GEOGRAPHICAL LORE OF THE
TIME OF THE CRUSADES
AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
RESEARCH SERIES NO. 15
W. L. G. JOERG, _Editor_
THE GEOGRAPHICAL LORE OF THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES
A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western
Europe
BY
JOHN KIRTLAND WRIGHT, Ph.D.
Librarian, American Geographical Society
[Illustration: AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK · 1854 ·]
AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
BROADWAY AT 156TH STREET
NEW YORK
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925
BY
THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK
RUMFORD PRESS
CONCORD, N. H.
TO
K. M. W.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE xix
INTRODUCTION 1
The Time of the Crusades 1
Scope of the Term “Geographical Lore” 1
Origins of the Geographical Lore of the Time of the
Crusades 3
Organization of the Present Work 4
PART I
_Origins, Sources, and Place in the Classification of
Knowledge of the Geographical Lore of the Time of the
Crusades_
I THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ANCIENT WORLD 9
Sources 9
The Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle 9
Roman Influence on Geography 10
Ptolemy 10
Latin Writers: Pliny, Solinus, Capella, Macrobius 11
The History of the Universe 12
Ancient Cosmogony 12
Celestial Influences 12
Cosmic Cycles: The Great Years 13
Geographic Application of the Theory of the Great Years 14
Duration of the Great Years 14
Shape, Movements, and Size of the Earth 15
Sphericity of the Earth 15
Immobility of the Earth 15
Circumference of the Earth 16
The Distribution of Habitable Regions; Zones; the
Distribution of Land and Water 17
Zones 17
Crates’ Theory of Four Land Masses 18
Extent of the “Oikoumene” 19
Physical Geography 19
Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny 19
The Four Elements 20
Meteorology 21
Winds 22
Climatology 23
The Water Element 24
The Sea: Its Salinity, Depth, Currents, and Tides 25
Subterranean Channels 27
Rivers of the Underworld 28
Origin of Rivers 29
The Nile Flood 30
The Lands 31
Earthquakes and Volcanoes 31
Height of Mountains 32
Mathematical Geography and Cartography 33
Mathematical Geography Largely Based on Itineraries 33
Astronomical Determination of Latitude 34
Astronomical Determination of Longitude 34
Cartography 35
The Expansion of Regional Knowledge 36
Expansion of Greek Regional Knowledge 37
Geography at Alexandria 38
Hellenistic Regional Knowledge 39
Regional Knowledge of Mela and Pliny 40
The “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea” 40
Limits of Ancient Regional Knowledge on the South and
East 41
II THE CONTRIBUTION OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM BEFORE 1100 A. D. 43
Introduction 43
Scriptural Influence on Early Medieval Geography 43
Ignorance of the Best Work of Antiquity 43
Scientific Stagnation During the Early Middle Ages 44
Sources 45
The Bible 45
Writings of the Church Fathers 46
Interpretation of the Bible 46
Classical Influences 47
Encyclopedic Compilations 47
Miscellaneous Geographical Writings 48
Legends 49
Books of Travel and Description 50
The History of the Universe 51
Christianity Opposed to Belief in an Eternal Universe 51
The Creation 52
Shape and Size of the Earth 53
Early Christian Belief in a Flat Earth 53
Early Christian Belief in a Spherical Earth 54
Size of the Earth 54
Zones and the Antipodes 55
Zones 55
The Antipodes 55
Physical Geography 57
Meteorology 57
The Waters Above the Firmament 58
The Congregation of the Waters 59
The Nile Flood 60
The Earth Upon the Waters 61
The Sea 61
The Lands 62
The Medieval Attitude Towards Landscape and Scenery Before
1100 A. D. 63
Esthetic Appreciation of Nature in Antiquity 63
Early Christian Attitude Towards Nature 64
Revival of Esthetic Feeling in the Middle Ages 64
Mathematical Geography and Cartography 65
Mathematical Geography 65
Maps 65
Macrobian Maps 66
T-O Maps 66
Sallust Maps 68
Beatus Maps 68
Regional Geography 70
Limited Geographical Horizon in the Early Middle Ages 70
Medieval Conception of the Known World 71
Paradise 71
Rivers of Paradise 72
Asia 72
Gog and Magog 72
Romance of Alexander the Great 73
St. Thomas in India 74
Africa 74
Europe 74
Explorations to the North 75
The Atlantic 75
America Reached by the Norsemen 76
III THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MOSLEMS 77
Sources 77
Influence of Aristotle 77
Influence of Ptolemy’s “Almagest” 78
Influence of Ptolemy’s “Geography” 78
Az-Zarqalī and the “Toledo Tables” 79
Geography in Sicily 79
Edrisi 80
Influence of Sicilo-Moslem Geography 81
Oriental Ideas Transmitted to the West 82
Astronomical Geography; Theories of the Tides 82
The Great Years 82
Cosmic Cycles and Geographical Changes 83
Theories of the Tides 84
Measurement of a Terrestrial Degree 85
Geographical Positions 85
Arin 86
Arabic Exploration and Travel 87
IV THE SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD 1100–1250 A. D. 88
Introduction 88
Theological and Philosophical Works 89
Theological Works 89
Peter Abelard 89
Hugh of St. Victor 90
Hildegard of Bingen 90
Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor 91
The School of Chartres: Its Intellectual Independence 91
Bernard and Theodoric of Chartres 91
Adelard of Bath; Hermann the Dalmatian; Robert of
Retines 92
Bernard Sylvester 93
William of Conches 93
Alexander Neckam 93
Translations from the Arabic; Works Written under Arabic
Influence; Aristotelianism and Its Opponents 95
Adelard of Bath; Peter Alphonsi 95
John of Seville; Plato of Tivoli 96
“Marseilles Tables” and “Toledo Tables” 96
Robert of Retines; Hermann the Dalmatian; Daniel of
Morley 97
Gerard of Cremona; John of Holywood (Sacrobosco) 97
Aristotelianism Introduced Through Arabic Works 98
Gerard of Cremona 99
Michael Scot 99
Aristotelianism in the Thirteenth Century 100
Opponents of Aristotelianism 101
William of Auvergne 101
Robert Grosseteste 101
Encyclopedic Works 102
“De Imagine Mundi” 103
Lambert’s “Liber Floridus”; Guido’s Encyclopedia 103
“Lucidarius” 104
Gervase of Tilbury 104
Jacques de Vitry 105
“L’Image du Monde” 105
“Konungs-Skuggsjá” 105
Great Encyclopedias of the Thirteenth Century 106
Dante 106
Histories, Chronicles, Sagas, Epic Poems 107
Otto of Freising 107
Gunther of Pairis 108
Walter of Châtillon; William the Breton 108
Historians and Histories of the Crusades 109
Scandinavian Historical Works 110
Latin Histories of the North 111
Legends 113
Romance of Alexander 113
Prester John 114
St. Brandan 115
Pilgrim Narratives; Miscellaneous Records of Travel 115
Christian Pilgrim Narratives 115
Letters of Travel 116
Jewish Travelers 117
Benjamin of Tudela 117
Petachia of Ratisbon 118
Topographical Works 118
Godfrey of Viterbo 119
Gervase of Canterbury 119
Giraldus Cambrensis 119
Maps 121
Zone Maps 121
T-O and Sallust Maps 121
Beatus Maps 122
Maps of Lambert, Guido, Henry of Mayence, and Others 124
Regional Maps 125
Matthew Paris’ Maps of Britain 126
V THE PLACE OF GEOGRAPHY IN THE MEDIEVAL CLASSIFICATION OF
KNOWLEDGE 127
Geography Included Under Geometry 127
Geography Included Under Astrology 128
Geography and the Aristotelian Division of Learning 129
PART II
_The Substance and Character of the Geographical Lore of the
Time of the Crusades_
VI COSMOGONY, COSMOLOGY, AND COSMOGRAPHY 133
General Character of the Cosmology and Natural Science of
the Period 134
The Chartres Group: Bernard Sylvester and Theodoric 134
Adelard of Bath and William of Conches 135
Concept of Natural Laws 136
The Orthodox Tendency 137
Effects of Influx of Arabic Science 138
The Creation 138
Problems 139
The Preëxistence of Matter 139
The Orthodox View 139
A Rational View 141
Processes of the Creation 141
Theodoric of Chartres’ Theory 141
William of Conches’ Theory 142
Function of Light in the Creation 143
The Nature of the Six Days 144
Eternity of the Universe 145
Bernard Sylvester’s Account of the Creation 145
The Icelandic Account 146
Macrocosm and Microcosm 147
Shape, Movements, and Size of the Earth 150
Sphericity of the Universe 150
Shape of the Earth 152
Immobility of the Earth 153
Size of the Earth 155
Zones, the Antipodes, and “Climata” 156
Zones 156
Uninhabitability of Polar Caps and Equatorial Zone 157
Austral Continent and Antipodal Regions 157
The Cratesian Theory 158
Persistence of Belief That Antipodal Regions Were
Inhabited 159
Manegold’s Arguments Against This Doctrine 161
Habitability of the Equatorial Region 162
Grosseteste on the Habitable Parts of the Earth 163
The Equatorial Zone 163
The Southern Hemisphere 164
The Polar Regions 165
VII THE ATMOSPHERE 166
Meteorology 166
Composition of the Atmosphere 166
Temperature 167
Upper Levels of the Atmosphere 167
Clouds 168
Precipitation 169
Floods; The Deluge 170
Winds 171
Atmospheric Circulation 172
Names of the Winds 173
Qualities of the Winds 174
Local Winds 175
Climatology 175
Hot and Cold Climates 176
Distribution of Climates 177
Climatic Differences Between East and West 177
Topographic Influences Upon Climate 177
The Sea 177
Mountains 178
Influence of Climate on Man 180
Climate of Rome 180
VIII THE WATERS 182
The Waters Above the Firmament 182
Rationalistic Beliefs 182
Literal Beliefs 183
Purpose of the Waters 184
The Congregation of Waters 184
Connection Between Seas and Rivers 185
The Earth Established on the Waters 186
The Oceans and Seas 187
Relative Areas of Land and Sea 187
Explanation of Uniform Level of Sea Surface 188
Salinity of the Sea 189
Tides 190
Lunar Causation 190
Terrestrial Causation 192
Giraldus Cambrensis’ Tidal Studies 194
Other Marine Phenomena Noted by Giraldus 196
St. Brandan and the Spirit of the Sea 197
Bottom of the Sea 198
The Waters of the Lands 199
Ground Water 199
The Sea As the Source of the Waters of the Land 200
Effect of Land on Waters Which Spring From It 202
Miraculous Wells and Springs; Geysers 203
The Fountain of Youth 204
Rivers 205
The Nile Flood 206
Lakes 207
IX THE LANDS 210
Classification of Land Areas 210
Quantitative and Qualitative Subdivisions 210
Giraldus Cambrensis’ Comparison of East and West 211
Mountains 212
Origin of Mountains 213
Their Size and Height 214
Miraculous Mountains 214
Accurate Observation of Orographic Phenomena 215
Appreciation of the Beauty of Mountains 215
Religious Attitude Towards Mountains 216
Normal Medieval Feeling About Mountains 217
Glaciers 219
Volcanoes and Earthquakes 220
Visits to Volcanoes 220
Volcanic Region of Southern Italy and Sicily 220
Michael Scot on the Eolian Isles and Etna 222
Volcanoes of Iceland 222
St. Brandan’s Visits to Volcanic Isles 224
Volcanoes As Gates of Hell 225
Causes of Vulcanism 225
Earthquakes 227
Deserts 228
Islands 229
Origins 229
Miraculous Islands 229
Islands of St. Brandan 230
Influences of Geographical Environment 231
On Plant and Animal Life 231
On Man 232
Topography As a Natural Defense 233
Theory of the Westward Flow of Civilization 233
Feeling for Landscape and Scenery 235
Spiritual Feeling for Nature 235
Esthetic Love of Nature 237
Practical Interest in Countrysides 238
Giraldus Cambrensis’ Eye for Local Topography 240
X THE ASTRONOMICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE KNOWN WORLD 241
Phenomena Resulting From Differences in Latitude 241
“Climata” 242
Geographical Coördinates 243
Methods of Finding Latitude and Longitude 244
XI CARTOGRAPHY 247
Inaccuracy 247
Accuracy Not Deemed Necessary 248
Exaggeration 249
Distortion 249
Technique 250
Conventions 251
Symbols and Legends 252
Summary 254
XII REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY 255
General Character of Regional Knowledge of the Period 255
Geography of Tradition and Geography of Observation 255
Gradations of Accuracy of Knowledge 256
The “Oikoumene” As a Whole 257
The “Oikoumene” Divided into Three Parts 258
The Center of the “Oikoumene” 259
Jerusalem As the Center 259
The Exact Position of the Earth’s Center 260
The Terrestrial Paradise 261
Paradise in the East 261
Journeys to Paradise 263
The Rivers of Paradise 264
Asia 265
The Opening of Asia in the Thirteenth Century 266
The Mongol Conquests 266
Thirteenth-Century Journeys 269
The Great Mountain System of Asia 270
The Land of the “Seres” 271
China 271
India 272
Subdivisions 272
Facts Known About India 273
Marvels of India 274
Legend of St. Thomas in India 275
Visit of Patriarch John of India to Rome 278
Indian Ocean 279
Islands of the Indian Ocean 280
Al-Battānī on the Indian Ocean 280
Scythia and Central Asia 281
Benjamin of Tudela on Central Asia 282
Prester John 283
Origins of the Legend 283
Prester John’s Kingdom As Described in His “Letter” 285
Alliance With Prester John Desired 286
Gog and Magog 287
Western Asia 288
Mesopotamia 289
Benjamin of Tudela on Baghdad 289
Benjamin of Tudela on Arabia 291
Syria and Palestine 292
Geographical Knowledge Enlarged by the Crusades 292
Occidental Population of the Levant 294
European Occupation of Syria 294
Asia Minor 295
Western Asia As Described by the Crusaders 296
Africa 298
Egypt As Part of Asia 298
Descriptions of Egypt 299
Africa West of Egypt 300
Ethiopia 302
Sources of the Nile 304
Traditional View of Central Africa 306
The Mediterranean Sea 307
The Name “Mediterranean” 307
The Mediterranean During the Crusades 307
Instructions for Navigation in the Mediterranean 308
Islands of the Mediterranean 309
Sicily 311
Europe 312
Northeastern Europe 312
Russia 312
Poland 313
Slavic Europe As Described by Benjamin of Tudela and
Petachia of Ratisbon 314
Hungary 314
Balkan Peninsula 316
Constantinople 318
Italy 319
Rome 321
Antiquities 321
Spain 322
The Alps 323
Use of Terms “Transalpine” and “Cisalpine” 324
“Alemannia” 325
Germany 325
Baltic Regions 327
Scandinavia 329
France 331
Paris 331
Alsace 332
Southern France 333
Islands of the Atlantic Ocean 334
British Isles 335
Cities of Britain 336
Giraldus Cambrensis on Ireland and Wales 337
Ireland 337
Wales 340
William Fitzstephen on London 341
Matthew Paris’ Maps of Britain 342
Orkneys and Shetlands 345
Iceland and Thule 345
Iceland in Icelandic Literature 346
Greenland 347
Polar Seas 348
Wineland the Good 349
Fabulous Isles 350
St. Brandan’s Isles 351
XIII CONCLUSION 353
The Outstanding Elements of the Geographical Lore of the
Time of the Crusades 353
Character of the Geographical Lore of the Time of the
Crusades 358
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
NOTES TO CHAPTER I 365
NOTES TO CHAPTER II 378
NOTES TO CHAPTER III 392
NOTES TO CHAPTER IV 396
NOTES TO CHAPTER V 416
NOTES TO CHAPTER VI 417
NOTES TO CHAPTER VII 430
NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII 435
NOTES TO CHAPTER IX 445
NOTES TO CHAPTER X 453
NOTES TO CHAPTER XI 458
NOTES TO CHAPTER XII 459
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 491
BIBLIOGRAPHY 503
INDEX 547
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. PAGE
1 Types of T-O and Sallust maps 67
2 St. Sever Beatus map 69
3 Zone map in Lambert of St. Omer’s _Liber floridus_ 122
4 Osma Beatus map 123
5 The macrocosm, the microcosm, and the winds from Hildegard
of Bingen’s _Liber divinorum operum_ 148
6 Sketch map of the Mediterranean region and the Near East
plotted from the geographical positions in the
_Marseilles Tables_, with inset of Henry of Mayence’s
map 245
7 Plan of Jerusalem from the anonymous _Gesta Francorum
Ierusalem expugnantium_ 250
8 Two sections from the Hereford map to illustrate the
marvels of India 276–277
9 Matthew Paris’ map of Britain 343
10 Diagram to illustrate John of Holywood’s reasoning that
the earth is in the center of the universe 422
11 Comparative diagram of certain parallels of latitude and
of the _climata_ according to various ancient and
medieval geographers 454–455
12 Map showing the relative positions of certain points in
Europe as indicated in astronomical tables of the
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries 457
PREFACE
When viewed historically, geographical concepts are seen to have come
from an immense variety of sources. They have sprung partly from
activities that cause men to travel over the surface of the earth: war,
commerce, pilgrimage, diplomacy, pleasure. They have also sprung from
the accumulated learning and lore of preceding ages and to no small
extent from unfettered flights of the imagination. The history of
geography, therefore, leads its students into many fields, affording
them a key by means of which they may gain a sounder understanding of
the extensive ranges of human activity and of the evolution of important
phases of intellectual life.
