European exploration, exploration of regions of Earth for scientific, commercial, religious, military, and other purposes by Europeans, beginning about the 4th century bce.
The motives that spur human beings to examine their environment are many. Strong among them are the satisfaction of curiosity, the pursuit of trade, the spread of religion, and the desire for security and political power. At different times and in different places, different motives are dominant. Sometimes one motive inspires the promoters of discovery, and another motive may inspire the individuals who carry out the search.
For a discussion of the society that engaged in these explorations, and their effects on intra-European affairs, see European history. The earliest European empires are discussed in ancient Greek civilization and ancient Rome.
The threads of geographical exploration are continuous and, being entwined one with another, are difficult to separate. Three major phases of investigation may nevertheless be distinguished. The first phase is the exploration of the Old World centred on the Mediterranean Sea, the second is the so-called Age of Discovery, during which, in the search for sea routes to Cathay (the name by which China was known to medieval Europe), a New World was found, and the third is the establishment of the political, social, and commercial relationships of the New World to the Old and the elucidation of the major physical features of the continental interiors—in short, the delineation of the modern world.
The exploration of the Old World
From the time of the earliest recorded history to the beginning of the 15th century, Western knowledge of the world widened from a river valley surrounded by mountains or desert (the views of Babylonia and Egypt) to a Mediterranean world with hinterlands extending from the Sahara to the Gobi Desert and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean (the view of Greece and Rome). It later expanded again to include the far northern lands beyond the Baltic and another and dazzling civilization in the Far East (the medieval view).
The earliest known surviving map, dating probably from the time of Sargon of Akkad (about 2334–2279 bce), shows canals or rivers—perhaps the Tigris and a tributary—and surrounding mountains. The rapid colonization of the shores of the Mediterranean and of the Black Sea by Phoenicia and the Greek city-states in the 1st millennium bce must have been accompanied by the exploration of their hinterlands by countless unknown soldiers and traders. Herodotus prefaces his History (written in the 5th century bce) with a geographical description of the then known world: this introductory material reveals that the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea had by then been explored.
Stories survive of a few men who are credited with bringing new knowledge from distant journeys. Herodotus tells of five young adventurers of the tribe of the Nasamones living on the desert edge of Cyrenaica in North Africa, who journeyed southwest for many months across the desert, reaching a great river flowing from west to east; this presumably was the Niger, although Herodotus thought it to be the Upper Nile.
Exploration of the Atlantic coastlines
Beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), the Carthaginians (from the Phoenician city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia), holding both shores of the strait, early ventured out into the Atlantic. A Greek translation of a Punic (Carthaginian) inscription states that Hanno, a Carthaginian, was sent forth about 500 bce with 60 ships and 30,000 colonists “to found cities.” Even allowing for a possible great exaggeration of numbers, this expedition, if it occurred, can hardly have been the first exploratory voyage along the coast of West Africa; indeed, Herodotus reports that Phoenicians circumnavigated the continent about 600 bce. Some scholars think that Hanno reached only the desert edge south of the Atlas; other scholars identify the “deep river infested with crocodiles and hippopotamuses” with the Sénégal River; and still others believe that the island where men “scampered up steep rocks and pelted us with stones” was an island off the coast of Sierra Leone. There is no record that Hanno’s voyage was followed up before the era of Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince of the 15th century.
About the same time, Himilco, another Carthaginian, set forth on a voyage northward; he explored the coast of Spain, reached Brittany, and in his four-month cruise may have visited Britain. Two centuries later, about 300 bce, Carthaginian power at the gate of the Mediterranean temporarily slackened as a result of squabbles with the Greek city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily, so Pytheas, a Greek explorer of Massilia (Marseille), sailed through. His story is known only from fragments of the work of a contemporary historian, Timaeus (who lived in the 4th and 3rd centuries bce), as retold by the Roman savant Pliny the Elder, the Greek geographer Strabo, and the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, all of whom were critical of its truth. It is probable that Pytheas, having coasted the shores of the Bay of Biscay, crossed from the island of Ouessant (Ushant), off the French coast of Brittany, to Cornwall in southwestern England, perhaps seeking tin. He may have sailed around Britain; he describes it as a triangle and also relates that the inhabitants “harvest grain crops by cutting off the ears…and storing them in covered granges.” Around Thule, “the northernmost of the British Isles, six days sail from Britain,” there is “neither sea nor air but a mixture like sea-lung…binds everything together,” a reference perhaps to drift ice or dense sea fog. Thule has been identified with Iceland (too far north), with Mainland island of the Shetland group (too far south), and perhaps, most plausibly, with Norway. Pytheas returned to Brittany and explored “beyond the Rhine”; he may have reached the Elbe. The voyage of Pytheas, like that of Hanno, does not seem to have been followed up. Herodotus concludes by saying, “Whether the sea girds Europe round on the north none can tell.”
