1 Geography in Feudal Europe.

2 Geography in the Scandinavian world.

3 Geography in the countries of the Arab world.

4 Development of geography in medieval China.

1 Geography in Feudal Europe. From the end of the 2nd century slave society was in deep crisis. The invasion of the Gothic tribes (3rd century) and the strengthening of Christianity, which became the state religion from 330, accelerated the decline of Roman-Greek culture and science. In 395, the division of the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern parts took place. From that time on, the Greek language and literature gradually began to be forgotten in Western Europe. In 410, the Visigoths occupied Rome, and in 476 the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist (26,110,126,220,260,279,363,377).

Trade relations during this period began to decline significantly. The only significant stimulus to the knowledge of distant countries was Christian pilgrimages to the "holy places": to Palestine and Jerusalem. According to many historians of geography, this transitional period brought nothing new to the development of geographical concepts (126,279). V best case old knowledge was preserved, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. In this form, they passed into the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages, a long period of decline set in, when the spatial and scientific horizons of geography narrowed sharply. The extensive geographical knowledge and geographical representations of the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians have been largely forgotten. Former knowledge was preserved only among Arab scientists. True, the accumulation of knowledge about the world continued in Christian monasteries, but on the whole the intellectual climate of that time did not favor their new understanding. At the end of the XV century. the era of the great geographical discoveries began, and the horizons of geographical science again began to rapidly move apart. The flow of new information that flooded into Europe had an extremely great impact on all aspects of life and gave rise to that definite course of events that continues to this day (110, p. 25).

Despite the fact that in Christian Europe of the Middle Ages the word "geography" practically disappeared from the ordinary lexicon, the study of geography still continued. Gradually, curiosity and curiosity, the desire to find out what distant countries and continents are, prompted adventurers to go on journeys that promised new discoveries. The crusades, carried out under the banner of the struggle for the liberation of the "holy land" from the rule of the Muslims, drew into their orbit masses of people who had left their native places. Returning, they talked about foreign peoples and unusual nature that they happened to see. In the XIII century. the paths blazed by missionaries and merchants became so long that they reached China (21).

Geographical representations of the early Middle Ages were formed from biblical dogmas and some conclusions of ancient science, cleared of everything "pagan" (including the doctrine of the sphericity of the Earth). According to "Christian Topography" by Kosma Indikopov (6th century), the Earth looks like a flat rectangle washed by the ocean; The sun hides behind the mountain at night; all great rivers originate in paradise and flow under the ocean (361).

Modern geographers unanimously characterize the first centuries of the Christian Middle Ages in Western Europe as a period of stagnation and decline in geography (110,126,216,279). Most of the geographical discoveries of this period were repeated. Countries known to the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean were often re-discovered for the second, third and even fourth time.

In the history of geographical discoveries of the early Middle Ages, the most prominent place belongs to the Scandinavian Vikings (Normans), who in the VIII-IX centuries. their raids devastated England, Germany, Flanders and France.

Along the Russian route "from the Varangians to the Greeks," Scandinavian merchants traveled to Byzantium. Around 866 the Normans rediscovered Iceland and established themselves there, and around 983 Eric the Red discovered Greenland, where they also established permanent settlements (21).

In the first centuries of the Middle Ages, the Byzantines had a relatively broad spatial outlook. The religious ties of the Eastern Roman Empire extended to the Balkan Peninsula, and later to Kievan Rus and Asia Minor. Religious preachers reached India. They brought their writing to Central Asia and Mongolia, and from there penetrated into the western regions of China, where they founded their numerous settlements.

The spatial outlook of the Slavic peoples, according to the Tale of Bygone Years, or the Chronicle of Nestor (the second half of the 11th - the beginning of the 12th centuries), extended almost to the whole of Europe - up to about 60 0 north latitude. and to the shores of the Baltic and North Seas, as well as to the Caucasus, India, the Middle East and the northern coast of Africa. In the "Chronicle" the most complete and reliable information is given about the Russian Plain, primarily about the Valdai Upland, from where the main Slavic rivers flow (110,126,279).

2 Geography in the Scandinavian world. The Scandinavians were excellent sailors and brave travelers. The greatest achievement of Scandinavians of Norwegian origin, or the so-called Vikings, was that they were able to cross the North Atlantic and visit America. In 874, the Vikings approached the coast of Iceland and founded a settlement, which then began to develop rapidly and prosper. In 930, the world's first parliament, the Althing, was established here.

Among the inhabitants of the Icelandic colony was someone Eric the Red , which was distinguished by a violent and stormy disposition. In 982, he was expelled from Iceland along with his family and friends. Having heard about the existence of a land lying somewhere far to the west, Eric set sail on the stormy waters of the North Atlantic and after a while found himself off the southern coast of Greenland. Perhaps the name Greenland, which he gave to this new land, was one of the first examples of arbitrary name-creation in world geography - after all, there was nothing green around. However, the colony founded by Eric attracted some Icelanders. Close maritime links developed between Greenland, Iceland and Norway (110,126,279).

Around 1000, the son of Eric the Red, Leif Eirikson , returning from Greenland to Norway, got into a violent storm; the ship is off course. When the sky cleared, he found himself on an unfamiliar coast, stretching north and south as far as he could see. Coming ashore, he found himself in a virgin forest, the tree trunks of which were twined with wild grapes. Returning to Greenland, he described this new land, lying far to the west of his native country (21,110).

In 1003, someone Karlsefni organized an expedition to take another look at this new land. About 160 people sailed with him - men and women, a large supply of food and livestock was taken. There is no doubt that they managed to reach the coast North America. The large bay they described, with a strong current emanating from it, is probably the estuary of the St. Lawrence River. Somewhere here people landed on the shore and stayed for the winter. The first European child on American soil was born right there. The next summer they all sailed south, reaching the peninsula of South Scotland. They may have been further south, by the Chesapeake Bay. They liked this new earth, but the Indians behaved too belligerently towards the Vikings. The raids of local tribes caused such damage that the Vikings, who made so much effort to settle here, were eventually forced to go back to Greenland. All stories related to this event are captured in the "Saga of Eric the Red" passed from mouth to mouth. Historians of geographical science are still trying to find out exactly where the people who sailed from Karlsefni landed. It is quite possible that even before the 11th century sailings were made to the shores of North America, but only vague rumors of such travels reached European geographers (7,21,26,110,126,279,363,377).

3 Geography in the countries of the Arab world. From the 6th century Arabs begin to play a prominent role in the development of world culture. By the beginning of the 8th century they created a huge state that covered the whole of Asia Minor, part of Central Asia, northwestern India, North Africa and most of the Iberian Peninsula. Among the Arabs, handicraft and trade prevailed over subsistence farming. Arab merchants traded with China and African countries. In the XII century. the Arabs learned of the existence of Madagascar, and according to some other sources, in 1420 Arab navigators reached the southern tip of Africa (21,110,126).

Many nations have contributed to Arab culture and science. Started in the 8th century decentralization of the Arab Caliphate gradually led to the emergence of a number of major cultural centers of learning in Persia, Spain and North Africa. Scientists of Central Asia also wrote in Arabic. The Arabs adopted a lot from the Indians (including the written account system), the Chinese (knowledge of the magnetic needle, gunpowder, making paper from cotton). Under Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809), a college of translators was established in Baghdad, which translated Indian, Persian, Syriac and Greek scientific works into Arabic.

Of particular importance for the development of Arabic science were the translations of the works of Greek scientists - Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Strabo, Ptolemy, etc. To a large extent, under the influence of Aristotle's ideas, many thinkers of the Muslim world rejected the existence of supernatural forces and called for an experimental study of nature. Among them, first of all, it is necessary to note the outstanding Tajik philosopher and scientist-encyclopedist Ibn Sinu (Avicenna) 980-1037) and Muggamet Ibn Roshd, or Avverroes (1126-1198).

To expand the spatial horizons of the Arabs, the development of trade was of paramount importance. Already in the VIII century. geography in the Arab world was seen as "the science of postal communication" and "the science of paths and regions" (126). Description of travel becomes the most popular form of Arabic literature. From travelers of the VIII century. the most famous merchant Suleiman from Basra, who sailed to China and visited Ceylon, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as well as the island of Socotra.

In the writings of Arab authors, information of a nomenclature and historical-political nature predominates; nature, however, has received unjustifiably little attention. In the interpretation of physical and geographical phenomena, scientists who wrote in Arabic did not contribute anything essentially new and original. The main significance of Arabic literature of geographical content lies in new facts, but not in the theories to which it adhered. The theoretical ideas of the Arabs remained underdeveloped. In most cases, the Arabs simply followed the Greeks without bothering to develop new concepts.

Indeed, the Arabs collected a lot of material in the field of physical geography, but failed to process it into a coherent scientific system (126). In addition, they constantly mixed the creations of their imagination with reality. Nevertheless, the role of the Arabs in the history of science is very significant. Thanks to the Arabs, a new system of "Arabic" numbers, their arithmetic, astronomy, as well as Arabic translations of Greek authors, including Aristotle, Plato and Ptolemy, began to spread in Western Europe after the Crusades.

The works of the Arabs on geography, written in the VIII-XIV centuries, were based on a variety of literary sources. In addition, Arab scholars used not only translations from Greek, but also information received from their own travelers. As a result, the knowledge of the Arabs was much more correct and accurate than that of the Christian authors.

One of the earliest Arab travelers was Ibn Haukal. The last thirty years of his life (943-973) he devoted to traveling to the most remote and remote regions of Africa and Asia. During his visit to the east coast of Africa, at a point about twenty degrees south of the equator, he turned his attention to the fact that here, in these latitudes, which the Greeks considered uninhabited, a large number of people lived. However, the theory of the uninhabitedness of this zone, which was held by the ancient Greeks, was revived again and again, even in the so-called modern times.

Arab scientists own several important observations on the climate. In 921 Al Balkhi summarized information about climatic phenomena collected by Arab travelers in the first climatic atlas of the world - "Kitab al-Ashkal".

Masudi (died 956) penetrated as far south as present-day Mozambique and made a very accurate description of the monsoons. Already in the X century. he correctly described the process of evaporation of moisture from the water surface and its condensation in the form of clouds.

In 985 Makdisi proposed a new subdivision of the Earth into 14 climatic regions. He found that climate changes not only with latitude, but also westward and eastward. He also has the idea that most of the southern hemisphere is occupied by the ocean, and the main land masses are concentrated in the northern hemisphere (110).

Some Arab geographers expressed correct ideas about the formation of forms earth's surface. In 1030 Al-Biruni wrote a huge book on the geography of India. In it, in particular, he spoke of rounded stones, which he found in alluvial deposits south of the Himalayas. He explained their origin by the fact that these stones acquired a rounded shape due to the fact that swift mountain rivers rolled them along their course. He also drew attention to the fact that alluvial deposits deposited near the foot of the mountains have a coarser mechanical composition, and that as they move away from the mountains, they are composed of smaller and smaller particles. He also spoke about the fact that, according to the ideas of the Hindus, the tides are caused by the moon. His book also contains an interesting statement that as one moves towards the South Pole, night disappears. This statement proves that even before the 11th century, some Arab navigators penetrated far to the south (110,126).

Avicenna, or Ibn Sina , who had the opportunity to directly observe how mountain streams develop valleys in the mountains of Central Asia, also contributed to deepening knowledge about the development of the forms of the earth's surface. He owns the idea that the highest peaks are composed of hard rocks, especially resistant to erosion. Rising, mountains, he pointed out, immediately begin to undergo this process of grinding, going very slowly, but relentlessly. Avicenna also noted the presence in the rocks that make up the highlands, fossil remains of organisms, which he considered as examples of attempts by nature to create living plants or animals that ended in failure (126).

Ibn Battuta - one of the greatest Arab travelers of all times and peoples. He was born in Tangier in 1304 into a family in which the profession of a judge was hereditary. In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he hoped to complete his study of the laws. However, on the way through northern Africa and Egypt, he realized that he was much more attracted by the study of peoples and countries than by the practice of legal wisdom. Having reached Mecca, he decided to dedicate his life to travel, and in his endless wanderings through the lands inhabited by the Arabs, he was most concerned about not going twice in the same way. He managed to visit those places of the Arabian Peninsula, where no one had been before him. He sailed the Red Sea, visited Ethiopia and then, moving farther and farther south along the coast of East Africa, he reached Kilwa, lying almost under 10 0 S.l. There he learned about the existence of an Arab trading post in Sofala (Mozambique), located south of the present port city of Beira, that is, almost 20 degrees south of the equator. Ibn Battuta confirmed what Ibn Haukal insisted on, namely, that the hot zone of East Africa was not sizzlingly hot and that it was inhabited by local tribes who did not oppose the establishment of trading posts by the Arabs.

Returning to Mecca, he soon sets off again, visits Baghdad, travels around Persia and the lands adjacent to the Black Sea. Following through the Russian steppes, he eventually reached Bukhara and Samarkand, and from there through the mountains of Afghanistan came to India. For several years, Ibn Battuta was in the service of the Sultan of Delhi, which gave him the opportunity to freely travel around the country. The Sultan appointed him as his ambassador to China. However, many years passed before Ibn Battuta arrived there. During this time, he managed to visit the Maldives, Ceylon and Sumatra, and only after that he ended up in China. In 1350 he returned to Fes, the capital of Morocco. However, his travels did not end there. After a trip to Spain, he returned to Africa and, moving through the Sahara, reached the Niger River, where he managed to collect important information about the Negro Islamized tribes living in the area. In 1353 he settled in Fez, where, by order of the Sultan, he dictated a long narrative about his travels. For about thirty years, Ibn Battura covered a distance of about 120 thousand km, which was an absolute record for the XIV century. Unfortunately, his book, written in Arabic, did not have any significant impact on the way of thinking of European scientists (110).

4 Development of geography in medieval China. Beginning around the 2nd century BC. and until the 15th century, the Chinese people had the highest level of knowledge among other peoples of the Earth. Chinese mathematicians began to use zero and created a decimal system, which was much more convenient sexagesimal, which existed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Decimal reckoning was borrowed from the Hindus by the Arabs around 800, but it is believed that it entered India from China (110).

Chinese philosophers differed from ancient Greek thinkers mainly in that they attached paramount importance to the natural world. According to their teaching, individuals should not be separated from nature, since they are its organic part. The Chinese denied the divine power that prescribes laws and creates the universe for man according to a certain plan. In China, for example, it was not considered that after death life continues in the Garden of Eden or in the circles of hell. The Chinese believed that the dead are absorbed by the all-pervading universe, of which all individuals are an inseparable part (126,158).

Confucianism taught a way of life in which friction between members of society was minimized. However, this doctrine remained relatively indifferent to the development of scientific knowledge about the surrounding nature.

The activity of the Chinese in the field of geographical research looks very impressive, although it is characterized more by the achievements of a contemplative plan than by the development of a scientific theory (110).

In China, geographical research was primarily associated with the creation of methods that made it possible to make accurate measurements and observations with their subsequent use in various useful inventions. Starting from the XIII century. BC, the Chinese conducted systematic observations of the weather.

Already in the II century. BC. Chinese engineers made accurate measurements of the amount of silt carried by rivers. In 2 AD China conducted the world's first population census. Among the technical inventions, China owns the production of paper, printing books, the use of rain gauges and snow gauges to measure precipitation, as well as a compass for the needs of sailors.

The geographical descriptions of Chinese authors can be divided into the following eight groups: 1) works devoted to the study of people (human geography); 2) descriptions of the interior regions of China; 3) descriptions of foreign countries; 4) travel stories; 5) books about the rivers of China; 6) descriptions of the coasts of China, especially those that are important for shipping; 7) works of local lore, including descriptions of areas subordinate to and ruled by fortified cities, famous mountain ranges, or certain cities and palaces; 8) geographical encyclopedias (110, p. 96). Much attention was also paid to the origin of geographical names (110).

