by Umberto Eco
What, then, was the question at issue in Columbus's time? It was that the learned men of Salamanca had made more precise calculations than his, and believed that the totally spherical earth was bigger than our Genoese mariner thought, and therefore that he was mad to try to circumnavigate the globe and arrive in the East by sailing West. Columbus, though, inspired by sacred fire, and a good sailor, if a hopeless astronomer, thought the earth was smaller than it was. Naturally neither he nor the wise men of Salamanca suspected that another continent lay between Europe and Asia. So you see how complicated the question is, and how narrow are the bounds between truth and error, right and wrong. The doctors of Salamanca, though they were right, made a mistake; and Columbus, though wrong, pursued his error with determination and was right—through serendipity.
Yet have a look at Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.* It is true that in these two thick volumes he aims to list all the cases where religious thought retarded the development of science, but since he is an informed man, he cannot conceal the fact that Augustine, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas knew very well that the earth was round. Nevertheless, he claims that in order to maintain this they had to fight against the dominant theological view. But the dominant theological view was represented precisely by Augustine, Albertus, and Aquinas, who consequently did not have to fight against anyone.
Once more it is Russell who reminds us that a serious work like that by F. S. Marvin, which appeared in 1921 in Studies in the History and in the Method of the Sciences, repeats that "[t]he maps of Ptolemy ... were forgotten in the West for a thousand years," * and that in a manual written in 1988 (A. Holt-Jensen, Geography: History and Concepts) it is claimed that the medieval church taught that the earth was a flat disk with Jerusalem at the center; and even Daniel Boorstin, in his popular Discoverers of 1983, states that from the fourth to the fourteenth century Christianity suppressed the notion that the earth was round.
How did the idea spread that the Middle Ages considered the earth a flat disk? We saw that Isidore of Seville calculated the length of the equator, yet in the actual manuscripts of his work there is a diagram that inspired many representations of our planet, the so-called T-map.
The structure of the T-map is very simple: Given that the circle represents the planet earth, three lines forming a T separate an upper semicircle from two lower quarter circles. The upper portion represents Asia, upper because according to legend the earthly paradise was in Asia; the horizontal bar represents on one side the Black Sea, on the other the Nile, while the vertical line represents the Mediterranean, so the quarter circle on the left is Europe, and the one on the right is Africa. All around is the large circle of the ocean.
Could it have been that these maps signified that the earth was a flat circle?
In a manuscript from the Liber Floridus by Lambert of Saint-Omer, from the twelfth century, the emperor holds a circle in his hand, on which is drawn a T-map. It is not by accident that this map appears as a regal symbol in the hands of an emperor. It has a symbolic rather than a geographical value. With a little bit of goodwill one could interpret it not as a circle but as the schematic representation of a terrestrial globe, as happens in other images.
However, the impression of a circle is given by the maps illustrating the commentaries on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, a text written in the eighth century but which, illustrated by Mozarabic miniaturists in subsequent centuries, had a wide influence on the art in Romanesque abbeys and Gothic cathedrals, and T-maps are found in countless illuminated manuscripts.
How was it possible that people who believed that the earth was round made maps where what one saw was a flat earth? The first answer is that this is just what we also do. Criticizing the flatness of these maps would be like criticizing the flatness of one of today's atlases. This was simply a naive and conventional form of cartographic projection. However, there are other factors we have to bear in mind.
The Middle Ages was a period of great travels, but with the roads in disrepair, forests to traverse, and stretches of sea to cross relying on any sailor who was around, there was no chance of drawing adequate maps. They were purely schematic, like the Instructions for Pilgrims at Santiago de Compostela, and they said more or less: "If you want to go from Rome to Jerusalem proceed southward and then ask as you go along." Let us try to think of a railway map as found in any railway timetable that you buy from a newsstand. Nobody could extrapolate from that series of crisscrosses, which in themselves are clear enough if you want to take a train from Milan to Livorno (and realize that you have to go via Genoa), the exact shape of Italy. The exact shape of Italy is not of any interest to someone who has to go to the station.
The Romans had charted a series of roads connecting every city in the known world; these roads were represented in what is called Peutinger's map (named after the person who rediscovered it in the fifteenth century). The map shows with great precision every road of the time, but it places them roughly along two stretches of land, the upper one representing Europe and the lower one Africa, so that the Mediterranean appears as a little stream. We are in exactly the same position as with the railway timetable map. The shape of the continents is not of any interest, only the information that there is a road that allows you to go from Marseille to Genoa. And yet the Romans, from the Punic wars onward, had crisscrossed the Mediterranean and knew very well that it was not the little stream that was shown on the map.
For the rest, medieval journeys were imaginary. The Middle Ages produced encyclopedias, called Imagines Mundi, that tried more to satisfy the taste for marvels, telling of distant and inaccessible countries, and these were all from books written by people who had never seen the places they wrote about, since the force of tradition counted more than actual experience. Various maps of the world of the time aim not to represent the shape of the earth but to list the cities and peoples that could be seen there. Furthermore, symbolic representation counted more than empirical representation, and often what preoccupied the illuminator was putting Jerusalem at the center of the earth, not how to get to Jerusalem. Last point: medieval maps did not have any scientific function but met the demand for marvels that came from the public, I mean in the same way that today glossy magazines show us the existence of flying saucers and on TV they tell us that the Pyramids were built by an extraterrestrial civilization. Even in the Nuremberg Chronicle, which was actually written in 1493, or in Orteliuss atlases in the next century, maps represented mysterious monsters that were thought to inhabit those countries the maps themselves already showed in acceptable cartographic terms.
