CHAPTER IV

ISLAMITES AND ITALIANS

When Egypt had become part of the Byzantine dominions, all interest in the Nile sources had died away, and men’s minds were mainly centred on religious controversies of greater or less violence. Greek Christianity penetrated to Abyssinia and south of Abyssinia to countries not far from the north end of Lake Rudolf. Most of the Nubian kingdoms became nominally Christian, and Christianity was the religion of the people on the Nile banks as far south as the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. It is thought by the missionaries of the White Fathers’ Mission to Uganda that the sign of the cross and the idea of baptism, with one or two other practices found in the old heathen religions of Unyoro and Uganda, may have reached those countries from Abyssinia. Greek and Arab Christians in the first six centuries of the Christian era certainly penetrated to the East African coast, but after the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire all mundane knowledge began to decay. Christianity inspired a contempt for science, and the only ideas of geography which floated about the world were connected with the wanderings of propagandists or pilgrimages to the shrines of saints. Arab enterprise, moreover, in these sad centuries suffered a curious eclipse. Far to the south, in Zambezia, no doubt the invasion of the country by the earlier and later sections of the Bantu Negroes brought about the destruction of Sabæan power; and the somewhat degenerate successors of the Sabæans from the south coast of Arabia only occupied the coast emporiums dotted along the littoral from Somaliland to Sofala.

Then came one of the great landmarks of the world’s history, a movement productive of a little good and some harm to civilisation. Christianity had first been organised as a socialistic religion, grafting on to the beautiful and indisputable precepts of its Founder the reaction of poor, ignorant, starved, and enslaved people against the unmoral philosophy, unequal wealth, and excessive materialism of the time. It then grew to be a somewhat dismal faith, taking no heed of the beauty of this world and of mundane opportunities for happiness; and above all it waged an active warfare with sexuality, not merely curbing immorality, but (wisely or unwisely) opposing polygamy and advocating celibacy. The Arab and the North African were not ripe for such a faith, and Judaism had already biassed them against the polytheistic tendencies of Greek Christianity. Muhammad, the prophet of western Arabia, founded on a basis of phallic worship and animistic belief the third great Semitic religion--Islam. His teaching was a direct challenge to Christianity, and soon became iconoclastic in every sense of the word. Though the Persian, Syrian, and Iberian elements of the Arab Empire for a time revived and perpetuated in somewhat grotesque aspect the science of Greece, the art of Persia, and the lore of India, the Muhammadan religion sealed most parts of Africa to European and Christian research. It is true, however, that the conquests of Islam enabled Arabs to penetrate further into the interior of tropical Africa than before, though from the dawn of civilisation they had been the most constant explorers of the eastern part of that continent.

The Arabs began to mention names connected with the Niger and the western Sudan to the geographers of Italy and Sicily. Under the impulse of Islamic, Persian, and Arab colonies the east coast of Africa and the north coast of Madagascar came partially under Muhammadan rule in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Arabs there carrying on almost continuously the commercial enterprise founded by their predecessors and brothers, the Phœnicians and Sabæans. Invasion after invasion crossed from Arabia, and passed over the lowlands surrounding Abyssinia to the central Sudan; or higher up, through Egypt, to Mauritania. But the Arabs who crossed the Nile in the latitudes of Khartum and Assuan made no attempts to follow the White Nile, the Blue Nile, or the Bahr-al-Ghazal to their sources,--left in fact all the Nile basin above the confluence of the Blue and White rivers absolutely untouched and unexplored. Egypt itself came under Arab rule in 640 A.D., and subsequently formed an independent principality under the Fatimite Khalifs.

The Crusades brought French, Germans, and English, Aragonese and Flemings to the Delta of the Nile in more or less disastrous expeditions against the Saracen power,--a power which was fast becoming that of the Turk. A curious relic of these crusading days in the Nile Delta is or was (for the present writer is not aware if they still exist) several Spanish (originally Aragonese) monasteries, which were established with the consent of the Muhammadan rulers of Egypt in order to mitigate the woes of Christian captives and to arrange terms for their release.

[Illustration: AN ARAB TRADER (MASKATI).]

Venice, however,--which had somewhat held aloof from the religious ardour of the Crusades in order to build up a great commerce with the Muhammadan East,--Venice became during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the great neutral go-between for the trade of India, Persia, Egypt, Arabia, and Syria with the Byzantine Empire and the rest of Europe. Venetians (in Arab dress, of course) ran less risk than other Europeans when travelling in Egypt in the days before the Portuguese discoveries. Through the Venetians Europe became acquainted with several strange African beasts which were brought from the Sudan for public exhibition in Muhammadan Egypt, and in this way European interest in the sources of the Nile was occasionally revived. It is remarkable to reflect that the name of Venice will probably never die out (as far as etymology is concerned) in the very heart of Africa. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and perhaps later, Venice manufactured in her arsenals improved types of guns. She also acted as an intermediary in exchanging muskets (manufactured elsewhere in Europe) with the Arabs and Turks, who at that time could not construct these firearms for themselves. Thus the Turks and Arabs became accustomed to call any improved type of musket a “Venetian” (Bunduqi).[12] In this way the name of the most beautiful city in the world has penetrated beyond the explorations of any European into the very heart of Africa, as it has also circulated through all the Muhammadan East.