Tracing the map’s topography outwards from Jerusalem in terms of theology rather than geography, we begin to see a clearer logic to its shape. Asia is covered with locations and scenes from the Old Testament. Surrounding Jerusalem are Mount Ephraim, the Mount of Olives and the Valley of Jehoshaphat; further north stand the Tower of Babel, and the cities of Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah. To the right are Joseph’s ‘barns’ – a medieval rendition of the Egyptian pyramids – and Mount Sinai, where Moses is shown receiving the Ten Commandments from God’s hand. The map also weaves a mazy itinerary of the Exodus, wandering through the Dead Sea and the River Jordan before reaching Jericho, passing a series of fabled sites along the way, including Lot’s wife, turned to a pillar of salt.
In the midst of all this wealth of geographical, biblical, mythical and classical detail, the viewer’s eye is inexorably drawn upwards towards the map’s apex, and its shaping theology. At the top, just below the circular border, lies the Garden of Eden, the Earthly Paradise, shown as a fortified circular island irrigated by four rivers, and inhabited by Adam and Eve, portrayed at the moment of the Fall. Just to the south, the couple is shown being expelled from Eden, cursed to roam the terrestrial world that lies beneath them. Directly above this scene, beyond the worldly frame of human time and space, sits the resurrected Christ, presiding over the Day of Judgement. Around him a legend reads ‘Behold my witness’, a reference to the marks of the Crucifixion (the stigmata and spear wound in his right breast) that testify to his status as the promised Messiah. To Christ’s right (the viewer’s left), an angel resurrects the saved souls from their graves, proclaiming ‘Arise! You shall come to joy everlasting.’ To Christ’s left, the damned are led away to the gates of Hell by an angel brandishing a flaming sword, declaring ‘Arise! You are going to the fire established in Hell.’
Between these contrasting scenes, a bare-breasted Mary gazes up at her son. ‘See, dear son, my bosom, in which you took on flesh,’ she tells him, ‘and the breasts at which you sought the Virgin’s milk.’ ‘Have mercy,’ she implores him, ‘as you yourself have pledged – on all those who have served me, since you made me the way of salvation.’ Mary’s appeal is probably designed as a mnemonic. It evokes the exchange in the Gospel of Luke where ‘a certain woman of the company’ called out to Jesus, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.’ Viewers of the map would be versed in Jesus’s response: ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it’ (Luke 11: 27–8). They would understand that the Final Judgement is based on strict adherence to the word of God.
The whole biblical scene of resurrection and judgement stands at the top of the mappamundi, where a modern reader might look for a gloss or explanation of a world map or atlas. But instead of a written title, the Hereford mappamundi provides its audience with a visual image of the drama of Christian creation and redemption. It shows how the world was created by God, and how it will come to an end with the Day of Judgement and the creation of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ (Revelation 21: 1). This is a map of religious faith, with a symbolic centre and monstrous margins, which bears little resemblance to either Ptolemy’s geometrical project of the terrestrial sphere created in Alexandria nearly a millennium earlier, or world maps made in Palermo just 100 years previously. In the period between Ptolemy and the Hereford mappamundi, Christianity emerged as a global religion that also manufactured a new and compelling idea of the world made in its own theological image. The Hereford mappamundi is an enduring example of this ambitious new world picture shaped not by science but primarily by faith. Within the map’s unfamiliar geography, and what seems to a modern eye its bizarre ethnography and eccentric topography, it is possible to trace a development from classical Graeco-Roman civilization, and the rise of Christianity, a religion which only reluctantly embraced geography, but nevertheless adopted mappaemundi from the eighth century as its defining image of the world for the next 600 years.