Perhaps the Middle Ages were cartographically naive, but many modern historians have been even more naive and have not known how to interpret their criteria for mapmaking.
Another fake that changed the history of the world? The Donation of Constantine. Nowadays, thanks to Lorenzo Valla, we know that the Constitutum was not authentic. And yet without the profound belief in that document's authenticity, European history would have run a different course: no investiture struggles, no struggle to the death for the Holy Roman Empire, no papal temporal power, but also no Sistine Chapel—which is painted after the Donation has been proved false, but it can be painted because it was believed to be authentic for centuries.
In the second half of the twelfth century a letter arrived in the West telling how in the Far East, beyond the areas occupied by the Muslims, beyond the lands that the Crusaders had tried to remove from the dominion of the infidels, but which had come back under Saracen control, there flourished a Christian kingdom, governed by the fabled Prester John, or Presbyter Johannes, " rex potentia et virtute dei et domini nostri Iesu Christi" (a king by the power and virtue of our lord Jesus Christ). The letter began by saying:
You must know and firmly believe that I, Prester John, am the lord of lords, and in all riches that exist under the heavens, in virtue and in power I outdo all the kings of the earth. Seventy-two kings pay us tribut
e. I am a devout Christian and I protect and support with alms everywhere true Christians governed by the sovereignty of my Clemency [...].
Our sovereignty extends to the three Indias: from India Major, where rests the body of Thomas the Apostle, our dominions extend toward the desert, pushing toward the borders of the Orient before bending back toward the West as far as deserted Babylon, beside the Tower of Babel [...] In our dominions there are born and live elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, [...] panthers, wild asses, white and red lions, bears, and white blackbirds, deaf cicadas, griffins, tigers, jackals, hyenas, wild bulls, centaurs, wild men, horned men, fauns, satyrs and their female equivalents, pygmies, cynocephali, giants forty cubits tall, one-eyed men, cyclops, a bird called the phoenix, and almost every kind of animal that lives under heavens vault [...] In one of our provinces there is a river called the Indus. This river, which flows from Paradise, extends its meandering course through different channels throughout the whole province and in it are found natural stones, emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, amethysts, sardonyxes, and many other precious gems [...].
In the furthermost regions of our land [...] we have an island [...] where all year round, twice a week, God rains manna in great abundance, which is gathered and eaten by the peoples who live on no other food but this. For they do not plow, nor sow, nor reap, nor move the earth in any way to extract its richest fruit [...]. All these people, who live only on divine food, live for five hundred years. Yet when they reach the age of a hundred, they are rejuvenated and regain their strength by drinking thrice the water from a fountain which springs up at the root of a tree that grows in that place [...] None of those among us are liars [...] Among us there is no one who is an adulterer. No vice has any power with us.*
Translated and paraphrased several times in the course of the following centuries (up until the seventeenth century), and existing in various languages and versions, the letter played a decisive role in the expansion of the Christian West toward the Orient. The notion that there could be a Christian kingdom beyond the Muslim territories legitimized all their expansionist and exploratory undertakings. Prester John would be spoken about by Giovanni Pian del Carpine, William of Rubrouck, and Marco Polo. Halfway through the fourteenth century Prester John's kingdom would move from a vague Orient to Ethiopia when Portuguese navigators began their African adventure. Contacts with Prester John would be attempted by Henry IV of England, the due du Berry, and Pope Eugenius IV. At Bologna, when Charles V was crowned, there would still be discussion of Prester John as a possible ally for the reconquest of the Holy Sepulchre.
How did Prester John's letter come about, and what was its aim? Perhaps it was a document of anti-Byzantine propaganda, produced in Frederick I's scriptoria, but the problem concerns not so much its origins (this period abounded in forgeries of all types)* as its reception. This geographical fantasy served to bolster a political project. In other words, the ghost evoked by some scribe with a flair for forgeries (a highly prized literary genre at the time) acted as an alibi for the expansion of the Christian world toward Africa and Asia, and friendly support for the white man's burden.
Another invention that was rich in historical implications was that of the Rosicrucian confraternity. Many scholars have discussed the climate of extraordinary spiritual renewal that emerged at the dawn of the seventeenth century, when the idea of a Golden Century gathered pace. This climate of expectation pervaded both Catholic and Protestant areas in different forms (in an interplay of mutual influences): plans for ideal republics come forward—from Campanella's Città del sole to Johann Valentin Andrea es Christianopolis, as well as hopes of a universal monarchy and a general renewal of morals and religious sensibility—at the very time when Europe, in the period around the Thirty Years' War, was raging with national conflicts, religious hatreds, and the rise of raison d'état.
