One account, by the writer Ibn Haukal, author of The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, which contained a map of the Islamic world as it was then known, described a meeting toward the end of the tenth century with the great Arab cartographer al-Istakhri. “He showed me the geographical maps in his work, and, when I had commented on them, he gave me his work with the words, ‘I can see that you were born under a lucky star, therefore take my work and make such improvements as you think fit.’ I took it, altered it in several particulars, and returned it to him.”6
There was cooperation not just between individuals but between cultures. One of the greatest of all the Arab cartographers, Muhammed al-Idrisi, was born in Morocco, studied at Cordoba in Islamic Spain, and worked at the twelfth-century court of the Christian king Roger of Sicily. There, he produced several world maps that drew directly both on Ptolemy and on the observations of Arab travelers, and which were still being used as models by Islamic cartographers four hundred years later. Among them were a large rectangular map in seventy sheets, and a smaller, circular map, similar to the T-O maps of the West, but incorporating curved parallels, which suggest that al-Idrisi was aware of the spherical shape of the world. The maps and sources that he used are lost, but the geographic detail he provided was far in advance of anything that was being produced by the copyists in Europe’s monasteries. Al-Idrisi’s representation of Spain, for example, with the northern coast of Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar, and Bay of Biscay all clearly discernible, is far more detailed than the stylized version presented around the same time by European mapmakers. When Al-Idrisi described Britain as “a great island, shaped like the head of an ostrich,” and the peninsula of Cornwall as “like a bird’s beak,”7 he had evidently been studying more accurate maps than anything available in Europe.
DESPITE ITS ULTIMATE INFLUENCE in Europe, for hundreds of years after publication of the Geographia, Christian scholars turned their backs on Ptolemy’s knowledge. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the original manuscripts that Ptolemy had written in the second century were lost and forgotten. For the medieval scribes of the early Church, the old T-O maps compiled in the centuries before Ptolemy had the great advantage that they could easily be adapted to place the holy city of Jerusalem at the center of the world, as the Bible itself decreed.8 For them, as for the Greek philosophers, the sea was a fitting symbol to represent the mysteries that bounded man’s little area of knowledge on every side. What had not been established by exploration was supplied by imagination or faith; the maps that the medieval Christian scholars drew were therefore inaccurate, impressionistic expressions of belief, not descriptions of fact.
Some of these great mappaemundi, the medieval pictures of the world, were also works of art of staggering beauty. Most of them are lost, but in the English cathedral city of Hereford, it is still possible to glimpse the vision of the world that was in men’s minds on the eve of the age of discoveries. The great Hereford mappamundi dates from the last years of the thirteenth century.9 Even after a visitor to the cathedral has puzzled out the fact that, as on almost all early maps, east is to the top, and has spotted the outline of the Mediterranean Sea that divides the world down the middle, the coastlines and landforms are almost unrecognizable. There is no mistaking the traditional T-shape of great waters surrounded by the O of the ocean, although the lands are threaded with rivers. The British Isles clutch grimly to the perimeter of Europe, twisted and misshapen; instead of the familiar boot shape of Italy, there is a bloated peninsula, dotted with apparenty random cities and ribbed with unknown rivers. The names of Europe and Africa are transposed, probably a mistake by the copyist. Indeed, the map as a whole seems to be sketched more in hope than in conviction. Any modern classroom could produce a dozen more realistic views of the world. Ptolemy would have scoffed.
Yet the Hereford mappamundi has its own confidence, as befits the only complete wall map of the world known to have survived from the Middle Ages. It speaks the language of another age. What were once its bright colors are faded and browned into a dull ochre that challenges the eyes, while the drawings that crowd the map seem almost to jostle each other aside; it takes a while to focus on them individually, to see the delicacy and precision with which they are sketched in. Carefully drawn towers and turrets mark some of the cities of which the map-maker had heard: The familiar names of the Bible are clustered around Jerusalem, and, closer to home, Paris, Ghent, and even Hereford itself are marked. But it is a work to be interpreted, rather than simply consulted; a statement of belief.
Medieval library catalogs show that there were few monasteries or noble palaces without such maps in their stores of manuscripts. Charlemagne, at the end of the eighth century, had plans of Rome and Constantinople engraved on silver tablets among a comprehensive collection, and most great libraries would have included maps of the Holy Land as well as the great mappaemundi – triumphs and baubles for the rich and mighty, and reminders for the humble poor of their place in the great scheme of being. Few survived. A sister-map of the Hereford mappamundi, the Ebsdorf map, was rediscovered in a Benedictine monastery in the German town whose name it bears after being lost for six hundred years, only to be destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. Now it survives only in modern copies and photographs. The history of cartography is the tantalizing study of what has been left behind.
The Hereford mappamundi
Hereford Cathedral Library, Hereford, England
The worldview of the mappaemundi encompassed the soul as well as time and space. The Hereford map, for example, shows not only the towns of the Holy Land but also the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and Noah riding on the waters of the Flood. It admits no conflict between geographic accuracy and religious faith: The holy city of Jerusalem stands unchallenged at the center of the world, while Paradise itself is shown far away in the apparently unreachable East, a round island circled by flames that warn the importunate traveler not to dare too much.
The mappaemundi may have been used for planning journeys from town to town across Europe – marks over the great central city of Paris on the Hereford map suggest that fingernails may have traced a route through it at various times – but it mattered little to the mapmaker that the shape of the coastlines should be so inaccurate, or that the whole map should have been shoehorned so ruthlessly into an all-embracing circle of ocean. Much more important, from his standpoint, God had to be shown overseeing the whole of his kingdom, and the fabulous creatures described by the ancients, such as the bonnacan, with its bull’s head, horse’s mane, and ram’s horns, the screaming mandrake plant, and the death-dealing cockatrice, needed to be faithfully represented to demonstrate the awesome variety of his Creation.
The Hereford mappamundi laid out a world at once mysterious and threatening, where the only hope of safety was to be found in the majestic figure of Christ that dominates the map. To criticize it for inaccuracy would be as foolish as to find fault with Picasso’s famous painting as a street guide to Guernica. Yet for the rapidly growing world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the mappaemundi were quickly proved inadequate. A new geography was needed to enable sailors to plot a reliable course across the oceans and to represent the world they were revealing.
Three events in the half century or so before Mercator’s birth made his achievement as a cartographer both possible and necessary. The first was the rediscovery of the geographic writings of Ptolemy, brought back into Europe after hundreds of years; the second was the development of printing, which meant that Ptolemy’s ideas could be spread more quickly and efficiently than the monks who had copied them by hand could ever have dreamed; and the third was the voyage of Christopher Columbus, who, looking for Asia, discovered America.
Other explorers had made great discoveries around the coast of Africa and in Asia about lands that were already dimly known about, but Columbus’s voyage proved that there really was a world elsewhere. The looming shadows that had marked the boundaries of geographic knowledge ever since man first looked about him were beginning to part, to reveal a reality far different from anything the ancient scholars had imagined.
Chapter Two Forgotten Wisdom
FOR THE SCHOLARS of fifteenth–and sixteenth-century Europe, who looked on the past with reverence, the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s writing in the early fifteenth century was a revelation and an inspiration. The task of translating the Geographia into Latin from an original Greek manuscript in Byzantium was begun by the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras and finished in 1406 by his pupil Jacobus Angelus in Tuscany.
