with strange fictional races and creatures that featured on the maps of Solinus. These went on to be copied onto maps produced up until the 18th century.
The disinformation spread by the works of Solinus had already been compounded by ‘Christian geography’; one such work was written in the 500s by Cosmas Indicopleustes, who believed that all things – the nature of the universe, all living things and the form of the earth – could be found in the Holy Scriptures.
In his earlier life, Cosmas had been a successful merchant trading over much of the known world, around the cities of the Mediterranean and as far east as Ceylon (Sri Lanka). He converted to Christianity and eventually settled into the cloistered life of a monk, retiring to a monastery in the Sinai desert. He produced a work called Christian Topography, in which he looked only to the scriptures, describing the world as a flat parallelogram, with Jerusalem at its centre. It was written in Ezekiel 5.5: ‘I have set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her.’ Cosmas argued that in the far north of the inhabited world there was a great mountain around which the sun and moon revolved, creating night and day. Beyond the centre lay a great ocean, and beyond that were other lands where, before the biblical flood, people lived but that were now uninhabited and inaccessible. Beyond these empty lands arose the four walls of the sky meeting in the dome of heaven, the ceiling of the tabernacle. In his Christian Topography, Cosmas berates arrogant and sceptical scholars who:
attribute to the heavens a spherical figure and a circular motion, and by geometrical method and calculations applied to the heavenly bodies, as well as by the abuse of words and by worldly craft, endeavour to grasp the position and figure of the world by means of the solar and lunar eclipses, leading others into error, while they are in error themselves, in maintaining that such phenomena could not represent themselves if the figure was other than spherical.
Map 10. The original of this map was created in around 1040 and contains the earliest-known vaguely realistic depiction of the British Isles.
Cosmas determinedly went on to discourage any consideration of Greek thought regarding the possibility of people inhabiting the Antipodean side of the spherical earth, for they ‘could not be of the race of Adam’. Did not the scriptures refer to the four corners of the earth? The Apostles were commanded to go out into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature; they could not reach the Antipodes and therefore such a place could not exist.
Now let’s take a look at the early medieval world as portrayed in Christian maps. I use the word ‘Christian’ very loosely, to describe a region and time, as in mapmaking cultures tended to overlap and influence each other. About 1,100 mappa mundi, or world maps, from this period are known to exist. The mappa mundi come in a number of groups, which include zonal maps, a group of diagrammatic maps that divide the world sphere into five climactic zones. Only two of these zones were believed to be inhabited: the northern temperate and the southern temperate, which were separated by an imaginary ocean along the equator.
Zonal maps attempted to fit landforms into the zonal concept, which emphasises the separating equatorial ocean and places north at the top, as we would view a world map today. They looked back to a Greek tradition where human existence was shaped by the natural world, and therefore it was believed that there was an unknown and inaccessible theoretical race occupying the southern temperate zone, which corresponded with the northern temperate zone. For the Christian mind this was an unresolved problem; this race was not mentioned in the Bible, so was it created by God?
Next (though in no particular order) are T-O (sometimes called the ‘Tripartite’) maps These offered a simplified description of geography, showing only the inhabited regions of the world as known to Roman and medieval scholars. The world map was illustrated within a circle, with the three land areas – Europe, Africa and Asia – divided by a T shape, representing water that reached out to a circular ocean. Most of these maps placed east (oriens in Latin) at the top, giving us the term ‘orienting’. These maps also resolved the problem of an unknown race by completely ignoring the possibility, at least geographically. Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (580–636 CE), used this style of map in his epic Etymologiae (‘Origins’), a collection of works from antiquity that would probably have been lost without his efforts.
Map 11. These maps are sometimes called ‘Macrobian’, after the Roman administrator and author Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius.
In the maps known as Beatus, or Quadripartite, east is again shown at the top, where the Garden of Eden is located – a focal point of Christian belief. These maps show the three known continents plus a new and unknown continent to the south, hence the name Quadripartite. This fourth continent is often called Antipodes. The Beatus maps are named after Beatus of Liébana, a monk and theologian with a keen interest in geology. In the years running up to his birth in around 730 CE the bulk of Visigothic Spain had been overrun by Muslim invaders of the Umayyad dynasty, with the exception of the kingdoms of north-west Spain, the home of Beatus. The most accurate mapmakers of the day were Arabic, and their maps would have influenced the young monk, who is now best remembered for his work Commentary on the Apocalypse of St John, published in 776 with revisions in 784 and 786. The Beatus maps that now exist are believed to derive from an original now lost to us.
Map 12. These maps illustrated only the habitable portion of the world, as it was known in Roman and medieval times.
The Complex, or Great, maps are perhaps the most famous manifestations of the mappa mundi world maps. The Ebstorf map, made by Gervase of Ebstorf following the T-0 format in the 12th century, was rediscovered in a convent in Ebstorf in 1843. It was painted on 30 goatskins and showed detailed landforms with illustrations from classical antiquity, as well as images from biblical history. The head of Christ is shown at the top – the east – of the map. The original was lost in an allied bombing raid in 1943, but a number of copies still survive.
Map 13. These maps represent a kind of amalgam of Zonal and T–O maps and include a fourth, unknown continent, sometimes labelled ‘Antipodes’.
The largest map of this style known to still exist is the Hereford mappa mundi, created around 1300. It is drawn and painted on a single sheet of vellum, 158cm by 133cm, and illustrates fifteen biblical events, five scenes from classical mythology, 420 towns and cities, plus people, plants and animals. Again, east is at the top, with Jerusalem in the centre and the Garden of Eden towards the edge. The map was displayed on the wall of a choir aisle in Hereford Cathedral but was apparently little regarded. In times of trouble – during the Civil War and the Commonwealth in the 17th century, for example – it was hidden beneath the floor of the chantry. During the Second World War the map was hidden again, before being returned to the cathedral in 1946.
A new library to house the map was built with public subscription and large donations from the National Heritage Fund and Paul Getty, which was opened in 1996.*
Despite the cultural revision encouraged by the Christian faith, some classical works still survived across the empire of Charlemagne, which extended across northern and western Europe in the 8th and 9th centuries. Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, a huge amount of classical learning and geography had been preserved by scholars from Baghdad to Córdoba. I call this the Islamic tradition in geography, but
