Download PDF | Cartography between Christian Europe and the Arabic-Islamic World, 1100-1500: Divergent Traditions, By Alfred Hiatt, Brill 2021.
248 Pages
Notes on Contributors
Elly Dekker
is an independent scholar interested in astronomical models and instruments
such as astrolabes, celestial globes and celestial maps. She has published numerous scientific papers in addition to catalogues on major globe collections
in Greenwich and Florence, and more recently a book on maps and globes
made before 1500: Illustrating the Phaenomena. Celestial cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (2013). At present she is working in collaboration with
Kristen Lippincott on an edition and commentary of Alessandro Piccolomini,
De le Stelle Fisse, printed in Venice in 1540, which book includes the first printed star atlas.
Jean-Charles Ducène
is an Arabist and Directeur d’études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études,
Paris. He is the author of many articles on Islamic cartography and geography,
and has published editions and translations of several Arabic works, including L’Afrique dans le Uns al-muhaǧ wa-rawḍ al-furaǧ d’al-Idrīsī (2010), and Les
tables géographiques du manuscrit du Sultan Rasūlide al-Malik al-Afḍal (2013).
As seen in his book L’Europe et les géographes arabes du Moyen Âge (2018), he is
interested in the development of geography as a body of knowledge, as well as
in the particular representations elaborated by Arab geographers.
Alfred Hiatt
is Professor of Medieval Studies in the Department of English at Queen Mary,
University of London. He is the author of Dislocations: Maps, Classical Tradition, and Spatial Play in the European Middle Ages (2020), and Terra Incognita:
Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (2008), as well as several articles on the history of cartography, and medieval geographical thought.
Yossef Rapoport
is Professor in Islamic History in the School of History at Queen Mary,
University of London. He is the author of several articles on Islamic maps, as
well as Islamic Maps (2019). With Emilie Savage-Smith he is the co-author of
Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo (2018),
and the co-editor of An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The
Book of Curiosities (2014)
Stefan Schröder
is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki.
He has published a book on “Otherness” in late medieval pilgrimage reports
to the Holy Land – Zwischen Christentum und Islam. Kulturelle Grenzen in den
spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichten des Felix Fabri (2009) – and written several related articles on medieval travelling and on images of Islam and Judaism. He is the author of several articles on the history of cartography with the
focus on the influence of Islamic maps in medieval Europe. He is currently
working on a project entitled “Historicizing the Crusades: Strategies of Historiographical Writing and Functions of the Past in the Late Middle Ages”.
Emmanuelle Vagnon
is a Research Fellow at the CNRS, in the Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris (LaMOP, University Pantheon-Sorbonne). She is the author of
Cartographie et représentations de l’Orient méditerranéen en Occident, du milieu
du XIIIe à la fin du XVe siècle (2013), and co-editor of L’Âge d’or des cartes marines. Quand l’Europe découvrait le monde, catalogue of the exhibition at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France (2012), and of La Fabrique de l’océan Indien.
Cartes d’Orient et d’Occident (2017). She has written several articles on medieval
maps and portolan charts.
Cartography between Christian Europe and the
Arabic-Islamic World
Alfred Hiatt
Over the past three decades considerable scholarly attention has been directed
towards cultural relations between Latin Christendom and the Arabic-Islamic
world during the Middle Ages. The nature of this attention has been diverse,
multi-disciplinary and therefore resistant to simplification. However, two
principal axes of interest may be identified within recent contributions to this
topic. Scholars have, on the one hand, studied the methods and motivations
for the transmission of scientific knowledge from the Arabic-Islamic world
to the Latin West from the eleventh century onwards, and they have traced
the wide-ranging effects of that transmission upon European cultural life.1
Fields such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy were profoundly altered by the translation and circulation of Arabic texts, while many
other pursuits – including literature, the visual arts and material culture more generally – felt the influence of contact zones such as al-Andalus, Sicily, and
the near east.
This debt of Christian European culture to the Arabic-Islamic
world, and particularly the latter’s contribution to the rise of Aristotelianism,
has been acknowledged since at least the nineteenth century, but recent scholarship has taken important strides in specifying the chronology, techniques,
uses – and the limits – of “knowledge transfer” to the Latin West.
The other major axis around which recent work pivots may broadly be
defined as that of perception and representation. Here scholars have been less
concerned with documenting the transmission of texts than with analysing
the idea of Islam as conceived and depicted within Europe. Such work has
tended to respond directly or obliquely to the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which identified, however fleetingly, classical and medieval
roots of modern European attitudes towards Islam and the east.2 Medievalists
and early modernists have subsequently investigated representations of Muslims and their beliefs in literature, historical writing, and the visual arts, in an
attempt to assess the role of Islam as an outside force necessary to define and
construct identity within Christian communities.3 Much less attention has
been directed to the other direction of travel, that is, the influence of medieval European Christian texts and ideas in the Islamic world, at least before
the fifteenth century. In part this has been because the governing assumption
of much work has been the textual and technical superiority of the Islamic
world: put simply, Europe seemingly had little to offer in intellectual terms, at
least until the later Middle Ages, whereas contact with Arabic texts profoundly
enriched European scholarship.
As we shall see, however, while a version of
this paradigm has been asserted for the history of mapmaking in the Middle
Ages, there are reasons to doubt it.
The motivations for the attention directed towards Islam and Europe in
recent years have been political and institutional, as well as intellectual. For ideological reasons, many scholars have sought a different narrative to that of
the “clash of civilizations”.4 Rosamund Mack, for example, concluded her 2002
study of the connections between Islam and Italian art, Bazaar to Piazza, with
the positive thought that “[s]ixteenth-century East-West trade and artistic
exchange softened a clash of civilizations, establishing a historical precedent
for cultural coexistence and mutual enrichment”.5 While attempts to assert an
“Islamo-Christian civilization”, positing a synchronous religious and intellectual development of cultures in explicit opposition to the thesis of a “clash”,
can seem strained,6 more persuasive arguments have been made for the interdependence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Middle Ages.7
One of
the more interesting effects of the need to examine interactions across linguistic and devotional boundaries has been the methodological challenge such
enquiry has posed to disciplines that have traditionally regarded the study of
Christian and Islamic texts and images as separate fields. Studies such as Hans
Belting’s “westostlische Geschichte” (west-eastern history) of visual theory in
the Renaissance – which aims to understand the emergence of perspective in
Western art as both product of, and divergence from, Islamic mathematical
theory – hold the promise of a radically revised and decentred picture of the
Middle Ages, in which claims to cultural exclusivity have been swept aside.8 In
this context, the world picture itself can serve as an important test case. What
level of exchange and interaction between Christian and Muslim cultures does
the history of cartography in medieval Europe and the Arabic-Islamic world reveal? Did the imago mundi and its counterpart the ṣurat al-arḍ constitute
a bridge between civilisations – or did they sit apart on opposite banks of the
Mediterranean, looking inland?
