A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  In his preface, provided the motivation behind his decision to divide the world in this way, which offers one of the most detailed pre-modern accounts of how maps supplement and enhance written geographical description:

  And we have entered in each division what belonged to it of towns, districts, and regions so that he who looked at it could observe what would normally be hidden from his eyes or would not normally reach his understanding or would not be able to reach himself because of the impossible nature of the route and the differing nature of the peoples. Thus he can correct this information by looking at it. So the total number of these sectional maps is seventy, not counting the two extreme limits in two directions, one being the southern limit of human habitation caused by the excessive heat and lack of water and the other the northern limit of human habitation caused by excessive cold.

  This account demonstrated the power of the map to visualize places that the viewer could never imagine ever visiting because of the distances, and dangers, involved. But also acknowledged that his regional maps could only go so far in the information they provided. After reiterating the importance of describing physical geography, he goes on to say:

  Now it is clear that when the observer looks at these maps and these countries explained, he sees a true description and pleasing form, but beyond that he needs to learn descriptions of the provinces and the appearance of their peoples, their dress and their adornments and the practicable roads and their mileages and farsangs [a Persian unit of measurement] and all the wonders of their lands as witnessed by travellers and mentioned by roaming writers and confirmed by narrators. Thus after each map we have entered everything we have thought necessary and suitable in its proper place in the book.

  This eloquent statement on both the power and the limitations of mapmaking acknowledged the importance of giving a ‘form’, or geometrical order to the inhabited world, just as Ptolemy had described it, but it also implicitly conceded the problem of (‘hearsay’) provided by ‘roaming writers’. Travellers’ reports were clearly necessary for the detailed human geography that Roger wanted, but how could these reports be verified and ‘confirmed by narrators’? To , the basic geometry of the map was unquestionable and could be reliably reproduced, unlike the partial accounts provided by even the most experienced traveller.

  was stuck with the same problem voiced by Herodotus more than 1,500 years earlier. His solution went against the grain of the cartographic traditions inherited from the classical world and early Muslim mapmaking, and took a non-scientific route to depict the local reality of the inhabited world. This would produce one of the most exhaustively detailed geographical descriptions of the medieval world, but would also leave his work neglected and dismissed, as political ideology embraced increasingly moralized cartographic visions of the world.

  How responded to the preceding history of mapmaking from court to Ibn is complicated because he says relatively little about his sources, and also because of the problems of the circulation and exchange of ideas within his culture of manuscripts. We are reliant on the later scribal copies of the Entertainment (as well as its maps) to assess his achievements. Similarly, his education and early career at the westernmost limits of the Islamic world makes it hard to interpret just which texts might have reached him, either in Córdoba or Sicily. Is his apparent silence on the influence of someone like pure ignorance, or does it represent some more obscure intellectual or ideological conflict? We may never know. But by piecing together the sources he does cite, along with his maps and written geographical descriptions, it is possible to offer some idea of what he was trying to achieve.

  In the preface to the Entertainment claims that, among his other sources, he has drawn on Ptolemy, Paulus Orosius, Ibn and Ibn .37 It is a revealing list: a Greek, a Christian and two Muslims, one an administrator, the other an inveterate traveller. Reading and looking at the maps drawn from his text, it appears that no one source predominates. He borrows from everyone, while tacitly acknowledging their limitations by reaching his own conclusions. Having drawn on Ibn for his theoretical understanding of the earth’s shape, circumference and equatorial dimensions, he then turns back to Ptolemy in describing and drawing climes and by extension the regional dimensions of his maps.

  In the ensuing text and maps describing his seventy regions, moves seamlessly between Ptolemy and his Muslim sources, often describing places and estimating their locations at variance to their position on his maps. The written chapters describe routes and distances between places located on each map, for instance, ‘Mecca to Medina, also called Yathrib, by the most convenient route, is 6 days’ journey’, or 415 kilometres. The conclusion of the route shows how closely turns from Ptolemy back to Ibn , this time drawing on his predecessor’s administrative and practical interests:

  From Sabula to Mêlée, a halting place where there are springs of sweet water, 27 kilometres.

  From there to Chider, a meeting place for the inhabitants of Medina inhabited by a small number of Arabs, 19 kilometres.

  From Chider to Medina, 11 kilometres.38

  The map showing Mecca betrays few signs of its sacred significance, and neither does the description that accompanies it. ‘Mecca’, writes , ‘is a town so old that its origins are lost in the night of time; it is famous and flourishing, and people come there from every corner of the Muslim world.’ The description of the is similarly prosaic. ‘Tradition relates that the was the dwelling of Adam and that, being constructed of stone and clay, it was destroyed in the Flood and remained in ruins until God commanded Abraham and Ishmael to rebuild it.’39 This is not the sacred geography of either contemporary Christian mappaemundi (discussed in the next chapter) with Jerusalem as the divine centre of the world, or the Mecca-centred mapmaking of the School. Instead it offers a naturalistic description of the physical world, full of marvels and miracles, but with little apparent interest in a founding act of divine creation.

