Although the mappamundi was too large to act as a medieval pilgrimage routefinder, it appears to have been intended to inspire the faithful to contemplate pilgrimage, to admire the piety of those who undertook such a journey, and to reflect on the widely held medieval belief that the Christian life was itself an ongoing metaphorical pilgrimage. Homilies and sermons repeatedly reminded the faithful that their earthly life was a temporary exile from their ultimate destination and true, eternal home of heaven.33 In St Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews the faithful are regarded as ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth’ (Hebrews 11: 13), who ‘seek a country’ from which they came, and to which they seek to return. Earthly life is simply a stage in man’s spiritual pilgrimage, replaying on an individual level the vast historical gulf between the exile from Eden and the quest for ultimate salvation and the return to the heavenly Jerusalem.
The essence of the Hereford mappamundi is contiguity, the proximity of one place to one another, each place charged by a specific Christian event. It is a map shaped by its religious history connected to specific places, rather than geographical space. The map offers the faithful a depiction of scenes from the Creation, the Fall, the life of Christ and the Apocalypse in an image of the vertical progression of Christian history from top to bottom in which they could grasp the possibility of their own salvation. The Hereford congregation or visiting pilgrims would read the mappamundi vertically according to the passage of preordained time, beginning with the Garden of Eden and Adam’s expulsion, moving down through the growth of the great Asian empires, the birth of Christ and the rise of Rome, and ending with the prefiguration of the Last Judgement in the representation of the most westward point on the map, the Columns of Hercules. All these key historical moments, identified through their geographical locations, are placed equidistant from each other on the Hereford mappamundi. Each location is one further step in a religious story that anticipates divine revelation, which is represented at the apex of the map’s pentagonal frame, outside of earthly time and space. The wonder of mappaemundi, both in general and in their particular manifestation at Hereford, is the ability to embody all of human history in one image, and simultaneously to provide a sequential account of divine judgement and personal salvation.
So this is a map that promises salvation; but it also prefigures its own destruction. Man is a pilgrim on earth, questing and anticipating the Last Judgement: the earth itself is a husk, a divinely created but ultimately expendable shell to be superseded at the end of time when ‘the first heaven and the first earth were passed away’ in preparation for ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ (Revelation 21: 1). Mappaemundi are created with a prefiguration of their own end; Christian salvation is predicated on an obliteration of the worldly individual and the world he or she inhabits. The theme of contemptus mundi (literally, ‘contempt for the world’), the active renunciation of the terrestrial world in preparation for death and the world to come, pervaded medieval Christian belief. Pope Innocent III’s contemptus mundi tract, On the Misery of the Human Condition (c. 1196) survives in more than 400 medieval manuscripts.34 Its message, that the conclusion of the earthly pilgrimage was inevitably death and divine judgement, shaped religious observance, and suffused mappaemundi. Nowhere is this more graphically portrayed than in Hereford. It is there in the prefiguration of the arrival in heaven (or hell) at its top, to the rider at its bottom, waving farewell to the world before embarking on one final journey, to ‘go ahead’ as the legend says, into the eternal present of the afterlife. The mappamundi prefigures the end of its representation of the world with the Last Judgement, the terminus of the contemptus mundi tradition and the beginning of a new world of heaven and earth. This genre reached its zenith in the thirteenth century with the Hereford mappamundi. From the late fourteenth century the tradition began to decline, as a result not of the discovery of the new world of heaven, but of a whole host of new worlds discovered by more prosaic earth-bound travellers.
The Hereford mappamundi was therefore designed to work at various levels: to display to the faithful the wonders of God’s created world; to explain the nature of creation, salvation and, ultimately, God’s final judgement; to project the history of the world through locations, moving gradually from east to west, from the beginning of time to its end; and to describe the physical and spiritual world of pilgrimage, and the ultimate end of the world. All of this is built from the long historical, philosophical and spiritual tradition it inherits, stretching back through the early Christian Fathers to Roman times.
