Cartography

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Cartography

Personal View of the World. Mapmaking and the perception of the world it demonstrates has two distinct aspects in the Middle Ages. The first was theoretical; it constructs an image of the world in keeping with Greco-Roman and Christian authorities and reflects a spiritual perspective on Earth’s place in the universe. The second aspect was practical and applicable geographical knowledge that was rarely expressed in permanent maps. The world of medieval Europeans of all social classes was limited to the boundaries of their personal experience. Their grasp of geography was strongly influenced by the people who farmed and the lords who held legal rights to plots of land. In a bill of sale the borders of a property were commonly described by listing the names of the people who held the lands on the borders; if a person reading the document did not know those people or the extent of their lands, it would be almost impossible to draw a picture of the property. This personal knowledge extended into the ways lords, traders, or any other traveler planned his or her movements. These figures relied on local guides at each stage of their journey, as well as information brought to them by others who had previously traveled the route. Changes in this personal knowledge could, however, have the same emotional force that changes in national boundaries have in the modern era. During the 1180s Kings Henry II of England and Philip II Augustus of France frequently fought. The most famous site for negotiating their treaties was under the “elm of Gisors,” a large elm tree that according to legend stood on the border between their territories. When the tree was cut down in 1188, it was seen by both sides as a symbol of the impossibility of the two monarchs agreeing.

Geographical Knowledge. If a villager or craftsman was asked to describe the geography where he lived, he would most likely focus on a territory’s productive capacity: how the slope of land helped or hindered water retention, how readily wood was available on neighboring hillsides, or how to transport most easily goods to neighboring villages. Knights and nobles might emphasize the defensive attributes of geographical features: vantage points, difficult access, or ready water. When asked to describe the geography of France, Germany, or Italy as a whole, most would probably first need those terms defined. When they thought of a territory, they thought of the lands controlled by their respective overlord or of some province that was only slightly larger: Brittany, Picardy, Artois, Burgundy—all parts of modern France. In describing distant lands, medieval Europeans, scholars and laymen alike, often relied on a mixture of folklore and hearsay interpreted according to a framework that was generally Christian. Scholars, sailors, and others with education or a practical training in geography did, however, know that the world was round, and they had known this fact since before the birth of Christ. Medieval travelers were not afraid of falling off the end of the Earth; they were afraid of getting lost in the vast sea that they believed encircled the globe.

T-0 Maps. Although medieval maps are rare, maps do exist that depict this vast, world-encircling ocean.

T-0 maps, also known as mappae mundi or mappamundi (world maps), appeared in Europe during the eighth century. Building on classical knowledge and scholarship, these documents reflected both an awareness of real geographic features and a desire to set them into a Christian, universal framework. One of the most famous and earliest T-O maps is found in Isidore of Seville’s De natura rerum from the late sixth century to the early seventh century, and it has the basic characteristics of later, more-elaborate versions. In it the world is depicted as a perfect circle with a great ocean around the edges. Two great rivers form the T, one running lengthwise across the globe and the other going down from the middle of the first river to the global ocean on the bottom of the Earth. This pattern divides the land into three continents. The top continent, which covers the top half of the globe, is Asia, and the two smaller continents in the bottom half of the globe are Europe and Africa. Later T-O maps would elaborate considerably on this basic scheme. Frequently Jerusalem would be placed in the center of the Earth; other biblical sites such as the Garden of Eden and Gog and Magog would be situated on the Asian continent; and smaller rivers or principalities would be added depending on the intended audience. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when much more detailed maps of the world were being produced, it was often difficult to find the basic T-O framework of the map. World maps such as those from Ebstorf (1234), by Henry of Mainz (circa 1110), and at Hereford Cathedral (circa 1250) were artworks as much as maps. Angels and mythological creatures decorated the borders, legendary buildings and animals denoted geographic locations, and no attempt was made to produce the map according to scale.

Mapping and God. When medieval scholars prepared maps of the world, they thought in holistic terms. In other words, heaven and earth formed a whole; earth and, by inference, human beings could not be separated from the divine geography and the divine plan of which all beings were a part. This logic underlay the inclusion of Asia, Africa, and Europe on the earliest such maps; the division reflected the dispersal of Noah’s sons after the Flood. Following logic derived from Greek philosophy, the world was believed to be and sometimes was drawn as a perfect circle. According to medieval theology, as an embodiment of God’s power, the Earth is by definition perfect without beginning and without end, just as a circle has no beginning and ending. The T in a T-O map symbolized the cross on which Christ was crucified. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, maps were increasingly drawn with Jerusalem in the center, thus signifying that the site of Christ’s passion, the Holy City, was the spiritual and real center of the world. Produced by monks and churchmen at medieval schools, medieval maps were a vision of how the world should be spiritually rather than how the world was geographically.

Portolan and Other Charts. Although almost all surviving medieval maps emphasized this spiritual depiction of the world, there are examples of other mapmaking traditions, at least during the later Middle Ages. Perhaps not surprisingly they were developed by sailors. Portolan charts were line drawings put into notebooks that captains and navigators would carry with them of the features a sailor could see as he sailed past land. They marked harbors, reefs, sandbars, fresh water, villages, and sometimes stands of wood—all of which were essential knowledge for a medieval sailor. Measuring distance was always a problem, however, given that medieval ways of keeping time were quite imprecise and medieval units of measurement varied greatly depending on the region. For example, time was often measured by how long it took to say a standard prayer such as the Our Father, and measurement was often done based on how long someone could walk in one day or how much land one team could plow in one day, neither of which were particularly effective on a body of water. In the late thirteenth century European sailors adopted the magnetic compass which helped determine direction and curvature in the coastline, but it still did not solve the distance problem. Only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would knowledge be recovered and techniques developed that minimized this problem.