommunicated, the King of Hungary’s plea for help was answered only by words. After all, Europe was saved by an Act of God, when the Tartar hordes at the height of their successes received word that their great Khan Okkodai was dead in Asia and that they must hasten home. Despite the alarms of Christian rulers, and the Tartar massacres of Poles and Hungarians, the Tartars would prove powerful allies against the Mus- lims and the Turks who blocked the eastward path. For the Tartars, after succeeding in their campaigns against the “Assassins,” or Ismailians, on the southern shores of the Caspian, went on to overcome the Caliph of Baghdad and Syria. The conquering Tartar general in Persia had actually sent his embassy to Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France, who was then at Cyprus on a Crusade, offering an alliance and asking for collaboration. If Christian kings and the Pope himself had been willing to join in such an alliance, they might have shared the glory and the profit of the conquest of the Muslim Turks, and eventually have accomplished the aims of the Christian Cru- sades with pagan help. But instead of postponing conversion until after a worldly victory, they determined to ally only with fellow Christians, and so spent themselves on futile efforts to convert the Khans before joining them as allies. This mistake of judgment decisively shaped the future of much of Asia. The power of Islam was then in retreat. If Christian leaders had only been willing first to become comrades in arms against a common enemy, Pope Innocent IV and the Christian powers might soon enough have made them comrades in faith. Western Christendom vainly awaited the sudden conversion of the 128 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS Khans. Meanwhile the Europeans would unintentionally profit from the religious vagueness, the indifference and tolerance of the Tartars. After the Tartars extinguished the Caliphate of Baghdad and took possession of Syria, Persia, and the lands that had become an Iron Curtain, the path was suddenly opened for the European traveler. The way of thinking of the Tartar Khans was most alien to the medieval Christian West. In 1251 at the court of Mangu Khan in the Tartar capital of Karakorum far north of the Great Wall, the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck was surprised to find priests from all over and from all religions — Catholics, Nestorians, Armeni- ans, Manichaeans, Buddhists, and Muslims — peacefully debating, vying for the support of the Khan. The Khans also believed in free commercial intercourse among nations. They made merchants welcome by lowering tolls and taxes, by protecting caravans, by guarding roads against bandits. The “barbarian” Tartars, who did not care enough for any dogma to persecute in its name, opened the pathway from the Christian West. The Tartar conquest of Persia brought the usual Mongol policy of low customs, well-policed roads, and free passage for everybody — and so opened the road to India. The Tartar conquest of Russia opened the road to Cathay. The great overland Silk Road traversing Asia, though heavily traveled for centu- ries, was not frequented by Europeans until the years of Tartar conquest. Egyptian roads, still in the hands of Muslims, remained forbidden to Euro- peans, and goods passing there were so heavily taxed by the Mamluk sultans that Indian merchandise trebled in cost by the time it reached an Italian merchant. Missionary Diplomats By the mid-thirteenth century the hopes to convert the Tartars and their Khans to Christianity were nourished by recent events. For the Tartar conquest of the Muslim Turks had made Tartars the unwitting allies of Western Christendom. These contagious hopes made militant Christians eager to confuse Genghis Khan with Prester John. Rumors that the Great Khan himself had been converted in Cathay seemed substantiated by the report that the wives and the mother of the Great Khan had taken up Paths to the East 129 Christianity, and the fact that considerable numbers of Nestorian Christians spread over the Tartar realm were allowed to practice their religion freely. Franciscan friars became geographic pioneers. “Just at the time when God sent forth into the eastern parts of the world the Tartars to slay and to be slain,” a pious chronicler noted, “he also sent forth in the west his faithful and blessed servants Dominic and Francis, to enlighten, instruct, and build up in the Faith.” The energetic Pope Innocent IV, soon after his election in 1243, organized Christendom against the new threat of Tartar invasion. He called a church council at Lyons in 1245 for “finding a remedy for the Tartars and other spurners of the faith and persecutors of the people of Christ.” Recalling recent Tartar atrocities in Poland, Russia, and Hun- gary and the rising Tartar flood, the council desperately exhorted faithful Christians to block every road over which the invaders might come, by digging ditches, building walls, and erecting other barriers. The Church itself would contribute to the cost of these defenses, and also would enforce contribution by all Christians in the neighborhood. At the same time the Pope decided to try to stop the trouble at its source by sending an emissary to convert the Great Khan, Kuyuk Khan himself, at his capital in northern Mongolia. Undaunted by the fact that no Euro- pean had gone to the Tartar capital and returned to tell the tale, Innocent IV dispatched his emissary on April 16, 1245, even before the council had met. His providential choice was a Franciscan friar, John of Pian de Carpine (11807-1252), who had actually been a companion and disciple of the great Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). Bom near Perugia, just a few miles from Assisi, he was then in charge of the Franciscan order at Cologne. Friar John proved the perfect man for the assignment. His thirty-page report of his two-year journey remains, despite its brevity, the best description of Tartar customs in the Middle Ages. Another hardy Franciscan, Friar Benedict the Pole, became his companion to Mongolia and back. These two pioneer Franciscan friars trekking across eastern Europe and central Asia suffered the howling winds and numbing cold of the high steppes, the deep snow of the Altai mountain passes, and the heat of the Gobi Desert. Thence then, by the grace of God having been saved from the enemies of the Cross of Christ, we came to Kiew, which is the metropolis of Ruscia. And when we came there we took counsel ... as to our route. They told us that if we took into Tartary the horses which we had, they would all die, for the snows were deep, and they did not know how to dig out the grass from under the snow like Tartar horses, nor could anything else be found (on the way) for them to eat, for the Tartars had neither straw nor hay nor fodder. So, on their advice, we decided to leave our horses there ... I was ill to the point of death; but I had myself carried '3° THE EARTH AND THE SEAS along in a cart in the intense cold through the deep snow, so as not to interfere with the affairs of Christendom. Friar John, while not concealing his mission, actually cajoled his unwill- ing hosts along the way into supplying guides and fresh mounts to hasten their journey. From Batu’s camp on the Volga, a journey of three and a half months brought the friars to the court of the Great Khan, Kuyuk Khan, at Karakorum in the heart of Mongolia. When the two Franciscans arrived there in mid- August two thousand Tartar chiefs had met to elect and enthrone their new emperor, in a tent “resting on pillars covered with gold plates, fastened with gold nails.” Kuyuk’s first audience as newly enthroned Khan enacted European fantasies of the fabled East. “They asked us if we wished to make any presents; but we had already used up nearly everything we had, so we had nothing at all to give him. It was while here that on a hill some distance from the tent there were more