  When turned his attention to the capital of the caliphate, Baghdad, his account was similarly muted. ‘This great city’, he writes, ‘was established on the west bank of the Tigris by the caliph al-Mansur, who divided the surrounding territory into fiefs that he then distributed among his friends and followers.’40 In direct contrast, the great cities of Christendom are celebrated in minute detail. Rome is described as ‘one of the pillars of Christianity and first among the metropolitan sees’, celebrated for its classical architecture, thriving markets, beautiful squares, and more than 1,200 churches, including St Peter’s. also writes of ‘the palace of the prince called the pope. This prince is superior in power to all the kings; they respect him as if he were equal to the Divinity. He rules with justice, punishes oppressors, protects the poor and weak, and prevents abuses. His spiritual power exceeds that of all the kings of Christianity, and none of them may oppose his decrees.’41 If was deliberately downplaying Islamic locations in favour of Christian ones to please Roger, this was hardly the version of papal authority that the king wanted to hear.

  But it is in his account of Jerusalem that a subtly syncretic perspective on geography begins to emerge from book. He chronicles the city’s entwined Jewish, Christian and Muslim theological histories, including repeated references to Christ as the ‘Lord Messiah’, describing his life geographically from the Nativity to the Crucifixion. In a remarkable passage on the Temple Mount, or the Noble Sanctuary in Islam, describes it as

  the holy dwelling that was built by Solomon, son of David, and which was a place of pilgrimage in the days of Jewish power. This temple was then snatched from them and they were expelled from it at the time of the arrival of the Muslims. Under Muslim overlordship it was enlarged, and it is today the mosque known to the Muslims by the name of Masjid al-Aqsa. There is not one in the world that exceeds it in greatness, with the exception of the great mosque of Córdoba in Andalusia; for, according to report, the roof of that mosque is bigger than that of Masjid al-Aqsa.42

  Here is t
he holiest site in Judaism, the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina, the ‘Farthest Mosque’, named after the Prophet’s visionary journey from Mecca to Jerusalem city on a flying horse, following which it was briefly adopted as the Muslim qibla. But in describing the edifice on which the mosque was erected, also reminds his readers that in 1104 ‘the Christians took possession of it by force and it has remained in their power until the time of composition of the present work’. As in career, no one religion predominates; his identity as a Muslim is stated throughout the Entertainment, but he appears indifferent to the valorization of one intellectual or religious tradition over another.

  The Entertainment clearly magnifies Roger’s place on the world map. Sicily – described as ‘a pearl of pearls’ – looms larger than any other island in the Mediterranean, its ruler eulogized as ‘adorning imperium and ennobling sovereignty’.43 But this is the result of political exigency, and a typical example of egocentric mapping, whereby magnifies both his own location and that of his sovereign. At a more basic level, neither the geometry of Ptolemy nor the sacred geography of the School of mapmaking takes precedence in the Entertainment. None of maps contains a scale or consistent measurement of distances. In contrast to the maps drawn by Ibn , maps depict a world without , the Islamic term for limits, boundaries or the end of a particular city, country or land mass.44 Roger’s continued patronage of the project over so many years indicates he was pleased with it as political geography, but for his Entertainment was clearly something else: adab, the refined and cultured pursuit of scholarly works of edification, recreation – or entertainment. An – someone who possessed adab – sought to know something about everything, and the encyclopedic geography book represented one of the best vehicles for its expression.45

  • • •

  The much-vaunted spirit of convivencia, the multi-cultural exchange and transmission of objects, ideas and beliefs that gave rise to Entertainment, was a transitory phenomenon. As it began to unravel towards the end of Roger’s life, geographical achievements were left stranded, a result of the growing ideological polarization between Christians and Muslims which left little room for a Muslim mapmaker at a polyglot Christian court. In 1147, as was compiling the Entertainment, Roger enthusiastically supported plans for the Second Crusade, with the ultimate aim of driving the Muslims out of Jerusalem. Cunning as ever, Roger was planning to exploit his involvement in the crusade to further his own political cause, but it was also a sign of the times that he found it increasingly difficult to sidestep the growing confrontation between the two faiths.

  At his death in 1154, Roger was succeeded by his son, William I. Although William continued his father’s enthusiastic patronage of learning, he lacked Roger’s political acumen. According to one contemporary account of William’s reign, ‘after only a short time, all this tranquillity slipped away and disappeared’, and the Sicilian kingdom soon collapsed into factionalism and internecine conflict.46 Perhaps, just as had fled Córdoba as a young man, he understood that a moment had passed, and he left Sicily on one final journey, back to North Africa, probably Ceuta, where he died in 1165, aged 65. His departure coincided with growing Muslim rebellion against their Norman masters. Roger’s nephew Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily (r. 1198–1250), took a very different approach to the island’s Muslim community, deporting many of them. He also took up the mantle of Holy Crusade, leading the Sixth Crusade which culminated in his coronation as king of Jerusalem in 1229. By the time of his death the last of the island’s Muslims were either in exile or had been sold into slavery. The Norman experiment of convivencia on the island had come to a bitter end and with it the eradication of the Muslim presence in Sicily for ever.47