The earliest evidence of Chinese travel is a book probably written between the 5th and 3rd centuries. BC. She was discovered in the tomb of a man who ruled around 245 BC. territory that occupied part of the Wei He valley. The books found in this burial were written on strips of white silk glued to bamboo cuttings. For better preservation, the book was rewritten at the end of the 3rd century. BC. In world geography, both versions of this book are known as "The Travels of Emperor Mu".

The reign of Emperor Mu fell on 1001-945. BC. Emperor Mu, these works say, desired to travel around the world and leave traces of his carriage in every country. The history of his wanderings is full of amazing adventures and embellished with fiction. However, the descriptions of the wanderings contain such details that could hardly be the fruit of fantasy. The emperor visited the forested mountains, saw snow, hunted a lot. On the way back, he crossed a vast desert so dry that he even had to drink the blood of a horse. There is no doubt that in very ancient times, Chinese travelers traveled considerable distances from the Wei He valley, the center of their cultural development.

Well-known descriptions of travels of the Middle Ages belong to Chinese pilgrims who visited India, as well as the regions adjacent to it (Fa Xian, Xuan Zang, I. Ching, etc.). By the 8th century refers to the treatise Jia Danya "Description of nine countries", which is a country guide South-East Asia. In 1221 a Taoist monk Chan Chun (XII-XIII centuries) traveled to Samarkand to the court of Genghis Khan and collected fairly accurate information about the population, climate, and vegetation of Central Asia.

In medieval China, there were numerous official descriptions of the country, which were compiled for each new dynasty. These works contained a variety of information on the history, natural conditions, population, economy and various sights. The geographical knowledge of the peoples of South and East Asia had practically no effect on the geographical outlook of Europeans. On the other hand, the geographical representations of medieval Europe remained almost unknown in India and China, except for some information received through Arabic sources (110,126,158,279,283,300).

Late Middle Ages in Europe (XII-XIV centuries). In the XII century. feudal stagnation in the economic development of the countries of Western Europe was replaced by a certain upsurge: handicrafts, trade, commodity-money relations developed, new cities arose. The main economic and cultural centers in Europe in the XII century. there were cities of the Mediterranean, through which trade routes to the East passed, as well as Flanders, where various crafts flourished and commodity-money relations developed. In the XIV century. the area of ​​the Baltic and North Seas, where the Hanseatic League of trading cities was formed, also became a sphere of lively trade relations. In the XIV century. paper and gunpowder appear in Europe.

In the XIII century. sailing and rowing ships are gradually being replaced by caravels, the compass is coming into use, the first sea charts are being created - portolans, methods for determining the latitude of a place are being improved (by observing the height of the Sun above the horizon and using solar declination tables). All this made it possible to move from coastal navigation to navigation on the high seas.

In the XIII century. Italian merchants began to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar to the mouth of the Rhine. It is known that at that time the trade routes to the East were in the hands of the Italian city-republics of Venice and Genoa. Florence was the largest industrial and banking center. That is why the cities of Northern Italy in the middle of the XIV century. were the center of the Renaissance, the centers of the revival of ancient culture, philosophy, science and art. The ideology of the urban bourgeoisie that was being formed at that time found its expression in the philosophy of humanism (110,126).

Humanism (from the Latin humanus - human, humane) is the recognition of the value of a person as a person, his right to free development and manifestation of his abilities, the assertion of the good of a person as a criterion for evaluating public relations. In a narrower sense, humanism is the secular freethinking of the Renaissance, opposed to scholasticism and the spiritual dominance of the church and associated with the study of newly discovered works of classical antiquity (291).

The greatest humanist of the Italian Renaissance and world history in general was Francis of Assis (1182-1226) - an outstanding preacher, author of religious and poetic works, the humanistic potential of which is comparable to the teachings of Jesus Christ. In 1207-1209. he founded the Franciscan order.

From among the Franciscans came the most advanced philosophers of the Middle Ages - Roger Bacon (1212-1294) and William of Ockham (about 1300 - about 1350), who opposed the scholastic dogmatism and called for an experimental study of nature. It was they who laid the foundation for the disintegration of official scholasticism.

In those years, interest in ancient culture, the study of ancient languages, and translations of ancient authors was intensively revived. The first prominent representatives of the Italian Renaissance were petrarch (1304-1374) and Bocaccio (1313-1375), although, undoubtedly, it was Dante (1265-1321) was the forerunner of the Italian Renaissance.

Science of the Catholic countries of Europe in the XIII-XIV centuries. was in the firm hands of the church. However, already in the XII century. the first universities were established in Bologna and Paris; in the 14th century there were more than 40 of them. All of them were in the hands of the church, and theology occupied the main place in teaching. Church councils of 1209 and 1215 decided to ban the teaching of Aristotle's physics and mathematics. In the XIII century. prominent representative of the Dominicans Thomas Aquinas (1225-1276) formulated the official teaching of Catholicism, using some of the reactionary aspects of the teachings of Aristotle, Ibn Sina, and others, giving them their own religious and mystical character.

Undoubtedly, Thomas Aquinas was an outstanding philosopher and theologian, a systematizer of scholasticism on the methodological basis of Christian Aristotelianism (the doctrine of act and potency, form and matter, substance and accident, etc.). He formulated five proofs of the existence of God, described as the root cause, the ultimate goal of existence, etc. Recognizing the relative independence of natural being and human reason (the concept of natural law, etc.), Thomas Aquinas argued that nature ends in grace, reason - in faith, philosophical knowledge and natural theology, based on the analogy of being, - in supernatural revelation. Thomas Aquinas' main writings are Summa Theologia and Summa Against the Gentiles. The teachings of Aquinas underlie such philosophical and religious concepts as Thomism and Neo-Thomism.

The development of international relations and navigation, the rapid growth of cities contributed to the expansion of spatial horizons, aroused the keen interest of Europeans in geographical knowledge and discoveries. In world history, the entire XII century. and the first half of the thirteenth century. represent the period of the exit of Western Europe from centuries of hibernation and the awakening of a stormy intellectual life in it.

At this time, the main factor in the expansion of the geographical representations of European peoples were the crusades undertaken between 1096 and 1270. under the pretext of liberating the Holy Land. Communication between Europeans and Syrians, Persians and Arabs greatly enriched their Christian culture.

In those years, representatives of the Eastern Slavs. Daniel from Kiev , for example, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and Benjamin of Tudela traveled to different countries of the East.

A noticeable turning point in the development of geographical concepts occurred approximately in the middle of the 13th century, one of the reasons for which was the Mongol expansion, which reached its extreme western limit by 1242. Since 1245, the Pope and many Christian crowns begin to send to Mongolian khans their embassies and missions for diplomatic and intelligence purposes and in the hope of converting the Mongol rulers to Christianity. Merchants followed the diplomats and missionaries to the east. The greater accessibility of the countries under Mongol rule compared to Muslim countries, as well as the presence of a well-established system of communications and means of communication, opened the way for Europeans to Central and East Asia.

In the XIII century, namely from 1271 to 1295, Marco Polo traveled through China, visited India, Ceylon, South Vietnam, Burma, the Malay Archipelago, Arabia and East Africa. After the journey of Marco Polo, merchant caravans were often equipped from many countries of Western Europe to China and India (146).

The study of the northern outskirts of Europe was successfully continued by Russian Novgorodians. After they in the XII-XIII centuries. All major rivers of the European North were discovered; they paved the way to the Ob basin through the Sukhona, Pechora and Northern Urals. The first campaign to the Lower Ob (to the Gulf of Ob), about which there are indications in the annals, was undertaken in 1364-1365. At the same time, Russian sailors moved to the East along the northern coasts of Eurasia. By the end of the XV century. they explored the southwestern coast of the Kara Sea, the Ob and Taz Bays. At the beginning of the XV century. Russians sailed to Grumant (Spitsbergen archipelago). However, it is possible that these voyages began much earlier (2,13,14,21,28,31,85,119,126,191,192,279).

Unlike Asia, Africa remained for the Europeans of the 13th-15th centuries. almost unexplored mainland, with the exception of its northern outskirts.

With the development of navigation, the emergence of a new type of maps is associated - portolans, or complex charts, which were of direct practical importance. They appeared in Italy and Catalonia around 1275-1280. Early portolans were images of the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, often made with very high accuracy. Bays, small islands, shoals, etc. were especially carefully indicated on these drawings. Later, portolans appeared on the western coasts of Europe. All portolans were oriented to the north, at a number of points compass directions were applied to them, for the first time a linear scale was given. Portolans were in use until the 17th century, when they began to be replaced by nautical charts in the Mercator projection.

Along with portolans, unusually accurate for their time, in the late Middle Ages there were also "monastery cards" which for a long time retained their primitive character. Later they increased in format and became more detailed and precise.

Despite the significant expansion of the spatial outlook, XIII and XIV centuries. gave very little new in the field of scientific geographical ideas and ideas. Even the descriptive-regional direction did not show much progress. The term "geography" itself at that time, apparently, was not used at all, although literary sources contain extensive information related to the field of geography. This information in the XIII-XV centuries, of course, became even more numerous. The main place among the geographical descriptions of that time is occupied by the stories of the crusaders about the wonders of the East, as well as writings about travel and the travelers themselves. Of course, this information is not equivalent both in volume and in objectivity.

The greatest value among all the geographical works of that period is the "Book" of Marco Polo (146). Contemporaries reacted to its content very skeptically and with great distrust. Only in the second half of the XIV century. and at a later time, the book of Marco Polo began to be valued as a source of various information about the countries of East, Southeast and South Asia. This work was used, for example, by Christopher Columbus during his wanderings to the shores of America. Up until the 16th century. Marco Polo's book served as an important source of various information for compiling maps of Asia (146).

Especially popular in the XIV century. used descriptions of fictional travel, full of legends and stories of miracles.

On the whole, it can be said that the Middle Ages were marked by an almost complete degeneration of general physical geography. The Middle Ages practically did not give new ideas in the field of geography and only preserved for posterity some ideas of ancient authors, thereby preparing the first theoretical prerequisites for the transition to the Great geographical discoveries (110,126,279).

Marco Polo and his Book. The most famous travelers of the Middle Ages were the Venetian merchants, the Polo brothers and the son of one of them, Marco. In 1271, when Marco Polo was seventeen years old, he went on a long journey to China with his father and uncle. The Polo brothers had already visited China up to this point, spending nine years on the way back and forth - from 1260 to 1269. The Great Khan of the Mongols and the Emperor of China invited them to visit his country again. The return journey to China lasted four years; for another seventeen years, three Venetian merchants remained in this country.

Marco served with the khan, who sent him on official missions to various regions of China, which allowed him to acquire in-depth knowledge of the culture and nature of this country. The activity of Marco Polo was so useful for the khan that the khan with great displeasure agreed to Polo's departure.

In 1292, the Khan provided all the Polos with a flotilla of thirteen ships. Some of them were so large that the number of their team exceeded a hundred people. In total, together with the Polo merchants, about 600 passengers were accommodated on all these ships. The flotilla departed from a port located in southern China, approximately from the place where the modern city of Quanzhou is located. Three months later, the ships reached the islands of Java and Sumatra, where they stayed for five months, after which the voyage continued.

Travelers visited the island of Ceylon and South India, and then, following along its western coast, they entered the Persian Gulf, dropping anchor in the ancient port of Hormuz. By the end of the voyage, out of 600 passengers, only 18 survived, and most of the ships perished. But all three Polos returned unharmed to Venice in 1295 after a twenty-five-year absence.

During naval battle In 1298, in the war between Genoa and Venice, Marco Polo was captured and until 1299 was kept in a Genoese prison. While in prison, he dictated stories about his travels to one of the prisoners. His descriptions of life in China and the perilous adventures on the way back and forth were so vivid and lively that they were often taken as products of a fervent imagination. In addition to stories about the places where he directly visited, Marco Polo also mentioned Chipango, or Japan, and the island of Madagascar, which, according to him, was located at the southern limit of the inhabited earth. Since Madagascar was located much south of the equator, it became obvious that the sizzling, sultry zone was not such at all and belonged to the inhabited lands.

However, it should be noted that Marco Polo was not a professional geographer and did not even suspect the existence of such a field of knowledge as geography. Nor was he aware of the heated discussions between those who believed in the uninhabitability of the hot zone and those who disputed this notion. He also heard nothing of the controversy between those who believed that the underestimated value of the earth's circumference was correct, following Posidonius, Marines of Tyre, and Ptolemy in this, and those who preferred the calculations of Eratosthenes. Marco Polo did not know anything about the assumptions of the ancient Greeks that the eastern tip of the Oikumene is located near the mouth of the Ganges, nor did he hear about Ptolemy's statement that the Indian Ocean "is closed" from the south by land. It is doubtful that Marco Polo ever attempted to determine the latitude, let alone the longitude, of the places he visited. However, he tells you how many days you need to spend and in what direction you need to move in order to reach one or another point. He does not say anything about his attitude to the geographical representations of previous times. At the same time, his book is one of those that tells about the great geographical discoveries. But in medieval Europe, it was perceived as one of the numerous and ordinary books of that time, filled with the most incredible, but very interesting stories. It is common knowledge that Columbus had a personal copy of Marco Polo's book with his own notes (110,146).

Prince Henry the Navigator and the Portuguese Sea Voyages . Prince Heinrich , nicknamed the Navigator, was the organizer of major expeditions of the Portuguese. In 1415, the Portuguese army under the command of Prince Henry attacked and stormed the Muslim stronghold on the southern coast of the Strait of Gibraltar in Ceuta. Thus, for the first time, a European power came into possession of a territory lying outside Europe. With the occupation of this part of Africa, the period of colonization of overseas territories by Europeans began.

In 1418 Prince Heinrich founded the world's first geographical research institute in Sagrisha. In Sagrisha, Prince Heinrich built a palace, a church, an astronomical observatory, a building for storing maps and manuscripts, as well as houses for the employees of this institute to live. He invited here scientists of different faiths (Christians, Jews, Muslims) from all over the Mediterranean. Among them were geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, astronomers, and translators capable of reading manuscripts written in different languages.

someone Jakome from Mallorca was appointed chief geographer. He was given the task of improving the methods of navigation and then teaching them to the Portuguese captains, as well as teaching them decimal system calculus. It was also necessary to find out, on the basis of documents and maps, the possibility of sailing to the Spicy Islands, following first south along the African coast. In connection with this, there whole line very important and complex issues. Are these lands near the equator habitable? Does the skin turn black in people who get there, or is it fiction? What are the dimensions of the Earth? Is the Earth as big as Marin of Tyre thought? Or is it the way the Arab geographers imagined it, having carried out their measurements in the vicinity of Baghdad?

Prince Heinrich was developing a new type of ship. The new Portuguese caravels had two or three masts and Latin rigging. They were rather slow-moving, but they were distinguished by their stability and the ability to travel long distances.

Prince Henry's captains gained experience and self-confidence by sailing to the Canary and Azores. At the same time, Prince Henry sent his more experienced captains on long voyages along the African coast.

The first reconnaissance voyage of the Portuguese was undertaken in 1418. But soon the ships turned back, as their teams were afraid to approach the unknown equator. Despite repeated attempts, it took 16 years for the Portuguese ships to pass 26 0 7 'N in their advance to the south. At this latitude, lying just south of the Canary Islands, on the African coast, a low sandy promontory called Bojador juts out into the ocean. A strong ocean current runs along it, directed to the south. At the foot of the cape, it forms whirlpools, marked by foaming wave crests. Whenever the ships approached this place, the teams demanded to stop sailing. Of course, there was boiling water here, as ancient Greek scientists wrote about!!! This is the place where people should turn black!!! Moreover, an Arab map of this coast immediately south of Bojador showed the hand of the devil rising from the water. However, on the portolan of 1351, nothing unusual was shown near Bojador, and he himself was only a small cape. In addition, in Sagrisha there was an account of the travels of the Phoenicians led by Hanno , in ancient times sailing far south of Bojador.

In 1433 the captain of Prince Henry Gil Eanish tried to go around Cape Bojador, but his crew rebelled and he was forced to return to Sagrish.

