A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  As the world map of Ibn shows, the geography of mapping provinces and focusing on religious sites and trade routes began to predominate. It became imperative to establish what the mapmakers called – defining internal boundaries between one Muslim state and the beginning of another. As Baghdad’s political and theological power diminished, the mapmakers shifted the centre of their maps away from the caliphate’s capital, and, in a decisive moment of geographical Islamicization, placed Mecca at the centre of the known world. These mapmakers made the first sustained attempt to provide a detailed physical geography of the Islamic world, a region that since Ptolemy had been mapped with only limited degrees of success. It was this shift from Greek geometry to a definably Islamic physical geography that had such a noticeable effect upon the mapmaking of .

  Of all the mapmakers described in this book, none boasts a more distinguished lineage than . In Islam, the term ‘’ (meaning ‘noble’ or ‘illustrious’) denotes a descendant of the prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima. As his name suggests, was descended from the powerful Idrisid dynasty, founders of the first Islamic state in Iberia in AD 786, and rulers of much of Morocco throughout the ninth century, which traced its lineage back to the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus in the late seventh century. In 750, remnants of the Umayyad dynasty, including the Idrisids, fled Damascus after their defeat at the hands of the Abbasids, and settled in Iberia and North Africa, establishing a rival Caliphate in Córdoba. The new caliphate went on to conquer most of the Iberian peninsula, as well as absorbing the Idrisid dynasty in 985 as it declined under the pressure of internecine feuds. direct ancestors were the , rulers of the area around modern-day Malaga. By the time he was born, in 1100, probably in Ceuta, on the tip of North Africa (the final stronghold), family would have been very familiar with the violent dynastic and religious factionalism of their faith.

  The records that remain of life are sparse and often contradictory. Debate continues as to his place of birth, some suggesting Spain, others Morocco or even Sicily, but all the evidence suggests that he was educated in Córdoba. At its height during the eighth and ninth centuries as the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, Córdoba was one of the largest cities in the world, with a population estimated at more than 300,000. It boasted the world’s third largest mosque, founded in 786, and was home to what can claim to be the first university in Europe, which produced some of the greatest minds of the medieval world, including the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and the Jewish rabbi, philosopher and physician Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides).20 The city was another early example of convivencia, as Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars were given relative freedom to establish Córdoba as the intellectual (if no longer political) rival to Abbasid Baghdad.

  According to one Islamic commentator of the time, Córdoba became ‘the homeland of wisdom, its beginning and its end; the heart of the land, the fount of science, the dome of Islam, the seat of the ; the home of right reasoning, the garden of the fruits of ideas’.21 It was an understandable description: the Umayyads supported more than 400 mosques, 900 baths, 27 free schools, and a royal library of 400,000 volumes that rivalled the great collections in Baghdad and Cairo. As well as being a centre for the study and practice of Islamic jurisprudence, the city’s schools and university taught science and a variety of other subjects, ranging from medicine and astronomy to geography, poetry and philology (including a thriving industry in translating classical Greek texts into Arabic).

  Writing more than thirty years later in his Entertainment about the city where he was educated, called it ‘the most beautiful jewel of al-Andalus’.22 But by the time he arrived there the caliphate was a distant memory, having collapsed in 1031, giving way to a series of petty claimants, before being finally taken over in 1091 by the Almoravids, a Berber dynasty deeply distrusted by the Córdobans by the time began his studies, but who nevertheless represented the only hope of salvation in the face of the growing threat of the Christian reconquista moving southwards. While absorbed the multi-cultural learning the city had to offer, he also learnt how quickly the political geography of the Islamic world around him could change.

