A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  3

  Faith

  Hereford Mappamundi, c. 1300

  Orvieto, Italy, 1282

  On 23 August 1282, the bishop of Hereford, Thomas Cantilupe, died at Ferente, near Orvieto in Italy. A former Chancellor of England and of Oxford University, canon of London and York, and personal adviser to King Edward I, Cantilupe was one of the most influential figures in thirteenth-century English ecclesiastical life. In the last years of his life he became embroiled in a bitter controversy with his superior, John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury. Born into the ruling baronial class, Cantilupe was a firm believer in the established rights of senior clergy to hold multiple benefices – land and property attached to religious titles – a practice commonly known as pluralism. Pecham was a vociferous critic of pluralism, along with what he regarded as indiscipline, absenteeism and unorthodox theological teaching. Upon his appointment as archbishop in 1279, Pecham made it clear to senior clergy, including Cantilupe, that he intended to stamp out such practices. Pecham represented a new kind of ecclesiastical authority. He was a firm supporter of the decrees laid down at the Fourth Lateran Council held in Rome in 1215, which wanted to formalize Christian doctrine by strengthening the power of its ruling elite, who were given increased authority to disseminate the basic points of doctrine to the laity.1 Pecham enthusiastically endorsed such reforms, expanding his jurisdiction over the dioceses, but in the process eroding the authority and privileges enjoyed by many of his bishops.

  Pecham was particularly concerned about bringing the Welsh clergy into line on the issue of pluralism. This was as much a political as a religious matter. Throughout the 1270s and 1280s King Edward was involved in a long and bitter conflict with independent Welsh rulers in an attempt to incorporate the realm within England. Situated in the Marches (border regions) between England and Wales, the diocese of Hereford represented the furthest extent of English political and ecclesiastical authority, and Pecham was keen to ensure it abided by his reforms. While Cantilupe remained loyal to King Edward on political matters, he rejected Pecham’s attempts to challenge pluralism and other practices deeply embedded in English religious life, and resisted the archbishop’s attempts at reforming his diocese. Matters came to a head in February 1282, when the archbishop dramatically excommunicated Cantilupe at Lambeth Palace. The disgraced bishop went into exile in France, and by March 1282 was heading to Rome, to make a direct appeal to Pope Martin IV against his excommunication.2

  Throughout the summer of 1282 Cantilupe met the pope and made his case. But before the matter could be resolved, Cantilupe’s health began to deteriorate, and by August he had departed for England. Shortly after his death at Ferente, Cantilupe’s heart was removed and his body boiled to separate the flesh from the bones. The flesh was interred in a church in Orvieto, the heart and bones carried back to England. On their return, Pecham refused permission for Cantilupe’s bones to be interred in Hereford until early 1283. Thanks to the efforts of Richard Swinfield, Cantilupe’s protégé and successor as bishop of Hereford, the former bishop’s bones were finally laid to rest in the cathedral in 1287. The tomb was decorated with soldiers standing with their feet on monstrous beasts, an image of the Church Militant, fighting sin and protecting the virtuous Cantilupe, lying within the Garden of Paradise, and protected by Christ’s battalions.3

  The shrine was the beginning of a concerted effort by Swinfield to have his mentor canonized, and he cultivated Cantilupe’s tomb as a site of pilgrimage for the faithful from across the country. Between 1287 and 1312, more than 500 ‘miracles’ were associated with it, ranging from cure of the mad and the crippled, to the miraculous revival of children believed drowned, the recovery of a knight’s favourite falcon trampled to death by his squire, and the restoration to a Doncaster man of the power of speech even though his tongue had been cut out by robbers. Finally, in 1320, after repeated petitions to the papal curia, Cantilupe was granted saintly status, the last Englishman before the Reformation to receive such an honour.

  • • •

  The story of Cantilupe’s career and his conflict with Pecham over matters of ecclesiastical authority encapsulates the vicissitudes of faith in thirteenth-century Catholic England. But today, Cantilupe’s life, and his final resting place, the base of which can still be seen in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral, is largely forgotten. Most tourists who make the secular pilgrimage to the cathedral walk straight past Cantilupe’s tomb and head instead for the modern annex behind the church, designed to hold its most famous relic: the Hereford mappamundi.