In 1434, Captain Gilles Eanish resorted to a maneuver suggested by Prince Henry. From the Canary Islands, he boldly turned into the open ocean so far that the land disappeared from his eyes. And south of the latitude of Bojador, he sent his ship to the east and, approaching the shore, made sure that the water did not boil there and no one turned into a negro. The Bojador barrier was taken. The following year, Portuguese ships penetrated far south from Cape Bojador.

Around 1441, Prince Henry's ships sailed so far south that they were already reaching the transitional zone between desert and humid climates, and even countries beyond it. South of Cap Blanc, on the territory of modern Mauritania, the Portuguese captured first a man and a woman, and then ten more people. They also found some gold. In Portugal, this caused a sensation, and hundreds of volunteers immediately appeared who wanted to sail south.

Between 1444 and 1448 almost forty Portuguese ships visited the African coast. As a result of these voyages, 900 Africans were captured for sale into slavery. Discoveries as such were forgotten in the pursuit of profits from the slave trade.

Prince Heinrich, however, managed to return the captains he had nurtured to the righteous path of research and discovery. But this happened after ten years. Now the prince knew that a much more valuable reward awaited him if he could sail around Africa and reach India.

The coast of Guinea was explored by the Portuguese in 1455-1456. The sailors of Prince Henry also visited the Cape Verde Islands. Prince Henry the Navigator died in 1460, but the business he started continued. More and more expeditions left the coast of Portugal to the south. In 1473, a Portuguese ship crossed the equator and failed to catch fire. A few years later, the Portuguese landed on the coast and erected their stone monuments (padrans) there - evidence of their claims to the African coast. Placed near the mouth of the Congo River, these monuments, according to eyewitnesses, were still preserved in the last century.

Among the glorious captains of Prince Henry was Bartolomeu Dias. Dias, sailing along the African coast south of the equator, got into a zone of headwind and current directed to the north. To avoid the storm, he turned sharply to the west, moving away from the coast of the continent, and only when the weather improved, he again swam to the east. However, having traveled, according to his calculations, in this direction more time than it was necessary to reach the coast, he turned north in the hope of finding land. So, he sailed to the shores of South Africa near Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth). On the way back, he passed Cape Agulhas and the Cape of Good Hope. This brave voyage took place in 1486-1487. (110)

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The Middle Ages (V-XV centuries) in Europe are characterized by a general decline in the development of science. The feudal isolation and religious worldview of the Middle Ages did not contribute to the development of interest in the study of nature. The teachings of ancient scientists were uprooted by the Christian church as "pagan". However, the spatial geographical outlook of Europeans in the Middle Ages began to expand rapidly, which led to significant territorial discoveries in different parts of the globe.

Normans(“Northern people”) first sailed from Southern Scandinavia to the Baltic and Black Seas (“the path from the Varangians to the Greeks”), then to the Mediterranean Sea. Around 867, they colonized Iceland, in 982, led by Leif Erikson, they opened the east coast of North America, penetrating south to 45-40 ° N. latitude.

Arabs, moving west, in 711 penetrated the Iberian Peninsula, in the south - into the Indian Ocean, up to Madagascar (IX century), in the east - into China, from the south they went around Asia.

Only from the middle of the XIII century. the spatial horizons of Europeans began to expand noticeably (journey Plano Carpini,Guillaume Rubruk, Marco Polo and others).

Marco Polo(1254-1324), Italian merchant and traveler. In 1271-1295. traveled through Central Asia to China, where he lived for about 17 years. Being in the service of the Mongol Khan, he visited different parts of China and the regions bordering it. The first of the Europeans described China, the countries of Western and Central Asia in the "Book of Marco Polo". It is characteristic that contemporaries treated its content with distrust, only in the second half of the 14th and 15th centuries. they began to appreciate it, and up to the 16th century. it served as one of the main sources for compiling the map of Asia.

A series of such trips should also include the trip of a Russian merchant Afanasia Nikitina. In 1466, with trading purposes, he set off from Tver along the Volga to Derbent, crossed the Caspian and reached India through Persia. On the way back, three years later, he returned through Persia and the Black Sea. The notes made by Afanasy Nikitin during the trip are known as "Journey Beyond the Three Seas". They contain information about the population, economy, religion, customs and nature of India.

§ 3. Great geographical discoveries

The revival of geography begins in the 15th century, when Italian humanists began to translate the works of ancient geographers. Feudal relations were supplanted by more progressive - capitalist ones. In Western Europe, this change occurred earlier, in Russia - later. The change reflected an increase in production that required new sources of raw materials and markets. They presented new conditions for science, contributed to the general rise of the intellectual life of human society. Geography also acquired new features. Travel enriched science with facts. Generalizations followed. Such a sequence, although not marked absolutely, is characteristic of both Western European and Russian science.

The era of great discoveries of Western navigators. At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, outstanding geographical events took place over three decades: the voyages of the Genoese H. Columba to the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, the mouth of the Orinoco River and the coast of Central America (1492-1504); Portuguese Vasco da Gama around South Africa to Hindustan - the city of Kallikut (1497-1498), F. Magellan and his companions (Juan Sebastian Elcano, Antonio Pigafetta, etc.) around South America in the Pacific Ocean and around South Africa (1519-1521) - the first circumnavigation.

The three main search routes - Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Magellan - ultimately had one goal: to reach by sea the richest space in the world - South Asia with India and Indonesia and other regions of this vast space. In three different ways: straight to the west, around South America and around South Africa - the navigators bypassed the state of the Ottoman Turks, which blocked the land routes to South Asia for Europeans. It is characteristic that the versions of the indicated world routes for circumnavigation around the world were subsequently used many times by Russian navigators.

The era of great Russian discoveries. The heyday of Russian geographical discoveries falls on the XVI-XVII centuries. However, the Russians collected geographic information themselves and through their western neighbors much earlier. Geographical data (since 852) contains the first Russian chronicle - “The Tale of Bygone Years” Nestor. Russian city-states, developing, were looking for new natural sources of wealth and markets for goods. In particular, Novgorod grew rich. In the XII century. Novgorodians reached the White Sea. Sailing began to the west to Scandinavia, to the north - to Grumant (Svalbard) and especially to the northeast - to Taz, where the Russians founded the trading city of Mangazeya (1601-1652). Somewhat earlier, movement began to the east by land, through Siberia ( Ermak, 1581-1584).

The rapid movement into the depths of Siberia and the Pacific Ocean is a heroic feat of Russian explorers. It took them a little more than half a century to cross the space from the Ob to the Bering Strait. In 1632, the Yakut prison was founded. In 1639 Ivan Moskvitin reaches Pacific Ocean near Okhotsk. Vasily Poyarkov in 1643-1646 passed from Lena to Yana and Indigirka, the first of the Russian Cossack explorers sailed along the Amur Estuary and the Sakhalin Bay of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk. In 1647-48. Erofei Khabarov passes the Amur to the Sungari. Finally, in 1648 Semyon Dezhn e v goes around the Chukchi Peninsula from the sea, opens the cape that now bears his name, and proves that Asia is separated from North America by a strait.

Gradually, the elements of generalization acquire great importance in Russian geography. In 1675, a Russian ambassador, an educated Greek, was sent to China. Spafari(1675-1678) with the instruction “depict all the lands, cities and the path to the drawing”. Drawings, i.e. maps were documents of national importance in Russia.

Russian early cartography is known for the following four of its works.

Large drawing of the Russian state. Compiled in one copy in 1552. The sources for it were “scribe books”. The Great Drawing did not reach us, although it was renewed in 1627. The geographer of the time of Peter the Great V.N. wrote about its reality. Tatishchev.

Big Drawing Book- text to the drawing. One of the later copies of the book was published by N. Novikov in 1773.

Drawing of the Siberian land compiled in 1667. It has come down to us in copies. The drawing accompanies the "Manuscript against the drawing".

Drawing book of Siberia compiled in 1701 by order of Peter I in Tobolsk by S.U. Remizov and his sons. This the first Russian geographical atlas of 23 maps with drawings of individual regions and settlements.

Thus, and in In Russia, the method of generalizations became first of all cartographic.

In the first half of the XVIII century. extensive geographical descriptions continued, but with an increase in the importance of geographical generalizations. It is enough to list the main geographical events in order to understand the role of this period in the development of Russian geography. First, an extensive long-term study of the Russian coast Arctic Ocean detachments of the Great Northern Expedition 1733-1743. and expeditions Vitus Bering and Alexey Chirikov, who, during the First and Second Kamchatka expeditions, discovered the sea route from Kamchatka to North America (1741) and described part of the northwestern coast of this continent and some of the Aleutian Islands. Secondly, in 1724 the Russian Academy of Sciences was established with the Geographic Department as part of it (since 1739). This institution was headed by the successors of the affairs of Peter I, the first Russian scientists-geographers V.N. Tatishchev(1686-1750) and M.V. Lomonosov(1711-1765). They became the organizers of detailed geographical studies of the territory of Russia and themselves made a significant contribution to the development of theoretical geography, brought up a galaxy of remarkable geographers-researchers. In 1742, M.V. Lomonosov wrote the first domestic essay with a theoretical geographical content - “On the layers of the earth”. In 1755 two Russians were published classical regional studies monographs: “Description of the land of Kamchatka” S.P. Krashennikova and “Orenburg topography” P.I. Rychkov. The Lomonosov period began in Russian geography - a time of reflection and generalizations.

1.1. prehistoric period. Representations of primitive man about the world. Migration of peoples, trade relations and their importance for the dissemination of geographical knowledge.

1.2. Hearths of ancient civilization(Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, China) and their role in the accumulation and development of geographical knowledge.

1.3. Successes in navigation and expansion of ideas about the inhabited world. Historical and geographical significance of the Bible. Chinese expeditions to India and Africa. Sailing of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, around Africa to Northern Albion. Ancient cartographic images.

1.4. Ancient Greece: the origins of the main directions of modern geography, the emergence of the first scientific ideas about the shape and size of the Earth. Geographic representations of Homer and Hesiod. Ancient Greek geographical descriptions of the seas (periples) and land (periegi). The significance of the campaigns of Alexander the Great in expanding the geographical horizons of the ancient Greeks. The first speculative theories of ancient geographers about the shape and size of the Earth, ideas about the relationship between land and sea spaces on Earth. Ionian (Miletian) and Elean (Pythagorean) schools. Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Herodotus and others. The first experimental measurements of the length of the earth's meridian. The emergence of ideas about different levels(scales) descriptions and display of the surrounding world: geographical and chorographic.

1.5. Ancient Rome: development of the practice of geography and geographical knowledge. Antique cartography. Geographical works of Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus and Ptolemy.

1.6. First schemes climatic zones and views on their habitability, the influence of these views on the expansion of the geographical horizons in the ancient world.

1.7. The general level of geographical representations in ancient times.

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§ 3. Geography of the ancient era

Discovery of the shape of the Earth. Knowledge of the shape of our planet was extremely important for the further development of geography and especially for the creation of reliable maps. In ancient times (VIII century BC - IV century AD) the highest development of knowledge, including geographical, was in ancient Greece. Then travelers and merchants reported on the newly discovered land.

The scientists were faced with the task of bringing this heterogeneous information into one whole. But first, it is important to decide whether the Earth is flat, cylindrical or cubic - the data is about. Greek scientists thought about many? Why? Why does a ship, moving away from the shore, suddenly disappear from sight? Why does our gaze encounter some obstacle - the horizon line?

Why does the horizon expand as we go up? The concept of a flat earth did not answer these questions. Then there were hypotheses about the shape of the earth. In science, hypotheses are unproven assumptions or conjectures.

The first guess that our planet has the shape of a ball was expressed in Vst.

BC a greek mathematician Pythagoras . He believed that objects were based on numbers and geometric shapes. The perfect of all figures is the sphere, that is, the bullet. “The earth must be perfect,” Pythagoras reasoned. “Therefore, it must have the shape of a sphere!”

He proved the sphericity of the Earth in the IV century. BC uh another greek - Aristotle . For proof, he took the rounded shadow that the Earth casts on the Moon.

This shadow people see when lunar eclipses. Neither a cylinder, nor a cube, nor any other shape gives a round shadow. Aristotle also relied on observing the horizon. If our planet were flat, then in clear weather our eye would see through a telescope far to the edge.

The presence of the horizon is explained by the bending, sphericity of the Earth.

Indisputable evidence of the ingenious assumption of the Greeks was obtained through 2500 astronauts.

Geographic literature and maps. The information received by travelers and navigators about previously unknown lands was generalized by Greek philosophers.

They wrote many works. The first geographical works were created by Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Strabo.

Eratosthenes used the data of history, astronomy, physics and mathematics to highlight geography as an independent science.

He also compiled the oldest map that has come down to us (3rd century BC). On it, the scientist depicted parts known at that time Europe, Asiaі Africa. Not by chance Eratosthenes called the father of geography, which indicates the recognition of his merits in its development.

In the second st. ClaudiusPtolemy made a more up-to-date map. On it, the world known to Europeans has already expanded significantly.

The map showed many geographic features. However, she was very approximate. Despite such "little things", maps and "geography" in the 8 books of Ptolemy were used for 14 centuries! The work of Greek scientists testifies to the origin of geography as a true science already in ancient times. However, it was mostly descriptive. And on the first maps, only an insignificant part of the space was reflected.

§ 1. Geographical ideas of the ancient world

But more

Entertaining geography

First geographical document

The poem "Odyssey" is considered such a document. It was written by the famous poet of ancient Greece, Homer, as they think, in the 9th century. BC This literary work contains geographical descriptions of many known areas of the world at that time. .

Entertaining geography

Making the first maps

Even during military campaigns, the Greeks did not leave the desire to write down everything , what they saw.

In the troops of the outstanding emperor Alexander of Macedon (he was a student of Aristotle) ​​Appointed a special pedometer. These people counted the distances traveled, made descriptions of the routes of movement and put them on the map. Based on this information, another student of Aristotle, Dicaearchus, compiled a fairly detailed map of the then known lands.

Rice. World map of Eratosthenes (3rd century BC)

Rice.

Map of the worldClaudiusPtolemy (II century)

Rice. Modern physical map of the hemispheres

The first information about Ukrainian lands. VVst. BC e Greek traveler and historian Herodotus visited the Northern Black Sea region - where Ukraine is now located.

Everything he saw and heard during this and other travels, he outlined in 9 books of "History". For this heritage, Herodotus is called the father of history. However, in his descriptions, he provided a lot of geographical information. The information of Herodotus is the only landmark of the geography of the south of Ukraine. At that time there was a big country Scythia The dimensions of which caused the greatest surprise of the overseas guest.

For centuries, people have learned from the "History" of Herodotus about Europe, Asia and Africa. A learned Greek left us reliable information about our area. Guided by them and 500 years later testimony Strabo , We got a clear view of our land.

Questions and tasks

Who owns the first correct idea of ​​the shape of the Earth?

2. What evidence did the Greeks give in favor of the spherical shape of our planet?

3. Who wrote the first geographical work?

4. When and by whom were the first geographical maps created?

5. What continents and seas were known to the compilers of the first maps?

6. Compare the geographical maps of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy with the modern map of the hemispheres and establish differences in the image of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Antique mediterranean geography

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The pre-Socratic philosophical tradition has already generated many prerequisites for the emergence of geography. The most ancient descriptions of the Earth were called by the Greeks "periods" (περίοδοι), that is, "detours"; this name was applied equally to maps and descriptions; it was often used and subsequently instead of the name "geography"; thus, Arrian calls by this name the general geography of Eratosthenes.

At the same time, the names “periplus” (περίπλος) were also used in the sense of a sea detour, description of the coast, and “perieges” (περιήγησις) - in the sense of a land detour or guide. information about countries remote from the coast - "perieges", containing a detailed description of countries, and such geographical works as Eratosthenes, which had the task of astronomical and mathematical determination of the size of the globe and the type and distribution of "inhabited land" (ήοίκουμένη) on its surfaces.

Strabo also gives the name "Perieges" to parts of his own work, which describes in detail the then known countries, sometimes, however, mixing the terms "Perieges" and "Periplus", while other authors clearly distinguish "Peripluses" from "Perigeses", and in some later authors use the name "perieges" even in the sense of a visual representation of the entire inhabited earth.