  decision to leave Córdoba was a wise one. Caught between its Almoravid occupiers and the advancing Christian armies of Castile, the city’s future must have looked bleak (and by 1236 it had fallen to Castile’s armies). By the 1130s he was on the move. He travelled throughout Asia Minor, France, England, Morocco and the rest of al-Andalus. No contemporary records have survived to explain the reasons for his arrival in Sicily around 1138. It may have been that Roger’s interest in was motivated more by political rather than by intellectual considerations: throughout his reign the Norman king annexed parts of the North African coastline (including Tripoli) and installed puppet rulers of Islamic descent; the possibility of using such a distinguished Muslim nobleman as in this way may have appealed to him.23 Indeed, the Hautevilles already had a record of sheltering his kinsmen: when Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah, the last of the rulers, fled Malaga in 1058, he was given refuge on Sicily by Roger II’s father, Roger I, count of Sicily.24 Writing in the fourteenth century, the Damascene scholar (1297–1362) gave one account of Roger’s motives for sheltering :

  Roger, king of the Franks and lord of Sicily, loved learned men of philosophy, and it was he who had al-Sharif brought to him from North Africa . . . When he arrived Roger welcomed his guest ceremoniously, making every effort to do him honour . . . Roger invited him to stay with him. To persuade him to accept, he told him: ‘You are from the Caliphal house, and if you were under Muslim rule their lords would seek to kill you, but if you remain with me you will be safe’. After had accepted the king’s invitation, the latter granted him an income so large as to be princely. was accustomed to ride to the king on a mule, and when he arrived Roger stood up and went to meet him, and then the two sat down together.25

  This is the only surviving account of the first meeting between the two men, written nearly 200 years after the event. It is couched in the timeless language of the wise, beneficent patron and his silent, grateful subject. But it also grasps something of Roger’s shrewd ability to conflate politics with learning, and his awareness that lineage made him as much a target for his co-religionists as for the king. Both men had, for very different reasons, learnt to accommodate the customs and rituals of other cultures in an era which officially frowned on such behaviour. Both were strangers in a strange land, hundreds of kilometres away from their homelands. And both were far from orthodox in their approach to religion.

  The ruler that met on his arrival in Palermo inherited an enduringly ambivalent relationship towards his religious faith, and a healthy scepticism towards the political claims made in its name. The Normans had claimed parts of southern Italy and Sicily from Byzantine rule since the mid-eleventh century, taking control of Calabria, Apulia, Reggio and Brindisi, despite continued opposition from virtually every power in Christendom, all with their own vested interests in these territories. The papacy was understandably suspicious of Norman domination of the states south of Rome, while the Hohenstaufen dynasty in Germany, which also claimed areas of Italy, also objected to the Hautevilles encroaching on their territory. Even the Byzantine emperors of Constantinople reacted angrily to what they regarded as Hauteville usurpation of its traditional rights to Sicily, condemning Roger as a ‘tyrant’.26

  Despite the forces ranged against him, Roger had proved a wily opponent. In 1128, just before arrived in Palermo, Pope Honorius II refused to sanction Roger’s claims to Apulia, and even went so far as to issue a bull of excommunication and encourage a crusade against him. When this failed, weakening Honorius’s position, he reluctantly agreed to endorse Roger’s Italian claims. Following Honorius’s death in February 1130, Roger exploited the confusion that arose from the subsequent papal schism, supporting the Roman-based Anacletus II against his rival claimant Innocent II. In an attempt to ensure Roger’s military support, the politically weakene
d Anacletus issued a papal bull later in 1130 conferring the title of king of Sicily upon him, but in 1138 Roger’s kingdom was plunged into yet another crisis. Pope Anacletus died, leading to the accession of Innocent II with the support of the German rulers who were so hostile to Roger’s Sicilian reign. Roger was confronted with yet another pope implacably opposed to him. The following year Innocent excommunicated Roger once again, but in a subsequent military skirmish was captured by Roger’s forces. He was faced with the humiliation of accepting the king’s sovereignty and withdrawing support for any future challenges to his rule over Sicily.27

  Opposition to Roger’s rule rumbled on throughout the 1140s. Despite having neutralized papal opposition, Roger still faced attempts by the Byzantine and German rulers to oust him, but they all foundered. Then, just as the kingdom entered one of its few relatively stable periods of governance, the Norman ruler and his Muslim subject began working together on the Entertainment.

