Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/425

Rh P o L P L 409 book to have a sudden effect upon geography. But no such result occurred for a long time. Doubtless several causes contributed to this, of which the unreal character attributed to the book as a collection of romantic marvels, rather than of geographical and historical facts, may have been one, a view that the diffusion of Mandeville s fictions, far outdoing Polo s facts in marvel, perhaps tended to corroborate, whilst supplanting the latter in popularity. But the essential causes were the imperfect nature of publication ; the traditional character of the prevailing geography, which hampered the propagation of true statements ; and the entire absence of scientific principle in what did pass for geography, so that there was no organ competent to the assimilation of so huge a mass of new knowledge. The late Sir Francis Pal grave wrote a book called The Merchant and the Friar, in which it is feigned that Marco Polo comes to England, and becomes acquainted with Roger Bacon. Had Eoger Bacon indeed known either the traveller or his book, we cannot doubt, from the good use he makes, in his Opus Majus, of William of Rubruk, that he would have turned the facts to good account. But the world with which the map makers of the 13th and 14th centuries dealt was, in its outline, that handed down by traditions of the craft, as sanctioned by some fathers of the church, such as Orosius and Isidore, and sprinkled with a combination of classical and mediaeval legends. Almost universally the earth s surface fills a circular disk, rounded by the ocean, a fashion that already was ridiculed by Herodotus (iv. 36), as it was in a later generation by Aristotle (JfctcoroL, ii. 5). This was the most persistent and the most obstructive dogma of the false geography. The central point of the circle is occupied by Jerusalem, because it was found written in Ezekiel : &quot; Hrec dicit Dominus Deus, Ista est Jerusalem, in medio gentium posui earn, et in circuitu ejus terras,&quot; supposed to be corroborated by the Psalmist s expression, regarded as prophetic of our Lord s passion &quot;Deus autem Rex noster ante ssecula operatus est salutern in medio terrce&quot; (Ps. Ixxiv. 12). Paradise occupied the extreme east, because it was found in Genesis that the Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden. Gog and Magog were set in the far north or north-east because it was again said in Ezekiel; &quot; Ecce ago super te Gog priucipem capitis Mosoch et Thubal. . . et ascendere te faciam de lateribus aquilonis.&quot; This last legend of Gog and Magog, shut up by a mountain-barrier, plays a prominent part in the romantic history of Alexander, which had such enormous currency in those ages, and attracted especial attention in the 13th century, owing to the general identification of the Tartar hordes with those impure nations whom the hero had shut up. It is not wonderful that the Tartar irruption into the West, heard of at first with as much astonishment as it would produce now, was connected with this old belief. The loose and scanty nomenclature of the cosmography was mainly borrowed from Pliny and Mela, through such fathers as we have named ; whilst vacant spaces were occupied by Amazons, Arimaspians, and the realm of Prester John. A favourite representa tion of the inhabited earth was a great T within an (see MAP). Such schemes of the world had no place for the new knowledge. The first genuine attempt at a geographical compilation absolutely free from the traditional idola seems to be that in the Portulano Mcdicco at Florence. In this, some slight use seems to be made of Polo. But a far more important work is one of the next generation, the celebrated Catalan map of 1375 in the Paris library. This also is an honest endeavour on a large scale to represent the known world on the basis of collected facts, casting aside all theories, pseudo-scientific and pseudo-theological ; and a very remarkable work it is. In this work Marco Polo s influence on maps is perhaps seen to the greatest advantage. As regards Central and Further Asia, and partially as regards India, his book is the basis of the map. His names are often much perverted, and it is not always easy to understand the view that the compiler took of his itineraries. Still we have Cathay admirably placed in the true position of China, as a great empire filling the south-east of Asia. The trans-Gangetic peninsula is absent, but that of India proper is, for the first time in the history of geography, represented with a fair approximation to correct form and position. We really seem to see in this map something like the idea of Asia that the traveller himself would have presented, had he bequeathed us a map. In the following age we find more frequent indications that Polo s book was diffused and read. And now that the spirit of discovery was beginning to stir, the work was regarded in a juster light as a book of facts, and not as a mere Romman du Grant Kaan. But the age produced new supplies of information in greater abundance than the knowledge c f geographers was prepared to digest or co-ordinate ; and, owing partly to this, and partly to his unhappy reversion to the fancy of a circular disk, the map of Fra Mauro (1459), one of the greatest