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.