This book is an attempt to illustrate and trace the origins of the most
characteristic geographical ideas current in Western Europe at the
height of the Middle Ages. Historians of geography have tended to
neglect this period partly because of the dramatic appeal of the great
Age of Discovery which was immediately to follow. It should be
remembered, however, that, small as the known world was during the
Middle Ages and naïve as may have been men’s conceptions of it, medieval
learning was none the less the central element in the scholarly
background of the Age of Discovery. The Renaissance brought no sudden
and complete emancipation from old modes of thought. While medieval
science persisted and some of its errors may have restricted subsequent
progress, on the whole the positive achievements of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries would have been impossible had it not been for the
enlightenment transferred from the centuries that went before.
C. R. Beazley in the second volume of his great work, _The Dawn of
Modern Geography_ (1901), adequately treats of the travels and
explorations of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, but to the
more theoretical aspects of geographical knowledge in this age he gives
but meager space. Karl Kretschmer in a monograph, _Die physische
Erdkunde im christlichen Mittelalter_ (1889), deals systematically with
the physical geography of the entire Middle Ages but necessarily slights
or wholly neglects many of the more interesting writings of the century
and a half to which the present book is devoted. Other, lesser studies
of the geographical conceptions of this period have to do exclusively
with points of detail. The present writer ventures to hope, therefore,
that there is place for a book in which the geographical lore of the
time of the Crusades is discussed with greater fullness and at the same
time with an orientation differing in many particulars from that of any
work hitherto devoted to the subject.
Except as regards a few minor points (especially in Chapter X) he makes
no claim to having based his work upon hitherto unpublished manuscript
sources. The main part of the study, however (that dealing with the time
of the Crusades, Chapters IV-XIII), is founded essentially upon printed
editions of the primary sources for the history of civilization in the
period. The first three chapters, on the other hand, relating as they do
to the background of medieval geography and covering an enormous field,
of necessity have to a large degree been written with the aid of the
secondary works of modern scholars.
The volume is an enlargement of a thesis submitted in 1922 in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in history at Harvard University. Some of the research was pursued in
Europe in 1919–1920, during which academic year the writer held the
Woodbury Lowery Fellowship from Harvard. Subsequently the American
Geographical Society has generously permitted him, while acting as
Librarian of the Society, to devote much time to the revision of the
manuscript.
The writer owes a special debt of gratitude to Professor C. H. Haskins,
largely as a result of whose advice the particular period dealt with was
selected. Helpful suggestions and the occasional receipt from Professor
Haskins of a photograph or transcript of a manuscript bearing upon an
apposite topic have been a constant stimulus. Useful suggestions have
also been made by Professor R. P. Blake of Harvard and by Monsieur
Charles de La Roncière of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Dr.
Charles Singer of the University of London courteously permitted the use
of Plate VIII from his _Scientific Views and Visions of St. Hildegard_
(1917) as a basis for Figure 5 of the present volume. The writer is
indebted to Mr. W. L. G. Joerg, the editor, from whose editorial skill,
experience, and tireless care the book has greatly profited. He also
wishes to thank Mr. George W. Robinson, Secretary of the Harvard
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Miss Genevieve R. Fallon, formerly
of Radcliffe College, and Mr. Arthur A. Brooks and members of the
library staff of the American Geographical Society for their painstaking
aid with manuscript and proof.
_New York, October 7, 1924._
INTRODUCTION
THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES
The time of the Crusades, like all great constructive epochs in the
history of civilization, was an age of contrasts. A succession of crises
marked the progress of conflict between the ideals of Papacy and of
Empire. The feudalism of an earlier day was giving place in Western
Europe to centralized monarchy, in Italy to the growth of city states.
Though faith swayed the masses of men to the undertaking of immense
coöperative enterprises—cathedral building and crusades—the time, none
the less, was one of questioning and doubt: faith sometimes gave place
to heresy hunting. Keener intellects were not afraid to probe deep at
the very foundations of established theological doctrine. A profound and
widespread enthusiasm for scholarship expressed itself in many forms.
The writings of older authorities were ransacked for the wisdom which
they contained, and from them erudite and forbidding tomes were
compiled. But wandering students and poets were abroad who hated the
musty learning of the monastic cell and frankly rejoiced in the beauty
of the world around them. For some time historians have been in the
habit of speaking of a “twelfth-century renaissance.” This expression is
not wholly apt if used in a narrow sense to imply merely a rebirth of
interest in the Greek and Latin classics. If taken to mean a re-stirring
of the vital forces of civilization, the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were an age of renaissance indeed.
The purpose of this book is to illustrate a limited aspect of the
intellectual activity of the time of the Crusades, but an aspect that is
sufficiently broad to reveal to us something of the contrasting forces
of this age.
SCOPE OF THE TERM “GEOGRAPHICAL LORE”
By “geographical lore” we mean what was known, believed, and felt about
the origins, present condition, and distribution of the geographical
elements of the earth. This covers a wider field than most definitions
of geography. It comprises theories of the creation of the earth, of its
size, shape, and movements, and of its relations to the heavenly bodies;
of the zones of its atmosphere and the varied physiographic features of
air, water, and land; finally, it comprises theories of the regions of
the earth’s surface. Because many of these theories were false they are
no less deserving of attention. The errors of an age are as
characteristic as the accurate knowledge which it possesses—and often
more so. Moreover, in addition to formulated beliefs, whether true or
false, our definition of geographical lore covers man’s spiritual and
esthetic attitude toward the various geographical facts, as
revealed—often unconsciously—in descriptions of regions or of
landscapes.
The historian of geology or the theologian may complain that we trespass
on their domains in discussing theories of the Creation in a book
devoted to the history of geography. Yet this is justifiable if we hold
with most modern geographers that some explanation of the immediate
causes of existing terrestrial conditions is an essential part of
geography. These causes, it was the opinion of medieval thinkers, were
to be sought for in the processes of the Creation. No man had the
vaguest conception of the countless eons that have elapsed during which
air, sea, and land have been in evolution. The good Christian thought
that the world was made by God in the course of the six days of Genesis
and that it then assumed practically the identical geographical
appearance it has preserved ever since. In the Middle Ages geology,
geography, and theology were inextricably interwoven.
Then again, the geographical lore of the Middle Ages involves a wider
range of subjects in space, as well as in time, than is now included in
geography. If medieval man had no knowledge of the age of the earth, he
also had but the feeblest understanding of the immensity of the
universe. To him, earth, stellar bodies, and celestial spheres were all
part of a unified system of which the earth formed the core and most
important member. Cosmology, astronomy, astrology, theology all dealt
with this unified, geocentric, cosmic system; the interrelations between
them were immediate and intimate. We cannot avoid some discussion of the
matters in which these allied sciences bore directly on geography.
ORIGINS OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL LORE OF THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES
Whence came the geographical lore of the time of the Crusades?
Some of it came from books of earlier ages, some of it from contemporary
observation. A sharp distinction may be made between the geography of
the scholar and churchman, drawn largely from antiquity, and the
geography of the merchant, soldier, and pilgrim, who learned of the
world by travel and exploration. It was exceptional when the philosopher
or theologian incorporated in his book the reports of recent travels.
Indeed, we are almost startled to come across a bit of “up-to-date”
geography in the philosophical or theological treatises. Even the
histories and chronicles of contemporary events, though perforce
containing more new geography than works of deeper learning, tended to
appeal to ancient authorities in explaining the course of rivers or the
relation of provinces or mountain chains to each other.
Any consideration of the state of medieval geography inevitably
presupposes some acquaintance with the earlier accumulation of
geographical lore from which it borrowed.
This was derived for the most part from two fountainheads of original
observation and thought: (1) the writings of Greek historians and
philosophers and (2) the Bible. Greek geography was the main source
whence Latin writers of the Roman Empire and Moslems of the eighth,
ninth, and tenth centuries of our era found their inspiration and facts.
The Bible, as interpreted in the exegetical works of the Church Fathers,
stimulated thought on geographical problems. The scholar of our period
had at his disposal many Latin writings, both classical and patristic,
and a somewhat more limited number of Arabic books and translations from
the Arabic.
ORGANIZATION OF THE PRESENT WORK
The aim of the first three chapters of our study is to give an estimate
in broad outline of the contributions of classical, patristic, and
Oriental geography to the medieval West. The purpose is to show the kind
of geographical ideas which a reader of the twelfth or thirteenth
century might have gathered from older works in the libraries and to
reveal something of the evolution of these ideas. No attempt is made to
discuss works not well known in the Occident. The writings of famous
Greek geographers like Herodotus, Pausanias, Strabo, Eratosthenes,
Hipparchus, and Ptolemy receive only scant attention, and their contents
are noted only in so far as they became familiar to Western Christendom
through Latin media. Similarly the Greek Fathers of the Church and most
of the more important Moslem geographers are overlooked because they
exerted almost no influence on Western thought. Nor within the period
itself that forms the subject of our investigation is much space given
to writers like the Moslem Edrisi or the Greek Michael Psellos, whose
researches did not contribute materially to the formation of Western
science.
After a fourth chapter, on the literary and cartographic sources which
date from the time of the Crusades and upon which our estimate of the
geographical lore of this age is based, and a fifth, on the place of
geography in the medieval scheme of learning, there follows the main
part of this book. The attempt is here made to illustrate from
representative sources geographical lore of all kinds, whether original
or borrowed, to emphasize evidences of originality where they are
apparent, and to trace a few significant borrowed theories to their
origins. Though the period under consideration lasted a century and a
half, there was not much change during this time in the quantity of
geographical information available or in the quality of geographical
thinking. Hence it will be more convenient and enlightening to adopt a
topical and regional arrangement for the main portion of our treatment
than to try to arrange the material chronologically.
By no means all the geographical knowledge and thought of the Crusading
age could be stated and discussed in a volume of even many times the
size of this. It is the writer’s hope that the materials selected are
sufficiently diverse to give a rounded and just, though it be
necessarily far from complete, understanding of the geographical lore of
a significant period in the history of science and of civilization.
PART I
ORIGINS, SOURCES, AND PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE OF THE
GEOGRAPHICAL LORE OF THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES
CHAPTER I
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
_SOURCES_
THE PYTHAGOREANS, PLATO, AND ARISTOTLE
The earliest writers who dealt with geographical matters in a more or
less scientific spirit were the Greeks of Ionia and the Pythagorean
philosophers of Magna Graecia. Though their theories exerted no direct
influence on the formation of medieval geography, they should not be
entirely overlooked. Ionic geography gave many ideas to the later
Greeks; Pythagorean thought brought to bear a strong influence on the
Platonic cosmology, which reached the Middle Ages through the Latin
translation of Plato’s _Timaeus_ made by Chalcidius early in the fifth
century after Christ, and through the Platonists Martianus Capella and
Macrobius. Until the middle of the twelfth century Plato, of all
philosophers, held the strongest grip on medieval thought; after that
time the influence of Aristotle became more potent in the framing of the
scholastic conception of the universe. We must regard Plato and, even
more, Aristotle as the indirect sources of most of the cosmological,
physiographic, and meteorological knowledge which, elaborated by later
writers of antiquity and by the Moslems, reached the Middle Ages at
second hand. Among the many writings of Aristotle those which contain
the most material of interest to the geographer are the _De caelo_ (Περὶ
οὐρανοῦ) and the _Meteorology_. The former, in four books, treats of the
properties of the heavenly bodies, of the elements, and of the earth.
Translations of the _De caelo_ in the Middle Ages often went under the
title _De caelo et mundo_.[1][2] The _Meteorology_, besides a detailed
discussion of the phenomena of the atmosphere, includes many
speculations on physical geography. Theories of cosmology also found
expression in the _Physics_ and _De generatione et corruptione_.
Footnote 1:
The notes will be found at the back of the book grouped by chapters
and consecutively numbered within each chapter.
The scientific genius of the Alexandrian Greeks of the Hellenistic
period showed itself in the work of men like Eratosthenes and
Hipparchus. By them the mathematical and astronomical aspects of
geography were developed with accuracy; but unfortunately, owing to the
almost universal ignorance of Greek in the West, the products of their
genius had little part in the molding of medieval theories.
ROMAN INFLUENCE ON GEOGRAPHY
The Roman conquests tended to discredit scientific investigations and to
bring into favor works of a descriptive nature which would appeal to the
military chief, the provincial governor, or man of the world—to the
practical rather than speculative type of mind. Polybius regarded
geography as an important auxiliary science to politics and history. The
geographical portions of his history treat of the countries of the known
world, their peoples and customs; he is not concerned with the size and
shape of the earth nor with the determination of latitudes and
longitudes. Strabo, writing at the time of Augustus, represents the
culmination of the Polybian method; but his great and comprehensive
work, though of first importance in the history of ancient geography,
was not read at the time of the Crusades.