than five hundred carts, all full of gold and silver and silken gowns, all of which was divided up between the Emperor and the chiefs; and the various chiefs divided their shares among their men as they saw fit.” The Franciscans then were offered the opportunity to deliver their message from the Pope declaring his wish that all Christians be friends of the Tartars and that the Tartars be mighty with God in Heaven. But to achieve this the Tartars must embrace the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. Saddened that the Tartars could have slain so many Christians when the Christians had done nothing to injure the Tar- tars, the Pope urged them to repent what they had done and write him what they intended to do in all these matters. The Great Khan obliged by giving Friar John two letters to the Lord Pope. Unfortunately these contained nothing of substance, for the Khan was not persuaded to embrace Jesus Christ. Even so, Friar John was not discouraged, because Christians employed in the Khan’s household told him that the Khan was about to become a Christian. When Kuyuk Khan proposed sending his own ambassadors back to the Pope with the two Franciscans, Friar John demurred. “We feared they would see the dissen- sions and wars among us, and that it would encourage them to march against us.” On November 13, 1246, Kuyuk Khan gave Friar John permis- sion to leave. “We were travelling the whole winter,” Friar John reported, “resting most of the time in the snow in the desert, save when in the open plain where there were no trees we could scrape a bare place with our feet; and often when the wind drifted in we would find, on waking, our bodies all covered with snow.” Reaching Kiev in early June, they were met with rejoicing as if they had risen from the dead. Similar jubilation greeted them all across Europe. In the fall of 1247, a year after leaving Karakorum, Friar John Paths to the East 131 delivered the Khan’s letter to the Lord Pope Innocent IV, and gave him their report in person. This was not the end of Friar John of Pian de Carpine’s role in the meeting of East and West. Louis IX, king of France, was about to set out for Cyprus on the first stage of his promised Crusade (the Seventh Crusade, 1248-54). To persuade Louis that he could serve Christendom better by remaining in France to protect Innocent IV against the Tartars and against the Hohenstaufen “arch-fiend” Frederick II, the Pope sent the two worldly- wise Franciscan friars to Paris. In that mission they failed. But another remarkable Franciscan friar, William of Rubruck, a native of French Fland- ers, who had the confidence of King Louis, was stirred by their fresh account of their Mongol adventure. When King Louis went on his Crusade, he took along this Friar William. Soon after Louis IX arrived on Cyprus in September 1248, a man who represented himself as an emissary from the Great Khan brought a message of good cheer. He reported that the Great Khan was eager for an alliance against Islam. It was on the day of the Epiphany three years before, this emissary reported, that Kuyuk Khan himself, following his mother’s conversion, had become a Christian. All the leading Tartar princes had followed his example and the Tartar people were now eager to join hands against the Saracen enemy. The credulous King Louis speedily dispatched as his ambassador the Dominican Friar Andrew of Longumeau, who knew Arabic and had earlier visited the camp of Batu. After another remarkable overland journey, An- drew finally reached the court of the Great Khan, where his mission came to a melodramatic anticlimax. He expected to be embraced by Kuyuk Khan as a companion in the Faith and so open a grand alliance. But Kuyuk Khan had died, and the empire was now in the hands of the Regent Mother Ogul Gaimish, who was surely no Christian. She dismissed him like a tribute bearer, with insolent letters for his sovereign. The overland homeward journey lasted a year. Friar Andrew’s mission brought back reports that the Tartars, who originally came from the far end of a great sandy desert that began at the eastern end of the world, had escaped long ago from the wall of mountains (the Great Wall of China?) which held back Gog and Magog. They recounted the conversion of Kuyuk’s grandfather Genghis Khan to Christianity after a vision in which God promised him dominion over Prester John. They described the piles of bleached human bones in the path of the Tartar conquests, and eight hundred Christian chapels mounted on carts, which they had seen in a single camp. They brought cheering rumors of a Mongol chief, Sartach, son of Batu, whom they reported to be a Christian. King Louis was in the Holy Land when he received this optimistic report. With him once again Vas William of Rubruck, who by the standards of his '3* THE EARTH AND THE SEAS day was not unprepared for a long expedition to the Khan. He knew some Arabic, had an aptitude for languages and could manage for himself in the Tartar language. King Louis gave him a Bible and a small sum for expenses, together with letters to Sartach and the Great Khan. Queen Margaret gave him an illuminated psalter and some church vestments. He also carried his own prayer book, favorite devotional works, and, for some unexplained reason, a rare Arabic manuscript. To avoid the indignity of another rebuff, King Louis purposely did not name the Friar as his ambassador. This Friar William, accompanied by another friar, Bartholomew of Cremona, a dip- somaniac guide-interpreter, and two servants, left Constantinople on May 7, 1253, took ship across the Black Sea to the Crimea, then went overland across the Don. When they finally reached Sartach, their reputed friend, he indignantly denied being a Christian and “he mocked the Christians.” Pushing on across the Volga, the corpulent friar suffered hunger, frostbitten toes, alpine winds, and desert heat before finally arriving at the camp of the Great Khan, Mangu, in the heart of Mongolia on December 27, 1253. The Khan, out of “compassion,” gave him permission to remain for two months, till “the great cold” would be over. At court there were a considerable number of heretical Christians, Nes- torians, who were bringing Christianity into bad repute. Nor was the mis- sionary Friar William encouraged by the tolerant spirit of Mangu Khan himself, at his last audience: He began confiding to me his creed: “We Mongols,” he said, "believe that there is only one God, by whom we live and by whom we die, and for whom we have an upright heart.” Then I said: “May it be so, for without His grace this cannot be.” . . . Then he added: “But as God gives us the different fingers of the hand, so he gives to men divers ways. God gives you the Scriptures, and you Christians keep them not. You do not find (in them, for example) that one should find fault with another, do you?” “No, my lord,” I said; “but I told you from the first that I did not want to wrangle with anyone.” ... “I do not say it,” he said, “for you. God gave you therefore the Scriptures, and you do not keep them; He gave us diviners, we do what they tell us, and we live in peace.” “If,” Friar William recorded with regret, “I had had the power to work by signs and wonders like Moses, perhaps he would have humbled himself.” Like John of Pian de Carpine, he refused to take Tartar ambassadors back with him. But he did carry the Khan’s letters to King Louis. Though the friar took a different way home, surviving the hardships of hunger, thirst, cold and heat, by mid-June 1255 he was back in Cyprus. King Louis had returned to France, and the provincial of the Franciscan Order refused to allow Friar William to follow. The friar was ordered to the Franciscan Paths to the East •33 house in Acre and instructed to send his report from there. If Friar William could have reported in person to King Louis, he might not have reported so eloquently to us. Friar William of Rubruck brought to Europe a treasure of facts about the opposite side