A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Following the exhaustive descriptions of both map projections, Ptolemy concluded book 1 of the Geography with some remarkably sanguine observations. Although preferring the second projection, he appreciated that ‘it might be inferior to the other with respect to the ease of making the map’, and he counselled future geographers to ‘hold on to descriptions of both methods, for the sake of those who will be attracted to the handier one of them because it is easy’. His advice would influence the response of scholars and mapmakers to the revival of the Geography from the thirteenth century onwards.

  Ptolemy’s predecessors used geography to try to understand cosmogony, the explanation of the creation of everything. In his Geography, Ptolemy turned away from this quest. There are no myths, and few political boundaries or ethnographies in his book. Instead, he recreates the origins of his subject in two enduring principles of Alexandrian learning: Euclid’s principles of geometry and Callimachus’ bibliographical method of classification. Ptolemy’s innovation was to establish a repeatable methodology for mapping the known world according to recognized mathematical principles. His map projections allowed anyone with a basic understanding of Euclidean geometry to create a map of the world. His innovation of tables of latitude and longitude, drawn from the Alexandrian Pinakes, established the coordinates of locations throughout the . These tables enabled mapmakers to plot the positions of every known location upon a map with utter simplicity, and by refusing to place explicit boundaries upon his , Ptolemy encouraged future mapmakers to plot ever more locations upon the surface of their world maps.

  Ptolemy’s claim to objectivity and exactitude in the gathering of geographical and astronomical materials was of course an illusion. The measurement of any substantial distance in the second century was notoriously imprecise, astronomical observations were compromised by limited and unwieldy instruments, and much of Ptolemy’s data on the location of places was based on what the Greeks call , or ‘hearsay’ – the claims made by a certain merchant, the reported observations of an astronomer passed down through centuries or the anonymous records of itineraria. His projections were also limited to just half the earth, an inhabited surface that was only 180° wide, even though he and his contemporaries understood that there was a world elsewhere beyond the limits of the .55 In many ways this was just an incitement to future speculation and projection. Having provided the methodological toolkit for making a map, Ptolemy invited others to revise his tables and relocate their places. Regional mapping, chorography, was an art, but the mapping of the world was now a science. The outline of a region or position of a place could be changed if new information appeared, but the methodology of marking a point upon the map’s surface according to certain enduring mathematical principles was, he believed, immutable.

  One puzzle in assessing Ptolemy’s importance for mapmaking remains. Throughout the Geography, there are no explicit references to maps illustrating the text. As we have seen, the earliest surviving text only appears in Byzantium in the late thirteenth century, more than a thousand years after it was first written. These early texts included world maps (mainly based on the first projection), but it is unclear if these maps were copies of Ptolemy’s original illustrations, or Byzantine additions based on Ptolemy’s written instructions. The question of whether Ptolemy ever drew maps to illustrate the original Geography has divided cartographic historians for decades; scholarly opinion now leans towards the belief that, although he may have done so, any such maps were not incorporated into the original Geography.56 There are very few examples of maps in Graeco-Roman treatises on geography, and it was more common for them to be erected in public spaces, as in the case of maps placed on the wall of a portico in Rome in the early first century AD by the emperor Augustus’ friend Agrippa.57

  It is possible that the initial form of the Geography was responsible for its lack of maps. It was probably written with lampblack ink made from soot, and inscribed on a roll of papyrus cut from plants growing along the Nile Delta. Most papyrus rolls from this period were composed of conjoined sheets measuring an average 340 centimetres in length. However, the height of any roll rarely measured more than 30 centimetres.58 Such dimensions suited Roman itineraries, such as the so-called ‘Peutinger Map’, a twelfth- or thirteenth-century copy of a fourth-century AD Roman map showing the world from India, Sri Lanka and China to Iberia and the British Isles. These itineraries described the movement across terrestrial space in linear terms, a one-dimensional representation with little sense of depth, relief or scale, primarily due to the limitations of the medium. The ‘Peutinger Map’ is inscribed on a parchment roll with a length of over 6 metres, but a width of just 33 centimetres, creating obvious lateral distortion. These dimensions made it effectively impossible to reproduce either the world or regional maps described in such detail by Ptolemy without improbable reduction and distortion. Ptolemy’s solution was either to draw maps separate from his book (but if so, none have survived), or, in the explanation offered by the most recent translators of the Geography, he decided to ‘encode the map in words and numbers’.59 If this was the case, then Ptolemy’s approach was to provide the geographical data and the mathematical method, and leave the rest to future generations.