PTOLEMY
The Greek, or more purely scientific, attitude, however, did not
completely succumb. Posidonius[3] in the first century before Christ
reverted to the method of Eratosthenes; and with Marinus of Tyre and
Claudius Ptolemy, in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, there came a
revival of mathematical geography which almost, if not quite, equaled
the high level reached by the Alexandrians[4]. Ptolemy was the author of
two works, both of which were destined profoundly to modify the
development of science in later ages. These were the _Mathematical
Composition_ (or _Almagest_, as the Arabs called it), a treatise on
astronomy, knowledge of which reached the medieval West through Moslem
channels; and the _Geography_, a work which remained virtually unknown
in Europe until the fifteenth century.
LATIN WRITERS: PLINY, SOLINUS, CAPELLA, MACROBIUS
Though the most fertile investigations were made by Greeks, Latin
writers naturally influenced more directly medieval thought in the West.
Of those who dealt with geographic matters in the strictly classical
period Pliny the Elder (23–79 A. D.) and Seneca (3 B. C.-65 A. D.) were
the most influential. The _Historia naturalis_ of Pliny, an ill-digested
compilation of information of all sorts, contained books on geography
that were destined to furnish the larger part of the lettered man’s
geographical ideas during many centuries.[5] Pliny’s work was not merely
extensively read but was used and plagiarized by other writers of
possibly greater popularity. The most significant of these was
Solinus,[6] a compiler of fables in the third century after Christ,
whose _Collectanea rerum memorabilium_ consists almost entirely of
borrowings from Pliny or from a book from which Pliny drew.[7] The
geographical information in Isidore’s _Etymologiae_ is largely made up
of quotations and paraphrases from Solinus. Seneca’s _Quaestiones
naturales_[8] was also widely read and formed the source of the bulk of
the meteorological lore of the Middle Ages.
Two Latin writers of the late Empire also contributed materially to the
evolution of geographical knowledge, Martianus Capella (fourth or fifth
century) and Macrobius (fifth century). Capella’s encyclopedic _De
nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii_ is an elaborate commentary on and
exposition of the seven arts; the book dealing with geometry gives the
author an opportunity of presenting a résumé of geography, more
particularly in its mathematical aspects.[9] That Martianus Capella’s
treatise enjoyed an immense popularity in the medieval period is
indicated by the quantity of manuscripts extant and by the frequency
with which we find it listed in the medieval library catalogues[10] that
have been preserved. The general sketch of the distribution of land and
water on the surface of the globe contained in Macrobius’ commentary on
the _Somnium Scipionis_[11] of Cicero was often quoted at later periods
and formed the basis for some of the extremely crude maps of the world
used in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.
In the remainder of the present chapter a very general review will be
given of the more important geographic ideas borrowed by the Western
world in these centuries from Aristotle, Pliny, Solinus, Seneca,
Martianus Capella, Macrobius, and some others, and an attempt will be
made to indicate the relationship between the growth of these ideas and
the broader evolution of ancient geography as a whole.
_THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE_
ANCIENT COSMOGONY
Though it is not now regarded as lying strictly within the field of
geography, the history of the evolution of theories about the origin of
the earth is so closely allied to the history of geography that the two
cannot well be dissociated. A marked antagonism inevitably arose between
the usual Greek view, which regarded matter as eternal, and the
Christian view, which was based on the first chapter of Genesis and
conceived of the universe as created at a definite point in time or
concurrently with time. The men of the Middle Ages tended to adhere
strictly to the Christian opinion, for to have done otherwise would have
been heretical. Nevertheless, the ancient theory was well known to
Christians and exerted in its various forms no small influence on the
development of certain phases of Christian thought.
CELESTIAL INFLUENCES
It was a deeply rooted belief of many classical thinkers that the events
and conditions on this world and on all the regions below the sphere of
the moon’s orbit are regulated by the heavenly bodies. Aristotle and his
followers taught that the heavenly bodies themselves are made of an
imperishable and incorruptible, almost divine, fifth element, ether,
which distinguishes them from the four corruptible elements (fire, air,
water, and earth) that constitute the immediate world of our senses.[12]
By virtue of this semi-divine quality, it was argued, the sun, planets,
and stars exert an all-powerful control over the earth around which they
revolve—an absolutely determining control over all events both great and
small.[13] From this fatalistic belief sprang the science of astrology,
a science which throughout antiquity was held in equal esteem with
astronomy.
The study of the movements of the celestial bodies revealed the fact
that at some time in the distant future, sun, planets, and stars will
bear exactly the same relative position one to another that they do at
the present moment. Consequently, it was inferred that the influence
exerted by them on the sublunar regions will at that time be exactly the
same as it now is, and all the phenomena now apparent on the earth’s
surface will be exactly repeated. They will be repeated not only once
but an infinite number of times at periodic intervals in the future;
similarly they have been repeated throughout infinite cycles in the
past.[14]
COSMIC CYCLES: THE GREAT YEARS
This idea of cosmic cycles, or Great Years, appears to have originated
in the Orient, possibly with the Chaldeans.[15] It was firmly
established among the Ionian Greeks[16] and Pythagoreans,[17] from whom
Plato adopted it. Many and various opinions prevailed about the violence
and character of the changes produced by the celestial cycles. The
Chaldeans had thought that whenever all the planets come into
conjunction on one straight line in the sign of the zodiac Cancer, the
entire universe is destroyed by fire but destroyed only to be born
again; similarly the world is destroyed by water when the same
phenomenon occurs in Capricorn.[18] The theory of a complete and
universal birth and rebirth (_palingenesis_) was held by some of the
Greek philosophers.[19] Plato and Aristotle, however, seem to have
restricted the destructive effects of the celestial influence to the
sublunar sphere and maintained that the realms above the moon were
eternal.[20] On the whole, belief in periodically recurrent destructions
of the earth by water was more widespread and was given greater
definition than belief in corresponding destructions by fire.[21] The
main reason for this is probably to be looked for in the dissemination
among nearly all peoples of legends of a great flood, but it also in no
small measure may be attributed to rudimentary geological observations
(notably of the presence of shells on high ground) which showed that
portions of the earth’s surface had at one time lain beneath the
waters.[22]
GEOGRAPHIC APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF THE GREAT YEARS
The theory of the Great Years was invoked to explain changes in
geographic and climatic conditions on the earth’s surface.[23] When the
various planets and stars bear a certain relation to one another, a
period of dryness and heat, or a Great Summer, is experienced;
conversely, when other stellar relationships prevail, there is a period
of cold and wetness, or a Great Winter. Even land and sea gradually
change places under stellar control. Certain parts of the land,
Aristotle observed, had once been covered by the sea, and what is now
sea had once been land: like plants and animals, land and sea grow to
maturity and old age. If the causes adduced for these changes were not
so utterly different from those that are now accepted, we might almost
be tempted to think that Aristotle had some conception of climatic
cycles and cycles of erosion.
After Plato and Aristotle, as before them, the doctrine of the Great
Years, though by no means universal, was very popular in antiquity.[24]
The Stoics adopted it in its more extreme form involving successive
burnings and liquefactions of the universe.[25] It entered into
Neoplatonism and was ultimately taken over by the Jews. It seems to have
penetrated to India, where the Greek elaboration of the theory gave
precision to ideas that were probably already in existence there. The
Indian belief in the recurrent reincarnations of Brahma was brought into
connection with Hellenic calculations of the duration of the Great
Years.[26] From the Hindus and from the Greeks the conception was
transferred to the Arabs and by them to the knowledge of the Latin West.
DURATION OF THE GREAT YEARS
Numerous endeavors were made in antiquity to calculate the length of a
Great Year.[27] The figure that was adopted by the Arabs and passed on
to the Christian world originated in Hipparchus’ discovery of the
precession of the equinoxes, or apparent gradual revolution of the fixed
stars around the pole of the ecliptic.[28] Ptolemy calculated that the
period of this revolution was 36,000 years,[29] a figure which became
known to the Hindus and Arabs and ultimately to medieval
Christendom.[30] The actual figure is approximately 25,800 years.
_SHAPE, MOVEMENTS, AND SIZE OF THE EARTH_
SPHERICITY OF THE EARTH
Nearly all scholars of antiquity after the fifth century before Christ
thought that the earth was a globe.[31] The earlier opinion of a
disk-shaped earth resting upon the waters, which appears to have been
held by Anaximander (although some students have thought that he, too,
believed in a spherical earth [32]), was discarded by the Pythagoreans
and Plato, and after their time no serious thinkers questioned the
theory of sphericity. The Pythagoreans based their opinion on
speculative and philosophical grounds rather than on physical and
experimental proofs; they thought that since the sphere is the most
perfect mathematical form, the earth must therefore be a sphere. The
whole tendency of Aristotle’s thought, less speculative and less
hypothetical than Plato’s,[33] led him to look for proofs of
sphericity,[34] and these he enunciated with great emphasis.
Cleomedes,[35] Pliny,[36] Ptolemy,[37] Martianus Capella,[38] and other
ancient writers likewise adduced more or less convincing proofs, which
were well known and often cited in the medieval period.
IMMOBILITY OF THE EARTH
Though the learned men of the ancient world were almost universally
agreed that the earth is a globe, they were not unanimous in the belief
that it stands immovable in the center of the universe; yet the various
theories which diverged from this orthodox view had no place in the
development of medieval cosmology until long after our period.[39]
Certain among the Pythagoreans maintained that there is a fire in the
heart of the earth.[40] Plato said that the center of the earth, which
stands immobile[41] in the center of the universe, is the seat, not of a
fire, but of the World Soul.[42] Through its own internal movement the
World Soul causes the movement of the universe as a whole. Belief in the
World Soul of Plato was extraordinarily tenacious, and it emerges in the
writings of more than one Neoplatonist of the Middle Ages. Aristotle,
however, though he likewise held fast to the doctrine of the immobility
of the earth in the center of the universe, differed both from the
Pythagoreans and from Plato in refusing to believe that the center of
the universe could be the seat of an incorruptible being of the same
substance as the celestial bodies, be it fire or World Soul.
Aristotle,[43] Pliny,[44] and Ptolemy[45] also brought forward proofs of
varying validity in favor of the immobility of the earth.
CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE EARTH
Several figures were given by ancient authors for the circumference of
the earth. Aristotle stated it to be 400,000 stades;[46] Eratosthenes
determined it to be 252,000 stades according to the testimony of many
writers, including Pliny,[47] Vitruvius,[48] Martianus Capella,[49] and
Macrobius,[50] although Cleomedes, who gives the most circumstantial
account of Eratosthenes’ measurement, had said that the latter’s figure
was 250,000.[51] It is probable that Eratosthenes himself arbitrarily
added 2000 stades to his result in order to obtain a figure more easily
divisible.[52] Cleomedes quotes Posidonius as giving 240,000 stades,[53]
and Strabo says that the latter gave 180,000 stades.[54] The last number
was that adopted by Marinus of Tyre and by Ptolemy.
Though we have several distinct figures cited by ancient writers, these
assuredly do not indicate that as many distinct processes of measurement
were carried out. The circumference given by Aristotle was a mere
estimate; Eratosthenes’ result was the only one based on accurate
measurements and calculations;[55] the two figures given by Posidonius
may well have been derived from Eratosthenes, the larger arising from a
mistaken interpretation or intentional alteration of the latter’s
figure, and the smaller from the use of a longer stade.[56]
At all events, so far as we know, only one method was employed by the
Greeks for determining the size of the earth. This consisted of finding
on the same day of the year the meridian altitudes of the sun at two
places supposed to be on the same meridian of longitude, the distance
between which was known through itineraries. The angle between the two
meridian altitudes was then assumed to bear the same relation to the
circumference of the heavens as the distance between the two points of
observation bore to the circumference of the earth. Cleomedes[57] and
Martianus Capella[58] described how Eratosthenes carried out such
observations in Egypt.
The figure determined by Eratosthenes is surprisingly accurate. Whether
the stade used by him was 157.50[59] or 168[60] meters, as different
modern scholars contend, the circumference according to his estimate
would be 39,375 or 42,336 kilometers. In either case the error is seen
to be very slight, the true circumference of the earth being about
40,000 kilometers.
_THE DISTRIBUTION OF HABITABLE REGIONS; ZONES; THE DISTRIBUTION OF LAND
AND WATER_
We see, then, that the writers of antiquity whose opinions were destined
to mold the thought of the medieval period believed that the earth is a
sphere, immovably fixed in the center of the universe. We must now
examine their theories regarding the distribution of phenomena on the
surface of the globe and the interaction of these phenomena. Of prime
importance were their views concerning the distribution of habitable
areas of land, but these were so closely bound up with the theory of
climatic zones that it is absolutely necessary to understand what this
theory was before going further, even though the subject of zones might
more properly be included in the study of the atmosphere.
ZONES
Parmenides may have been the first to conceive of zones upon the earth’s
surface corresponding to the zones into which the astronomers had
divided the heavens. Eratosthenes is said to have been the first to
place the theory of terrestrial zones upon a firmly scientific footing,
“by determining exactly upon the sphere the position of the fixed
circles which mark the limits of each zone” (Thalamas).[61] Ancient
geographers set the number of terrestrial zones at five, though they
differed as to the character of the climates within them. The general
opinion—one which was shared by Aristotle—was that the polar caps and
the equatorial regions were incapable of sustaining life, the first on
account of cold, the second on account of heat. Despite the fact that
the notion of the existence of a fiery belt between the tropics was
challenged by Polybius and Posidonius, who had heard reports from
expeditions in these regions, this notion persisted in the writings of
Martianus Capella, Macrobius, and many others and exerted an extremely
restrictive effect on the subsequent development of geographical
knowledge and enterprise.
The majority of the ancient writers whose works were read in Christendom
before 1300 also thought that the _oikoumene_, or portion of the earth
inhabited by men of our kind, is completely surrounded by an ocean. This
is a belief common to many early peoples.[62] In the Greek world we can
trace it back to the Homeric and Hesiodic Ocean Stream and to the
conceptions of early Ionian philosophers, who had gone so far as to
maintain that the earth had been created out of water,[63] or at least
that it was originally submerged beneath the ocean and had been brought
forth through the evaporation of the water by sun and stars.[64] The
theory of an encircling ocean was certainly held by Aristotle,
Pliny,[65] Seneca, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella.