There are indications that "periods" or "periples" (next to documents or letters on the founding of cities, "ktisis") were the first Greek manuscripts, the first experiments in applying the art of writing borrowed from the Phoenicians.

The compilers of geographical "detours" were called "logographers"; they were the first Greek prose writers and forerunners of the Greek historians.

Herodotus used them a lot in compiling his history. Few of these "detours" have come down to us, and then of a later time: some of them, like the "Periplus of the Red Sea" (I century AD) or the "Periplus of Pontus Euxinus" - Arrian (II century after R. X .), constitute important sources on ancient geography. The form "periplus" was used in later times to describe the "inhabited land", making around it, as it were, a mental, imaginary detour.

This character is, for example, the geography of Pomponius Mela (I century AD).

Report: Geographical Ideas of the Ancient World

e.) and others.

The name "detour" was in this case all the more appropriate because the ancient Greek idea of ​​the Earth was combined with the idea of ​​a circle. This representation, naturally evoked by the circular line of the visible horizon, is already found in Homer, where it has only the peculiarity that the earth's disk was represented by the "Ocean" washed by the river, beyond which the mysterious realm of shadows was located.

The ocean - the river - soon gave way to the ocean - the sea in the sense of the outer sea, surrounding the inhabited earth, but the concept of the Earth, as a flat circle, continued to live for a long time, at least in the popular imagination, and was revived with renewed vigor in the Middle Ages.

Although Herodotus already scoffed at those who imagined the Earth to be a regular disk, as if carved by a skilled carpenter, and considered it not proven that the inhabited earth was surrounded on all sides by the ocean, however, the idea that the Earth is a round plane, bearing on itself in the form of an island the round "inhabited earth", dominated during the period of the most ancient Ionian school.

It found expression in the maps of the Earth, which were also made round and the first of which is usually attributed to Anaximander. We also heard about a round map of Aristagoras of Miletus, a contemporary of Hecataeus, made on copper and depicting the sea, land and rivers.

From the testimonies of Herodotus and Aristotle, we can conclude that on the most ancient maps the inhabited earth was also depicted as round and surrounded by an ocean; from the west, from the Pillars of Hercules, the middle of the ecumene was cut through by the internal (Mediterranean) sea, to which the eastern internal sea approached from the eastern margin, and both of these seas served to separate the southern semicircle of the Earth from the northern one.

Round flat maps were in use in Greece as early as the time of Aristotle and later, when the sphericity of the Earth was already recognized by almost all philosophers.

Anaximander proposed that the earth was a cylinder and made the revolutionary suggestion that people must also live on the other side of the "cylinder". He also published separate geographical works.

In the IV century. BC e. - V c. n. e. ancient scientists-encyclopedists tried to create a theory about the origin and structure of the surrounding world, to depict the countries known to them in the form of drawings.

The results of these studies were a speculative idea of ​​the Earth as a ball (Aristotle), the creation of maps and plans, the determination of geographical coordinates, the introduction of parallels and meridians, cartographic projections. Cratet Mallsky, a Stoic philosopher, studied the structure of the globe and created a model - a globe, he also suggested how the weather conditions of the northern and southern hemispheres should correlate.

"Geography" in 8 volumes of Claudius Ptolemy contained information about more than 8000 geographical names and coordinates of almost 400 points.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene for the first time measured the meridian arc and estimated the size of the Earth, he owns the term "geography" (earth description). Strabo was the founder of regional studies, geomorphology and paleogeography.

In the works of Aristotle, the foundations of hydrology, meteorology, oceanology are outlined, and the division of geographical sciences is outlined.

Geography of the Middle Ages

Until the middle of the XV century. the discoveries of the Greeks were forgotten, and the "center of geographical science" shifted to the East.

The leading role in geographical discoveries passed to the Arabs. These are scientists and travelers - Ibn Sina, Biruni, Idrisi, Ibn Battuta. Important geographical discoveries in Iceland, Greenland and North America were made by the Normans, as well as the Novgorodians, who reached Svalbard and the mouth of the Ob.

Venetian merchant Marco Polo discovered East Asia for Europeans.

And Afanasy Nikitin, who sailed the Caspian, Black and Arabian seas and reached India, described the nature and life of this country.

“Judging by the information of the official Chinese historical chronicles, already in the XI-VIII centuries. BC e. when choosing sites for the construction of cities and fortresses, the Chinese drew up maps (plans) of the relevant sites and presented them to the government. During the Warring States period (403–221 BC), maps are often referred to in sources as necessary funds support for military operations. In the chronicle of Chu Li (“Rules [rituals] of Chu”) it is written that by this time two special government institutions in charge of maps had long been functioning: Ta-Ccy-Ty - “all land maps” and Ssu-Hsien - “center for collecting strategic maps...

In 1973, during the excavations of the Ma-wang-tui burial in the capital of Yunnash province, Changsha, among the weapons and other equipment that accompanied the young commander on his last journey, a lacquer box with three maps made on silk was discovered. The maps were dated to the period before 168 BC. e.

The accuracy of the contours and the rather constant scale of Chinese maps of the 2nd c. BC e. make it quite reasonable to assume that the results of direct surveys on the ground were used in their compilation. The main tool for such surveys, obviously, was the compass, the use of which by Chinese travelers is mentioned already in the 3rd century BC. BC e.

The achievements of Chinese practical cartography were theoretically generalized in the writings of Pei Xu (223/4? - 271 AD) ... The end result of these works was the remarkable “Regional Atlas of Xu Kung”, consisting of 18 sheets and, perhaps, being the oldest of famous regional atlases of the world. In the preface to this work, Pei Xiu, summarizing the achievements of his predecessors and relying on his own experience, formulated six basic principles for the "materialities" of mapping.(From the principles cited by A.V. Postnikov, it follows that the Chinese in the 3rd century knew geometry brilliantly, and from the tools they had not only a compass, but also a mechanical watch and other equipment necessary for performing geodetic work. However, this obviously could not be. - Auth.)

Cartographic principles and techniques, generalized in the work of Pei Xu, dominated Chinese cartography until the penetration of the European cartographic tradition in the 17th-18th centuries ...

In the XII-XIV centuries. the most significant works of Chinese cartography were created, some of which have survived to this day. Widely known, in particular, are maps, remarkable in terms of geographical reliability, engraved on the front and side sides of one of the steles in the so-called "forest of plates" in the ancient capital of China, Xi'an. The maps are dated May and November 1137 and created according to the originals, compiled in 1061 - the end of the 11th century. using ... maps of Jia Tang (IX century). The maps on the stele have a grid of squares with a side of 100 li (57.6 km), and the depiction of the coastline and hydrographic network on them is undoubtedly more perfect than on any European or Arabic maps of the same period. Another remarkable achievement of Chinese cartography of the XII century. is the first printed map known to science. It is assumed that it was made around 1155 and thus predated the first printed European map by more than three centuries. This map, used as an illustration in an encyclopedia, shows the western part of China. In addition to settlements, rivers and mountains, a part of the Great Chinese wall. The described maps have a northern orientation ...

If on Chinese land maps the grid of squares serves as the basis for plotting elements of content and determining the scale, then for marine cartographic manuals, the main parameters that determine the scale and drawing of the contour of the coasts were distances in days of travel and compass courses between their individual points. The sea areas were covered with a pattern of waves, and the grid of squares was not drawn on them ... (Very reminiscent of European portolan charts. - Auth.)

In the period from 1405 to 1433, under the leadership of Zheng He, Chinese navigators made seven long voyages, during which they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf and Africa. Ensuring safe navigation ... required not only significant geographical knowledge and navigational skills, but also the availability of perfect cartographic aids. Indirect evidence of the existence of such aids on board the ships of the Chinese squadron is the so-called "Sea Chart" of Zheng He's expedition, drawn up in 1621, which shows the east coast of Africa. At the same time ... this map has well-defined features that prove the presence of Arab influence ... In particular, this influence can be seen in the indication of the latitudes of individual points on the coasts of Africa ... through the height of the North Star, expressed in "fingers" and "nails" (among the Arabs of that time 1 “finger” (“Isabi”) = 1 ° 36, and 1 “nail” (“Zam”) = 12.3) ...

In the XVII-XVIII centuries. China's cartography came under the strong influence of the French Jesuit missionaries, who, making extensive use of Chinese materials and based on astronomical definitions, they began to draw up geographical maps of China in the system of geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude familiar to Europeans. From this period, the original development of Chinese cartography practically ceased, and only detailed, multicolored topographic drawings by artists of the 18th-19th centuries. continue to be a reminder of the rich cartographic traditions of ancient China."

European cartography of the early Middle Ages

Medieval European maps are extremely original: all real proportions are violated on them, the outlines of lands and seas may well be deformed for the convenience of the image. But these maps did not have the practical purpose that is naturally given to them in modern cartography. They are unfamiliar with either the scale or the coordinate grid, but on the other hand, they have such features that the modern map is devoid of.

The medieval map of the world combined the entire sacred and earthly history in one spatial plane. On it you can find images of Paradise with biblical characters, starting with Adam and Eve, right there there are Troy and the possessions of Alexander the Great, a province of the Roman Empire - all this along with modern Christian kingdoms; the completeness of the picture that combines time with space and a holistic historical and mythological chronotope, completes with scenes of the end of the world predicted in Scripture. History is imprinted on the map, just as it is reflected in the icon, on which the heroes of the Old and New Testaments, sages, and rulers of later eras coexist. The geography of the Middle Ages is inseparable from history. Moreover, different parts of the world, as well as different countries and places, had different moral and religious status in the eyes of medieval people. There were sacred places, and there were profane places. There were also cursed places, first of all, the vents of volcanoes, which were considered entrances to hellfire.

T-O card example

With few exceptions, all surviving examples of Western European maps made before 1100 can be divided into four more or less distinct groups on the basis of their shape.

The first group consists of drawings illustrating the division of the earth's surface into zones proposed by Macrobius. Similar drawings have been found in manuscripts since the 9th century. The drawings of this group cannot yet be called cards in the full sense of the word.

The second group includes the simplest schematic representations of the three continents, often called T-O or O-T maps. The then known world is depicted on them in the form of a circle, in which the letter T is inscribed, dividing it into three parts. East is at the top of the map. The part located at the top, above the crossbar of the letter T, represents Asia; the two lower parts are Europe and Africa. Usually the surface of the map is devoid of decorations in the form of vignettes or any conventional symbols, and explanatory inscriptions are reduced to a minimum.

On many maps of the T-O type, the main continents are named after the names of the three sons of the biblical patriarch Noah - Shem, Ham and Japhet, who, according to the division of the Earth after the Flood, got Asia, Africa and Europe. On other maps, instead of these names, the names of the continents are given; on some maps, both nomenclatures are present together.

Drawings of the third type are quite close to T-O type cards, but are more complex. They accompany the manuscripts of the writings of Sallust. The drawings follow the form of T-O cards, but general form they are greatly enlivened by explanatory inscriptions and drawings. On their oldest example of the 10th century, there is not even the designation of Jerusalem, which is invariably present in the center of most later maps.

The most interesting is the fourth group. It is believed that at the end of the 8th century, a certain Beat, a priest from the Benedictine abbey of Valcavado in northern Spain, wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse. To represent graphically the division of the world between the twelve apostles, Beat himself or one of his contemporaries drew a map. Although its original has not come down to us, at least ten maps made according to its model have been preserved in manuscripts of the 10th and subsequent centuries. The best example is a map from Saint-Sevres Cathedral dating from about 1050.

In addition to purely biblical subjects, the maps also showed the place of origin of "heresy": various mythical lands, biological monsters, etc. These fantastic elements turned out to be very tenacious, and some of them appeared on maps until the 17th century. The "inventor" of this gallery of curiosities is considered Solin, the author of the book "Collection of Things Worthy of Mention" ("Polyhistor"). Solina was copied long after his myths and miracles were debunked, and his biological monsters "decorated" not only medieval, but also later maps.

An important place in the cartography of the Middle Ages was occupied by the biblical Gog and Magog. The persistence of this mythical tradition was so great that even such an enlightened man as Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294) recommended the study of geography, in particular in order to determine the time and direction of the invasion of Gog and Magog. This story was no less famous than it is now - the story of the invasion of the Tatars and Mongols of the same XIII century.

In addition to Rome and Jerusalem, on the "maps of the world" you can find Troy and Carthage, the Cretan labyrinth and the Colossus of Rhodes, a lighthouse on the island of Pharos near Alexandria and the Tower of Babel.

The geographical ideas of medieval cartographers began to gradually expand only during the period of the Crusades of 1096-1270, which was reflected to a certain extent in the most significant and interesting work - the Hereford map of the world (c. 1275), drawn on parchment from the skin of a whole bull by the monk Richard of Goldingham. The map was placed in the altar of Hereford Cathedral and was, in fact, an icon.

Another group of maps interprets the distribution of terrestrial and water masses of the inhabited world according to the scheme of natural zones (tropical, temperate and polar). These maps have received the names "zonal" or "macrobian" in modern literature. Some of them show five, others seven zones or climates Earth.

On zonal maps, the idea of ​​the Earth's sphericity is clearly traced. The globe is surrounded by two intersecting oceans (Equatorial and Meridional), forming four equal quarters of the globe with continents. The maps allow for the habitability not only of our ecumene, but also of three other continents.

Two zonal maps depict the equator - this is the map of the abbess Gerrada of Lansberg in her work The Garden of Delights (c. 1180) and the map of John Halifax of Holywood (c. 1220).

In total, about 80 “Macrobian” maps are known to science, the earliest of which dates back to the 9th century.

Arabic cards

The initial positions of Muslim geographical science, dictated by the holy book of Islam - the Koran, were based on primitive ideas about a flat Earth, on which, like stakes, mountains are installed and there are two seas, separated from each other so as not to merge, by a special barrier. Geography among the Arabs was called the science of "postal communications" or "of paths and regions." The intensive development of astronomy and mathematics inevitably led Arabic geography beyond the cosmographic dogmas of the Koran, so that some authors began to interpret it as a mathematical "science of latitudes and longitudes."

The famous mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi created the "Book of Earth Pictures", which is a heavily revised and supplemented version of Ptolemaic geography; the book was widely used and highly regarded in the Arab world. The manuscript of the "Book of Pictures of the Earth", stored in Strasbourg, contains four maps, of which the maps of the course of the Nile and Meotida (Sea of ​​Azov) are the most interesting. On the map of the Nile from this manuscript, the boundaries are marked climates, natural and climatic zones.

A peculiar cartographic and geographical tradition was formed at the court of the Samanids in Khorasan. The founder of this trend was Abu-Zeid Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balkhi (d. 934). He wrote the "Book of the Earth's Belts", which, apparently, was a geographical atlas with an explanatory text. Maps from the work of al-Balkhi passed into the works of Abu Ishaq al-Istakhri and Abu-l-Qasim Muhammad ibn Haukala, influencing all the cartographic works of both authors, which made it possible for one of the first researchers of Arabic maps, Miller, to combine them into his " Arabic Maps" under the general name "Atlas of Islam", which is firmly established in the historical and cartographic literature.

In the maps of the Atlas of Islam, the ideas of geometry and symmetry dominated real knowledge. All geographical maps were drawn with a compass and straightedge. The geometric correctness of the outlines of the seas inevitably entailed a gross distortion of the outlines and disproportion (in comparison with the actual ones) of the areas of the seas, bays and land. Rivers and roads, regardless of their natural outlines, were drawn in straight lines. There was no network of meridians and parallels, although the geographical texts that accompanied the maps often contained indications of latitudes and longitudes.

The conditionally geometric tradition continued to dominate Arabic cartography in the subsequent period (XII-XIV centuries).