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The Hereford map is a classic example of a mappamundi that emanated from centuries of conflict and gradual accommodation between Graeco-Roman attitudes concerning the earth and its origins, and the new monotheistic Christian faith and belief in a divinity that created the world and promised everlasting salvation to mankind. Although Greece and Rome were regarded as ‘pagan’ societies, inimical to Christianity’s story of Creation, they provided the only geographical accounts available through which to understand the Bible’s varied (often vague, even contradictory) pronouncements on the shape and scope of the earth. As a result, the early Fathers of the Church, responsible after the death of the Apostles for defining the tenets of the Christian faith, had to step carefully, celebrating the classical world for its intellectual achievements, but castigating it for its paganism.
Nevertheless, it was Rome that provided Christianity with its earliest geographical knowledge. One of the great enigmas of early mappaemundi is their repeated inference of the existence of a standard Roman map of the world, a lost original which provided the basis for all subsequent Roman and early Christian mapmaking. On the Hereford mappamundi the outer pentagonal frame in the top left-hand corner contains a legend that reads, ‘The terrestrial landmass began to be measured under Julius Caesar.’ This is a reference to Julius Caesar’s decision in 44 BC to survey the entire earth by dispatching consuls to map each cardinal direction – Nicodoxus (the east), Teodocus (the north), Policlitus (the south) and Didymus (the west), and to return with a world map to be publicly displayed in Rome. The first three men are all given their own legends in the eastern, northern and southern corners of the map, and reappear again in the map’s bottom left-hand corner illustration. Above them sits Augustus Caesar, Julius’ adopted son, enthroned and wearing a Christian papal triple tiara, who presents the three men with a scroll on which is written, ‘Go into all the world and make a report to the Senate on all its continents: and to confirm this [order] I have affixed my seal to this document.’ Above this scene another legend reads ‘Luke in his Gospel: “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be described”.’ In the King James Version the phrase is translated as ‘all the world should be taxed’, but this interpretation was not followed by subsequent translations, and the reference on the mappamundi is clearly to topography, not population.6
Whatever the scientific achievements of Roman surveying and mapmaking may have been, many of the Latin Fathers – including Tertullian, St Cyprian, St Hilary and St Ambrose – had little interest in such innovations. The third-century Christian martyr St Damian certainly dismissed such pursuits. ‘What can Christians’, he asked, ‘gain from science?’7 The more intellectually adventurous Fathers, like St Augustine (354–430) and his near contemporary St Jerome (c. 360–420), had a rather different attitude. Augustine acknowledged that the classical study of physica, the created world, was necessary to understand sapientia, what Augustine defined as ‘the knowledge of divine things’.8 According to Augustine, without a knowledge of ‘the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world’, we cannot understand the Bible, nor, by implication, can we be good Christians. He argued that biblical time and history should be studied alongside space and geography for a better understanding of divine creation. In his book On Christian Doctrine, Augustine skilfully argued for the study of both geography and history, without suggesting that this in any way showed man challenging God. ‘Thus,’ he suggested, ‘he who narrates the order of time does not compose it himself,’ and similarly: ‘he who shows the location of places or the natures of animals, plants or minerals does not show things instituted by men; and he who demonstrates the stars and their motion does not demonstrate anything instituted by himself.’ Such observations only reflected on the glory of God’s creations, and allowed those who undertook such study to then ‘learn or teach it’.9
St Jerome took up Augustine’s suggestion of listing biblical locations. Jerome is better known today for tr
anslating and standardizing the Vulgate, a Latin version of the Bible, from its various early Hebrew and Greek versions. But around 390 he also produced a book On the Location and Names of Hebrew Places, often referred to simply as the Liber locorum, which provided an alphabetical description of place names from the Bible. Jerome’s book was based on the writing of an earlier Church Father, Eusebius (c. 260–340), bishop of Caesarea, who wrote one of the earliest histories of the Christian Church; he also acted as an adviser to Constantine I (272–337), the founder of the capital of what became the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. Around 330 Eusebius completed his Greek text Onomasticon, ‘a list of proper nouns naming people or places’, a topographical dictionary listing nearly a thousand biblical locations. Jerome corrected and updated Eusebius’ text to provide a comprehensive Latin gazetteer of biblical place names, so that someone ‘who knows the sites of ancient cities and places and their names, whether the same or changed, will gaze more clearly upon Holy Scripture’.10
Fig. 4 Map of Palestine, St Jerome, Liber locorum, twelfth century.
