Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq or ‘Entertainment for He Who Longs to Travel the World’. Al-Idrisi had produced a collection of 70 detailed maps covering the known world, their orientation with south at the top. (If you look at al-Idrisi’s work on the internet, his maps are frequently upside down, with north at the top, to help the modern viewer.) The atlas became known as The Book of Roger, indicating the king’s important role in sponsoring the work. It was created following the Greek tradition, dividing the world into seven climes and moving from west to east, describing each clime in detail. Al-Idrisi referred extensively to previous Arabic geographers in his final compilation. He also relied on his own observations as well as collating the reports of contemporary travellers, many of whom, as you might expect, passed through the ports and towns of Roger’s kingdom, located as it was in the central Mediterranean. The work’s geographical accuracy, an improvement on Ptolemy’s gigantic contribution, corrected the interpretation of the Indian Ocean as enclosed by land and the form of the Caspian Sea, and determined the direction of major European rivers. Further details were added concerning China and Tibet far in the east. In Africa, the lakes near the Mountains of the Moon are shown as the source of the Nile, whose course is tracked to the Mediterranean. The Niger River is also shown, locating the trading city of Timbuktu on the edge of the known world.
The map’s style and draughtsmanship and the choice of colour are a joy to behold. They have a kind of rhythmic quality; to my eye there is a modern feel – perhaps David Hockney’s pool paintings are suggested. I could stare at them for hours. Among all the triumphs of cartographic design, a calculating mind was at work on this map, as al-Idrisi estimated the circumference of the earth to be some 22,900 miles, which was just 8 per cent off from a modern calculation.
Map 17. Muhammad al-Idrisi was a geographer and cartographer. For much of his life he lived in Palermo, Sicily, at the court of King Roger II.
Al-Idrisi’s work remained a standard for accuracy for almost 300 years after it was written. Geographers and travellers from Islamic traditions, such as Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun and Piri Reis, were influenced by it in creating their own views of the world, while European explorers such as Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus also read his work in detail, thus shaping Christian tradition also.
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