CRATES’ THEORY OF FOUR LAND MASSES
The two last-named writers set forth an elaboration of an opinion first
held by the Pythagoreans and worked out in detail by Crates of Mallos in
the second century before Christ, which gained great ascendancy over the
minds of map makers and writers of the Middle Ages. They explained that
the _oikoumene_ is one of four similar inhabited bodies of land on the
surface of the globe. These bodies of land are separated from one
another by two oceans which encircle the earth, one running east and
west in the fiery equatorial regions, and one running north and south at
right angles to the equatorial ocean. This idea, which we shall call the
“Cratesian” theory after its foremost expositor, did not pass
unchallenged either in antiquity or in the Christian period. Involving
as it did the doctrine of the antipodes—people dwelling in quarters
absolutely inaccessible to men of our race, eternally cut off from our
_oikoumene_ by the fires of the equator and the terrors of the
meridional ocean—the Cratesian theory provoked the indignation of the
Fathers of the Church as containing the seeds of heresy.[66]
EXTENT OF THE “OIKOUMENE”
Aristotle, although he had derived from the Pythagoreans the theory of
an uninhabitable torrid belt,[67] believed in a greater southward
extension of our _oikoumene_ than would be possible in accordance with
the Cratesian theory. He harbored no idea of the existence of another
_oikoumene_ in the same latitude as ours. He says very clearly in the
_De caelo_[68] that there is no great distance between India and Spain
and hinted at the same opinion in the _Meteorology_.[69] Seneca[70] held
similar views.
The opposite theory—which has been called the continental as opposed to
the oceanic hypothesis[71]—that Africa and Asia extended unknown
distances south and east and that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, like
the Caspian Sea, were enclosed basins—also had its adherents, among them
Herodotus, Hipparchus, and, most significant of all, Ptolemy. But
Ptolemy’s _Geography_, though its content was reflected in Arabic
notions of the earth’s surface, had almost no readers in the Christian
West until the fifteenth century, and the works of Herodotus and
Hipparchus were unknown.
_PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY_
ARISTOTLE, SENECA, AND PLINY
Among the writers of antiquity who dealt with physical geography only
three can be said to have influenced twelfth- and early
thirteenth-century thought to any marked degree. These were, first and
foremost, Aristotle, the substance of whose _De caelo_ and _Meteorology_
had reached the West before the year 1187 through the borrowings and
plagiarisms of later scholars and after that time could be read in
translations from the Greek and Arabic. In the second place, Seneca’s
_Quaestiones naturales_ was popular before the direct influence of the
_De caelo_ and _Meteorology_ began to be felt. In the third place, as we
have seen, the Elder Pliny’s _Historia naturalis_ was not only widely
read in the original, but also much that it contained was familiar
through the intermediary channels of Solinus, Isidore, Martianus
Capella, and others. Aristotle, however, was the fundamental authority,
for a large portion of the material in the books of the two Latin
authors came from his treatises.
THE FOUR ELEMENTS
Most ancient authorities believed that the universe is composed of four
elements, fire, air, water, and earth, arranged in concentric spheres.
Theoretically, according to this view, the sphere of water should
entirely enclose the earth. Practical observation shows that it covers
the lower levels of the earth’s surface only. How to reconcile the
theoretical conception with observed facts was a problem which, as we
shall see, greatly puzzled geographers and physicists during the later
Middle Ages.[72]
According to Aristotle the four elements, under the control of the
heavenly bodies and through their interaction upon each other, produce
all the physical phenomena of the atmosphere, sea, and earth.[73]
Working from this axiom, he, and all the ancient writers who dealt with
the subject, attempted to explain winds, tides, earthquakes, and other
occurrences of nature; but there was little agreement among them as to
the manner in which these interactions were manifested. Though there
were many theories, the actual matters under discussion were not very
numerous. Only the most striking and unusual happenings—such as tides,
earthquakes, and floods—attracted attention, and we find almost no trace
of a minute and careful observation or even of a superficial
understanding of those imperceptibly slow natural forces which modern
geology recognizes as having fashioned mountains, rivers, and seas.
A logical division of the subject matter of physical geography is into
three studies: that of the atmosphere, that of the waters, and that of
the earth. In each of these there is room for a great deal of
hairsplitting about what belongs to geography and what to geology,
geophysics, or meteorology. Physical geography merges into the other
natural sciences as human geography merges into history, politics,
economics, or ethnology. Even at the present day, when the often futile
attempt is being made to delimit the domains of the various sciences
ever more definitely, it is impossible to distinguish where one begins
and another ends, and it would be foolish to set up hard and fast
definitions in dealing with the lore of the ancient and medieval worlds,
when natural science was as yet inchoate.
METEOROLOGY
The ancients were more interested in meteorology[74] than they were in
oceanography and physiography (if such terms can be used for their naïve
attempts at explaining the features of ocean and land), perhaps because
the phenomena of the air make a deeper impression on men than the
phenomena of the sea and earth—tides, earthquakes, and volcanoes
excepted. Thunder and lightning, comets, rainbows, balls of fire were
looked upon as portents, and complex theories were created to explain
them and what they were supposed to foretell. But all this type of
meteorological lore, however interesting in itself, is, strictly
speaking, not geography. On the other hand, there are certain distinctly
geographical aspects of the study of the atmosphere as pursued by the
Greeks and Romans that deserve our attention.
The men of antiquity conceived of the interaction of atmosphere and
earth in two ways: effects produced by the land upon the atmosphere, and
effects produced by the winds upon the land. In connection with the
first, Seneca makes a remark which, when taken from its context, would
not be out of place in a modern manual of meteorology. He conceived the
lower portion of the atmosphere to be extremely variable and inconstant
as a result of the proximity of the earth. “The earth is a more
important cause than all others ... for the air’s changefulness and
inconstancy. The varying positions of the land, facing here this way and
there another way, are of great moment in determining the temperature of
the air.”[75] Nothing is truer than this, but the reasons that Seneca
gives for the influence of the atmosphere upon the land are not
satisfactory, being based to a large extent on the supposition that
winds are produced by vapors. Indeed, by the theory of vapors and
exhalations many ancient and medieval thinkers attempted to explain
nearly all the phenomena of the atmosphere and heavens as well.
Aristotle had pointed out that a dry and smokelike exhalation is caused
by the sun to rise from the earth’s surface through the air and even to
penetrate the zone of fire.[76] While near the earth this exhalation
takes the form of wind; when ignited at higher levels it becomes comets
and shooting stars. Besides this, Aristotle maintained that a damp and
watery vapor is also drawn into the atmosphere by the sun’s heat and
when cooled turns into cloud or falls in the form of rain and snow.[77]
These ideas of Aristotle became known to the Western world of the Middle
Ages with translations of the _De caelo_ and _Meteorology_ and found
their expression in the thirteenth-century writings of Albertus
Magnus.[78] Seneca, on the other hand, explained that the winds were air
in motion and that they might be produced by many and various
causes.[79]
WINDS
All three of the writers whom we are specially considering,[80]
Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny, had observed that there is a variety of
local winds—valley, river, sea, and marsh breezes—taking their origin
from the exhalations and vapors arising from these natural features. But
even though their explanations of the causes for these winds are now
regarded as archaic, the observations they made of their occurrence were
not inaccurate.
As to the effects of the winds on the earth, we encounter a theory that
sounds most extraordinary in the light of modern science but which
corresponds logically to the Aristotelian hypothesis of the elements and
to the general ideas current in classical times regarding the structure
of the earth. This theory, that the winds are the cause of earthquakes,
can better be understood after we have examined the ancient opinions
about the physical geography of the water and of the earth.
Another persistent belief, held alike by poets, physicists, and
geographers, originated in the Homeric mythology of the calm heights of
Olympus, dwelling place of the gods. This was to the effect that the
winds are limited to the lower part of the atmosphere,[81] a zone some
ten or fifteen stades in thickness.[82] The highest mountains were
thought to reach above into a realm of perpetual tranquillity where
clouds and dew and frost were unknown and where the ashes of sacrifice
would remain undisturbed for a year’s time.[83] This idea was
transferred to the Middle Ages through the writings of Pomponius Mela,
Solinus, and others.
CLIMATOLOGY
As to the climates, it has already been shown that many writers of
antiquity divided the earth’s surface into zones: fiery, temperate, and
frozen. Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny do not seem to have had that more
exact understanding of the distribution of climates which recognizes
that two countries in the same latitude may, nevertheless, have
different climatic conditions and products.[84] To them, all places on
the same parallel were virtually the same from the climatic point of
view. In this connection it must be pointed out that the parallel
strips, or _climata_, into which Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy,
Pliny, and Martianus Capella divided the _oikoumene_ were not climatic
divisions in our modern sense—implying the prevalence of well-defined
conditions of temperature and weather—but, rather, artificial
astronomical divisions the boundaries of which were determined by
arbitrary means.[85] Nevertheless, true climatic differences were well
understood; Seneca describes vividly in more than one place in the
_Quaestiones naturales_ the intense heat and dryness of southern
regions[86] and the cold of the far North; Seneca and Pliny had acquired
more detailed knowledge than Aristotle of the northern ice and
snows.[87] Pliny made some interesting, if unsound, observations
connecting the dark complexions of the Ethiopians with the scorching
effects of the sun and foreshadowed a modern theory by asserting that
the inhabitants of northern Europe are blonde (and savage) because of
the coldness and inclemency of the climate in which they dwell.[88] A
brief but striking passage from the _Octavius_ of Marcus Minutius Felix
explains as follows the warming effect of the western ocean upon the
climate of Britain: “God is mindful of our welfare not only universally
but locally. Britain is deficient in sunshine, but this deficiency is
made good by the warmth of the sea that flows around it.”[89]
The Greeks and Romans certainly had no satisfactory understanding of the
general circulation of the atmosphere. Only with the maritime voyages
since the fifteenth century have we come to know the distribution of
belts of prevailing winds and calms. Aristotle said that the etesian, or
north, winds blow from the cold countries full of water and snow under
the Great Bear; and that the south wind originates at, but not south of,
the Tropic of Cancer;[90] this is the nearest he came to giving a theory
of atmospheric circulation. Megasthenes had heard of the monsoons of the
Indian Ocean; Pliny described the use made of them by sailors in going
out to India,[91] but he made no attempt to explain the general areas of
westerlies or trades. On the other hand, Aristotle,[92] Seneca,[93] and
Pliny[94] all recognized and discussed at considerable length the
influences of wind on weather; for example, the fact that the etesians,
though they bring clear skies to Italy, deluge Ethiopia and India with
rain—a conception which contains a shadow of truth.[95] Auster, the
south wind, was supposed to bring rain to Italy.
THE WATER ELEMENT
Since water was one of the four—or, according to Aristotle,
five—elements that were supposed to make up the universe, the ancient
authorities looked upon the ocean as necessarily as old as the earth
itself. Seneca thought that the Nile and the Ister (Danube) are of equal
age with the primordial ocean, because of remarkable characteristics
which differentiate them from all other streams.[96]
THE SEA: ITS SALINITY, DEPTH, CURRENTS, AND TIDES
We must note what features of the sea interested the Greeks and Romans.
These were primarily its saltness, its depth, its currents, and its
tides.
The problem of why the sea is salt gave rise to a good deal of
theorizing. That the evaporation of the lighter fresh water leaves
behind the heavy salt water was well understood, but in the further
solution of the problem opinions diverged widely. Aristotle thought that
the salt was the result of combustion;[97] that it was an ashlike
substance first carried into the air by the exhalations from the earth
and then deposited in the sea by rainfall—particularly by the autumn
rains that accompany the south winds blowing from hot, dry districts
where the process of combustion is most active. Pliny believed that the
salt came partly from dry vapors intermingled with the sea waters and
partly from the nature of the earth, which tends to impregnate the sea
with salt.[98]
Aristotle said[99] that the Pontus (Black Sea) was deeper than the
Maeotis (Sea of Azov), the Aegean deeper than the Pontus—except in one
place—the Sicilian Sea deeper than the Aegean, and the Sardinian and
Tyrrhenian the deepest of all seas. Pliny quotes[100] a certain Fabianus
to the effect that the greatest known depth of the sea is fifteen
stades, or about 1200 fathoms—not an excessive figure, for parts of the
Mediterranean are in fact even deeper. Pliny,[101] following
Aristotle,[102] believed that the “Deeps of the Euxine,” opposite the
shores of the people of the Coraxi, were unfathomable.[103] Aristotle
had a very false idea that the Atlantic is made up of shallows and mud
banks and that it is calm, an idea shared by the Mohammedans and one
that may have contributed to the horror of the Western Ocean which
lingered in the minds of Mediterranean peoples throughout antiquity and
until the close of the Middle Ages.[104]
The ancient geographers certainly had no clearer understanding of the
general circulation of the ocean than of the atmosphere, and for the
very same reason: they had not traveled sufficiently. Aristotle thought
that there is a flow of water southward from the higher northern part of
the earth,[105] and Macrobius explained a series of currents in the
oceanic belts which he imagined surrounded the earth.[106] Certain
currents of the Mediterranean attracted attention: the constant flow
from the Euxine into the Aegean and the fluctuating currents of the
Strait of Messina and the Euripus (between Euboea and the mainland). A
tradition arose at later times that the death of Aristotle was caused by
his disgust at being unable to explain to his satisfaction the currents
of the Euripus.[107]
Only with the travels of Pytheas of Marseilles along the North Atlantic
coasts, the expedition of Alexander, and Nearchus’ voyage and
exploration of the mouths of the Indus and coasts of Beluchistan and
Mekran did the Greeks gain any adequate knowledge of tidal phenomena;
for the tides of the Mediterranean, except in a few places, are so low
as to be almost negligible.[108] Eratosthenes thought that the currents
through narrows in the Mediterranean are caused by variations in the
relative levels of the sea at either end of the channels and that these
variations are a response of the sea to fluctuations of the tides in the
ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules.[109] As early as the third century
before the Christian era the Greeks had understood the relation of the
moon’s phases to the ebb and flood, but certainly not much earlier, for
Aristotle appears to have been ignorant of it.[110] Posidonius was the
first to give a full account of the manner in which the moon and sun
regulate the tides.[111] He had accurate knowledge of the diurnal, the
monthly, and perhaps the annual tidal periods,[112] a knowledge which
formed a bulwark of the structure of his astrology. Pliny also believed
that the tides were caused by lunar influence and described the three
periods with even greater accuracy than Posidonius.[113] He recognized
that the tides must correspond to a lunisolar cycle of one hundred
lunations, or eight years, an astronomical cycle that had long been
familiar to the Greeks.[114] He included in his account an astute
observation that the tides, like everything else on the earth’s surface
depending on celestial controls, tend to drag behind the time when these
controls are exerted.[115] Seneca does not try to explain the tides; he
mentions them only incidentally in connection with a graphic description
of the terrible deluge that will overwhelm the earth at the end of the
Great Winter. Though in some respects like the spring tides at the
equinoxes, when the sun and moon are in conjunction, this flood will be
bound by no law of nature and will have no curb to its fury.[116]
Macrobius’ explanation of the tides,[117] which was copied by many later
writers, though ingenious, was not founded on actual knowledge or
observation. He said that the ebb and flood are caused by the impact of
the opposing currents of the two ocean belts which encircle the earth,
and, with Eratosthenes, he thought that the tide of the Mediterranean is
a repercussion of the ocean tides. Indeed, after the time of Pliny there
was no addition to the scientific understanding of tidal phenomena until
the eighth century.