Geographical thought in Medieval Christian Europe and the
Arabic-Islamic World
Before reviewing the evidence for interactions in the field of spatial representation, it will be helpful to outline the basic features of Arabic and Latin
geographical traditions. In the first place, however, some clarification of terminology is necessary. Terms such as “Arabic-Islamic maps” and the “ArabicIslamic world” are clearly dangerously vague concepts,9 which shift depending
on which period of history one has in mind: the “Islamic world” in 1100 looks
rather different to the “Islamic world” around 1500. The opposition to Europe
may also not always be a helpful one, since for a large portion of the period in
question Islam extended well into parts of Europe – most notably in the case of
al-Andalus – and by the end of it the Ottoman Empire was pressing hard against
“European” frontiers. Moreover, Europe itself is a notoriously unstable concept
in the Middle Ages, although perhaps it is in geographical texts that it finds its
clearest articulation.10 An even more pertinent objection to the discussion of
interactions between medieval Muslim and Christian mapmakers is that it runs
the risk of excluding the crucial role played by Jewish intermediaries, as conduits between faiths, and between north Africa and Europe. Notwithstanding
these drawbacks, there remain valid justifications for continuing to use terms
such as the “Arabic-Islamic world”. Not only is there is a lack of viable alternatives, there is also precedent in the works of Muslim geographers themselves,
such as al-Muqaddasī, who understood the empire al-Islām to include places
with a significant Muslim population, from the Maghrib to al-Sind, as well as
realms under Islamic rule.11
While fully acknowledging the imperfection of any terminology, this volume will therefore use “Arabic-Islamic” to refer to authors
and works operating within Islamic traditions, and (for the most part) in the
Arabic language, in comparison with authors and works operating within
Christian traditions, in Latin and European vernaculars. This comparison necessarily includes consideration of Jewish astronomical and geographical texts,
but excludes (for the most part) discussion of Byzantine material. That said, it
is worth emphasising the importance of viewing Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as plural, often fractured, entities during the centuries under discussion.
In neither Christian Europe nor the Arabic-Islamic world was geography,
still less cartography, a field of study in its own right.
In the Latin tradition the
description of the earth was incorporated within the seven liberal arts under
geometry. Descriptions of the world occurred in a variety of contexts – notably
as a preface to historical writing,12 or within the medieval encyclopedia (as in
the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, and later books of nature),13 or as rhetorical
display within literary texts.14 Maps were even more peripatetic texts. Many of
those that survive are preserved in manuscript books of different kinds, including bibles, psalters, exegetical works, histories, and cartularies. Others, such as
the sea charts of the later Middle Ages, circulated independently. Although
relatively few survive, records attest that maps were frequently displayed in
monumental form, again in a variety of contexts, including churches, halls,
refectories, royal and noble bedchambers, and with supports that included
walls, tables, and floor mosaics.
In Arabic texts, geography could be expressed as something much closer to
being an independent subject, but it was frequently presented either as matter
incidental to astrological science, or as part of knowledge essential for administration and trade, or (as it was in the Latin world too) within the context of
travel narrative. In its highest form it was considered an art, part of the practice of literary expression, the adab, as well as a science.16 Broadly speaking,
two distinct genres of geographical description can be discerned in medieval
Arabic texts. One, associated with scholars working in third/ninth-century17
Baghdad, such as al-Khwārazmī and Abū Maʿshar, and indebted to the mathematical geography of Claudius Ptolemy (second century CE), presented the
ṣurat al-arḍ, the extent of the world and peoples and places on it, as part of
their exposition of the influence of planets and stars on earthly events. The
other geographical genre was non-mathematical.18
This geography, which first
flourished in the fourth/tenth century, typically contained a mixture of itineraries, postal routes, enumerations of administrative divisions (provinces and
districts), as well as ethnographic detail, historical anecdote, and poetry. While
it could be expressed in the form of written description without graphic representation, one strand of non-mathematical geography used maps to depict
different regions as well as the entire known world. Known to historians of
cartography as the “Balkhī school” of mapmakers, the authors of this mode of
geographical representation produced perhaps the best known and certainly
longest-lasting genre of Arabic-Islamic map. Manuscripts of “Balkhī school”
geographers survive in significant number, although there are relatively few
known cases of maps being prepared for the purposes of display outside of the
book in the medieval Arabic-Islamic world.
Christian European and Arabic-Islamic scholars inherited from classical antiquity the notion of a spherical earth, divided into two hemispheres.
The known world – Asia, Europe and Africa – therefore constituted only
roughly a quarter of the globe. Many of the same questions about the earth
are evident in both traditions: these typically concern the shape of the earth,
its position with regard to celestial regions, the relationship between land and
water, and the differences in temperature experienced in different parts of
the world. The answers to these questions were often very similar, and indeed
there was demonstrable transference of texts and ideas from the ArabicIslamic tradition to the Latin one on the subject of the climes, the disposition
of land and water, and the interrelation of earthly and heavenly phenomena.20
At the same time, certain differences between the traditions are evident. The
question of the antipodes – that is, whether regions beyond the known world
supported human life – came to the Latin West with a significant classical and
late antique legacy, running from Plato and Aristotle through Cicero and his
commentator Macrobius to Augustine of Hippo and Martianus Capella. The
antipodes generated commentary, speculation, and visual representation.
Macrobius’ Commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio),
and Martianus Capella’s encyclopedic work, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury) presented the theory that the
spherical world was divided into five zones: two zones of intense cold at the
far north and south of the world; a central zone of intense heat – including
an equatorial ocean which perpetually burned up and regenerated; and two
temperate zones, one in each hemisphere.21
Macrobius and Martianus also
explained that, in addition to the equatorial sea, a band of ocean ran from
pole to pole, with the result that the earth was divided into four segments.
One of these segments contained the inhabited world (oikoumenē); the other
three – one on the underside of the northern hemisphere, and two more in the
southern – were unknown, and unknowable, to “us” due to the barriers formed
by the expanse of ocean, the intense heat of the “torrid” zone, and the intense
cold of the “frigid” zones (Fig. 0.1).
Yet the question of the antipodes, and the possibility of inaccessible regions
of the earth, seems never to have arisen in the Arabic-Islamic world. Though they differed on the precise extent of human habitation, most commentators
agreed that only the northern quarter of the globe was inhabited, that desert
prevented human settlement in the far south, and that the underside of the
earth, in both hemispheres, was covered with water. Rather than the division
of the earth into five zones, which was a standard point of reference for Latin
geographical description, Arabic texts divided the inhabited earth into seven
latitudinal bands known as al-aqālīm, the plural of iqlīm, from the Greek klima.