It was not Mediterranean folk but Northmen from Scandinavia, emigrating from their difficult lands centuries later, who carried exploration farther in the North Atlantic. From the 8th to the 11th century bands of Northmen, mainly Swedish, trading southeastward across the Russian plains, were active under the name of Varangians in the ports of the Black Sea. At the same time, other groups, mainly Danish, raiding, trading, and settling along the coasts of the North Sea, arrived in the Mediterranean in the guise of Normans. Neither the Swedes nor the Danes traveling in these regions were exploring lands that were unknown to civilized Europeans, but it is doubtless that contact with them brought to these Europeans new knowledge of the distant northern lands.
It was the Norsemen of Norway who were the true explorers, though, since little of their exploits was known to contemporaries and that little soon forgotten, they perhaps added less to the common store of Europe’s knowledge than their less adventurous compatriots. About 890 ce, Ohthere of Norway, “desirous to try how far that country extended north,” sailed round the North Cape, along the coast of Lapland to the White Sea. But most Norsemen sailing in high latitudes explored not eastward but westward. Sweeping down the outer edge of Britain, settling in Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, and Ireland, they then voyaged on to Iceland, where in 870 they settled among Irish colonists who had preceded them by some two centuries. The Norsemen may well have arrived piloted by Irish sailors; and Irish refugees from Iceland, fleeing before the Norsemen, may have been the first discoverers of Greenland and Newfoundland, although this is mere surmise. The saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauda; also called Thorfinns saga Karlsefnis), gives the story of the Norse discovery of Greenland in 982; the west coast was explored, and at least two settlements were established on it. About 1000 ce, one Bjarni Herjulfsson, on his way from Iceland to Greenland, was blown off course far to the southwest; he saw an unknown shore and returned to tell his tale. Leif, Erik’s son, together with some 30 others, set out in 1001 to explore. They probably reached the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland; some think that the farthest point south reached by the settlers, as described in the sagas, fits best with Maryland or Virginia, but others contend that the lands about the Gulf of St. Lawrence are more probably designated. The area was named Vinland, as grapes grew there, but it has been suggested that the “grapes” referred to were in fact cranberries. Attempts at colonization were unsuccessful; the Norsemen withdrew, and, although the Greenland colonies lingered on for some four centuries, little knowledge of these first discoveries came down to colour the vision of the seamen of Cádiz or Bristol. The voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot had their strongest inspirations in quite other traditions.
The exploration of the coastlines of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea
Trade, across the land bridges and through the gulfs linking those parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe that lie between the Mediterranean and Arabian seas, was actively pursued from very early times. It is therefore not surprising that exploratory voyages early revealed the coastlines of the Indian Ocean. Herodotus wrote of Necho II, king of Egypt in the late 7th and early 6th centuries bce, that “when he stopped digging the canal…from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf…[he] sent forth Phoenician men in ships ordering them to sail back by the Pillars of Hercules.” According to the story, this, in three years, they did. Upon their return, “they told things…unbelievable by me,” says Herodotus, “namely that in sailing round Libya they had the sun on the right hand.” Whatever he thought of the story of the sun, Herodotus was inclined to believe in the voyage: “Libya, that is Africa, shows that it has sea all round except the part that borders on Asia.” Strabo records another story with the same theme: one Eudoxus, returning from a voyage to India about 108 bce, was blown far to the south of Cape Guardafui. Where he landed he found a wooden prow with a horse carved on it, and he was told by the Africans that it came from a wrecked ship of men from the west.
About 510 bce Darius the Great, king of Persia, sent one of his officers, Scylax of Caria, to explore the Indus. Scylax traveled overland to the Kabul River, reached the Indus, followed it to the sea, sailed westward, and, passing by the Persian Gulf (which was already well known), explored the Red Sea, finally arriving at Arsinoë, near modern Suez. The greater part of the campaigns of the famous conqueror Alexander the Great were military exploratory journeys. The earlier expeditions through Babylonia and Persia were through regions already familiar to the Greeks, but the later ones through the enormous tract of land from the south of the Caspian Sea to the mountains of the Hindu Kush brought the Greeks a great deal of new geographical knowledge. Alexander and his army crossed the mountains to the Indus valley and then made a westward march from the lower Indus to Susa through the desolate country along the southern edge of the Iranian plateau; Nearchus, his admiral, in command of the naval forces of the expedition, waited for the favourable monsoon and then sailed from the mouth of the Indus to the mouth of the Euphrates, exploring the northern coast of the Persian Gulf on his way.