Eusebius, Augustine and Jerome, like all the other early Church Fathers, were living in the shadow of the decline of the classical Roman Empire and its gradual Christianization. The emperor Constantine’s conversion around 312 gave ultimate sanction to the faith, but the adoption of Christianity took place against a backdrop of the erosion of Rome’s military and political dominance, and Constantine’s decision to split the empire into eastern and western spheres, with Constantinople as its eastern imperial capital. The Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 made some realize what had for centuries seemed unthinkable: that Rome might not be eternal after all. This caused further problems for the Church Fathers. Until Constantine’s conversion, Rome had represented the pagan, repressive past, but by the end of the fourth century Rome had adopted Christianity as its official religion. Many now worried that the empire’s political decline was somehow connected to its newly adopted faith. Augustine provided a theologically and intellectually profound answer in The City of God, written as a direct response to the Sack of Rome. Augustine used the metaphor of the city of Rome to propose that there were two cities: the earthly city of men, represented by Rome, its pagan gods and pursuit of glory; and the eternal city of God, a religious community of earthly pilgrims temporarily inhabiting this world, dedicated to the divine capital of Heaven. For Augustine, Rome, and earlier earthly cities and empires (such as Babylon and Persia), were necessary historical prefigurations of the ultimate creation of the City of God. This account of faith and salvation would become central to subsequent Christian theology.
For Christians, the City of God was a spiritual community, rather than a physical location, so how did thinkers like Jerome and Augustine visualize the terrestrial world so as to be consistent with Scripture? How did they represent the Christian world on a flat map? Jerome offered one response in his Liber locorum. Later twelfth-century copies of the book made in Tournai contain regional maps of Palestine and Asia, designed to illustrate Jerome’s catalogue of places. Jerome’s text, and the maps that accompany it, influenced mappaemundi like Hereford’s in their use of biblical place names and their geographical location. In Jerome’s map of Palestine Jerusalem stands at the centre, a fortified circle distinguished by the tower of David. To the right is Egypt, with the two versions of the Nile which reappear on the Hereford mappamundi. Above Jerusalem, the Ganges, Indus, Tigris and Euphrates are shown flowing down from the Caucasus and Armenia, where a legend notes that Noah’s Ark came to rest, which is again reproduced on the Hereford map. Although this is an explicitly biblical map, with most of its 195 locations drawn from Scripture, it also shows the rather garbled influence of Graeco-Roman mythology. At the top of the map in India stand Alexander’s altars, next to the prophetic or ‘oracular’ trees he consulted during his time in the East.
The Jerome maps focused primarily on one part of the known world. But there were other mapping traditions available to the Church Fathers that claimed to represent the whole of the earth’s surface and which would have a decisive influence upon the shape of the Hereford mappamundi. The first is now known as the T-O map, which is composed of a ‘T’ within a circle containing three continents, Asia, Europe and Africa, surrounded by water. The land masses are divided by three waterways which make up the ‘T’: the Don (usually labelled as the Tanais) dividing Europe and Asia, the Nile separating Africa and Asia, and the Mediterranean dividing Europe and Africa. Most mappaemundi, including Hereford’s, inherited the orientation of east at their apex from the T-O tradition. The classical origin of these maps remains obscure. One possible source is the Judaic belief in the peopling of the three continents by Noah’s sons – Japheth (Europe), Shem (Asia) and Ham (Africa), but there are no known surviving examples of this specifically Jewish tradition.
Fig. 5 T-O Map, from Sallust, The Jugurthine War, thirteenth-century manuscript.
