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 THE AGE OF
RECONNAISSANCE

HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

For more than thirty years this distinguished series has provided the general
reader with a comprehensive picture of the world’s greatest civilizations.
The series is free from commitment to any single interpretation of history,
and seeks to go beyond the standard works of reference. It presents
individual and original evocations, by leading scholars in many countries,
of the culture and development of a nation, groups of nations or period of
history.

The following books in the series

are all available in Phoenix Press editions:

The Japanese Experience, W.G. Beasley

The English Experience, John Bowle
The Greek Experience, C.M. Bowra
The Chinese Experience, Raymond Dawson
The Celtic Realms, Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick
The Golden Age of Persia, Richard Frye
The World of Rome, Michael Grant
The Climax of Rome, Michael Grant
The Medieval World, Friedrich Heer
The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, Eric Hobsbawm
The Age of Capital 1848–1875, Eric Hobsbawm
The Age of Empire 1875–1914, Eric Hobsbawm
Ancient American Civilisations, Freidrich Katz
The Middle East, Bernard Lewis
 Byzantium, Cyril Mango
Eternal Egypt, Pierre Montet
The World of the Phoenicians, Sabatino Moscati
The Byzantine Commonwealth, Dimitri Obolensky
The African Experience Roland Oliver
The Age of Reconnaissance, J.H. Parry
Trade and Dominon, J.H. Parry
The Decline of Rome, Joseph Vogt
John H. Parry was educated at Clare College, Cambridge and at Harvard.
He became a Fellow of Clare College in 1938, after a period of travel and
research in Spain and Spanish America. He served in the Royal Navy
during the Second World War. Returning to Cambridge in 1945 he taught
there as a university lecturer and college tutor until he was appointed
Professor of Modern History at the University College of the West Indies.
He spent a year at Harvard in 1955 as visiting professor before being
appointed Principal of the University College at Ibadan in Nigeria. He
returned to Britain once more in 1960 to become the Principal of University
College, Swansea and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from
1963 to 1965. From 1965 until his death in 1982 he was Gardiner Professor
of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University.
 ALSO BY J.H. PARRY

Trade and Dominion (Phoenix Press)

The Audiencia of New Galacia
Europe and a Wider World
The Sale of Public Office in the Spanish Indies
A Short History of the West Indies
The Spanish Theory of Empire in the Sixteenth Century
The Establishment of the European Hegemony 1415–1715
The Spanish Seaborne Empire
The European Reconnaissance (documents)
The Discovery of the Sea
The Discovery of South America
New Iberan World – 5 volumes (documents)
 THE AGE OF
RECONNAISSANCE

J.H. Parry
 CONTENTS

Cover
Title
About the Author
Also By J.H. Parry
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION

PART I. THE CONDITIONS FOR DISCOVERY

I. ATTITUDES AND MOTIVES
II. COMMERCIAL EXPERIENCE AND FINANCIAL BACKING
III. SHIPS AND SHIPBUILDERS
IV. SEAMEN AND SEAMANSHIP
V. PILOTAGE AND NAVIGATION
VI. CHARTS AND MAPS
VII. THE FIGHTING CAPACITY OF MEN AND OF SHIPS

PART II. THE STORY OF DISCOVERY

VIII. AFRICA AND THE INDIAN OCEAN
IX. THE ATLANTIC AND THE SOUTH SEA
X. THE AMERICAN CONQUESTS
XI. ATLANTIC TRADE AND PIRACY
XII. NEW ROUTES TO THE EAST
XIII. FISHING, FUR-TRADING AND PLANTING

PART III. THE FRUITS OF DISCOVERY

XIV. THE LAND EMPIRE OF SPAIN
XV. THE SEA EMPIRES OF PORTUGAL AND HOLLAND
XVI. THE PLANTATIONS AND THEIR TRADES
XVII. MIGRATIONS AND DISPERSALS
XVIII. THE COLONIAL BUREAUCRATS
XIX. THE RIGHTS OF CONQUERORS AND CONQUERED
CONCLUSION
MAPS
NOTES
NOTES FOR FURTHER READING
INDEX

Plates
Copyright
 PREFACE

THE purpose of this book is to tell in outline the story of European

geographical exploration, trade and settlement outside the bounds of Europe
in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; to define the factors
which stimulated expansion and made it possible; and to describe briefly
the consequences which followed from it.
I am indebted to many friends and colleagues for advice, criticism and
help. In particular I wish to thank Mr R. A. Skelton and Dr Helen Wallis of
the British Museum; Mr G. P. B. Naish of the National Maritime Museum;
and Miss H. A. Rees.
Most of the maps, drawings and prints reproduced in the plates are in
the British Museum. Nos. 1 to 6 and 14 to 17 come from the National
Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The photographs of Indian Ocean
shipping reproduced in Nos. 7 to 11 were generously lent by Commander
Alan Villiers, R.N. My acknowledgement and thanks are due to the Trustees
of the British Museum, to the Trustees of the National Maritime Museum,
and to Commander Villiers, for permission to include these illustrations.

J. H. P.
University College of Swansea,
February, 1962
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Ship-building in the early sixteenth century. Engraving by Stradanus.

(Photo: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
2 Hull evolution, 1400–1600. Drawings by R. Morton Nance in The
Mariner’s Mirror, vol. XLI, 1955. (Photo: National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich)
3 The evolution of sail plan, 1430–1600. Drawings by R. Morton Nance in
The Mariner’s Mirror, vol. XLI, 1955. (Photo: National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich)
4 A carrack of about 1470. Drawing by the Flemish master ‘W.A.’ (Photo:
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
5 A model of a square-rigged caravel of the late fifteenth century. (Photo:
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
6 A model of a lateen-rigged caravel of the late fifteenth century. (Photo:
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
7 A baghla beached for cleaning at Kuwait. (Photo: Alan Villiers)
8 A Borah dhow in harbour. (Photo: Alan Villiers)
9 A large boum from the Persian Gulf. (Photo: Alan Villiers)
10 Sambuqs at sea. (Photo: Alan Villiers)
11 A boum at anchor in the Rufigi River. (Photo: Alan Villiers)
12 The Portuguese attack on Aden in 1513. An anonymous Flemish
woodcut dated 1514. B.M., Dept. of Prints and Drawings. 1950–3–6–1.
(Photo: British Museum)
13 A merchant ship of about 1530. Drawing by Holbein. (Photo: The
Science Museum, London)
14 Portuguese carracks, c. 1521. Contemporary oil painting attributed to
Cornelis Anthoniszoon. (Photo: National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich)
15 A high-charged carrack of the middle of the sixteenth century. From
Pieter Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus. (Photo: National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich)
16 The galleon Golden Lion (?). An engraving in the Armada series by C. J.
Visscher. (Photo: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
17 A Dutch fluyt off Rotterdam. A grisaille by A. van Salm. (Photo:
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
18 Drake’s fleet before Santo Domingo in 1585. By Battista Boazio from
W. Bigges, A summarie and true discourse of Sir Frances Drake’s West
Indian voyage (London, 1589). (Photo: British Museum)
19 The Portuguese India Fleet lying at St. Helena. From Jan Huyghen van
Linschoten, Itinerario, (English edition, London, 1589). (Photo: British
Museum)
20 The wreck of the São Thomé in 1589. Bernardo Gomes de Brito,
Historia Tragico-maritima, vol. II, (Lisbon, 1735–6). (Photo: British
Museum)
21 Vasco da Gama. Contemporary portrait by unknown painter. (Photo:
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
22 The Jerónimos monastery and the bar of the Tagus. Coloured aquatint by
H. L’Evèque, 1816. B.M., Dept. of Prints and Drawings. (Photo: British
Museum)
23 Captain John Smith. (Photo: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
24 Sebastian Cabot. Contemporary portrait. (Photo: National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich)
25 Ferdinand Magellan. A portrait. (Photo: National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich)
26 Sir Humphrey Gilbert. (Photo: John R. Freeman & Co.)
27 Part of the declination table in The Regiment of the Astrolabe, 1509.
(Photo: British Museum)
28 Part of the list of latitudes from The Regiment of the Astrolabe, 1509.
(Photo: British Museum)
29 The first page of Sacrobosco’s Treatise of the Sphere in The Regiment of
the Astrolabe, 1509. (Photo: British Museum)
30 A sea astrolabe, probably Spanish, c. 1588. (Photo: National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich)
31 An Italian quadrant, c. 1600. B.M., Dept. of British and Medieval
Antiquities, 93, 6–16, 6. (Photo: British Museum)
32 A nocturnal by Humphrey Cole of London, 1580. B.M., Dept. of British
and Medieval Antiquities, 57, 11–16, 2. (Photo: British Museum)
33 Sixteenth-century dividers made in Augsburg. Bronze, length 11 inches.
B.M., Dept. of British and Medieval Antiquities, 1903, 2–18, 1 (Photo:
British Museum)
34 A cross-staff made by Walter Arsenius at Louvain, c. 1571. B.M., Dept.
of British and Medieval Antiquities, 86,6–30,1. (Photo: British Museum)
35 Science and seamanship: an early sixteenth century cosmographer in his
study. Engraving by Stradanus, Antwerp. (Photo: National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich)
36 A medieval ‘wheel’ map of the world. From an illuminated psalter
written in England in the thirteenth century. B.M., Add. MS. 28,681, f.
g. (Photo: British Museum)
37 A Portolan chart of the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa. Attributed
to Petrus Vesconte, c. 1327. B.M., Add. MS. 27,376, ff. 180 v. –181.
(Photo: British Museum)
38 A Portolan chart of the Atlantic archipelagos. By Grazioso Benincasa,
1463. B.M., Add. MS. 18454, ff. 16–2. (Photo: British Museum)
39 A Portolan chart of the west coast of Africa. By Grazioso Benincasa,
1468. B.M., Add. MS. 6390, ff. 8 v. –9. (Photo: British Museum)
40 The world according to Ptolemy’s description. From Geographia by
Ptolemy (Ulm, 1482), (Photo: British Museum)
41 A world map by Henricus Martellus, c. 1489. B.M., Add. MS. 15,760, ff.
686. –69. (Photo: British Museum)
42 A map of the World by Giovanni Matteo Contarini, 1506. (Photo: British
Museum)
43 A map of Africa. From Montalboddo, Itinerarium Portugallesium e
Lusitania in India, (Milan, 1508). (Photo: British Museum)
44 Peter Martyr’s map of the West Indies. From Pietro Martyr d’Anghiera,
Opera, (Seville, 1511). (Photo: British Museum)
45 A chart of Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1522. Attributed to Pedro
Reinel. B.M., Add. MS. 9,812. (Photo: British Museum)
46 The track of Magellan’s Vitoria round the world. World map in an atlas
drawn by Battista Agnese, (Venice, 1536). B.M., Add. MS. 16,627, ff
126–13. (Photo: British Museum)
47 A manuscript chart of the Indian Ocean. Drawn by Diogo Homem, 1558.
B.M., Dept. of MSS. Add. 5,415. A map 15 verso and 16 recto. (Photo:
British Museum)
48 A map of the New World. Drawn by Diego Gutiérrez, (Antwerp, 1562).
(Photo: British Museum)
49 A chart of the Indian Ocean. Drawn by Joan Martines, 1578. B.M.,
Harley MS. 3,450, f. 6. (Photo: British Museum)
50 John White’s map of Raleigh’s Virginia. B.M., Dept. of Prints and
Drawings. L.B.1. (2). 1906–5–9–1 (8). (Photo: British Museum)
51 A map of the Spice Islands. Drawn by Plancius, (Amsterdam, 1592).
(Photo: British Museum)
52 A map of ‘Nova Francia’. Drawn by Plancius, (Amsterdam, 1592).
(Photo: British Museum)
53 William Barents’ chart of the Arctic regions, 1598. From J. H. van
Linschoten, Itinerarium, (The Hague, 1599). (Photo: British Museum)
54 A chart of Hudson’s discoveries. From Hessel Gerritsz, Descriptio ac
delineatio Geographica Detectionis Freti, (Amsterdam, 1612). (Photo:
British Museum)
55 The Empire of the ‘Great Mogoll’. Drawn by William Baffin, 1619.
B.M., K. Top. CXV. 22. (Photo: British Museum)
56 A chart of the coast of Guiana. From Robert Dudley, Dell’ Arcano del
Mare, (Florence, 1646–7). (Photo :British Museum)
57 A map of the known world at the end of the seventeenth century. From
Edward Wells, New sett of Maps, (Oxford., 1701). (Photo: British
Museum)
58 The title-page of The Mariners Mirror (London 1588). (Photo: British
Museum)
59 Cruelties attributed to the Spaniards in the New World. Engraving by de
Bry in the Latin edition of Las Casas, Brief Relation, (Frankfurt, 1598).
(Photo: British Museum)
60 An Aztec sacrifice. From de Bry, Grands Voyages. (Photo: British
Museum)
61 A cannibal feast in Brazil. From de Bry, Grands Voyages. (Photo: British
Museum)
62 ‘The Towne of Pomeiocke’. Drawn by John White. B.M., Dept. of Prints
and Drawings. L.B.7. 1906–5–9–1 (8). (Photo: British Museum)
63 The Wonders of South America. Engraving in de Bry, Grands Voyages.
(Photo: John R. Freeman & Co.)
64 European notions of the American Indian. Frontispiece from de Bry,
Grands Voyages. (Photo: British Museum)
65 Brazil in the sixteenth century. Engraving from de Bry, Grands Voyages.
(Photo: British Museum)
66 The arrival of the English in Virginia. Sketch by John White. (Photo:
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
67 A plan of Malacca in 1646. Drawn by Pedro Barreto de Resende, from
Livro do Estado da India oriental, 1646. B.M., Sloane MSS. 197. ff.
 381b–382. (Photo: British Museum)
68 A picture of Surat. Drawn by Pedro Barreto de Resende, 1646. B.M.,
Sloane MSS. 197. ff. 182. 1468. (Photo: British Museum)
69 William Barents’ picture of his winter quarters in Novaya Zemlya.
(Photo: British Museum)
70 Barents’ encounter with a polar bear. (Photo: John R. Freeman & Co.)
71 The sinking of Barents’ ship. (Photo: John R. Freeman & Co.)
72 A plan of Mexico City in 1524. (Photo: British Museum)
73 A prospect of Cuzco. From G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis
Terrarum, 1573. (Photo: British Museum)
74 A plan of Goa in the sixteenth century. Drawn by Pedro Barreto de
Resende from Livro do Estado da India oriental, 1646. B.M., Sloane
MSS. 197. f. 248. (Photo: British Museum)
75 Daily life in sixteenth century Goa. From Linschoten, Itinerario,
(Amsterdam. 1595–6) (Photo: British Museum)
76 Carrier’s arrival at Hochelaga. From Ramusio, Terzo volume delle
Navigationi et viaggi, 1569. (Photo: British Museum)
77 A prospect of Bahia in Brazil. Drawn by Frans Post, c. 1640. B.M.,
Dept. of Prints and Drawings. 197. a. 2. f. 16. (Photo: British Museum)
78 The Castle of São Jorge da Mina. From G. Greenhill, Collection of views
of West African forts, 1682. (Photo: British Museum)
79 A plan of New York in 1664. B.M., K. Top. CXXXI. 35. (Photo: British
Museum)
80 A French raid on a Spanish Caribbean harbour. From de Bry, Grands
Voyages. (Photo: British Museum)
 LIST OF MAPS

