ABSTRACT
The world envisaged by scholars and known to travellers in Catholic Europe in the early Middle Ages was a tiny one. It was conceived in terms deriving from vestiges of classical geography modified by Christian piety, and had Jerusalem as its focal point. The widening of horizons, the discovery of new lands, new continents and new peoples meant an enormous increase in factual knowledge in Europe, with savants recording matters on which Antiquity was proved to be ignorant or ill-informed. Through the trade of the Hanse the rich resources of the Baltic littoral were known from Norway to Italy. European products sold alike in imperial China and Norse Greenland in the high Middle Ages. The willingness to accept as fellow humans those millions of people whose conventions were not of a familiar order, whose skins were not of a familiar whiteness, and whose beliefs were not Christian, was a very different matter.
