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 rendered the greatest service to geography by the protection and encouragement of Eratosthenes, whose labours gave the first approximate knowledge of the true size of the spherical earth. The second Euergetes and his successor Ptolemy Lathyrus (118–115 ) furnished Eudoxus with a fleet to explore the Arabian sea. After two successful voyages, Eudoxus, impressed with the idea that Africa was surrounded by ocean on the south, left the Egyptian service, and proceeded to Cadiz and other Mediterranean centres of trade seeking a patron who would finance an expedition for the purpose of African discovery; and we learn from Strabo that the veteran explorer made at least two voyages southward along the coast of Africa. The Ptolemies continued to send fleets annually from their Red Sea ports of Berenice and Myos Hormus to Arabia, as well as to ports on the coasts of Africa and India.

The Romans did not encourage navigation and commerce with the same ardour as their predecessors; still the luxury of Rome, which gave rise to demands for the varied products of all the countries of the known world, led to an active trade both by ships and caravans. But it was the military genius of Rome, and the ambition for universal empire, which led, not only to the discovery, but also to the survey of nearly all Europe, and of large tracts in Asia and Africa. Every new war produced a new survey and itinerary of the countries which were conquered, and added one more to the imperishable roads that led from every quarter of the known world to Rome. In the height of their power the Romans had surveyed and explored all the coasts of the Mediterranean, Italy, Greece, the Balkan Peninsula, Spain, Gaul, western Germany and southern Britain. In Africa their empire included Egypt, Carthage, Numidia and Mauritania. In Asia they held Asia Minor and Syria, had sent expeditions into Arabia, and were acquainted with the more distant countries formerly invaded by Alexander, including Persia, Scythia, Bactria and India. Roman intercourse with India especially led to the extension of geographical knowledge.

Before the Roman legions were sent into a new region to extend the limits of the empire, it was usual to send out exploring expeditions to report as to the nature of the country. It is narrated by Pliny and Seneca that the emperor Nero sent out two centurions on such a mission towards the source of the Nile (probably about 60), and that the travellers pushed southwards until they reached vast marshes through which they could not make their way either on foot or in boats. This seems to indicate that they had penetrated to about 9° N. Shortly before 79 Hippalus took advantage of the regular alternation of the monsoons to make the voyage from the Red Sea to India across the open ocean out of sight of land. Even though this sea-route was known, the author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, published after the time of Pliny, recites the old itinerary around the coast of the Arabian Gulf. It was, however, in the reigns of Severus and his immediate successors that Roman intercourse with India was at its height, and from the writings of Pausanias (c. 174) it appears that direct communication between Rome and China had already taken place.

After the division of the Roman empire, Constantinople became the last refuge of learning, arts and taste; while Alexandria continued to be the emporium whence were imported the commodities of the East. The emperor Justinian (483–565), in whose reign the greatness of the Eastern empire culminated, sent two Nestorian monks to China, who returned with eggs of the silkworm concealed in a hollow cane, and thus silk manufactures were established in the Peloponnesus and the Greek islands. It was also in the reign of Justinian that Cosmas Indicopleustes, an Egyptian merchant, made several voyages, and afterwards composed his  (Christian Topography), containing, in addition to his absurd cosmogony, a tolerable description of India.

The great outburst of Mahommedan conquest in the 7th century was followed by the Arab civilization, having its centres at Bagdad and Cordova, in connexion with which geography again received a share of attention. The works of the ancient Greek geographers were translated into Arabic, and starting with a sound basis of theoretical knowledge, exploration once more made progress. From the 9th to the 13th century intelligent Arab travellers wrote accounts of what they had seen and heard in distant lands. The earliest Arabian traveller whose observations have come down to us is the merchant Sulaiman, who embarked in the Persian Gulf and made several voyages to India and China, in the middle of the 9th century. Abu Zaid also wrote on India, and his work is the most important that we possess before the epoch-making discoveries of Marco Polo. Masudi, a great traveller who knew from personal experience all the countries between Spain and China, described the plains, mountains and seas, the dynasties and peoples, in his Meadows of Gold, an abstract made by himself of his larger work News of the Time. He died in 956, and was known, from the comprehensiveness of his survey, as the Pliny of the East. Amongst his contemporaries were Istakhri, who travelled through all the Mahommedan countries and wrote his Book of Climates in 950, and Ibn Haukal, whose Book of Roads and Kingdoms, based on the work of Istakhri, was written in 976. Idrisi, the best known of the Arabian geographical authors, after travelling far and wide in the first half of the 12th century, settled in Sicily, where he wrote a treatise descriptive of an armillary sphere which he had constructed for Roger II., the Norman king, and in this work he incorporated all accessible results of contemporary travel.