1 THE EAST INDIES

2 THE CARIBBEAN SEA

3 THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

4 THE INDIAN OCEAN

5 THE WIND CHART OF THE WORLD

 INTRODUCTION

BETWEEN the middle of the fifteenth century and the late seventeenth,
Europeans learned to think of the world as a whole and of all seas as one.
Their lessons were those of experience and eye-witness report. During those
two and a half centuries European explorers actually visited most of the
habitable regions of the globe; nearly all those, in fact, which were
accessible by sea. They found vast territories formerly unknown to them,
and drew the rough outlines of the world which we know. The period,
especially the earlier half of it, is commonly called the Age of Discovery,
and with reason. Geographical exploration, however, is only one of many
kinds of discovery. The age saw not only the most rapid extension of
geographical knowledge in the whole of European history; it saw also the
first major victories of empirical inquiry over authority, the beginnings of
that close association of pure science, technology, and everyday work which
is an essential characteristic of the modern western world. During this
period, especially the latter half of it, European scientists sketched the
outline of the physical universe which, broadly speaking, is that accepted by
the ordinary educated man today, and formulated the laws they deduced
from the movement and interaction of its parts. All forms of discovery, all
forms of original thought, are connected in some way, however distant: and
it is natural to see a connection between these particular forms. The seaman,
exploring uncharted seas, needed the help of learned men, especially men
learned in mathematics, astronomy, and physical science; also, though this
came later, in medical science. The student of science, seeing the
achievements of geographical exploration (most empirical of all forms of
inquiry, and most destructive of purely a priori reasoning) was naturally
stimulated to further exploration in his chosen field. Both kinds of
discovery further stimulated, and were stimulated by, the work of
philosophers, poets and pamphleteers.
Connection there undoubtedly was; but its precise nature was both
complex and elusive. The modern historian, accustomed to finding as the
result of seeking, to discovery as the product of research, is tempted both to
exaggerate and to anticipate. It is confidently expected today that every
decade will produce new and important additions to the mounting sum of
human knowledge. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries people—even
educated people—had no such confident expectation. The intellectual
temper of the sixteenth century, particularly, was conservative, respectful of
authority. Even with evidence before their eyes that seamen were in fact
finding lands formerly unknown and unsuspected, learned men were slow
to draw analogies in other fields of inquiry. The idea that there was an
America of learning and understanding beyond the horizon of the classics,
ancient philosophy and the teachings of religion, was still in those years
new and strange—the vision of comparatively few men. Students of science
were concerned less with research than with attempts to provide neat and
consistent explanations of known phenomena. It is significant that
Copernicus—perhaps the most original figure in sixteenth-century science
—reached his momentous conclusions by a mixture of reasoning and
intuition, and made little or no attempt to check his hypotheses by actual
observation. The first major European astronomical research to be based
upon careful detailed observation over a long span of years was undertaken
in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth by that perverse and
unmanageable enthusiast, Tycho Brahe, and by Kepler, the mathematical
genius into whose hands Tycho’s mass of raw data providentially fell. Until
towards the end of our period, certainly until the time of Tycho and Kepler,
scientific inquiry in general tended to remain hypothetical and tentative,
more given to broad speculation than to precise observation and
experiment. Scientists had still, moreover, to be a little wary of charges of
heresy; a danger which they commonly avoided by framing as hypotheses
conclusions which in some instances they really regarded as proven fact.
Galileo’s difficulties with the ecclesiastical authorities arose chiefly from
his neglect of this elementary precaution. In these circumstances, it was
only by very slow degrees that science and technology, intuition and
experience, experiment and everyday skill, could be brought together freely
to illuminate one another.
 It is commonly assumed today, at least among educated people, not only
that knowledge can be indefinitely extended, but that all extensions are
potentially useful—that all new knowledge will somehow or other, sooner
or later, be turned to practical account. Conversely, it is fairly generally
accepted that a technological approach need not inhibit pure inquiry; on the
contrary, it can prove fruitful in giving rise to problems of a purely
theoretical kind. It can help the inquirer, whether in the natural or the social
sciences, in the fundamental task of selecting problems; and it imposes a
discipline upon his speculative inclinations, by forcing him to submit his
theories to definite standards of clarity and testability. These ideas and
assumptions were also foreign to the intellectual temper of the period we
are discussing. Science was then very far from being harnessed to
technology, as it is sometimes said to be today; or as some say it should be.
Possibly it gained in originality and intuitive strength by this very fact; but
its immediate usefulness was limited, and less was expected of it by
practical men. Scientific discoveries of obvious practical value were
incidental, often fortuitous. The system of mutual check and stimulation
between pure science and technology—the regular submission of theories to
standards of clarity and testability—operated only in very limited fields.
Geographical exploration, with its associated skills of navigation and
cartography, was not merely the principal field of human endeavour in
which scientific discovery and everyday technique became closely
associated before the middle of the seventeenth century; except for the arts
of war and of military engineering and (to a very limited extent) medical
practice, it was almost the only field; hence its immense significance in the
history of science and of thought. Even in this field, association was slow
and hard to establish. The sailors and explorers received only meagre
crumbs from the table of the philosophers and scientists. The elementary
processes of arithmetic were naturally among the first to be seized and
accepted. Arithmetic, which freed men from dependence upon the abacus,
was made practicable by Hindu numerals, first introduced into Europe by
Leonardo of Pisa’s book of arithmetic at the beginning of the thirteenth
century. Leonardo was exceptional, a well-travelled man, of merchant
stock, who kept the needs of practical men in mind. His book took the
reader as far as the Rule of Three. He wrote helpfully also on geometry and
its application to measurement. Later came the trigonometry of the plane
right-angled triangle, a simple and essential tool of dead-reckoning
navigation, but slow to find application in regular use. The influence of
astronomy came much later still. At first and for long, only the simplest
celestial phenomena—the apparent immobility of the pole star and the
movement of the sun relative to the earth—were seen to have any practical
significance for the ocean traveller; and not until the fifteenth century was a
technique evolved for making use even of these. Long after that, great
discoveries continued to be confined to the learned world. The influence of
Copernicus upon the development of astronomy was tremendous. His
influence on the development of navigation was negligible. Galileo made
great indirect contributions to navigation, but not—at least in our period—
by his astronomical reasoning and observation. It was his work in the field
of optics which, by facilitating the making of instruments, eventually made
the task of the navigator easier and more precise. That the invention of the
telescope, by making possible an estimation of the relative distances of
heavenly bodies, also revolutionized the study of astronomy, was, from the
point of view of contemporary seamen, irrelevant. Similarly, navigators
were scarcely, and only indirectly, affected by Kepler’s resounding
declaration, in the introduction to the New Astronomy, that the earth ‘is
round, circumhabited by antipodes, of a most insignificant smallness, and a
swift wanderer among the stars.’
If the discoveries and the hypotheses of the scientists were only
occasionally and fortuitously helpful to seamen, most seamen—even
sometimes sea-going explorers and compilers of navigation manuals—
tended for their part to be sceptical and unreceptive of scientific ideas.
Seamen were then, much more than now, a race apart, practical,
conservative, employing traditional skills, relying on accumulated
experience. To say this is not to belittle the skill or the experience.
Hydrography and pilotage developed steadily in the later Middle Ages.
Practical use had given the sailor, well before the fifteenth century, charts
and sailing directions of good working accuracy for the known trade routes
of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the coasts of western Europe, and
instruments—straight-edge and dividers, compass and lead-line—accurate
enough to lay off and follow courses on those charts. The charts, the rutters
and the instruments, however, were adequate only for the limited area and
the relatively short passages of the regular trade routes. Information about
the world outside that area, guidance on how to navigate on long ocean
passages, could come only from books; and sailors, traditionally suspicious
of book-learning, absorbed it very slowly. Even arithmetic, the elementary
arithmetic of Leonardo of Pisa, to take a simple instance, made very slow
headway. For short, familiar passages it was unnecessary. Well into the
sixteenth century, accounts of ships’ stores, records of mileages run, were
still often kept in Roman figures. Most sailors, moreover, had naturally little
wish to leave the familiar trade routes where their living lay, unless they
could see a clear advantage in doing so. Even the great discoverers of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not primarily interested in discovery
for its own sake. Their main interest, the main task entrusted to them by the
rulers and investors who sent them out, was to link Europe, or particular
European countries, with other areas known or believed to be of economic
importance. The discovery of distant, unknown islands and continents, like
much scientific discovery, was incidental, often fortuitous. Sometimes it
was positively unwelcome. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an
immense body of geographical knowledge was accumulated by this
somewhat haphazard process; but this knowledge, despite (or because of)
its vast extent, was still rough and sketchy. For the most part it revealed
only coastlines, roughly explored, and harbours. It lacked precision and
unity; it left many gaps and perpetuated some long-lived myths. In the story
of discovery in the broadest sense, then, our period was a time of tentative,
though splendid, beginnings. ‘The Age of Reconnaissance’ seems the most
appropriate name by which to describe it.
Even in so far as they were willing to turn to books for help, the early
pioneers of the Reconnaissance had little to guide them. Books about the
world outside Europe, available to Europeans in the early fifteenth century,
may be divided roughly into two classes: academic treatises and travellers’
tales. The travellers’ tales included both the accounts of genuine travellers
and the romances of imaginary ones. Both dealt chiefly with Asia and—
very sketchily—with Africa. The early Norse voyages to Greenland and
North America had left, even in Scandinavia, only a hazy memory
preserved in epic verse. Elsewhere they were unknown, and were without
influence in the development of the Reconnaissance. African travel was a
little better recorded. The accounts of the great Arab travellers—Masudi,
Ibn Haukal, El-Bekri, Ibn Battuta—were unknown to Europeans in their
original form, but traces of their influence appeared in Europe from time to
time. Edrisi, writing in Norman Sicily in the twelfth century, transmitted
scraps of Arab knowledge to western Europe. Much of this information was
not only inaccurate, but from the point of view of the maritime explorer,
positively discouraging. Masudi, for example, described accurately enough
the places he had visited, but beyond them relied upon hearsay and guess.
He believed the ‘green sea of darkness’ (the Atlantic) to be unnavigable,
and the frigid and torrid zones of the earth to be uninhabitable; and in these
opinions he was followed by many later writers, both Muslim and Christian.
A more practical channel of information was the school of Jewish
cartographers and instrument-makers working in Majorca in the later
fourteenth century. Iberian Jews were well placed as intermediaries between
Christendom and Islam, and the Majorcan Jews had particular advantages
because of their connection, through Aragon, with Sicily, and because of
their commercial contacts in the Maghreb. They were familiar with both the
Arab and (such as they were) the European travellers’ tales from Africa.
The famous Catalan Atlas,1 drawn in Majorca by Abraham Cresques about
1375, was perhaps the best and most accurate, certainly the most beautifully
executed medieval chart collection in the practical maritime tradition. It
represents the first, and for long the only, attempt to apply medieval
hydrographical techniques to the world outside Europe. It contains in
addition, however, a considerable amount of inland information. It includes
an elaborate drawing of Mansa Musa, the greatest of the fourteenth-century
Mandingo kings;2 it places Timbuktu in approximately its true position, and
shows near it a lake from which one river, clearly the Senegal, flows
westward to the sea, and another, presumably intended to represent the
Niger, eastward to join the Nile. The implications of this supposedly
continuous waterway were to be noted by Portuguese promoters of
exploration in the following centuries.
For Asia, Europeans were less dependent upon Arab sources; the
travellers’ tales available to them were more numerous and more detailed.
They were, however, even more out of date. Most of them were written in
the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, during the longest respite
which Christendom enjoyed, between the seventh century and the
seventeenth, from Muslim pressure on its eastern and southern borders. This
respite was due not to the efforts of crusading armies, nor to the
intervention of any Prester John beloved of medieval legend, but to the
conquests of Chingis Khan. Swift and devastating campaigns, by Mongol
cavalry operating over immense areas, had led to the establishment of an
empire embracing China and most of central Asia. The Tatar Khans,
Chingis’ successors, were tolerant in religion, desirous of trade, curious
about the world outside their great dominions. Their authority was effective
enough to make travel safe for those whom they protected. For a little over
a hundred years it was possible for Europeans to travel to the Far East, and
a few did so. In 1245 John of Piano Carpini, a Franciscan friar, was sent by
the Pope on a mission to the great Khan at his camp-capital at Karakorum.
Another friar, William of Rubruck, undertook a similar mission in 1253.3
The Venetian merchants Nicolo and Maffeo Polo set out in 1256 on a
journey which took them eventually to Peking, where the Tatar Khans had
recently established their permanent capital; and in 1271–3 they returned
there with Nicolo’s son Marco, on a visit which lasted until 1292. In the
early fourteenth century more ecclesiastics—John of Monte Corvino,
Odoric of Pordenone, Andrew of Perugia, Jordan of Severac, John of
Marignolli, to mention only the best known4—visited China, some by way
of the Indian coast, and wrote accounts of their travels. The existence of a
mid-fourteenth-century merchants’ handbook,5 containing a detailed section
on mid- and far-eastern trade routes, suggests that a considerable number of
itinerant merchants, who left no surviving records, made similar journeys.
All this coming and going of European travellers was sharply interrupted in
the middle of the fourteenth century. The Black Death, which swept both
Asia and Europe, brought most long-distance travel temporarily to a
standstill. The incursion from the Steppe of yet another pillaging mounted
horde—the Ottoman Turks, quickly converted to Islam and engaged in holy
war against Christendom—interposed a further barrier between east and
west. Finally the Tatar Empire broke up; in 1368, the descendants of Kublai
Khan were driven from their Peking throne by a native Chinese dynasty, the
Mings, who brought back the traditional official dislike and contempt for
western barbarians. The Tatar Khans, for their part, embraced Islam, and
made no attempt to re-establish the broken contact. Fifteenth-century
Europe, therefore, was almost entirely dependent upon thirteenth-century
writers for eye-witness knowledge of the Far East.
Of all the accounts of Asia written by medieval European travellers, the
Travels of Marco Polo6 is the best, the most complete and the most
informative. His long residence at Peking; the privileged position which he
achieved as a trusted official in the service of Kublai Khan; the missions
with which he was charged in many widely separated parts of the Khan’s
dominions; all combined to give him unique opportunities for collecting
information. He was an assiduous, though not very penetrating observer; he
had a good memory, and a talent for describing what he had seen in plain,
sober detail. In writing of what he had heard about but not seen, he
preserved, on the whole, a judicious scepticism. His accounts are factual,
unsophisticated and—so far as can be judged—accurate. They are relatively
free from the tales of the grotesque and the marvellous, in which medieval
readers delighted and which formed the staple of much of the travel
literature of the time. The Travels was widely read and copied. It was
undoubtedly the source of the information on Asia set out in the Catalan
Atlas, which was one of the very few maps of the practical portolano type
to include such information. Its superiority over other contemporary
writings on similar subjects was not, however, universally or immediately
recognized. The Travels of Odoric of Pordenone7 enjoyed an equal
popularity in the fourteenth century. Odoric gives a better description of
Chinese customs than Marco, and his work is more freely enlivened with
marvels and curiosities. Significantly, the popularity of both was exceeded
by that of a famous collection of spurious travellers’ tales—the Travels of
‘Sir John Mandeville’.8 Nothing illustrates European geographical
ignorance better than the long inability of the reading public to discriminate
between Polo’s eye-witness accounts and Mandeville’s lying wonders,
whether as entertainment or as serious information. Polo’s description of the
‘black stones’ which the Chinese burned as fuel was received with no more,
and no less, credulity than Mandeville’s dog-headed men. Mandeville had
his importance in the Reconnaissance; for probably no book did more to
arouse interest in travel and discovery, and to popularize the idea of a
possible circumnavigation of the globe. Gradually, however, as the search
for India by sea got seriously under way, the unique value of Marco Polo’s
Travels as a reliable source of information came to be generally recognized
among the more penetrating amateurs of geography. It influenced most of
the pioneers of the Reconnaissance. Prince Henry of Portugal knew it in
manuscript. It was printed at Gouda in 1483, and frequently thereafter.
Columbus had a printed copy. Polo’s description of the immense east-west
extent of Asia, and his reference to Japan, lying far to the east of the China
coast, may have helped to form Columbus’ geographical convictions; at
least it lent them strong support. It was still, in Columbus’ time, the best
account of the Far East available to Europeans; but since it described a
political situation which had long passed away, it was bound to mislead as
well as to encourage.
Marco Polo, and the travellers generally, had very little influence upon
the academic geographers and cosmographers of the later Middle Ages; so
wide was the gap between theory and knowledge. The academic treatises
available to Europeans fall, like the travellers’ tales, into two broad groups:
those in the strait scholastic tradition, drawing their information chiefly
from scriptural and patristic sources and from the handful of ancient writers
long accepted as respectable, and those which made use of the more
recently recovered works of ancient science, coming to Europe chiefly
through Arabic translations. Of the first group little need be said, just as the
Travels of Marco Polo and similar travel books had their cartographical
counterparts in the Catalan Atlas and other maps in the portolano tradition,
so the scholastic geographies had their counterpart in the great mappae-
mundi, such as the Hereford and Ebstorf maps,9 with their central Jerusalem
and their symmetrically disposed continents—all-embracing in scope,
splendid in execution, and for practical purposes useless. Symmetry and