These aqālīm ran from, or near to, the equator (depending on the commentator) to latitudes as far north as 66 degrees (Fig. 0.2). Derived from classical
Greek sources such as Ptolemy’s Almagest and Tetrabiblos, the climes were
closely associated with astronomical theory (some texts linked each clime
to the influence of particular planets) and were broadly aligned with mathematically-based geography, though they could be described independently of
mathematical calculation.22 At the same time they functioned as a means of
organising the known world in ethnographic terms, often within a clear hierarchy. The fourth clime, which ran across the Mediterranean and included
Baghdad as well as al-Andalus, was generally regarded as optimal in terms of
temperature and therefore of civilization. A steady decline could be observed
in climes both to the south and north, where extremes of temperature resulted
in sterile territories and barbarous populations. While the division of the earth
into seven climes was not unknown in the Latin West (descriptions could be
found in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia and in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis), the popularity of the scheme certainly increased with the transmission of
Arabic astronomical materials as well as its inclusion in texts that summarised
Arabic-Islamic geographical theory, such as Petrus Alfonsi’s early twelfth-century Dialogus contra Judaeos.
The beginnings of Arabic-Islamic geography are usually located during the
caliphate of al-Maʾmūn (198–218/813–33). Al-Khwārazmī’s influential adaptation of Ptolemy’s Geographia (from a Syriac intermediary, rather than directly
from Greek) took place during al-Maʾmūn’s reign, and a large world map was
reportedly produced in Baghdad for the Abbasid caliph.23 The map did not
survive and its exact nature remains uncertain, but it is generally supposed
to represent the mathematical geographical tradition with its roots in the calculations of Ptolemy and his predecessor, Marinus of Tyre.
Although mathematical geography in the tradition of al-Khwārazmī continued to flourish in the work of al-Bīrūnī (d. c. 440/1048) and others,24 few examples of world
maps constructed on mathematical principles survive from the Arabic-Islamic world; those that do are either hybrid in nature, incorporating elements of
non-mathematical geography, or late medieval.25 Far more numerous are the
world and regional maps that illustrate descriptive geographical treatises in
the “ways and realms” tradition (dubbed by Konrad Miller the “Islam Atlas”).
These treatises have their earliest surviving expression in the Kitāb al-masālik
wa-al-mamālik (Book of Ways and of Realms) of Ibn Khurradādhbih, a third-/
ninth-century director-general in the “Post and Intelligence Department” in
Baghdad and Samarra. Ibn Khurradādhbih’s work is not illustrated with maps,
but by the fourth/tenth century works of this ilk were being furnished with a
world map and a series of regional maps to accompany the written text. The
most significant landmarks in this regard were the Kitāb al-masālik wa-almamālik of al-Iṣṭakhrī (fl. 324/936), and the Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ (Book of Geography) of Ibn Ḥawqal. The maps in these texts are thought to derive from the
lost work of the mapmaker Abū Zayd al-Balkhī (hence the possibly misleading
term “Balkhī school”).26 Whatever their original provenance, they have certain
reasonably consistent features. The world maps in manuscripts of al-Iṣṭakhrī
and Ibn Ḥawqal are usually circular, oriented to the south, with prominent representation of the Nile, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; in terms of
size and detail they place particular emphasis on North Africa and the near
east, though they include representation of India and China (Fig. 0.3).
That
emphasis is carried through in the regional maps, whose main purpose is to
represent lands ruled by Muslims, or with a significant Muslim population.
Different regional divisions can be found in different authors (and there was
evidently a lively debate among geographers about where borders should be
drawn),27 but generally within the “ways and realms” tradition the principal
regions of the Arabic-Islamic world – the Maghrib and al-Andalus; Egypt; the
Arabian peninsula; Syria; Iraq; Fars (Iran/Persia) – and the outer provinces such as Khurāsān, Khūzistān, and Kirmān, each had their own map to accompany a written description (Fig. 0.4).
Geographical genres were never rigid, and it is clear that interaction
between mathematical and descriptive geography was reasonably common.
Two telling examples of such interaction can be found in the Fatimid Book
of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes (Kitāb Gharāʾib al-funūn
wa-mulaḥ al-ʿuyūn), dated to the fifth/eleventh century, and al-Idrīsī’s mid
sixth-/twelfth-century Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Promenade for
the one eager to penetrate distant horizons). The Book of Curiosities consists
of two parts.
The first, devoted to the heavens, comprises descriptions of the
zodiac, stars and planets; the second, on the earth, comprises two world maps
(one rectangular, the other circular), a description of the climes and a remarkable array of regional maps and diagrams, including maps of the Indian Ocean,
the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, islands (Sicily, Cyprus), and rivers (the
Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, Indus, and Oxus).28 In their focus on maritime
and fluvial geography, these maps do not conform to the “ways and realms”
tradition represented by al-Iṣṭakhrī and Ibn Ḥawqal. Nor for the most part do they appear to derive from mathematical geography. However, the map of the
Nile, which marks the equator and the first three climes, and includes references to the latitude and longitude of particular places, is clearly related to a map produced by al-Khwārazmī, while the rectangular world map, although in
many ways indebted to the geography of Ibn Ḥawqal, can be understood to preserve the frame of a map constructed on mathematical principles, as marked
by its representation of a scale bar (evidently poorly understood by the map’s
copyist, and perhaps too by the original mapmaker) (Fig. 0.5).29 A similar mingling of approaches characterises al-Idrīsī’s work.
The Nuzhat al-mushtāq uses
the seven climes as the basis for its description of the world, but divides them
into ten longitudinal sections, resulting in 70 regional subdivisions. These subdivisions are not, in fact, mathematically calculated, but they represent an
expansion of the scope of the “ways and realms” tradition, particularly with
regard to northern European and Asian regions, and at least some maps seem
originally to have included co-ordinates.30 Al-Idrīsī credits both Ptolemy and
al-Khwārazmī, and Ibn Khurradādhbih and Ibn Ḥawqal as sources, indicating
his inheritance and adaptation of both mathematical and non-mathematical
strands of geography.
These examples of the Book of Curiosities and the Nuzhat
al-mushtāq indicate the vitality of spatial representation in the Arabic-Islamic world, and suggest the wide dissemination and eager criticism of the image of
the world and its regions.
The religious dimension of spatial representation in the Arabic-Islamic
world, often understated on maps, is manifest in another genre that straddles
descriptive and mathematical geography: the representation of the qibla, the
direction towards the Kaʿba in Mecca which, following a Qurʾānic injunction,
Muslims must face when they pray.31 The Kaʿba was understood in relation to
geographical space – with, for example, Yemen to its south, Egypt to its northwest, Iraq to its north-east, and India to its east – and numerous medieval texts
and diagrams were devoted to specifying the position of the qibla in different
parts of the world. Many such diagrams were schematic in form, with varying degrees of complexity and detail; they were usually centred on the Kaʿba,
with segments containing different regions arranged around it. A minority of
qibla maps used mathematical principles, such as co-ordinates of latitude and
longitude, to express the relationship between different places and the Kaʿba.32
Both mathematical and non-mathematical methods of representing the qibla
further attest the importance of geographical consciousness within Islamic
societies, here at the level of daily devotional practice.
