interest of Europe, and the bold friars, Carpini and Rubruquis, made
their way to the centres of that barbaric sovereign's power in the
remote East, and brought back stories of what they had seen; later the
Poli, especially the great Marco, undertook still more daring and
long-continued journeys, which made India and Cathay less unreal to
Europeans, and stimulated the desire for further knowledge. The later
mediaeval maps of the world, like that of Fra Mauro (1459),[3] which
incorporate this knowledge, are less wildly imaginative than their
predecessors, and show a vague notion of the general configuration of
the main land-masses in the Old World. But beyond the fringes of the
Mediterranean the world was still in the main unknown to, and
unaffected by, European civilisation down to the middle of the
fifteenth century.

[3] Simplified reproductions of this and the other early maps alluded
to are printed in Philip's Students' Atlas of Modern History, which
also contains a long series of maps illustrating the extra-Europeans
activities of the European states.

Then, suddenly, came the great era of explorations, which were made
possible by the improvements in navigation worked out during the
fifteenth century, and which in two generations incredibly transformed
the aspect of the world. The marvellous character of this revelation
can perhaps be illustrated by the comparison of two maps, that of
Behaim, published in 1492, and that of Schoener, published in 1523.
Apart from its adoption of the theory that the earth was globular, not
round and flat, Behaim's map shows little advance upon Fra Mauro,
except that it gives a clearer idea of the shape of Africa, due to the
earlier explorations of the Portuguese. But Schoener's map shows that
the broad outlines of the distribution of the land-masses of both
hemispheres were already in 1523 pretty clearly understood. This
astonishing advance was due to the daring and enterprise of the
Portuguese explorers, Diaz, Da Gama, Cabral, and of the adventurers in
the service of Spain, Columbus, Balboa, Vespucci, and--greatest of them
all--Magellan.

These astonishing discoveries placed for a time the destinies of the
outer world in the hands of Spain and Portugal, and the first period of
European imperialism is the period of Iberian monopoly, extending to
1588. A Papal award in 1493 confirmed the division of the non-European
world between the two powers, by a judgment which the orthod