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The Medieval Expansion of Europe
Between the year 1000 and the mid-14th century, several remarkable events unfolded as Europeans made contact with a very substantial part of the inhabited world, much of it never previously known or suspected to exist by them. Leif Ericsson and other Vikings discovered North America; European crusading armies established themselves in Syria and Palestine; Marco Polo and other Italian merchants, and missionaries such as John of Monte Corvino, penetrated the dominions of Mongolia and China; the Vivaldi brothers sought to open a sea route to India; Jaime Ferrer was lured by dreams of locating the source of West African gold; and the Atlantic island groups, the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, were all discovered. In this detailed survey, Phillips describes these exciting quests while also exploring their closely related myths and legends, all the while setting the stage for the even greater exploits of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and their successors.
For this new Clarendon Paperback edition, Phillips has added both an introduction and a bibliographical essay, the latter of which surveys recent work in what is becoming a thriving area of new research.
For this new Clarendon Paperback edition, Phillips has added both an introduction and a bibliographical essay, the latter of which surveys recent work in what is becoming a thriving area of new research.
344 pages, Paperback
First published October 20, 1988
67 people want to read
About the author
J.R.S. Phillips
10 books2 followersJohn Roland Seymour Phillips, after a long teachng career was made Professor emeritus at University College Dublin.
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September 6, 2017To my mind, a back to front book as only in the last couple of chapters does Philips make clear that what he is interested in is the background to the discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries - what knowledge and practical experience of that wider world did Europeans have and how widely available was it? Philips' answer is that there was quite a lot of knowledge and experience, but in an age of oral culture not necessarily widely known, and even if written down new discoveries did not necessarily supplant older ideas, also the categories of European geographical thought were vague, unhelpful and confusing. Ethiopia was sometimes thought of as one of the three Indias for instance.
Even when new information was written down like the travels of Marco Polo, it wasn't necessarily understood or read as we might expect - Polo was often bundled together with more fanciful writings like the Alexander Legend in a single manuscript suggesting it was read at least sometimes as a similar work of fictional entertainment, an impression helped by the fact that it was ghost-written by a writer of Romances who freely recycled bits of his own versions of Arthurian legends in to the travel account, particularly in the battle scenes and war strategy (a fair chunk of Marco Polo is taken up by a potted and confused history of the rise of Genghis Khan to power in which there were many battles and wars). There was a tendency for certain written works like Orosius and eventually Ptolemy to remain influential as alternative views didn't circulate or get copied so often.
I'm a bit lost in the land of the dog headed men myself over how to continue the review, it is mixed bag of a book, with interesting chapters and curious odds and ends of information, the title is a little unhelpful as one might think it could be like The conversion of Europe or The Making of Europe, a book about how Europe reached its current boundaries, alternatively we might think about the expansion of Europe in terms of the expansion of geographical knowledge, allied to that Europeans actually travelling to places beyond Europe, but also colonisation. Philips looks at all three of these aspects which turn out not to be so closely linked as one might expect and all of which to varying extent feed into the motivations that propelled the Portuguese round Africa to India and the Spanish across the Atlantic. Exploration didn't always feedback into widespread knowledge, famously it was a misunderstanding that brought Columbus to the Americas .
We might notice that Europe is a difficult concept and would have been even more so at the time, some might have thought in terms of Christendom which happened to be concentrated in a region similar to that described as Europe in Classical texts but then again that region included populations of non-Christians and they were sniffy and unaccepting of many of their fellow non-Catholic Christians. Religion was a factor in drawing Europeans out into the wider World as word of Christian communities in India and Africa captured the imagination. Religion was also important in the transmission of information - Roger Bacon mentioned the discoveries of Carpini and William of Rubruck among the Tatars - all three were Franciscans, an order which originally had a strong missionary ethos. But these Christians were problematic - they weren't Catholic, their theology and practice sometimes sharply different. Occasionally, possibly wilfully, Buddhists in China were believed to be Christians too .
The desire for commercial wealth was a driver but maybe less than might be imagined until the Portuguese were bringing back gold and slaves from Guinea profits were haphazard and uncertain, as John Larner says in Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch commercial adventures satisfied the cultural longing for chivalric adventure, going to far off places, visiting the courts of great Kings and potentates, seeing incredible things (like watertight bulkheads in China) was as good as stories about King Arthur.
