Intriguingly, Strabo’s world is smaller than that described by Eratosthenes, his predecessor by two centuries. The earth’s width is reduced to 30,000 stades (compared with Eratosthenes’ 38,000), while its length is 70,000 stades compared to Eratosthenes’ 78,000. Or that at least is his inhabited world, which he describes as ‘an island’ floating in a sea in the northern hemisphere. He believed that the world he knew and described took up about a quarter of the earth.
Strabo was no mathematician, and he distrusted the scientific advances in measurements and map projection made by Eratosthenes. Accordingly, he described his world in the most literal of ways, akin to the conceits of astrology. Taken as a whole, the inhabited world resembled a chlamys, a short tapering cloak worn by Greek soldiers and hunters. Britain and Sicily were triangular, while India was a rhomboid. He compared the northern part of Asia to a kitchen knife; Iberia to an ox-hide; the Peloponnese to a leaf on a plane tree; while Mesopotamia had the profile of a boat with the Euphrates as its keel and the Tigris the deck.
We read Strabo’s Geographica now with a mix of awe and bemusement: awe at the scale of the enterprise, bemusement at some of its assumptions. Britain is thought not worth conquering, described as wretched and uninhabitable on account of its climate (Strabo notes that the sun hardly shines in Britain, particularly not in the region we now call Scotland). Ireland is full of cannibals. Ceylon, an island seven days’ sailing from India, has an unusual crop: ‘It produces elephants.’
Although Strabo is a geographer rather than mapmaker, he acknowledged the limitations of his descriptions, instructing that his prose should be visualised on a flat surface. For this he suggests a simplified grid of parallels and meridians on a parchment seven foot long and three foot wide. But he also envisaged a far better method of representing his research: a globe.
He mentions a sphere constructed by the philosopher Crates of Mallus in the previous century that was ten feet in diameter and showed the world divided into four clear regions, all islands, all of roughly equal size, two above the ‘torrid zone’ dividing the northern and southern hemispheres and two below.* Only one of these islands – his own – was definitely inhabited, but Crates, drawing on a combination of Eratosthenes and Homer for much of his information, believed that the other three might also be temperate and populated, with at least one other region below the equatorial ocean cultivated by ‘Ethiopians’ who had no connection with other Ethiopians in Cinnamon Country.
Strabo suggested that his own globe should also be at least ten feet in diameter in order to capture sufficient detail. But he appreciated that most of his readers would find the construction of such a thing beyond them.
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The Great Library of Alexandria had one more defining contribution to make to the history of cartography, and although it built on the gains of Eratosthenes and Strabo it was such a momentous piece of individual scholarship that it set the tone and look of map-making in the European and Arab worlds for hundreds of years. This wasn’t a map itself, but a descriptive atlas, and its originator could be said to be the world’s first modern cartographer. It was a book of instructions, in Greek, that changed the way we looked at the world so fundamentally that – almost 1,350 years later – it was, in modified form, one of the main navigational tools Columbus carried with him when he departed for Japan in 1492.
The atlas was the work of Claudius Ptolemy, who lived between 90 and 170 AD, studied at Alexandria for the majority (if not all) of his life, and had earlier produced a highly influential treatise on Greek astronomy called the Almagest. This contained detailed star charts and a multilayered model of the earth’s position in the cosmos, with the earth, stable in the centre, playing host to the daily revolution – in order of proximity – of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and a sphere of fixed stars sparkling on the outer edge. Ptolemy also wrote a scientific investigation into optics, examining the process of seeing and the role of light and colour.
But the work we are interested in is Ptolemy’s Geographia. This was a two-part interpretation of the world, the first consisting of his methodology, the second of a huge list of names of cities and other locations, each with a coordinate. If the maps in a modern-day atlas were described rather than drawn they would look something like Ptolemy’s work, a laborious and exhausting undertaking, but one based on what we would now regard as a blindingly simple grid system. In the seventh section of Geographia (there were eight in all), Ptolemy provided detailed descriptions for the construction of not just a world map, but twenty-six smaller areas. No original copies have survived, and the closest we can get to it is a tenth-century Arab description of a coloured map – though whether that was an original or merely inspired by his text is unknown, and at any rate, it no longer exists.
The modern winds of change: Ptolemy’s classic map of the world, beautifully rendered in 1482 by the German engraver, Johannes Schnitzer of Armsheim.
As one would expect, Ptolemy had a skewed vision of the world. But while the distortion of Africa and India are extreme, and the Mediterranean is too vast, the placement of cities and countries within the Greco-Roman empire is far more accurate. Ptolemy offered his readers two possible cylindrical projections – the attempt to project the information from a three-dimensional sphere onto a two-dimensional plane – one ‘inferior and easier’ and one ‘superior and more troublesome’. He gives due credit to a key source, Marinus of Tyre, who had advanced the gazetteer listings system a few decades earlier, assigning his locations not merely a latitude and longitude, but also an estimated distance between them. (Marinus had another claim, too: his map data was the first to include both China and the Antarctic.)
Ptolemy boasted that he had greatly increased the list of cities available to the cartographer (there were about 8,000), and also disparaged the accuracy of Marinus’s measurements. But he had his own flaws. Indeed, the map historian R. V. Tooley suggests that Ptolemy stood apart from his predecessors not just in his brilliance but in his disregard for science. Where earlier cartographers were willing to leave blanks on the map where their knowledge failed, Ptolemy could not resist filling such empty spaces with theoretical conceptions. ‘This would not have mattered so much in a lesser man,’ Tooley contends, but so great was his reputation ‘that his theories assumed an equal validity with his undoubted facts.’ As we shall see, this had the uncanny ability to send ambitious sailors, Columbus among them, to places they had no intention of seeing.
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There were maps of the world before these Alexandrian advances – a clay tablet here, a papyrus shroud there – but they were unique and random objects.* By contrast, the maps by Eratosthenes, Strabo and Ptolemy spawned at the Great Library were logical and disciplined. The reputation of the library as the most important the world has seen has some grounding here – and it is a legend made more romantic by the various destructions that befell it over the centuries.
The Library’s ultimate destruction occurred nearly half a millenium after Ptolemy’s death, in 641, when Alexandria fell to the Arabs. At the time, the Library had again been replenished, and although it was not the powerhouse of learning it once was, it still contained many hundreds of thousands of volumes. But its new captor apparently had no use for books. When asked about the fate of the Library, the Caliph Omar is said to have replied: ‘If the contents of the books are in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah, there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them.’
But there is one more improbable thing. We have seen that Ptolemy’s Geographia appeared in about AD 150, and we could logically have anticipated a steady stream of carto-graphic progress. The coordinates and projection that he employed were a universal system, something to be employed and expanded as our knowledge of the world itself grew over the centuries. It was like an enormous net, able to cat
ch new information and spread out accordingly. But it didn’t happen. The steady cartographic advance one might have anticipated failed to materialise. Where was the Ptolemy of the fourth or fifth century? Why do we not know what Harold thought of the shape of the world when he trotted out to Hastings in 1066? Or how Saladin saw the Middle East? Because there are no maps to show us.
Neither the Romans nor the Byzantines progressed Ptolemy’s work. There were some fine localised beauties – the Peutinger Table from the fifth century (a long, schematic roadmap showing the key settlements of the Roman Empire), and the sixth-century Madaba map (a mosaic of the Holy Land, preserved in a church in Jordan, that includes street plans of Jerusalem and other cities). But they show little curiosity about the world beyond, and neither of them advances the science of mapmaking.