Quite apart, with no apparent connection with the traditions of "classical" Arabic cartography, are the works of the famous Arab scholar Abu Abdallah al-Shorif al-Idrisi (1099-1162), a native of Morocco, educated in Cordoba and invited to Sicily by King Roger II. In 1154, al-Idrisi, on behalf of Roger II, compiled 70 separate maps of "populated areas" and one general map of the world. In the conditions of the Kingdom of Sicily, in whose culture the Arabs played a significant role, in the cartographic work of al-Idrisi, freed from the Muslim fetters of conventionality and schematism, not only a deep and ancient knowledge of ancient geographical science was manifested, but also the ability to approach Ptolemy's maps critically. European cartographers mastered this skill only three or four centuries later, within the framework of traditional chronology.

Each "regional map" of al-Idrisi showed 1/10 of one of the seven "climates", and the combination of all maps in a certain order gave a complete map of the world. In addition to this rectangular map, on 70 sheets al-Idrisi compiled round card world on silver, which most fully reflected the Ptolemaic ideas.

It is impossible to pass over in silence a kind of purely theistic mapping - the so-called qibla maps, which indicated the directions in which orthodox Muslims should bow so as to be facing Mecca during the hours of daily prayers in different countries. In the center of the map is a square image of the sacred temple of the Kaaba in Mecca, indicating the location of its gates, corners, black stone and the sacred source of Zemzem. Around the Kaaba are placed 12 ovals in the form of closed parabolas, which depict 12 mihrabs for different parts of the Muslim world. The mihrabs are arranged according to the geographical order of these parts, and each of the latter is represented in the inscription by several of the most famous cities.

Sources testify to the presence of detailed descriptions of the coasts, indicating the distances and magnetic points between their points, among the Arabs already in the 12th century. Later, such descriptions received the Italian name of portolans, but already in the works of al-Idrisi there is a detail of a true portolan of the coasts between Oran and Barka. The first one really known to science the Italian portolan came later.

In the future, the greatest contribution to the development of this original look nautical charts in the 15th-17th centuries was introduced by Italian and Catalan cartographers, followed by Spanish and Portuguese. During this later period Muslim cartographers did, according to the sources, much less to develop nautical cartography. Only a few Arabic and Turkish portolan charts are known, of which the sea chart of Ibrahim al-Murshi (1461) is the most remarkable and well studied. We need to remember that portolan charts were a secret of the state, so their small number is quite understandable.

Renaissance cartography

The practical needs of the development of agricultural production and trade gave rise to the need for descriptions of land, land trade routes, coastal and long-distance sea routes, places convenient for anchoring ships and sheltering them from bad weather. And in the XIII century, there was a realization that geographical realities and their relationships in space are qualitatively better transmitted in graphic than in text form, that a map can be an indispensable tool in organizing the economy. Already around 1250, road maps of England and Wales compiled by the monk Matthew Paris (Matthew of Paris) appeared. They were itineraries, or lists of road stations with distances between them, but already illustrated. (Matthew Paris's maps bear some similarities to Peitinger's Chart, suggesting some genetic connection to these original maps.)

The fastest progress was made in marine mapping. Peripluses, descriptions of routes, could be used almost exclusively for sailing in sight of the coast, so that the navigator could follow the indications of the document about the priority of ports and harbors and the distances between them in days of travel. But for navigation on the high seas, out of sight of the coast, it was necessary to know the direction between the ports. The solution to this problem was given by the invention of portolan charts.

The first mention of the use of portolan charts in practice dates back to 1270, when the sailors of King Louis IX, who was on a crusade in the Mediterranean to North Africa, were able to determine the position of the royal ship after a storm using a sea chart; she did not survive.

Due to the secrecy of these maps, their early examples are completely missing. In fact, they were the key to overseas markets and colonies, a means of ensuring enrichment for their owners. At the state level, portolan charts were considered as secret materials, and their free circulation and introduction into the scientific sphere were almost completely excluded. On Spanish ships, it was instructed to store portolan charts and navigational logs fastened with lead weights, so that if the ship was taken by the enemy, they would be immediately drowned.

So, at the beginning of the 14th century, portolan cards appeared as a fully formed type of cards. The earliest known map of this type, the so-called Map of Pisa, was supposedly drawn a little before 1300. No more than 100 portolan charts have come down to us from this century. Their production developed initially in the Italian city-republics and in Catalonia, their language was Latin. They were usually drawn on parchment made from whole sheepskin while maintaining its natural shape. Their sizes varied from 9045 to 140 75 cm.

The central wind rose served as a functional and graphic basis for portolan charts. The modern magnetic compass provided the combination of the ancient wind rose and the magnetic needle. It should be noted that the invention of the compass chronologically coincides with the appearance of portolan charts.

But the wind rose has an older origin than the magnetic needle. Initially, it developed independently and was nothing more than a convenient way of dividing the circular horizon, and the names of the winds were used to indicate directions. Rays were drawn from the wind rose according to the number of main compass points. In the beginning, eight main winds were used; the Latin 12-wind rose was held for a long time, then the number of winds reached 32. On the periphery of the map, on the rays of the main rose, auxiliary roses were located in a circle. Wind roses - main and auxiliary - were used to map the contours of the coastline, ports, etc., as well as to determine the course magnetic rhumb in navigation. The medieval compass made it possible to plot the ship's course with an angular accuracy not exceeding 5 °.

When asked where the compass came from - from China or Europe, the answer is very simple. From Europe. The Arabs used Italian rather than Chinese terms for the compass. In the event that the path was the opposite, and the Arabs in both cases should be intermediaries, the Arabs would have Chinese terms.

In 1269, Petrus Peregrinus provided a magnetic needle with a round graduated scale and with the help of this device determined the magnetic directions on objects. 1302 is the traditional date for the invention of the nautical compass by an unknown Italian navigator from Amalfi, which consisted in connecting the wind rose with a magnetic needle. To designate the main points of the compass, various (Latin, Frankish, Flemish) names of the winds were used, as well as the northern Pole Star.

By making portolan charts, European cartographers for the first time really realized the role of directions and angular measurements in the compilation of maps. In this sense, portolan charts opened a new stage in the development of practical cartography.

Portolan charts were originally used to serve the maritime trade of Italy and the Catalan ports and covered the waters along which their trade routes from the Black Sea to Flanders passed. Over time, the production of cards spread to Spain and Portugal, where their production acquired the character of a state monopoly, and the cards were considered secret.

By decree of the King of Spain on January 20, 1503, the “Chamber of Commerce with the Indies” was established in Seville, which was a government department that combined the functions of the Ministry of Trade and the Hydrographic Department to regulate overseas trade relations and explore newly discovered territories with special attention to the New World. A separate geographical or cosmographic department of this Chamber was created, which was perhaps the first hydrographic department in history. The famous traveler Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512) became the pilot-major (chief pilot) of this department, responsible for compiling charts and sailing directions.

From the end of the 15th century, a hydrographic office, similar to the Spanish one, existed under the name of the Chamber of Guinea (later - the Chamber of India) in Portugal.

At this time, portolan cards became the object of illegal trade. The official maps of the Spanish Chamber were kept in a safe with two locks, the keys to which were only held by the Pilot Major and the Chief Cosmographer. After Sebastian Cabot (1477–1557) tried to sell the "secret" of the mythical Strait of Anian to the British, a decree was issued forbidding foreigners to hold leadership positions in the Chamber. But, despite such careful precautions on the part of the Spanish and Portuguese governments, information about geographical discoveries and the practice of compiling portolan charts inevitably spread to other countries.

Then nautical cartography began to develop in Holland. The Dutch, having thoroughly studied the coasts of Northern Europe, created the famous marine atlas "The Sailor's Mirror", the first volume of which was published in 1584. The Dutch East India Company made a significant contribution to cartography, in particular by compiling the so-called Secret Atlas, which included 180 detailed maps. Since 1600, the English East India Company began to carry out active cartographic work.

Around 1406 Ptolemy's Manual of Geography was translated into Latin in Florence. Somewhat later, maps appeared that replaced the scholastic picture of the world, which was preached by the monastic "maps of the world." Already at its very new birth in Europe, Ptolemy's "Geography", enthusiastically accepted by scientists and to some extent canonized, required clarification in terms of the Scandinavian North and Greenland, well known to medieval Europeans.

In 1492, a native of Nuremberg, Martin Beheim, in collaboration with the miniaturist Georg Holzschuer, created a globe that became known as the first modern globe of the Earth. celestial globes more early periods were used before by Byzantine, Arabic and Persian astronomers, but not a single geographical globe has survived between antiquity and the 15th century. Behaim's globe appears to be based on a late 15th-century world map by Heinrich Martellus, and measures just over 50 cm (20 inches) in diameter.

The equator divided into 360 undigitized parts, two tropics, the Arctic and Antarctic polar circles are plotted on the globe. One meridian is shown (80 west of Lisbon) which is also divided into degrees; divisions are not labeled, but at high latitudes the duration of the longest days is given. The length of the Old World on the globe is 234° (with a true value of 131°), and accordingly the distance between Western Europe and Asia on it is reduced to 126° (actually 229°), which is the final expression of pre-Columbian ideas about the world.

The use of printing for the reproduction of maps made it possible to widely use the comparative method in cartography and thus stimulated its further development. At the same time, the mass production of maps in a number of cases contributed to the rather stable consolidation of outdated and erroneous ideas.

Even if the cartographer-compiler had at his disposal primary survey materials - navigational records, portolan charts, ship's logs, he could not always connect these materials with the available maps. Only with the further development of methods for astronomical determination of the coordinates of the terrain, as well as with the invention of trigonometric survey (triangulation), cartographers were able to determine an almost unlimited number of points on the ground by measuring the angles of the triangles formed by these points, and the length of the original basis.

The principles of the triangulation method were first formulated in 1529 by the famous mathematician, professor at the University of Louvain, Gemma Fries Regnier (1508–1555). In 1533, he bound his book Libellus with the Flemish edition of Peter Apian's Cosmographia. In this work, he described in detail the method of surveying a vast region or an entire state using triangulation. The triangulation method, similar in all aspects to that of Fries Regnier's Gemma, was apparently independently invented before 1547 by August Hirschvogel (1488–1553).

In the 60s of the XV century, Johannes Regiomontanus (1436-1473) visited Ferrara, where he was captured by the general fascination with Ptolemy's "Geography", as well as the dream of creating a new map of the world and European states. He compiled a "Calendar", the famous "Ephemeris" or astronomical tables, and a list of the coordinates of various places, mostly taken from Ptolemy. Also, Regiomontanus calculated tables of sines and tangents and published the first systematic manual on trigonometry in Europe, "On Triangles", which dealt with flat and spherical triangles.

Another well-known scientist of the 16th century, professor of astronomy and mathematics in Ingolstadt (Bavaria), Peter Apian (1495–1552), was engaged in compiling various geographical maps, among which are the map of the world in a heart-shaped projection, a map of Europe and a number of regional maps. In his most famous work, Cosmography or a Complete Description of the Whole World (1524), which went through numerous reprints, Apian, in particular, gives instructions for determining geographic longitudes by measuring the distances of the Moon from the stars. He also paid much attention to the improvement of astronomical instruments.

It is characteristic that all these scientists were specialists in the field of geometry and trigonometry, had experience in astronomical instrumental observations and, to a certain extent, were instrumental masters, which inevitably led to their understanding of the applicability of geometry and instrumental methods to practical surveys.

Triangulation for cartographic purposes was first applied by the great Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594), who in 1540 published a map of Flanders on four sheets. Triangulation survey remained unique for its time, but it marked the beginning of a new stage in the development of cartography, which now has the ability to quickly enter new information into overview maps with error-free localization of these data. The development of new projections also played an important role, of which we note only the Mercator projection (1541), which has been used so far for navigation purposes, which makes it possible to lay ships' courses in a straight line.

We already wrote that the practice of surveying land in Ancient Rome necessitated the creation of special instructions for land surveyors. The following similar instructions date back to the 16th century. (It is no coincidence that we doubted the dating of the previous instructions.) These instructions and instructions gave, to a certain extent, a standardized methodology for field work and drawing up plans and maps.

The first manual giving specific instructions to the surveyor was published around 1537 by Richard Benise (d. 1546), who was a tenant for King Henry VIII. Benise's text does not give any guidance on how to measure the directions of the lines, nor does it mention any instrument for determining the meridian or the direction of any other survey point. It should be noted that the tradition of land surveying by linear methods, with limited involvement of angular measurements, was not obsolete in European cartography until the 18th century.

At the beginning of the 17th century, in the wars of the Netherlands, and especially in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), massive movements of the troops of the warring states on the ground developed. And to ensure the maneuver, a much more detailed study of the landscape in operational cartographic form was required, with special attention to the conditions of patency for large contingents of infantry, cavalry and artillery. All this greatly expanded the functions of military engineers, who, along with their former occupations of fortification, began to survey and reconnoiter the terrain on a topographic scale. Initially in France, and then in other European countries, military engineers began to unite in special units and receive professional training, part of which was training in the elements of topographic surveying and drawing up plans and maps.

Being operational-tactical documents, military maps had to have good measuring properties, therefore it is not surprising that the earliest samples of them, compiled by military engineers, already have scale indications in 1540-1570, while on civilian maps this starts only from 70 -s of the 16th century. The first map drawn to scale is considered to be the plan of the city of Imola, created by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) during his service with Cesare Borgia in 1502-1504.

The importance of angular measurements for compiling military maps was especially noted in 1546 in the book of the Italian Niccolo Tartaglia, who served under the English king Henry VIII. Tartaglia describes a compass with sights adapted for taking angle measurements. At the end of the 16th century in Ireland, the military topographer Richard Bartlett made a remarkable topographic survey, which was far ahead in accuracy and reliability of all contemporary works. It should be emphasized that filming Bartlet was a rare exception for that period; The heyday of military topography falls on the middle of the 18th-19th centuries.

We illustrate the importance of cartography with the following example.

In an effort to seize and secure newly discovered lands, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, after long disputes, made a conditional colonial division of the world, setting the boundaries of their spheres of influence along the so-called Tordesillas line, which in the Western Hemisphere was taken to be the meridian 46 ° 37 W. D., and in the east - 133 ° 23 in. e. Moluccas, located approximately at 127 ° 30 in. etc., that is, in the immediate vicinity of the demarcation line, were the main source of the eastern spice trade. That is why they became the main arena of the so-called map war between Spain and Portugal: in this “war”, the parties tried with all their might to place “spice islands” on the maps within their conditional zones.

Having generated a lot of cartographic falsifications, the “war of the maps” nevertheless had a certain stimulating effect on the study of cosmology and cartography.

Brazil's secret discovery

Who was the first to set foot on the coast of the South American continent? - Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences A. M. Khazanov took up this issue. He's writing:

“It is believed that the largest country in South America - Brazil - was discovered in 1500 by Pedro Alvares Cabral. However, I would like to offer my hypothesis, the essence of which is that Vasco da Gama, perhaps even before Cabral, visited this country. A number of "iron" arguments can be cited in favor of this hypothesis.

This version gives us the opportunity to show by example the importance of geography and cartography for public affairs in the 15th-16th centuries.

The following is an exposition of the article by A. M. Khazanov.

Geographic determinism

The physical conditions of the Atlantic Ocean made transatlantic travel, even at the beginning of the 15th century, not only quite possible, but also not too difficult an undertaking. America is closer to Europe than, for example, South Africa, and if the southern tip of Africa was reached by Europeans in 1488, then it is logical to assume that America could have been reached by them even earlier. In addition, there are islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that could serve as an excellent base for such a journey. These islands were inhabited, and at the time of the death of Enrique the Navigator in 1460, of all the inhabitants of the Old World, their inhabitants were the closest neighbors of the inhabitants of America.

According to the authoritative testimony of Admiral La Graviere, “starting from the Azores, the stormy sea gives way to a zone of breezes, so quiet and constant in direction that the first navigators considered this path the path of an earthly paradise. Ships enter here in the zone of trade winds".

It is also appropriate to cite the opinion of J. Cortezan: “If we compare the obstacles, dangers and storms that the first ships encountered when traveling to the Azores, or along the coast of Morocco, or to the south, with the extreme ease of navigation that they encountered in the zone of the trade winds of the northwest winds, one cannot help but be surprised because the navigators of the 15th century took so long to reach the edge of this easy and seductive path and discover America".