orthodoxy rather than scientific verisimilitude were in general the guiding
principles of these works. The most important, indeed almost the only,
departure from this tradition before the fifteenth century, was the
geographical section of Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus of 1264. Bacon had, for
his day, an unusually wide acquaintance with Arab writers. He believed, on
literary evidence, that Asia and Africa extended southwards across the
equator, and (contrary to Masudi and his followers) that the torrid zone was
habitable. Both in his specific geographical opinions, and in his objective
approach to scientific problems in general, Bacon was almost unique among
the schoolmen. Not quite unique, however; for he exerted a powerful
influence on the last great scholastic geographer, whose work not only
summarized the best medieval thought, but also provided a significant link
with later developments. The Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, the
leading geographical theorist of his time, was written about 1410.10 It is a
vast mine of scriptural and Aristotelian erudition, bearing little relation to
travellers’ experience—its author knew nothing, for instance, of Marco
Polo. D’Ailly was a prolific writer on many topics, whose works enjoyed an
immense prestige among scholars. The Imago Mundi had a widespread
influence throughout the fifteenth century. It was printed at Louvain about
1483. Columbus’ copy, with his marginal annotations, survives in the
Colombina at Seville. Like all theorists of whom Columbus approved,
d’Ailly exaggerated the east-west extent of Asia and the proportion of land
to sea in the area of the globe. His section on this subject was copied almost
word for word from Bacon’s Opus Majus. Apart from his influence on
Columbus, d’Ailly’s main interest lies in his acquaintance, much wider than
that of his predecessors, even than Bacon, with Arab authors and with little-
known classical writers. He made relatively little use of them; he knew
Ptolemy’s Almagest well, for example, but where they conflicted he
considered Aristotle and Pliny to be of greater authority. Nevertheless, for
all his scholastic conservatism, d’Ailly was the herald of a new and exciting
series of classical recoveries, and of geographical works based on their
inspiration.
Throughout the period of the Reconnaissance, the normal educated man
believed not only that the Ancients had been more civilized, more elegant in
behaviour and expression, more sagacious in the conduct of affairs than his
contemporaries; save in the field of revealed religion (a large exception,
admittedly) he believed them to have been better informed. At the
beginning of our period, in the middle of the fifteenth century, this belief
was general, and, in general, reasonable; and nowhere more so than in
geographical study. The Ancients had indeed a better knowledge of
geography and cosmography than fifteenth-century Europeans. It is true that
some ancient writers—Pliny and Macrobius, for examples—widely read in
the Middle Ages, had retailed information little more reliable than that of
Sir John Mandeville; but in the early fifteenth century readers had the same
difficulty in discriminating between Pliny and—say—Strabo, as between
Mandeville and Marco Polo. To scholars, the way to clearer understanding
seemed, naturally enough, to lie in more extensive study, in more careful
interpretation, of all the relevant ancient writings which scholarship could
discover; and in fact, in the field of geography, fifteenth-century study of
neglected or hitherto unknown classical writers yielded rich rewards. It
revealed to Europe Strabo’s compendious gazetteer of the world of his time,
and—more important and influential still—the Geography of Claudius
Ptolemaeus.
Ptolemy was a Hellenized Egyptian who wrote about the middle of the
second century AD. It was natural, at the time of the greatest extension of
the Roman Empire, that there should be a demand for a complete
description of the empire itself and of the oikoumene of which it appeared
to form the major part. Ptolemy set out to summarize, in his writings, the
entire geographical and cosmographical knowledge of his day. He was not
himself a discoverer or a particularly original thinker, but rather an
assiduous compiler. He inherited and made use of the works of a long series
of Greek geographers, mathematicians and astronomers, many of whom had
lived and worked in his own city of Alexandria. His fame rests on two
works: the Geography, and an Astronomy, usually known by its Arabic
name, Almagest, ‘the Greatest’. Both books were well known and highly
respected in the Middle Ages among Arab scholars, who were the most
direct inheritors of classical Greek learning; but among them the Almagest
attracted far the greater attention. It was a book for the learned practitioner,
serving the esoteric purposes of astrology rather than the satisfaction of
general scientific curiosity—still less the task of finding one’s way at sea. It
enlarged upon the austerely beautiful Aristotelian picture of transparent
concentric spheres, revolving round the earth and carrying the sun and the
stars with them; and added an immensely elaborate and ingenious system of
circles and ‘epicycles’ to account for the eccentric movements of the
planets and other heavenly bodies relative to the earth. The Almagest was
translated into Latin in the twelfth century by Gerard of Cremona, an avid
student of Arabic learning, working at Toledo. In the course of the
thirteenth century it came to be known and accepted in the learned world of
the schoolmen; though less understood, and much less revered, than
Aristotle’s own works, most of which had reached western Europe about the
same time and by similar routes. The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system with its
celestial spheres and its epicycles remained—albeit with many variants—
the standard academic picture of the universe until Copernicus, distrusting
its over-strained complexity, began its demolition in the sixteenth century.
The indirect influence of the Almagest was not, however, confined to
the erudite. An abstract of Gerard of Cremona’s translation was made about
the middle of the thirteenth century by John Holywood or Sacrobosco, an
English scholar then lecturing in Paris (who, incidentally, also composed
one of the earliest European arithmetic primers, only a little later than the
famous Arithmetic of Leonardo of Pisa). Sacrobosco’s little book, De
Sphaera Mundi, became and for nearly three centuries remained the best-
known elementary textbook. It was not, of course, a textbook of navigation;
though later it was often bound up with navigation manuals. Its importance
lay in its wide diffusion. It survives in more than thirty incunabula editions,
besides many manuscripts. Most university students in the later Middle
Ages must have read it. Sacrobosco did more than any other writer to
discredit flat-earth fundamentalists such as Cosmas Indicopleustes, who had
exerted a formidable, though never quite unchallenged, influence upon
cosmographical thought for seven centuries. Thanks to Sacrobosco, it was
at least common knowledge among educated people in the fifteenth century
that the world was round.
Ptolemy’s Geography made its impact upon Europe much later and in a
very different manner. It is curious that so famous a book remained so long
unknown. Edrisi, the gifted Ceuta Moor who worked for many years at the
Court of Roger II of Sicily, drew largely upon Ptolemy in compiling his
own Geography, the celebrated Book of Roger; but Edrisi’s influence was
less than the merits of his work deserved, and no European scholar tried to
investigate the sources he had used.11 Ptolemy’s Geography was first
translated into Latin not from an Arabic manuscript, but from a Greek one
brought from Constantinople. The translation was made by Jacobus
Angelus, a pupil of the celebrated Crysoloras, and was completed about
1406 or a little after. Its appearance was one of the most important events in
the growth of European geographical knowledge.
The main part of Ptolemy’s text is an exhaustive gazetteer of places,
arranged by regions, with a latitude and longitude assigned to each place.
Ptolemy divided his sphere into the familiar 360 degrees of latitude and of
longitude, and from his estimate of the circumference of the earth he
deduced the length of a degree of the equator or of a meridian. He gives a
method of adjusting the length of a degree of longitude for any given
latitude, and explains how to construct a ‘grid’ of parallels and meridians
for maps drawn on a conical projection. The idea of using co-ordinates of
latitude and longitude for defining the position of points on the earth’s
surface was not entirely new to medieval Europe. Astrologers’ Ephemerides
were constructed with reference to positions in the Zodiac, and estimated
differences of longitude were necessarily used for the ‘rectification’ of these
tables for places other than those for which they were compiled. Roger
Bacon had even attempted an actual map based on co-ordinates. The map,
which he sent to Pope Clement IV, is lost; and Bacon, before his time in this
as in other ways, exerted no influence upon cartography and inspired no
imitators. Ptolemy’s use of co-ordinates as a base and a frame of reference
in the construction of maps reappeared in the fifteenth century as a new and
revolutionary invention. The second part of the Geography is a collection of
maps, a world map and regional maps. Whether Ptolemy himself drew
maps to accompany his text is doubtful. He implied that any intelligent
reader, using the information contained in the text, could prepare his own
maps; and the maps which reached fifteenth-century Europe—whoever
drew them, and whenever they were made—were based on his co-ordinates
and drawn on his projection. They show, in addition to a detailed and
reasonably accurate (though elongated) Mediterranean, the continents of
Europe, Asia and Africa. Africa is broad and truncated, India even more
truncated, Ceylon greatly exaggerated in size. To the east of India is drawn
another and larger peninsula, the Golden Chersonese; to the east of that
again, a great arm of the sea, the Great Gulf; and finally, near the
easternmost extremity of the map, the country of the Sinae. The interior of
Asia contains towns and river systems which cannot easily be related to any
actual places. The interior of Africa is drawn with some attempt at detail,
showing not only the ‘Mountains of the Moon’, but also the lacustrine
source of the Nile and other rivers; but South Africa is joined to the country
of the Sinae, making the Indian Ocean a landlocked sea; and all around, to
the east and south, is solid land, Terra Incognita.
Ptolemy was a compiler, not an originator. His ideas on the
measurement of the earth, for example, came from Marinus of Tyre, who
had them from Posidonius; the concepts of a sphere divided into degrees of
angular distance, and of co-ordinates of latitude and longitude, were derived
from Hipparchus; the immense catalogue of names and places was
compiled from various Periploi—sailing directions—for the Mediterranean,
from Marinus, perhaps from Strabo; though Ptolemy gives little of Strabo’s
descriptive detail. Compilation involves selection, and the authorities used
by Ptolemy did not always represent the best classical thought on the
subject. In adopting Marinus’ measurement of the earth, for example, he
perpetuated and popularized an underestimate of the size of the earth, and
consequently of the length of a degree: 500 Stadia or 62 Roman miles.
This figure was too small by about one quarter. Eratosthenes, centuries
earlier, had by a very clever and very lucky calculation reached a much
more accurate figure. Ptolemy assumed, moreover—and in this he differed
from Marinus—that the ‘known’ world of his day covered exactly 180
degrees of longitude; he numbered these off from the furthest reported land
to the West—the Canaries or Fortunate Isles—and stretched the continent of
Asia eastward accordingly. These errors, together with those of the enclosed
Indian Ocean, the twin peninsulas and gulf of south-eastern Asia, and the
interior waterways of Africa, were to have momentous consequences.
Ptolemy had, of course, no compass and no practicable means of
observing longitude. The number of reliably observed latitudes actually
known to him was, as he admitted, small. He could ascertain the positions
of little-known places only by plotting their reported distance, along
vaguely indicated lines of direction, from places better known; and
calculating differences of latitude and longitude by means of plane right-
angled—not spherical—triangles. Consequently, the positions which he
gives for many places outside the well-known area of the Mediterranean are
wildly inaccurate. Further, a text such as Ptolemy’s, with its long lists of
names and figures, is peculiarly vulnerable to corruption in copying. It may
be supposed that, over the centuries, many copyists’ errors came to be
added to Ptolemy’s own.
The scholars of early fifteenth-century Europe, however, had no reliable
criteria for criticizing Ptolemy, just as they had none for criticizing Marco
Polo. His compendiousness suited their requirements and their own literary
habits, and much of what he wrote was to them new, exciting and
incontrovertible. The maps based on his information, despite their many
errors, were vastly superior to the medieval mappae-mundi and covered
areas not usually touched by the makers of portolani. His use of co-
ordinates was a major advance which—though still unintelligible to seamen
—could not be ignored by scholars. We have seen that Cardinal Pierre
d’Ailly wrote his first major work, the Imago Mundi, about 1410, before he
had seen the Latin Ptolemy. In 1413, after the recovery of the Geography,
d’Ailly wrote a second work, the Compendium Cosmographiae, in which
he summarized—albeit in a distorted form—the opinions of Ptolemy. In one
respect this was, curiously, a retrograde step, for in the Imago Mundi
d’Ailly had described an insular Africa and an open Indian Ocean; in the
Compendium he deferred to Ptolemy. More august recognition followed.
The Historia rerum ubique gestarum of Pope Pius II—that erudite and
cultivated humanist—is largely a digest of Ptolemy, though not an uncritical
one, for the Pope maintained the circumnavigability of Africa. Columbus
had a printed copy of this book, and drew from it such knowledge of
Ptolemy’s Geography as he possessed. From its first appearance, then, the
Latin Geography was received among scholars with great, though not
entirely uncritical deference. Hundreds of manuscript copies were made.
The first of the many printed editions which were to give Ptolemy’s ideas
wider and wider currency, appeared in Vicenza in 1475; the earliest to
include maps in Bologna in 1477 and—a much better edition—in Rome in
1478.12
Growing dissatisfaction with Ptolemy’s archaic maps did little, at first,
to diminish the popularity of his text, for improved maps, incorporating the
results of sailing experience, were bound up with it from 1482 onwards.
The splendid Strasburg edition of 1513 contains forty-seven maps, eleven
of them new—the first modern atlas, and the best for many years; until
1570, in fact, when Ortelius set new standards with his great Theatrum
Orbis Terrarum. Editions of Ptolemy, some of great beauty and distinction,
continued to appear in Rome, in Venice and in Basel. They were only
displaced from serious use (and not then, of course, from historical interest)
by the rise of the Dutch school of geography and cartography at the end of
the sixteenth century. For nearly two hundred years, therefore, Ptolemy was
the leading academic source of geographical knowledge. His ideas, in
geography as in astronomy, were both stimulating and enslaving, and the
advancement of knowledge in both fields required that his theories should
first be mastered and then superseded. It was a principal task of the
Reconnaissance to challenge belief in the necessary superiority of ancient
wisdom. Not only in the specific field of geography, but in almost every
branch of science, at some time during our period there came a moment
when western Europe, so to speak, at last caught up with the ancient world,
and a few bold men, understanding and revering what the ancients had
taught, were, nevertheless, ready to dispute their conclusions. So in the
process of Reconnaissance, explorers by sea, pushing rashly out into a
world unknown, but for Ptolemy, and finding it bigger and more varied than
they expected, began first to doubt Ptolemy, then to prove him wrong in
many particulars, and finally to draw on maps and globes a new and more
convincing picture. Similarly, but independently, Copernicus and his
successors, studying their Ptolemy and watching the heavens, noticed
certain celestial phenomena which Ptolemy’s theories failed adequately to
explain. They began, timidly and tentatively, first, to question, then to
dismantle the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentric scheme of the universe, and
to postulate a heliocentric system in its place. In both studies, the whole
progress from deferential acceptance to doubt, from doubt to discard and
replacement, took many years. Eventually, in all branches of science,
Reconnaissance became Revolution.
But how did Reconnaissance begin? Information about the world
outside Europe, available to Europeans in the first half of the fifteenth
century, was all, as we have seen, misleading to a greater or less degree. It
was either purely theoretical and academic, ignoring practical experience;
or out-of-date; or merely fanciful, compounded of myth and guess-work.
Technical knowledge of means of communication with African or Asian
coasts outside the Mediterranean by sea—the only practicable way, in view
of Turkish power, save on the Turks’ own terms—was even more
inadequate. The political situation, on the face of it, could hardly have been
less propitious. The most recently acquired information, from newly
discovered ancient sources, was interesting and valuable, but on the whole
very discouraging—Ptolemy’s landlocked Indian Ocean, for example. What
other factors operated, to make this unpropitious half-century the beginning
of a movement of world-wide exploration?
The initial steps in expansion were modest indeed: the rash seizure by a
Portuguese force of a fortress in Morocco; the tentative extension of fishing
and, a little later, trading, along the Atlantic coast of North Africa; the
prosaic settlement by vine and sugar cultivators, by log-cutters and sheep-
farmers, of certain islands in the eastern Atlantic. There was little, in these
early- and mid-fifteenth-century ventures, to suggest world-wide expansion.
In the later fifteenth century, however, new advances in the arts of
navigation and cartography, made by a new combination of academic
knowledge and nautical experience, enabled the explorers for the first time
to observe and record the position—or at least the latitude—of a point on an
unknown coast; and even, in favourable circumstances, of a ship at sea.
New methods in the design of ships, consequent upon a marriage of
European with oriental traditions, made it possible for sailors not only to
make long voyages of discovery, but to repeat them, and so to establish
regular communication with newly discovered lands. New developments in
gunnery and the making of guns, particularly in ship-borne artillery, gave
European explorers a great advantage over the inhabitants of even the most
civilized countries to which they sailed; enabled them to defend themselves,
upon arrival, sometimes against overwhelming numbers; and encouraged
them to establish trading posts even in places where they were clearly
unwelcome. This vital technical superiority in ships and guns ensured the
continuous development of the Reconnaissance and the permanence of its
results. By the end of our period European explorers had not only sketched
the rough outlines of most of the continents of the world; they had
established, in every continent except Australasia and Antarctica, European
outposts—trading factories, settlements, or lordships, according to the
nature of the area—small, scattered, diverse, but permanent. In so doing,
they not only derived help from physical scientists and stimulated the
further development of physical science—though tentatively and indirectly
at first, as we have seen; they also called attention to new and far-reaching
problems in the social sciences, in economics, in anthropology, and in the
arts of government. In these fields also there was a tentative but widespread
Reconnaissance, a wide but uneven series of additions to knowledge, with
momentous consequences for Europe and the world as a whole. In all
branches of science, as the Reconnaissance proceeded and became less
tentative, as the European picture of the world became fuller and more
detailed, so the idea of continually expanding knowledge became more
familiar and the links between science and practical life became closer. A
technological attitude to knowledge, an extreme readiness to apply science
in immediately practical ways, eventually became one of the principal
characteristics which distinguish western civilization, the civilization
originally of Europe, from other great civilized societies. The
unprecedented power which it produced eventually led Europe from
Reconnaissance to world-wide conquest, and so created the world of
yesterday, much of which was governed by Europeans, and the world of
today, almost all of which has accepted European technology and European
techniques of government, even if only to escape from actual European
rule.
 Part I
THE CONDITIONS FOR DISCOVERY
 CHAPTER 1
ATTITUDES AND MOTIVES