The Northmen of Denmark and Norway, whose piratical adventures were the terror of all the coasts of Europe, and who established themselves in Great Britain and Ireland, in France and Sicily, were also geographical explorers in their rough but practical way during the darkest period of the middle ages. All Northmen were not bent on rapine and plunder; many were peaceful merchants. Alfred the Great, king of the Saxons in England, not only educated his people in the learning of the past ages; he inserted in the geographical works he translated many narratives of the travel of his own time. Thus he placed on record the voyages of the merchant Ulfsten in the Baltic, including particulars of the geography of Germany. And in particular he told of the remarkable voyage of Other, a Norwegian of Helgeland, who was the first authentic Arctic explorer, the first to tell of the rounding of the North Cape and the sight of the midnight sun. This voyage of the middle of the 9th century deserves to be held in happy memory, for it unites the first Norwegian polar explorer with the first English collector of travels. Scandinavian merchants brought the products of India to England and Ireland. From the 8th to the 11th century a commercial route from India passed through Novgorod to the Baltic, and Arabian coins found in Sweden, and particularly in the island of Gotland, prove how closely the enterprise of the Northmen and of the Arabs intertwined. Five-sixths of these coins preserved at Stockholm were from the mints of the Samanian dynasty, which reigned in Khorasan and Transoxiana from about 900 to 1000. It was the trade with the East that originally gave importance to the city of Visby in Gotland.

In the end of the 9th century Iceland was colonized from Norway; and about 985 the intrepid viking, Eric the Red, discovered Greenland, and induced some of his Icelandic countrymen to settle on its inhospitable shores. His son, Leif Ericsson, and others of his followers were concerned in the discovery of the North American coast (see ), which, but for the isolation of Iceland from the centres of European awakening, would have had momentous consequences. As things were, the importance of this discovery passed unrecognized. The story of two Venetians, Nicolo and Antonio Zeno, who gave a vague account of voyages in the northern seas in the end of the 13th century, is no longer to be accepted as history.

At length the long period of barbarism which accompanied and followed the fall of the Roman empire drew to a close in Europe. The Crusades had a favourable influence on the intellectual state of the Western nations. Interesting regions, known only by the scant reports of pilgrims, were made the objects of attention and study; while religious zeal, and the hope of gain, combined with motives of mere curiosity, induced several persons to travel by land into remote regions of the East, far beyond the countries to which the operations of the crusaders extended. Among these was Benjamin of Tudela, who set out from Spain in 1160, travelled by land to Constantinople, and having visited India and some of the eastern islands, returned to Europe by way of Egypt after an absence of thirteen years.

Joannes de Plano Carpini, a Franciscan monk, was the head of one of the missions despatched by Pope Innocent to call the chief and people of the Tatars to a better mind. He reached the headquarters of Batu, on the Volga, in February 1246; and, after some stay, went on to the camp of the great khan near Karakorum in central Asia, and returned safely in the autumn of 1247. A few years afterwards, a Fleming named Rubruquis was sent on a similar mission, and had the merit of being the first traveller of this era who gave a correct account of the Caspian Sea. He ascertained that it had no outlet. At nearly the same time Hayton, king of Armenia, made a journey to Karakorum in 1254, by a route far to the north of that followed by Carpini and Rubruquis. He was treated with honour and hospitality, and returned by way of Samarkand and Tabriz, to his own territory. The curious narrative of King Hayton was translated by Klaproth.

While the republics of Italy, and above all the state of Venice, were engaged in distributing the rich products of India and the Far East over the Western world, it was impossible that motives of curiosity, as well as a desire of commercial advantage, should not be awakened to such a degree as to impel some of the merchants to visit those remote lands. Among these were the brothers Polo, who traded with the East and themselves visited Tatary. The recital of their travels fired the youthful imagination of young Marco Polo, son of Nicolo, and he set out for the court of Kublai Khan, with his father and uncle, in 1265. Marco remained for seventeen years in the service of the Great Khan, and was employed on many important missions. Besides what he learnt from his own observation, he collected much information from others concerning countries which he did not visit. He returned to Europe possessed of a vast store of knowledge respecting the eastern parts of the world, and, being afterwards made a prisoner by the Genoese, he dictated the narrative of his travels during his captivity. The work of Marco Polo is the most valuable narrative of travels that appeared during the middle ages, and despite a cold reception and many denials of the accuracy of the record, its substantial truthfulness has been abundantly proved.