The representation of the world in the Latin West was rooted in classical
geographical tradition. Key texts of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages
disseminated an image of the world that corresponded broadly to that of the
high Roman Empire, albeit with accretions of various kinds. Of particular
importance were Julius Solinus’ Polyhistor or Collectanea, a redaction of Pliny’s
Naturalis historia; the description of the world at the beginning of Paulus Orosius’ early fifth-century Historiae adversus paganos; and book 14 of Isidore of
Seville’s Etymologiae. None of these texts appears originally to have contained
a map, but their detailed verbal description of the known world provided a
framework for subsequent cartographic representation. The earliest surviving
world maps date from the eighth century, and suggest the strong likelihood
of the survival of classical Roman models (the only surviving Roman world
map, the “Peutinger Table”, is extant in a copy of c. 1200), but also the emergence of a Christianised world image, with a strong emphasis on the Holy
Land (Fig. 0.6).33 The use of maps in an explicitly religious text – not a feature of Islamic geography aside from the qibla map tradition – is easy to find in
the Latin West, and from an early date: maps on occasion appear in Bibles or
as a tool of exegesis, and the world map that illustrates Beatus of Liébana’s
eighth-century Commentary on the Apocalypse survives in no less than fourteen manuscripts.34
By the twelfth century, mappae mundi of considerable
size and detail are attested in monasteries and cathedrals; while none of these
maps has survived, other than in a reduced copy, they undoubtedly provided the basis for large world maps of the thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries.35
The Hereford and Ebstorf world maps, both now dated to c. 1300, show the
impressive scope that mappae mundi had achieved by this time. Such maps,
consistently oriented to the east, gave spatial meaning to Christian history by
representing events including the expulsion from the earthly paradise, the
Flood, the itinerary of the Israelites to the promised land, and the Crucifixion,
while also including secular mythology such as Jason’s quest for the golden
fleece, Daedalus’ labyrinth in Crete, or the columns of Hercules at the mouth of
the Mediterranean (Fig. 0.7).36 Particularly evident in maps such as Hereford and Ebstorf is the development of “encyclopedic” elements in Asia and Africa,
such as remarkable plants, animals and monstrous beings, virtually all derived
from late antique texts such as Solinus, but in much greater abundance than
in earlier mappae mundi. The centering of these maps on Jerusalem (not a
consistent feature within the mappa mundi tradition) appears to be another
thirteenth-century innovation.37
World maps from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show the increasing influence of sea charts, and a by no means uniform tendency to incorporate
new information about distant parts of the world.
Sea charts (usually known in
Anglophone scholarship as “portolan charts”), whose origins seem to go back
to the late twelfth century, presented a particularly detailed representation of
Mediterranean, Black Sea, and northern Atlantic coastlines (Fig. 0.8). While
they were produced, perhaps in small numbers, in the thirteenth century,
they seem to have been relatively common by the first half of the fourteenthcentury.38 Pietro Vesconte, a Venetian chartmaker, contributed a world map
and regional maps to Marino Sanudo’s 1321 crusading tract, the Liber secretorum fidelium crucis. The world map in this text reveals not only the drawing of
coast-lines with reference to sea charts, but also the clear use of Arabic-Islamic
cartography.39 The fourteenth century seems also to have seen the development of a hybrid sea-chart world map, in which pictorial and topographic elements filled interior space.
The deluxe Catalan Atlas, produced in Majorca by
the Jewish chartmaker Cresques Abraham for the King of France, provides the
most elaborate example of this kind of mappa mundi rooted in the sea chart
tradition, while also incorporating information derived from reports of the
east such as the Divisement dou monde of Marco Polo.40 Reports of the Indies,
such as those given by Marco Polo and Odoric da Pordenone were received in
a variety of ways, and they were not systematically trawled by those compiling
maps and geographies.41 However, it is possible to see a significantly changed
representation of Asia on maps such as the magnificent planisphere produced
by the Camaldolese monk, Fra Mauro, for which Marco Polo was a significant
source (Fig. 0.9).42 Fifteenth-century mappae mundi such as Fra Mauro’s continued to respond to sea charts, as well as to the information contained in
the narrative of Polo and others, but they also responded to the translation
of Ptolemy’s Geographia into Latin. This event, which took place in the first
decade of the fifteenth century, did not have the immediately transformative
effect on European mapping that has sometimes been supposed, but it is true
to say that by the end of the century, and the time of the New World discoveries, the Ptolemaic world image had become common to the point of banality
in educated circles throughout Europe (Fig. 0.10)
The rapid overview of European Christian and Arabic-Islamic mapping
that I have just given cannot do justice to the complexities of either tradition,
but it may be enough to indicate the existence of shared ground as well as
some significant differences between the two. It is worth emphasising that,
aside of any question of influence, in its basic form the world image in the
Latin West and the Arabic-Islamic world was essentially the same, comprising an outer encircling ocean, a prominent Mediterranean basin and Nile (the
presence of a western Nile, extending from the Atlas mountains, can be found
on maps from both traditions),44 a tendency to emphasise urban space, and
a lively interest in regional and provincial subdivision. That said, at the level
of detail very considerable divergences between the traditions emerge. In the
Christian tradition foundational descriptions of the earth such as the opening of Orosius’ Historiae and book fourteen of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae
defined the westernmost extent of the world as the pillars of Hercules, set at
the mouth of the Mediterranean; in the far east of Asia was India and Taprobana (Sri Lanka), though for Isidore the easternmost part of the world was
the earthly paradise.45 From north to south the known world extended from
Scythia to Ethiopia, with deserted and uncultivated lands to be found in the
far north as well as in the far south.
