[Footnote 6: **Missing.** Please see the Transcriber's Note
at the foot of the text.]




PREFACE


This volume aims at giving an account, based throughout upon original
sources, of the progress of geographical knowledge and enterprise in
Christendom throughout the Middle Ages, down to the middle or even the
end of the fifteenth century, as well as a life of Prince Henry the
Navigator, who brought this movement of European Expansion within sight
of its greatest successes. That is, as explained in Chapter I., it has
been attempted to treat Exploration as one continuous thread in the
story of Christian Europe from the time of the conversion of the Empire;
and to treat the life of Prince Henry as the turning-point, the central
epoch in a development of many centuries: this life, accordingly, has
been linked as closely as possible with what went before and prepared
for it; one third of the text, at least, has been occupied with the
history of the preparation of the earlier time, and the difference
between our account of the eleventh-and fifteenth-century Discovery, for
instance, will be found to be chiefly one of less and greater detail.
This difference depends, of course, on the prominence in the later time
of a figure of extraordinary interest and force, who is the true hero in
the drama of the Geographical Conquest of the Outer World that starts
from Western Christendom. The interest that centres round Henry is
somewhat clouded by the dearth of complete knowledge of his life; but