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In the mid-15th century, the Portuguese and Spanish navigators combined the lateen sail with their own square-rigged tradition. The lateen sail allowed dhows and other ships to sail close to the wind. This innovation reached the Mediterranean around the 13th century. The axial stern-post rudder, which was developed by the Chinese in about 1000 CE, greatly facilitated sailing and made it safer. These were the axial stern-post rudder, the lateen sail, “fingers” and the compass. In the 15th century, four major inventions had a highly significant and far-reaching influence on seafaring and navigation and ship building. It described a method of “raising the Pole Star,” which was borrowed from Arab navigators. The first European printed book on navigation appeared in 1509. In Portugal, tables of the sun’s declination, which were compiled for mariners on the orders of King Manuel I, were based on the tables prepared by Arab navigators in the mid-13th century.
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In the Middle Ages, Chinese and Korean maps used Arabic, not European, place names, he adds. Another Arab navigator, Khwashir ibn Yusuf al-Arki was known for his extensive navigation in the Arabian Sea in the 11th century.įuat Sezgin has pointed out that until the 18th century, eighty per cent of the history of cartography dated from the medieval Islamic period, and only twenty per cent came from the ancient Greeks and the later European sources. An Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Tirawayh wrote some monographs on navigation in the beginning of the 11th century. Muslim navigators wrote treatises on the principles and methods of navigation, based on the observations and experiences of their predecessors and the lore of seafarers and navigators as well as their own experiences. An Arab work on astronomy and navigation, written in 1242, describes a compass seen on a voyage from Syria to Alexandria that was in the shape of a hollow iron fish that floated on water in a bowl. Arab sailors and navigators were familiar with the compass in the 12th century. The compass was invented by the Chinese in the 10th century. More importantly, the map provided sailing directions, which was called Rahnama by navigators of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, and which was known among the navigators of the Mediterranean Sea as the compass. The map showed various routes for reaching from one port to another. Muslim navigators made extensive use of certain instruments for navigational purposes, including a kind of astrolabe called safiha, for finding the altitude of heavenly bodies, a map of the coast and islands of the sea about which the navigator had a special knowledge and experience, the compass and a wind-rose. There is now a substantial, and growing, literature on the subject in English, German, French, Spanish and other European languages as well as in Arabic, Turkish and Persian. This period roughly coincides with the Golden Age of Islamic science.ĭuring the Golden Age of Islamic science, between the 9th and 16th centuries, Muslim scientists made original, wide-ranging and enduring contributions to botany, chemistry, medicine and surgery, optics, anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, technology, cartography and geography and navigation. The period between the decline of the Greco-Roman civilization and the Renaissance, which spans nearly 1000 years, is generally described as the Dark Ages in European history, in which no note-worthy developments in science, medicine and technology took place. Vasco da Gama’s Voyage to India and the Ibn Majid Connection