Broadly speaking, the same boundaries
can be found in Arabic-Islamic geography, albeit with further extension into
the bilād al-sīn (China) in the east, and of course without Christian features
such as the earthly paradise. That said, Orosius and Isidore, and the medieval
authors, compilers and translators who adapted them, provided significantly
more information about northern Europe than their Arabic-Islamic counterparts, but with nothing like, for example, the detailed accounts of Berber tribes
in north-west Africa supplied by Ibn Ḥawqal, or the detail of south-east Asia
recorded by Ibn Khurradādhbih.46
Orosius’ Historiae offers a rare example of a Latin text that was translated
into Arabic. The Kitāb Hurūshiūsh is the product of late third/ninth- or fourth/
tenth-century Andalusian intellectual exchange; one current conjecture is that
it was translated in Cordoba by two translators, one Christian and one Muslim,
perhaps with the aim of supplying the need felt in Mozarabic Spain for a universal Christian history in Arabic, but whatever the identities of the translators it was consistently associated with the Umayyad court by Arabic-Islamic
authors.47 The Kitāb Hurūshiūsh provides a relatively faithful translation of
Orosius’ geography, one which does not in general attempt to modernise the
text’s spatial reference. Yet close inspection reveals quite a number of alterations. While the dimensions and toponymy of Spain vary little from the source
– Narbona, Brigantia, Galicia, Gades, and the Pyrenees are all transliterated –
the “insulae Baleares” become “jazīra mīūrqa wa minūrqa” (island of Majorca
and Minorca).48 The Kitāb alters Orosius’ description of Spain, omitting his
description of the province of Aquitaine, and substituting “al-andalus” for the
original’s “Hispania”, just as it includes the “balad al-barbar” in north Africa.49
Furthermore, there is a significant insertion in the Kitāb Hurūshiūsh’s geography. After translating Orosius’ account of Mediterranean and Atlantic islands,
the Kitāb Hurūshiūsh adds a lengthy list of rivers culled from the Cosmographia
Julii Honorii.50
This work (of uncertain date, but certainly in circulation by the
mid sixth century CE when it was cited by Cassiodorus) purports to derive
from an imperial survey commissioned by Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, conducted by four surveyors, who were sent respectively to the east, west, north
and south.51 It records seas, islands, rivers, mountains, peoples, provinces, and
towns, and is the basis for the image of the emperor and three surveyors that
appears in the lower left margin of the Hereford map.52 The Kitāb Hurūshiūsh
includes the story of Caesar’s commission at the start of the chapter, then gives
information on the number of oceans, islands, mountains, countries and provinces, then the list of over 50 rivers. It does not constitute an “updating”, and
may very well derive from the Latin source text used by the compiler of the Kitāb Hurūshiūsh.53 But it does testify to the way in which classically-derived
geographical information circulated, to the level of authority accorded the
“imperial” survey, and to the free manner in which the text of Orosius could be
supplemented – in this case filled out with a comprehensive topographical list
not present in the original. Although the influence of the Kitāb Hurūshiūsh on
Arabic-Islamic geography appears to have been relatively limited, the book was
a source for a number of Arab geographers, including the Andalusian authors
al-Rāzī and al-Bakrī, as well as another Arabic-Islamic geographer with strong
links to al-Andalus, al-Idrīsī.54
Mozarabic Andalusia would seem to provide the context for another example of the translation of geographical material in the form of a tripartite map
found in an eighth- or ninth-century manuscript of Isidore’s Etymologiae
(Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Vitr. 14.3, fol. 116v) (Fig. 0.11).
Apart from four
inscriptions in Latin, the map is written entirely in Arabic. It is likely to be a
later addition to the manuscript, which contains many Arabic glosses to the
Latin text of the Etymologiae.55 A reasonable hypothesis is that the compiler
of the manuscript drew the outline of the map but left it blank, to be filled
by one or more later annotators.56 As is standard within the Latin tradition
the map associates the peoples of the three partes of the world with the three
sons of Noah (the “banū sām”, i.e. sons of Shem, in Asia; the “banū Jāfat”, i.e.
Japhet, in Europe; and the “banū Ḥām” in Africa). But although some of the
peoples and places it identifies are shared with Latin versions of the same map it introduces a number, particularly in Africa, that derive from Arab sources:
Sind; the Zanj; al-Habasha (Ethiopia); the Copts; “the Blacks” (“Sudān”); and
the Berbers; as well as Mecca and al-Ḥijāz in Asia, and the Khazars in Europe.
Precise details of where and how this particular map came to be adapted in
this way are not clear, but it at least testifies to the possibilities for the movement of form and the reinterpretation of content across languages and faiths within a hybrid cultural milieu, even if those possibilities were not always
taken advantage of over the course of the Middle Ages.
One final point of comparison that reveals both similarities and differences
is the representation of monstrous peoples. It is this aspect of the Latin tradition that shows with most clarity the importance of the ends of the earth as
a site for the contemplation of humanity and its limits. One strand of mappae mundi depict marvellous peoples in the far south of Africa, as well as in
northern Europe and Asia (Fig. 0.12).57 These beings all show some distortion
of human features but on these world images they were explicitly embraced
as part of God’s creation, along with other natural marvels such as mandrakes,
basilisks and bonnacons. At first glance Arabic-Islamic maps seem far more
austere in their representation of monsters and marvels. But it could be argued
that they too allude to and stage the limits of the human. The great shared
feature between the two traditions is Gog and Magog: more precisely perhaps
the shared feature is Alexander and his tutor, Aristotle. Alexander’s enclosure
of Gog and Magog marked the imminent threat of apocalypse in the Christian
tradition, since the release of Gog and Magog would occur as a prelude to the Last Judgement (an event represented at the top of the Hereford map). Within
Islam the function of Gog and Magog (Yājūj wa-Mājūj) was similar: the Qurʾān
describes their enclosure by Alexander behind a barrier to be razed by God at
the end of time.58 The origin of these creatures was disputed: on one account,
they were the product of Adam’s nocturnal emission, mixed with earth;
another claimed that Mājūj had been born of Eve’s menstrual blood.59 Elsewhere on the Arabic-Islamic map it is possible to see negotiation of the boundaries between human and non-human. The people known as the “wāqwāq”
hover between the categories of ethnography and mirabilia. The location of
the wāqwāq was never clearly defined, and shifted from author to author, but
they were generally associated with the east and the south.60 A text in the Book
of Curiosities identifies a curious tree on Wāqwāq island, bordering on Sofalah
in east Africa. The fruit of the tree has the appearance of women suspended
by their hair: “They have breasts, female sexual organs, and curvaceous bodies,
and they scream ‘wāqwāq’. When one of them is cut off the tree, it falls down
dead and does not talk any more”.61
The trees, we are told, gain in attractiveness the further one progresses into the island: the plump interior fruit talks
and screams for a day after being removed from its tree; sexual intercourse
with the fruit is said to be pleasurable for the one who cuts it down. Both world
maps in the Book of Curiosities mark the wāqwāq islands, and, prior to the circular world map, a later reader added a fine illustration of the tree (Fig. 0.13).
The Book also contains a chapter on “deformed humans”, some of which are
shared with the Latin tradition: people with faces in their chests, cannibals,
and a race with enormous ears, as well as many others unfamiliar to it, such as
the nisnās, half-people with half a head and face, one eye, an arm and a leg. The
overwhelming emphasis of this chapter is on deformation as the result of miscegenation: creatures born from the union between humans and land animals
(the bawāqīr), humans and sea animals, humans and birds of prey (resulting in
“a nation that look like Turks with long beards, fangs and claws”), and even the
offspring of Gog and Magog’s union with sea animals (aḥbūsh).62 These races
are not all located at the ends of the earth – the nisnās dwell in Yemen – but
many are noted for their extreme position: the offspring of humans and sea
animals dwell on Thule in the far north-west; the children of humans and birds of prey live in the furthest east; the Damdam, who value copper more than
gold, are found in the south-west of Africa.63 The humanity of such creatures
is not as firmly expressed as it is in the European tradition; they seem to stand on a threshold between human and animal, and – in the case of the wāqwāq –
plant, as human seed, the essence of humanity, is led astray.