  • • •

  ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ exclaimed Shelley’s Egyptian pharaoh Ozymandias. In Shelley’s poem on the hubris of imperial might, ‘nothing beside remains’ of the tyrant’s kingdom and all its glittering monuments, except the ruins of his statue. Similarly, today, most traces of the Ptolemaic dynasty and their rule over Egypt have disappeared, submerged beneath the waters of Alexandria’s harbour. The library is long gone, most of its books looted and destroyed. Its loss has haunted the Western imagination ever since and historians of different ideological persuasions throughout the ages have blamed everyone from Romans and Christians to Muslims for its destruction. It remains a romantic memory of endless possibilities, a source of speculation and myth, a ‘might have been’ in the development of learning and civilization, and a lesson on the creative as well as destructive impulses that lie at the heart of all empires.60

  But some of the ‘works’ survived and migrated and they included Ptolemy’s Geography. Although Ptolemy’s writing seems remarkably untouched by the events that surrounded him, his text betrays a desire to transmit his ideas in a more enduring form than maps or monuments. The Geography was the first book that, either by accident or design, showed the potential of transmitting geographical data digitally. Rather than reproducing unreliable graphic, analogue elements to describe geographical information, the surviving copies of the Geography used the discrete, discontinuous signs of numbers and shapes – from the coordinates of places across the inhabited world to the geometry required to draw Ptolemy’s projections – to transmit its methods. This first rudimentary digital geography created a world based on a series of interconnecting points, lines and arcs grounded in the Greek tradition of astronomical observation and mathematical speculation, that stretched through Eratosthenes and Euclid all the way back to Anaximander. Ptolemy threw a net across the known world, defined by the enduring abstract principles of geometry and astronomy and the measurement of latitude and longitude. One of his greatest triumphs was to make all subsequent generations ‘see’ a series of geometrical lines criss-crossing the globe – the poles, the equator and the tropics – as if they were real, rather than man-made geometrical projections upon the earth’s surface.

  Ptolemy’s scientific methods sought to make the world comprehensible through the imposition of geometrical order onto the chaotic variety of the world ‘out there’, while also retaining a sense of wonder at its infinite variety. His vision, enshrined in one of the Geography’s earliest statements on the geometrical measurement of the earth, would inspire generations of geographers even beyond the Renaissance, all the way to the age of manned space flight:

  These things belong to the loftiest and loveliest of intellectual pursuits, name
ly to exhibit to human understanding through mathematics both the heavens themselves in their physical nature since they can be seen in their revolution about us, and the nature of the earth through a portrait since the real earth, being enormous and not surrounding us, cannot be inspected by any one person either as a whole or part by part.61

  2

  Exchange

  , AD 1154

  Palermo, Sicily, February 1154

  On 27 February 1154 Roger II, ‘king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia and of the principality of Capua’, died aged 58 in his palace, the Palazzo Reale, situated in the heart of his royal capital of Palermo. He was buried with due ceremony in the south aisle of Palermo Cathedral, where, twenty-four years earlier, he had been crowned king on Christmas Day 1130. His death brought to an end an extraordinary reign on the island that to modern eyes represents one of the great moments of medieval convivencia, the Spanish term for the peaceful coexistence of Catholics, Muslims and Jews under one rule.

  Descended from the Hauteville dynasty that originated in Normandy’s Cotentin peninsula, Roger and his forebears led a series of spectacular Norman conquests across Europe, Africa and the Middle East in the late eleventh century. As the Byzantine Empire declined in the face of first Persian then Arabic Muslim challenges to its authority, the Normans exploited the international disarray of medieval Christendom and soon established their rule over parts of southern Italy, Sicily, Malta and North Africa. They went on to conquer England and even created a principality in Antioch (straddling present-day Turkey and Syria) before the First Crusade of 1095.1

  At each stage of their military conquests the Normans assimilated the cultures they conquered (with varying degrees of success). In 1072 Roger’s father, Roger Guiscard, captured Palermo and appointed himself Count of Sicily, ending more than 100 years of Arab control of the island. Before Arab rule, Sicily had been governed by first the Greeks, then the Romans, and finally the Byzantines. It was a heritage that left the Normans in control of one of the most culturally diverse and strategically important islands in the whole of the Mediterranean. When Roger II was crowned king in 1130, he pursued a policy of political accommodation and religious toleration towards Muslims and Jews that quickly established Sicily as one of the most highly organized and culturally dynamic kingdoms in the medieval world. Roger’s kingdom was primarily administered by a royal chancery that employed Greek, Latin and Arabic scribes. His court produced a trilingual psalter, and the liturgy was reportedly sung in Arabic.

  Roger’s death represented the end of an era. Of those mourners who gathered at his interment in 1154, none had more to lament Roger’s passing than one of his closest confidants, Abu ibn ibn ibn al-Sharif , more commonly known as . Just weeks before Roger’s death, had finally completed a vast geographical compendium over which he had laboured for more than a decade since its commission by Roger in the early 1140s. The book provided a comprehensive summary of the known world, and was illustrated with seventy regional maps of the world – and one small but beautifully illuminated world map.

