第42节

the occasion by

burning his own Templars at the stake and stealing all their

possessions. Prince Henry used the revenues of the domains

of his religious order to equip several expeditions which explored

the hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea.

But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages and

spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a

search for the mysterious ``Presser John,'' the mythical Christian

Priest who was said to be the Emperor of a vast empire

``situated somewhere in the east.'' The story of this strange

potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the

twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried

to find ``Presser John'' and his descendants Henry took part

in the search. Thirty years after his death, the riddle was

solved.

In the year 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land

of Prester John by sea, had reached the southernmost point

of Africa. At first he called it the Storm Cape, on account of

the strong winds which had prevented him from continuing his

voyage toward the east, but the Lisbon pilots who understood

the importance of this discovery in their quest for the India

water route, changed the name into that of the Cape of Good

Hope.

One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters

of credit on the house of Medici, started upon a similar mission

by land. He crossed the Mediterranean and after leaving

Egypt, he travelled southward. He reached Aden, and from

there, travelling through the waters of the Persian Gulf which

few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great,

eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the

coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the

island of the Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie

halfway between Africa and India. Then he returned, paid

a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea

once more and in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of

Prester John, who was no one less than the Black Negus (or

King) of Abyssinia, whose ancestors had adopted Christianity

in the fourth century, seven hundred years before the Christian

missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia.

These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers

and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies

by an eastern sea-route was possible, it was by no means easy.

Then there arose a great debate. Some people wanted to continue

the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope. Others

said, ``No, we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we

shall reach Cathay.''

Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that

day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a

pancake but was round. The Ptolemean system of the universe,

invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy, the great

Egyptian geographer, who had lived in the second century of

our era, which had served the simple needs of the men of the

Middle Ages, had long been discarded by the scientists of the

Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the Polish

mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies had con-

vinced him that the earth was one of a number of round planets

which turned around the sun, a discovery which he did not venture

to publish for thirty-six years (it was printed in 1548,

the year of his death) from fear of the Holy Inquisition, a

Papal court which had been established in the thirteenth century

when the heresies of the Albigenses and the Waldenses

in France and in Italy (very mild heresies of devoutly pious

people who did not believe in private property and preferred

to live in Christ-like poverty) had for a moment threatened the

absolute power of the bishops of Rome. But the belief in the

roundness of the earth was common among the nautical experts

and, as I said, they were now debating the respective

advantages of the eastern and the western routes.

Among the advocates of the western route was a Genoese

mariner by the name of Cristoforo Colombo. He was the son