of the earth. He described the course of the Don and the Volga, and showed that the Caspian was not a gulf but a lake. For the first time in European literature, he observed that Cathay was the same as the land of the “Seres,” which the Romans had described as the source of silk. “The Cathayans write with a brush such as painters paint with, and they make in one figure the several letters containing a whole word.” In this first Western reference to Chinese writing, he shows an understanding that eluded others for centuries. The religious rituals of the lamas, the northern Buddhist monks, and their prayer formula — Om mani padme, hum — are precisely noted. When Friar William finally was given leave to go to Paris, luckily he encountered the pioneer English scientist and fellow Franciscan Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292). The notorious Friar Bacon, “Doctor Mirabilis,” was suspected of necromancy and heresy by the chiefs of his Franciscan order, and had been confined in Paris, where his superiors could watch him. Bacon studied William of Rubruck’s account of his journey, and then embodied Friar William’s findings in his own Opus majus, the encyclopedia he pre- pared for Pope Clement IV (1268). Through Bacon’s work, Friar William’s discoveries reached the Christian West. Friar William’s own Franciscan order long ignored him in their annals, and not until 1600 was even a portion of his delightful and informative travel book published by Richard Hakluyt. William of Rubruck, on the very last page of his reflections, wrote a swan song of the overland pioneers. A half-century before, in 1201, the Doge of Venice had contracted with the Council of the Fourth Crusade to carry the crusading army to the Holy Land by sea for the astronomical fee of £180,000. Against this extravagance the friar contrasted the frugality of travel overland. Should not the Army of the Church better pass by land — from Cologne to Constantinople and thence to the Holy Land? In times past valiant men passed through these countries, and succeeded, though they had most powerful adversaries, whom God has since removed from the earth. Nor should we, if we followed this road, be exposed to the dangers of the sea or to the mercies of the sailor men, and the price which would have to be given for a fleet would be enough for the expenses of the land journey. I state it with confidence, that if your peasants — I speak not of the princes and noblemen — would but travel like the Tartar princes, and be content with like provisions, they would conquer the whole world. >34 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS The Discovery of Asia Marco Polo excelled all other known Christian travelers in his experience, in his product, and in his influence. The Franciscans went to Mongolia and back in less than three years, and stayed in their roles as missionary- diplomats. Marco Polo’s journey lasted twenty-four years. He reached far- ther than his predecessors, beyond Mongolia to the heart of Cathay. He traversed the whole of China all the way to the Ocean, and he played a variety of roles, becoming the confidant of Kublai Khan and governor of a great Chinese city. He was at home in the language, and immersed himself in the daily life and culture of Cathay. For generations of Europe, his copious, vivid, and factual account of Eastern ways was the discovery of Asia. Venice at the time was a great center for commerce in the Mediterranean and beyond. Marco Polo was just fifteen years of age in 1269, when his father, Nicolo, and his uncle Maffeo Polo returned to Venice from their nine-year journey to the East. Another of Marco’s uncles, also named Marco Polo, had trading houses in Constantinople and at Soldaia in the Crimea, where Nicolo and Maffeo had joined him in 1260 in his trading ventures. Marco Polo opens his own book with an account of these earlier travels in which he had no part. Nicolo and Maffeo laid in a stock of jewels at Constantinople which they took by sea to Soldaia, then north and east along the Volga to the splendid court of Barka Khan, son of Genghis Khan. Barka Khan not only treated them courteously and with honor but, what was more to the point, bought their whole stock of jewels, as Marco Polo observes, “causing the Brothers to receive at least twice its value.” When a war between Barka Khan and a rival Tartar prince cut off the Polo brothers’ return to Constantinople, they decided to take their trading ventures farther eastward. A seventeen-day journey across the desert took them to Bokhara, where they fell in with some Tartar envoys who were en route to the court of the Great Khan, Kublai Khan. These envoys per- suaded the Polos that Kublai Khan, who had never before seen any Latins, intensely desired to see them, and would treat them with great honor and Paths to the East 135 liberality. The envoys promised to guard them on the way. The Polo broth- ers took up this invitation, and after a full year’s journey, “seeing many marvels of divers and sundry kinds,” arrived at the court of Kublai Khan. The Great Khan, every bit as friendly as had been promised, proved to be a man of wide-ranging curiosity and alert intelligence, eager to learn every- thing about the West. Finally he asked the two brothers to be his envoys to the Pope, requesting one hundred missionaries educated in all the Seven Arts to teach his people about Christianity and Western science. He also wanted some oil from the lamp at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. When Nicolo and Maffeo de- parted, they carried the Emperor’s Tablet of Gold, his certificate of safe passage, ordering everybody en route to supply their needs. Arriving at Acre in April 1269, the two brothers learned that the Pope had died and his successor had not yet been named. They returned to Venice to await the result. When the new pope, Gregory X, was finally named, he did not offer the requested hundred missionaries, but instead only assigned two Domini- can friars to accompany the Polos. In 1271, when Nicolo and Maffeo Polo set out from Venice on their return journey to Kublai Khan, they took with them Nicolo’s seventeen-year-old son, Marco, who was destined to make their trip historic. At Lajazzo on the eastern Mediterranean the two Dominicans left in panic. The three Polos, now alone, proceeded to Baghdad, then on to Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, where they might have taken ship for a long journey through the Sea of India. Instead they chose to go north and east overland through the Persian Desert of Kerman to the frigid mountains of Badakh- shan, noted for its rubies and lapis lazuli, and its fine horses. There used to be horses here, Marco tells us, which were “directly descended from Alexander’s horse Bucephalus out of mares that had conceived from him and they were all born like him with a horn on the forehead.” There they stayed a year to allow Marco to recover from an illness by breathing the pure mountain air. Then up still higher, across a land of glaciers, with many peaks over twenty thousand feet — Pamir, which the natives accurately called “The Roof of the World.” “Wild game of every sort abounds. There are great quantities of wild sheep of huge size [now known as ovis Poli, though William of Rubruck had noted them before]. Their horns grow to as much as six palms in length and are never less than three or four. From these horns the shepherds make big bowls from which they feed, and also fences to keep in their flocks.” “No birds fly here because of the height and the cold. And I assure you that, because of this great cold, fire is not so bright here nor of the same colour as elsewhere, and food does not cook well.” They then took the old southern caravan route through northern Kashmir, '36 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS where no European would be seen again till the nineteenth century, then eastward to the edge of the Gobi Desert. The party rested at Lop, a town