  Written in Arabic, and completed (according to its introduction) in the month of in the Islamic calendar, or 14–15 January 1154, the book was entitled nuzhat , the ‘Entertainment for He Who Longs to Travel the World’. So close was the relationship between Roger and that the nuzhat (hereafter the Entertainment) became known simply as The Book of Roger. Few rulers had taken such a close personal interest in their patronage of maps or their makers. Originally commissioned as a statement of Roger’s imperial and cultural ambitions, within weeks of its completion book became a commemoration of the dead king’s legacy and a powerful statement of his kingdom’s syncretic traditions, complementing the palaces and cathedrals he built throughout his reign. But with the death of his patron, and his newly completed book faced an uncertain future.2

  Its geographical range and painstaking detail made the Entertainment one of the great works of medieval geography, and one of the finest descriptions of the inhabited world compiled since Ptolemy’s Geography. book and the maps that accompanied it drew on Greek, Christian and Islamic traditions of science, geography and travel to produce a hybrid perspective on the world based on the exchange of cultural ideas and beliefs between different faiths. There is an obvious appeal today in seeing work as the product of a rapprochement between Christianity and Islam, when both learnt from each other in an apparently amicable exchange of ideas. But the twelfth-century world of Norman Sicily and the aspirations of individuals like Roger II and were more strategic and provisional than such thinking might hope. Muslims were granted only limited rights under Roger, and the Normans continued to provide support for the Crusades against the Muslims in the Holy Lands to the east. From the perspective of Islamic theology, the known world was divided into two: the , or House of Islam, and the , or House of War, inhabited by all non-Muslims. Until Muhammad’s divine revelations were universally accepted, a state of perpetual war existed between the two houses.

  But not all non-Muslims were the same. Both Christians and Jews were regarded as ahl , or ‘people of the book’, adhering to a revealed faith explained through a standard scriptural book of prayer (the Bible, the Torah and the ). The belief in one common God led to a range of cultural encounters between the three religions, as each tried to assert its theological superiority over the others, more often than not producing exchanges and encounters characterized by conversion and conflict, rather than dialogue and diversity.3 Nevertheless, discussion happened, debates took place, and in the midst of such competitive exchanges emerged Entertainment.

  The story of relationship with Roger II and the creation of his maps is not one of the Muslim East encountering the Christian West on equal terms. Instead it reveals a world where these geopolitical distinctions were only just beginning to develop, and where dynastic conflicts and religious divisions ensured that the labels ‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian’ were fluid categories, characterized by schism, conversion and apostasy, rather than unconditional doctrinal belief. Its chapters unfolded against the backdrop of the wider Mediterranean world, where the Byzantine Empire fell in inverse proportion to the rise of the Muslim Caliphate, and a divided and relatively insignificant Latin Christianity was caught somewhere in the middle, trying (but often failing) to assert some vestige of political autonomy and control.

  Only ten manuscript copies of Entertainment remain, the earliest made in 1300, and the latest at the end of the sixteenth century. As with Ptolemy’s Geography, we are working with a book and its maps that were produced hundreds of years after their original creation. In one of the best preserved manuscript copies of the Entertainment, held in the Bodleian Library’s Pococke Collection, and dated 1553, there is a circular world map, beautiful in its simplicity, which appears to show how represented the world in the middle of the twelfth century. The most startling aspect of the map is that it is oriented with south at the top.

  Etymologically, ‘orientation’ stems from the original Latin root oriens, which refers to the east, or the direction of the rising sun. Virtually all ancient cultures record their ability to orient themselves according to an east–west axis based on observations of the rising (eastern) and setting (western) sun, and a north–south axis measured according to the position of the North Star or the midday sun.4 Such orientation was as much symbolic and sacred as directional. In polytheistic sun-worshipping cultures, the east (oriens) was revered as the direction of renewal and life, closely followed by the south, while the west was understandably associated with decline and death, and north with darkness and evil. The Judaeo-Christian tradition developed these associations by orienting places of worship as well as maps towards the east, which was ultimately regarded as the location of the Earthly Paradise. In contrast, the west was associated with mortality, and the direction faced by Christ on the cross. The north became a sign of evil and satanic influence, and was often the direction in which the heads of excommunicants and the unbaptized faced wh
en they were buried.5 As the next chapter shows, virtually all Christian world maps (or mappaemundi) put east at the top of their maps until the fifteenth century.

  Islam and mapmakers like inherited a similar reverence for the east, although it developed an even stronger interest in the cardinal directions with the injunction to its believers to pray in the sacred direction of Mecca, regardless of their location on the globe; finding the direction (known as qibla, or ‘sacred direction’) and distance to both Mecca and the inspired some of the most complicated and elaborate maps and diagrammatic calculations of the medieval period.6 Most of the communities who converted to Islam in its early phase of rapid international expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries lived directly north of Mecca, leading them to regard the qibla as due south. As a result, most Muslim world maps, including , were oriented with south at the top. This also neatly established continuity with the tradition of the recently conquered Zoroastrian communities in Persia, which regarded south as sacred.