Mozambique, which, in their
turn, led to settlements on the opposite coasts of Asia. Thus the trade
of the Indian Ocean was secured for Islam, the first Moslem settlements
arose in Malabar, and when the Portuguese broke into this _mare
clausum_, in 1497-8, they found a belt of "Moorish" coast towns, from
Magadoxo to Quiloa, controlling both the Indian and the inland African
trades, as Ibn Batuta had found in 1330.

By Edrisi's day, moreover, the steady persistence and self-evident
results of Arabic overland exploration had become recognised by a sort
of "Traveller's Doctorate." It was not enough for the highest knowledge
to study the Koran, and the Sunna, and the Greek philosophers at home;
for a perfect education, a man must have travelled at least through the
length and breadth of Islam. All the successors of Edrisi, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, shew this mingling of science and
religion, of practical and speculative energy.

Tradition still governed Moslem thought, but there had come into being a
sort of half-acknowledged appendix to tradition, made up of real
observations on men and things. And in these observations, geographical
interest was the main factor.

The Life of Al Heravy of Herat (1173-1215), the "Doctor Ubiquitus" of
Islam in the age of the Crusades, gives us a picture of another
Massoudy. The friend of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, the "first man
among Christians," Heravy seems able in his own person to break down the
partition wall of religious feud by the common interest of science. In
1192 he was offered the patronage of the Crusading princes, and Richard
Coeur de Lion begged for the favour of an interview, and begged in
vain. Heravy, who had been on one of his exploring journeys, angrily
refused to see the King whose men had broken his quiet and wasted his
time. Before his death, he had run over the world (men said) from China
to the Pyrenees and from Abyssinia to the Danube, "scribbling his name
on every wall," and his survey of the Eastern Empire was the single
matter in which Turks and "Romans" made common cause,--for Greeks and
Latins at Byzantium alike read Heravy, like a Christian doctor. Another
example of the same catholic spirit is "Yacout the Roman,"[16] whose
_Dictionary_, finished in the earlier half of the thirteenth century,
was a summary of geographical advance since Edrisi, like the similar
work of Ibn Said, of the same period.

[Footnote 16: Yacout "the ruby," origin