As certain ideas circulated there was a feedback loop - travellers wanted to find Prester John , see the wonders of the three Indies, and find out the truth about the dog headed men. The ongoing search for Prester John led to his decisive relocation to Africa in the fourteenth century, as Asia became better known and travellers reported that they sought him there and found him not, it became clear to Europeans back home that the reason he couldn't be found in Asia plainly was because he was in Africa -.
It is a book full of interesting things, my eye was taken by the gold crossing the Sahara this time and the Ethiopian discovery of Europe - they sent several embassies somehow through Mamluk Egypt to Italy in the Fourteenth century, the previous reading I had ,my eyes open only for the relations and contacts with the Mongols which this time seemed arid and less interesting, despite the attempts of the Mongols in Persia to arrange a combined war effort with the King of France, or England against the Mamluks in Egypt, although due to that a network of Catholic Bishoprics was established from the Black sea into China. The Viking discovery of the north Atlantic is familiar enough, in a more recent book one might read about the genetic make-up of Iceland and maybe a little more detail on the slow sad end of Viking Greenland. Phillips thinks that the Americas would have been discovered even without Columbus at around the same time - Northern Europeans were searching for fishing grounds, while the Portuguese after exploring and settling the Azores and Canary Islands were sweeping out into the Atlantic, virtually as far as Brazil to catch prevailing winds and currents back to Lisbon.
Still all the interesting details didn't come together for me to make an interesting book. The bibliography has various temptations for further explorations - the writings of Johan Schiltberger, a Bavarian taken prisoner by the Turks and then Timur the Lame (the Tamberlane of legend and Marlowe), and the embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, a Castillian to Timur in the early years of the fourteenth century, for instance. Reading I noticed whenever a priest or Merchant reached some distant place they frequently stumbled across some other European. I imagined how different a book could have been written about the Jewish or Arab discoveries of the wider worlds, perhaps one day there will be the scholars with the patience and the languages for such researches. Very wide-ranging this volume makes a lot of specialised information available to the general reader.
Even when new information was written down like the travels of Marco Polo, it wasn't necessarily understood or read as we might expect - Polo was often bundled together with more fanciful writings like the Alexander Legend in a single manuscript suggesting it was read at least sometimes as a similar work of fictional entertainment, an impression helped by the fact that it was ghost-written by a writer of Romances who freely recycled bits of his own versions of Arthurian legends in to the travel account, particularly in the battle scenes and war strategy (a fair chunk of Marco Polo is taken up by a potted and confused history of the rise of Genghis Khan to power in which there were many battles and wars). There was a tendency for certain written works like Orosius and eventually Ptolemy to remain influential as alternative views didn't circulate or get copied so often.
I'm a bit lost in the land of the dog headed men myself over how to continue the review, it is mixed bag of a book, with interesting chapters and curious odds and ends of information, the title is a little unhelpful as one might think it could be like The conversion of Europe or The Making of Europe, a book about how Europe reached its current boundaries, alternatively we might think about the expansion of Europe in terms of the expansion of geographical knowledge, allied to that Europeans actually travelling to places beyond Europe, but also colonisation. Philips looks at all three of these aspects which turn out not to be so closely linked as one might expect and all of which to varying extent feed into the motivations that propelled the Portuguese round Africa to India and the Spanish across the Atlantic. Exploration didn't always feedback into widespread knowledge, famously it was a misunderstanding that brought Columbus to the Americas .
We might notice that Europe is a difficult concept and would have been even more so at the time, some might have thought in terms of Christendom which happened to be concentrated in a region similar to that described as Europe in Classical texts but then again that region included populations of non-Christians and they were sniffy and unaccepting of many of their fellow non-Catholic Christians. Religion was a factor in drawing Europeans out into the wider World as word of Christian communities in India and Africa captured the imagination. Religion was also important in the transmission of information - Roger Bacon mentioned the discoveries of Carpini and William of Rubruck among the Tatars - all three were Franciscans, an order which originally had a strong missionary ethos. But these Christians were problematic - they weren't Catholic, their theology and practice sometimes sharply different. Occasionally, possibly wilfully, Buddhists in China were believed to be Christians too .