It is known that the Bengal current made it extremely difficult to travel to the Cape of Good Hope along the western coast of Africa. In order to reach the Indian Ocean, it was easier for ships to describe a large arc to the west in the Atlantic, approaching close to the coast of Brazil, and from there, with the help of fair winds and a current running along the meridian, go to the Cape of Good Hope. Similarly, in the opposite direction: in order to quickly pass from the coast of Mina to Portugal, sailing ships preferred not to go along Africa, but to describe a large semicircle that led them to the Sargasso Sea, and from there to the Azores. Otherwise, they risked encountering headwinds constantly blowing in the area.

From the very first attempts of Portuguese navigators to follow the course to southern Africa, ocean currents and winds forced them to pass so close to the coast of Brazil that they could not fail to notice signs indicating the proximity of the land (birds, branches, pieces of trees, etc.). ).

During Vasco da Gama's first voyage, in August 1497, his flotilla moved away from the African coast and bravely plunged into the Atlantic, describing a large arc to the west. On the meteorological map of the Atlantic Ocean corresponding to August, we can see what winds the famous navigator was supposed to meet. Familiarity with this map, as well as with the direction and speed of the currents in the Atlantic, leaves no doubt that Vasco da Gama's fleet must have come very close to Pernambuco (the northeast corner of Brazil). And given the real distance that needed to be traveled, and the speed of the winds and currents, it is easy to calculate that such a journey took 40–45 days.

This is the history of this path. At the first stage, the researchers studied the north of Africa. The second was the discovery of Madeira and the Azores (1419 and 1427). These islands, being developed and settled, served as a base for new expeditions. There is reason to believe that the discovery of the islands of Flores and Corvo by the navigator Diogo de Teivi in ​​1452 was associated with an attempt to reach the island of the Seven Cities, as a result of which the Sargasso Sea was discovered. So in the course of ever longer voyages, the Portuguese moved step by step closer to the coast of Brazil.

If we compare the distances from Lisbon to the Azores and from them to the eastern point of Brazil, it will be difficult to admit that after overcoming the first section, it took as much as 73 years to overcome the second, much easier sector of the Atlantic. Much of this explains the maximum secrecy that surrounded the Portuguese royal court of sailing their ships in the Atlantic.

Map resource

There are Portuguese maps from 1438, 1447, 1448 dating back to the time of Enrique the Navigator, and the most important one is that of Diogo de Teivy from 1452. And this last one irrefutably testifies that in 1452 or a little earlier, Diogo de Teivy made a journey and carried out thorough research in the Western Atlantic and approached the shores of the New World. Later Portuguese maps of the pre-Columbian time are also known, on which sections of the Atlantic coast of America are fixed.

Today it has been proven that King Juan II and his cosmographers had information about the location of the island of Spice (Moluccas) and knew its geographical coordinates. Thus, when the negotiations for the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) began, João II had valuable geographical knowledge and resources that the Castilian sovereigns did not have.

Geographic maps have played a huge role in the history of mankind. In the conditions of intense Spanish-Portuguese competition, the Portuguese crown demanded that not only geographical maps, but also any information relating to Portuguese sea voyages be kept secret. This requirement was especially strictly observed in relation to information about travels to the Western and South Atlantic, which had as their goal the search for a sea route to India. As a result, geographical maps or any other sources have not come down to us, in which extensive and reliable information would be recorded confirming the voyages of Portuguese navigators to the shores of America in the pre-Columbian period. Nevertheless, the surviving evidence gives sufficient grounds to assert that such "secret" journeys did take place.

Land in the Western Atlantic

Here we must turn to the next group of sources - references in documents of that time. For reasons of secrecy, the chronicles do not explicitly record Portuguese travels west of the Azores until it is mentioned in the book of Darti Pasco Pereira and until the arrival of Pedro Álvaris Cabral in Brazil in 1500. Nevertheless, there were such trips.

Some direct or indirect references in documents of 1452, 1457, 1462, 1472-1475, 1484 and 1486 about travels to the west and about the existence of land in the Western Atlantic give the right to assert that the Portuguese knew about the Antilles and the coast of the American continent as early as the first quarter XV century. Apparently, the discovery of the New World was begun in 1452 by the expedition of Diogo de Teivy and continued by the journey to the shores of America by João Vaz Corti Real in 1472.

Special mention should be made of royal deeds of gift, which contain information of interest to us. The most striking of them is a letter dated March 3, 1468, granting Fernau Dulmo as a gift captaincy to "a great island, islands or continent, which was found and supposed to be the island of the Seven Cities." We do not know if Fernau Dulmo himself sailed to this "great island". He probably did, but the results of his venture were, as usual, classified.

There are also documents that mention the journey of António Leme, who saw the islands or the continent in the west around 1484, and documents of anonymous pilots who, after 1460, also saw the islands in the west. Columbus later relied on their information, as he himself admitted.

To this must be added a large number of existing royal charters, which (from 1460-1462) give captains and pilots awards to some undefined "islands" with a view to discovering and settling them. The most curious and important of them are the letters to the Madeiran Rui Gonçalves da Camara (1473) and Fernau Telish (1474).

One of the documents relating to 1486 even mentions the intention to "find again any land in the west."

Arc of Vasco da Gama

The frequency of Portuguese expeditions to the zone of trade winds gradually increased with the discovery and colonization of the islands of Madeira, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands (Cape Verde), with discoveries on the coast of Africa, with the founding of the Argen trading post, with the development of the Guinean coast, the Mina coast, the Sao Tome Islands and Principe. It is no coincidence that the Portuguese accumulated such a great and valuable experience of navigation so early. According to J. Cortezan, “only from Portugal could such journeys be made, because only here did the geographical, scientific and financial possibilities necessary for the realization of these discoveries exist in a combined form”.

Evidence of voyages and possible discoveries of lands or islands in the west is multiplying from 1470-1475, and especially after 1480-1482, that is, after the discovery, exploration and colonization of the coast of the Gulf of Guinea and the islands of Sao Tome and Principe. The return of ships from the Gulf of Guinea, from the islands of Cape Verde and the islands of Sao Tome to Portugal was systematically carried out, so to speak, “by the will of the waves”, that is, with the help of the calm of the Gulf of Guinea and the breezes of the Atlantic with the obligatory entry into the Azores, from where they then went to Lisbon and other ports of Portugal.

Starting in 1482, the caravels sailed already at distances twice as long as usual for them: from Lisbon to São Jorge da Mina. At the same time, sailing along a large arc, curved towards the Western Atlantic, became commonplace, and each time the Portuguese flotillas described an increasingly larger arc. Such an arc was also described by Vasco da Gama during his travels to India. It is possible that he repeated the route known to him.

Gaga Coutinho, a specialist in the era of great geographical discoveries, who studied the possibilities of the Portuguese sea ​​vessels, as well as the strength and direction of currents and winds in the Atlantic, came to the conclusion that the arc described by the fleet of Vasco da Gama in the Atlantic during his first trip to India, could reach almost to Pernambuco. And perhaps the most convincing argument in favor of our hypothesis can be a very curious document - the instructions that Vasco da Gama compiled in February 1500 for Pedro Alvaris Cabral, who went on a trading expedition to India, during which he, as is commonly believed, accidentally discovered Brazil. The route he advised Cabral to follow was in fact the best, shortest route to Brazil.

The flotilla under the command of Pedro Alvaris Cabral left Lisbon on March 8, 1500 and after 45 days easily reached the Brazilian coast at Porto Seguro, where they soon “accidentally” discovered a place where they could stock up on water. And all this was in accordance with the instructions of Vasco da Gama, who recommended that Cabral, if he had a supply of water for four months, not enter the islands of Cape Verde, but move away from the calm of the Guinean coast as quickly as possible. Such a recommendation clearly implies a preliminary acquaintance with the Brazilian coast, since there was no other place than Brazil where one could stock up on water until reaching the Cape of Good Hope, if not done on the Cape Verde islands.

This is another argument in favor of the hypothesis that Vasco da Gama visited Brazil before Pedro Alvaris Cabral.

Cabral reached Brazil so easily precisely because he was well aware of its existence and location. He carried with him secret instructions instructing him to deviate steeply west from his original course and "open" Brazil.

It is curious that the explanations to the Cantinou map of 1502 contain detailed information about the "Brazilian tree" (pau brazil) and its coloring properties. This information could not be obtained from the natives, since pau brazil can only be cut down with an iron machado, and the locals had only stone tools. In addition, pau brazil grew only in the hinterland. According to the historian, Professor R. Magalhains, it took at least five years to conduct research that would allow such detailed explanations for the 1502 map. Consequently, the Portuguese visited Brazil around 1497, and this is exactly the estimated date of Vasco da Gama's arrival there.

Playing with Columbus

Of course, this hypothesis can be spoken of in cautious terms of conjecture and conjecture, which can serve as a stimulus and starting point for further scientific research. In any case, it somehow explains Castaneda's cryptic mention that Vasco da Gama was "experienced in maritime affairs, in which he rendered great services to João II."

Finds its explanation and no less mysterious mention in a letter from Manuel I (1498) about a gold mine found by Vasco da Gama in an unnamed country.

Cortezan writes: “It is hard to believe that any ship sailing to discover any lands known to exist in the Western Atlantic would not be assigned to the Antilles or to the American coast, given the regime of winds and currents in the North Atlantic. In addition, there is various reliable evidence, although there is no indisputable documentary evidence, that many other Portuguese ships explored the western and southern Atlantic long before 1492. If it is impossible to prove with undeniable documents in hand that American soil was reached by unknown or known navigators before Columbus sailed for the first time to the Antilles in 1492, it is even more difficult to refute this thesis by logical arguments..

Professor Kimble writes: “The existence of the lands beyond the Azores was known or suspected in Portugal ... João II's suspicions about the existence of a country like Brazil grew into a conviction”. Kimble recalls that, according to Las Casas, Columbus directed his third journey to the Southern Continent, the existence of which João II told him.

As you know, Juan II answered Columbus with a refusal to the proposal to reach India by the western route. He did this after consulting with a council of experts (José Vizinho, Moisis, Rodrigo, Diogo Ortis) - undoubtedly the best and most informed cosmographers of the then Europe. Apparently, these experts knew that there were islands or a whole continent in the west, but they knew for sure that this was not India. After the voyage of Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, João II had in his hands direct access to India heading east and possessed a fairly reliable knowledge of the realities of the Western Atlantic. Therefore, he did not care too much about the journey of Columbus.

Most likely, João II knew from the very beginning that Columbus' plan was unworkable. But he also knew that the Genoese would find some lands in the west, and this would distract him and his masters for some time from the search for true India. This explains some mysterious events, such as the friendly letter sent by João II to Columbus in 1488, or his behavior during the negotiations in Tordesillas, and the friendly reception of Columbus in Lisbon after his return from the New World. As Cortezan rightly points out, in fact Columbus was a pawn in the hands of João II, who skillfully used him as a valuable piece on the chessboard.

A curious entry in Columbus's diary of his first voyage is that the latitude he observed in Puerto Gibara (in Cuba, but he thought he was on the coast of China) was 42 ° N. sh., while in reality it is 21 ° 06 . Error at 21°. It is incredible that such a skilled navigator as Columbus, who studied with the Portuguese, could make such a mistake. Most likely, he realized that all the lands he discovered, in accordance with the Alkasov-Toledo treaty of 1480, are in the Portuguese zone. So he invented a parallel that put them in the Spanish zone. So Columbus tried to deceive his masters.

Juan II probably had accurate information about the latitude of the lands discovered by Columbus. He invited him to return to Madrid via Lisbon. Accepting this offer, Columbus drove to Lisbon in 1493 with the news and the firm conviction that he had reached India. People from the environment of João II thought about physically liquidating him, but the king did not allow it. He received Columbus with marked courtesy and at the same time declared the lands discovered by Columbus to belong to Portugal on the basis of the Portuguese-Castilian Treaty of Alcasova-Toledo of 1480.

Mysteries of the Treaty of Tordesillas

All this greatly frightened the sovereigns of Castile. They proposed negotiations to find out in whose zone the lands discovered by Columbus are located in the light of the Alkasova-Toledo treaty. João II accepted this offer. During the negotiations that began in Tordesillas, he showed incredible perseverance and perseverance, seeking to ensure that the demarcation line of the Portuguese and Spanish possessions passed along the meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, and insisted on his own. According to the Tordesillas Treaty of 1494, the dividing line was established in this way.

How can one explain the stubborn, almost maniacal insistence on this by João II? Perhaps the only explanation is that by this time he had an accurate knowledge of the realities of the Western Atlantic, and 370 leagues (as it turned out after 1500) were sufficient to include in the Portuguese zone of the coast of Brazil. Moreover, the demarcation line provided Portugal not only with the eastern part of Brazil in the west, but also with the Moluccas in the east. Both his refusal to Columbus and his negotiating behavior could only indicate that he had a better estimate than Toscanelli's (whose map provided Columbus's impetus) for the size of the globe.

He knew for sure that the shortest way to the East was the way around Africa. It was absolutely clear to him that the islands found by Columbus were not India. Therefore, he was not very interested in this "discovery", since he knew better than Columbus the dimensions of the space that must be crossed in order to reach the East by the western route. All this makes one think that John II was quite well informed about the lands that were later called America.

Who informed him so well? Vasco da Gama.

Of course, on the question of the authorship of the plan, which led the Portuguese navigators to establish a maritime connection between Europe and India, the opinions of historians differ. Some believe that Prince Enrique the Navigator (Henry the Navigator) was the author of the idea. But in any case, the gradual accumulation of knowledge about the southern countries and seas, about ocean currents, winds and general conditions navigation, which was collected by Portuguese navigators from Gilles Eanish (1434), regardless of whether they set or did not set themselves the goal of reaching India, contributed to the fact that the discovery of Vasco da Gama became possible.

1 Geography in Feudal Europe.

2 Geography in the Scandinavian world.

3 Geography in the countries of the Arab world.

4 Development of geography in medieval China.

1 Geography in Feudal Europe. From the end of the 2nd century slave society was in deep crisis. The invasion of the Gothic tribes (3rd century) and the strengthening of Christianity, which became the state religion from 330, accelerated the decline of Roman-Greek culture and science. In 395, the division of the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern parts took place. From that time on, the Greek language and literature gradually began to be forgotten in Western Europe. In 410, the Visigoths occupied Rome, and in 476 the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist (26,110,126,220,260,279,363,377).

Trade relations during this period began to decline significantly. The only significant stimulus to the knowledge of distant lands was Christian pilgrimages to "holy places": to Palestine and Jerusalem. According to many historians of geography, this transitional period brought nothing new to the development of geographical concepts (126,279). At best, old knowledge has been preserved, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. In this form, they passed into the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages, a long period of decline set in, when the spatial and scientific horizons of geography narrowed sharply. The extensive geographical knowledge and geographical representations of the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians have been largely forgotten. Former knowledge was preserved only among Arab scientists. True, the accumulation of knowledge about the world continued in Christian monasteries, but on the whole the intellectual climate of that time did not favor their new understanding. At the end of the XV century. the era of the great geographical discoveries began, and the horizons of geographical science again began to rapidly move apart. The flow of new information that flooded into Europe had an extremely great impact on all aspects of life and gave rise to that definite course of events that continues to this day (110, p. 25).

Despite the fact that in Christian Europe of the Middle Ages the word "geography" practically disappeared from the ordinary lexicon, the study of geography still continued. Gradually, curiosity and curiosity, the desire to find out what distant countries and continents are, prompted adventurers to go on journeys that promised new discoveries. The crusades, carried out under the banner of the struggle for the liberation of the "holy land" from the rule of the Muslims, drew into their orbit masses of people who had left their native places. Returning, they talked about foreign peoples and unusual nature that they happened to see. In the XIII century. the paths blazed by missionaries and merchants became so long that they reached China (21).