The earliest surviving examples of T-O design date from the ninth century and are used to illustrate manuscripts of classical Roman history. Historians like Sallust (86–34 BC) and Lucan (AD 39–65) used geographical descriptions to situate their written histories of the battles and struggles for power that defined the period surrounding the death of the Roman Republic and the rise of the empire. In The Jugurthine War (40 BC), Sallust describes the unsuccessful rebellion of the Libyan King Jugurtha against the Republic in 118–105 BC. In chapter 17 he pauses to reflect that ‘my subject seems to require of me, in this place, a brief account of the situation of Africa, and of those nations in it with whom we have had war or alliances’. Discussing debates over the division of the earth, Sallust continues, ‘most authorities recognise Africa as a third continent’, although he goes on to concede that ‘a few admit only Asia and Europe as continents, including Africa in Europe’. Sallust then provides two chapters describing what he calls ‘the aborigines of Africa, the immigrant races, and the cross-breeding that took place’, before returning to his commentary on Jugurtha’s rebellion.11 Sallust’s geographical references were limited, but they offered one of the few classical accounts of what we would today call human geography: how humans interact with and shape their physical environment. The book and its geographical content were popular: between the ninth and twelfth centuries 106 manuscript copies survived, with more than half illustrated with a T-O map.12
The second cartographic tradition known to the Church Fathers, and which had a more intangible influence upon the Hereford mappamundi, was the zonal map. This method of world mapping has a clearer lineage, which we have seen stretching back even further than the T-O map, through Arabic astronomy to Ptolemy, Aristotle, Plato and the early Greek cosmographers. Its most influential exponent in the early Christian period was the fifth-century writer Macrobius and his Commentary on Scipio’s Dream.13 Little is known about Macrobius’ life. He may have been Greek, or more likely an African-born Roman administrator in North Africa. His book provided a commentary on the closing section of Cicero’s Republic, which was itself a response to Plato’s Republic, but, instead of exploring the idea of utopia, Cicero used Rome’s Republic as a model for the ideal commonwealth. Much of Cicero’s text was subsequently lost, but Macrobius inherited its later section, known as ‘Scipio’s Dream’, which he interpreted as an astronomical and geographical text.
In the Commentary, Macrobius describes a classical, geocentric world picture. ‘The earth’, he argues, is ‘fixed in the middle of the universe’, around which seven planetary spheres rotate from west to east. The terrestrial sphere is ‘divided into regions of excessive cold or heat, with two temperate zones between the hot and cold regions. The northern and southern extremities are frozen with perpetual cold’, and, Macrobius believes, cannot support life, ‘for their icy torpor withholds life from animals and vegetation; animal life thrives upon the same climate that sustains plant life’. The central zone, ‘scorched by an incessa
nt blast of heat, occupies an area more extensive in breadth and circumference, and is uninhabited because of the raging heat’. Between the frozen extremities and the middle, torrid zone lie the temperate zones, ‘tempered by the extremes of the adjoining belts; in these alone has nature permitted the human race to exist’. In anticipating the later discovery of Australia (whose name derives from the Latin auster, or south wind), Macrobius argues that the southern temperate zone is inhabited because ‘it has the same climate as our zone, but by whom it is occupied we have never been permitted to learn and never shall be, since the torrid zone lying between denies the people of either zone the opportunity of communicating with each other’.14
Where T-O maps proposed a simplified diagram of human geography, with mankind shaping the bare outlines of the division of the world into distinct continents, zonal maps of the kind described by Macrobius tried to provide some understanding of physical geography, or how the natural world dictated where humans dwelt upon its surface. For the Christian Fathers, both models required a certain amount of appropriation and manipulation to fit into their theological vision of the world. Zonal maps were particularly tricky, as they drew on a Greek tradition which claimed that mankind’s place on the earth was primarily shaped by the physical environment. These maps also posited an unknown, inaccessible race in the southern half of the terrestrial globe. Was this race created by God? If so, why was it not mentioned in the Bible? Such questions remained unanswered, but continued to preoccupy theologians throughout this period.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 13