The desire for commercial wealth was a driver but maybe less than might be imagined until the Portuguese were bringing back gold and slaves from Guinea profits were haphazard and uncertain, as John Larner says in Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch commercial adventures satisfied the cultural longing for chivalric adventure, going to far off places, visiting the courts of great Kings and potentates, seeing incredible things (like watertight bulkheads in China) was as good as stories about King Arthur.
As certain ideas circulated there was a feedback loop - travellers wanted to find Prester John , see the wonders of the three Indies, and find out the truth about the dog headed men. The ongoing search for Prester John led to his decisive relocation to Africa in the fourteenth century, as Asia became better known and travellers reported that they sought him there and found him not, it became clear to Europeans back home that the reason he couldn't be found in Asia plainly was because he was in Africa -.
It is a book full of interesting things, my eye was taken by the gold crossing the Sahara this time and the Ethiopian discovery of Europe - they sent several embassies somehow through Mamluk Egypt to Italy in the Fourteenth century, the previous reading I had ,my eyes open only for the relations and contacts with the Mongols which this time seemed arid and less interesting, despite the attempts of the Mongols in Persia to arrange a combined war effort with the King of France, or England against the Mamluks in Egypt, although due to that a network of Catholic Bishoprics was established from the Black sea into China. The Viking discovery of the north Atlantic is familiar enough, in a more recent book one might read about the genetic make-up of Iceland and maybe a little more detail on the slow sad end of Viking Greenland. Phillips thinks that the Americas would have been discovered even without Columbus at around the same time - Northern Europeans were searching for fishing grounds, while the Portuguese after exploring and settling the Azores and Canary Islands were sweeping out into the Atlantic, virtually as far as Brazil to catch prevailing winds and currents back to Lisbon.
Still all the interesting details didn't come together for me to make an interesting book. The bibliography has various temptations for further explorations - the writings of Johan Schiltberger, a Bavarian taken prisoner by the Turks and then Timur the Lame (the Tamberlane of legend and Marlowe), and the embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, a Castillian to Timur in the early years of the fourteenth century, for instance. Reading I noticed whenever a priest or Merchant reached some distant place they frequently stumbled across some other European. I imagined how different a book could have been written about the Jewish or Arab discoveries of the wider worlds, perhaps one day there will be the scholars with the patience and the languages for such researches. Very wide-ranging this volume makes a lot of specialised information available to the general reader.
April 25, 2016
I thought this was wonderful. Phillips looks at what "Europe" knew about the world, what they thought they knew and what they didn't know at all. It's more complex than that, obviously, since he doesn't look at Europe as a single entity. One of my favorite parts was his discussion of the many times Europeans and Mongols tried (unsuccessfully) to coordinate their attacks on Muslim countries. I hadn't ever known about that. Just the thought that they'd tried was amazing to me.
June 3, 2018
A superb piecing together of disparate unreliable information from multiple countries and centuries in an effort to piece together just what medieval Europe knew of the wider world, prior to its rapid expansion after Columbus, Magellan, and Da Gama. The legends of Prester John, the travels of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, the rediscovery of classical learning, the threat of the Mongols, the desire to reconquer Jerusalem with a new crusade, the closing of the Silk Road by Central Asian wars, the rumours of Atlantic islands, the pursuit of Paradise in Ceylon, the source of African gold, and the various pre-Columbian discoverers of the Americas - all are here, making the medieval world seem much bigger in the process. Excellent fun stuff that makes Columbus' voyage both make more sense and less - he had enough evidence there was something over the horizon, but much of that evidence suggested it was much further away, and he still had no real idea how to get there.
January 27, 2018
The Medieval Expansion of Europe is a book only scholars and researchers would find interesting, me thinks. I'm not a scholar (wouldn't self-identify that way) and I do lots of research (love learning stuff). This book is (to me) a gem for authors looking for details of plot, of place, of history. I came up with story idea after story idea from beginning to end, about every 5-10 pages, and that made it an enjoyable read for me.
As for the actual scholarship, the book was written mid-1980s, I think, and some of the information presented has been superceded by more recent discoveries. There's a few places where the conclusions are incorrect, some places where the historical scholarship is inexact and nothing to throw most readers.
As for the actual scholarship, the book was written mid-1980s, I think, and some of the information presented has been superceded by more recent discoveries. There's a few places where the conclusions are incorrect, some places where the historical scholarship is inexact and nothing to throw most readers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews