Each page, which has two columns and flows from bottom to top and left to right, contains about a week’s expedition. We begin in London, displayed as a walled city with the ‘River de Tamise’, ‘Audgate’ and ‘Billingesgate’ marked against a selection of crenellated buildings and steeples, dominated by St Paul’s. From there it’s a day to Rochester, another day to Canterbury, one more to Dover and northern France before heading through Reims, Chambery, and Rome. The map’s accuracy declines as Paris leaves Paris, but to criticise the appearance of Fleury as coming just after Chanceaux rather than just after Paris would be to misjudge the map’s intentions; it was clearer, for the narrative of the story, to have the site of Saint Benedict’s bones there rather than earlier.
Another entry, on another flap, suggests a certain weariness with the map-making craft: ‘Toward the Sea of Venice and toward Constantinople on this coast,’ Paris writes, ‘are these cities which are so far away.’ But the strip eventually reaches Jerusalem, the final destination, which Paris depicts with the Dome of the Rock and church of the Holy Sepulchre, and a reasonably coherent coastline, from the gateway port of Acre, and beyond it, Bethlehem.
Are we there yet? Jerusalem finally in view as we near the end of the journey.
Paris does seem to have been troubled by problems of scale. On another map, one of four he drew of Britain, he writes regretfully (across an illustration of London) that ‘If the page had allowed it, this whole island would have been longer,’ which is not necessarily the ideal cartographic lesson to pass on to impressionable minds. Despite the squeeze, Scotland is permitted a generous and bulbous display, a rarity in this period. But Paris also produced another map in which Britain has uncannily accurate proportions, not least in Wales and the West Country, and it is difficult to argue with the British Library’s claims that it is the earliest surviving map of the country with such a high level of detail.
One other significant Paris strip map has also survived, from London to Apulia, but it is less elaborate than the Jerusalem version and crammed onto one page of his Book Of Additions, an addenda to his larger history that contains such oddities as a map of the main Roman roads with Dunstable at the centre and a map of the world’s leading winds (with the earth at the centre).
With all these maps, Matthew Paris achieved one other thing easily overlooked by detailed cartographic analysis: some fifty years before the Hereford Mappa Mundi, he made objects that provided a highly engaging and unique viewing experience, and he was uncommonly prescient in showing how maps may delight by their beauty and intrigue. His maps nourish the imagination, and they prompt interaction and engagement. They have an uncanny resemblance to the maps we draw as children.
Chapter 3
The World Takes Shape
The Mappa Mundi at Hereford is unique, but it is also part of a genre. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, mappae mundi were drawn up frequently throughout the western and Arab world, and the ones that survive provide remarkable evidence of how the medieval world viewed itself. They took many different forms, some more recognisable than others, many distinctly bizarre. Most, however, share a common purpose: they were not intended for use, at least not for travel use. Rather, they were statements of philosophical, political, religious, encyclopaedic and conceptual concerns.
These qualities apply to the European cartographers, like the creators of the Hereford map. But they are applicable, too, to the Arab scholars, based in the cultural whirlpool of Baghdad – the heart of the Arab caliphate – which had inherited an Alexandrian appetite for amassing the world’s knowledge, and drew upon Ptolemy as well as first-hand reports from Arab sailors and Chinese explorers.
Strangely, though, the finest – and most modern – of all the medieval cartographers was an Arab geographer based in Europe – one Muhammad al-Idrisi. Al-Idrisi traced his lineage back to the Prophet and came from a noble Arab family from Muslim Andalusia. He travelled widely as a young man – in Spain, North Africa and Anatolia – before settling at the court of Roger II, the Norman King of Sicily. Here, around 1150, he completed his finest work, producing what was essentially an early atlas, combining various regional maps to form a global picture. Perhaps because of his position as a Muslim working for a Christian king, his mapping was notable for the absence of religious symbolism and fable. Instead, drawing on Islamic maps and travellers, as well as the accounts of Norman sailors, it showed what was possible if geographical accuracy was given its head. His view of the world looks more familiar to us today than most of the maps that followed it for hundreds of years.
From The Book of Pleasant Journeys to Faraway Lands: an Arabian geographer plots North Africa and Europe.
Indeed, his mapping of the Nile and the lakes that form it was unimproved until Stanley’s expeditions seven centuries later.
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In the 1360s, a map of the world produced by a Buddhist monk in Japan displayed an entirely different view of life’s priorities. It was another map for pilgrims, this time heading elsewhere than Jerusalem. The elderly cartographer inscribed a plain explanation: ‘With prayer in my heart for the rise of Buddhism in posterity, I engaged myself in the work of making this copy, wiping my eyes which are dim with age, and feeling as if I myself were travelling through India.’
His map looks like a lantern floating over an ocean. The Sumeru mountain dominates the centre, with a series of named shrines following the Silk Route. Many of these are indebted to the Chinese Buddhist scholar, Hsuang-Tsang, whose seventh-century topography, A Record to the Regions of the West of China, describes a fifteen-year journey in India. Those travels, marked on the map with a red thread, had taken seven hundred years to find such lavish cartographic form, and would take about half that again to make an impact in the west.
Not that Christian ideology didn’t produce anything of significance, or at least beauty, in this time. Some of the most abstract examples of divine geography were spread over facing pages in medieval books, and the most remarkable suggested exciting places on the map that wouldn’t actually be viewed by explorers for many centuries. The Beatus Map, based on the writing of the Spanish Benedictine Monk Beatus of Liebana, was among the most notable. It was created towards the end of the eighth century and faithfully recreated on numerous medieval manuscripts (fourteen European examples survive from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).
One highly stylised edition from 1109, housed in the British Library, measures 43 × 32cm, and looks like a giant oval fish platter (indeed it has fish swimming upstream within its framing ocean). It is a wonderfully fanciful rendering of the world, perhaps all the more attractive for its complete disregard for anything we might recognise as geographical accuracy. Again, allegory and fearful biblical learning dominate, with the Revelation of St John and the work of Saint Isidore of Seville to the fore. Adam and Eve, almost anatomically drawn next to a serpent, lie in Eden at the top, with India to their left. Alexandria rather than Jerusalem occupies the centre (with the Pharos lighthouse close by), with Africa directly below. Ravenna, a crucial cultural and political centre of the Byzantine and then Lombard empire, is given equal importance towards the north. Several locations, including Britain and the Fortunate Isles, are placed in boxes at the base of the map, like Scrabble tiles awaiting placement. Mountain ranges resemble piles of steaming dung.
Adam and Eve at the helm of the Beatus Map in the British Library. But what is that mysterious fourth continent on the right?
But the map is remarkable for geographical reasons, too. The Red Sea, which spans the entire length of the map to the south, divides the three known continents from the possibility of a mysterious fourth. There is only a brief description of this land – we learn it is unknown torrid desert – but it is a feature of most of the Beatus interpretations.
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Many western mappae mundi were designed as wall decorations and have since crumbled or been painted over, while many that do survive are later copies on paper, and on a much smaller scale. One of
the most intricate and significant is the so-called Psalter Map, drawn sometime after 1262 and perfectly preserved within a small prayer book. It is only 15 × 10cm but shows many of the elements that were to appear on the Hereford map less than thirty years later. Jerusalem is at the centre, east is at the top, the trading cities are prominent, the Red Sea is massive and dripping with colour, and newly created saints (in this case Richard of Chichester) make a last-minute appearance.
It also contains much detail for its size: the Thames and the Severn are visible, Adam and Eve appear mournfully stranded in a walled Eden. The fearful Gog and Magog, supposed forces of the Antichrist, also make an appearance in the east, where they appear to be contained by a wall built by Alexander the Great, one of the many legends of Alexander’s travels reflected in mappae mundi (the fortification has also been identified, contrary to received wisdom, as the Great Wall of China).
