and exchange between this tradition and neighbouring ones; for instance, the Christian tradition and, to a lesser degree, Indian tradition to the east. Al-Mas’udi was a fine proponent of Islamic cartography.
Map 14. These maps show coastal details, mountains, rivers and cities, and may sometimes include figures and stories from history and the Bible.
Al-Mas’udi (896–956 CE), referred to by some as the Arabic Herodotus, was born in 896 CE in Baghdad, descended from Abdullah Ibn Mas’ud, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad. His education took place in and around Baghdad and Basra, learning from well-known and much-admired local literary scholars. He was also influenced by the Mu’tazila school of Islamic theology, which taught that good and evil were not determined by interpretations of revealed scripture, but could be established through ‘unaided reason’, because knowledge was derived from reason, the final arbiter in distinguishing right from wrong.
Al-Mas’udi was thus well equipped to describe and interpret the world he observed in the mid-900s CE and we owe much to the detailed observations he left us as he travelled around the Near East and Persia, North Africa, the Arabian Sea and further afield to the East African coast and to India and Sri Lanka. He took an interest in European affairs and studied the political goings on in Byzantium in particular. In his writings on the latter, in and around the year 947 CE, he uses the name ‘Istanbul’, rather than the usual Constantinople, five centuries before the Ottoman conquest of the city. He was aware of faraway Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish kingdom with its capital at Paris, listing their kings up to his own time.
Travelling far to the north, he describes the Rus, an account based on personal experience and contacts made on his explorations. He describes the diverse nature of the Rus and the apparent absence of a central authority, with power in the hands of a collection of local rulers instead; they were, as he notes, capable sailors, navigating both their extensive river systems and the open sea. He was well aware that the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea were separate bodies of water, as you can see on his world map.
East of the Rus were the lands of the Kazars, a Khanate made up of a Turkic ruling elite and other diverse ethnic groups who followed various religious traditions. According to Al-Mas’udi, the Kazar rulers converted to Judaism sometime in the 740s CE and encouraged the population to follow their example; what success they had still seems open to debate among today’s scholars.
Map 15. Some classical texts survived within the Carolingian Empire and many surviving texts were taken to the city of Florence.
Map 16. Al-Mas’udi was an Arab historian, geographer and explorer. His world map, which followed Arab tradition at the time, viewed the world with south at the top.
Al-Mas’udi went on to describe the Turkic tribes of Central Asia and wrote in some detail on India, its rulers, trade and beliefs. He described China, though in less detail, dwelling at one point on a revolt towards the end of the Tang period, led by a certain Huang Chao, which he describes as leading to a weakening of the dynasty.
Al-Mas’udi was a prolific writer, but the best known of his works is Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma’adin al-jawahir (‘Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems’), a history that begins with Adam and Eve and takes the reader through the ages to the time of the late Abbasid Caliphate. The same book mentions the story of Khashkhash Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad, a navigator of al-Andalus (in southern Spain) who sailed across the Atlantic in 889 CE and eventually returned loaded with booty. This story is said to be well known among the people of al-Andalus – a tantalising tradition for succeeding generations of Iberians staring towards that vast western horizon.
He was an expert mineralogist and geologist, proposing a theory of evolution based on his observation of fossils; thus – from minerals to plants to animals to man – his work preceded Darwin by 900 years.
* The map, the cathedral and the town are all well worth a visit. Hereford is also the birthplace of 17th-century actress and Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwynn. I enjoyed a very happy couple of days there, lubricated by good cider.
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I try to spend as much time as I can these days in my little place in Normandy, in the middle of the Cotentin Peninsula – a great place to rest and recuperate. It is an ancient small farm, and the building is long and thin, 25 feet wide and 105 feet long. It is about half a mile from a small village, and Axel, an old and very knowledgeable local worthy, visits from time to time – just to test my wine stock, you understand, and offer advice on anything he might notice. Like most Normans, he is very generous in that way, and I soon come to realise that the shelf I have just put up in the kitchen is in the wrong place. The Normans are an unusual group of people, an amalgam of long-settled farming folk with layers of Franks and later Vikings, the latter in particular. My neighbours, Axel included, lay specific claim to being of Viking descent – an important element of their family inheritance. In Axel’s case, with a face of sun-bleached leather, white bristly hair and bright, clear blue eyes, he might just be right.
Not far from the farm lie the ancestral lands of the Hauteville dynasty. This particular Norman family arrived in southern Italy in 999 CE as mercenaries on behalf of Byzantine and Lombard overlords, and it did not take long for them to see the opportunities the area presented. On hearing the good news, more Normans, well armed and upwardly mobile, were soon on the way, eager to carve out estates for themselves. Unlike the conquest of England, which took less than a decade to consolidate, in Italy and Sicily the process took over 100 years. Eventually the Normans became local lords, and then ‘the power’ in the land.
King Roger II inherited his Italian and Sicilian domains from his father Roger Guiscard, Roger I, Count of Sicily, and in 1130, he established the Kingdom of Sicily. For 24 years he ruled over an unusually diverse state, made up of native Sicilians and south Italians, Arabs, Lombards, Byzantines and Normans, and fought a complicated struggle to control his lands, but in doing so he developed an amazingly inclusive and tolerant society.
Among the citizens of this realm was a certain Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Abdallah Idris al-Sharif al-Idrisi, a name that rolls off the tongue, but let’s call him al-Idrisi for short. Al-Idrisi spent much of his time in the Christian kingdom of Sicily, and consequently the geographic traditions of Islam and Christianity came together in his work. He was born in the North African city of Ceuta, spent part of his early life in al-Andalus and travelled through France and into England, stopping in London and York. I was in York not so long ago, and with an afternoon to spare I walked around the area of the minster and pondered the fact that one of my cartographic heroes had, at least according to some, visited the city. With this thought on my mind I wandered into a fine little place with good beer called The Hole in the Wall, and chose the special of the day, a hearty plateful. It seemed an ancient place located on a medieval plot. What, I wondered, had al-Idrisi chosen from the menu 885 years earlier? What was the special of the day in 1130? He would have seen Normans strutting through the lanes, as they had conquered the place 60 or so years before. His later journeys took him east to Anatolia and North Africa, where he gained first-hand knowledge of those regions. Al-Idrisi chose to settle in Sicily in around 1136 and his skills eventually came to the attention of the royal household. Roger II’s administration was run by a royal chancery, and among its talented staff were Greek, Arabic and Latin scribes who were capable of producing documents to suit the needs of his state and its population, in whatever appropriate language might be needed.
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