As Roman power grew, increasing wealth brought increasing demands for Oriental luxuries; this led to great commercial activity in the eastern seas. As the coasts became well known, the seasonal character of the monsoonal winds was skillfully used; the southwest monsoon was long known as Hippalus, named for a sailor who was credited with being the first to sail with it direct from the Gulf of Aden to the coast of the Indian peninsula. During the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian in the 1st century bce, Western traders reached Siam (now Thailand), Cambodia, Sumatra, and Java; a few also seem to have penetrated northward to the coast of China. In 161 ce, according to Chinese records, an “embassy” came from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to the emperor Huan-ti, bearing goods that Huan-ti gratefully received as “tribute.” Ptolemy, however, did not know of these voyages: he swept his peninsula of Colmorgo (Malay) southwestward to join the eastward trend of his coast of Africa, thus creating a closed Indian Ocean. He presumably did not believe the story of the circumnavigation of Africa. As the 2nd century ce passed and Roman power declined, trade with the eastern seas did not cease but was gradually taken over by Ethiopians, Parthians, and Arabs. The Arabs, most successful of all, dominated eastern sea routes from the 3rd to the 15th century. In the tales of derring-do of Sindbad the Sailor (a hero of the collection of Arabian tales called The Thousand and One Nights), there may be found, behind the fiction, the knowledge of these adventurous Arab sailors and traders, supplying detail to fill in the outline of the geography of the Indian Ocean.
The land routes of Central Asia
The prelude to the Age of Discovery, however, is to be found neither in the Norse explorations in the Atlantic nor in the Arab activities in the Indian Ocean but, rather, in the land journeys of Italian missionaries and merchants that linked the Mediterranean coasts to the China Sea. Cosmas Indicopleustes, an Alexandrian geographer writing in the 6th century, knew that Tzinitza (China) could be reached by sailing eastward, but he added: “One who comes by the overland route from Tzinitza to Persia makes a very short cut.” Goods had certainly passed this way since Roman times, but they usually changed hands at many a mart, for disorganized and often warring tribes lived along the routes. In the 13th century the political geography changed. In 1206 a Mongol chief assumed the title of Genghis Khan and, after campaigns in China that gave him control there, turned his conquering armies westward. He and his successors built up an enormous empire until, in the late 13th century, one of them, Kublai Khan, reigned supreme from the Black Sea to the Yellow Sea. Europeans of perspicacity saw the opportunities that friendship with the Mongol power might bring. If Christian Europe could only convert the Mongols, this would at one and the same time heavily tip the scales against Muslim and in favour of Christian power and also give political protection to Christian merchants along the silk routes to the legendary sources of wealth in China. With these opportunities in mind, Pope Innocent IV sent friars to “diligently search out all things that concerned the state of the Tartars” and to exhort them “to give over their bloody slaughter of mankind and to receive the Christian faith.” Among others, Giovanni da Pian del Carpini in 1245 and Willem van Ruysbroeck in 1253 went forth to follow these instructions. Traveling the great caravan routes from southern Russia, north of the Caspian and Aral seas and north of the Tien Shan (Tien Mountains), both Carpini and Ruysbroeck eventually reached the court of the emperor at Karakorum. Carpini returned confident that the emperor was about to become a Christian; Ruysbroeck told of the city in Cathay “having walls of silver and towers of gold”; he had not seen it but had been “credibly informed” of it.