AMONG the many and complex motives which impelled Europeans, and
especially the peoples of the Iberian peninsula, to venture oversea in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, two were obvious, universal, and admitted:
acquisitiveness and religious zeal. Many of the great explorers and
conquerors proclaimed these two purposes in unequivocal terms. Vasco da
Gama, on arrival at Calicut, explained to his reluctant Indian hosts that he
had come in search of Christians and spices. Bernal Díaz, frankest of
conquistadores, wrote that he and his like went to the Indies ‘to serve God
and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow
rich, as all men desire to do.’1
Land, and the labour of those who worked it, were the principal sources
of wealth. The quickest, most obvious, and socially most attractive way of
becoming rich was to seize, and to hold as a fief, land already occupied by a
diligent and docile peasantry. Spanish knights and noblemen in particular
had long been accustomed to this process, for which successful war against
the Muslim states in Spain had offered occasion and excuse. In most parts
of Europe, during the constant disorders of the fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries, such acquisitions of land had also often been made by means of
private war. In the later fifteenth century, however, rulers were again
becoming strong enough to discourage private war; and even in Spain, the
territory still open to acquisition by lawful force of arms was narrowly
limited, and protected by its feudal relations with the Crown of Castile.
Further opportunities were unlikely to arise unless the rulers of Granada
denounced their vassalage, and so gave the Castilians occasion for a formal
campaign of conquest. Even if that campaign were successful, kings and
great noblemen would get the lion’s share of the booty. For lesser men, the
best chances of acquiring land by fighting for it lay outside Europe.
 A second possibility was the seizure and exploitation of new land—land
either unoccupied, or occupied by useless or intractable peoples who could
be killed or driven away. New land could be colonized by adventurous
farmers or by small owners of flocks and herds. Such men often wished to
be their own masters, to avoid the increasingly irksome obligations imposed
by feudal tenure and by the corporate privileges of transhumant graziers,
particularly in Castile. This was a less attractive, but still promising
alternative, which also could most readily be pursued outside Europe.
Madeira and parts of the Canaries were occupied in this way in the fifteenth
century, respectively by Portuguese and Spanish settlers, comparatively
humble people, who borrowed capital from princely or noble promoters in
return for relatively light obligations. The settlements were economically
successful. They brought in revenue to the princes and noblemen—notably
Prince Henry of Portugal—who financed them; and set a fashion for islands
which lasted more than two hundred years. Rumours of further islands and
mainlands to be discovered in the Atlantic all helped to encourage interest
in this type of oversea adventure.
A less sure, and in most places socially less attractive way to wealth,
was by investment in trade, especially long-distance trade. The most
sought-after trades were in commodities of high value and small bulk, most
of them either of eastern origin—spices, silk, ivory, precious stones and the
like—or Mediterranean in origin but in demand in the East, such as coral
and some high-quality textiles. These rich trades almost all passed through
the Mediterranean and were conducted chiefly by the merchants of the
Italian maritime cities, in particular Venetians and Genoese. Some Atlantic
maritime peoples were already looking enviously at the rich trades. Portugal
in particular possessed a long ocean seaboard, good harbours, a
considerable fishing and seafaring population and a commercial class
largely emancipated from feudal interference. Portuguese shippers were
able and eager to graduate from an Atlantic coastal trade in wine, fish and
salt, to more widespread and lucrative ventures in gold, spices and sugar.
They had little hope of breaking into the Mediterranean trades, which were
guarded by the Italian monopolists with formidable naval force; with
unrivalled knowledge of the East derived from many generations of
merchants and travellers; and with an assiduous diplomacy which reached
across the ancient dividing line between Christendom and Islam. Merchant
capitalists in Portugal and western Spain therefore had strong motives for
seeking by sea alternative sources of gold, ivory and pepper; and according
to information current in Morocco, such sources existed. It is highly likely
that in undertaking West African voyages, the Portuguese were encouraged
by information about the gold mines of the Guinea kingdoms, obtained
through their conquest at Ceuta and not available to the rest of Europe. At
least, the voyages quickly demonstrated that sailing in the Tropics was
easier and less dangerous than pessimists had supposed. If, as was hinted in
some of the travel literature of the time, it were even possible to penetrate
by sea to the oriental sources of silk and spice, that would provide a still
stronger incentive for sea-borne exploration.
Failing the rich trades, there was one commodity which the Portuguese
thoroughly understood and which always commanded a sale everywhere in
Europe: fish. Long before Columbus reached America, or the sea route to
India became a possibility, the demands of the salt-fish trade were
encouraging Portuguese deep-sea fishermen to venture further and further
into the Atlantic. Fishing took them to Icelandic waters, well on the way to
America; and fishing was one of the principal reasons for their interest in
the north-west coast of Africa.
Precious commodities—indeed, most marketable commodities—might
be secured not only by trade, but by more direct methods; by plunder, if
they should be found in the possession of people whose religion, or lack of
religion, could be made an excuse for attacking them; or by direct
exploitation, if sources of supply were discovered in lands either
uninhabited, or inhabited only by ignorant savages. Here again, rumour and
imaginative travel literature suggested the possibility of hitherto unknown
mines, gold-bearing streams, or pearl fisheries. Casual unforeseen treasures
also occasionally came the way of adventurous sailors: the unexpected lump
of ambergris upon a deserted beach, or the narwhal’s potent horn.
All these economic considerations, these imaginative dreams of quick
adventurous gain, were heavily reinforced by the promptings of religious
zeal. The discoverers and conquistadores were devout men for the most
part, whose devotion took forms at once orthodox and practical. Of the
many possible forms of religious zeal, two in particular appealed to them,
and to the rulers and investors who sent them out. One was the desire to
convert—to appeal to the minds and hearts of individual unbelievers by
preaching, reasoning, or force of example, by any means of persuasion short
of force or threat, and so to bring unbelievers into the community of belief.
The other was the more simple-minded desire to ensure by military and
political means the safety and independence of one’s own religious
community and, better still, its predominance over others; to defend the
believer against interference and attack; to kill, humiliate, or subdue the
unbeliever. Of course, these two possible lines of action might be confused
or combined. It might appear politic, for example, to subdue unbelievers in
order to convert them. In general, however, two expressions of religious
devotion in action were kept distinct in men’s minds. The first called for
intense effort, with little likelihood of immediate material gain. The second,
the politico-military expression, provided an excuse for conquest and
plunder on a grand scale. It was an aspect of religious zeal with which
Europe had long been familiar, since for several centuries it had supplied
one of the principal motives for the crusades.
The fifteenth-century voyages of discovery have often been described as
a continuation of the crusades. Certainly the menacing proximity of Islam
was always in the minds of fifteenth-century kings, especially in eastern and
southern Europe. Nevertheless, those kings were realists enough, for the
most part, to see that a crusade of the traditional pattern—a direct campaign
against Muslim rulers in the eastern Mediterranean lands, with the object of
capturing the Holy Places and establishing Christian principalities on the
shores of the Levant—was no longer even a remote possibility. Crusades of
this type in earlier centuries had been, in the long run, costly failures. The
wide mixture of motives among the crusaders—religious zeal, personal love
of adventure, hope of gain, desire for reputation—and jealousy and
suspicion among the rulers concerned, had always been powerful factors
preventing effective unity. The European nations had never embarked on
crusades as organized States. Even those armies led by kings or by the
Emperor in person had been bound together only by feudal and personal
ties. No medieval European kingdom had possessed an organization capable
of administering distant possessions; only the knightly Orders had the
organization, and their resources were inadequate. Conquests, such as the
Latin States established after the first crusade, were made possible only by
disunity among the local Arab principalities, and could not survive the
counter-attack of a capable and unifying Muslim ruler. In the long run, the
political effect of the crusades was to reduce the Byzantine Empire, the
leading Christian State of eastern Europe, to a fragment of Greek territory,
and to enable the Venetians to extort commercial privileges in
Constantinople. From the thirteenth century onwards the great feudal
monarchies of northern Europe lost interest in crusading, and left the war
against Islam to those who had Muslim neighbours: to the Byzantine
emperors and the neighbouring Balkan kings, and to the Christian kings of
the Iberian peninsula.
These war-hardened rulers, left to themselves, achieved considerable
successes. The Greek Empire, employing a supple diplomacy as well as
military tenacity, showed a remarkable capacity for survival. It was still a
formidable naval power. It recovered much territory in the fourteenth
century. Weakened though it was, it could normally hold its own, in stable
conditions, against a variety of settled and relatively orderly Muslim states,
who had no more unity among themselves than had the Christian kingdoms.
The chief danger to the empire came from newly-Islamized barbarian
hordes who from time to time migrated from their homes in central Asia,
broke into the lands of the ‘fertile crescent’, overthrew the established
Muslim States, created new and unified military sultanates and embarked
on holy war against the Christian unbeliever. If successfully resisted, a
horde might settle down and become, in its turn, an organized and
stationary kingdom; but the Greek power of resistance, under successive
blows, was becoming less and less reliable. The most dangerous of these
invasions, from a European point of view, was that of the Ottoman Turks in
the fourteenth century.
At the other end of the Mediterranean these great waves of assault were
felt at first only as attenuated ripples. The aggression of the Iberian
kingdoms against Islam was a long-term, ding-dong local affair which in
the later Middle Ages had steadily gained ground. At the beginning of the
fifteenth century the only Muslim State surviving in Europe was the ancient
and highly civilized kingdom of Granada; and, rich and powerful though
this kingdom had been, it now paid tribute to Castile, and the rulers of
Castile could look forward, with good hope of success, to its eventual
incorporation in their own dominions. The rulers of Portugal no longer had
a land frontier with Muslim neighbours and were beginning to contemplate
a sea-borne assault on the rich Arab-Berber principalities of North Africa.
The end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries
brought a brief respite to the beleaguered Greeks. Two great Muslim States
confronted one another in the Levant. One was the Mamluk kingdom of
Egypt and Syria, firmly established a century and a quarter before by that
great Sultan Baybars who had chased the remaining Franks out of Syria and
had also defeated the grandson of Chingis Khan. The other was the more
recently founded Ottoman kingdom in Asia Minor, which was restless,
aggressive, and a constant danger to its neighbours, both Christian and
Muslim. The Turks had crossed the Dardanelles in 1353 and in 1357
occupied Adrianople, so almost surrounding the Byzantine Empire. To
some extent, Byzantine survival depended on Mamluk power in the
Ottomans’ rear. At the very end of the fourteenth century, both these
Muslim States were over-run by the cavalry of the last great nomad Mongol
Khan, Timur the Lame. In 1400 Timur sacked both Aleppo and Damascus;
in 1402, he defeated the Ottoman army at Ankara, sacked Smyrna, and took
the Sultan Bayezid I prisoner. The Christian rulers naturally regarded this
most savage of conquerors as a deliverer. The Byzantine Emperor offered
him tribute. Even the Castilians sent him an embassy, which, however,
arrived in Samarcand to find him already dead. The Christian respite was
thus very brief. Timur died in 1405. His heirs fell to quarrelling and his
exploits were never repeated. In the long run, and indirectly, the Mongol
incursion worked to the disadvantage of Byzantium and so of Christian
Europe. The Ottomans had been less severely mauled, and recovered more
quickly from their defeat, than their Mamluk rivals. Their military
organization and equipment was by far the best among the Muslim states.
Their civil administration bore comparatively lightly upon conquered
subjects, and made them not entirely unwelcome conquerors to an over-
taxed peasantry. The immediate question was where their formidable
strength would first be exerted: against the Mamluks, against the heretic
Safawid kingdom in Persia, or against the Byzantine Empire. All three were
overthrown eventually; but the Byzantine Empire, the weakest of the three,
received the first blows. Constantinople was besieged in 1422. Rebellions in
Asia Minor and counter-attacks from Hungary against the Turks prolonged
Greek resistance; but the great city finally fell to Muhammad II in 1453.
The fall of Constantinople had been so long expected, and so long
delayed, that much of its psychological effect in Europe was dissipated. In
Italy, it is true, the news of the fall provided a powerful motive for a
general, if uneasy, pacification among the major states—the Most Holy
League; but there was no effective call to arms, and despite much talk, no
general crusade.2 If Europe was a beleaguered fortress, its garrison was not
so small nor so closely invested that its members felt any special need for
unity among themselves. Nevertheless, the event clearly marked the
emergence of the Ottoman Empire as the most powerful State of the Near
East, a State beside which most European kingdoms were petty
principalities; a State, moreover, bent on military expansion. The kingdoms
of the Balkans and the Danube basin immediately received the impact of
Turkish aggression. They were thrown upon a desperate defensive,
retreating step by step, until the middle of the sixteenth century, when
Sulaiman the Magnificent unsuccessfully besieged Vienna. Even more
serious from a European point of view, the Turks became almost overnight
the most formidable of the Mediterranean powers. They had hitherto been
horsemen rather than sailors. In Muhammad I’s day they had been
decisively defeated at sea by the Venetians. The capture of Constantinople,
however, made them the heirs to the naval power of Byzantium. The
Venetians, fearing for their trading privileges, hastened to make their peace,
and succeeded in retaining most of their business contacts and some of their
colonies, notably Crete. They could not, however, prevent the loss of the
Morea and other territorial possessions, or deter the Turks from further
Mediterranean aggression. In 1480, Muhammad II actually invaded Italy,
took Otranto and established there a flourishing market in Christian slaves.
Possibly a sustained campaign of conquest was prevented only by the
Sultan’s death in the following year. Naval power made the eventual defeat
of the Mamluks and the extension of Turkish rule round the shores of the
Levant certain. It also rendered any direct seaborne attack by a western
force against the centres of Muslim power in the Levant quite out of the
question. By the middle of the fifteenth century the mantle of the crusaders
had fallen upon the Iberian kingdoms. Alone among European States, they
were still in a position to inflict damage upon Islam. Their activities were
necessarily, in the circumstances, local and limited; but the effects even of
local successes might be widely felt throughout Islam, if vigorously
exploited. It is against the background of disastrous European defeats in the
Levant that Castilian campaigns against Granada and Portuguese
expeditions to north-west Africa must be considered.
Both in Castile and in Portugal the idea of a crusade still had power to
fire the imagination of men of gentle birth and adventurous impulses;
though Iberian crusading fervour in the later Middle Ages was more
sophisticated and more complex than the headstrong ransom-gambling
adventurousness of the earlier crusades. Nor had it much in common with
the Christian apostolate which had converted northern Europe in still older
times. Nobody supposed that any serious impression could be made upon
Islam by preaching or by rational disputation. Muslims were not only
powerful and well-organized; they were also—though diabolically
misguided—clever, self-confident and civilized. A missionary friar would
have had no more chance of making converts in Granada or Damascus than
would a mullah in Rome or Burgos. He would have been considered at best
an interesting curiosity, at worst a spy or a dangerous lunatic. A duty to
attempt conversion was recognized, of course. Individual captives,
especially if captured in youth, were brought up in the faith of their captors.
Naturally, also, considerable numbers of Muslims under Christian rule—or
Christians under Muslim rule—adopted the religion of their rulers, either
from conviction or as a matter of political or commercial prudence.
Christian conquerors might sometimes attempt the forcible mass conversion
of entire Muslim populations; but conversions achieved in this way were
generally understood to be insincere and often temporary. No Christian
ruler possessed, or attempted to create, any body of men comparable with
the Turkish Janissaries. Genuine conversion on a wide scale was generally
assumed to be an impracticable ideal. It might, moreover, be financially
unprofitable, since both Christian and Muslim rulers often levied special
taxes from subjects of different religion from their own; a practice which
encouraged wars of conquest but discouraged attempts to convert the
conquered. Nor—despite loud talk about smiting the infidel—was a crude
policy of extermination ever seriously considered as either practicable or
desirable.
Contact with the Arab world in the Middle Ages had formed part of the
education of a rough and primitive Europe. European art and industry owe
much to the Arabs. Greek science and learning found their way to medieval
Europe—in so far as they were known at all—largely through Arabic
translations. Even the elaborate conventions of late medieval chivalry were
to some extent imitated from Arab customs and Arab romances. The Iberian
peninsula was the principal channel of contact between the two cultures;
and the more intelligent among the Christian rulers there understood the
value and the importance of their intermediary function. Archbishop
Raymond of Toledo in the twelfth century had founded schools where Arab,
Jewish and Christian scholars collaborated in a series of works which, when
communicated to the learned centres in Europe, opened a new era in
medieval science. Alfonso X of Castile also gathered into his court the
learned of three religions, for he was as eager to sift the wisdom of the East
as of the West. He was the first European king to show a systematic interest
in secularizing culture. His oriental works were translated into French, and
influenced Dante. His astronomical tables were studied in Europe for
centuries, and were read and annotated by Copernicus himself. Though
exceptional, he was by no means unique in tolerance and wisdom. The
greatest of all the monarchs of the Reconquest, Fernando III, King and
Saint, is proclaimed by his epitaph to have been a king who tolerated infidel
cults in mosque and synagogue.3
Within the Iberian peninsula, then, Christian and Muslim kingdoms had
existed side by side for centuries and had perforce, when not actually
fighting one another, maintained some kind of relations, however
perfunctory. Occasionally, Christian rulers had allied with Muslims against
Christians, and vice versa. Similarly, within particular kingdoms, Christian
and Muslim populations had lived side by side, and while often feeling for
one another little respect and no affection, had grown accustomed to one
another’s ways. Where conversions occurred, there were mixed marriages
and mixed blood. Inevitably, Spanish culture, except in the very north, was
profoundly affected. Arab influence made itself evident in the immense and
varied vocabulary of the Spanish language, in social habits such as the
seclusion of women, in architecture and the lay-out of towns, in commercial
