ortal. For the positive tabernacle-system of "the man
who sailed to India" there was never much support; his work was soon
forgotten, though it has been called by some paradox-makers "the great
authority of the Middle Ages"--in the face of the known facts, that this
was the real position of Ptolemy and Strabo, that no one can speak of
the "Middle Ages" in this unqualified way any more than of the Modern or
Ancient worlds; and that Cosmas is almost unnoticed in the great age of
mediaeval science, from the twelfth century.

And whatever we may think of Cosmas and his _Christian System of the
Whole World, Evolved out of Holy Scripture_, he is of interest to us as
the last of the old Christian geographers, closing one age which,
however senile, had once been in the truest sense civilised, and
preparing us to enter one that in comparison is literally dark. From the
age of Justinian, and from the rise of Islam in the early years of the
seventh century, the geographical knowledge of Christendom is on a par
with its practical contraction and apparent decline. There are
travellers; but for the next five hundred years there are no more
theorists, cosmographers, or map-makers of the Universe or Habitable
Globe.

From the time that Islam, after a century of world-conquest, began to
form itself into an organised state, or federation of states, in the
later eighth and earlier ninth centuries A.D.,--thus making itself until
the thirteenth century the principal heir of the older Eastern
culture,--Christendom was content to take its geography, its ideas of
the world in general, from the Arabs, who in their turn depended upon
the pre-Christian Greeks.

The relation of Ptolemy and Strabo to modern knowledge is best seen
through the work of the Arabic geographers, but the Saracens did much to
destroy before they began to build up once more. As the northern
barbarians of the fifth century interrupted the hope of a Christian
revival of Pagan literature and science, so the Moslems of the seventh
and eighth cut short the Catholic and Roman revival of Justinian and
Heraclius, in which the new faith and the old state had found a working
agreement.

Between Cosmas and the Viking-Age, "Christian," "Roman," "Western"
exploration falls within very narrow limits: the few pilgrims whose
recollections represent to us the whole literature of travel in the
seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, add nothing fresh even of
practical discovery; theory an