  The shifting cultural boundaries of the late twelfth-century Mediterranean world and the climate of amicable intellectual exchange they once created meant that geographical legacy was limited. It is difficult to imagine how such a large and complex book like the Entertainment could have been easily transmitted from Sicily throughout the Islamic world, and in any case many Muslim scholars regarded as a renegade from his own faith. Some later Islamic writers drew on his writing and copied his maps, including the famous North African scholar Ibn (1332–1406), whose family had also fled the slow disintegration of al-Andalus. His monumental world history, the al-‘ibar, compares maps with Ptolemy in describing ‘the mountains, seas, and rivers to be found in the cultivated part of the world’.48 Otherwise, circulation of work was confined to the scholarly circles of North Africa. Although an abridged Latin version of the Entertainment was printed in Rome in 1592, it was by then regarded as an historical curiosity, and dismissed as an example of the backwardness of Islamic geography.

  In the late twentieth century, as scholars began to reconsider the significance of Islamic cartography, reputation was slowly rehabilitated. The importance of his mapmaking, and in particular the significance of his circular world map, might have continued to grow, were it not for an extraordinary recent discovery. In June 2002, the Department of Oriental Collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired an Arabic manuscript that shed new light on the development of Arabic geography, and challenged established assumptions about world map. Based on its author’s political and dynastic references, the original manuscript can be dated to the eleventh century, but it survived as an early thirteenth-century copy, probably made in Egypt. Its author remains unknown, but the title, when translated into English, puts it tantalizingly in the same descriptive genre as Entertainment.

  Entitled The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes, the book is composed of thirty-five chapters written in Arabic describing the celestial and terrestrial worlds. Of even greater significance is the fact that the treatise contains no fewer than sixteen maps, depicting the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Oxus and the Indus. Other maps include Cyprus, North Africa and Sicily. The earliest chapters are also illustrated with two world maps, one rectangular and one circular, both remarkable in their own right. The rectangular world map is unlike any other known Islamic map. It is highly schematic, oriented with south at the top, showing the world effectively composed of two vast continents, Europe to the right and Asia conjoined with a limitless Africa to the left. The Arabian peninsula is particularly prominent, with Mecca depicted like a golden horseshoe. The map also contains a scale bar that bears a striking resemblance to method for projecting a world map onto a plane surface. It runs from the map’s top right to left, ending somewhere along the East African coast. Although the copyist clearly did not understand the graticule (it is incorrectly numbered), its presence suggests a hitherto unknown level of sophistication in the measurement of distances and the application of scale to Islamic world maps.49

  The circular map is more familiar: it is virtually identical to the world map found inserted into at least six copies of Entertainment. As the map in the Book of Curiosities predates the Entertainment by at least a century, it completely undermines the traditional attribution to . There are two possibilities to explain its appearance in the Entertainment. Either copied this map without acknowledging his source and included it in his treatise, or, even more intriguingly, later copyists took the liberty of adding the Book of Curiosities map, believing that it somehow complemented the rest of the Entertainment. Considering that text never refers to a world map, and as its purely physical representation of the earth is at odds with the rest of the Entertainment’s interest in regional human geography, the second of these seems most likely. Whatever the truth, the appearance of the Book of Curiosities reveals that the circulation and exchange of maps and geographical ideas across the medieval Muslim world were much earlier and far more extensive than historians have previously believed. Our understanding of medieval mapmaking, of whatever religious denomination, continues to evolve.

  The existence of the circular map in the Book of Curiosities changes how we see geographical
achievements. His method of regionally mapping the inhabited world is one of the great examples of non-mathematical mapping in the pre-modern world, the product of exchanges between not only Christians and Muslims but also Greeks and Jews. Its conventions may not look objective in the modern sense, but they pursued a kind of realism in the ways they mapped space as uniform and relatively free of the religious rhetoric that defined so many maps of his time. Although regional maps and his descriptions of towns, cities, communities, commodities, trade routes and distances across the inhabited world reflect his attempt to unify elements of Christian and Islamic mapmaking, he appears reluctant to endorse either religion’s cosmogony, or their claims to universal sovereignty.

  Like Ptolemy, was drawn to creating a map of the world as an intellectual exercise, a task that ambitious patrons like Roger demanded. But what seems to have excited him was the potentially infinite possibility of regional mapping; he resisted unifying all seventy of his local maps into one global image, because such an image would inevitably beg the question of its creation based on the beliefs of one faith or another. Incrementally mapping the wonder of the earth’s physical diversity was unacceptable to subsequent courts and rulers, Christian or Muslim, across the Mediterranean. By the thirteenth century, both sides had turned away from , instead demanding maps that provided unequivocal support for their particular theological beliefs. Despite his geographical innovation, neither Christians nor Muslims appreciated the value of his maps, and religious belief triumphed over geographical description.