SUBTERRANEAN CHANNELS
Evaporation was given by Aristotle as a reason why the sea does not
overflow its bed on account of the constant inflow from the rivers.[118]
Another explanation of this puzzling circumstance was found by
Pliny[119] in a curious theory that prevailed throughout antiquity and
the Middle Ages to the effect that the land is seamed with veins,
cavities, and tunnels.[120] Into some of these the air enters; others
are the passages for rivers which sink into the ground; through still
others the water of the sea finds its way to wells, springs, and
fountains, where, made fresh by its passage through the earth, it bursts
forth to form rivers which return it to the sea. A continuous
circulation of the waters of the earth is thus maintained through
passages corresponding to the veins, arteries, and canals of the human
body.[121]
The origin of the latter theory is undoubtedly to be sought for partly
in the nature of the ground in Greece and the Aegean region and partly
in the age-old belief that the interior of the earth is the abode of the
dead.
The soluble character of the limestone rocks throughout parts of the
Balkan Peninsula has led to the production of what is now known as
_karst_ topography, so called from the Karst, a plateau between Trieste
and Fiume, where it has attained its most typical development. In such
regions many streams disappear into hollows of the ground; caverns and
underground galleries are extremely common; and the traveler
occasionally comes across a full-grown river bursting out of the depths
of the earth. The old and persistent story that the river Alpheus of the
Peloponnesus passes beneath the Ionian Sea only to gush forth in the
well of Arethusa in Syracuse was destined to have a medieval counterpart
in the explanation of the subterranean courses of the rivers of
Paradise.
RIVERS OF THE UNDERWORLD
Among the most famous and sinister of the subterranean streams of
antiquity were the dark waters of Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and
Styx.[122] These were the streams of the nether world, the world of the
dead. Belief in the subterranean position of the after-world, the Hades
of the Greeks, the Inferi of the Italian folk, was widespread and
lasting among early Mediterranean peoples. Hellenic mythology placed not
only Tartarus, the abyss of torment, but also the Elysian Fields in the
depths. Plato taught that within the bowels of the earth are immense
caverns, some filled with fire, some with water, others the abode of the
shades. To be sure, rationalistic arguments against such doctrines were
raised by the incredulous. Aristotle had believed that of all four
elements the earth is the most dense and solid and that its position is
at the center of the universe. Although the earth might be seamed with
small water channels, it would be a reversal of the physical laws of the
universe to suppose that within it there could exist caverns large
enough to “hold Tartarus, the Elysian Fields, and the infinite multitude
of the dead” (Cumont).[123] Hence some would identify the Elysian Fields
with the Islands of the Blessed, placing them in the antipodes, and
would relegate Tartarus to the lowest hollow of the celestial
sphere.[124] But even this explanation could not be reconciled with the
more mature cosmography of the Alexandrian age. The Epicureans resorted
to out-and-out disbelief in a future life and future dwelling place of
the spirit.[125] Others looked for the shades in the atmosphere below
the moon’s orbit or else treated the whole problem in a lofty vein of
allegory. Rationalistic questioning of the subterranean position of the
next world, however, did not shake faith in this doctrine as it
persisted among the ignorant, and the doctrine was given new life, if in
somewhat different forms, by the Neoplatonic movement and the influx of
Oriental cults during the waning years of the Western Empire.[126] The
Neoplatonists reverted to Plato’s theory that the interior of the earth
may well include hollows large enough to contain the future abode of
men’s souls. The religion of Mithras tended to spread throughout the
Occident the dualistic cosmology of an eternal conflict between the
powers of light and goodness on high and the powers of darkness and evil
below. In the words of Franz Cumont, whose truly fascinating study of
this subject we are here following: Oriental dualism cut “the abode of
the souls into two halves, of which it placed one in the luminous sky
and the other in subterranean darkness. This was also the conception
which, after some hesitation, became generally accepted by the Church
and which for long centuries was to remain the common faith of
Christendom.”[127] In the period with which it is our special problem to
deal, then, we shall find that Hell is almost invariably placed in the
heart of the earth.[128]
ORIGIN OF RIVERS
To return from this digression to the vexed question of the origin of
super-terrestrial rivers, we find that the circulation of water from the
sea either by underground passages or by rain was not regarded by the
majority of ancient thinkers as sufficient to account for the huge
volumes of water that rivers constantly pour into the sea. Plato had
thought that there were enormous reservoirs in the interior of the earth
which served to keep the rivers supplied,[129] but Aristotle rejected
this hypothesis.[130] A reservoir as large as the entire earth, he said,
would be necessary for the purpose. His explanation was worked out of
the theory that one element actually may be transformed into another. In
a relatively unscientific age what is more natural than to believe, when
one sees soluble substances passing into solution in water, that they
actually become water? Or when one sees the condensation of invisible
vapor into clouds and of clouds into rain, that the air is actually
turning to water? Aristotle, followed by Seneca,[131] argued that the
air which penetrates into the internal cavities and recesses of the
earth is chilled and liquefied by the cold encountered there, just as
air seems to be condensed by cold in the outer atmosphere. Aristotle
cited as a proof of this the supposed fact that most great rivers have
their sources in mountains.[132] Mountains were to be looked upon as
enormous elevated sponges exuding water on all sides. Aristotle
concluded likewise that the northern part of the earth must be high and
mountainous,[133] because many great rivers originate there. But, if the
air is transmutable into water, why, then, was it not perfectly logical
to suppose that the earth could also undergo a similar change? This as a
theory to explain the origin of some of the water of rivers was clearly
expressed by Seneca and, among the early Church Fathers, by Gregory of
Nyssa.[134] The faulty character of Seneca’s scientific thought is seen
in his failure to account satisfactorily for the logical demands of his
theory, i. e. for the replacement of the land lost by its liquefaction.
THE NILE FLOOD
One of the natural phenomena most puzzling to the Greeks and Romans was
the inundation of the Nile.[135] Herodotus in his famous book on Egypt
had given a lengthy account of the Nile and what it meant to Egypt. He
had called Egypt the “gift of the Nile,” for he understood the alluvial
character of the country. His theory as to the cause of the flood—he
held that the normal height of the river was its flood height but that
the etesian winds, by driving the sun southward out of its course in
winter, caused the sun to dry up the headwaters of the stream—was less
successful than his description of the features of the flood itself.
Seneca also gives a long and extremely picturesque description of the
inundation[136] and sets forth various older explanations of its origin,
all of which he tries to refute without presenting an opinion of his
own. He tells how, starting in the upper reaches of the river, the flood
travels downstream and arrives in Egypt about midsummer; how it adds to
the fertility of the country by its deposits of silt; and how—here
Seneca repeats the crisp phrase of Herodotus—Egypt is the creation of
its stream. Among the various theories which he comments upon and
refutes it is rather significant to find one which had been propounded
by Anaxagoras and which is now recognized, in part at least, as the
right explanation: that the high water is caused by the melting of the
snows on the Ethiopian mountains. Seneca said that there were twenty
proofs available to refute this hypothesis.[137] Another view which
Seneca rejected was that the flood was caused by the etesian winds
backing up the water, a theory fated to reappear in many medieval books,
among them the _Expositio in hexaemeron_ of Peter Abelard.[138] Pliny
discussed the Nile and its peculiarities.[139] Like Herodotus, he
believed that it rises in the western part of Africa and reaches the
Sudan and Upper Egypt only after a series of long subterranean journeys.
He described the flood, giving statistics of the various heights of the
water on the nilometer and explaining which heights meant plenty and
which meant famine. He shows a lack of critical sense in his remarks on
the causes of the high water; for he held that two theories are equally
worthy of credence, the theory of the etesian wind, which we have just
examined, and the true explanation that the floods are due to summer
rains in Ethiopia.
THE LANDS
To turn now from water to land. We have already discussed Aristotle’s
idea of the gradual transposition of continents and oceans under the
control of the celestial bodies. Pliny describes a large number of local
changes of land and sea:[140] the building of new land by alluvial
deposits, the sudden appearance of land and islands out of the depths of
the waters, the separation of islands from the mainland, the tying of
islands to the shore, the total disappearance of entire countries
beneath the sea—Plato’s Atlantis is given as an example[141]—the
collapse of mountains; but in all this, though he tells where such
prodigies took place, he rarely tries to explain how and why they
happened.
EARTHQUAKES AND VOLCANOES
The explanation of the causes of earthquakes and volcanoes, however, was
attempted by Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Seneca, and many other writers of
antiquity with no small measure of ingenuity. We have seen that ancient
philosophers almost universally were of the opinion that the earth is
honeycombed with cavities and subterranean passages. Plato said that
some of these cavities were filled with water and air but that others
contained mighty swamps and streams of fire, including the immense fiery
river Pyriphlegethon. The volcanoes of the earth’s surface were
outpourings from these internal streams, and their minglings with the
atmosphere and strivings to burst forth were the cause of
earthquakes.[142] Aristotle, on the other hand, denied the possibility
of subterranean fires. According to his scheme of physics the place for
fire in the universe was above the sphere of air. He maintained that the
dry and smokelike exhalation which causes the winds of the atmosphere
not only penetrates into the cavities of the earth from the outside but
is generated within the earth’s interior[143] and that when this
exhalation tries to escape and is opposed by any obstacle—for example,
by the sea—there is a tremendous upheaval and the land is shaken.
Seneca[144] and Pliny[145] ascribed the cause of earthquakes to the
winds. Pliny believed that after a great storm, in which wind is driven
down and compressed in the interior of the earth, it frequently strives
to come forth and in so doing shakes the earth’s surface far and wide.
Occasionally, if the pressure is too tremendous to be withstood by the
crust of the earth, the winds burst through, accompanied by a violent
tempest and a rain of sparks and cinders. Aristotle describes such a
volcanic eruption in the Eolian (Lipari) Isles.[146] While this was the
explanation of violent eruptions, the quiescent volcanic activity of
mountains like Etna was usually attributed to a different cause.
Pliny[147] speaks of Etna, Chimaera in Lycia, and various other
volcanoes as burning, and it would seem that he connected them with such
phenomena as burning naphtha wells and pits of bitumen and sulphur.
HEIGHT OF MOUNTAINS
A word must be said about classical estimates of the height of
mountains.[148] Aristotle suggested that these altitudes might be
determined by observing the duration of sunlight on the peaks. He would
have us believe that the Caucasus range is illumined by the sun for a
third of the night after sunset and for a corresponding time before
sunrise. If this were true, these mountains would be from 60 to 180
miles high![149] Less fantastic were the estimates of Dicaearchus and
Eratosthenes. The former, Pliny tells us, measured Pelion and found it
to be 1250 paces (10 stades) in height.[150] If we are right in our
understanding of the length of the pace here employed, this represents
5167 feet[151]—certainly not far short of the actual altitude (5308
feet). We do not know the method used by Dicaearchus in this survey, but
his calculation was probably determined from simple triangulation with
the aid of a diopter, an instrument for measuring angles.[152]
Triangulation as a means of finding the height of trees and buildings
was well understood. Eratosthenes probably did not carry out a
triangulation of his own but adopted the results obtained by
Dicaearchus, asserting that the highest mountains in the world do not
exceed 10 stades in elevation. He demonstrated by an ingenious and
graphic mathematical proof that the volume of mountains is so utterly
insignificant in comparison with the volume of the earth as a whole that
the earth can be regarded as essentially a sphere,[153] a conception
which became well established in the astronomical thought of antiquity
and one which reappeared in the Middle Ages.[154] When the Greeks
learned something of the Alps, they were able to correct Eratosthenes’
underestimate of the maximum height of mountains. Posidonius argued that
15 instead of 10 stades should be taken as the correct figure and that
the maximum depth of the sea was no greater than 15 stades.[155]
_MATHEMATICAL GEOGRAPHY AND CARTOGRAPHY_
Mathematical geography deals in part with the accurate determination of
the location of places and with the accurate representation of the
earth’s surface on maps.
MATHEMATICAL GEOGRAPHY LARGELY BASED ON ITINERARIES
The method almost universally employed by ancient geographers for
determining locations was the compilation of itineraries; the position
of a place was found, not by accurate surveys, but by reference to other
places at so many stades or so many days’ journey in such and such a
direction. Whatever maps the Romans may have had (for example the great
representation of the Empire set up by Agrippa in the Porticus Octaviae
in Rome) were probably compiled entirely from route traverses. The
greater part of the information which even the most accurate and
scientific of the Greek geographers, Eratosthenes, Marinus of Tyre, and
Ptolemy, possessed, was drawn from such itineraries and from estimates
of sea voyages. The figures for the latitude and the longitude of the
large number of places given in Ptolemy’s _Geography_ are for the most
part not the result of astronomical observations, and the tables cannot
be regarded as analogous to modern tables of latitudes and longitudes
but must be considered rather as guides for the construction of
maps.[156]
Other methods besides these simple reckonings of locations were well
known, none the less.
ASTRONOMICAL DETERMINATION OF LATITUDE
The determination of latitude has always been a comparatively easy
astronomical problem. No complicated instruments are needed to measure
either the vertical elevation of the sun on the meridian or of the north
celestial pole, and from both of these the latitude of the observer can
be calculated with extreme accuracy. The instrument commonly used by the
Greeks for measuring the angle of the sun[157] consisted of an
hemispherical bowl (_scaphe_) with a vertical rod (_gnomon_) for a
radius. The shadow of the rod on the concave interior of the bowl gives
the elevation of the sun (with an error of 16′[158]) and thereby the
latitude. Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy were all familiar with
the latitudes of several places that had thus been determined.
ASTRONOMICAL DETERMINATION OF LONGITUDE
To find longitude by astronomical means is a more difficult matter for
people who have neither chronometers nor telegraphs. Eratosthenes,
Hipparchus, Pliny, and Ptolemy all understood that it may be found by
observing the time of eclipses in different localities.[159] Hipparchus
believed that an extensive series of observations should be carried out
in order to ascertain, by mathematical and astronomical means alone,
latitudes and longitudes of a large number of places.[160] To facilitate
such a survey he prepared tables of lunar eclipses and tables to aid in
the determination of latitudes, but the practical difficulties of the
undertaking were too great and the work was never completed. In fact,
throughout antiquity the total number of places whose position had thus
been accurately determined probably does not exceed half a dozen, if it
is as many.
