PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

settlements arose in Malabar, and when the Portuguese
broke into this mare clausum, in 1497-8, they found a
belt of "Moorish" coast towns, from Magadoxo to
Quiloa, controlling both the Indian and the inland
African trades, as Ibn Batuta had found in 1330.
By Edrisi's day, moreover, the steady persistence and
self-evident results of Arabic overland exploration had
become recognised by a sort of "Traveller's Doctorate."
It was not enough for the highest knowledge to study
the Koran, and the Sunna, and the Greek philosophers
at home; for a perfect education, a man must have
travelled at least through the length and breadth of
Islam. All the successors of Edrisi, in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, shew this mingling of science and
religion, of practical and speculative energy.
Tradition still governed Moslem thought, but there had
come into being a sort of half-acknowledged appendix
to tradition, made up of real observations on men and
things. And in these observations, geographical interest
was the main factor.
The Life of Al Heravy of Herat (1173-1215), the
"Doctor Ubiquitus" of Islam in the age of the Crusades,
gives us a picture of another Massoudy. The friend of
the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, the "first man among
Christians," Heravy seems able in his own person to
break down the partition wall of religious feud by the
common interest of science. In 1192 he was offered the
patronage of the Crusading princes, and Richard Cœur
de Lion begged for the favour of an interview, and
begged in vain. Heravy, who had been on one of his
exploring journeys, angrily refused to see the King
whose men had broken his quiet and wasted his time.
Before his death, he had run over the world (men said)
from China to the Pyrenees and from Abyssinia to the
Danube, "scribbling his name on every wall," and his
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