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I Introduction The Prodigious East FOR ADAM AND EVE ON THEIR JOURNEY from Paradise into History, east was the direction of exile, loss, and new' beginnings. Behind them lay the unpeopled enclosure of a naturally blissful life, barred now by cherubim and a flaming sword, while ahead lay a cursed existence on "the subjected Plain;' soon to be the boundless scene of manual and maternal labor, fraternal murder , and further exile for some of their progeny. For their medieval Christian descendents in Europe, though, east was the direction of return, restoration, and old beginnings: in short, of origins. By traveling east they could make their way to the very "navel of the earth;' the divinely privileged theater where the new Eve and the second Adam had made possible the return journey from History to Paradise.' This medieval sense of the East as the source and symbolic center of a new world order was especially strong between the late eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. During that time Jerusalem and the Holy Land became virtually fetishistic objects of desire, stirring the devout, diabolical, or ambitious souls not simply of popes and princes, or even of poets, lunatics, saints, mercenaries, and propagandists, but also of ordinary men, women, and children. There are many things that could illustrate the nature and consequences of medieval Christian Europe's at once real and imagined relations with the East: the custom ofpenitential pilgrimage; the numerous treatises delocis sanetis ; the theological justification ofviolence in defense of a political Christ; the aborted Children's Crusade of 1212; the maps of Palestine drawn by Matthew Paris or Marino Sanudo; the pogroms against European Jews; the meeting in Damietta in 1219 between St. Francis of Assisi and the Sultan al-Kamil; the reliquary built in Paris in 1246 to display the Crown of Thorns and other relics; or vernacular narratives and memoirs like Joinville's pious Vie de Saint Louis, Margery Kempe's troubling retelling of her visions and crying fitswhile visiting Calvary, and the brutal English romance Richard Caur de Lion. But 2 Chapter I among all these examples one in particular seems to me to stand out. It does so because it occurs in a document that has nothing to do with Jerusalem or the Holy Land, and thus illustrates how far-reaching the medieval obsession with the East could be; in addition, it happens to suggest that Latin Christian designs on the biblical East can be seen as the first moves in a long, slow, and often discontinuous process of European expansion that well outlasted Latin Christendom itself, and whose bright traces and disfiguring scars still mark not only the surface of the globe but the lives of millions of people. The example I have in mind is a passing reference to Jerusalem in a medieval sailor's log under the date Wednesday 26 December 1492. That sailor was Christopher Columbus, and he made the reference as he found himself off an unknown island (the present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic, which he named Espanola) during his first attempt to reach the oneiric East by way of the untried West: And he [Columbus] says that he hopes in God that on the return ... he would find a barrel of gold that those who were left would have acquired by exchange; and that they would have found the gold mine and the spicery, and those things in such quantity that the sovereigns ... will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulcher ; for thus (sayshe) I urged Your Highnesses to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem, and Your Highnesses laughed and said that it would please them and that even without this profit they had that desire. These are the Admiral's words.' Presumably they are (the log itself as Columbus kept it has not survived, and is known only from the edited transcription made by Bartolome de las Casas). But even if they are not quite the Admiral's own words, these and others like them in his writings reveal that there was more to the medieval East than its association with the central event of Salvation History and thus with the ultimate terrestrial goal of pilgrims and crusaders. The gold, for instance , that Columbus so desired for financing the conquest of the Holy Sepulcher had to be somewhere near "Espanola," and it had to be there by the barrelful, since he knew from his studies preparatory to this his "enterprise...

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