  As settled into his new life in Palermo, he found an island that enabled him as both a Muslim and a scholar to draw on a wide variety of intellectual traditions. Since Roman times Sicily had secured a reputation for its wealth and prosperity. Like Ptolemy’s Alexandria, its position between different Mediterranean cultures and traditions ensured its commercial affluence and political importance. The island was a stopping-off point for political leaders travelling between Rome and Constantinople, and its ports welcomed traders of all faiths from across the Mediterranean. It also acted as a safe haven for both Christian and Muslim pilgrims. Spanish Muslims embarking on the haj to Mecca often broke their journey in Sicily’s ports, as did European Christians heading for the Holy Land. Travelling through Sicily from Valencia to Mecca in 1183, the Spanish Muslim Ibn Jubayr wrote that ‘the prosperity of the island surpasses description. It is enough to say that it is the daughter of Spain [al-Andalus] in the extent of its cultivation, in the luxuriance of its harvests, and in its well-being, having an abundance of varied produce, and fruits of every kind and species.’ In describing the peaceful coexistence of the Muslim community with its Christian rulers, Ibn Jubayr even went so far as to approvingly quote a verse from the , observing that ‘The Christians treat these Muslims well and “have taken them to themselves as friends” [, 20, 41], but impose a tax on them to be paid twice yearly’. He marvelled at the Norman court’s ‘splendid palaces and elegant gardens’, and concluded that it exercised its legal, administrative and regal authority ‘in a manner that resembles the Muslim kings’.28

  Such a mixed heritage enabled Sicily to establish itself as a centre of learning by the time Roger was crowned king in 1130. Salerno was already a renowned centre for the diffusion of Greek and Arabic medical learning throughout the Latin-speaking world long before Roger annexed it as part of his Italian empire. Roger’s chancery produced official proclamations in Latin, Greek and Arabic, which ensured that there was a steady stream of suitably qualified scholars able to continue a flourishing tradition of translating and disseminating such texts to and from all three languages. The Greek diplomat and archdeacon of Catania, Henry Aristippus, translated sections of Aristotle’s Meteorology from Greek into Latin, and produced the first Latin translation of Plato’s Phaedo during his time on the island. He was also responsible for bringing a Greek copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest back to Sicily from Constantinople, where it was used as the basis for one of the earliest Latin translations of Ptolemy’s astronomical treatise.29 Roger also sheltered the Greek theologian Nilos Doxapatres, who fled from Constantinople to Palermo around 1140, and commissioned him to write a pro-Byzantine manuscript on ‘The Orders and Ranks of the Patriarchal Thrones’, described as an ‘historical geography of the ecclesiastical world’.30 In Arabic, Roger patronized at least six poets to write in praise of his political and cultural achievements.31

  The polyglot culture of Palermo, and the diverse range of intellectual traditions on which it could draw, made it the ideal place to complete the ambitious task that Roger was about to set . In the preface to the Entertainment, described the genesis of the king’s commission. It was, unsurprisingly for Roger, initially conceived as an exploration of political geography. The king

  wished that he should accurately know the details of his land and master them with a definite knowledge, and that he should know the boundaries and the routes both by land and by sea and in what climate they were and what distinguished them as to seas and gulfs together with a knowledge of other lands and regions in all seven climates whenever the various learned sources agreed upon them and as was established in surviving notebooks or by various authors, showing what each climate contained of a specific country.

  This was the most ambitious study of physical geography proposed since Ptolemy’s tables identifying more than 8,000 places throughout the inhabited world, including the subsequent surveys undertaken by the Romans (and since lost). The Romans had at least been able to draw on their vast empire, and a relatively unlimited access to Greek geographical texts, to undertake such a project. Roger’s tiny kingdom lacked the resources and manpower to complete such a survey, but it could draw on a diverse collection of texts written in Greek, Arabic and Latin. concentrated on two main sources: Ptolemy’s Geography (available in the original Greek and Arabic translations), and the writings of the early Christian theologian Paulus Orosius. Like , Orosius was an itinerant scholar, who had lived and worked throughout Iberia, North Africa and the Holy Land, and whose History against the Pagans (416–17) offered a geographical history of the rise of Christianity.