But the greatest of the 13th-century travelers in Asia were the Polos, wealthy merchants of Venice. In 1260 the brothers Nicolo and Maffeo Polo set out on a trading expedition to Crimea. After two years they were ready to return to Venice, but, finding the way home blocked by war, they traveled eastward to Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan in Central Asia), where they spent another three years. The Polos then accepted an invitation to accompany a party of Tatar envoys returning to the court of Kublai Khan at Cambaluc, near Peking (Beijing). The khan received them well, provided them with a gold tablet as a safe-conduct back to Europe, and gave them a letter begging the pope to send “some hundred wise men, learned in the law of Christ and conversant with the seven arts to preach to his people.” The Polos arrived home, “having toiled three years on the way,” to find that Pope Clement IV was dead. Two years later they set off again, traveling without the wise men but taking with them Nicolo’s son, Marco Polo, then a youth of 17. (Marco kept detailed notes of all he saw and, late in life when a captive of the Genoese, dictated to a fellow prisoner a book containing an account of his travels and adventures.) This time the Polos took a different route: starting from the port of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, they crossed Persia to the Pamirs and then followed a caravan route along the southern edge of the Tarim Basin and Gobi Desert to Cambaluc. Information about the route is interesting, but the great contribution of Marco Polo to the geographical knowledge of the West lay in his vivid descriptions of the East. He had tremendous opportunities of seeing China and appreciating its life, for he was taken into the service of the khan and was sent as an administrator to great cities, busy ports, and remote provinces, with instructions to write full reports. In his book he described how, upon every main high road, at a distance apart of 25 or 30 miles (40 to 50 km), there were stations, with houses of accommodation for travelers, with 400 good horses kept in constant readiness at each station. He also reported that, along the roads, the great khan had caused trees to be planted, both to provide shade in summer and to mark the route in winter when the ground was covered with snow. Marco Polo lived and worked in western China, visiting the provinces of Shensi (Shaanxi), Szechwan (Sichuan), and Yunnan, as well as the borders of Burma (now Myanmar). He frequently visited “the noble and magnificent city of Quinsay [Hangzhou], a name that signifies the Celestial City and which it merits from its preeminence to all others in the world in point of grandeur and beauty.” Cipango (Japan) he did not visit, but he heard about it from merchants and sailors: “It is situated at a distance of 1,500 miles from the mainland.…They have gold in the greatest abundance, its sources being inexhaustible.” The most detailed descriptions and the greatest superlatives were reserved for Cambaluc, capital of Cathay, whose splendours were beyond compare; to this city, he said,
everything that is most rare and valuable in all parts of the world finds its way: …for not fewer than 1,000 carriages and pack-horses loaded with raw silk make their daily entry; and gold tissues and silks of various kinds are manufactured to an immense extent.
No wonder that, when Europe learned of these things, it became enthralled. After 17 years, the Venetians were permitted to depart; they returned to Europe by sea. After visiting Java they sailed through the Strait of Malacca (again proving the error of Ptolemy); and, landing at Hormuz, they traveled cross-country to Armenia, and so home to Venice, which they reached in 1295.
A few travelers followed the Polos. Giovanni da Montecorvino, a Franciscan friar from Italy, became archbishop of Peking and lived in China from 1294 to 1328. Friar Oderic of Pordenone, an Italian monk, became a missionary, journeying throughout the greater part of Asia between 1316 and 1330. He reached Peking by way of India and Malaya, then traveled by sea to Canton; he returned to Europe by way of Central Asia, visiting Tibet in 1325—the first European to do so. Friar Oderic’s account of his journeys had considerable influence in his day: it was from it that the spurious traveler, the English writer Sir John Mandeville, quarried most of his stories.
Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, an Arab of Tangier, journeyed farther perhaps than any other medieval traveler. In 1325 he set out to make the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, and in some 30 years he visited the greater part of the Old World, covering, it has been said, more than 75,000 miles (120,700 km). He was the first to explore much of Arabia; he traveled extensively in India; he reached Java and Southeast Asia. Then toward the end of his life he returned to the west, where, after visiting Spain, he explored western Sudan “to the northernmost province of the Negroes.” He reached the Niger, which he called the Nile, and was astonished by the huge hippopotamuses “taking them to be elephants.” When he finally returned to Fès in Morocco he “kissed the hand of the Commander of the Faithful the Sultan…and settled down under the wing of his bounty.” He wrote a vivid and perspicacious account of his travels, but his book did not become known to Christian Europe for centuries. It was Marco Polo’s book that was the most popular of all. Some 138 manuscripts of it survive: it was translated before 1500 into Latin, German, and Spanish, and the first English translation was published in 1577. For centuries Europe’s maps of the Far East were based on the information provided by Marco Polo; even as late as 1533 Johannes Schöner, the German maker of globes, wrote:
Behind the Sinae and the Ceres [legendary cities of Central Asia]…many countries were discovered by one Marco Polo…and the sea coasts of these countries have now recently again been explored by Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci in navigating the Indian Ocean.
Columbus possessed and annotated a copy of the Latin edition (1483–85) of Marco Polo’s book, and in his journal he identified many of his own discoveries with places that Marco Polo describes.
Thus, with Ptolemy in one hand and Marco Polo in the other, the European explorers of the Age of Discovery set forth to try to reach Cathay and Cipango by new ways; Ptolemy promised that the way was short, and Marco Polo promised that the reward was great.