• • •
There is one final, more pragmatic dimension to the map’s creation, one which leads all the way back to the life and death of St Thomas Cantilupe. In the bottom left-hand corner of the pentagonal frame, below Augustus Caesar’s feet, is the legend: ‘Let all who have this history – or who shall hear, read, or see it – pray to Jesus in his divinity to have pity on Richard of Haldingham, or of Lafford, who made it and laid it out, that joy in heaven may be granted to him.’ The legend provides clues as to the authorship of the mappamundi, and its use once installed in Hereford Cathedral. There were in fact two closely related Richards who are relevant to the map’s history. Richard of Haldingham and Lafford, also known as de Bello, held the prebendery of Lafford (today known as Sleaford in Lincolnshire) and was treasurer of Lincoln Cathedral until his death in 1278. The Latinized surname de Bello indicates his family name, and ‘Haldingham’ his birthplace – such alternative surnames were common in the thirteenth century.
There was also a second, younger Richard de Bello (or ‘de la Bataille’). As his surname suggests, his family hailed from Battle, in Sussex, with another branch living in Lincolnshire, making the younger Richard a possible cousin of his older namesake, Richard of Haldingham. Richard de Bello took holy orders in Lincoln in 1294, but was subsequently appointed prebend in Norton in Herefordshire, going on to hold clerical positions in Salisbury, Lichfield, Lincoln and Hereford. He was in other words a pluralist, enjoying a series of non-residentiary benefices, just like both his patron, Richard Swinfield, who administered Lincoln Cathedral chancery in the late 1270s, and Swinfield’s mentor, Thomas Cantilupe. It seems that Richard de Bellos, Richard Swinfield and Bishop Cantilupe were all clerical pluralists, connected by a web of ecclesiastical patronage, and all with good reason to oppose the reforming, anti-pluralist campaign of Archbishop John Pecham. In 1279 Pecham launched a fierce attack on Richard Gravesend, the bishop of Lincoln, insisting on a reformation of what he saw as a range of abuses, including the seizure of benefices. Swinfield appears to have been sent from Hereford to Lincoln by Cantilupe, who held a benefice in the diocese, to defend the pluralist case and oppose what he and his supporters saw as Canterbury’s interference.35
These conflicts over ecclesiastical rights all point to a very specific earthly context for the mappamundi’s creation. It may even have been conceived not in Hereford but in Lincoln, by some combination of Richard Haldingham/de Bello senior, Richard Swinfield, and the younger Richard de Bello who briefed the craftsmen involved in the map’s composition. These men, with unrivalled access to the great ecclesiastical libraries of thirteenth-century England, were able to assimilate the diverse strands of classical and biblical learning that are so evident throughout the map, as well as consulting contemporary mappaemundi held in other religious institutions across the country. Their combined wealth would have enabled them to appoint those responsible for making the map. These included the artist who first drew the map’s illustrations and coloured them, the scribe who copied out the long and complicated written texts that cover its surface, and the expert limner who provided the finishing touches to the map’s display script and vivid illumination.
Although the mappamundi does not provide specific theological support for Cantilupe’s quarrel with Pecham and his defence of pluralism, the final scene in its frame seems to support the bishop in a different dispute that took place just a few years before Cantilupe’s death. In 127
7 Cantilupe protested against Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, who was accused of usurping the bishop’s rights to hunt in the Malvern Hills. The royal justices who were asked to adjudicate found in the bishop’s favour, and the earl’s foresters were instructed to step aside and allow Cantilupe and his retinue to hunt as they wished. The contemptus mundi scene in the bottom right-hand corner of the mappamundi shows an elegantly attired rider on a richly caparisoned horse, followed by a huntsman leading a pair of greyhounds. The huntsman addresses the words ‘Go ahead’ to the rider, who turns and raises his hand as if to acknowledge the offer, as he trots forward, glancing upwards at the world above him. The scene is an invitation to the map’s reader to ‘go ahead’ beyond the earthly realm into the heavenly world outside of time, space and the map’s frame. But it perhaps also, more prosaically, evokes Cantilupe’s local dispute with Gloucester. The huntsman represents Gloucester’s men, allowing the rider, possibly Cantilupe himself, to ‘go ahead’ and hunt in their place.36
There is one final intriguing scenario that may connect Cantilupe with the creation of the Hereford mappamundi: that it represents an attempt to support the canonization of the highly controversial bishop. In the early 1280s Cantilupe’s feud with Archbishop Pecham came to a head, leading to his excommunication, his travel to Italy, and finally his death in August 1282. In life, any prospective plan to create a mappamundi that celebrated Cantilupe was hardly original. But in death, it could represent a unique opportunity to memorialize him and put Hereford on the map of international Christianity. None of this would have been possible without Cantilupe’s protégé, Richard Swinfeld. It was Swinfield who succeeded Cantilupe as bishop of Hereford, and who as we have seen launched a campaign, in spite of Pecham’s opposition, to have his mentor canonized and the cathedral established as an international centre of pilgrimage.
