Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D.: With an Account of Geographical Progress Throughout the Midd

EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS.

C

IRCA 333-867.

The special interest of the life and work of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460)

lies in the relation it bears to the general expansion of Europe and Christendom-

an expansion that had been slowly gathering strength since the eleventh cen-

tury. But even before the tide had turned in the age of Hildebrand and the

First Crusade, even from the time that Constantine founded the Christian

Empire of Rome, the Christian Capital on the Bosphorus, and the State

Church of the Western World, -pilgrimage, trade, conquest, and colonisa-

tion had been successively calling out the energies of the moving races, "the

motor muscles" of Europe. It is through the "generous Henry, Prince of

Portugal," that this activity is brought to its third and triumphant stage-to

the time of Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan, -but it is only by tracing

the earlier progress of that outward movement, which has made Europe the

ruling civilisation of the world, that we can fairly grasp the import of that

transition in which Henry is the hero.

3 C. RAYMOND (CHARLES RAYMOND) BEAZLEY

More than any other single man he is the author of the discovering move-

ment of thefifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, -and by this move-

ment India has been conquered, America repeopled, the world made clear,

and the civilisation which the Roman Empire left behind has conquered or

utterly overshadowed every one of its old rivals and superiors-Islam, India,

China, Tartary.

But before the fifteenth century, before the birth of Prince Henry, Chris-

tendom, Greek and Latin, was at best only one of the greater civilising and

conquering forces struggling for mastery; before the age of the Crusades,

before the eleventh century, it was plainly weaker than the Moslem pow-

ers; it seemed unable to fight against Slav or Scandinavian Heathendom; it

was only saved by distance from becoming a province of China; India, the

world's great prize, was cut off from it by the Arabs. Even before the rise

of Islam, under Constantine or Theodosius or Justinian, the Church-State

of the Byzantine Caesars, though then ruling in almost every province of

Trajan's empire, was in a splendid but sure decline from the exhaustion of

the southern races. Our story then begins naturally with the worst time and

climbs up for a thousand years, from the Heathen and Mohammedan con-

quests of the fifth and seventh centuries, to the reversal of that judgment, of

those conquests, in the fifteenth. The expansion of Europe is going on all

this time, but at our beginning, in the years before and after Pope Gregory

the Great, even the legacy of Greece and Rome, in wide knowledge of the

world and practical exploring energy, seemed to have passed from sight.