  The term mappamundi comes from the Latin mappa – a tablecloth or napkin – and mundus – the world. Its development in the Christian Latin-speaking West from the late eighth century did not always refer specifically to a map of the world; it could also designate a written geographical description. Similarly, not all world maps from this period were called mappaemundi (the plural of mappamundi). Other terms were also used, including descriptio, pictura, tabula, or, as in the case of the Hereford map, estoire, or history.4 Just as geography was not recognized at this time as a distinct scholarly discipline, so there was no universally accepted noun in Latin or European vernacular languages to describe what we would now call a map. Of all the terms in circulation, however, mappamundi became the most common term to define a written and drawn account of the Christian earth for nearly 600 years. Of the 1,100 mappaemundi that survive today, the vast majority are to be found in manuscript books, some just a few centimetres in size, illustrating the writings of some of the most influential thinkers of the time: the Spanish cleric and scholar Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), the late fourth-century writer Macrobius and the fifth-century Christian thinker Paulus Orosius. The Hereford mappamundi is unique; it is one of the most important maps in the history of cartography, and the largest of its kind to have survived intact for nearly 800 years. It is an encyclopedic vision of what the world looked like to a thirteenth-century Christian. It offers both a reflection and a representation of the medieval Christian world’s theological, cosmological, philosophical, political, historical, zoological and ethnographic beliefs. But although it is the greatest medieval map in existence, it remains something of an enigma. We do not know exactly when it was made, nor its exact function within the cathedral; nor are we certain why it is to be found in a small cathedral town on the Anglo-Welsh border.

  Going to Hereford today and walking into the cathedral’s annex to examine the mappamundi, the visitor is first struck by just how alien it appears as an object, never mind as a map. Shaped like the gable end of a house, the map undulates and ripples like some mysterious animal – which, in effect is what it is. Measuring 1.59 metres (5 feet 2 inches) high, and 1.34 metres (4 feet 4 inches) wide, the map was made from one enormous animal skin. The shape of the animal is still discernible, from its neck, which forms the map’s apex, to its spine, which runs down the middle of the map. At one glance, the map can look like a skull, or cross-section of a cadaver, with its veins and organs on display; with another look it could be a strange, curled animal. Gone are the grids of measurement found in Ptolemy and . Instead, this map emanates an almost organic aura, embodying a chaotic, teeming world, full of wonders, but also edged with horrors.

  Most of the parchment contains a circular depiction of the world, portrayed within one vast sphere, encircled with water. Looking at the map’s distribution of land masses and geographical orientation only leaves the modern viewer alienated and confused. The earth is divided into three parts, picked out in gold leaf on the map as ‘Europa’, ‘Asia’ and ‘Affrica’.5 The titles of Europe and Africa have been transposed, which says something either about the limitations of thirteenth-century geographical knowledge, or that the map’s scribe experienced profound embarrassment when it was finally unveiled (unless there is a more obscure intention to show a deliberately confused image of the world in contrast to reality). The cardinal directions are represented on the map’s outer ring f
rom the top, moving clockwise, as Oriens (east, the rising sun), Meridies (south, the position of the sun at midday), Occidens (west, the setting sun), and Septemtrio (north, from the Latin for seven, referring to the seven stars of the Plough in the Great Bear, by which the direction of north was calculated). Where the world map in had placed south at the top, the Hereford mappamundi reorients the world with east at the top. But just like map, Asia fills nearly two-thirds of the whole sphere on the Hereford mappamundi. To the south in the right-hand corner of the map is Africa, with its southern peninsula incorrectly shown as joined to Asia. Europe is to the west in the bottom left-hand corner, with present-day Scandinavia to the north. Asia takes up the rest of the map.