All pilgrimage sites required some kind of ‘marvel’, usually a tangible and recurring miracle. Where this was not possible, other wonders were needed to attract pilgrims and sanctify the object of their veneration. Swinfield soon began work on an elaborate shrine in the cathedral’s north transept. It was here that the former bishop’s remains were translated in a ceremony held over Holy Week, 1287. The latest archaeological evidence may even indicate that the mappamundi was initially installed on the wall next to Cantilupe’s tomb, a novel and striking ‘marvel’ to what one critic calls the ‘Cantilupe pilgrimage complex’, a carefully orchestrated series of routes, sites and objects situated throughout the cathedral, designed to attract pilgrims and confirm Cantilupe’s saintliness.37
An eighteenth-century drawing of the the Hereford mappamundi by the antiquary John Carter showed that it originally formed the centrepiece of a magnificently adorned triptych, presumably also commissioned by Swinfield, complete with folding side panels.38 This was a particularly striking innovation, and one of the earliest known examples of a painted panelled triptych in western Europe – roughly contemporary with the paintings of the great early Italian Renaissance masters Cimabue and Giotto. Carter’s drawing shows that the side panels of the Hereford triptych depicted the Annunciation, with the Archangel Gabriel on the inside left panel and the Virgin Mary on the right, intensifying the message of the central mappamundi panel. Experienced as an ensemble, the triptych invited pilgrims to meditate on the Annunciation’s anticipation of Christ’s First Coming, in contrast to the Second Coming represented at the apex of the mappamundi.39 Where the side panels celebrate life, the central panel spells out death – MORS – around its edge, confirming the mappamundi’s prefiguration, for those pilgrims who gazed on it of death and the end of the world, of the ‘new heaven’ and ‘new earth’ to come.
Fig. 6 Drawing by John Carter, c. 1780, of the triptych containing the Hereford map.
Many pilgrims who saw the Hereford mappamundi probably shared the approach towards spiritual pilgrimage as that voiced by the anonymous twelfth-century Benedictine monk living in Bèze Abbey, who prayed, ‘May your soul leave this world, traverse the heavens themselves, and pass beyond the stars until you reach God.’ Who, he asked, ‘will give us wings like the dove, and we shall fly across all the kingdoms of this world, and we shall penetrate the depths of the eastern sky? Who then will conduct us to the city of the great king in order that what we now read in these pages and see only as in a glass darkly, we may then look upon the face of God present before us, and so rejoice?’40 Such imagined journeys to the heavenly Jerusalem involve a rejection of the earthly world, and echo Macrobius’ Dream of Scipio – transformed into a Christian vision of ascending the earth and looking down upon it from the heavens, grasping the insignificance of the earth and mankind’s futile, mortal struggles upon its surface, when faced with divinity.
At some point during the late eighteenth century the Hereford mappamundi lost its side panels and its identity as part of a triptych. It now hangs in its own purpose-built extension, the subject of the scrutiny of a more secular pilgrim: the modern tourist. One consequence of this almost inevitable relocation of the mappamundi (whatever its original position might have been) is the distortion of our modern understanding of its original function. This is a map that celebrates religious faith, but it does so on a range of different levels, some abstract and universal, and some, as with the map’s possible connection to Cantilupe, pragmatic and local. It is also a genre of map unique in the history of cartography that eagerly anticipates and welcomes its own annihilation. It looks forward to the moment of Christian Judgement when the terrestrial world as we know it will come to an end, all our travelling and peregrinations will cease, and salvation will be at hand. The Hereford mappamundi hopes and prays for the end of space and time – an eternal present in which there will be no need for either geographers or maps.