  In a determined bid to unify past, present and evolving conceptions of geography, the king took what could be gleaned from Ptolemy and Orosius, put it together with the geographical knowledge of and his team of court scholars, and then supplemented it with newly commissioned travellers’ reports drawn from across the inhabited world:

  They studied together, but he did not find much extra knowledge from [other scholars] over what he found in the aforementioned works, and when he had convened with them on this subject he sent out into all his lands and ordered yet more scholars who may have been travelling around to come and asked them their opinions both singly and collectively. But there was no agreement among them. However, where they agreed he accepted the information, but where they differed, he rejected it.32

  Over subsequent years, Roger’s scholars painstakingly collated information. Where there was agreement on particular matters, the results were entered on a large drawing board, from which a vast map of the world slowly began to emerge:

  He wished to make sure of the accuracy of what these people had agreed upon both of longitudes and latitudes [and in measurements between places]. So he had brought to him a drawing board [ ] and had traced on it with iron instruments item by item what had been mentioned in the aforementioned books, together with the more authentic of the decisions of the scholars.33

  The first result of these labours was not a gazetteer in the Ptolemaic tradition, but an enormous circular map of the world, made of silver. tells us that Roger ordered that

  a disk [’ ] should be produced in pure silver of a large extent and of 400 Roman in weight, each of 112 dirhams and when it was ready he had engraved on it a map of the seven climates and their lands and regions, their shorelines and hinterlands, gulfs and seas, watercourses and places of rivers, their habited and uninhabited parts, what [distances] were between each locality there, either along frequented roads or in determined miles or authenticated measurements and known harbours according to the version appearing on the drawing board.34

  Neither this extraordinary silver world map nor the geographical drawing board have survived, but explains that, following the completion of the map, Roger commissioned ‘a book explaining how the form was arrived at, adding whatever they had missed as to the conditions of the lands and countries’. This book would describe ‘all the wonderful things relating to each [country] and where they were with regard to the seven climates and also a description
of the peoples and their customs and habits, appearance, clothes and language. The book would be called the Nuzhat . This was all completed in the first third of January agreeing with the month of in the year A. H. 548.’35

  The completed book is all that remains of Roger’s geographical ambitions. Leafing through it today, it is obvious why the king wanted help. As well as drawing on Greek and Latin geographical sources like Ptolemy and Orosius, the book incorporates the third crucial tradition that brought to the project: more than 300 years of Arabic geographical learning. The Entertainment represents the first serious attempt to integrate the three classical Mediterranean traditions of Greek, Latin and Arabic scholarship in one compendium of the known world.

  Befitting someone not necessarily trained in astronomy and cosmography, spent little time describing the origins of the earth, beyond asserting that it was spherical, with a circumference estimated at a reasonably accurate 37,000 kilometres (23,000 miles), and that it remained ‘stable in space like the yolk in an egg’. Little of what he said in his preface was particularly searching or innovative, and remained close to the standard Greek and Islamic authorities; it was his method of arranging the diverse information gathered by Roger’s contributors that was so unprecedented. Drawing on Ptolemy, divided the rest of his book into seven longitudinal climates running east to west, but oriented his map with south at the top. The first clime ran through equatorial Africa all the way to Korea. ‘This first climate’, he writes, ‘begins to the west of the Western Sea, called the Sea of Shadows. It is that beyond which no one knows what exists. There are in this sea two islands, called (the Fortunate Isles), from which Ptolemy begins to count longitudes and latitudes.’36 The final, seventh clime covered modern-day Scandinavia and Siberia. His most daring innovation was to then subdivide each climate into ten sections, which if put together would make a grid of the world composed of seventy rectangular areas. never envisaged unifying his maps in this way – the assembled map would simply be too large to be of any use, even in a ceremonial situation – but it was a new way of executing a geographical description of the whole world. In the Entertainment, each of the seventy regional maps followed written descriptions of the regions described, allowing the reader to visualize the territory after first reading about it.