Pliny gives[161] an account of two different occasions when observations
were made of the same eclipse at two different places. He says that at
the time of the battle of Arbela the moon was eclipsed at the second
hour of the night, when at the same hour it was rising in Sicily. He
also speaks of an eclipse of the sun that was seen in Campania between
the seventh and eighth hours and in Armenia between the eleventh and
twelfth, indicating a difference in longitude of four hours, or 60°. The
actual distance is no more than half of this. Ptolemy also cites[162]
the eclipse of 331 B. C. as giving the distance between Carthage and
Arbela. We shall see later that much greater accuracy was attained by
the Arabs in their calculations of longitude and that some of their
figures were passed on to the Western world in astronomical tables
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
CARTOGRAPHY
Little need be said of the cartography of antiquity,[163] for although
medieval maps undoubtedly owe much to classical predecessors, none of
the classical maps which were destined directly to influence the
cartography of the Middle Ages have come down to us. Indeed we have good
copies of only two. These are the maps of Ptolemy and the so-called
Tabula Peutingeriana,[164] or Peutinger Table. Ptolemy’s maps exerted no
influence whatever on the cartography of the age of the Crusades.[165]
The Tabula Peutingeriana is preserved in a manuscript of the twelfth
century or earlier and probably was originally copied from a large chart
showing the main routes and provinces of the Roman Empire. It is an
extremely long and narrow affair in which the geography is woefully
distorted. Though in itself hardly representative of the best in the
Roman cartographer’s art, the original may have been compiled from a
contemporary Roman map of the world and adapted through its long and
narrow form to the especial purpose of illustrating itineraries. We know
that maps of the world were officially drawn in imperial Rome and posted
up for the benefit of the public: the one constructed by the order of
Agrippa and Augustus in the Porticus Octaviae was the most famous;[166]
and others are mentioned in literary sources.[167] Certain medieval maps
of the world are possibly related to some of these Roman charts,[168]
but unfortunately in the absence of the Roman maps themselves the exact
relationships cannot satisfactorily be worked out.
Although the ancient astronomers knew a variety of projections for
representing the heavens—stereographic, orthographic, and
others[169]—these were not applied to maps of the earth until long after
our period. Ptolemy describes several projections, among them the conic,
which he may have used; but there is no question of any mathematical
projections in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and none of the
cartographers of that period took account of the fact that they were
endeavoring to show a globe on a flat surface.
_THE EXPANSION OF REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE_
We have seen what the geographers of antiquity thought about the general
distribution of land and water and about the physical processes of the
earth’s surface. We now must study a subject which is less concerned
with what they thought than with what they actually knew—however vague
and inexact this knowledge was. Though the heritage of knowledge which
antiquity left to the Middle Ages of the countries and regions of the
_oikoumene_ was vast, much had been lost and much garbled in the process
of transmission. Hence it would be beside the point to discuss the
details of topographic information contained in the works of Strabo,
Pliny, and Ptolemy; our aim is merely to indicate in a broad way the
limits of the regional knowledge of the ancient world. This can best be
done by sketching the various stages in which the horizon of geography
was expanded until it reached the Shetlands and Scandinavia in the
north, China in the east, and, perhaps, the Central African mountains in
the south.
EXPANSION OF GREEK REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE
Homer’s geographical horizon was limited by the Mediterranean—one might
almost say Aegean—shores; Italy, Sicily, and everything to the west was
a realm of fable, and his acquaintance with the Black Sea coasts was
little better. The colonizing movement of the eighth to the sixth
centuries before Christ brought Greek settlers to these coasts; and
through them there was gained some acquaintance with the country behind
them, which found expression in the writings of Hecataeus at the close
of the sixth century. With this writer ancient geography begins to
assume its familiar classical form. He shows some slight knowledge of
Central Asia beyond the Caspian Sea and is even aware of the existence
of India—or at least of the northwestern portions of that peninsula. The
great struggle with Persia brought the Greeks into much closer relations
with Asia, and a corresponding increase in geographical knowledge
ensued. This was summed up by Herodotus. Much of his geography is
fabulous and legendary, but much of it is of surprising detail and
accuracy. The voyage of Scylax of Caryanda from the Indus to the Persian
Gulf had brought the Indian Ocean within Greek ken. Herodotus also
describes the rivers of Scythia and of Central Asia and displays
detailed familiarity with Egypt and northeastern Africa; he knew less of
the West, although at about this same time the voyages of the
Carthaginian Hanno in the Atlantic Ocean extended the horizon at least
as far as the Canaries, which were destined to remain on the limits of
the known world in that direction for many centuries to come. Shortly
after Herodotus, Ctesias, who had lived seventeen years at the Persian
court, wrote his _Persica_ and _Indica_, in which we find collected
together many of the fabulous and marvelous tales of Oriental animals
and monsters which were later to figure so strikingly in the _Historia
naturalis_ of Pliny, in the medieval encyclopedias, and in the
_Physiologus_, a collection of animal lore widely read in the Middle
Ages. Further detail regarding the local features of Mesopotamia and
Armenia was learned from the expedition of Cyrus and preserved for the
future in Xenophon’s _Anabasis_. But the events which did most to expand
the regional knowledge of the ancients were those connected with
Alexander’s conquests and with the reigns of his successors. Alexander’s
march in itself opened to Greek eyes wide territories that had been
unknown before; it brought Greek armies and, after them, Greek merchants
into the innermost heart of Asia; it established direct connections with
India; rumors reached the companions of Alexander of an enormous island
of Taprobane in the Southern Ocean, an island which we now recognize to
be Ceylon. With the voyage of Nearchus came a better understanding of
the Indian seas; and subsequently under Seleucus I (Nicator),
Megasthenes, who was sent as ambassador to the court of an Indian
potentate on the Ganges, gave a detailed description of the tribes and
products of Hindustan, more extensive notes on Taprobane,
and—unfortunately—a repetition of the fabulous legends of Ctesias.
Patroclus, in command of the easternmost provinces of the kingdom of
Antiochus I, provided some valuable statistical and geographical facts
about the peoples of the Caspian region, although he was quoted as an
authority for the belief that the Caspian communicates with the outer
ocean and that it is an easy matter to sail thence to India.
GEOGRAPHY AT ALEXANDRIA
In addition to the reports of travelers and eyewitnesses, the
establishment of Greek control over Egypt and the greater part of
southwestern Asia led to a scientific awakening that centered in
Alexandria. One of the greatest triumphs of Hellenistic science was the
geographical and astronomical school that flourished at Alexandria under
the Ptolemies. Eratosthenes and Hipparchus were undoubtedly the most
famous representatives of this school, and in them we see the
culmination of Greek scientific geography; for their work, all things
considered, surpassed that of Claudius Ptolemy, and the work of no other
man approached it. Though Eratosthenes’ researches were significant
mainly in the field of mathematical geography, he made use of much of
the regional knowledge which was available in the library at Alexandria
and which he could gain from enterprising Greek traders, administrators,
and soldiers who had actually visited the countries with which he deals
in his treatises.
One striking result of this broadening of regional knowledge was the
lesson it taught in regard to the countries south of the Tropic of
Cancer. The progress of exploration in Upper Egypt and in India showed
that these countries were not only habitable but thickly settled.
Adherents of what we have called the Cratesian theory were obliged to
acknowledge that the tropic could not be taken as the beginning of the
burning zone. Eratosthenes pushed the limit of the _oikoumene_ as far
south as latitude 11½° N.[170]
HELLENISTIC REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE
While Greek military enterprise had been opening up the Orient and
exploratory enterprise penetrating the tropics, an important advance was
made in the direction of the northwestern seas and the British Isles.
The voyage of Pytheas of Marseilles, about 330 B. C., had brought within
the scope of ancient knowledge Britain, Scandinavia, Thule, and the
frozen ocean beyond. Thus, in the Hellenistic period the frontiers of
knowledge included the Orkneys, Shetlands, Faroes—or whatever of the
northern isles was meant by Thule—the Canaries, tropical Africa, and
Ceylon. No further notable extension of these borders seems to have been
made until the first century after Christ, except that vague rumors of a
people called “Seres” and of the use of silk had crept into the Roman
world in Virgil’s time. This may have indicated acquaintance with China,
although Horace took the Seres to be a tribe of Central Asia.[171] The
Scythian invasions which overwhelmed the Greek kingdom of Bactria and
the conquest by the newly risen power of Parthia of the provinces of the
Seleucids east of the Euphrates tended to cut all communication with the
interior and farther parts of the Asiatic continent; but the Mithridatic
wars, as described by Theophanes, familiarized the public with the local
geography of Armenia, Pontus, and the Caucasus. Similarly Caesar’s
campaigns in Gaul, Germany, and Britain opened Western Europe to the
Roman world.
REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE OF MELA AND PLINY
The most complete and accurate summing up of the regional geography of
the ancients was the _Geography_ of Strabo, written in Greek probably
shortly before 17 A. D. But, as we have seen, this work was unknown to
our period of the Middle Ages, when men had to rely on Latin writers
like Pomponius Mela and Pliny, whose writings were of distinctly
inferior quality and included a great deal of fabulous and worthless
material. Devoid of that critical judgment which characterized
Eratosthenes and Strabo, Mela and Pliny were content to bring together
huge quantities of miscellaneous information, much of which was derived
from antiquated Greek sources. Mela, for example, closely follows
Herodotus’ description of the marvels of Asia, and Pliny retails many of
the fanciful legends of Ctesias and Megasthenes. Pliny’s contributions
to geography were somewhat more satisfactory than those of Mela; for he
added some details about Asia that had not been mentioned before,
especially in his description of Serica and of India and in his account
of the monsoons. On the other hand Mela was the first writer to mention
the Baltic Sea, or “Sinus Codanus,” which he described as a great gulf
full of islands.
THE “PERIPLUS OF THE ERYTHRAEAN SEA”
Nearly contemporaneously with Pliny there came an advance in the
knowledge of the Indian Ocean in the anonymous Greek _Periplus of the
Erythraean Sea_, a manual for sailors and merchants. This is of interest
because it gave indications of the existence of coasts and islands
beyond India, the islands of Chryse, the land of the Seres, and, at the
end of the earth to the east, a region of “Thin”—the first mention of
the word “China” in the West unless we take into account the “Sinim” of
Isaiah xlix, 12, which may or may not have referred to the great nation
of the Far East.
At about the same time, as we have already seen, the upper reaches of
the Nile, possibly as far as the great marshes of the White Nile in
about latitude 9° N., were explored by the expedition described by
Seneca and Pliny which Nero sent out to solve the age-long mystery’ of
the sources of the river of Egypt.[172] Pliny accordingly placed the
southern border of the _oikoumene_ some 7½° south of the position to
which Eratosthenes had assigned it, or at about latitude 4° N.[173]
LIMITS OF ANCIENT REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE ON THE SOUTH AND EAST
Before the days of Marinus of Tyre and Ptolemy the limits of
geographical knowledge were again much extended both southward and
eastward. The Ptolemaic map depicts a wealth of detail in the interior
of Africa, although we are unable to say with assurance what most of
this detail represents in reality.[174] Ptolemy certainly had some
knowledge of the great lakes and mountains of east-central Africa. The
snow-covered mountains which he placed at the sources of the Nile may be
associated with reports derived from the east coast of Africa, of Kenya,
Kilimanjaro, or possibly the Ruwenzori range.[175] Farther to the west
he describes a river, the Nigir, flowing from a region south of the
country of the Garamantes (probably modern Fezzan) to the westward into
a lake near the Atlantic. It seems altogether likely that by this river
he meant the Niger. Ptolemy mentions two expeditions that had been made
at an unknown period to the south from the land of the Garamantes, one
under Septimius Flaccus, who arrived at the country of the Ethiopians
after three months’ journey, and the other under Julius Maternus and the
king of the Garamantes, a four months’ journey to a country called
Agisymba, abounding in rhinoceroses. Ptolemy’s regional knowledge
certainly extended as far south as the equator, and he was well aware of
the fact that the equatorial zone is inhabited.
In the east, also, the Ptolemaic map reveals an advance in knowledge
over its predecessors. Chryse appears as a peninsula, and other islands
and coasts are shown that certainly indicate familiarity with the Malay
Peninsula and China, possibly also with Borneo and Java. We shall find,
however, that these valuable extensions of knowledge eastward and
southward were universally lost sight of in the West in the Middle Ages
and that cosmographers were united in placing India or Paradise as the
farthest end of the world in the one direction and either the shores of
the Ethiopian Ocean immediately beyond the Garamantes or the edge of the
uninhabitable zone at the tropic or not far beyond it, as the extreme
limit in the other.[176]
CHAPTER II
THE CONTRIBUTION OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM BEFORE 1100 A. D.
_INTRODUCTION_
The geographical lore of antiquity was carried over to the Western
Europe of the Crusading age by the Christians of the first eleven
centuries of our era and by the Moslems. In this chapter we shall study
the manner in which it was transmitted, transformed, and augmented by
Christian agencies.
SCRIPTURAL INFLUENCE ON EARLY MEDIEVAL GEOGRAPHY
Our primary problem is to examine the effects of Christianity on
geographical knowledge and belief, effects which sprang in large measure
from men’s varying attitudes toward the Bible. Some believed that
Scripture contains the absolute and only truth, but others were willing
to grant a partial authority to pagan teachings. The evolution of
science was profoundly modified by the conflicts between these divergent
tendencies of thought and by the efforts made to reconcile one with the
other. The general result spelled disaster to clear thinking in
geography. Moreover, many of the facts which the scholars of antiquity
had gathered together were wholly lost sight of in the confusion that
accompanied the disintegration of Roman civilization. The horizon of the
known world was narrowed from the wide bounds it had reached in the time
of Ptolemy.[177] New information acquired by exploration and travel was
ignored; and a host of legends, fancies, and false theories took the
place of the reasonably accurate body of information which the Greeks
and Romans had possessed.
IGNORANCE OF THE BEST WORK OF ANTIQUITY
During these long years Constantinople was the only great metropolis of
Christendom, the only center where the arts and sciences of civilization
were cultivated without interruption. We might expect, therefore, that
the Byzantine influence upon Western geography would be as marked as it
was upon Western art and architecture. But this was not the case.
However much the scholars of Constantinople may have been interested in
the historians of antiquity, they neglected the geographers; and the
scientific geography of the Greek Empire was at best a work of lifeless
compilation and commentary. Furthermore, knowledge of Greek was at no
time widespread in the West until the Renaissance, and the great
majority of Western scholars were profoundly ignorant of Byzantine
literature.[178] For their geography the men of the Occident turned
rather to the Bible and to the mediocre and worse than mediocre works of
an age of intellectual degeneracy. Solinus, Martianus Capella,
Macrobius, Aethicus of Istria, and Orosius became authorities from which
later writers derived their facts.
SCIENTIFIC STAGNATION DURING THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
The earlier Fathers of the Church, whatever may have been their merits
as theologians and dialecticians, were not distinguished by an ability
to understand the truths of natural science or to combat error in that
field. With the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms between the
sixth and eighth centuries came an epoch of mental stagnation in nearly
all realms of science and scholarship. Learning in general and geography
in particular suffered almost universal eclipse. Yet dark and ignorant
as the times may have been, the torch of civilization was kept burning,
if feebly, by a few Irish and English monks[179] and by contacts with
the Levant that were maintained through Greek, Asiatic, and Egyptian
traders in the principal cities of Europe.[180] If not much authentic
geographical information was contributed to Western society by these
agents of enlightenment, they served to disseminate certain geographical
legends and traditions destined to seize a strong hold on the Western
imagination.
In the days of Charlemagne came the new awakening sometimes known as the
“Carolingian Renaissance;” and, although tenth-century Europe relapsed
temporarily into a torpor, a current of theological interest and, with
it, interest in the natural sciences had by then once more set in—a
current which was to reach full flood at the time of the Crusades.
