on, so it ended. If it rejects Ptolemy, it is only
to follow Strabo or someone else; on all the mathematical and
astronomical data its doctrine is according to the Alexandrians of
twelve hundred years before, and this last _precis_ of the science of a
great race and a great religion can only be understood in the light of
its model--in Greek geography.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS.

CIRCA 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 century. 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 colonisation 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.

More than any other single man he is the author of the discovering
movement of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries,--and by
this movement 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,
Christendom, 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 powers; 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 ruli