Instead of progress, the world appeared to fall into the cartographic dark ages for about a thousand years. Did our ambitions towards exploration, conquest and the pursuit of wealth suddenly disappear like so much candle smoke? And what about globes? They too spun backwards. The concepts of latitude and longitude, the emergence of the graticule and the prime meridian – all these were put back in the box, only really to emerge into the sun again in teeming Venice and Nuremberg in about 1450.
The long and winding empire: a detail from the Peutinger Table, a fifth-century Roman roadmap stretching from the Dalmatian Coast to the African Med.
And what was it that did actually emerge at the height of the Renaissance? Some great new picture of the world? The discovery of new continents? Something to do with America? No, what emerged was the translation from Greek into Latin of a volume that had been thought lost since the glory days of Alexandria. It was Ptolemy’s ‘atlas’, and its rediscovery – matched with the boom in European printing – heralded the birth of the modern world.
But let’s stay awhile in the dark ages. Or, more precisely, Hereford in the winter of 1988.
Chapter 2
The Men Who Sold the World
On Wednesday 16 November 1988, the Dean of Hereford, the Very Reverend Peter Haynes, and Lord Gowrie, a former Arts Minister who was now Chairman of Sotheby’s, stood outside Hereford Cathedral in suits and posed for photographs beside a framed facsimile of a large brown map. The map, almost as tall as the pair holding it, was due to be auctioned the following June, and Sotheby’s had agreed a reserve price of £3.5m, which would make it the most valuable map in the world. Later that day it would be described by Dr Christopher de Hamel, Sotheby’s expert on medieval manuscripts, as ‘without parallel the most important and most celebrated medieval map in any form.’
Lord Gowrie regretted that such an important object might soon be leaving the country to the highest bidder, but said that all attempts to save it for the nation had failed. He had been trying for almost a year to keep the map in the UK, but now needs must. The Dean explained that his eleventh-century cathedral, one of the most impressive Norman constructions in England, was in need of £7m to prevent it from crumbling to the tiled floor, and disposing of the map was the only way forward. After their announcement, the two men handed the frame to the cathedral staff, and departed, Gowrie back to London, the Dean back to his troubled place of worship.
Mass unhappiness ensued.
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The map in question was Hereford’s Mappa Mundi, c.1290, and it wasn’t a beautiful thing to look at. A large shank of tough hide – measuring 163 cm by 137 cm – it has a murky rendition of the world that, at fist sight, is hard to fathom with its faded colours and indistinct lettering. It is also a map that if you had been transported from the Great Library at the time of Ptolemy, would have come as quite a surprise. Gone is the careful science of coordinates and gridlines, longtitude and latitude. And in their place is, essentially, a morality painting, a map of the world that reveals the fears and obsessions of the age. Jerusalem stands at its centre, Paradise and Purgatory at its extremes, and legendary creatures and monsters populate the faraway climes.
And this is very much its conception. The mappa (the word meant cloth or napkin rather than map in medieval times) had a lofty ambition of metaphysical meaning: a map-guide, for a largely illiterate public, to a Christian life. It has no reservation in mixing the geography of the earthly world with the ideology of the next. Its apex displays a graphic representation of the end of the world, with a Last Judgement showing, on one side, Christ and his angels beckoning towards Paradise, and on the other the devil and dragon summoning to another place.
But it seems likely that those who saw it first at the end of the thirteenth century would have done what we do now and looked for the ‘You Are Here’ spot. If so, they would have found themselves in the south-west region of the giant circle, with Hereford one of the few places mentioned in England, and England itself a fairly insignificant part of the global story. Around them is a world crowded with cities, rivers and countries teeming with human activity and strange beasts. Ancient and brilliant cartographic theories have been replaced by something else: the map as story, the map as life.
A scandal in the making: Hereford Cathedral’s Dean, Peter Haynes (left), and Sotheby’s chairman Lord Gowrie announce the sale of the Mappa Mundi.