In 1614 a manifesto appeared, entitled Fama Fraternitatis R. C, in which the mysterious Rosicrucian confraternity revealed its existence, and gave notice of its own history and its mythical founder, Christian Rosencreutz—who had apparently lived in the fifteenth century and learned secret revelations from Arabic and Jewish sages in the course of his wanderings in the Orient. In 1615 there appeared, alongside the Fama, which was in German, a second manifesto, in Latin, Confessio Fraternitatis Roseae Crucis. Ad Eruditos Europae. The first manifesto hopes that there might arise in Europe too a society in possession of gold, silver, and jewels in abundance, which would distribute these to the kings to satisfy their needs and legitimate aims, a society that would teach the rulers to learn everything that God has allowed man to know and help them with their deliberations.
Amid alchemical metaphors and more or less messianic invocations, both manifestos insist on the secret nature of the confraternity and on the fact that their members cannot reveal its real nature ("our edifice—even though a hundred thousand people should see it—will be forever intangible, indestructible, and hidden from the sinful world"). Consequently, the final appeal of the Fama, to all the learned men of Europe, to make contact with those who had drawn up the manifesto, might appear even more ambiguous: "Even though we have not for the moment revealed our names, nor when we meet, nevertheless we will certainly get to know everyone's opinion, in whatever language it is expressed; and whoever makes his name known to us can confer with one of us either viva voce or, should there be some impediment to that, in writing."
Almost at once, people from all corners of Europe began to write appeals to the Rosicrucians. Nobody claimed to know them, no one said he was a Rosicrucian, everyone tried somehow to let it be understood that they were entirely in agreement with its program. Julius Sperber, Robert Fludd, and Michael Maier all speak to the invisible Rosicrucians: Maier, in his Themis Aurea (1618), maintains that the confraternity really does exist, even though he admits that he is too humble a person to have ever belonged to them. But as Frances Yates observed, the usual behavior of Rosicrucian writers was to claim not only that they were not Rosicrucians but that they had never even met a member of the confraternity.*
For a start, Johann Valentin Andreae and all his friends in the Tübingen circle, who were immediately suspected of being the authors of the manifestos, spent their lives either denying the fact or playing it down as a literary game, a youthful folly. Moreover, not only is there no historical evidence of the existence of the Rosicrucians, but by definition there cannot be. Still today, the official documents of the AMORC ("Anticus et Mysticus Ordo Rosae Crucis, "whose temple, rich in Egyptian iconography, can be visited in San José, California) state that the original texts legitimizing the order certainly do exist but for obvious reasons will remain secret and locked up in inaccessible archives.
We are interested not so much in todays Rosicrucians, however, who are just part of folklore, as in the historical ones. From the earliest appearance of the first two manifestos critical pamphlets began to be published, attacking the confraternity with accusations of various kinds, in particular those of being forgers and charlatans. In 1623 there appeared in Paris anonymous notices announcing the arrival of the Rosicrucians in the city, and this announcement unleashed fierce polemics, in both Catholic and libertine circles; the common rumor that the Rosicrucians were devil worshippers was expressed in an anonymous Effroyables Pactions faites entre le diable et les prétendus invisibles (Terrifying Pacts Made between the Devil and the So-Called Invisible Ones), also of 1623. Even Descartes, who during a journey to Germany had tried—it is said—to contact them (unsuccessfully, of course), was suspected on his return to Paris of belonging to the confraternity, and he got out of the predicament with a masterstroke: since the common legend had it that the Rosicrucians were invisible, he made his appearance at many public occasions and thus defused the rumors that surrounded him, according to Baillet in his Vie de Monsieur Descartes. A certain Neuhaus published, first in German, then in French in 1623, an Advertissement pieux et utile des frères de la Rose-
Croix (Pious and Useful Advertisement of the Brothers of the Rosy-Cross), which asked if there were any Rosicrucians, who they were, where they took their name from, and why they revealed themselves to the public; and it concluded with the extraordinary argument that "since they change and turn their names into anagrams, and conceal their age, and come here without revealing their identity, there is no Logician who can deny that they must of necessity exist."
This tells us that it only required someone to make an appeal for the spiritual reform of humanity for the most paradoxical reactions to be unleashed, as though everyone were waiting for some decisive event.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his '"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," writes of an improbable country, described in an unfindable encyclopedia. From the researches into this country it emerges, through vague clues based on texts that plagiarize each other, that in fact what is being talked about is an entire planet, "with its own architectures and wars, with the terror of its mythologies and the sound of its languages, with its emperors and seas, its minerals and birds, its fishes, its algebra and its fire, and its theological and metaphysical controversies." This entity is the creation of "a secret society of astronomers, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, moralists, painters, geometers ... under the guidance of an obscure man of genius."
We are here faced with a typical Borges invention: the invention of an invention. Yet Borges's readers know that he never invented anything; his most improbable stories come from his rereading of history. In fact, at a certain point Borges says that one of his sources was a work by Johann Valentin Andreae, which (though Borges got this information secondhand from De Quincey) "described the imaginary community of the Rosicrucians; a community that others later genuinely founded from the example of what he had imagined."