practices, and in a great range of practical devices: irrigation and water-
lifting appliances; the design and rig of boats and ships; saddlery and
harness. Moorish influence was less obvious in Portugal than in Spain. By
the fifteenth century crusading in Portuguese territory was little more than a
distant memory; hence the somewhat bookish and romantic crusading
notions of, for example, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, contrasted with the
much more practical attitude of his Spanish contemporaries.4 In their
varying degrees, however, both Spain and Portugal were homes of mixed
societies, and probably that very fact equipped Spaniards and Portuguese,
better than other Europeans, to understand and to deal with the still more
exotic cultures they were to encounter when they embarked upon a career of
oversea adventure.5
By the fifteenth century, European civilization had developed to a point
where it no longer depended upon the Arab world for inspiration and
instruction, and in Spain Africanizing fashions tended to become a
somewhat sterile affectation. At the hedonistic and disorderly court of
Henry IV of Castile, this affectation was pushed to extremes in which the
Christian religion was derided, Moorish customs openly adopted, and the
war against Islam forgotten or deliberately postponed. The Succession War
and the accession of Isabella brought a sharp reversal. Isabella, inspired not
only by intense religious conviction, but also by apprehension of the danger
threatening from the East, was determined to press ahead immediately with
preparations against Granada (whose rulers, emboldened by the Succession
War, had withheld tribute in 1476) and if possible eventually to carry the
war into the enemy’s territory in Africa, as the Portuguese had already done
at Ceuta in 1415. Systematic operations for the conquest of the Moorish
kingdom, village by village, began in 1482. Spaniards embarked on this last
European crusade with a complex mixture of attitudes towards the Muslim
enemy. The mixture included intense religious exaltation; abhorrence of
unbelief, modified (on the part of feudal superiors) by concessions to
economic expediency; acquisitiveness, in the sense not only of hope of
plunder, but of determination to exploit the Moors as vassals; social dislike,
modified by long familiarity; economic envy (for the Moors were usually
better farmers and craftsmen, and often sharper traders, than their Spanish
rivals); and finally acute political fear—fear not of Granada, but of the
powerful support which might reach Granada if that kingdom were not
brought under Christian control. As for Granada, isolated and divided
within itself, the issue was never in serious doubt. The capital city fell in
1492. All Spain, for the first time in many centuries, was ruled by Christian
sovereigns. The territory of Granada was duly divided in fiefs among the
leaders in the campaign.
The conquest did not relieve Spain of the fear of Islam; nor did the
Spanish invasion of North Africa, which began with the capture of Melilla
in 1492, prevent the advance of the Turks. Early in the sixteenth century
they conquered Syria and Egypt and extended their suzerainty along the
whole north African coast. The immense power of the Ottoman Empire
could then be summoned to defend the Muslim rulers of the coast, and
possibly even to support rebellion among disaffected Moors in Spain. It was
a power too strong to be challenged, as yet, by the forces of the Spanish
kingdoms. Meanwhile, the enthusiasms and ambitions generated by the war
against Granada persisted, only partially satisfied by victory. An outlet for
this pent-up martial energy was suggested, only a year after the fall of
Granada, by Columbus’ report of islands in the western Atlantic, and by his
insistence that those islands might be used as stepping-stones to China.
Within a generation, the feelings which had rallied Spaniards against
Granada developed into a bold and methodical imperialism which, casting
about for new provinces to conquer, found its opportunity overseas. While
Portuguese imperialism in West Africa sought, among other objects, a back
door through which to attack the Arab and the Turk, Spanish imperialism,
by chance discovery, was led to operate in a new world.
Granada was to the Spaniards what Constantinople, in its last enfeebled
years, had been to the Turks: the culmination of one series of conquests, and
the beginning of another. There was a curious parallel between the role of
the Turks in the Byzantine Empire and that of the Castilians in Muslim
Spain. The Turks had been nomads; they had entered the Near East as
highly mobile mounted bands operating against a long-established
agricultural or city-dwelling society. They settled down as overlords, living
by the labour of a conquered peasantry, and recruiting their subordinate
officials and their technical experts from the literate among their new
subjects; but never themselves entirely losing their character as horsemen.
The Castilians had never been parasitic upon the horse in the same degree
as the Turks, but they too, in Andalusia and elsewhere, employed mobile
and largely mounted forces against sedentary communities. Among them, in
the arid uplands of Castile, pastoral pursuits, the grazing of semi-nomadic
flocks and herds, had long been preferred to arable farming. The preference
was social and military as well as economic; it was the legacy of centuries
of intermittent fighting, of constantly shifting frontiers. The man on
horseback, the master of flocks and herds, was best adapted to such
conditions; the peasant, conversely, was economically vulnerable and
socially despised. As the work of conquest proceeded, the Castilians, or the
upper classes, the fighting classes, among them, retained their pastoral
interests and possessions, their mobility and military effectiveness, and their
respect for the man on horseback. Like the Turks, as far as possible they
lived by the labour and employed the skill of vassal peoples as well as of
their own peasants and craftsmen. These social habits produced a class of
fighting men well fitted for the conquest, and the subsequent organization,
of the settled peoples of the New World, who were prosperous arable
farmers or docile town-dwellers, and who had never before even seen
horses and horned cattle. Small bands of mounted Spaniards could achieve
remarkable victories, and could then settle as quasi-feudal overlords,
retaining their own pastoral interests and avocations, relying on conquered
peasants to grow grain for them, as both they and the Turks had done in the
Old World; their mobility as horsemen enabling them to suppress revolts
with a minimum of effort. In this respect also, reconquest in Spain was an
appropriate training for imperial expansion in America.
Isabella, however, advised by the uncompromising ecclesiastics who
surrounded her, was little disposed to allow the Moors of Granada to settle
down peacefully as Muslim vassals of Christian overlords. Religious zeal,
for her, must find expression not only in conquest and suzerainty, but in
conversion. After the capture of Granada she inaugurated a new policy of
vigorous proselytizing. This policy, initially confined to preaching and
persuasion, met with very limited success, despite the devotion of the
Observant Franciscans to whom it was entrusted. The impatience of the
Queen and her minister Cisneros soon insisted upon sterner measures:
systematic persecution and a drastic stiffening of ecclesiastical discipline.
The expulsion of the Jews, the violent baptism of the Moors of Granada, the
extraordinary powers entrusted to the new Inquisition, were all radical
departures from medieval tradition in Spain. All three were, on the whole,
publicly approved, as they would not have been a hundred years before; and
in Castile (though not in Aragon) they were vigorously enforced. They
represented both a reaction against the intensified Muslim pressure on
Christendom since the fall of Constantinople, and an intensification of
religious fervour, and so of religious intolerance, in Spain. This
intensification of zeal, this new enthusiasm for conversion, quickly
travelled to the New World, where it was to find new and more effective
forms of expression.
Humanist learning, apostolic fervour, and discipline, were the principal
features of the reform of the Church in Spain undertaken by Cardinal
Ximénez de Cisneros in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.6 The
regular Orders included in their ranks many men who were exalted by a
spiritual unrest closely akin to that which was to break out in Reformation
in northern Europe. Cisneros’ reforms appealed to this unrest, and rendered
it effective. He sought above all to purify the clergy by strengthening the
austerity and the preaching mission of the mendicant Orders. Among the
Orders he favoured his own Franciscans, and among Franciscans the strict
Observants, who in Spain and Portugal elected to preach their simple and
austere Christianity among poor and neglected rural folk, and among
infidels, as their papal privileges expressly commanded them to do. Internal
reform movements similar to the Franciscan Observance occurred about the
turn of the century in other Orders also, particularly among Dominicans and
Jeronymites. A remarkable increase in the reformed mendicant population
occurred in Cisneros’ lifetime. From it emerged a spiritual élite of
evangelical tendency, which was to sympathize with Erasmus and to come
under suspicion of Lutheranism later in the century. From it emerged, also,
a spiritual militia, recruited from disciplined, highly-trained religious
radicals, available for employment in the New World. The Amerindian
peoples encountered by Spaniards in Cisneros’ own day were weak,
primitive, and few in number; but from the second decade of the sixteenth
century Spaniards came into contact with the settled city-building peoples
of Mexico and Central America, and in dealing with them, missionary
policy became an issue of burning importance. They were numerous and
well-organized. They possessed a material culture which, despite crucial
technical weaknesses, impressed and attracted the Spanish invaders. They
had no knowledge of Christianity, a deficiency for which they clearly could
not be blamed or punished; and on the credit side they were uncontaminated
by Islam. Their own religion included rites of horrifying savagery; but
individually they appeared to be gentle and docile people for the most part;
and their agrarian collectivism seemed to provide an ideal basis on which to
build Christian communities. Neither Crown nor Church in Spain could
ignore the opportunity and the duty of bringing such people into the
Christian fold, or could contemplate leaving matters to the consciences of
the conquistadores. The Crown early decided to entrust the American
mission to the mendicant Orders. For a time, at least, it gave masterful
support to the mendicant vows of renunciation, the Christian doctrine of a
compassionate deity, and the institutional authority of the sacraments. Such
a missionary policy, with its logical consequences in terms of control over
the native population, inevitably conflicted with the economic interests of
the leading colonists, and led to long and acrimonious disputes; but the
friars commanded the respect and sympathy of many of the conquistadores,
including Cortés, who himself petitioned for a Franciscan mission to
Mexico. The feeling of ‘bringing light to those who were in darkness’ was
general even among the humbler soldiers, and helps to explain their
conviction that, however unsanctified their own lives might be, the Saints
fought on their side. This is not to suggest an unsophisticated credulity. The
stories of the actual appearance of St James in battle were invented by
chroniclers, not by conquistadores; Bernal Diaz treats these ‘miracles’ with
ironic contempt.7 Nevertheless, the conquistadores prayed to St Peter and St
James before their battles, and the feeling of divine support was strong
among them. In somewhat lesser degree, and in very different
circumstances, the same was true of the Portuguese in India. Missionary
zeal, the desire to bring genuine conversion to millions of pagan souls, must
be placed high among the motives of the Reconnaissance.
Acquisitiveness and religious zeal, however, even taken together, are
not the whole story. The unprecedented harshness with which Isabella
treated the Moors of Granada was more than an expression of religious
intolerance and political hostility. It represented a deliberate rejection on the
Queen’s part of the African element in Spanish culture. It was accompanied
by an equally deliberate affirmation of Spain’s community with the rest of
Christian Europe. The Queen’s iron will and keen intelligence worked to
end the intellectual isolation of Spain, not by a timid and defensive
obscurantism, but by a vigorous and self-confident encouragement of
European learning. Her reign was a golden age for universities. The famous
foundations of Alcalá, Salamanca and Valladolid date from this time. (The
founding impulse was soon carried to the New World, for both Mexico and
Peru were to have universities within a generation or so of their conquest.)
Many printing presses were set up in Spain in Isabella’s reign. Foreign
scholars and foreign books, Italian, French, German and Flemish, were
welcomed and encouraged. Ideas and literary conventions characteristic of
the Italian Renaissance spread throughout Spain, albeit in forms modified
by Spanish sobriety and conservatism, and without the superficial paganism
of much Italian writing. Classical scholars such as Alfonso de Palencia and
Antonio de Lebrija (who had been educated in Italy) worked in the direct
tradition of Lorenzo Valla. The great Polyglot Bible is one of the chief
glories of Renaissance scholarship. In more popular literary forms also,
Italian influence pervaded Spain. The Orlando Furioso of Ariosto was
quickly translated and widely read in Spanish. Epics and romances of all
kinds enjoyed a great vogue in Spain in the early sixteenth century. Bernal
Díaz, writing of his first breathtaking sight of the city of Mexico, remarked
quite naturally that it put him in mind of the Amadis romances.
 With Renaissance literary conventions, Spaniards absorbed Renaissance
attitudes of mind: the cult of the individual, the passion for personal
reputation. This passion was vital in the mental make-up of the
conquistadores, and goes far to explain their prickly pride, their dislike of
discipline and regimentation, their insistence on being consulted about
every decision. On the other hand, it also helps to explain their extravagant
daring and their indifference to wounds and fatigue. They conducted
themselves, and their chroniclers wrote, with the high seriousness of men
conscious of taking part in great deeds; men who saw themselves not as
imitators, but as rivals, of the heroes of antiquity and of romance. Cortés—
most eloquent of conquistadores, one most sensitive to the mood of his
men, and himself a product of Renaissance Salamanca—returned again and
again in his speeches and letters to this theme. He alluded sometimes to the
riches that lay ahead, and sometimes to the glory of winning pagan souls;
but most frequently to the prospect of human fame. In endeavouring, for
example, to persuade his men on the beach at Vera Cruz to burn the boats in
which they had come from Cuba, he gave them ‘many comparisons with
brave deeds done by heroes among the Romans’.8 When his more cautious
companions complained that Alexander had attempted nothing so foolhardy
as the taking of Mexico with four hundred men, he told them that history
would relate greater things of them than of the ancient captains. There were
darker comparisons, of course. Cortés could not have missed the analogy
between Cuauhtémoc and Vercingetorix; vae victis. But Cortés, like Caesar,
cultivated in general a reputation for gallant and politic clemency, and he
ran considerable risks to stop his Indian allies butchering the defeated
Aztecs. Bernal Díaz—every historian of the conquista must return to that
scrupulous old soldier—boasted no nobility save that of having fought in a
hundred and nineteen battles—more than twice those of Julius Caesar; and
like the great Roman he wished—as he explains—to record his own deeds,
along with those of Cortés, ‘in the manner of the writings and reports of...
illustrious men who served in wars in time past; in order that my children,
grandchildren and descendants can say “my father came to discover and
conquer these lands... and was one of the foremost in the conquest”.’9 This
passionate care for reputation was not, of course, confined to Spaniards. It
was common to most of the pioneers of the Reconnaissance, of whatever
nation. Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s serene (and avoidable) death on board the
Squirrel was a late instance of it. Such men sought not only riches ‘such as
all men desire’, not only merit in the eyes of God, but also fame among
their own people and in posterity.
With a new attitude towards the individual, the Renaissance fostered a
new attitude towards the State, also Italian in origin. A sensitive alertness, a
studied, objective attention to the most effective and most elegant means of
achieving desired ends, tended to supplant the older notion of the State as a
network of fixed, traditional rights and duties, over which the monarch
presided as a judge of disputes. It was becoming recognized that a
government might use force, whether against subjects or against
neighbouring princes, in pursuit of rational interests as well as in support of
legal claims. Like many Italian rulers, Isabella of Castile owed her throne to
a mixture of war and diplomacy. A masterful restoration of public order and
discipline was one of her major achievements, and contributed greatly to the
growth of authoritarian feeling in Castile. Machiavelli’s principles of
statecraft had no more successful exemplars than Ferdinand of Aragon and
John II of Portugal. It is true that this more flexible attitude towards
sovereignty and statecraft, this cult of governmental expediency, was
restrained, particularly in Spain, by legalistic conservatism as well as by
individual obstinacy. Nevertheless, it helped to prepare men’s minds for the
immense task of political and administrative improvisation which was to
confront Spanish government in the New World.
The fifteenth century was remarkable for the spontaneous growth,
among a few gifted and highly-placed men, of a genuine disinterested
curiosity. Like the passion for classical learning (and, of course, associated
with it) this spirit of curiosity was among the leading characteristics of the
Renaissance. It can hardly, at first, be called scientific, for it was
undisciplined and quite unsystematic. The men of the Renaissance were
concerned to absorb knowledge rather than to digest it, to amass rather than
to select. Their curiosity was far stronger in inquiry than in arrangement;
but it was omnivorous, lively, uninhibited; and while it corroded and
gradually weakened the accepted medieval systems of knowledge, it
collected, with avid and apparently random enthusiasm, the materials of
which new systems would eventually be constructed. It was shared not only
by scholars, but by princes and by men of action in their entourage,
especially in Italy, but also in Portugal and Spain. Geography and
cosmography were prominent among the objects upon which it seized, but it
had many others. The attention paid to medical research at the time,
Other documents randomly have
different content
God, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. For the
greater glory of God and the increase of devotion to the Blessed
Virgin Mary, His Eminence deigns to permit the account of this signal
miracle, not only to be printed and published but also authorized."—
A picture commemorative of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin to
M. Ratisbonne, a representation of the Virgin of the medal, was
placed in the chapel of St. Andrew's Church, where the miracle had
taken place.
A few days after his return to France, M. Ratisbonne, in token of
his gratitude, and with the intention of obtaining his family's
conversion, felt urged to erect a chapel under the invocation of Mary
Immaculate, in the Providence orphanage of the Faubourg St.
Germain, Paris. The laying of the corner stone took place May 1st,
1842, and the sanctuary was finished and dedicated May 1st, 1844,
with great solemnity, in the presence of the founder of the house, M.
Desgenettes, curé of Notre Dame des Victoires, the Baron de
Bussière, M. Étienne, Superior General of the Priests of the Mission
and daughters of Charity, M. Eugène Boré, then a simple layman,
but afterwards M. Étienne's immediate successor, the abbé de
Bonnechose, later an Archbishop and Cardinal, and many other
distinguished persons.
The pious convert often repaired to this sanctuary to mingle his
prayers with those of the Daughters of Charity and their dear
orphans; and many times has he also enjoyed the ineffable
consolation of celebrating the Holy Sacrifice and thanking his
celestial Benefactress, before the beautiful picture of the Immaculate
Conception placed above the high altar, as a souvenir of the miracle
of St. Andrew delle Fratte, for M. Ratisbonne is now a priest. Not
content with leading a pious life in the world, he has renounced
forever the joys and hopes of time to embrace the ecclesiastical
state, which consecrated him unreservedly to God. For several years
past he has been associated with his beloved brother Theodore in
the order of Our Lady of Sion, the object of which congregation is
the conversion of Israelites.
 V.
Graces Obtained from 1843 to 1877, in France, Germany, Italy,
America.
CURE OF A LITTLE GIRL (PARIS)—1843.