at the western edge of the desert, where travelers usually took supplies to strengthen them against the terror of the crossing. Beasts and birds there are none, because they find nothing to eat. But I assure you that one thing is found here, and that a very strange one, which I will relate to you. The truth is this. When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make him loiter and lose touch with his companions, by dropping asleep or for some other reason, and afterwards he wants to rejoin them, then he hears spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Sometimes, indeed, they even hail him by name. Often these voices make him stray from the path, so that he never finds it again. And in this way many travellers have been lost and have perished. Across the desert they entered Tangut, in extreme northwestern China, traversed the Mongolian steppes and arrived in the court of the Great Khan after a trek of three and a half years. Kublai Khan received the Venetians with great honor. Sensing the talents of the twenty-one-year-old Marco, the Khan at once enlisted him in his service, and sent him on an embassy to a country six months away. When we read Marco Polo’s travels today, we all reap the fruits of the voracious curiosity of that thirteenth-century Mongol emperor. Now he had taken note on several occasions that when the Prince’s ambassadors returned from different parts of the world, they were able to tell him about nothing except the business on which they had gone, and that the Prince in consequence held them for no better than fools and dolts, and would say: “I had far liever hearken about the strange things, and the manners of the different countries you have seen, than hearing of the affairs of strange countries.” Mark therefore, as he went and returned, took great pains to learn about all kinds of different matters in the countries which he visited, in order to be able to tell about them to the Great Khan. . . . Thereafter Messer Marco abode in the Khan’s employment some seventeen years, continually going and coming, hither and thither, on the missions that were entrusted to him. . . . And, as he knew all the sovereign’s ways, like a sensible man he always took much pains to gather knowledge of anything that would be likely to interest him, and then on his return to Court he would relate everything in regular order, and thus the Emperor came to hold him in great love and favour. . . . And thus it came about that Messer Marco Polo had knowledge of, or had actually visited, a greater number of the different countries of the World than any other man; the more that he was always giving his mind to get knowledge, and to spy out and enquire into everything in order to have matter to relate to the Lord. Paths to the East 137 It seemed, the Khan would exclaim, that only Marco Polo had learned to use his eyes! We do not know how Nicolo and Maffeo Polo spent their time at the court of the Khan, except that, at the end of the seventeen years, they had “acquired great wealth in jewels and gold.” Every year Kublai Khan be- came more reluctant to lose Marco’s services. But in 1292 an escort was required for a Tartar princess who was to become the bride of the Ilkhan of Persia. Envoys of the Ilkhan had already failed in their efforts to deliver the seventeen-year-old bride overland. Returned to the court of Kublai Khan, they hoped to secure sea passage. Just then Marco had come back from an assignment that had taken him on a long sea voyage to India. The Persian envoys, who knew the seafaring reputation of Venetians, persuaded Kublai Khan to allow the Polos to accompany them and the bride by sea. The Khan outfitted fourteen ships, with an entourage of six hundred per- sons and supplies for two years. After a treacherous sea voyage through the South China Sea to Sumatra and through the Sea of India from which only eighteen of the six hundred survived, the Tartar princess was safely deliv- ered to the Persian court. She had become so attached to the Venetians that she wept at the parting. The Polos, returning home overland by way of Tabriz in northern Persia, Trebizond on the south coast of the Black Sea, to Constantinople, finally reached Venice in the winter of 1295, after their absence of twenty-four years. The Polo family had long since given them up for dead. A plausible tradition reports that when these three shabby strangers appeared, looking more like Tartars than Venetians, their noble relatives would have nothing to do with them. But the relatives’ memories were quickly jogged when the unkempt wanderers ripped open the seams of their sordid garments and produced their secret treasure — a shower of rubies, diamonds, and emer- alds. The returned travelers were affectionately embraced, and then enter- tained at a luxurious banquet, where music and jollity were mixed with exotic reminiscence. Those were years of bitter rivalry between Venice and Genoa for the Mediterranean seafaring trade. On September 6, 1298, a climactic sea battle between Venice and Genoa at Curzola off the Dalmatian coast left the Genoese victors, with seven thousand prisoners. Among these was a “gen- tleman commander” of a Venetian galley, Marco Polo. Brought back in chains to a prison in Genoa, he became friendly with another prisoner, relic of an earlier Genoese victory over the Pisans. This Rustichello happened to be a writer of romances who already had a considerable reputation for his retelling of the tales of King Arthur and his Round Table. Not a literary genius, Rustichello still was master of his genre, industrious and persuasive. In Marco Polo’s reminiscences he saw the raw material for a new kind of 138 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS romance — “A Description of the World” — and he persuaded the Venetian to cooperate. Marco Polo must somehow have managed to secure his notes from home. Then, profiting from his enforced leisure and from their confinement together, the Venetian dictated a copious account of his travels to Rustichello, who wrote it all down. If either Marco Polo or Rustichello had not fought in the wars against Genoa, we might have no record of Marco Polo’s travels and might not even have heard his name. Luckily, Rustichello was a writer congenial to the great Venetian traveler, and he knew the makings of a romance to charm the world for seven hundred years. Of course he could not restrain himself from occasionally embellishing Marco Polo’s facts with his own fancies. Some of the more colorful episodes are adapted from earlier writings by Rustichello or others. For example, the extravagant praise that Kublai Khan lavished on the young Marco when he first arrived at the court recalls what King Arthur said, according to Rustichello’s own romance, when he received the young Tristan at Camelot. This was not the first or the last time a writer made the reputation of an adventurer. The formula, “as told to,” which nowadays appears less often than it rightly should on title pages of books, has a surprisingly respectable history. Why did the energetic Vene- tian, who was literate in several languages, who must have written much to please Kublai Khan and extensive detailed notes for his own use, not write down for himself his personal adventures? Perhaps if promptly on his return to the commercial city of Venice in 1295 he had been tempted by a publisher’s contract, he might have written his own book. But two centuries would pass before a publishing trade flourished. Other great medieval travelers — Friar Odoric of Pordenone, Nicolo de’ Conti, and Ibn Battuta — and the noted French chronicler and biographer of Saint Louis, Jean de Joinville (12247-1317?), also dictated their books. The rewards of money or celebrity were not yet dangled before so many, nor was literacy required to get or to hold political power. The opening sentence of the prologue of Marco Polo’s book exhorts: “Emperors and kings, dukes and marquises, counts, knights, and townsfolk, and