4
Empire
Kangnido World Map, 1402
The Liaodong Peninsula, Northeastern China, 1389
In 1389, the Korean military commander Yi (1335–1408) stood poised to march his army into the Liaodong peninsula, on the border between China and Korea. Yi was part of a military expedition dispatched by the ruling dynasty to attack the forces of the recently founded Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The were indignant at the Ming threat to annexe a huge swathe of their northern kingdom, and ordered Yi to attack. As part of Manchuria, the Liaodong peninsula would see more than its fair share of bloody conflict over the next six centuries, but in 1389 Yi stepped back from war. Yi was a pro-Ming critic of policy towards its powerful new neighbour, and opposed the decision to mobilize against them. On Wihwa Island at the mouth of the Yalu River, bordering Ming China, Yi called his army to a halt and made a fateful decision. He announced that instead of attacking the Chinese, the army would now be marching against the king U.
In the political coup that followed, Yi overthrew King U and his ruling elite, bringing to an end nearly 500 years of dynastic rule over the Korean peninsula. Pronouncing himself King T’aejong, Yi founded a new dynasty, the , which governed Korea for the next 500 years, the longest period of continuous rule by a single dynasty in any East Asian kingdom. The dominant Buddhist values of the had overcome archaic, tribal shamanistic practices, but in time Buddhist monasteries and their leaders, richly endowed with lands and exempt from taxation, generated a level of corruption and nepotism that many of the ruling elite could no longer support. From the ninth century the Chinese ruling dynasties became increasingly critical of Buddhism, championing instead a revival of Confucianism, or ‘Neo-Confucianism’, that stressed the importance of practical rule and bureaucratic organization over the Buddhist retreat into spiritualism. As Koreans like Yi adopted Neo-Confucianism, the impetus for change in Korea became irresistible.
Neo-Confucianism supported a programme of social and political renovation that drew on the classical texts of the sage-kings of Chinese antiquity. Opposed to the shamanistic and Buddhist principles that shaped society, Korean Neo-Confucianism taught that an active, public life was neces
sary to understand human nature and maintain social order. Pragmatic learning was preferred to esoteric study: where Buddhism cultivated the self, Neo-Confucianism embedded the individual within the management of the state. For the new elite, the contrast between the worldly outlook of Neo-Confucianism and the Buddhist message of spiritual liberation and the abandonment of worldly troubles provided a compelling justification for the sweeping programme of social reform and political renovation (or yusin) that took place from the 1390s.1
The transition from the to the dynasty is regarded as a key moment in Korean history that transformed its culture and society by reforming its political, legal, civic and bureaucratic structures. Power was concentrated within the hands of the king, and the kingdom’s territory was consolidated with the creation of a new military infrastructure. Bureaucratic power was centralized and civil service examinations introduced in line with Neo-Confucian beliefs; land was nationalized; a new, fairer system of taxation was proposed; and Buddhism was all but abolished.2 The rise of the was also part of a broader realignment of imperial and cultural geography. The foundation of the Ming dynasty in 1368 signalled the gradual demise of Mongol influence in the region. To the east, the region’s other great power, Japan, was beginning to unify its northern and southern kingdoms, establishing a period of relatively peaceful and commercially prosperous relations with both the Ming and dynasties.3
In seeking to legitimize their usurpation of the dynasty, King T’aejong and his Neo-Confucian advisers drew on the classical Chinese concept of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, which explained the rise and fall of dynasties. Only heaven could dispense the moral right to rule. As far as King T’aejong was concerned, part of this new mandate included not just a new ruler, but a new capital as well. The moved the capital from Songdo (today’s , in North Korea), to Hanyang (modern-day Seoul in South Korea), where T’aejong built his new residence, the Palace. The new administration also commissioned two new maps, one of the earth and the other of the heavens. The map of the heavens, entitled ‘Positions of the Heavenly Bodies in their Natural Order and their Allocated Celestial Fields’, was engraved onto an enormous block of black marble over 2 metres high (a stela), and displayed in the Palace. It was based on Chinese star charts, and is unusual for reproducing the Chinese names for the Greek zodiacal signs, which reached China through its contacts with the Muslim world from the ninth century. Although it has many inaccuracies (many stars are misaligned), it showed the position of the heavens as they looked to King T’aejong and his astronomers in the early 1390s. This was a map that represented a new vision of the heavens for a new dynasty, a way of conferring cosmic legitimacy on the kingdom.4
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 15