Geographical representations of the early Middle Ages were formed from biblical dogmas and some conclusions of ancient science, cleared of everything "pagan" (including the doctrine of the sphericity of the Earth). According to "Christian Topography" by Kosma Indikopov (6th century), the Earth looks like a flat rectangle washed by the ocean; The sun hides behind the mountain at night; all great rivers originate in paradise and flow under the ocean (361).

Modern geographers unanimously characterize the first centuries of the Christian Middle Ages in Western Europe as a period of stagnation and decline in geography (110,126,216,279). Most of the geographical discoveries of this period were repeated. Countries known to the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean were often re-discovered for the second, third and even fourth time.

In the history of geographical discoveries of the early Middle Ages, the most prominent place belongs to the Scandinavian Vikings (Normans), who in the VIII-IX centuries. their raids devastated England, Germany, Flanders and France.

Along the Russian route "from the Varangians to the Greeks," Scandinavian merchants traveled to Byzantium. Around 866 the Normans rediscovered Iceland and established themselves there, and around 983 Eric the Red discovered Greenland, where they also established permanent settlements (21).

In the first centuries of the Middle Ages, the Byzantines had a relatively broad spatial outlook. The religious ties of the Eastern Roman Empire extended to the Balkan Peninsula, and later to Kievan Rus and Asia Minor. Religious preachers reached India. They brought their writing to Central Asia and Mongolia, and from there penetrated into the western regions of China, where they founded their numerous settlements.

The spatial outlook of the Slavic peoples, according to the Tale of Bygone Years, or the Chronicle of Nestor (second half of the 11th - early 12th centuries), extended almost to the whole of Europe - up to about 600 N.S. and to the shores of the Baltic and North Seas, as well as to the Caucasus, India, the Middle East and the northern coast of Africa. In the "Chronicle" the most complete and reliable information is given about the Russian Plain, primarily about the Valdai Upland, from where the main Slavic rivers flow (110,126,279).

2 Geography in the Scandinavian world. The Scandinavians were excellent sailors and brave travelers. The greatest achievement of Scandinavians of Norwegian origin, or the so-called Vikings, was that they were able to cross the North Atlantic and visit America. In 874, the Vikings approached the coast of Iceland and founded a settlement, which then began to develop rapidly and prosper. In 930, the world's first parliament, the Althing, was established here.

Among the inhabitants of the Icelandic colony was someone Eric the Red , which was distinguished by a violent and stormy disposition. In 982, he was expelled from Iceland along with his family and friends. Having heard about the existence of a land lying somewhere far to the west, Eric set sail on the stormy waters of the North Atlantic and after a while found himself off the southern coast of Greenland. Perhaps the name Greenland, which he gave to this new land, was one of the first examples of arbitrary name-creation in world geography - after all, there was nothing green around. However, the colony founded by Eric attracted some Icelanders. Close maritime links developed between Greenland, Iceland and Norway (110,126,279).

Around 1000, the son of Eric the Red, Leif Eirikson , returning from Greenland to Norway, got into a violent storm; the ship is off course. When the sky cleared, he found himself on an unfamiliar coast, stretching north and south as far as he could see. Coming ashore, he found himself in a virgin forest, the tree trunks of which were twined with wild grapes. Returning to Greenland, he described this new land, lying far to the west of his native country (21,110).

In 1003, someone Karlsefni organized an expedition to take another look at this new land. About 160 people sailed with him - men and women, a large supply of food and livestock was taken. There is no doubt that they managed to reach the coast of North America. The large bay they described, with a strong current emanating from it, is probably the estuary of the St. Lawrence River. Somewhere here people landed on the shore and stayed for the winter. The first European child on American soil was born right there. The next summer they all sailed south, reaching the peninsula of South Scotland. They may have been further south, by the Chesapeake Bay. They liked this new land, but the Indians were too belligerent towards the Vikings. The raids of local tribes caused such damage that the Vikings, who made so much effort to settle here, were eventually forced to go back to Greenland. All stories related to this event are captured in the "Saga of Eric the Red" passed from mouth to mouth. Historians of geographical science are still trying to find out exactly where the people who sailed from Karlsefni landed. It is quite possible that even before the 11th century sailings were made to the shores of North America, but only vague rumors of such travels reached European geographers (7,21,26,110,126,279,363,377).

3 Geography in the countries of the Arab world. From the 6th century Arabs begin to play a prominent role in the development of world culture. By the beginning of the 8th century they created a huge state that covered the whole of Asia Minor, part of Central Asia, northwestern India, North Africa and most of the Iberian Peninsula. Among the Arabs, handicraft and trade prevailed over subsistence farming. Arab merchants traded with China and African countries. In the XII century. the Arabs learned of the existence of Madagascar, and according to some other sources, in 1420 Arab navigators reached the southern tip of Africa (21,110,126).

Many nations have contributed to Arab culture and science. Started in the 8th century decentralization of the Arab Caliphate gradually led to the emergence of a number of major cultural centers of learning in Persia, Spain and North Africa. Scientists of Central Asia also wrote in Arabic. The Arabs adopted a lot from the Indians (including the written account system), the Chinese (knowledge of the magnetic needle, gunpowder, making paper from cotton). Under Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809), a college of translators was established in Baghdad, which translated Indian, Persian, Syriac and Greek scientific works into Arabic.

Of particular importance for the development of Arabic science were the translations of the works of Greek scientists - Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Strabo, Ptolemy, etc. To a large extent, under the influence of Aristotle's ideas, many thinkers of the Muslim world rejected the existence of supernatural forces and called for an experimental study of nature. Among them, first of all, it is necessary to note the outstanding Tajik philosopher and scientist-encyclopedist Ibn Sinu (Avicenna) 980-1037) and Muggamet Ibn Roshd, or Avverroes (1126-1198).

To expand the spatial horizons of the Arabs, the development of trade was of paramount importance. Already in the VIII century. geography in the Arab world was seen as "the science of postal communication" and "the science of paths and regions" (126). Description of travel becomes the most popular form of Arabic literature. From travelers of the VIII century. the most famous merchant Suleiman from Basra, who sailed to China and visited Ceylon, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as well as the island of Socotra.

In the writings of Arab authors, information of a nomenclature and historical-political nature predominates; nature, however, has received unjustifiably little attention. In the interpretation of physical and geographical phenomena, scientists who wrote in Arabic did not contribute anything essentially new and original. The main significance of Arabic literature of geographical content lies in new facts, but not in the theories to which it adhered. The theoretical ideas of the Arabs remained underdeveloped. In most cases, the Arabs simply followed the Greeks without bothering to develop new concepts.

Indeed, the Arabs collected a lot of material in the field of physical geography, but failed to process it into a coherent scientific system (126). In addition, they constantly mixed the creations of their imagination with reality. Nevertheless, the role of the Arabs in the history of science is very significant. Thanks to the Arabs, a new system of "Arabic" numbers, their arithmetic, astronomy, as well as Arabic translations of Greek authors, including Aristotle, Plato and Ptolemy, began to spread in Western Europe after the Crusades.

The works of the Arabs on geography, written in the VIII-XIV centuries, were based on a variety of literary sources. In addition, Arab scholars used not only translations from Greek, but also information received from their own travelers. As a result, the knowledge of the Arabs was much more correct and accurate than that of the Christian authors.

One of the earliest Arab travelers was Ibn Haukal. The last thirty years of his life (943-973) he devoted to traveling to the most remote and remote regions of Africa and Asia. During his visit to the east coast of Africa, at a point about twenty degrees south of the equator, he drew his attention to the fact that here, in these latitudes, which the Greeks considered uninhabited, a large number of people lived. However, the theory of the uninhabitedness of this zone, which was held by the ancient Greeks, was revived again and again, even in the so-called modern times.

Arab scientists own several important observations on the climate. In 921 Al Balkhi summarized information about climatic phenomena collected by Arab travelers in the first climatic atlas of the world - "Kitab al-Ashkal".

Masudi (died 956) penetrated as far south as present-day Mozambique and made a very accurate description of the monsoons. Already in the X century. he correctly described the process of evaporation of moisture from the water surface and its condensation in the form of clouds.

In 985 Makdisi proposed a new subdivision of the Earth into 14 climatic regions. He found that climate changes not only with latitude, but also westward and eastward. He also owns the idea that most of the southern hemisphere is occupied by the ocean, and the main land masses are concentrated in the northern hemisphere (110).

Some Arab geographers expressed correct ideas about the formation of the forms of the earth's surface. In 1030 Al-Biruni wrote a huge book on the geography of India. In it, in particular, he spoke of rounded stones, which he found in alluvial deposits south of the Himalayas. He explained their origin by the fact that these stones acquired a rounded shape due to the fact that swift mountain rivers rolled them along their course. He also drew attention to the fact that alluvial deposits deposited near the foot of the mountains have a coarser mechanical composition, and that as they move away from the mountains, they are composed of smaller and smaller particles. He also spoke about the fact that, according to the ideas of the Hindus, the tides are caused by the moon. His book also contains an interesting statement that as one moves towards the South Pole, night disappears. This statement proves that even before the 11th century, some Arab navigators penetrated far to the south (110,126).

Avicenna, or Ibn Sina , who had the opportunity to directly observe how mountain streams develop valleys in the mountains of Central Asia, also contributed to deepening knowledge about the development of the forms of the earth's surface. He owns the idea that the highest peaks are composed of hard rocks, especially resistant to erosion. Rising, mountains, he pointed out, immediately begin to undergo this process of grinding, going very slowly, but relentlessly. Avicenna also noted the presence in the rocks that make up the highlands, fossil remains of organisms, which he considered as examples of attempts by nature to create living plants or animals that ended in failure (126).

Ibn Battuta - one of the greatest Arab travelers of all times and peoples. He was born in Tangier in 1304 into a family in which the profession of a judge was hereditary. In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he hoped to complete his study of the laws. However, on the way through northern Africa and Egypt, he realized that he was much more attracted by the study of peoples and countries than by the practice of legal intricacies. Having reached Mecca, he decided to dedicate his life to travel, and in his endless wanderings through the lands inhabited by the Arabs, he was most concerned about not going twice in the same way. He managed to visit those places of the Arabian Peninsula, where no one had been before him. He sailed the Red Sea, visited Ethiopia and then, moving farther and farther south along the coast of East Africa, he reached Kilwa, lying almost under 100S.l. There he learned about the existence of an Arab trading post in Sofala (Mozambique), located south of the present port city of Beira, that is, almost 20 degrees south of the equator. Ibn Battuta confirmed what Ibn Haukal insisted on, namely, that the hot zone of East Africa was not sizzlingly hot and that it was inhabited by local tribes who did not oppose the establishment of trading posts by the Arabs.

Returning to Mecca, he soon sets off again, visits Baghdad, travels around Persia and the lands adjacent to the Black Sea. Following through the Russian steppes, he eventually reached Bukhara and Samarkand, and from there through the mountains of Afghanistan came to India. For several years, Ibn Battuta was in the service of the Sultan of Delhi, which gave him the opportunity to freely travel around the country. The Sultan appointed him as his ambassador to China. However, many years passed before Ibn Battuta arrived there. During this time, he managed to visit the Maldives, Ceylon and Sumatra, and only after that he ended up in China. In 1350 he returned to Fes, the capital of Morocco. However, his travels did not end there. After a trip to Spain, he returned to Africa and, moving through the Sahara, reached the Niger River, where he managed to collect important information about the Negro Islamized tribes living in the area. In 1353 he settled in Fez, where, by order of the Sultan, he dictated a long narrative about his travels. For about thirty years, Ibn Battura covered a distance of about 120 thousand km, which was an absolute record for the XIV century. Unfortunately, his book, written in Arabic, did not have any significant impact on the way of thinking of European scientists (110).

4 Development of geography in medieval China. Beginning around the 2nd century BC. and until the 15th century, the Chinese people had the highest level of knowledge among other peoples of the Earth. Chinese mathematicians began to use zero and created a decimal system, which was much more convenient sexagesimal, which existed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Decimal reckoning was borrowed from the Hindus by the Arabs around 800, but it is believed that it entered India from China (110).

Chinese philosophers differed from ancient Greek thinkers mainly in that they attached paramount importance to the natural world. According to their teaching, individuals should not be separated from nature, since they are its organic part. The Chinese denied the divine power that prescribes laws and creates the universe for man according to a certain plan. In China, for example, it was not considered that after death life continues in the Garden of Eden or in the circles of hell. The Chinese believed that the dead are absorbed by the all-pervading universe, of which all individuals are an inseparable part (126,158).

Confucianism taught a way of life in which friction between members of society was minimized. However, this doctrine remained relatively indifferent to the development of scientific knowledge about the surrounding nature.

The activity of the Chinese in the field of geographical research looks very impressive, although it is characterized more by the achievements of a contemplative plan than by the development of a scientific theory (110).

In China, geographical research was primarily associated with the creation of methods that made it possible to make accurate measurements and observations with their subsequent use in various useful inventions. Starting from the XIII century. BC, the Chinese conducted systematic observations of the weather.

Already in the II century. BC. Chinese engineers made accurate measurements of the amount of silt carried by rivers. In 2 AD China conducted the world's first population census. Among the technical inventions, China owns the production of paper, printing books, the use of rain gauges and snow gauges to measure precipitation, as well as a compass for the needs of sailors.

The geographical descriptions of Chinese authors can be divided into the following eight groups: 1) works devoted to the study of people (human geography); 2) descriptions of the interior regions of China; 3) descriptions of foreign countries; 4) travel stories; 5) books about the rivers of China; 6) descriptions of the coasts of China, especially those that are important for shipping; 7) works of local lore, including descriptions of areas subordinate to and ruled by fortified cities, famous mountain ranges, or certain cities and palaces; 8) geographical encyclopedias (110, p. 96). Much attention was also paid to the origin of geographical names (110).

The earliest evidence of Chinese travel is a book probably written between the 5th and 3rd centuries. BC. She was discovered in the tomb of a man who ruled around 245 BC. territory that occupied part of the Wei He valley. The books found in this burial were written on strips of white silk glued to bamboo cuttings. For better preservation, the book was rewritten at the end of the 3rd century. BC. In world geography, both versions of this book are known as "The Travels of Emperor Mu".

The reign of Emperor Mu fell on 1001-945. BC. Emperor Mu, these works say, desired to travel around the world and leave traces of his carriage in every country. The history of his wanderings is full of amazing adventures and embellished with fiction. However, the descriptions of the wanderings contain such details that could hardly be the fruit of fantasy. The emperor visited the forested mountains, saw snow, hunted a lot. On the way back, he crossed a vast desert so dry that he even had to drink the blood of a horse. There is no doubt that in very ancient times, Chinese travelers traveled considerable distances from the Wei He valley, the center of their cultural development.

Well-known descriptions of travels of the Middle Ages belong to Chinese pilgrims who visited India, as well as the regions adjacent to it (Fa Xian, Xuan Zang, I. Ching, etc.). By the 8th century refers to the treatise Jia Danya "Description of nine countries", which is a guide to the countries of Southeast Asia. In 1221 a Taoist monk Chan Chun (XII-XIII centuries) traveled to Samarkand to the court of Genghis Khan and collected fairly accurate information about the population, climate, and vegetation of Central Asia.

In medieval China, there were numerous official descriptions of the country, which were compiled for each new dynasty. These works contained a variety of information on history, natural conditions, population, economy and various sights. The geographical knowledge of the peoples of South and East Asia had practically no effect on the geographical outlook of Europeans. On the other hand, the geographical representations of medieval Europe remained almost unknown in India and China, except for some information received through Arabic sources (110,126,158,279,283,300).

Late Middle Ages in Europe (XII-XIV centuries). In the XII century. feudal stagnation in the economic development of the countries of Western Europe was replaced by a certain upsurge: handicrafts, trade, commodity-money relations developed, new cities arose. The main economic and cultural centers in Europe in the XII century. there were cities of the Mediterranean, through which trade routes to the East passed, as well as Flanders, where various crafts flourished and commodity-money relations developed. In the XIV century. the area of ​​the Baltic and North Seas, where the Hanseatic League of trading cities was formed, also became a sphere of lively trade relations. In the XIV century. paper and gunpowder appear in Europe.