all people who wish to know the various races of men and the peculiarities of the various regions of the world, take this book, take this book and have it read to you. ” Rustichello wrote Marco Polo’s book in French, which in Western Europe in those days was current among the laity just as Latin was among the clergy. Before long it was translated into most European languages, and numerous manuscripts survive. Never before or since has a single book brought so much authentic new information, or so widened the vistas for a continent. Paths to the East 139 The Land Curtain Comes Down In the decades of the overland pioneers there was a flourishing, but small- scale and specialized, trade between Europe and easternmost Asia. Scores of European merchants must have reached those far parts, but not many merchants besides the Polos left a firsthand report of their travels. A vivid if not always reliable record of communities of Europeans in Chinese cities was kept for us by a remarkable succession of intrepid Franciscan friars. One of the most enterprising was the Italian Franciscan friar John of Montecorvino. Dispatched by Pope Nicholas IV in 1289, he arrived in Peking in 1295, where he “presented the letter of our lord the Pope, and invited him [the Great Khan] to adopt the Catholic Faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, but he had grown too old in idolatry. However he bestows many kindnesses upon the Christians, and these two years past I am abiding with him.” In the Peking cathedral with a bell tower and three bells that he built just across the street from the Khan’s palace, he baptized, according to his own count, some six thousand townspeople. There he organized and trained a choir of a hundred and fifty boys. “His Majesty the Emperor moreover delights much to hear them chanting. I have the bells rung at all the canonical hours, and with my congregation of babes and sucklings I per- form divine service, and the chaunting we do by ear because I have no service book with the notes.” Friar John was appointed Archbishop of Cambaluc (Peking) in 1307 and within a few years received three suffragan bishops to assist him. Another Franciscan friar, Odoric of Pordenone, dictated to a fellow friar one of the most picturesque and copious records of life in China, where he lived for three years, before returning to Padua by way of central Asia in 1330. He noted many items not reported by Marco Polo — the custom of fishing with cormorants, the habit of letting fingernails grow long, and the tradition of compressing women’s feet. By the time Friar John Marignolli, an aristocratic Florentine, reached Peking, in 1342, he observed that the Archbishop of Peking had a residence appropriate to his high station and all the Christian clergy “had their subsistence from the Emperor’s table in 140 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS the most honorable manner.” In the seaport city of Zayton (Tsinkiang) he found three great Franciscan churches and a bathhouse for the use of European merchants. The greater part of Marignolli’s recollections, how- ever, is given over to a detailed description of Paradise, and the Garden of Eden — in Ceylon — with its delightful mountains, fountains, and rivers. About 1340 the alert Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, agent for a Florentine banking family, the Bardi, prepared a helpful handbook for merchant- travelers that leaves us clues to a flourishing trade. His mercantile Baedeker gives much information that an overland merchant-traveler would need: the distances between places, and the local dangers; weights and measures; prices and rates of exchange; customs regulations; practical hints on cus- toms regulations, on what to eat, and what not to eat, and where to sleep. In the first place, you must let your beard grow long and not shave. And at Tana you should furnish yourself with a dragoman. And you must not try to save money in the matter of dragomen by taking a bad one instead of a good one. For the additional wages of the good one will not cost you so much as you will save by having him. And besides the dragoman it will be well to take at least two good men servants who are acquainted with the Cumanian tongue. And if the mer- chant likes to take a woman with him from Tana, he can do so; if he does not like to take one there is no obligation, only if he does take one he will be kept much more comfortably than if he does not take one. Howbeit, if he do take one, it will be well that she be acquainted with the Cumanian tongue as well as the men. . . . Whatever silver the merchants may carry with them as far as Cathay the lord of Cathay will take from them and put into his treasury. And to merchants who thus bring silver they give that paper money of theirs in exchange. This is of yellow paper, stamped with the seal of the lord aforesaid. And this money is called; and with this money you can readily buy silk and other merchandize that you have a desire to buy. And all the people of the country are bound to receive it. And yet you shall not pay a higher price for your goods because your money is of paper. . . . (And don’t forget that if you treat the custom-house officers with respect, and make them something of a present in goods or money, as well as their clerks and dragomen, they will behave with great civility, and always be ready to appraise your wares below their real value.) These days of lively overland traffic between the ends of the earth were not to last long. John of Montecorvino was to be both the first and, for centuries, the last effective archbishop of Peking. The successor whom Pope John appointed in 1333 appears never to have reached his destination. The land paths to the East that were so abruptly opened in the mid-thirteenth century were closed no less abruptly only one century later. The strength and unity of the vast Mongol Empire had opened, had kept Paths to the East 141 open, and had protected the European overland passage to India and China. During these years, sometimes called the Mongol Century, when some Europeans came eastward, some Chinese also went westward. Homeward- bound Westerners and traveling Chinese carried with them playing cards, porcelain, textiles, motifs in art, styles in furniture, which shaped the every- day life of the European upper classes. A few items — paper money, printing, and gunpowder — were world-shaking. These novelties reached the Middle East directly, and then arrived in Europe indirectly and interstitially, through the Arabs and others. Such momentous notions were carried by a very few. The empire that they had conquered on horseback, the Mongols discov- ered, could not be governed on horseback. They needed an elaborate ad- ministration for their vast empire. Within China, where they were aliens and invaders, it was never easy to keep their subject peoples under control. The Mongols put themselves or other foreigners like Marco Polo into the high government positions. Meanwhile the Chinese, with an ancient literary tradition, a developed technology, and a fastidious ceremonialism, found many reasons to condemn their barbarian conquerors. The Mongols, from the dry grasslands of the north, had never formed the habit of bathing. “They smell so heavily that one cannot approach them,” a Chinese traveler to Mongolia reported. “They wash themselves in urine.” Marco Polo was awed by the ruthlessness and hardiness of the Mongol soldiers, who drank mare’s milk, carried almost no baggage, and were “of all men in the world the best able to endure exertion and hardship and the least costly to main- tain and therefore the best adapted for conquering territory and overthrow- ing kingdoms.” Those Mongol soldiers he found in Cathay had become degenerate and dissolute, and he observed the restlessness of the native Chinese as he traveled around the country. All the ways of the Mongol rulers, and not the least their tolerance of foreign religions, irritated tradi- tional Confucians. By the mid-fourteenth century famine in the north and disastrous flood- ing of the Yellow River multiplied problems for the ruling Mongols. There were outbreaks of rebellion all over the country. Toghon Temur Khan (1320-1370), the last of the Mongol emperors, a man of Caligulan dissolute- ness, came to his insecure throne in 1333. He took ten close friends into the “palace of deep clarity” in Peking, where they adapted the secret exercises of Tibetan Buddist tantra into ceremonial sexual orgies. Women were sum- moned from all over the empire to join in functions that were supposed to prolong life by strengthening men with women’s powers. “All who found most pleasure in intercourse with men,” current rumor recounted, “were chosen and taken to the palace. After a few days they were allowed out. The families of the common people were glad to receive gold and silver. The 142 THE EARTH AND THE S^AS nobles were secretly pleased and said: ‘How can one resist, if the ruler wishes to choose them?’ ” But the people did resist. The climax came in 1368, when Hung Wu (Chu Yuan-chang, 1328-1398), a self-made man of great talents, emerged as the leader of Chinese rebellion to found the Ming dynasty. The natives had ingeniously organized rebellion under the very noses of the Mongols. In these last years of Mongol rule, folk history recalls, the nervous Khans placed an informer in nearly every family, and forbade people to gather in groups. The Chinese were not allowed to carry arms, which meant that only one family in ten was permitted to possess a carving knife. But somehow the Mongols had forgotten to suppress the Chinese custom, at the coming of the full moon, of exchanging little round full-moon cakes, decorated with pictures of the moon hare and which, like a fortune cookie, carried a piece of paper inside. The wily rebels, we are told, used these innocent-looking moon cakes for their messengers. Inside were instructions for the Chinese to rise and massacre the Mongols at the time of the full moon in August 1368. The dissolute Toghon Temur Khan, instead of staying to defend his patri- mony, fled with the Empress and his concubines — first to the fabled summer palace at Shangtu, the famed Xanadu, then to Karakorum, the original Mon- gol capital, where he met his death. Meanwhile Mongol princes and generals were fighting among themselves, and the Mongol Empire was coming apart. In the very year of the Peking uprising the great Tamerlane, with his head- quarters far to the west in Samarkand, was consummating the first stage of his own plan for world conquest. Tamerlane’s empire, vast by any other standard, was only a southwesterly quarter of the realm of Genghis Khan. But Tamerlane stood astride the land paths to the East. Dismemberment of the Mongol Empire interrupted the paths of safe passage that Pegolotti had described only a few decades before. Tamerlane did keep the passage open within his realm where Europeans could go as far as Tabriz, in Persia. Samarkand, where Tamerlane’s power stopped, briefly was the Athens of Asia. Soon after his death in 1405, Samarkand, the once busy way station on the Silk Road, lay in ruins, an Asian ghost town. Tamerlane’s empire was only a memory. Land passage to Cathay for Europeans was now closed. Even news of Cathay became a scarce commodity in Europe. The Pope himself, whose continent-wide communications network excelled all others, could not get word of the happenings in Peking. He went on appointing archbishops or bishops of Peking long after there was no hope that they could reach their see. Even if a European did reach the borders of Cathay, he would not be admitted. The new rulers of China, with memories of foreign tyranny still fresh, resumed their ancient isolationism. Paths to the East 143 After the disruption of that first Mongol Empire the European West lost touch with the farthest East. Only a trickle of travelers’ reports comes to us from the era of Tamerlane and of the second Mongol Empire. These sources remind us how few, how limited, and how insignificant had become the European overland contacts with Asia. A Madrid nobleman, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, and two companions, was sent by King Henry III of Castile in 1403 to solicit the alliance of Tamerlane against the Turks. This delegation went by ship to Trebizond on the far corner of the Black Sea, then overland as far as Samarkand. They witnessed the splendor of Tamerlane’s capital with its communities of captive craftsmen — silk weavers, potters, glassworkers, armorers, silver- smiths— gathered from the cities of conquest. There they heard rumors that it was a six-month journey to Cambaluc, but that was not for them. Before Clavijo could return from Samarkand, Tamerlane was dead, the subject princes were rising in revolt, and anarchy once again descended on the overland routes to the West. The Spanish party had to meander homeward to avoid robbers and escape the countless battlefields that had sprung up all across the remnants of Tamerlane’s realm. The last well-recorded European in the East in this overland age was no bold adventurer, no missionary, no diplomat or merchant, but an involun- tary traveler. Hans Schiltberger, a Bavarian of good family, was only fifteen years old when he was captured at the Battle of Nicopolis (1396), where he had been fighting in the Crusade against the Turks led by King Sigismund of Hungary. For the next thirty-two years Schiltberger was a slave of the Ottoman sultan Bajazet, and then of the Tartar Tamerlane and his succes- sor. He served as a runner and did other menial jobs to keep himself alive until he could make the dash for freedom. Carried along on the ebb and flow of battle, he was handed from one side to another, meanwhile getting a slave’s-eye view of life among Turks and Tartars. Like Clavijo, Schiltberger never reached farther east than Samarkand. His account is spiced by epi- sodes like the victory secured by Tartar Amazons, giant female warriors, led by a vengeful princess. He reports a Cairo with twelve thousand streets and twelve thousand houses in every street. But his book of travels, his Reisebuch, dictated after his return to his ancestral property in Bavaria, also gives us, along with these flights of fancy, a rare firsthand account of medieval life among the lowly. The frustrations of Clavijo and Schiltberger attested the end of the heroic age of overland travel. Instead of vivid eyewitness accounts of life in the capital of Cathay by Europeans honored by the Great Khan, Europeans now had to depend on rumor, on the casual reports of captives and slaves for word from the fabled East. PART SIX Enough for us that the hidden half of the globe is brought to light, and the Portuguese daily go farther and farther beyond the equator. Thus shores unknown will soon become accessible; for one in emulation of another sets forth in labours and mighty perils. — PETER MARTYR (1493) Ptolemy Revived and Revised The blocking of the land paths proved a godsend. Driven by new incentives to go to sea, Europeans would discover waterways to everywhere. The science of cartography first flourished on the sea. There the needs of work- ing mariners shifted the interest of geographers and map-makers from the wholesale to the retail. Christian geography had become a cosmic enter- prise, more interested in everyplace than in anyplace, more concerned with faith than with facts. Cosmos-makers confirmed Scripture with their graph- ics, but these were no use to a sea captain delivering a cargo of olive oil from Naples to Alexandria. The mariner who did not find much help in Cosmas Indicopleustes’ neat box of the universe needed to know the precise location of rocks and shoals outside the ports that fed Athens or Rome, or how to find the clear way between the small islands of the Adriatic. During the Great Interruption in European geographic knowledge, mariners going about their business accumulated bits of information