The cartographic historian Peter Whitfield has called the Psalter world and others like it ‘maps of the religious imagination’, and there is no finer or more stunning example than a map discovered in a Benedictine abbey in Ebstorf, lower Saxony, in 1832. At about 3.5m in diameter it was more than twice the size of the Hereford map, equally encyclopaedic and just as bizarre. Its origins are uncertain but it is believed to date from as early as 1234 and to have been the work of the abbey’s nuns, pooling their own knowledge with library manuscripts and reports from visitors. (A rival theory links it to Gervase of Tilbury, an English legal scholar teaching in Bologna.)
Its fame today is partly associated with its allegorical representation of Christ, whose body is splayed out (as if on the cross) so that it grasps the whole of the world – head at the top by Paradise, hands at the extremes of north and south, legs at the bottom due west, Jerusalem as his navel. The concept of Christianity embracing all humanity is echoed within the map itself, which is nothing less than a Bible class.
The map is packed with story and text, with one inscription hoping it will provide ‘directions for travellers and the things on the way that most pleasantly delight the eye’. But time again has stood still, and the traveller may find themselves searching in vain for such sights depicted here as Noah’s Ark and the Golden Fleece, or the unnerving possibilities of Africa, including a race yet to discover fire, a people without nose or mouth that speaks only in gesture, a tribe that is always falling on its face as it walks, and a nation with upper lips so elastic that they may pull them over their heads for disguise and shelter. But, alas, these wonders may now only be seen on photographs, as the map was destroyed in an allied bombing raid in 1943.
There may be a simple reason why these medieval maps contained many of the same features and landmarks: they may have been drawn from the same manual. In 2002 the French historian Patrick Gautier Dalche reported on his discovery of two manuscripts called Expositio Mappe Mundi that represented a template of how to make a map of the world. The manuscripts were copied in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century, but their origin is believed to be English and much earlier, possibly dating back to the Third Crusade between 1188 and 1192 (their author may have been part of Richard the Lionheart’s army). The guides contain not only a list of place names, but their spatial relationship to each other: places were ‘above’, ‘below’ or ‘opposite’ others, while regions were ‘demarcated’ and rivers ‘spanned’. Of the 484 items detailed in the Expositio, some 400 made it accurately onto the Hereford Mappa Mundi.
Another clue to vague but emerging global knowledge surfaces in another mappa, from around 1436, named after the sailor-cartographer who drew it on vellum, Andrea Bianco. As befits its origins and current home in Venice, the earth resembles a giant fish in a bowl, a flounder perhaps, with Europe, Asia and Africa surrounded on all sides by ocean. A dark blue rim encircles the whole, sparkling with heavenly constellations, the earth again a symbolic marble spinning in a broadly philosophical sphere.
The Andrea Bianco map – here come the poles
The British Isles, Spain and France are relatively accurate depictions, and there is the gentle introduction of the newly discovered Azores in a greatly enlarged Atlantic Ocean. But then there is real geographical news, as astonishing to us today as it must have been when the ink was fresh: the southerly base of Africa is encircled by what may be the south pole, enlivened by a merman and a man dangling perilously on a rope, while a similar circular section intrudes in the northern sphere, where the text tells us of frozen tundra. Elsewhere there are familiar figures – elephants, camels, enthroned monarchs within marquees, the Virgin Mary with child – while less familiar lands contain winged beasts and men with heads of dogs. But was the suggestion of the two polar regions sheer guesswork, tutored intuition or evidence of a greater awareness of regions beyond the habitable? There is no way of knowing, but it is clear that the map is edging towards something distinctly modern.
Pocket Map
Here Be Dragons
In the New York Times of 29 February 2012, the erudite columnist Thomas L. Friedman began his article about the fall-out from the Arab Spring with the following lines: ‘In medieval times, areas known to be dangerous or uncharted were often labeled on maps with the warning: “Beware, here be dragons.” That is surely how mapmakers would be labeling the whole Middle East today.’