_SOURCES_
What works widely read during these centuries served as sources of
geographical information for the scholar of the era of the Crusades?
THE BIBLE
First and foremost we must place the Bible. Certainly in the pagan world
no one book had ever held the paramount position in the minds of
thoughtful men that Scripture held during the Middle Ages. As we saw in
the Introduction, the two great fountainheads of medieval geography were
the works of Greek philosophers and historians and the Bible. The
geographic material in Scripture is neither very extensive nor very
explicit in comparison with the contributions of such writers as Strabo
and Ptolemy to the geographic education of mankind, and yet so
tremendous was its authority that it tended at one time completely to
supersede classical teachings. Slight and confusing as may have been its
geographical references, the man of the Middle Ages attached to all of
them paramount importance. Simply compare a map of the world
reconstructed from Ptolemy’s data[181] with one of the crude Beatus
sketches reflecting Biblical beliefs,[182] and some of the changes which
the reading of Scripture had wrought become strikingly apparent.
Genesis was the most important book of the Bible from the geographical
point of view. Here we find, in the history of the Creation, texts which
were the starting point of many speculations about the origin of the
world and the elucidation of which was attempted in many a long
commentary on the Works of the Six Days.[183] Furthermore, in Genesis we
find the description of Paradise and its four rivers, which figured
largely on most medieval maps, and the account of the division of the
earth among the descendants of Noah, which lay at the bottom of the
crude ethnography of the Middle Ages. By some writers the description of
the tabernacle of the Lord and its furnishings[184] was regarded as an
allegorical account of the heavens and earth. Gog and Magog, described
in Genesis, Ezekiel, and Revelation, were prominent among the supposed
medieval tribes of Asia.[185] And in the apocryphal Acts of the
Apostles, which, though technically not a part of Scripture, were often
given the authority of Scriptural truth, we find accounts of the
preaching of the Gospel in far lands, India, Ethiopia, Babylonia.[186]
WRITINGS OF THE CHURCH FATHERS
These and many other incidental references gave rise to those relatively
restricted portions of the vast mass of patristic literature which deal
with geography, but which nevertheless inevitably marked out the
channels that certain elements of geographic thought and tradition were
destined to follow until the beginnings of the Renaissance. How these
passages were interpreted was, then, of great importance.[187]
INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE
According to the Church Fathers there were four methods of
interpretation; but for our purposes we need consider only two of these,
the literal and the allegorical.[188] Both led to pitfalls: the literal
interpretation tended to narrow the thought and make it correspond to
the exact words of a text; the allegorical, unjustifiably to expand the
meaning of simple statements.[189] To these dangers were added the
difficulties and contradictions due to the manifold authorship of
Scripture and to the misunderstanding of passages woefully faulty from
the textual point of view.
Yet the writers of the early Christian age were in most cases unaware of
these pitfalls and did not even know when they had fallen into them.
Faith in the truth of the Holy Word was usually sufficient to render men
supremely oblivious to conflicting and inconsistent assertions that
would otherwise have been revolting to reason. Tertullian said: “When we
believe, we desire nothing besides belief. For we believe this in the
beginning: that there is nought which we need to believe beyond
it.”[190]
CLASSICAL INFLUENCES
This faith in the truth of the written Word persisted throughout the
Middle Ages and down to our own day. During the earliest Christian
centuries the Bible was sometimes regarded as the only source of truth,
and the teachings of pagan writers were often looked upon with
abhorrence. Lactantius Firmianus (early fourth century), with an
inconsistency characteristic of many of the Church Fathers, made use in
his _Institutiones divinae_ of the classical authors themselves to prove
the supposed fallacies and evils of pagan science.[191] About the fourth
century men began to try to amplify and expound the fundamental Biblical
truths by appeal to the legacy of classical learning. To effect a
reconciliation and combination of Christian teachings with the
classics—especially the works of Plato and his followers—became one of
the main preoccupations of theologians. Platonic and Neoplatonic
influences made themselves felt in the thought of churchmen and
scholars, and among the most popular works of the entire period was
Chalcidius’ translation of the _Timaeus_ of Plato. Neoplatonism was
interwoven into the theological system of Augustine.[192] In the ninth
century it appears in the writings of the great Irish scholar, John Scot
Erigena.[193] In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Platonic
commentary by Macrobius on Cicero’s _Somnium Scipionis_ enjoyed an
immense vogue;[194] it was read by the mathematician and astronomer Pope
Sylvester II (Gerbert) at the end of the tenth century and on the
threshold of our period aroused the protests of the more old-fashioned
churchmen like Manegold, who objected to the seeds of heresy which it
contained.[195]
ENCYCLOPEDIC COMPILATIONS
For more strictly geographical, rather than “cosmogonic” or cosmological
material, we must turn to the encyclopedias rather than to the
thoughtful and speculative theological books of such men as Augustine.
Like the mighty volumes of Aristotle or the _Natural History_ of Pliny
these encyclopedias were attempts to encompass and to put in convenient
form the entire range of human knowledge. The most significant was the
_Etymologiae sive originum libri XX_ of Isidore of Seville (died 636
A. D.). This large compilation of miscellaneous information served as a
model of style and composition as well as a mine out of which later
writers dug their “facts.” For the geographical portions of the
_Etymologiae_, Isidore used the Bible and classical authorities alike;
he derived much from Orosius and Solinus; and, though it is doubtful
whether he was acquainted with Pliny at first hand,[196] he incorporated
in his book not a little Plinian material taken from Solinus. Isidore’s
method was followed, and much of his work copied, by the Irish and
English monastic encyclopedists of the eighth and ninth centuries. We
find a great deal from Isidore in the Venerable Bede’s (died 735 A. D.)
_De natura rerum_, in Raban Maur’s (776–856 A. D.) _De universo_, in
Dicuil’s _De mensura orbis terrae_ (825 A. D.),as well as in the _De
imagine mundi_ of our period. John Scot Erigena, the great Platonist of
the eighth century, stands out among his contemporaries as one of the
most original and critical scholars of the Middle Ages. The range of his
interests was very broad, and it seems probable that he understood
Greek. In his _De divisione naturae_, beside the Latin sources which
Isidore, Bede, and other encyclopedists had copied, he made use of the
_De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii_ of Martianus Capella and also of
various Greek works, including the _Geography_ of Ptolemy.[197]
Martianus Capella was held in high favor during this epoch, and his
works were commented upon by such men as Remy (Remigius) of Auxerre, the
master of Gerbert, and by Adam of Bremen.[198]
MISCELLANEOUS GEOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS
Closely akin to the geography of the encyclopedias, and not infrequently
borrowed from by the encyclopedists, are a number of miscellaneous
writings, which, though intrinsically of slight value, nevertheless
profoundly affected the development of geographical ideas. The most
important of these was the brief description of the countries of the
world forming the second chapter of the first book of Orosius’
_Historiae adversus paganos_ (fifth century). Enjoying great popularity,
as is testified by the existence of over two hundred manuscripts, this
was much plagiarized by later scholars: parts of it became incorporated
into Isidore’s _Etymologiae_; it was translated into Anglo-Saxon by King
Alfred the Great;[199] and during our period it was extensively quoted
and copied by nearly all who attempted to write on geographical
subjects. Another of this miscellaneous group is a seventh-century
cosmography in barbarous Latin, a pretended translation of a fictitious
work originally written in Greek by Aethicus of Istria.[200] We find set
forth here for the first time many of those marvels of Scythia and the
northern regions employed by later writers to add interest to their
pages. Priscian’s sixth-century translation of the geographical
poem[201] of Dionysius Periegetes was also extensively quoted. In the
middle of the seventh century an anonymous cleric of Ravenna wrote a
description of the world in five books. Though entirely the result of
compilation, this cosmography is in many respects the most elaborate and
interesting geographical book dating from the early medieval West. The
sources quoted and utilized are extremely varied, including the Bible,
“Jordanis” (Jornandes), Ptolemy, Orosius, Isidore, and possibly the
Tabula Peutingeriana, in addition to a number of Greek, Roman, and
Gothic writings otherwise unknown.[202] The main importance of the work
of the Ravenna geographer in relation to the geography of the Crusading
age lies in the fact that a large portion of it was included in a
compilation made by a certain Guido in 1119.[203]
LEGENDS
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries many legends were current in
the West, some of which contained geographical elements. Though we shall
have occasion to discuss this subject in greater detail later on, the
fact should be brought out here that the origin of most of these legends
may be traced far back into the centuries before the beginning of the
Crusading age.
Perhaps the most significant was the cycle of stories of the exploits
and adventures of Alexander the Great which originated in a Greek
history purporting to be the work of Callisthenes, a companion of the
Macedonian conqueror, and is hence known as the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_.
Written in Alexandria about the beginning of the third century after
Christ, this work subsequently became widely dispersed through the East,
where translations were made into Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and other
Oriental tongues. Put into Latin by Julius Valerius about the middle of
the fourth century, again translated in the tenth century,[204] given
further Latin vernacular renderings with many additions at later dates,
the Romance of Alexander had come, by the time of the Crusades, to form
the nucleus of a mass of stories and fables whose scenes were laid in
distant Asiatic countries. With it had been associated those mysterious
tales and prophecies of Gog and Magog whose origins were ultimately
connected with the Biblical revelations of the end of the world.[205]
Alexander the Great and Gog and Magog appear in the _Pseudo-Methodius_,
a book of prophecy which foretold the dread events of the Last Day.
Rendered into Latin at an early period from a Greco-Syrian original, the
_Pseudo-Methodius_ made a deep impression on the medieval mind,
especially at the time of the Mongol invasions in the early thirteenth
century.
Writers of our period like Gervase of Tilbury and Giraldus Cambrensis
also drew on the legends found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mythological
history of Britain, many of which had entered into the composition of
the Romance of King Arthur. Some of the latter were of slight
geographical interest.
Finally, the mythology and folklore of Ireland, with infusions from
classical and even Arabic literature, gave rise to the story of the
wanderings of St. Brandan[206] among mysterious islands in the Western
Ocean, an account of which we have in a manuscript dating back perhaps
to as early a period as the ninth century.[207]
BOOKS OF TRAVEL AND DESCRIPTION
The most important books describing actual travels and explorations
written between the conversion of Constantine and the Crusades were for
the most part in languages unknown to the men of the West—Greek and
Arabic. Zemarchus’ account of the tribes and trade of Central Asia[208]
and the _Meadows of Gold_ of Al-Masʿūdī, wherein were described things
personally seen by the travelers between Spain and Burma and south as
far as Madagascar, were treasures of geographical lore unknown to
Occidental readers of this age.
In Adam of Bremen’s _Gesta Hammenburgensis ecclesiae pontificum_,
written in the latter half of the eleventh century, we find a
description of the countries of the North. This was based on knowledge
acquired from the voyagings of the Northmen between the eighth and
eleventh centuries and, together with the Sagas, will be discussed in a
later chapter.
From the varied narratives of Christian pilgrims the Western student
might have gleaned some arid details about routes eastward and about the
topography of the Holy Land.
_THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE_
We saw in the first chapter that Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and most of
the other Greek philosophers had believed that the universe is eternal,
though subject to ever-recurring destructions by fire or water, followed
by “rebirths” (_palingeneses_).[209] Aristotle had attributed to the
stars control over all occurrences in the sphere below the moon; not
only over physical and material happenings, but over the mind and will.
He had believed that this was by virtue of the fact that the celestial
bodies are formed of a divine substance different from the four
corruptible elements which constitute the sublunar world. On this theory
of the stars had been built the “science” of astrology.
CHRISTIANITY OPPOSED TO BELIEF IN AN ETERNAL UNIVERSE
What could be more antagonistic to such ideas than the teachings of the
Bible? The antagonism, however, was not felt by all the Fathers of the
Church. The fascination of Platonism led many to seek for analogies
between Greek and Biblical cosmology. Clement of Alexandria, for
instance, thought that the destruction of the world by fire prophesied
in Deuteronomy (xxxii, 22) was one of those general burnings which would
occur when the stars find themselves in conjunction in Cancer.[210]
Indeed, it was a common belief, and one shared by Augustine, that the
Greeks themselves had actually derived the best of their theological
concepts from the Bible.[211] But the glaring contradictions between
Scriptural and classical cosmology could not be overlooked even by the
Augustinians, and classical theories of the periodicity of the universe
in general were vigorously combated. Christian monotheism could never be
reconciled with a fatalistic doctrine that attributed to the stars in
their control over the destinies of the world a quality that approached
the divine; and through Christian teachings the astrology built on this
doctrine was discredited and the stars stripped of their divinity.[212]
This alone was enough to strike a deathblow at the idea of the unvarying
periodicity of the universe under celestial controls; but other
arguments equally potent were leveled against it. Augustine refused to
believe that Christ had been incarnated an infinite number of times in
the past or was destined to suffer the Passion an infinite number of
times in the future.[213] Origen declared that another Adam, another
Moses, another Judas were unthinkable and asked how the belief in the
stellar control of man’s actions and volition could be reconciled with
the Christian doctrine of the freedom of the will.[214]
Perhaps the most fatal argument lay in the express contradiction, by the
Old Testament account of the Creation, of the Hellenic idea of an
eternally recurrent universe.[215] Neoplatonist and Peripatetic alike
had denied that there ever had been a first day or a first Great
Year.[216] Yet the words of Scripture are very definite and very
explicit: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Neither
Christian nor Jew could question the meaning of these words nor think
otherwise than that all things were created at a certain fixed and
calculable point in time or else, following Augustine, that the universe
and time were created simultaneously.
In spite of these fatal objections, neither the Great Year theory nor
astrology perished completely in the Middle Ages. Lingering on
underground, they gave an heretical and pagan tinge to the thought of
many a philosopher and theologian during our twelfth and thirteenth
centuries and thereafter.[217]
THE CREATION
Even the Scriptural history of the Creation did not wholly satisfy the
inquiring curiosity of theologians or philosophers. One of the primary
problems dealt with by scholars was the problem of the first chapters of
Genesis. This inquiry led into the domain of metaphysics and theology:
through it men hoped to arrive at an understanding of the nature of God
and of his relation to the universe, to time, and to man. It also led to
innumerable speculations about the actual manner in which the will of
God operated in fashioning the world and to discussions of this question
from very diverse points of view—literal, allegorical, transcendental.
Indeed, there were even a few writers, notably the Venerable Bede, who
went so far as to try to reconcile a physical conception of the
processes of creation with the account given in the Bible[218] and who
thus prepared the way for more rationalistic studies of the Works of the
Six Days in the centuries which were to follow.
_SHAPE AND SIZE OF THE EARTH_
EARLY CHRISTIAN BELIEF IN A FLAT EARTH
Prevalent among most peoples in an early stage of their intellectual
development is the natural and obvious theory that the earth is a flat
disk covered by a dome-shaped heaven. This view was held by the
Assyrians, Chaldeans, Egyptians,[219] and, as we saw in the first
chapter, by the early Greeks; it was long believed by the Jews[220] and
is found in the Koran;[221] it was undoubtedly reflected in the words of
Scripture, although what is said there on the subject is by no means
definite and occurs in connections wholly incidental to other subjects.