about the Mediterranean that would smooth their paths, make their passage safer, quicker, more sure. Collecting information on a scale and in a form they could use, they accumulated a stock of knowledge that had nothing to do with the speculations of philoso- phers, theologians, and cosmos-concocters. Caring not at all about the grand shape of the Ecumene, about the precise location of Eden or from what direction to expect the invasion of Gog and Magog at the end of the world, they recorded countless details of the seacoasts to guide themselves and those who followed. As early as the fifth century B.c. some mariners in the Mediterranean were noting down their experiences of landmarks, coastal features, and other useful miscellaneous facts. Such a record was called a periplus (for “sailing around”), and we might call it a coast pilot. The oldest of these ancient peripli to survive was made by Scylax in the service of Darius the Great, Persian emperor of the sixth century B.c. His detailed sailing directions describe the perils and passages of the Mediterra- nean— the best way to get from the Eastern point, the Canopic mouth of the Nile in Egypt, to the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), and many shorter voyages, always indicating how many days’ sailing each voyage required with a favorable wind and fair weather. “This whole coasting from the Pillars of Hercules to Cerne Island takes twelve days. The parts beyond the isle of Ceme are no longer navigable because of shoals, mud, and sea-weed. This sea-weed has the width of a palm, and is sharp toward the points so Doubling the World 147 as to prick.” Scylax’s critical faculties leave him when he moves away from the sea. There, luckily, misstatements and exaggerations will not wreck a vessel or delay passage into port. “These Ethiopians are the tallest of all people we know, greater than four cubits; some are even five cubits [seven and a half to ten feet]; and they wear a beard and long hair and are the most handsome of all people. And he rules them who happens to be the tallest.” Of course, written records — whether of fact or fiction — were useful only to mariners who could read. It would be many centuriesi in the future before mariners were literate. Until then there was no large market for a written text. Yet it was hard to provide a useful picture of the seacoast because the arts of cartography remained primitive. The shortest and safest passage from one port to another, besides being a mariner’s trade secret, was a valuable state secret, for it spelled the commercial opportunity that could enrich a city or promote an empire. It is not surprising, then, that manuscript coast pilots were few. From the whole period of the Great Interruption, the fourth until the fourteenth century, no mariner’s charts survive. In that age of widespread illiteracy, sailors passed on their traditional knowledge by word of mouth. From about 1300, however, we do find Mediterranean sea charts, offering the kind of useful detail found in the ancient peripli. While the ancient guides were written texts telling about the coasting and sailing conditions, the later guides are charts. These coast charts of the Mediterranean, accord- ing to historians of cartography, are “the first true maps” because they “first laid down any considerable part of the earth surface from close, continuous, and what we may call scientific observation.” They came to be known by their Italian name, portolano, or harbor guide. They could have been called “handy guides,” for that is what they were. Being porta- ble, they could be tested and corrected on the spot against the actual experience of each place. Despite — or perhaps because of — their humble, utilitarian origins, the portolanos were the source of some of the most reliable information to be found in the grand printed atlases down to the middle of the sixteenth century. The pioneer-masters of modem cartography, Mercator and Or- telius, who opened a new era in the mapping of the planet, found little that was useful in all the speculations of Christian theologian-cosmographers. But they gratefully incorporated the piecemeal everyday findings of work- ing mariners. As late as 1595, the world’s leading seafaring merchants, the Dutch mariners, were being guided by the coastal outlines, hints, and cautions of mariners who had compiled sea charts two centuries before. Like Scylax, these later observant professionals somehow lost their criti- cal faculties when they went inland. Coastal guides either left the interior blank or sprinkled it with myth and rumor. It was on the edge of the sea, 148 THE EARTH AND THE SEAS where the outlines of the earth were tested by everyday experience, that the living truths of modern cartography were bom. There were other reasons, too, why the sea was the nursery of scientific, precise, usable charts of the earth. Christian theologians, whose business it was to know about the universe and man’s destiny, naturally put the Gar- den of Eden at the head of their maps. Scripture, in the apocryphal Book of II Esdras 6:42, declared “six parts hast thou dried up.” The earth therefore must be six-sevenths covered by land, and only one-seventh by water, and the seas would be only a minor marginal element in their scheme. “Facts” about the land were drawn mainly from such literary, and usually sacred, sources. In the Middle Ages, and all the long ages before printing, those manuscript sources accumulated and glossed one another. Slow to change, the sacred written sources acquired credibility by repeti- tion. Sea charts, however, were tested not by literature but by experience. No amount of theology would persuade a mariner that the rocks his ship foundered on were not real. The outlines of the seacoast, marked off by hard experience, could not be modified or ignored by what was written in Isidore of Seville or even in Saint Augustine. The farther man went out to sea, the less the opportunity or the temptation to be seduced by literary sources. For the sea had no memory. While the topography of the land remained servile to the written word, to rumor, myth, and tradition, the seascape remained a realm of freedom, freedom to learn from experience, to be guided by fact, and to increase knowledge. To reach Asia by water from the Mediterranean countries meant, of course, leaving the closed for the open sea. Mediterranean voyages were mostly coastwise sailing, which meant relying on personal experience of those particular places — local winds and currents, familiar landmarks, well- known offshore islands and the distinctive silhouette of a neighboring mountain. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules lay new problems. When Por- tuguese sailors advanced southward down the coast of Africa, they left behind all familiar landmarks. The farther down they went, the farther away they were from the reassuring details of the portolanos. There was no accumulated experience and there were no handy guides. The Mediterranean was nowhere more than five hundred miles from its southern to its closest northern coast, which meant a difference of only some seven degrees of latitude. Mediterranean pilots therefore seldom worried about their latitude, especially since the modes of defining latitude were still so crude. But the African continent stretched from 38 degrees north latitude to 38 degrees south latitude, one-fifth around the globe. When a seacoast was so little known, when local inhabitants were so hostile, and when the offshore hazards were so uncharted, latitude was the best and sometimes the only way of defining a ship’s position. Prudent mariners then would have Doubling the World 149 to learn how to mark latitude. At first they could estimate latitude by the altitude of the polestar. But as they reached farther south the polestar sank, and they had to use tables of declination with a sea astrolabe or a quadrant or cross-staff as they observed the midday altitude of the