The mass of knowledge the Norwegians had acquired about the northern regions, before their time entirely unknown, was to a great extent forgotten again; and at the close of the Middle Ages all that remained was the communication with Iceland and the knowledge of the neighbouring seas, besides the continuance of the connection between the White Sea and Norway; while the voyage to Greenland, to say nothing of America, was forgotten, at any rate by the mass of the people.
The development of humanity often proceeds with a strangely lavish waste of forces. How many needless plans and unsuccessful voyages, how much toil and how many human lives would not a knowledge of the Norwegians' extensive discoveries have been able to save in succeeding ages? How very different, too, might have been the development of many things, if by the chances of an unlucky destiny the decline of Norwegian navigation had not come just at a time when maritime enterprise received such a powerful impetus among more southern nations, especially the Portuguese, then the Spaniards, later the French, the English and the Dutch. By their great discoveries it was these nations who introduced a new era in the history of navigation, and also in that of polar voyages. But if Norwegian seamanship had still been at its height at that time, then certainly the Scandinavians of Greenland would once more have sought the already discovered countries on the west and south-west, and the Greenland settlements might then have formed an important base for new undertakings, whereby a new period of prosperity for Norwegian navigation and Norwegian enterprise might have been introduced. This was not to be; it was only reserved for the Norwegians to be the people who showed the way to the other nations out from the coasts and over the great oceans.
THE NORTH IN MAPS AND GEOGRAPHICAL WORKS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
At the beginning of the Middle Ages and down to the fifteenth century the cartography of the Greeks, which had reached its summit in the work of Ptolemy, was entirely unknown in Europe; while the early Greek conceptions (those of the Ionian school) of the disc of the earth or "œcumene" as a circle (called by the Romans "orbis terrarum," the circle of the earth) round the Mediterranean--and externally surrounded by the universal ocean--had persisted through the late Latin authors, and probably also through Roman maps. At the same time Parmenides' doctrine of zones (cf. vol. i. pp. 12, 123) remained prevalent owing to its enunciation by Macrobius, and maps exhibiting this doctrine were common until the sixteenth century. These two conceptions became the foundation of the learned view and representation of the world, and consequently also of the North, throughout the greater part of the Middle Ages. It was the age of speculation, not of observation. The Scandinavians were the first innovators in geography, by going straight to nature as it is, unfettered by dogmas. The Italian and Catalan sailors followed later with their portulans (sailing-books) and compass-charts.