The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the Age of Discovery

The Quest for Eastern Christians was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Most writers have considered that the great European explorations during the Age of Discovery were motivated primarily by a thirst for knowledge of other lands, desire for international trade, or missionary zeal. Professor Rogers demonstrates that there was another significant reason why Europeans traveled to the East during the lade medieval and Renaissance period. This was the dream of a Christian Indies, which in turn led to a quest for the Christians of the Farther East. The author specifically seeks to establish a direct relation between the knowledge of Indian and Ethiopian Christians which was available in Jerusalem from early Christian times onward and which returning pilgrims disseminated in the West, and the presence of the Portuguese in South India and the Ethiopian highlands in the early sixteenth century.

Throughout his presentation of the evidence for the chain of events which links Palestinian knowledge with Portuguese action, Professor Rogers places emphasis on the early printed books and tracts which circulated both accurate information and rumor. Specimen pages from some of these books are reproduced as illustrations, and there is a double-page chart showing the genealogy of the nations and the sects of the Christians. There is a list of the early printed books which the author has used in his study as well as a bibliography.