sun. These tech- niques, crucial for navigation over long distances and in unfamiliar waters, developed in the late fifteenth century when the Portuguese were pressing down the coast of Africa. By the early sixteenth century, marine charts began to show scales of latitude, and gradually numerous places on the African coast had their latitude defined. Such aids to navigation promoted sailing southward and northward. But, as we have seen, the definition of longitude, to mark and measure east-west distances, would be much more complicated. Mariners continued to rely on “dead reckoning.” This meant estimating position without astronomical observation, by calculating or guessing the course and distance traveled from a previously determined position. As we have seen, it was not until the eighteenth century that a seafaring clock made it possible for mariners to define their longitude with a precision sufficient to enable them to use longitude to guide their return to where they had been, and to guide those who wanted to follow them. Besides all these problems, leaving the Mediter- ranean obviously carried the risk of being driven off course into the trackless open ocean. The schematic Christian T-O map was little use to Europeans seeking an eastward sea passage to the Indies. European sovereigns and other investors financing long sea voyages had to abandon the theologian’s for the mariner’s point of view. No longer would Jerusalem remain the center, the Garden of Eden must be relegated to another world, and in their place appeared the geometry of latitude and longitude. Here entered — or, rather, reentered — the great Ptolemy. It was just about this time, when the land curtain thudded down across the European land paths to the East, that the geography of Ptolemy was revived to refresh and reform the thinking of European Christians. If there is a connection be- tween these events, we do not know it, but the coincidence was pregnant for the future of the world. Even before the revival of Ptolemy, by the time Marco Polo had returned to Venice the results of the portolano charts, the observations of careful mariners, were being garnered into larger maps and atlases and for poster- ity. The most impressive of these that survive was the so-called Catalan Atlas of 1375, made for the King of Aragon by Cresques le Juif, Abraham Cresques, a Jew of Palma on the island of Majorca, map-maker and instru- ment-maker to the King. His services along with those of other Jews of skill and learning were a reward that the kings of Aragon received for their I5° THE EARTH AND THE SEAS policy of toleration, which created a whole Jewish school of cartography at Majorca. When King Charles V of France sent to the King of Aragon for a copy of his best world map, he received this one, which, luckily, now survives in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. As the persecution of the Jews resumed in Aragon late in the fourteenth century, Abraham’s son, Jehuda, who was carrying on his father’s work, was forced to emigrate. Accepting the invitation of Prince Henry the Navi- gator, he took refuge in Portugal, where he helped the Portuguese prepare the maps and charts for their grand overseas adventures. It was no accident that Jews played a leading role in the liberation of Europeans from the slavery of Christian geography. Driven from place to place, they helped make cartography, still the special preserve of princes and high bureaucrats, into an international science, offering facts equally valid in lands of all faiths. Marginal both to Christians and to Muslims, the Jews became teach- ers and emissaries bringing Arab learning into the Christian world. The Catalan Atlas aimed to provide a “mappamundi, that is to say, image of the world and of the regions which are on the earth and of the various kinds of people who inhabit it.” It expressed the dominant interests of European mariners of the Age of the Land that was nearing its end. The east-west stretch that was the center of their world was depicted on twelve leaves mounted on boards to fold like a screen. It did not show northern Europe, northern Asia, or southern Africa, but did show the Orient and the little that was known of the Western Ocean. By contrast with Christian maps, it was a triumph of empiricism. It showed what could be learned by adding up the experiences of countless individuals, including Arabic seamen and the very latest European world travelers. Of course, the map-makers had to start with something and they inevitably started with the familiar T-O circular forms. Jerusalem is still near the center, and there too are the tribes of Gog and Magog held back by the “Caspian” mountains, and other relics of the orthodox landscape. But this is essentially a portolano atlas, which means that the seacoasts of the Black Sea, of the Mediterranean, and of Western Europe are delineated from the “normal” portolano, from the countless sketches of these coasts made by active seamen and recorded on their coastal guides. Abraham Cresques also drew on the reports brought back by recent travelers to Asia. We know that Cresques’s patrons, King Peter IV of Aragon and his son, went to special trouble to secure manuscripts of Marco Polo’s “Description of the World,” of Friar Odoric of Pordenone’s travels, and of the travels of the apocryphal “Sir John Mandeville,” to facilitate the cartographer’s work. As a result Cresques’s atlas offered, at last, a recognizable version of the Asian continent. The least inaccurate part is that stretch through the heart of the continent across which the Polos traveled and on which Marco Doubling the World 151 Polo’s book had provided a useful gloss. The southeastern peninsula of Asia is entirely omitted, but now for the first time in the West, India itself is properly represented as a great peninsula. This Catalan Atlas, however primitive it may seem to the modern eye, was a masterpiece of a burgeoning empirical spirit. Much of the legendary data that had populated maps for all the Christian centuries was omitted. The cartographer’s greatest act of self-control was to leave parts of the earth blank, and in the portolano spirit the Catalan Atlas leaves vast regions of the north and the south undescribed. Southern Africa, long a favorite habitat for anthropophagi and mythical monsters, is now left vacant to await facts that would satisfy a hardheaded sea captain. For most of history the human mind has abhorred a vacuum, and pre- ferred myths and factitious facts to the label “Terra Incognita.” How could people, especially the “learned,” be awakened to a willing confession of ignorance? The portolano atlases were a beginning. The discovery and plotting of the earth could not, however, be accom- plished by the unaided empirical spirit. Here Ptolemy’s large a priori aes- thetic concepts were essential. Like the portolano makers, Ptolemy had left behind the Homeric notion of a primordial, all-surrounding Oceanus encir- cling the earth and the sea. He admitted that there might be unknown lands beyond the bounds of his known mapped world. But he had something else to add. The portolano charts were projectionless. Although they appear to have been based on measurements and careful calculation, the manuscript copyists never made any two of them precisely alike. For they had no regular, constant, and universal system of coordinates — nothing like lati- tude and longitude. The geometric pattern characteristic of the portolano charts was a scheme of “wind roses,” each a center for radiating lines. The number of these on any particular chart depended on the size of the sheet on which it was drawn. There was usually a central point of radiation about which eight or sixteen other focal points are found in a circle. The decora- tive roses showed the orientation of the winds, and also could help the mariner by numerous radiating lines, one of which might correspond to the course of a particular voyage. The portolano charts did place north