This account was sent us in the month of January, 1877, by the

very person who was cured:

"About the 15th of December, 1843, a little girl, Zénobie de

M., just one year old, was attacked, at the same time, by water
on the chest, a disease of the bowels, and cerebral congestion.
Dr. Flandrin, a friend of the family was called in immediately,
and gave the child every attention, but his skill was powerless,
and the family was plunged in the deepest grief. The child's
eldest sister alone cherished a faint hope in the depths of her
heart; she had intended consecrating herself to God in a
religious state, and had always regarded the birth of this little
one as a gift of Providence, sent to take her place in the family,
and console her afflicted parents. God will not, she thought,
take back the child. In her room was a picture representing the
apparition of the Miraculous Medal; she knelt before it, begging
the child's recovery, and renewing her promises of embracing a
religious life should the petition be granted. This generous
offering she kept a secret. A little while after, the doctor came
and declared the child's case hopeless, and moreover, its
recovery not desirable as it would remain imbecile, paralyzed or
blind. He proposed, however, a consultation with M. Blache,
physician of the Necker hospital, who prescribed energetic
treatment, but said, 'this child cannot live.'
The poor mother, deeming it inadvisable to cause the little
creature unnecessary suffering, gently laid it in the cradle,
saying with the faith and resignation seen in none but a
Christian mother: 'The Lord gave it to me, the Lord wishes to
take it away, may His holy will be accomplished!' In the
afternoon, one of the aunts came to accompany the elder sister
to church, and whilst their prayers ascended to the Most High,
more for the mother than the child, this mother obeys
spontaneously a supernatural impulse, and taking the
Miraculous Medal as a last hope, she applies it to the body of
the child, and repeats with confidence the invocation: 'O Mary!
conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!'
The plaintive cries ceased, and when M. Flandrin came that
evening to see if the little one were still alive, he was greatly
surprised to perceive a faint improvement since morning, the
whole body covered with a gentle perspiration, and the little
paralyzed arm able to move in any direction. 'But what a pity,'
said he, 'the child will be blind,' which indeed it seemed to be
already, as a light passed several times before its eyes produced
no effect whatever.
"The mother who had not yet mentioned her secret, waited
until all had left the room, then taking her dear medal, she lay it
upon her infant's eyes and repeated the invocation. After a
sound sleep of about twenty-four hours, little Zénobie awoke,
recognizing all around her, and smiling upon all, her sight was
restored!
"The child's father, penetrated with faith and piety, said:
'Assuredly, God alone has restored our child to us; henceforth,
she shall be called Marie, that she may ever bear in mind to
whom she is indebted for life.' An attack of measles now
supervened and finished the work, according to the doctor, by
absorbing the water on the brain, and throwing out upon the
surface of the skin the heretofore internal malady. A small gold
cross, having engraven upon it the memorable date of this
miraculous cure, was hung around the neck of little Marie, who
is now a Daughter of St. Vincent de Paul."

CONVERSION OF A CAPTAIN IN THE AUSTRIAN ARMY.

 Letter from the Superioress of the Daughters of Charity, at the
Hospital of Gratz (Austria), 1860:

After the war in Italy, a Polish regiment passed through

Gratz; the captain, attacked by a violent hemorrhage, was
obliged to stop at the general hospital, in charge of the
Daughters of Charity. Their constant and unremitting attentions
did not retard the progress of the disease, and his life was in
imminent danger.
Full of consideration, gratitude and politeness for those who
nursed him, he nevertheless expressed great displeasure
whenever they approached him on the subject of religion; he
had requested to be spared the visits of the chaplain of the
regiment, and as to the hospital chaplain, he dared not present
himself. It was necessary to keep the patient very quiet, and
avoid all worry, for the least excitement might cause a mortal
hemorrhage.
A Sister, who had been watching by his couch one night, left,
in mistake, a little book containing an account of favors
obtained through the Blessed Virgin's intercession. The sick man
took the book and read a few pages; another Sister coming into
his room, he showed her a passage, and said, putting his hand
to his forehead with a significant gesture: "Here, Sister, just
read this nonsense; as for myself, I cannot understand how any
one can write such books—if I may dare, let me beg you to take
this away."
Vain was every effort to reach his heart by pleasant
distractions, by engaging his attention or his interest; he was
insensible to all. A few days after the occurrence just
mentioned, a Sister ventured to offer him a medal of the
Blessed Virgin suspended to a cord, so that he might wear it if
he wished. He was too polite to refuse the present, but he let it
remain just where the Sister had put it. His servant, though a
devout Christian, dared not speak to him of receiving the
Sacraments, and, although the patient expected to leave the
hospital soon, it was very evident to all else that the fever was
daily sapping his strength and rapidly conducting him to the
tomb. Much grieved at his condition, and especially his
impenitence, the Sisters determined to make one last effort to
save this soul. And what was it? They wrote the Blessed Virgin a
note, as follows: "Grant that, by some means, most holy Mother,
he may accept your medal, prepare him yourself to receive the
Sacraments, and assist him at the hour of death. O Mary!
conceived without sin, pardon our temerity, we attach this note
to your statue, and leave it there till you deign to hear our
prayers."
The chief physician of the hospital said, one day, to the
Sister on leaving this patient's room: "The captain will die
without the Sacraments, he seems inflexible." "Oh! as to that,"
she replied, "the Blessed Virgin will not fail to overcome his
obstinacy." Three or four days elapsed; one morning the sick
man requested the Sister to put the medal around his neck,
which she did most joyfully. In the afternoon, he called her
again: "Sister," said he, "I beg you to send for the chaplain of
my regiment to hear my confession, so that to-morrow I may
receive the Holy Eucharist and Extreme Unction." The worthy
priest was happy to answer the summons; he remained a long
time with the sick man, and next morning, after celebrating
Mass at the altar of the Immaculate Conception, he
administered to him the Holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction. We
were all edified at the dying man's piety. He cherished his medal
with religious fidelity, often asking for it and kissing it tenderly. A
few days after receiving the Last Sacraments, he rendered his
soul to God, saved, as we have every reason to hope, by the
intercession of Mary conceived without sin.

CONVERSION OF A HARDENED SINNER.

 A letter from the Superioress of the Daughters of Charity at
Issoudun, 1862:

In the month of August, 1862, a young man aged twenty-

nine, and who had been married several years, was dying of
consumption. Vainly did his friends endeavor to turn his
thoughts to eternity; every idea of religion seemed extinguished
in his heart, and he positively refused to see the priest. A pious
acquaintance informed the Sisters of his deplorable state; one
of them went immediately to see him. She met with a cool
reception, but was not the least disconcerted, and spoke to him
very kindly, proposing to send him a physician, and adding, that
she would supply all necessary medicines and nourishment. "I
need neither doctors nor medicines," was the reply, "I am going
to die, and I ask only that you will let me die in peace." His poor
wife, who was present, holding their little child in her arms, said
to him with tears: "Accept Sister's offer, and perhaps you will
recover," but he made no answer; and the Sister now turning to
his wife, endeavored to console her, by promising to send the
doctor and return soon herself. The doctor came and met with
no better reception. In a few days the Sister presented herself
again, and was received as before, all her advances eliciting no
response save a frigid silence; but naught discouraged, she
returned day after day, though her reception was always the
same. As the young man grew worse, the Sister's prayers
increased, and she felt inspired to offer him a medal of the
Immaculate Conception, still hoping that the good God would
lead back to the fold, this poor strayed sheep. "I accept a
medal!" he exclaimed vehemently, "and what do you wish me to
do with it? It would suit my wife or child well enough, but as for
myself, I want no medals!" The Sister withdrew from the contest
for the time, but not discouraged, she returned to the charge
next morning. "Ah," said she pleasantly, "you are going to take
the medal to-day?" "You know what I told you yesterday," he
answered, "besides, Sister, I am afraid of becoming imbued with
your sentiments should I accept it, for I perceive that you are
 much more unhappy than I care about being." A ray of
happiness illumined the Sister's countenance, for she knew that
he who fears is already conquered. After plying her with
questions about religion, he concluded thus: "After all, death
will be a great relief to me; I have twice made an unsuccessful
attempt at committing suicide. I suffer so much that I desire
nothing but to die as soon possible." Next day, the Sister asked
her Superioress to visit him and offer him the medal. She did so,
and he not only accepted it, but at last consented to see the
priest. When our Sister next saw him he was completely
changed, and expressed his joy at the priest's visit, and his
desire of seeing him soon again. "Sister," said he, "I am too
miserable, I wish to be like you." The priest did not delay his
second coming, and the poor, suffering creature, having made
his confession, asked for Holy Communion, which he had not
received for many years, but this favor was denied him, his
throat being so inflamed that he could swallow only a few drops
of liquid. His last days were sanctified by the most admirable
resignation; no one ever heard him utter a complaint, he asked
for one thing only, the visits of the priest and Sister, which alone
seemed to afford him any consolation. And on the Feast of All
Saints, evincing every mark of a sincere conversion, he breathed
his last.

CONVERSION OF A MALEFACTOR.

A Letter from the Superioress of the Daughters of Charity, at the

Hospital of Beuthen (Prussian Poland)—1865:

There was brought to our hospital, a young man of

notoriously bad character. He entered our doors blaspheming,
and as the physician had told the Sister that he had but a few
days to live, she essayed a few words of piety and consolation,
to turn his attention to the state of his soul; but he answered
her by maledictions. At last, one day she said to him, "My
friend, since you will not listen to me, I will ask my Superioress
herself to come." "Let her come," was his reply, "if she were to
tell me to hang myself, I would obey her, but as for confession,
she may talk about that as much as she pleases, I shall never
yield." These words were followed by so many blasphemies,
that it was with a very heavy heart the poor Sister sought her
Superioress. "Have you given him a medal?" said the latter. "A
medal!" was the reply, "he would throw it away." "Ah, well, we
must put one under his pillow and trust to prayer, for it is
useless to talk to him; tell him only that I say he is not worthy
of going to confession, and I forbid his doing so."
As soon as the Sister who was nursing him left the presence
of her Superioress, the latter threw herself upon her knees and
began to repeat that beautiful prayer, the Remember. In a very
few minutes the Sister returned, this time shedding tears of joy.
"Ah, Sister," said she, "he wishes to confess; as soon as I had
put the medal under his pillow and recited the Remember for
him, I delivered your message." "Indeed!" said he, rising from
his seat, "Well, I would just like to see the person that could
prevent it; tell your Superioress that to-morrow morning at eight
o'clock, I am going to pay the curé a visit."
The Sisters felt a little troubled concerning a confession
apparently dictated by the spirit of contradiction, but their fears
were dissipated when the penitent returned bathed in tears. He
had just been to Holy Communion; asking the Sisters' pardon
for his past misconduct, he begged them to implore the Blessed
Virgin to let him live eight days longer, that he might weep for
his sins. This favor was granted him, and daily did he bedew his
pillow with tears. At the end of the eight days he died, blessing
God, and pressing the medal to his lips.

CONVERSION OF AN ACTRESS.
 A letter from the Superioress of the Daughters of Charity, at the
Hospital of Beuthen (Prussian Poland), 1865:

Some years ago, a young Protestant woman, belonging to a

troupe of comedians, arrived in Beuthen with her company. The
good God permitted that she should find lodgings in a Catholic
family, with whom she soon essayed a controversy.
"Mademoiselle," said the master of the house, "it would be
better for you to go see the Sisters about these things; the
Blessed Virgin has wrought wonders in their establishments, I
am sure you would return fully enlightened on the subject you
have been discussing." The young girl laughed at such a
proposition; but a few days after, impelled by curiosity, she
repaired to the hospital and asked for the Sister-Servant. "Invite
her in," said the latter, who had already heard of the young
actress; "no doubt, the Blessed Virgin has something in store for
her here." After a few formalities of etiquette, our visitor
introduced the subject of religion, and attempted to enter into a
controversy with the Sister. "Alas! Mademoiselle," replied the
latter, "the poor Daughters of Charity have neither the time nor
learning necessary for a discussion of these subtle questions,
but they have other arms with which to vanquish you;" and,
smiling, she presented her disputant a little medal of the
Blessed Virgin. "Promise me to wear this slight souvenir, it will
be a constant reminder that we are praying for you." She
allowed the Sister to put the medal on her neck, and retired
rather pleased with her visit.
From this day, the Sisters at the hospital began to
recommend the young actress to Mary conceived without sin.
Not many weeks after, the curé said to the Sister-Servant: "Do
you know, Sister, that Mademoiselle M., who spent the most of
her time promenading with gentlemen and smoking cigars, now
comes to me for religious instruction? In a little while she will
make her abjuration." And, indeed, it was not very long before
she repaired to the hospital. "Sister," said she to the Sister-
 Servant, "I am going to confession to-day, and to-morrow I
make my First Communion. On my first visit here, I was
enraged at you. I could have fought you, and cast to the winds
this medal that I now kiss. From the very moment you put it on
my neck, an unaccountable change was wrought in me." Next
day, the church was filled with Protestants and Jews, all anxious
to witness a ceremony which had excited so much comment.
After her reception into the Church, the young convert, on the
eve of her departure, paid another visit to the Sister Servant,
and the latter saw by her very countenance what great changes
grace had wrought in this soul. "Well," said the Sister, just to try
her, "here is a silver medal to replace yours which has become
very black." "Oh, no," was the earnest, prompt reply, as she
tenderly pressed her own medal, "I would not exchange this for
any other in the world, for it is since I began to wear it my soul
has awaked to a new life."
Some years later, the Sister received a letter dated from
Rome, it was from the young convert, who wrote to her as
follows: "Sister, Providence has led me to Rome, and it is no
longer Mlle. M. you must address, but Sister St.—— of the B.
convent. Your desires are accomplished; I now belong entirely
to God, as I once did to the world; the Blessed Virgin
vanquishes souls with other arms than those of controversy."

We must add, to the praise of the young actress, that her moral
character was always irreproachable.
The Superioress of the hospital at Beuthen, in narrating these
facts, adds: "I could mention, for the greater glory of God and honor
of the Immaculate Mary, numberless incidents of this kind, but lack
of time and my weak eyes prevent my giving the details. I will say,
however, and that without the slightest exaggeration, that not a
week passes but the Blessed Virgin bestows upon our patients at the
hospital some new proof of her maternal bounty. The medal, so dear
to us, is really miraculous, and the instrument by which we snatch
from destruction souls that have cost Our Lord so much. Ah! how
numberless, in this unhappy land, the snares of the enemy of our
salvation to entrap souls; but to vanquish him, I everywhere
circulate the Miraculous Medal (you know what numbers we get),
and my confidence in Mary is never deceived."

