Roger Bacon was banished from Oxford on a charge of heresy and witchcraft: Pietro d’Abano escaped the Inquisition by dying, in 1316. Men such as these belonged to the new age that was coming, the age that would throw away the old lesson-books, and begin to discover for itself—and they suffered in consequence. Dante belonged heart and soul to his own era, and clung passionately to its ideals and traditions. For him the Ganges still flowed into the all-surrounding ocean on the east coast of Asia, 90 degrees from Jerusalem, as Orosius had pictured it, and there is not the faintest echo in his writings of the voyages of his countrymen, Corvino and his bishops, or Polo and his companions,[428] between “Greater India” and “Zayton” (Amoy harbour), although they surely must have recognized, when they praised the great rivers of China, that these flowed into a sea many days’ journey beyond that into which the Ganges rolled its waters. Nor is there, on the other hand, any hint of the monstrous races with which Dark-Age superstition had peopled the remote regions of the earth, although they were regularly represented on the maps of that time. It is true that the “portolani,” or handy charts, of which the earliest known date from Dante’s life-time, showed none of these things, but depicted the coast-lands of the Mediterranean and Black Seas with marvellous accuracy: but they were only for pilots and merchant captains, and had nothing to do with scholars. The maps Dante would see were hung on church or monastery walls, or illustrated learned books; and the mappe-monde of Cardinal Heinrich of Mainz may be taken as typical of them all. It much resembles our great Hereford Map of the World, and was probably copied from the same original design. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [428] Corvino and Marco Polo made the voyage in the same year, 1292, but in reverse directions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ It is two hundred years older than Dante, but so stationary was geography throughout the Middle Ages that it might have been executed in his day, or, except for a few details, several centuries earlier.