The Question of Interaction
As this overview of the two traditions makes clear, there is much common
ground, as well as certain clear differences between medieval Christian European and Arabic-Islamic geographical thought. What evidence is there, then,
of exchange between them? This question is particularly pointed given the
overwhelming evidence, as previously mentioned, for exchange in other fields.
Recent studies of the enormous impact of scientific materials translated from
Arabic into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have produced a
clearer picture of the complex mixture of personal and institutional factors
behind this remarkable engagement with non-Christian cultures and traditions.64 Nevertheless, crucial questions remain unanswered, and one of them
concerns the level of interest of the translators in spatial representation contained in Arabic texts. There is no doubt that the study of medicine, mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy, and alchemy in Europe would have
been very different without the translation of knowledge from the ArabicIslamic world. But what of geography? It has been noted that, in twelfth-century Spain, translators such as Gerard of Cremona, Hermann of Carinthia, and
Robert of Chester ignored not only Arabic juridical and literary texts, but even
the more “scientific” disciplines such as music and geography.65
The attention
of the Latin translators seems to have been directed overwhelmingly towards
mathematical, astrological, astronomical and divinatory texts in the first half of the twelfth century, with religious and philosophical works receiving sustained attention from the 1140s.66 Transmission of geographical descriptions,
maps and diagrams seems to have been largely incidental, a by-product rather
than an objective of their labours.
There were of course many opportunities for the transmission of Arabic
maps and geographical texts to the Latin West between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, and arguments in favour of the influence of Arabic-Islamic
maps in Christian Europe are not new. In the middle of the nineteenth century
Joachim Lelewel structured his history of medieval geography in alternating
chapters between Latin and Arabic traditions. Lelewel included comparative
discussion in his work and argued for the influence of Islamic maps on certain Latin mappae mundi.67 Perhaps the most forceful articulation of influence
in the first half of the twentieth century came from Konrad Miller’s Mappae
Arabicae, a work self-published by the author between 1926 and 1931. Miller
confidently, perhaps provocatively, asserted the significance of Arabic-Islamic
maps for the history of European cartography.68 Miller hailed the Arabs as the
world leaders of geography and cartography from the ninth to the thirteenth
centuries, and like Lelewel posited the influence of Arabic-Islamic maps on
European Christian maps such as the Vesconte-Sanudo world map in the Liber
secretorum fidelium crucis, as well as the Catalan Atlas.69 His compilation, photographic reproduction and transcriptions – however error-strewn – of Arabic
maps remain impressive achievements.
It is in fact a striking feature of the history of cartography in its manifestations prior to World War II that some of its most important publications
sought a cross-cultural approach to the field – an approach that in some ways
became harder to sustain during the subject’s post-war professionalization.
Between 1930 and 1935, the Egyptian prince, Youssouf Kamal, published under
the title “Époque arabe” five fascicules of his five-volume Monumenta Cartographica Africae et Aegypti, chronologically organised, comprising a mixture of Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin geographical works from
time of the Arab conquests to the end of the thirteenth century. A further four
fascicules comprising Volume Four, “Époque des Portulans suivie par l’époque
des découvertes” (1936–39), took the story into the fifteenth century, concentrating increasingly on Latin texts, although with still a significant amount of
Arabic material.70 By the time of works such as Leo Bagrow and R.A. Skelton’s
History of Cartography, however, only a slim chapter was devoted to Islamic
maps, while the 1964 census of mappae mundi published as Monumenta Cartographica Vetustioris Aevi ignored Islamic material completely.71 The University
of Chicago Press’ monumental, and in certain ways radical, History of Cartography series went some distance to redressing the side-lining of Arabic-Islamic
material, but by now the Latin and Arabic traditions were regarded separately,
with no serious attempt to compare them. The bulk of volume one (1987) of
the series was devoted to medieval European cartography, while a large portion of volume two (1992) provided a survey of medieval Islamic mapmaking.
There were good reasons, both practical and intellectual, for the separation of
Islamic and European cartography within the Chicago series, and the fact that
both volumes remain important touchstones for those working on maps in
these two traditions indicates their success. However, the question we should
now ask, after more than a quarter of a century, is whether it remains intellectually valid to continue to separate Islamic from Christian European, Arabic
from Latin, when we consider the history of cartography. The answer could
well be “yes”. Careful consideration might lead to the conclusion that – except
in perhaps a handful of cases – Christian European and Islamic maps of the
Middle Ages should be investigated separately, as essentially independent traditions. Yet it also seems true that a failure to compare is likely to lead to false
generalisations about “medieval” spatial representation, and that – more positively – much can be learned by reflecting on shared elements and difference
within the two traditions.
Since Miller, various links and translations between Islamic and Christian geography have been posited. At one extreme are the arguments of Fuat
Sezgin, who has made the case for extensive levels of Arabic-Islamic influence
in the Latin West.72 Sezgin believes that the world map produced for the caliph
al-Maʾmūn in the third/ninth century made significant revisions and improvements to Ptolemy’s world map, particularly the reduction by ten degrees of
the longitudinal axis of the Mediterranean between Tangiers and Antioch,
and that these revisions are visible on a number of western maps, including
a map attributed to Brunetto Latini, another described by Roger Bacon, and
the Vesconte-Sanudo world map.73 In his view, an updated version of the map
made for al-Maʾmūn must have circulated in western Europe, along with the
circular world map of al-Idrīsī. In addition, Sezgin argues for the Arab origins
of the sea chart, citing as proof the “Maghrib chart”, a map with toponyms in
Arabic that has received a variety of dates ranging from the thirteenth to the
sixteenth century (Fig. 0.14).74
According to this view, any properly scientific
advances in European mapmaking during the Middle Ages (such as improved
levels of accuracy – always judged, of course, by a modern standard) should
be attributed to the more sophisticated scientific culture of the Arabic-Islamic
world. Sezgin’s use of evidence has been critiqued elsewhere;75 here it is necessary only to note two broad problems with the case he makes. In the first place,
there is something curiously self-defeating about arguments that assume the
inherent superiority of modern Western science but strive to displace Eurocentrism by asserting the origins of scientific advance in the Arabic-Islamic
world. The upshot is simply to reinforce old paradigms of cultural primacy,
perhaps seen most spectacularly in Sezgin’s claim that Columbus’ discovery of
the New World was achieved on the back of the achievements of Arab cartographers and navigators who had reached the American continent and started
to survey it by the beginning of the fifteenth century.76 Secondly, the effect of
concentrating only on narrowly-defined scientific achievements is to flatten
the account of Arabic-Islamic maps themselves, while denigrating the value
of their Latin contemporaries. Sezgin has, in the end, very little to say about al-Idrīsī, the many Kutub al-masālik wa-al-mamālik, or non-mathematical
geography generally, except insofar as this material can be brought to bear on
his claims for the technical sophistication and influence of al-Maʾmūn’s map.