CONVERSION OF A PROMINENT FREE MASON.

New Orleans (United States), 1865.

Among the patients at the great Charity hospital, New
Orleans, was a very prominent Free Mason. His hatred of
religion was displayed in a thousand ways; not only did he
interdict the Sister who nursed him any allusion to his salvation,
but he even habitually repaid by harsh and injurious words her
kindness and attention to his physical sufferings. If others
ventured to mention the subject of religion to him, they were
received with jeers and banters. Several times was he at the
point of death, and yet, sad to relate, his dispositions remained
the same. At last, when the Sister saw that he had but a few
hours to live, she stealthily slipped a Miraculous Medal under his
bolster, and said interiorly to the Blessed Virgin: "My dear
Mother, you know I have spared no effort to touch this poor
man's heart, but in vain; now I abandon him to you, it is you
who must save him; I leave him entirely in your hands, and
shall try to divest myself of all anxiety concerning him." That
evening, in making her rounds, she glances at him and learns
from the infirmarian that ever since her (the Sister's) last visit,
he had been very calm and apparently absorbed in thought. On
inquiring of the patient himself how he felt, she was astonished
at his polite answer, but remembering that she had entrusted
him entirely to the Blessed Virgin's care, she did not venture a
word about his soul, and bidding him good night, she left the
room.
 About nine o'clock, he called the infirmarian, and asked for a
priest; knowing his former bitterness, the infirmarian thought it
a joke and treated it accordingly; the patient repeated his
request, but with no better success. Then he began to weep
and cry aloud for a priest; all the other patients were mute with
astonishment, and the infirmarian unable to resist such
entreaties went for the chaplain and the Sister. The dying man
requested Baptism, which was administered immediately, as
well as Extreme Unction, and before morning he had rendered
his account to the Sovereign Judge. His body was interred with
Masonic rites, but his soul, thanks to the powerful protection of
Mary Immaculate, had been carried by angels to the bosom of
its God.

CONVERSION OF A SICK PROTESTANT.

New Orleans (United States).

At the same hospital in New Orleans, a Sister for a long time
had vainly endeavored to convince a Protestant of the most
essential truths of religion, that he might receive Baptism, but
he was deaf to all her persuasions. One day she showed him a
Miraculous Medal, and related its origin. He appeared to listen
somewhat attentively, but when she offered it to him, "Take it
away," said he, in a tone of great contempt, "this Virgin is no
more than any other woman." "I am going to leave it on your
table," was the Sister's reply, "I am sure you will reflect on my
words." He said nothing, but to put it out of sight, placed his
bible over it. Every day, under the pretext of arranging and
dusting his room, the Sister assured herself that the medal was
still there. Several days elapsed, during which the patient grew
worse; one night, whilst lying awake racked with suffering, he
perceived a brilliant light around his bed, though the rest of the
room was enveloped in darkness. Greatly astonished, he
succeeded, in spite of his weakness, in rising and turning up the
gas, to discover if possible, the cause of this mysterious light.
Finding none, he returned to bed, and a few minutes after, he
perceived that the luminous rays escaped from the medal. He
then took it in his hands, and kept it there the remainder of the
night. As soon as the Sisters' rising bell rang (which was four
o'clock), he called the infirmarian, and begged him to tell the
Sister he desired Baptism. The chaplain was immediately
informed. "Impossible!" he exclaimed, for having had frequent
conversations with the sick man, he was well aware of his
sentiments, and could scarcely believe him in earnest.
Nevertheless, he obeyed the summons, and finding the patient
really disposed to profit by his ministry, he administered the Last
Sacraments, and shortly after receiving which the poor man
died, blessing God and the Blessed Virgin for the graces
bestowed upon him.

CONVERSION OF A PROTESTANT GIRL.

New Orleans, (United States).

A poor young Protestant girl, brought to our hospital to be
treated for a grave malady, had so great a horror of our holy
religion, that at the very sight of a Catholic near her, she acted
like one possessed. The presence of a Sister was especially
irritating, and one day she even went so far as to spit in the
Sister's face, but the latter, nothing dismayed, and ever hoping
that the God of all mercy would change this wolf into a lamb,
continued her kind attentions, the more disrespectful her
patient, the more gentle and considerate the Sister. The latter
was at last inspired with the thought of slipping a Miraculous
Medal between the two mattresses; she acted upon the
inspiration, and the following night the Immaculate Mary's
image became an instrument of salvation and happiness to a
guilty soul. Pitching and tossing upon her bed by reason of a
high fever, the patient, in some unaccountable manner, found
the medal, and the Sister's astonishment next morning at seeing
her clasping it in her hands, and covering it with kisses, was
second only to that she experienced on perceiving the
wonderful transformation grace had wrought in this poor
creature's soul. A supernatural light had revealed to her the sad
state of her conscience; her criminal life filled her with horror,
and, penetrated with regret for the past, she sighed only for
holy Baptism. After the necessary instruction, she was baptized;
and, during the remainder of her sickness, which was long and
tedious, her patience and fervor never faltered. She persevered
in these edifying sentiments, until a happy death placed the seal
upon the graces she had received through the intercession of
Mary Immaculate.

CONVERSION OF A PROTESTANT.

New Orleans (United States).

A Protestant gentleman had spent four years at the hospital,
sometimes in one hall, sometimes another. As his malady had
not been very serious, no one had considered it necessary to
speak to him concerning his soul. However, when his condition
became more aggravated, the Sister, after invoking the Blessed
Virgin's assistance, told him the physician considered his case
dangerous, and she thought he ought to receive Baptism,
without which no one could be saved. He listened attentively,
then turning to her, said: "Sister, if I were to ask you to become
a Protestant, would you comply with my request?" "No," was
the decided answer. "Well, then," he continued, "rest assured
that it is just as useless for you to attempt persuading me to
become a Catholic."
In spite of this positive refusal, she let no occasion pass
without enlightening him, were it ever so little, upon some of
the truths of religion. One day, showing him a Miraculous Medal,
she told him he would confer a great favor on her by reciting
the little invocation: "O Mary! conceived without sin, pray for us
who have recourse to thee!" "What, Sister! a Catholic prayer!
that is impossible, I cannot!" She said no more, but slipped the
medal under his pillow, and there it remained untouched for
several days, during which time she redoubled her attentions to
the physical necessities of the poor patient, who gradually grew
weaker. At last, one evening she said to him: "Well, Henry, are
you not going to do what I asked you?" "Yes, Sister, I most
earnestly desire to become a Catholic." The chaplain was called
immediately; he had barely time to administer Baptism and
Extreme Unction, ere the dying man's regenerated soul was
carried by angels to the abode of the blessed.

CONVERSION OF A YOUNG METHODIST.

St. Louis (United States), 1865.

A young man, a Methodist, arrived at the hospital in an
extremely weak condition. The physician at once pronounced
his case hopeless, and said he had but a few days to live.
Consequently, the Sister's first care was for his soul. Questioning
him, she soon learned that he believed neither in the efficacy
nor necessity of Baptism, and all her efforts to induce him to
receive this Sacrament were unavailing. He had no desire for
any conversation on the subject, and his invariable reply to all
her arguments was: "I believe in Jesus, that suffices; I am sure
of being saved." The Sister redoubled her prayers, for in them
lay her only hope, and time was precious. A good priest visited
him every day; once, after a much longer visit than usual, he
told the Sister on leaving the room it was impossible to do
anything with that man, unless God wrought a miracle in his
favor, and they must entreat Him to do so. The poor man
persisted, indeed, in refusing all spiritual succor, though
receiving gratefully the attentions bestowed upon his body. His
strength diminished day by day, and he calmly awaited death;
one thought alone disquieted him, that of never seeing his
mother and dying afar from her. Perceiving himself on the brink
of the grave, he called one of his companions whom he begged
to be with him at that fearful moment, and write the particulars
of it to his mother. Whilst he made this request, the Sister
slipped a Miraculous Medal under his pillow, confidently
believing that Mary would not let this soul entrusted to her
perish; yet he was already in his agony. Two Sisters watched
beside his bed till midnight, when obliged to retire, they left him
in charge of an infirmarian and the young man who had
promised to be with him at the hour of death. Apparently he
had not more than half an hour to live, so next morning when
the infirmarian came to meet the Sister, she was prepared for
news of the patient's death, but to her astonishment the
infirmarian exclaimed: "Come Sister, come see him, he is
restored to life!" He then told her that the patient, to all
appearances, had been dead an hour; that the friend and
himself had rendered all the last duties to the body, having
washed and dressed and prepared it for the grave; then the
young man went to bed, and he alone remained with the
corpse. After watching near it some time, he approached to
bandage the jaws, but what was his fright whilst thus engaged,
to see the dead man open his eyes! The Sister heard no more,
but eagerly hastened to the spot, and found the man still
breathing. With a great effort he said: "Oh! what a blessing that
you have come!" In reply, she exhorted him to receive Baptism,
and told him that he was indebted to the Blessed Virgin for this
prolongation of his life. "I wish to be baptized," said he, and
when the Sister replied that the priest would come, "Oh! that
will be too late!" was his pitiful answer. The other patients now
joined their entreaties to his, and the Sister, after reciting aloud
the acts of faith, hope, charity and contrition, which the dying
man endeavored to repeat, with hands clasped and eyes raised
to Heaven, baptized him. Whilst the regenerating waters flowed
upon his soul, transports of love and thanksgiving escaped his
lips. Half an hour later, he closed his eyes, never to open them
here below. All that the infirmarian related of his first death,
was confirmed in the most positive manner, by the Protestant
friend who had assisted in preparing him for the grave.

CONVERSION OF M. F——

St. Louis, (United States).

A Protestant named F—— was brought to our hospital in an
advanced stage of consumption. He detested the Catholic
religion most heartily, and received the Sisters' services with
extreme repugnance. His physical strength diminished
perceptibly, but his mind retained its energy and clearness. By
degrees, the odor escaping from his decayed lungs, became so
intolerable that all abandoned him. M. Burke, a missionary priest
and the Sisters, being the only persons who had the courage to
go near him, and pay any attention to his comfort. Yet neither
priest nor Sister dare mention religion. They contented
themselves with putting a Miraculous Medal under his pillow,
and invoking her, who so often deigns to display her power in
favor of those who deny it. She did not delay in granting their
petition. A few days later, as the Protestant minister left the
ward, after making his usual distribution of tracts, the sick man
said to the Sister, "Sister, it is done; I am converted." "Ah," said
the latter interiorly, "our good Mother has accomplished her
work." And it was indeed true; for the patient requested a
priest, was instructed, and in a few days received the
Sacraments of Baptism, the Holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction,
with inexpressible fervor. The very expression of his
countenance was changed; the happiness that inundated his
heart beaming from every feature. "Ah!" said he, "my sufferings
are great, but I feel that I am going to Heaven; the truth has
made me free." In these happy dispositions, he expired,
promising that in heaven he would pray for all who had been
instruments of his conversion.
 CONVERSION OF AN UNBAPTIZED PATIENT.

St. Louis, (United States).

A patient brought to the hospital in a hopeless condition,
openly manifested his hatred of Catholicity. Yet, as he was in
imminent danger of death, the Sister, profiting by a moment in
which he seemed a little better disposed than usual, ventured to
ask him if he would be baptized; he answered roughly, "No, that
he scarcely believed in baptism, and not at all in Catholic
baptism, that in case of his recovery, perhaps he would receive
baptism by immersion, and become a member of some church,
but that would never be the Catholic Church." "At any rate,"
added he, "I am not going to torment myself now about such
things." The poor Sister having no other resource than the
Blessed Virgin, and seeing that the young man approached his
end, stealthily slipped a medal under his pillow. Next morning it
was picked up by the infirmarian, who, thinking the Sister had
dropped it accidentally, was about to return it, but the patient
opposed him; the little image pleased his fancy, and he wanted
to keep it himself. To quiet him, the infirmarian was obliged to
ask Sister if the patient might have it. The request was granted.
Towards evening some one came to the Sister with a message
from the patient, he wished to see her. "Sister," said he as soon
as she approached, "you have told me I could not be saved
without Baptism; let me be baptized, for I wish to be saved."
Filled with joy at this news, she began to instruct and prepare
him for the ceremony. It took place next morning, and during
the course of the day, this soul, now the child of God, went to
repose in the bosom of its celestial Father, to bless and thank
Him for all eternity for His mercies.

CONVERSION OF A YOUNG GIRL.

Buffalo (United States).

 A young Protestant girl about twenty years of age came to
the hospital, covered from head to foot with a disgusting itch,
which the physician pronounced incurable. The Sister who
dressed her sores, told her that the Blessed Virgin could obtain
her recovery, and would do so, if she wore the medal and relied
upon the Blessed Virgin's intercession. The poor girl knowing
her case was deemed hopeless by the physician, answered
bluntly: "I do not believe in your Blessed Virgin, and I want no
medal." "Very well," replied the Sister, "then you may keep your
sores." A few days after she asked for a medal herself, put it on
her neck, received instruction and was baptized, and in a short
time she left the hospital perfectly cured, greatly to the
astonishment of the physicians, who had all pronounced her
malady incurable.

CONVERSION OF A SINNER.

Hospital of Gratz (Austria).

An artist whose life had been far from edifying, was an
inmate of our hospital. One morning the Sister was greatly
surprised at his expressing a desire to confess. Perceiving her
astonishment, he said: "This morning, Sister, the chapel door
was slightly open, and from my bed I could see the Blessed
Virgin's statue." (It was that of the Immaculate Conception.) "It
appealed so strongly to my heart, that I have had no peace
since. I must put my conscience in order." He did go to
confession, not once, but several times, and he often expressed
great regret for his past life. "Ah!" he would say, "what a life I
have led, and how sad the state of my soul when Mary came to
my aid." When asked what he supposed had attracted Mary's
compassion, he answered: "I was merely looking at the statue,
no thought of religion was in my mind; when suddenly,
recollections of my past life filled me with fear, and Mary at the
same time inspired me with a horror for sin." In this instance,
repentance and reparation were the immediate consequences of
the Immaculate Mary's merciful and maternal glance.

CONVERSION OF A GREEK SCHISMATIC.

Hospital of Gratz (Austria.)

A Greek schismatic, attacked by a mortal malady, was

brought to the hospital. He declared his intention of remaining
attached to the errors in which he had been educated, and the
Sisters, seeing his determination, entrusted him to the Blessed
Virgin, consecrating him to her by placing under his pillow a
medal, which for him proved truly miraculous. One day, a
Franciscan Father visited the sick, and the young man asked the
Sister to bring the good Father to see him. He conversed a long
time with the latter, but manifested no intention of becoming a
Catholic. Meanwhile, he grew worse, and, one day, when taken
with a hemorrhage, he asked for this Father, "because," said he,
"I wish to embrace the Catholic religion." The Sister was
surprised, for she had said nothing to persuade him, but the
Blessed Virgin had accomplished her work without earthly
assistance. He confessed and made his abjuration; he even
requested the Reverend Father to announce, in a loud voice, to
the other patients that he entered the Church of his own free
will. His attacks of vomiting made the priest hesitate to give him
the Holy Viaticum, but he insisted so strongly, and had so
ardent a desire to receive, that the good God permitted these
spells of vomiting to become less frequent, so that he could
make his first and last Communion at the same time, which he
did with inexpressible fervor and consolation. Interrogated on
the subject of his conversion, he answered: "For a long time I
felt that everything earthly was of little value, and I sought for
the true and lasting." During the delirium of his last moments,
he spoke continually of a white robe. The grace of Baptism had
clothed his soul in spotless raiment, and to Mary's intercession
was he indebted for it.

CONVERSION OF AN APOSTATE.

Austria, 1866.
In one of the prisons confided to the care of the Daughters
of Charity, was a young man belonging to a respectable Catholic
family, whose shame and disgrace he had become. After a short
stay, he fell sick, and his condition necessitated removal to the
infirmary; faithful to his principles of impiety, he absolutely
refused all spiritual succor, and whenever he saw one of the
chaplains pass, he either turned away his head or concealed it
under the bedclothes. All the Sisters begged the Superioress to
make one last effort for his soul. She paid him a visit, and was
received politely, but to rid himself of her importunity, he
avowed himself a Protestant, and related how he came to
forsake the Faith, after making the acquaintance of several very
bad characters, his companions in crime and his counselors in
advising him to become a Protestant. The Sister asked him if he
felt no remorse for such conduct, but he became enraged and
exclaimed aloud: "I am a Protestant, and I wish to live and die a
Protestant!" Seeing it impossible to do anything with the
miserable creature, she interiorly recommended him to the
Refuge of Sinners, and merely asked him to accept the medal
she offered, to wear it and sometimes kiss it. He seemed quite
pleased to get rid of her so easily, and placing all her confidence
in Mary, she withdrew.
The poor man passed a sleepless night, our Blessed Mother
touched his heart, and very early next morning he sent word to
the Sister that he wanted a priest to receive his solemn
profession of Faith, in reparation of his scandalous apostasy and
crimes. But his reputation was such that the prison chaplain
doubted his sincerity, and would not go to him except upon
repeated solicitations of the Superioress. He was deeply affected
at witnessing the change grace had wrought in this soul, and
the consequent compunction with which the prodigal confessed
his sins. The dying man then made a public abjuration of his
errors, and expired a few minutes after, in the grace of God and
under the protecting smile of Mary.