  To reorient the mappamundi according to today’s geography the viewer has to mentally turn it 90° clockwise, with the apex facing to the right, but even then its topography remains unfamiliar. Most people standing in front of the mappamundi try to get their bearings by looking for Hereford, but this hardly helps. The town is on the map, as is the River Wye (labelled ‘wie’), alongside important thirteenth-century settlements like Conway and Carnarvon, but it lies on a barely recognizable, sausage-shaped island labelled ‘Anglia’, squashed into the bottom left-hand corner. Although the whole of the British Isles seems incomprehensible to a modern eye, its toponymy reveals some strikingly modern conflicts over regional and national identity which are still with us today. Anglia is written in red to the north-east of Hereford, but further to the south the same island is also labelled ‘Britannia insula’, or the island of Britain. Wales, or ‘Wallia’ looks as if it is hanging to England (or Britain?) by a thread, while Ireland (‘Hibernia’) floats off on the very border of the map like a sinister crocodile, and appears to be almost split in two. To the north, Scotland (‘Scotia’) is shown as completely separate from England.

  Crossing the narrow arc of water to ‘Europa’, things do not get any clearer. The continent is also barely recognizable, a horn-shaped wedge riven by waterways snaking through the land, which is mainly distinguished by the depiction of mountain ranges, trade routes, religious sites and major cities like Paris, curiously slashed and scratched (perhaps due to age-old anti-French sentiment), and Rome, emblazoned as ‘head of the world’. The base of the map shows an island on which sit two classical columns, with the legend, ‘The Rock of Gibraltar and Monte Acho are believed to be the Columns of Hercules’, established by the Greek hero as the westernmost point of the known classical world. Just to their left, on mainland Spain, just above Córdoba and Valencia, a legend reads ‘Terminus europe’. From the Columns of Hercules, the Mediterranean runs back up the map’s spine, littered with islands labelled with a mishmash of classical information. Minorca is described as the place where ‘slings were first discovered’, while Sardinia is, according to the map, ‘called “Sandaliotes” in Greek from its similarity to the human foot’. The most prominent island is Sicily, the home of , floating off the African coast and directly adjacent to a castle portraying ‘Mighty Carthage’. The island is depicted as an enormous triangle, with a legend offering precise distances between its three promontories. Just above Sicily lies Crete, dominated by what it describes as ‘the labyrinth: that is, home of Daedalus’. In classical mythology the Athenian inventor Daedalus built the labyrinth to imprison the Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of Queen Pasiphae, wife of the island’s king, Minos. Above Crete the Mediterranean divides itself: to the right, it flows out of the Nile; to the left into the Adriatic and the Aegean. Passing Rhodes and the remnants of its Colossus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the map reaches the Hellespont, the modern-day Dardanelles, and directly above it the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople. The city is shown in oblique perspective, with its formidable walls and fortifications reproduced with impressive accuracy.

  Moving further away from the centre, the map and modern geographical reality increasingly part company. The further up the map one looks, the more settlements become scattered, legends more elaborate, and strange monsters and effigies begin to rear their heads. A lynx stalks across Asia Minor, and we are told ‘it sees through walls and urinates a black stone’. Noah’s Ark sits further up in Armenia, above which two fearsome creatures march back and forth across India. On the left, a tiger, on the right, a ‘manticore’, sporting ‘a triple set of teeth, the face of a human, yellow eyes, the colour of blood, a lion’s body, a scorpion’s tail, a hissing voice’. Moving deeper into Asia the map portrays the Golden Fleece, the mythical griffin, scenes of grotesque cannibalism, and an account of the fearsome Scythians, who are said to live in caves and ‘make drinking cups out of the heads of their enemies’. Finally, at the left-hand shoulder of the map, at the very limits of the known world, a legend concludes that:

  Here are all kinds of horrors, more than can be imagined: intolerable cold, a constant blasting wind from the mountains, which the inhabitants call ‘bizo’. Here are exceedingly savage people who eat human flesh and drink blood, the accursed sons of Cain. The Lord used Alexander the Great to close them off, for within sight of the king an earthquake occurred, and mountains tumbled upon mountains all around them. Where there were no mountains, Alexander hemmed them in with an indestructible wall.

  The legend conflates well known biblical and classical versions of the origins of the ‘savage people’, the tribes of Gog and Magog. These were the monstrous descendants of Noah’s son Japheth, scattered to the northernmost parts of the known world. The Book of Revelation predicts that in the Last Days Satan will gather the tribes of Gog and Magog from ‘the four quarters of the earth’, in a futile assault against Jerusalem (Revelation 20: 8–9). Early Christian and versions of the exploits of Alexander the Great claim that when the king reached the Caucasus Mountains he forged gates of brass and iron to keep Gog and Magog at bay – a barrier reproduced on the circular world map attributed to . For all these traditions, Gog and Magog were the ultimate barbarians, on the literal and metaphorical margins of Christianity, a permanent threat to any civilization.

  Moving across to the right-hand side of the map’s portrayal of Asia, the map imagines a world no less marvellous and terrifying. Crocodiles, rhinoceroses, sphinxes, unicorns, mandrakes, fauns and a very unfortunate race of people ‘with a prominent lip, with which they shade their face from the sun’ inhabit the regions to the south-east. In the map’s top right-hand corner the red claw-shaped ingress depicts the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, with Sri Lanka (labelled ‘Taphana’, or Taprobana according to classical sources) floating at their mouth, rather than off the south-east coast of India. Moving back down the map, a tadpole-shaped river runs along the southern African coast, representing the Upper Nile (wrongly believed to flow underground before rejoining the Lower Nile, portrayed on the map further inland).

  To the right of the Nile runs a fantastically elongated Africa, virtually devoid of settlements with the exception of Mount Hesperus on the north-west coast, to the monasteries of St Anthony in the top right-hand corner (in southern Egypt). The portrayal of Africa bears no relation to any geographical reality: its only function seems to be to explain the origin of the Nile and to depict a world of another ‘monstrous’ people; not Gog and Magog, but their diametrically opposed counterparts on the map’s southernmost point. Moving south from Mount Hesperus, the map portrays a range of fantastic creatures, with bizarre features and behaviour, starting with the ‘Gangines Ethiopians’, who are shown naked, holding walking sticks and pushing each other away. The legend tells us that ‘with them there is no friendship’. Hardly monstrous, more antisocial. But further south the map depicts ‘Marmini Ethiopians’ with four eyes; an unnamed people who ‘have mouth and eyes in their shoulders’; the ‘Blemmyes’, with ‘their mouth and eyes in their chest’; the Philli, who ‘test the chastity of their wives by exposing their new-borns to serpents’ (in other words, murdering illegitimately conceived offspring); and the Himantopods, who bear the misfortune of having to ‘creep along more than walk
’.

  Moving south of where a modern map would locate the equator, the races take on even more monstrous and bizarre characteristics. A bearded figure wearing a turban with a woman’s breast and male and female genitalia is labelled a people of ‘either sex, unnatural in many ways’, above an unnamed individual with ‘a sealed mouth’, who can only eat through a straw; below are ‘Sciapodes, who though one-legged are extremely swift and are protected in shade by the soles of their feet; the same are also called Monoculi’. The map portrays the Sciapodes as not only possessing one leg (with an extra three toes), but also sporting just one eye. Finally, the catalogue of monstrous races ends off the east coast of Africa with ‘a people without ears, called Ambari, the soles of whose feet are opposed’.

  This is not a map as we understand it in any modern sense. Instead, it is an image of a world defined by theology, not geography, where place is understood through faith rather than location, and the passage of time according to biblical events is more important than the depiction of territorial space. At its centre stands the place that is so central to the Christian faith: Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s crucifixion, graphically depicted above the city itself, which is represented with circular walls, rather like a giant theological cog. It takes its position at the heart of the map from God’s pronouncement in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel: ‘This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her’ (Ezekiel 5: 5). The layered theological geography of description of the city has gone, and is instead replaced by an exclusively Christian vision.