Aside from its particular claims for influence, the core narrative that underlies Sezgin’s thesis is a familiar one that continues to be reproduced. This is
that the Islamic world reached its cultural apogee between the third/ninth and
sixth/twelfth centuries, before experiencing a plateau. By contrast, so the narrative goes, during the same period Latin Europe was initially a backward region,
but gradually assumed a leading position in cultural, economic and political terms (due in large or small part, depending on the commentator, to the
transfer of knowledge from Arabic-Islamic sources).77 Maps can be deployed
in illustrative support of this narrative. Inaccurate medieval European mappae
mundi are compared unfavourably with “more realistic” Arabic-Islamic models, which unfortunately endured “stagnation” after the sixth/twelfth century, and
were eventually overtaken by the rapid advances in European maps, led by the
sea chart tradition, with its accurate, proto-modern depiction of coastlines.78
Again, this approach to maps, and to cultural achievement more generally, sees
value only in realism and accuracy as defined by post-Enlightenment standards, disregarding or at best downplaying any literary, historiographical, spiritual, political or intellectual function of spatial representation, and refusing
to consider texts in their own terms and in the terms of the cultures that produced them. The effects of such an approach to the history of cartography are
reductive and deadening; when applied to entire civilizations the result tends
towards crass caricature.
One alternative to grand narratives of epochal change is to explore instances
of transmission in detail, without a-priori value judgements, and without the
need to assert the superiority of one culture over another. To date, steps have
been taken along this path by a relatively small, if growing, body of scholarship devoted to the interrelations between European and Islamic cartography, while a limited number of studies have pursued comparisons between other
cartographic cultures.80 But a compelling thesis to describe and explain interaction has not emerged. Indeed, contrary to a model of extensive transfer,
considerable scepticism has been articulated about the extent of the links
between Latin and Arabic geographical thought. Patrick Gautier Dalché has
set out a picture, for the twelfth century at least, of limited diffusion of ArabicIslamic geography within Europe.81 The impact of Arabic-Islamic astronomical
geography on the Latin West from the twelfth century is undisputed: the calculation of latitude and longitude, the division of the northern hemisphere into
climes rather than zones, awareness in distilled form of Ptolemy’s Geographia
(long before its complete translation into Latin) – all seem to derive from contact with Arabic texts.82
In turn, this new information encouraged some thinkers to examine certain tenets of Latin geographical thought, such as the theory
of an uninhabitable torrid zone at the equator – a theory incompatible with
the system of the climes.83
Beyond the theoretical model represented by the climes, however, it is
much harder to find conclusive evidence of the assimilation of Arabic-Islamic
regional and world description to European maps. At the level of descriptive
geography, Gautier Dalché argues that there was surprisingly little exchange:
that Arabic-Islamic influence on the mappa mundi tradition (at least in the
twelfth century) was negligible, and that in the case of sea charts, the direction
of travel was emphatically from Latin West to the Arabic-Islamic world.84
It is
certainly possible to cite evidence of European mapmakers making use of Arabic sources, whether in the form of written texts or orally transmitted information. It is also true that the case of al-Idrīsī stands as a remarkable example of
the elaboration of Arabic-Islamic geography by a Muslim author in the service of a Christian prince. However, the evidence of Christian European use of Arabic sources becomes far stronger from the fourteenth century, while, however justly celebrated, al-Idrīsī’s Nuzhat al-mushtāq remains unprecedented,
and apparently of little influence within the Latin West.
The case of sea (or portolan) charts has attracted particularly polarised
views. Among a small number of surviving pre-1500 sea charts written in Arabic, most attention has been given to the “Maghrib chart” (Fig. 0.14), so called
because it appears to emphasise the western Mediterranean. In his seminal
essay on portolan charts, Tony Campbell dismissed the possibility raised in
earlier scholarship that this map could represent the oldest surviving chart,
seeing it instead as an early fourteenth-century copy of another map.85 As
previously mentioned, Fuat Sezgin saw the map quite differently, arguing
that it attested an Arabic-Islamic tradition of sea charts that pre-dated and
originated the Latin tradition.86 Subsequent work on sea charts has strongly
questioned this view, redating the “Maghrib chart” to the fifteenth century, and
reaffirming Campbell’s assessment of its derivative nature.87
Away from the
debate about this particular map, other scholars considering the possibility of
Arabic-Islamic origins for sea charts have pointed not only to the absence of
any reference to such maps in Arabic sources prior to the fourteenth century,
but also to the evidence of different traditions of maritime mapping, whether
oral, in the form of lists and ledgers, or diagrammatic, as found in the Book
of Curiosities.88 Were sea charts available to Arab authors in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, they would have used, cited, and reproduced them, and they
do not. It is in western sources, from the thirteenth century onwards, that evidence in the form of references, reproduction and adaptation, first appears. Yet
while the case for Arabic-Islamic origins can be dismissed, sea charts should be
viewed more productively as sites for cultural exchange, whether through the
introduction of contemporary Arabic place names into a Christian European
repertoire, or through the documented work of Jewish intermediaries, such
as the Cresques families, on the island of Majorca where there was significant
interchange of information within a diverse mercantile community.89 Moving beyond polarising questions of origins and cultural patrimony can thus have
the positive effect of revealing shared knowledge and a plurality of cultures
interacting within the same space.
Gautier Dalché’s critical assessment of claims for the extensive influence of
Arabic-Islamic maps on European cartography demands that we interrogate
the terms in which we conduct research. Is “exchange” an appropriate description of the movement of spatial representation “between Christian Europe and
the Arabic-Islamic world”?
If so, was this exchange two-way? “Influence” is an
attractive term but, as Gautier Dalché points out, also a tricky concept – easy to
assert, difficult to prove. No doubt other terms are possible, and perhaps preferable. A study of the question of intellectual relations between Europe and
Islam in the Middle Ages advocates “crosspollination” over “influence” because
crosspollination better captures the unpredictable and often undirected
nature of contacts between cultures.90 And of course languages other than
English offer suggestive alternatives: Begegnung; diffusione; carrefour; Belting’s
Blickwechesel (an exchange of glances but also a shift of focus).91 At the same
time, Gautier Dalché’s study provocatively raises the opposite possibility: that
of a lack of influence. That is, it is possible that cartographic relations between
Christian Europe and Islam may be characterised by difference and divergence
rather than exchange and sharing. This – one must emphasise – need not be a
disappointing conclusion. If what we find is difference, then the explanations
for difference are likely to be productive. But whether exchange, influence, or
divergence – or other terms – are found to be most appropriate, it is at least
clear that the context and the evidence should determine the terminology, and
not the other way around.