map-making enterprises in history, and the result of immense labour in the collection of facts and the endeavour to combine them, really gives a much less accurate idea of Asia than the Carta Catalana. When M. Libri, in his Hist, dcs Sciences Mathematiques, speaks of Columbus as &quot;jealous of Polo s laurels,&quot; he speaks rashly. In fact I letters of the Florentine Paolo Toscanelli and the like ; we cannot find that he ever refers to Polo by name. Though, to the day of his death, Columbus was full of imaginations about Zipangu (Japan) and the land of the Great Khan, as being in immediate proximity to his discoveries, these were but accidents of his great theory. It was his intimate conviction of the absolute smallness of the earth, of the vast extension of Asia eastward, and of the consequent nar rowness of the western ocean on which his life s project was based. When, soon after the discovery of the New World, attempts were made to combine the new and old knowledge, the results were unhappy. The earliest of such combinations tried to realize the ideas of Columbus regarding the identity of his discoveries with the Great Khan s dominions ; but even after America had vindicated its independent existence, and the new knowledge of the Portuguese had introduced China where the Catalan map had presented Cathay, the latter country, with the whole of Polo s nomenclature, was shunted to the north, forming a separate system. Henceforward the influence of Polo s work on maps was simply injurious ; and when to his names was added a sprinkling of Ptolemy s, as was usual throughout the 16th century, the result was a hotch-potch conveying no approximation to any representation of facts. Gradually the contributions of Ptolemy and Polo are used more sparingly, but in Sanson s map (1659) a new element of confusion appears in numerous features derived from the &quot; Nubian Geo grapher, &quot; i.e., Edrisi. It is needless to follow the matter further. With the increased knowledge of northern Asia from the Russian side, and of China from the maps of Martini, followed by the later Jesuit surveys, and with the real science brought to bear on Asiatic geography by such men as De 1 Isle and D Anville, mere traditional nomenclature gradually disappeared ; and the task which Polo has provided for the geographers of later days has been chiefly that of determining the true localities which his book describes under obsolete or corrupted names. Before concluding, a word or two seems necessary on the subject of the alleged introduction of important inventions into Europe by Marco Polo. Assertions or surmises of this kind have been made in regard to the mariner s compass, to gunpowder, and to printing. Though the old assertions as to the first two are still occasionally repeated in books of popular character, no one who has paid any attention to the subject now believes Marco can have had anything to do with their introduction. But there is no doubt that the resemblance of early European block-books to those of China is in some respects so striking that it seems clearly to indicate the derivation of the art from that country. There is, however, not the slightest reason for connecting this introduction with the name of Polo. His fame has so overshadowed later travellers that the fact has been generally overlooked that for some years in the 14th century not only were missions of the Roman church established in the chief cities of eastern China, but a regular overland trade was carried on between Italy and China, by way of Tana (Azoff), Astrakhan, Otrar, Kamul (Kami), and Kan-chow. Many a traveller other than Marco Polo might have brought home the block -books, and some might have witnessed the process of making them. This is the less to be ascribed to Polo, because he so curiously omits to speak of the process of printing, when, in describing the block- printed paper-money of China, his subject seems absolutely to challenge a description of the art. (H. Y. ) POLOTSK, a district town of the government of Vitebsk, at the confluence of the Polota with the Dwina (Diina), 5 miles from the Smolensk and Riga Railway, is one of the oldest towns of Russia. The continuous wars, however, of which, owing to its position on the line of communica tion between central Russia and the west, it was for many centuries the scene, have allowed almost nothing of its remarkable antiquities to remain. The &quot; upper castle &quot; which stood at the confluence of the rivers and had a stone-wall with seven towers, is now in ruins, as also is the &quot;lower castle,&quot; formerly enclosed with strong walls and connected with the upper by a bridge. The numerous monasteries and convents also have disappeared. The cathedral of St Sophia in the upper castle, built in the 12th century, and successively used as a place of worship by the Greek, the Catholic, and the &quot; United &quot; Churches, fell to ruins in the 18th century, when the &quot;United&quot; bishop Grebnicki substituted a modern structure. The town is now of trifling importance, and the population (12,200 in 1880, against 13,800 in 1865) is decreasing. Upwards of two-thirds of the inhabitants are Jews ; the remainder have belonged mostly to the Greek Church since XIX. 52
 * Columbus knew of Polo s revelations only at second-hand, from the