Such a thing had never required a reserve price in an auction catalogue before. But now, according to God’s current earthly representatives, a judgement had to be made. The timing of this can be fixed precisely, to February 1986, when an expert in medieval artefacts from Sotheby’s arrived at the cathedral to appraise its most prized possessions. At the time the Mappa Mundi was not on Hereford’s sale list. The cathedral’s great treasure was thought to be the books and manuscripts of its Chained Library, a collection of theological works secured by chains to their cases to enable study but not theft. While ascending a winding stone staircase to the library, the assessor saw the dimly lit Mappa Mundi below, and asked how much it was insured for. He was astonished at the answer: £5,000. He suggested it might be worth a little more.
The furore that ensued once the sale was announced took the cathedral entirely by surprise. Britain’s National Heritage Memorial Fund expressed ‘outrage that one of the most important documents in the world is to be put into an auction room’; the British Library complained that it had not been consulted on a possible sale (though Lord Gowrie claimed that it was ‘talking rot’). The Times composed a leader that concluded: ‘The Mappa ought to remain in England, on public display, and preferably in Hereford. Its ancient and original link with that city is part of the Mappa’s identity. As a work of art, it gains from being in Hereford. It is, so to speak, the only proper frame for it.’
The following day, amid resignations from the Hereford Cathedral’s fundraising committee, several offers of a private purchase emerged, meeting the £3.5m reserve. But Canon John Tiller, the cathedral chancellor, announced that the auction would proceed regardless to gain the best possible price: ‘Our first priority is the future of the Cathedral.’
Other funding schemes were raised but came to nothing. Then some months later came one that stuck: the Mappa Mundi Trust was established with a £1m donation from Paul Getty and £2m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, amid plans for a new building to house the map, to which the public would be charged admission. And in this way the map was saved for the nation. While these plans were laid, the map was loaned to the British Library in London where it was seen by tens of thousands who had only recently been made aware of its existence.
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What exactly did the British Library visitors see? They saw what pilgrims arriving in Hereford around 1290 would have seen, but with less colour, better footnotes and tighter security. The Mappa Mundi provides a masterful cartographical insight into medieval understanding and expectations. What appears at first glance like wonderful naivety is on more informed inspection an extraordinary accumulation of history, myth and philosophy as it stood at the end of the Roman Empire, with a few medieval additions.
The map is frantic – alive with activity an
d achievement. Once you grow accustomed to it, it is hard to pull yourself away. There are approximately 1,100 place names, figurative drawings and inscriptions, sourced from Biblical, Classical and Christian texts, from the elder Pliny, Strabo and Solinus to St Jerome and Isidore of Seville. In its distillation of geographical, historical and religious knowledge the mappa serves as an itinerary, a gazetteer, a parable, a bestiary and an educational aid. Indeed, all history is here, happening at the same time: the Tower of Babel; Noah’s Ark as it comes to rest on dry land; the Golden Fleece; the Labyrinth in Crete where the Minotaur lived. And surely for contemporaries – locals and pilgrims – it must have constituted the most arresting freakshow in town. With its parade of dung-firing animals, dog-headed or bat-eared humans, a winged sphinx with a young woman’s face, it seems closer to Hieronymus Bosch than to the scientific Greek cartographers.
These days you’d be tested for chemical substances: the Nile Delta bisects a magical world of unicorns, castles and a peculiar mandrake man.
We are about ninety years from Chaucer, and although there is much to be read on the map in clear gothic Latin and French script, most visitors to Hereford would have obtained their knowledge from the pictures. A century and a half before the printing press, these drawings – primitive and devoid of perspective, with almost every turreted building indistinguishable from the one next to it – would have been the first big storyboard they had ever seen, and its images would surely haunt their dreams.
Observed through modern eyes, the map is also a sublime puzzle. Things are not where we might expect them to be. What we regard as north lies to the left, while east is at the top, a placing that has given us the word ‘Orientation’. There are no great oceans, but instead the map is surrounded by a watery frame and floating islands of malformed creatures abound.
On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does Page 3