which was placed using the Ptolemaic principles of its longitude and latitude. Now, 1,300 years after his death, Ptolemy was a bestseller as his books poured off the printing presses.
Map 9. Ptolemy’s maps were the first to use longitudinal and latitudinal lines as well as specifying terrestrial locations by celestial observations.
Ptolemy’s mathematical scientific system made the chaotic world understandable by the application of methodical geometric order. Thousands of descriptions made by sailors, travellers and generals, with all their sense of wonder at the almost endless diversity of landscapes and peoples, came together as an understandable whole. Ptolemy’s achievement lasted into and past the Renaissance. I still plot my maps in degrees and minutes. I still check gazetteers of verified locations – now online, of course.
These things belong to the loftiest and loveliest of intellectual pursuits, namely 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).
Ptolemy’s Geography, Book I
The classical world in which this achievement was created, though, was now under threat.
By the beginning of the 4th century CE, the empire in the West was perhaps less ‘Roman’: many of its provinces were in the ownership of federated tribes – semi-independent kingdoms concerned with their own politics. The Roman state was a less cohesive entity. In the East, Alexandria, still a centre of learning, though much reduced, also became a centre of revolt. The museum buildings, by now over 500 years old and not in the best of condition, were finally destroyed, though the Great Library building still survived. In 391 CE, the library finally met its end when a Christian mob broke in, burned the almost irreplaceable contents and turned the building into a church, a triumph of faith over reason.
Meanwhile, a few years earlier at the opposite end of the empire along Hadrian’s Wall in Britannia, Magnus Maximus, who was commander of Britain, withdrew troops from northern and western Britain in pursuit of his own ambitions for imperial rule, usurping power from Emperor Gratian. His attempts ultimately failed, being defeated by Emperor Theodosius, and Maximus was finally executed in 388. With his death, Britannia came back under the direct rule of Theodosius, that is until 392 when another usurper, Flavius Eugenius, made another bid for imperial power. Again, after just two years his short-lived rule over the West failed when Theodosius marched from Constantinople at the head of his army and defeated Eugenius at the Battle of Frigidus in September 394. Eugenius was captured and executed as a criminal. The following year, 395, the victorious Theodosius died, leaving his 10-year-old son Honorus as Emperor in the West. However, the real power in the West was in the hands of Flavius Stilicho, a highly experienced general who had risen through the ranks. In 402 it was his decision to finally strip Hadrian’s Wall of its remaining garrison, and possibly other troops in Britain, to face wars with the Ostrogoths and Visigoths on the Continent.
Meanwhile, the Romano-Britons now dispensed with imperial authority. In 407, they selected Flavius Claudius Constantinus, or Constantine III, as their leader, who now declared himself the Western Roman Emperor, gathered the last Roman troops in Britain and headed for Gaul. Sixty-six years later, in the West, Rome was gone, replaced by a collection of ‘Barbarian’ kingdoms. The new kingdoms lived among the remains of a once great empire. The skills needed to repair and maintain roads, bridges, aqueducts and great buildings were lost. The Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin, written by an unknown author, looks upon the moss-covered buildings with a sense of wonder:
Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,
walls gape, torn up, destroyed,
consumed by age, Earth-grip holds
the proud builders, departed, long lost,
and the hard grasp of the grave, until a hundred generations
of people have passed. Often this wall outlasted,
hoary with lichen, red-stained, withstanding the storm,
one region after another; the high arch has now fallen.
The wall-stone still stands, hacked by weapons,
by grim-ground files.
Along with Roman infrastructure, the written word, the scrolls of study, were largely lost, at least in the West. As the natural science of the Greeks and Romans faded and almost disappeared, some ‘stories’ written in the 3rd century survived and became part of the early medieval world view. One such work was the product of Caius Julius Solinus, whose speciality was the study of grammar. His book A Collection of Memorable Facts comprises 1,100 descriptions that range from direct biblical descriptions to tall tales of Africa where the shadows of hyenas robbed dogs of their ability to bark. It was a great collection of myths – exaggerated travellers’ tales borrowed from many previous authors, with just enough geographical reality to give this masterpiece of disinformation a kind of believable life of its own. In the 6th century it was revised and republished under the title Polyhistor, meaning ‘many stories’.
The Christian faith spread around the Mediterranean from its place of origin in Palestine. It was a religion that, in a changing world occupied by usurpers, barbarian invaders, plagues and famine, offered at least the promise of a better life in the next world – the afterlife. The prevailing Greco-Roman religion did not offer any of that – it demanded sacrifice. The cults offered no guidance for the living of a good life; the underworld was not a place of peaceful eternity.
The Christian world still had a place for the Devil and leagues of demons. By the Edict of Thessalonica, 380 CE, Christianity was confirmed as the religion of the Roman Empire. Now, with official sanction, the new faith began its work: the suppression of pagan beliefs. Unfortunately, most of Greco-Roman scientific research was included in the works that were destroyed or suppressed. The Academy School of Philosophy, which had roots going back to 387 BCE, finally closed its doors in 528 CE, after 916 years of considered thought (though with interruptions), its teachers chased away, hunted down as pagans. The new religion destroyed far more than it saved, but in all this chaos, a new world view evolved that was based on faith. This would change the mapmakers’ approach to representing the world – at least for a few hundred years.
Sebastian Munster (1448–1552) was a theologian and Hebrew scholar who taught at the University of Heidelberg. Like many learned people of his age, he also had an interest in geography and mapmaking. He produced two major works: the first, in 1540, was Ptolemy’s Geography with 48 woodcut maps. He carved the names of places, cities and states on removable blocks, which enabled the map to be changed and updated without recarving the entire map. His next cartographic work was Cosmography, published in 1544, in which he mapped each continent separately and listed the sources upon which