Nice historical parallel, not quite true. The phrase ‘Here Be Dragons’ has never actually appeared on a historic map. There have been lots of ironic, nostalgic and fearful uses in literature, but try finding those three words on a map from the medieval or golden ages – the big Dutch atlases, say, or the fanciest German or British maps anytime from the fifteenth century to the twentieth – and you’ll look in vain. ‘Here Be Dragons’ is a map myth as mythical and wonderful as dragons themselves, and we may wonder how such a thing has come about.
Blanks on maps make it look like vital information is absent. So we put in something to hide our shame: very big curving country names (M-E-X-I-C-A-N-A), chunks of text about the unusual flora of a country, a proud message from the map-maker about his new projection. We once used another phrase to describe the unexplored: Terra Incognita. But, romantic though that sounds, you can’t beat animals, or better still, imaginary beasts. On the earliest medieval maps, which, as we have seen, have a tendency towards the fearful in their morality lessons, the trend was to portray the angriest, scaliest and toothiest fish that sailors had ever seen, and the biggest, ugliest winged monsters that intrepid colonisers had been warned about by canny natives. Sometimes this was like Chinese whispers: the animal would begin as an elephant, become a mammoth, and by the time the maps of Africa or Asia were drawn up back in London or Amsterdam, transform into a nightmare. In China, the Chinese whispers would, one assume, naturally take the form of one of the country’s sacred cultural symbols, the dragon.
‘Here Be Dragons’ may, however, have once appeared on a globe, but this rather depends on interpretation and translation. The Lenox Globe is believed to have been made around 1505, although its origin and maker is unknown. It’s a small thing, an engraved hollow copper ball of less than 12cm in diameter, and is proudly displayed at the New York Public Library as the earliest known example of a globe showing ‘Mundus Novus’ – the New World. The feature we are interested in – the Latin phrase HIC SUNT DRACONES – is to be made out just below the Equator in ‘East India’ (China). It might be a reference to Chinese dragons, assumed to be real. But scholars also suggest, spoilingly, that it could be translated as ‘Here are Dagronians’, referencing the cannibals of the kingdom of Dagronia mentioned in the travels of Marco Polo.
Some early dragon activity on the thirteenth-century Ebstorf map
Pictures of dragons on maps are another matter. They are many and magnificent. The American historian Erin C. Blake and her friends have compiled a scholarly list of early maps and globes which contain pictures of dragons (or almost-dragons, like scorpions with tongues), which include the previously-mentioned Psalter Map from c.1262, which has a dragon in the area b
eneath the world. She also notes that the Ebstorf Map has the word ‘Draco’ in south-east Africa.
Blake has also recorded the phrase’s appearances in literature, where the earliest confirmed finding is surprisingly late: a Dorothy L. Sayers short story about a treasure hunt, ‘The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head’ from 1928, in which a character reports seeing ‘hic dracones’ on an old map.* Perhaps he did. We are the poorer for having failed to find it.
Chapter 4
Venice, China and a Trip to the Moon
Some maps get the location they deserve. The Hereford Mappa Mundi is still in its cathedral; the first globe (and maps) to mention America have made their way to the United States. But for one of the most elaborate and important maps of the world to be hung in a dimly-lit corridor above a chilly Venetian stairwell? That makes sense too.
If you walk to the western corner of St Mark’s Square, climb up the stone steps of the Museo Correr, pay €16, saunter through nineteen rooms of marble, coins and globes, you end up at a glass door. This is the Biblioteca Marciana, the civic library built in the 1530s to house a vast collection of Greek and Roman manuscripts and later a copy of every book printed in Venice. And there, between the museum and the library, visible through the glass door but accessible only with special permission from an attendant, is the work of a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro, who somehow, in 1459, knew more about what was where in the world than anyone else.
Mauro lived and worked on the Venetian island of Murano, already famous for its glass by the time he established his cartographer’s studio there in the 1440s. He had travelled more than most, and some of his early naval and trade charts were drawn from experience. His circular world map (coloured ink on parchment, about two metres in diameter) was constructed for King Alphonso V of Portugal, and although the original no longer survives, we are fortunate that a copy was made for a Venetian lord.
On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does Page 5