CONVERSION OF A SOLDIER AT THE HOSPITAL OF CAVA.

Cava, (Italy), 1866.

A young soldier suffering from disease of the chest, was
brought to the Military Hospital of Cava. His first question was
to ask if the Sisters had charge of that hospital; on receiving an
affirmative answer, he said to himself: "They will bother me
about going to confession, so I shall call myself a Jew to get rid
of them," and Jew he was designated on the card of admission.
Perceiving the serious nature of his malady, the Sisters to whose
especial care he had been confided, visited him as often as
possible. One of them offered him a medal of the Immaculate
Conception; regarding it with a smile of pity, he said: "I accept
it, because it would not be polite to refuse, but believe me, I
consider it a mere plaything and nothing more."
Every time the chaplain visited the hall, to speak a word of
consolation to one and another, the poor Jew covered his head.
The Sister sometimes ventured a few words to him about the
good God, but he would never reply, and her approach was the
signal for his feigning sleep. One evening when he appeared
worse than usual, two Sisters went to see him just before they
retired for the night. On hearing them approach, he exclaimed:
"O Sister, a priest!" The chaplain was immediately summoned to
his bedside, the poor dying man repeating all the while: "A
priest! a priest!" As soon as the chaplain came, the patient
made his profession of Faith in a very audible voice; he then
confessed, and just as the priest, in administering Extreme
Unction, was anointing the ears, the penitent rendered his soul
to God, leaving us the consoling hope that it had found mercy in
its Maker's sight.

CONVERSION OF A WOUNDED SOLDIER.

Palermo (Italy), 1866.

In 1866, at the Military Hospital of Palermo, was a poor man
who had just undergone the amputation of his left arm. His
impiety was so great, that the Sister felt constrained to remove
a large crucifix that had been placed near his bed, for he
covered it with invectives. The miserable man's bodily infirmities
were as hopeless as his spiritual, yet no one could succeed in
inducing him to give any attention to his soul, or even to listen
to a word about the good God. What could be done in such an
extremity? The poor Sister was in great distress, when one day
whilst dressing his wounds she was inspired to slip a medal of
the Immaculate Conception between the bandages around the
stump of the amputated member. Next morning, on witnessing
the great change that had been wrought in her patient's
spiritual condition during the night, she was less astonished
than happy, for she had confidently relied upon the Blessed
Virgin. He asked for a priest, who came immediately; he
confessed, publicly repaired the scandals of his past life, and
received with piety the Holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction. His
few remaining days were spent in blessing that God who had
shown him such boundless mercy. "Oh! how good God is!" did
he repeat incessantly to his companions, "I have committed
manifold sins and He has pardoned me all!"

CURE OF AN AUSTRIAN OFFICER.

Hospital of Gratz (Austria), 1867.

 An officer in the garrison at Gratz, suffered from a serious
wound in the right arm. He was brought to the general hospital,
that he might be more conveniently under the especial
treatment of M. Rzehazeh, a very eminent surgeon. The latter
exhausted all his skill, but in vain, and after a few weeks he saw
the necessity of amputation to save the officer's life. Learning
the doctor's decision, the patient was deeply grieved, and his
oppressed heart sought refuge in piety. He who had never
spoken of God, who had accepted a proffered medal only from
courtesy, now appeared to experience a genuine satisfaction
when the Sisters told him they would implore the Blessed Virgin
in his behalf. During the few days immediately preceding the
operation, he felt inspired with a great confidence in his medal,
and frequently repeated the invocation engraven upon it: "O
Mary! conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to
thee!" The danger was now imminent, and the amputation,
which must not be delayed, was to take place on the morrow.
One of the Sisters, perceiving that the young officer's
confidence expressed itself in continual prayer, suggested that
evening that he lay the medal upon his afflicted arm, and let it
remain all night, a suggestion which was joyfully received. Next
morning she hastened to ascertain her patient's condition, and
get the medal. He had spent a quiet night, his sufferings being
less severe than usual; and the Sister, whilst attributing his
improvement to the anodynes prescribed, understood full well
that the precious medal had also been instrumental in procuring
relief, and that Mary had looked compassionately upon him; but
she did not yet realize the full extent of the blessing. The
surgeon came a few hours after, and whilst awaiting his
assistants, he carefully examined the wounded arm, he touched
it, he probed it, and to his great astonishment, perceived that
amputation was not necessary. The other doctors on arriving,
confirmed his opinion of this surprising change. The officer was
mute with happiness, and not until he found himself alone with
the chief surgeon did he impart to the latter, as a secret, his
opinion as to the cause of this wonderful change. On leaving
him, the surgeon (notwithstanding the injunction of secrecy),
could not refrain from saying to the Sister: "I believe the Sisters
of Charity have engaged the good God in this case."
The officer's arm was entirely healed; a few weeks later he
left the hospital, taking with him the precious medal as a
memento of gratitude and love for Mary Immaculate.

CONVERSION OF M. N—— AT LIMA.

Letter from a Daughter of Charity in Lima (Peru), 1876:

M. N—— had been suffering a long time from hypertrophy of

the heart, the physicians having vainly exhausted all the
resources of their skill, were forced to tell the family that he was
beyond the power of human aid, and should look to the state of
his soul, sad news for this father of a family, and a man devoid
of religion. In vain did his relatives and friends, with all possible
delicacy, endeavor to turn his thoughts to religion and induce
him to receive the Sacraments; he would hear nothing on the
subject; a priest, who was an intimate friend of the family,
attempted to second their efforts, but he met with no better
success; the sick man became exasperated at all allusions to
religion, he blasphemed everything relating to it, sparing not
even the Blessed Virgin.
One day, after listening to an account of the conversion of
M.——, of Lima, our patient's relatives expressed a desire of
having recourse to similar means for their dear one's
conversion. "It is very simple," said the person addressed, "you
have only to ask Sister N., of St. Anne's Hospital for a medal,
she got one for M. Pierre, she will not refuse you." One of his
nephews immediately repaired to the hospital and returned with
a medal. A niece offered it to him; "Mamma," said she, "sends
you this medal and begs that you will wear it." "Certainly," was
the reply, "I will wear it for her sake, but I want everybody to
understand that I have no notion of confessing."
He spent a quiet night, and was quite pleased next morning
to find himself somewhat better. "Euloge," said he, to one of his
nephews, "what preparation should a person make who intends
taking a long journey?" Euloge, who thought he certainly must
be in a dream to hear his uncle speak thus, inquired to what
journey he alluded. "Ah!" was the answer, "I speak of Eternity."
The poor young man, delighted at such a happy change, replied
that the best preparation was to put one's conscience in order
by making a good confession. "I will do so, send me a priest,"
said his uncle. As soon as the clergyman arrived and heard his
confession, he administered the Holy Viaticum. All the assistants
were overcome with emotion when they saw the sick man,
almost in his last agony, supported by his children, to receive on
bended knee, the God who had just pardoned all the sins of his
life. A few moments after, he blessed his children, gave them his
parting counsel, and died in sentiments of piety rivaling his past
irreligion. His family was deeply grateful to Mary Immaculate for
this token of her favor.

CONVERSION OF AN UNBELIEVER.

Letter from a Sister of Charity in Lima, Peru, 1877:

An old lady whose youth had been pious, having lost her
Faith by reading bad books, had not frequented the Sacraments
for thirty-five years. The Sister with whom she lived was carried
to her grave, after an illness of only five days, and it was natural
to suppose that the Christian death of one so dear would have
softened her heart; on the contrary, it embittered her the more,
and she vented her grief in blasphemies. A Sister of Charity
witnessing this scandal, and not being able to soothe the poor
creature, was inspired with the thought of giving her a medal of
the Blessed Virgin; the old lady accepted, and wore it for several
days, during which she appeared greatly pre-occupied, and
somewhat less confident in her scepticism; but having yielded to
a diabolical suggestion, that urged her to lay the medal aside,
doubtless because grace tormented her conscience with keen
remorse whilst the medal was on her person, she fell back into
an habitual hardness and melancholy that she styled peace. The
Sister perceived this, and inquired if she still wore the medal; on
receiving a negative answer, our good Sister represented the
danger to which her soul was exposed without it, and the old
lady promised to put it on again. Many prayers were offered up
for her, and at the end of fifteen days, the Sister, who was
greatly interested in this poor woman's soul, paid her another
visit; perceiving no change in her sentiments, she inquired
immediately if the medal had been resumed. The poor woman,
who was very uncouth, dared not speak, but made a sign with
her head which revealed all. "What have you done with it, and
where is it?" asked the Sister. The old lady replied that it was in
her wardrobe, and she had made several ineffectual efforts to
put it on again. The Sister understands that this miserable soul
is under some diabolical influence, holding her aloof from aught
calculated to reclaim her to God; she feels that now is the
moment for prompt action, and in a tone of severity, says: "Very
well, since you will not wear the medal, I abandon you entirely."
These words produced the desired effect; the old lady ran to the
wardrobe, and taking up the medal, put it around her neck this
time to remain. Soon experiencing the sweet and powerful
influence of Mary Immaculate, so justly called the Gate of
Heaven, in a few days she assisted at the Holy Sacrifice and
listened to the instruction, and from that time was entirely
changed; she confessed and made her Easter Communion, and
the deepest compunction and gratitude are now the abiding
sentiments of her heart. She wished to remain at the church
door, feeling herself unworthy to penetrate further into the
sacred edifice, and it was with the greatest difficulty her friends
could prevail upon her to accept a place nearer the altar. She
never ceases to thank God and Mary; and she told the Sister
 that, from the moment the medal was on her neck, she knew
neither peace nor rest till she had returned to her duties, so
great are the power and love of that Virgin who is the sovereign
Terror of demons.

CONVERSION OF A SCANDALOUS SINNER.

Moirans, 1877.
The Superioress of the Sisters of Charity at Moirans, relates as
follows a very consoling conversion, redounding to the glory of Mary
Immaculate:

"The most important manufacturer of our village, who

employed from four to five hundred men and women, has just
died, and contrary to all expectations, his death was penitent
and consoling. He had been impious and immoral, and the
profligate characters in his workshops were a curse to the
surrounding country. His rudeness was such, that everybody
trembled before him. His wife and two daughters, pious
Christians, silently bewailed his misconduct; and as for myself, I
had barely sufficient acquaintance with him to render justifiable
my calling upon him in any urgent need.
"One morning I received a message in great haste; this
person was very sick and wished to see me. I went at once, but
the disease was of so serious a character and its progress so
rapid, that I saw the poor man on the verge of the grave ere I
could find a means of turning his thoughts to eternity. I had told
his wife and daughters to give him a medal of the Immaculate
Conception, but he refused to accept it, and we were reduced to
the necessity of stealthily putting it under his pillow. On the
third day, as I was about to leave, after rendering him all the
care and attention in my power, he wished, in the effusion of his
gratitude, to shake hands with me. I profited by the opportunity
to tell him how much pleasure he could give me by consenting
to receive the curé, who had just come to see him. He made a
sign in the affirmative and with a smile that very rarely parted
his lips. We went out of the room, leaving him alone with the
priest, whom he had welcomed cordially. In half an hour the
latter returned blessing God, for the sick man had made his
confession. He now consented to wear the medal, and that
evening he received Extreme Unction, but not the Holy
Viaticum, as he had spells of suffocation. I asked his wife to let
his employees see him, that they might be edified at their
patron's conduct. The request was granted, but not many came,
as the workshops were closed at this hour; those who did come,
prayed a few minutes beside him. Next morning his family was
greatly rejoiced at his apparent physical improvement, but their
hopes were deceived, and very soon his last agony began. He
was recommended to the prayers of the parish; the whole
village manifested a touching interest in his condition, and his
employees all came to see him. The throng around the dying
man was renewed every quarter of an hour, and we recited the
Chaplet aloud, a most appropriate devotion for this occasion,
the last moments of one whom the Blessed Virgin had snatched
from eternal misery. Amidst this concert of praises to Mary, he
expired. The Christian Brothers, to whom he had been very
hostile, willingly aided us in rendering to him the last duties of
religion."
 CHAPTER VII.

PROGRESS OF THE DEVOTION TO

MARY
CROWNED BY THE DEFINITION OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.—I. OUR
LADY OF LA SALETTE.—II. THE CHILDREN OF MARY.—III. THE DEFINITION OF
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.

I.—Our Lady of La Salette.—1846.

In her first manifestation to Sister Catherine, July 19, 1830, the
Immaculate Virgin announced the disasters which threatened
France; grief was depicted upon her countenance, tears stifled her
voice, she earnestly recommended prayer to appease the wrath of
God.
Sixteen years later, this Mother of mercy, appearing to two little
shepherd children upon one of the summits of the Alps, repeated, in
a most solemn manner, the same warnings and the same counsels.
The first apparition remains in obscurity, but a knowledge of the
second has been spread throughout the world, and with most
consoling results. The miracle of La Salette has greatly increased
devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and given Christians a clearer idea of
the important duties of penance and prayer, which, in reality, are the
embodiment of all practical piety.
We quote the best authenticated account of La Salette, that of
the Abbé Rousselot, who himself received it from the mouths of the
children.
 "Two peasant children, Mélanie Mathieu, aged fourteen
years, and Maximin Giraud, aged eleven, both simple and
ignorant, as might naturally be expected of their age and
condition, were together upon the mountain of La Salette,
which overlooks a village where they were at service under
different masters. Their acquaintance was very slight, their first
meeting having been only the day before the occurrence we are
about to relate. When the Angelus announced the hour of noon,
they went to soak their hard bread in the water of a spring.
After this rural repast, they descended a little farther, and laying
down their crooks beside another spring, then dry, they seated
themselves a slight distance apart, upon a few stones which had
been piled up there, and went to sleep.
"It was Saturday, September 19th, 1846, and eve of the day
on which fell the Feast of Our Lady's Seven Dolors.
"'After taking the cows to water, and eating our lunch,' says
Maximin, 'we went to sleep beside a stream, and very near a
spring which was dry. Mélanie awoke first, and aroused me to
hunt our cows. We crossed the stream, and going in an
opposite direction, saw our cows lying down on the other side,
and not very far off.'
"'I came down first,' says Mélanie; 'when I was within five or
six steps of the stream, I perceived a light like that of the sun,
but even more brilliant and not the color of sunlight, and I said
to Maximin: Come quick to see the bright light down here.'
'Where is it?' inquired Maximin, coming towards me. 'I pointed
with my finger in the direction of the spring, and he stood still
when he saw it. Then the light seemed to open, and in the
midst of it appeared a Lady, she was seated, and her head
resting upon her hands.' 'We were both frightened,' continues
Maximin, 'and Mélanie, with an exclamation of terror, let fall her
crook.' 'Keep your crook,' said I, 'as for me, I am going to keep
mine. If it does anything to us, I will give it a blow with my
crook.' And the Lady arose. She crossed her arms, and said to
us: 'Come to me, my children, do not be afraid. I am here to tell
you something very important.' All our fears vanished, we went
towards her and crossed the stream, and the Lady advancing a
few steps, we met at the place where Mélanie and I had fallen
asleep. The Lady was between us, and she wept all the time
she was talking. 'I saw her tears flow,' adds Mélanie.
"'If my people,' said she, 'do not humble themselves, I shall
be forced to let them feel the weight of my Son's uplifted arm. I
have stayed it heretofore, but it now presses so heavily that I
can scarcely support it much longer. And all the while I am
suffering thus for you, I must pray without ceasing if I wish to
prevent your abandonment by my Son. And, moreover, you do
not appreciate it.'
"'In vain will you pray, in vain will you strive, never can you
recompense what I have undergone for you. I have given you
six days of the week wherein to work, the seventh I reserved
for myself, and even that is denied me! It is this which weighs
down my Son's arm.'
"'Even those who drive carts must curse, and mingle my
Son's name with their oaths.'
"'These are the two things that weigh down my Son's arm.'
"'If the harvest fails, it is for no other reason than your sins.
I tried last year to make you see this in the failure of the potato
crop. You took no account of it. On the contrary, when you
found the potatoes rotted, you swore and mingled my Son's
name with your maledictions. The potatoes will continue to rot,
at Christmas there will be none.'
"I did not know what this meant," said Mélanie, "for in our
part of the country we do not call them potatoes. I asked
Maximin what they were, and the Lady said to me:
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