In the XIII century. sailing and rowing ships are gradually being replaced by caravels, the compass is coming into use, the first sea charts are being created - portolans, methods for determining the latitude of a place are being improved (by observing the height of the Sun above the horizon and using solar declination tables). All this made it possible to move from coastal navigation to navigation on the high seas.

In the XIII century. Italian merchants began to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar to the mouth of the Rhine. It is known that at that time the trade routes to the East were in the hands of the Italian city-republics of Venice and Genoa. Florence was the largest industrial and banking center. That is why the cities of Northern Italy in the middle of the XIV century. were the center of the Renaissance, the centers of the revival of ancient culture, philosophy, science and art. The ideology of the urban bourgeoisie that was being formed at that time found its expression in the philosophy of humanism (110,126).

Humanism (from the Latin humanus - human, humane) is the recognition of the value of a person as a person, his right to free development and manifestation of his abilities, the assertion of the good of a person as a criterion for assessing social relations. In a narrower sense, humanism is the secular freethinking of the Renaissance, opposed to scholasticism and the spiritual dominance of the church and associated with the study of newly discovered works of classical antiquity (291).

The greatest humanist of the Italian Renaissance and world history in general was Francis of Assis (1182-1226) - an outstanding preacher, author of religious and poetic works, the humanistic potential of which is comparable to the teachings of Jesus Christ. In 1207-1209. he founded the Franciscan order.

From among the Franciscans came the most advanced philosophers of the Middle Ages - Roger Bacon (1212-1294) and William of Ockham (about 1300 - about 1350), who opposed the scholastic dogmatism and called for an experimental study of nature. It was they who laid the foundation for the disintegration of official scholasticism.

In those years, interest in ancient culture, the study of ancient languages, and translations of ancient authors was intensively revived. The first prominent representatives of the Italian Renaissance were petrarch (1304-1374) and Bocaccio (1313-1375), although, undoubtedly, it was Dante (1265-1321) was the forerunner of the Italian Renaissance.

Science of the Catholic countries of Europe in the XIII-XIV centuries. was in the firm hands of the church. However, already in the XII century. the first universities were established in Bologna and Paris; in the 14th century there were more than 40 of them. All of them were in the hands of the church, and theology occupied the main place in teaching. Church councils of 1209 and 1215 decided to ban the teaching of Aristotle's physics and mathematics. In the XIII century. prominent representative of the Dominicans Thomas Aquinas (1225-1276) formulated the official teaching of Catholicism, using some of the reactionary aspects of the teachings of Aristotle, Ibn Sina, and others, giving them their own religious and mystical character.

Undoubtedly, Thomas Aquinas was an outstanding philosopher and theologian, a systematizer of scholasticism on the methodological basis of Christian Aristotelianism (the doctrine of act and potency, form and matter, substance and accident, etc.). He formulated five proofs of the existence of God, described as the root cause, the ultimate goal of existence, etc. Recognizing the relative independence of natural being and human reason (the concept of natural law, etc.), Thomas Aquinas argued that nature ends in grace, reason - in faith, philosophical knowledge and natural theology, based on the analogy of being, - in supernatural revelation. Thomas Aquinas' main writings are Summa Theologia and Summa Against the Gentiles. The teachings of Aquinas underlie such philosophical and religious concepts as Thomism and Neo-Thomism.

The development of international relations and navigation, the rapid growth of cities contributed to the expansion of spatial horizons, aroused the keen interest of Europeans in geographical knowledge and discoveries. In world history, the entire XII century. and the first half of the thirteenth century. represent the period of the exit of Western Europe from centuries of hibernation and the awakening of a stormy intellectual life in it.

At this time, the main factor in the expansion of the geographical representations of European peoples were the crusades undertaken between 1096 and 1270. under the pretext of liberating the Holy Land. Communication between Europeans and Syrians, Persians and Arabs greatly enriched their Christian culture.

In those years, representatives of the Eastern Slavs also traveled a lot. Daniel from Kiev , for example, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and Benjamin of Tudela traveled to different countries of the East.

A noticeable turning point in the development of geographical concepts occurred approximately in the middle of the 13th century, one of the reasons for which was the Mongol expansion, which reached its extreme western limit by 1242. Since 1245, the Pope and many Christian crowns began to send their embassies and missions to the Mongol khans for diplomatic and intelligence purposes and in the hope of converting the Mongol rulers to Christianity. Merchants followed the diplomats and missionaries to the east. The greater accessibility of the countries under Mongol rule compared to Muslim countries, as well as the presence of a well-established system of communications and means of communication, opened the way for Europeans to Central and East Asia.

In the XIII century, namely from 1271 to 1295, Marco Polo traveled through China, visited India, Ceylon, South Vietnam, Burma, the Malay Archipelago, Arabia and East Africa. After the journey of Marco Polo, merchant caravans were often equipped from many countries of Western Europe to China and India (146).

The study of the northern outskirts of Europe was successfully continued by Russian Novgorodians. After they in the XII-XIII centuries. All major rivers of the European North were discovered; they paved the way to the Ob basin through the Sukhona, Pechora and Northern Urals. The first campaign to the Lower Ob (to the Gulf of Ob), about which there are indications in the annals, was undertaken in 1364-1365. At the same time, Russian sailors moved to the East along the northern coasts of Eurasia. By the end of the XV century. they explored the southwestern coast of the Kara Sea, the Ob and Taz Bays. At the beginning of the XV century. Russians sailed to Grumant (Spitsbergen archipelago). However, it is possible that these voyages began much earlier (2,13,14,21,28,31,85,119,126,191,192,279).

Unlike Asia, Africa remained for the Europeans of the 13th-15th centuries. almost unexplored mainland, with the exception of its northern outskirts.

With the development of navigation, the emergence of a new type of maps is associated - portolans, or complex charts, which were of direct practical importance. They appeared in Italy and Catalonia around 1275-1280. Early portolans were images of the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, often made with very high accuracy. Bays, small islands, shoals, etc. were especially carefully indicated on these drawings. Later, portolans appeared on the western coasts of Europe. All portolans were oriented to the north, at a number of points compass directions were applied to them, for the first time a linear scale was given. Portolans were in use until the 17th century, when they began to be replaced by nautical charts in the Mercator projection.

Along with portolans, unusually accurate for their time, in the late Middle Ages there were also "monastery cards" which for a long time retained their primitive character. Later they increased in format and became more detailed and precise.

Despite the significant expansion of the spatial outlook, XIII and XIV centuries. gave very little new in the field of scientific geographical ideas and ideas. Even the descriptive-regional direction did not show much progress. The term "geography" itself at that time, apparently, was not used at all, although literary sources contain extensive information related to the field of geography. This information in the XIII-XV centuries, of course, became even more numerous. The main place among the geographical descriptions of that time is occupied by the stories of the crusaders about the wonders of the East, as well as writings about travel and the travelers themselves. Of course, this information is not equivalent both in volume and in objectivity.

The greatest value among all the geographical works of that period is the "Book" of Marco Polo (146). Contemporaries reacted to its content very skeptically and with great distrust. Only in the second half of the XIV century. and at a later time, the book of Marco Polo began to be valued as a source of various information about the countries of East, Southeast and South Asia. This work was used, for example, by Christopher Columbus during his wanderings to the shores of America. Up until the 16th century. Marco Polo's book served as an important source of various information for compiling maps of Asia (146).

Especially popular in the XIV century. used descriptions of fictional travel, full of legends and stories of miracles.

On the whole, it can be said that the Middle Ages were marked by an almost complete degeneration of general physical geography. The Middle Ages practically did not give new ideas in the field of geography and only preserved for posterity some ideas of ancient authors, thereby preparing the first theoretical prerequisites for the transition to the Great geographical discoveries (110,126,279).

Marco Polo and his Book. The most famous travelers of the Middle Ages were the Venetian merchants, the Polo brothers and the son of one of them, Marco. In 1271, when Marco Polo was seventeen years old, he went on a long journey to China with his father and uncle. The Polo brothers had already visited China up to this point, spending nine years on the way back and forth - from 1260 to 1269. The Great Khan of the Mongols and the Emperor of China invited them to visit his country again. The return journey to China lasted four years; for another seventeen years, three Venetian merchants remained in this country.

Marco served with the khan, who sent him on official missions to various regions of China, which allowed him to acquire in-depth knowledge of the culture and nature of this country. The activity of Marco Polo was so useful for the khan that the khan with great displeasure agreed to Polo's departure.

In 1292, the Khan provided all the Polos with a flotilla of thirteen ships. Some of them were so large that the number of their team exceeded a hundred people. In total, together with the Polo merchants, about 600 passengers were accommodated on all these ships. The flotilla departed from a port located in southern China, approximately from the place where the modern city of Quanzhou is located. Three months later, the ships reached the islands of Java and Sumatra, where they stayed for five months, after which the voyage continued.

Travelers visited the island of Ceylon and South India, and then, following along its western coast, they entered the Persian Gulf, dropping anchor in the ancient port of Hormuz. By the end of the voyage, out of 600 passengers, only 18 survived, and most of the ships perished. But all three Polos returned unharmed to Venice in 1295 after a twenty-five-year absence.

During the naval battle of 1298 in the war between Genoa and Venice, Marco Polo was captured and until 1299 was kept in a Genoese prison. While in prison, he dictated stories about his travels to one of the prisoners. His descriptions of life in China and the perilous adventures on the way back and forth were so vivid and lively that they were often taken as products of a fervent imagination. In addition to stories about the places where he directly visited, Marco Polo also mentioned Chipango, or Japan, and the island of Madagascar, which, according to him, was located at the southern limit of the inhabited earth. Since Madagascar was located much south of the equator, it became obvious that the sizzling, sultry zone was not such at all and belonged to the inhabited lands.

However, it should be noted that Marco Polo was not a professional geographer and did not even suspect the existence of such a field of knowledge as geography. Nor was he aware of the heated discussions between those who believed in the uninhabitability of the hot zone and those who disputed this notion. He also heard nothing of the controversy between those who believed that the underestimated value of the earth's circumference was correct, following Posidonius, Marines of Tyre, and Ptolemy in this, and those who preferred the calculations of Eratosthenes. Marco Polo did not know anything about the assumptions of the ancient Greeks that the eastern tip of the Oikumene is located near the mouth of the Ganges, nor did he hear about Ptolemy's statement that the Indian Ocean "is closed" from the south by land. It is doubtful that Marco Polo ever attempted to determine the latitude, let alone the longitude, of the places he visited. However, he tells you how many days you need to spend and in what direction you need to move in order to reach one or another point. He does not say anything about his attitude to the geographical representations of previous times. At the same time, his book is one of those that tell about the great geographical discoveries. But in medieval Europe, it was perceived as one of the numerous and ordinary books of that time, filled with the most incredible, but very interesting stories. It is common knowledge that Columbus had a personal copy of Marco Polo's book with his own notes (110,146).

Prince Henry the Navigator and the Portuguese Sea Voyages . Prince Heinrich , nicknamed the Navigator, was the organizer of major expeditions of the Portuguese. In 1415, the Portuguese army under the command of Prince Henry attacked and stormed the Muslim stronghold on the southern coast of the Strait of Gibraltar in Ceuta. Thus, for the first time, a European power came into possession of a territory lying outside Europe. With the occupation of this part of Africa, the period of colonization of overseas territories by Europeans began.

In 1418 Prince Heinrich founded the world's first geographical research institute in Sagrisha. In Sagrisha, Prince Heinrich built a palace, a church, an astronomical observatory, a building for storing maps and manuscripts, as well as houses for the employees of this institute to live. He invited here scientists of different faiths (Christians, Jews, Muslims) from all over the Mediterranean. Among them were geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, astronomers, and translators capable of reading manuscripts written in different languages.

someone Jakome from Mallorca was appointed chief geographer. He was given the task of improving the methods of navigation and then teaching them to the Portuguese captains, as well as teaching them the decimal system. It was also necessary to find out, on the basis of documents and maps, the possibility of sailing to the Spicy Islands, following first south along the African coast. In this regard, a number of very important and complex issues have arisen. Are these lands near the equator habitable? Does the skin turn black in people who get there, or is it fiction? What are the dimensions of the Earth? Is the Earth as big as Marin of Tyre thought? Or is it the way the Arab geographers imagined it, having carried out their measurements in the vicinity of Baghdad?

Prince Heinrich was developing a new type of ship. The new Portuguese caravels had two or three masts and Latin rigging. They were rather slow-moving, but they were distinguished by their stability and the ability to travel long distances.

Prince Henry's captains gained experience and self-confidence by sailing to the Canary and Azores. At the same time, Prince Henry sent his more experienced captains on long voyages along the African coast.

The first reconnaissance voyage of the Portuguese was undertaken in 1418. But soon the ships turned back, as their teams were afraid to approach the unknown equator. Despite repeated attempts, it took 16 years for the Portuguese ships to pass 2607 'N in their advance to the south. At this latitude, lying just south of the Canary Islands, on the African coast, a low sandy promontory called Bojador juts out into the ocean. A strong ocean current runs along it, directed to the south. At the foot of the cape, it forms whirlpools, marked by foaming wave crests. Whenever the ships approached this place, the teams demanded to stop sailing. Of course, there was boiling water here, as ancient Greek scientists wrote about!!! This is the place where people should turn black!!! Moreover, an Arab map of this coast immediately south of Bojador showed the hand of the devil rising from the water. However, on the portolan of 1351, nothing unusual was shown near Bojador, and he himself was only a small cape. In addition, in Sagrisha there was an account of the travels of the Phoenicians led by Hanno , in ancient times sailing far south of Bojador.

In 1433 the captain of Prince Henry Gil Eanish tried to go around Cape Bojador, but his crew rebelled and he was forced to return to Sagrish.

In 1434, Captain Gilles Eanish resorted to a maneuver suggested by Prince Henry. From the Canary Islands, he boldly turned into the open ocean so far that the land disappeared from his eyes. And south of the latitude of Bojador, he sent his ship to the east and, approaching the shore, made sure that the water did not boil there and no one turned into a negro. The Bojador barrier was taken. The following year, Portuguese ships penetrated far south from Cape Bojador.

Around 1441, Prince Henry's ships sailed so far south that they were already reaching the transitional zone between desert and humid climates, and even countries beyond it. South of Cap Blanc, on the territory of modern Mauritania, the Portuguese captured first a man and a woman, and then ten more people. They also found some gold. In Portugal, this caused a sensation, and hundreds of volunteers immediately appeared who wanted to sail south.

Between 1444 and 1448 almost forty Portuguese ships visited the African coast. As a result of these voyages, 900 Africans were captured for sale into slavery. Discoveries as such were forgotten in the pursuit of profits from the slave trade.

Prince Heinrich, however, managed to return the captains he had nurtured to the righteous path of research and discovery. But this happened after ten years. Now the prince knew that a much more valuable reward awaited him if he could sail around Africa and reach India.

The coast of Guinea was explored by the Portuguese in 1455-1456. The sailors of Prince Henry also visited the Cape Verde Islands. Prince Henry the Navigator died in 1460, but the business he started continued. More and more expeditions left the coast of Portugal to the south. In 1473, a Portuguese ship crossed the equator and failed to catch fire. A few years later, the Portuguese landed on the coast and erected their stone monuments (padrans) there - evidence of their claims to the African coast. Placed near the mouth of the Congo River, these monuments, according to eyewitnesses, were still preserved in the last century.

Among the glorious captains of Prince Henry was Bartolomeu Dias. Dias, sailing along the African coast south of the equator, got into a zone of headwind and current directed to the north. To avoid the storm, he turned sharply to the west, moving away from the coast of the continent, and only when the weather improved, he again swam to the east. However, having traveled, according to his calculations, in this direction more time than it was necessary to reach the coast, he turned north in the hope of finding land. So, he sailed to the shores of South Africa near Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth). On the way back, he passed Cape Agulhas and the Cape of Good Hope. This brave voyage took place in 1486-1487. (110)