The essays in this volume should be understood as the necessary first steps
in opening out a field for further study.
They cannot hope to be definitive or
conclusive statements on their topics, since so little comparativist work on map
history has been done. Nor do they pretend to provide comprehensive coverage of medieval Christian and Islamic cartographic traditions. Certain genres of maps, particularly perhaps local maps and sea charts, will be under-represented in the following pages. However, the aim of the book as a whole is to
consider different types of map – including celestial maps, maps of the climes,
and world and regional maps – while at the same time broadening the frame
of reference in which such texts are viewed. The crucial questions of transmission of knowledge and interaction between Arabic-Islamic and European
Christian cartographic traditions are addressed throughout the volume, both
through detailed case studies and through synthetic overviews. Some chapters
focus critically on particular instances where transference of knowledge has
been claimed.
Elly Dekker examines the case of a pair of celestial hemispheres
found in a fourteenth-century compendium of Hebrew astrological and astronomical treatises written in Spain. She argues that these hemispheres must
ultimately derive from a fourth-/tenth-century Arabic globe using iconography
derived from the work of the Persian astronomer al-Ṣūfī (292–376/ 903–86),
and that this globe was copied as a pair of hemispheres by Jewish scholars in
Spain. On the other hand, while not doubting the enormous influence of Arabic astronomy on the Latin West, she finds little evidence to support the notion
that this pair of hemispheres had any influence on Latin map or globe making,
and questions the thesis that an Arabic “missing link” is needed to explain the
appearance of pairs of celestial hemispheres in Europe in the fifteenth century.
Chapter One considers another aspect of astronomical tradition, the theory
of the division of the earth into seven climes. Here too there is clear evidence
for the influence of Arabic texts describing the climes on Latin tradition, in
which it is possible to see adaptations and elaborations of the system in the
later Middle Ages. This chapter goes on to consider another act of undisputed
transmission: the only known instance of the wholesale translation of a world
map from Arabic to Latin. Even in this case, though, the nature of the transmission is problematic. The map that was translated was originally part of a now
lost Arabic treatise on the elements whose twelfth-century Latin translation is
entitled De causis proprietatum elementorum; although the Latin text survives
in over 100 manuscripts, just two of these contain the map, which was clearly
poorly understood and seems to have had relatively little impact, unlike the
content of the treatise, which entered into mainstream debates about the relationship between the four elements.
Two chapters consider in more depth the impact of Arabic-Islamic sources
on Latin mappae mundi. Stefan Schröder examines the often-cited case of the
influence of al-Idrīsī’s world map on the world map of Vesconte-Sanudo in the
Liber secretorum fidelium crucis. His careful study confirms that, indeed, the
Latin map must have used an Arabic source, since the presence of toponyms clearly derived from Arabic can have no other plausible explanation. By the
same token, Schröder shows the relatively limited use of this source, confined
to a handful of toponyms and the representation of the Mountains of the
Moon in southern Africa, and the Caspian Sea. Its deployment by VesconteSanudo needs to be understood in the context of Sanudo’s crusading project,
in which elements derived from the Arabic-Islamic tradition were included
not because of their greater accuracy, but because they helped to draw attention to areas of strategic and cultural interest to Sanudo and his audience. In a
similar vein, Emmanuelle Vagnon investigates the question of the influence of
Islamic texts and images on the Catalan Atlas.
The production of the atlas by
a Jewish cartographer on the island of Majorca for the French king lends itself
to the supposition of cultural transfer. Vagnon affirms that the sources of the
atlas can in many instances be considered “pluricultural”. Here the emphasis is
on the shared nature of certain traditions, and the circulation of information
across cultural, religious and linguistic borders, particularly in mercantile and
maritime centres. While arguments can be made for the transmission of particular elements of text and iconography on the map from the Arabic-Islamic
world, the ultimate sources of such elements cannot always be determined
and may not be exclusive to any single Mediterranean culture.
This case study
offers, then, another way of thinking about cultural contact and interaction
that may be more flexible than debates about influence and borrowing.
The two remaining chapters in the volume consider the two texts that,
more than any other, are at the heart of the question of interaction between
Arabic-Islamic and European Christian geographical thought: Ptolemy’s Geography and al-Idrīsī’s Nuzhat al-mushtāq. Jean-Charles Ducène provides a lucid
account of the transmission of the Geographia to the Arabic-Islamic world.
This is an important question for several reasons. In the first place, the translation and adaptation of the Geographia into Arabic was itself a significant act
of inter-cultural transmission, with lasting consequences on Arabic-Islamic
geography. Secondly, it elucidates one of the key differences between medieval
Arabic and Latin geography: the tangible presence of Ptolemy’s Geography in
one, against its presence only in a very diffused form in the other.
Thirdly, the
tendency to assume a Ptolemaic foundation for the Arabic-Islamic mathematical tradition makes it all the more crucial to establish what exactly authors of
Arabic maps and other geographical texts meant when they referred to “Btolomayus” as one of their authorities. One such author was al-Idrīsī; no book
on cultural interaction between the Arabic-Islamic world and Latin Christendom in the field of geography would be complete without consideration of his
Nuzhat al-mushtāq. After taking stock of recent research and argument about
the history of al-Idrīsī himself and his role at the Norman court in Palermo, Chapter Four examines the Nuzhat al-mushtāq from the point of view of its
sources and its attitude to Christian and Muslim realms on either side of the
Mediterranean. The chapter makes the argument that the Nuzhat al-mushtāq
should be considered primarily an expression of Arabic-Islamic geography,
rather than itself a point of meeting between Latin and Arabic traditions, and
that it may have been intended to serve the interests of Roger II of Sicily more
than has commonly been allowed.
Two overriding objectives direct the essays in this volume. The first is to
encourage scholars who specialise in Latin and other Christian European maps
to look carefully at, and learn more about, Arabic-Islamic maps – and viceversa.
The second is to introduce to a wider audience the question of the interrelation and divergence of medieval Christian European and Arabic-Islamic
maps. So far, maps and the representation of space have rarely been part of the
ongoing conversations, alluded to at the beginning of this introduction, about
interaction between the Arabic-Islamic world and the Latin West during the
Middle Ages. It is hoped that this volume will enable spatial representation to
enter the discussion. At the very least, it seems certain that we have much to
learn from an approach that brings together apparently separate cartographic
traditions – their contexts, their functions, their visual and verbal languages,
their makers and users – to think about what their shared features, their similarities and differences, reveal.
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