We read in Isaiah (xl, 22):[222] “It is he that sitteth upon the circle
of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that
stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent
to dwell in.”
This can hardly be called an exhaustive dissertation on the shape of the
universe, yet on it and on other scraps even less detailed were erected
the medieval arguments in favor of the flatness of the earth, a firm
belief in which was probably held by the majority of the earlier Church
Fathers, especially those of the East.[223] Not only were the ancient
proofs of sphericity overlooked; but such ideas were regarded as
heretical, and elaborate new systems were raised on the weak foundations
of littleunderstood Scriptural texts. The most remarkable theories of
the universe, however, were devised by the Greek fathers Patricius,
Cosmas Indicopleustes, and Severian of Gabala.[224] They remained
unknown to the men of the Western world and consequently do not concern
us. The Latin father Lactantius contented himself with endeavoring to
prove by pseudo-scientific means that the earth is not a sphere; a
spherical heaven, he argued, does not necessitate a spherical earth; and
the idea of the possibility of antipodes was to him thoroughly
absurd.[225]
EARLY CHRISTIAN BELIEF IN A SPHERICAL EARTH
On the other hand, the theory that the earth is a globe never, perhaps,
suffered complete eclipse.[226] Augustine was non-committal in this
regard, evidently troubled and puzzled by contradictory statements in
the Bible and in the writings of classical astronomers.[227] Isidore
quotes writers of antiquity who favored a spherical earth, though if we
interpret correctly texts in the _De natura rerum_[228] and
_Etymologiae_[229] we are impelled to think that he himself conceived of
a flat earth surrounded by a spherical heaven. The Venerable Bede, on
the contrary, did not mince matters; he stoutly maintained that the
earth is a sphere and cited as proof the fact that stars visible in one
latitude are invisible in another.[230] After the so-called Carolingian
Renaissance the world of thinkers seems gradually to have outgrown the
primitive notion of a flat earth. To the _De nuptiis Philologiae et
Mercurii_ of the Neoplatonist Martianus Capella may be ascribed much of
the credit for keeping alive the doctrine of sphericity during these
centuries. This immensely popular work, with its condensed argument in
favor of a globe-shaped earth, doubtless contributed to the formation of
the opinions of men like John Scot Erigena, Gerbert, Hermann of
Reichenau, and Adam of Bremen, adherents to the only theory compatible
with any observation better than the most superficial and any reasoning
better than the most trivial.[231]
SIZE OF THE EARTH
With the reëstablishment of the belief in a spherical earth we find men
again making conjectures about its size, though there is no evidence
that attempts were made in Christendom (as in the Moslem world) actually
to measure the circumference. In the ninth century John Scot Erigena
gave, from Martianus Capella, a full explanation of the famous
Eratosthenic measurements.[232] An unknown author of the ninth or tenth
century of a work on geometry often attributed to Gerbert also
explained, from Capella, Eratosthenes’ method of measuring a
degree;[233] and the eleventh-century mathematician Hermann of
Reichenau[234] had learned (possibly from Macrobius) how the length of a
degree could be ascertained from observations of the pole star. His
result, 700 stades, was the same as that of Eratosthenes, a fact which
alone indicates that he did not himself undertake any measurement. Thus
we see that as a result of the Platonic movement between the ninth and
eleventh centuries knowledge of one of the most magnificent achievements
of classical geographical investigation had been revived.
_ZONES AND THE ANTIPODES_
ZONES
Most Greek thinkers had agreed in dividing the earth’s surface into five
zones, though they differed as to whether or not the equatorial zone was
habitable. By Ptolemy’s time the discovery of countries in the heart of
the tropical regions and possibly beyond had exploded the old idea of an
equatorial ocean and fiery belt around the middle of the globe.
Unfortunately the broader regional knowledge which had been at Ptolemy’s
disposal was lost in the Middle Ages, and older views reappeared. The
maps of the period show us the encircling ocean in which Homer had
believed, and nearly all writers of the patristic age thought that
Africa has a very limited extension toward the south.[235] Beyond
Africa, they said, lies an equatorial ocean and an equatorial zone
uninhabitable on account of heat.
THE ANTIPODES
Whether or not there were other regions of the world on the other side
of this equatorial zone or beyond the waters of the western ocean, and
whether or not such regions were inhabited, were questions which piqued
the curiosity of the Church Fathers. The possibility of antipodal
regions—perhaps continents—must, in the logic of things, have been
admitted by those who were ready to believe that the earth is a sphere;
and even those who were not believers in the sphericity of the earth
were prone to discuss the possibility of a fourth, or austral,
continent, usually called by analogy the region of the antipodes, lying
immediately south of the equatorial zone.[236] Bede adopted Crates’
theory of two oceans encircling the earth, east and west, and north and
south, dividing its surface into four temperate habitable areas; and
after the interest in Macrobius had become widespread in the ninth
century this theory undoubtedly must have been generally familiar if not
generally accepted.
Whether or not the antipodes were actually inhabited was another matter.
Lactantius, who thought that the world is flat, was a determined
opponent of the possibility of inhabited antipodes for physical reasons.
His arguments were obvious but seem puerile to us: “Is there any one so
stupid,” he asked, “as to believe that there are men whose feet are
higher than their heads?”[237] It puzzled him to explain how trees could
grow upside down or rain fall upward. More serious were the religious
objections to the possibility of inhabited regions in other parts of the
earth, for this was as antagonistic to the words of the Bible as the
Great Year theory and antagonistic in much the same way. The theory of
the antipodes, as generally presented in association with the theory of
a fiery equatorial zone, presupposed the existence of other races of men
absolutely cut off from our race. How, then, inquired Augustine,[238]
could such races be descended from Adam, who, the Bible tells us, was
the forefather of all men? How could Christ have died for antipodeans?
How could the Gospel have been preached in “the four corners of the
earth” if half the earth is cut off from our quarter by tropical fires?
How could the text of Romans x, 18, be true which says: “Yes, verily,
their sound went forth over all the earth, and their words unto the ends
of the whole world”? Isidore[239] and Bede[240] categorically denied the
possibility of inhabitants of antipodal regions. Their authority,
together with the strength of their arguments and the arguments of
Augustine, were sufficient to arouse suspicions of the man who ventured
to believe in this doctrine. Such a man must certainly be a heretic. A
tenth-century interpreter of Boëthius wrote: “God forbid that anybody
think we accept the stories of antipodes, which are in every way
contradictory to Christian faith.”[241] In the middle of the eighth
century the question reached a head in a controversy between St.
Boniface and a certain Virgil, bishop of Salzburg.[242] The latter, who
doubtless thought that there were antipodal regions if not antipodeans,
was accused by Pope Zachary, to whom St. Boniface had complained, of
holding “perverse and iniquitous doctrines regarding another world.”
Unfortunately we do not possess Virgil’s own account of the incident and
are unable to tell exactly what these doctrines were.[243] At all
events, belief in antipodes contained the seeds of bitter religious
quarrels and was one of the charges brought against Cecco d’Ascoli, who,
after our period, was burnt to death for holding this and other damning
convictions.[244]
_PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY_
In the field of physical geography slight was the contribution of the
early medieval writers.
METEOROLOGY
Classical ideas about the atmosphere were repeated and garbled,[245]
little progress was made in the development of earlier theories, and
little new was added but superstition. Isidore, followed closely by Bede
and Raban Maur, was the primary authority in matters of
meteorology.[246] The ancient view persisted, that the polar regions
were uninhabitable on account of cold and the equatorial zone on account
of heat. The sort of popular meteorology that prevailed is illustrated
in an early ninth-century treatise written by Agobard, archbishop of
Lyons, and entitled _Against the Absurd Opinion of the Vulgar Touching
Hail and Thunder_.[247] This was an attack on charlatans who claimed
that they could control the weather, produce storms and hail at will,
and who asserted that there is a region, called Magonia, “whence ships
come in the clouds” (Poole’s translation).[248] Natural enough as it is
for the uneducated in any age to believe such things,[249] the
significant fact here is that Agobard did not attempt to invoke
scientific arguments to confute the claims of the impostors. Poole says:
“He disdained to allege scientific reasons to overthrow what was in its
nature unreasonable. He could only fall back on ... broad religious
principles. He argued that God’s relation to nature is immediate and
least of all conditioned by the artifices of men.”[250]
THE WATERS ABOVE THE FIRMAMENT
One distinctly new idea, however, was introduced by the Bible into the
circle of what we may, with a slight stretch of the imagination,
consider the medieval physical geography of the water element. This new
conception tended to revolutionize theories based on classical physics
and to cause much confusion and doubt in the minds of the Fathers of the
Church. The orthodox classical physicists had held that the elements
normally form four concentric spheres surrounding the center of the
universe, in order, from the heaviest to the lightest, earth, water,
air, fire. Genesis (i, 6–7) states that “God said: Let there be a
firmament made amidst the waters; and let it divide the waters from the
waters. And God made a firmament, and divided the waters that were under
the firmament from those that were above the firmament.” Though belief
in waters above the firmament is found in the cosmologies of the ancient
Egyptians and Persians and is there closely associated with belief in a
disk-shaped earth covered by a dome-shaped heaven, water in such a
position was very far removed from its proper place in the scheme of
nature of Aristotle and his followers. The Church Fathers, nevertheless,
were unwilling to doubt the actual existence of these waters, and in
general they accepted the text literally.[251] Gregory of Nyssa even
went to the extent of imagining mountains on the back side of the
firmament and that the waters were contained in the hollows and valleys
between them.[252] Others thought the waters were in the form of clouds
or fine drops. Jerome, Josephus, Ambrose, and Bede all held that the
waters were crystal.[253] Augustine was non-committal, though he
gathered together the statements of many who had expressed concrete
views on the subject.[254] Ambrose argued from analogy that if the earth
can hang in the center of the universe without support so also can the
waters hang unsupported above the firmament.[255]
The purpose which the waters were to serve was also a thorny problem.
Ambrose said they were intended to cool the axis of the universe,
overheated by its perpetual rotation;[256] others thought that they were
meant to screen the earth from the fiery heat generated by stars and
sun;[257] others that they were stored up as a reservoir to supply
hydraulic resources at the time of the Great Flood.[258]
THE CONGREGATION OF THE WATERS
According to the description of the Creation in the book of Genesis “God
also said: Let the waters that are under the heaven be gathered together
into one place; and let the dry land appear. And it was so done.” The
difficulty in explaining this text was to account for what became of
these waters. Great as are the seas, they were not considered large
enough to absorb all the primordial waters, and consequently arguments
were elaborated in favor of the existence of vast reservoirs within the
earth. Bede, for example, was of the opinion that the waters under the
firmament at first took the form of clouds and that when they became
condensed and fell as rain the water was sequestered in caverns of the
earth’s interior.[259]
Of even greater significance was the assertion that God had gathered the
waters below the firmament into “one” place. This could mean nothing
else than that all the waters of the earth, whether in subterranean
reservoirs, oceans, lakes, rivers, or in the atmosphere, must be
connected and must constitute a unit. Probably with this idea in mind
Isidore wrote: “The abyss is the deep water which cannot be penetrated,
whether caverns of unknown waters from which springs and rivers flow, or
the waters which pass secretly beneath, whence it is called abyss. _For
all waters or torrents return by secret channels to the abyss which is
their source_” (Brehaut’s translation).[260] Certainly most medieval
theorizing about the origin of springs and rivers[261] was dependent on
the doctrine of a “congregation of waters.” In further elaboration of
this doctrine it was often said that the water of the sea found its way
by underground channels to the Garden of Eden and returned again to the
sea, flowing first through a subterranean passage and thence through the
four rivers of Paradise. Augustine maintained that the words of Genesis
(ii, 6), “But a spring rose out of the earth, watering all the surface
of the earth,” mean that all the waters of the earth come from a single
source.[262] Rainfall as a source of springs and well water, however,
was also recognized,[263] and Gregory of Nyssa accepted and elaborated
the classical theory of the transmutation of earth into water.[264]
THE NILE FLOOD
The strange phenomenon of the flood of the Nile brought forth no new
theories during the Middle Ages, and Isidore, whose words were most
often copied, reverted to the explanation of Thales that the flood was
caused by the building of sand bars at the mouth of the river during the
summer when the etesian winds blow.[265]
THE EARTH UPON THE WATERS
Another Biblical phrase that provoked discussion of the problems of
hydrography was in the one hundred and thirty-fifth Psalm (Vulgate):
“Praise ye the Lord of lords, ... Who established the earth above the
waters” (_qui firmavit terram super aquas_). Many writers took this
literally and thought of the earth as actually floating upon water, held
up by the arbitrary force of God’s will. A few, despite the explicit
words of Scripture, were inclined to doubt; they either explained the
phrase by urging that the word “above” (_super_) should be taken to mean
“beside” or argued that all that was meant here was that the land rises
to a higher level than the sea.[266] The difficulty was also avoided, as
was frequently the case with puzzling Scriptural passages, by saying
that the passage was allegorical and should not be taken literally.
THE SEA
There is not much to record about the development of knowledge or theory
concerning the physical geography of the sea. The ancients themselves
had known little enough about the sea to pass on to an age when maritime
ventures were almost unknown—to learned men at least—and certainly we
cannot find a great deal of marine lore in the Bible. Occasional
glimmerings of intelligence, however, break the darkness of the times in
this respect. Dicuil, for instance, in his _De mensura orbis terrae_,
questions Fabianus’ statement that the sea is at most fifteen stades
deep. “Has Fabianus measured its depth?” he asks; “if not, how can we
believe what he says?”[267] Bede understood the difference in density
between fresh and salt water; and in accord with Isidore and others he
explained why the seas do not overflow their banks by pointing out that
water is constantly being removed into the air and into the land.[268]
Though the Church Fathers stood out valiantly against those teachings of
astrology which tended to exaggerate the powers of the heavenly bodies,
they were none the less ready to admit that the moon may exert a
physical attraction on the ocean and in that way may produce the tides.
Basil even explained that there is a corresponding lunar control over
the atmosphere.[269] Augustine and Ambrose believed that the moon causes
tides;[270] and a certain Augustine, writing in the seventh century,
described the spring and neap tides and tried to show how they follow
not only the moon’s phases but also the equinoxes and solstices. He made
a serious mistake by placing spring tides at the time of the
solstices.[271] Bede corrected this in his _De natura rerum_, apparently
from personal observation—a rare thing at this time—and noted a number
of tidal peculiarities which had not been commented on before.[272]
Not all writers attributed the action of the tides to the moon. Most
significant among the opponents of the lunar theory was Paul the Deacon
(720–780 A. D.). In his _Historia gentis Langobardorum_ he
described[273] the maelstrom on the coast of Norway. He asserted that
this gigantic whirlpool and another one, which he placed off the coast
of Ireland, made the tides by sucking in and spewing out vast quantities
of water twice a day. With the fashion of reading Macrobius a theory
became popular that the flood and ebb result from the impact of opposing
ocean currents; and in the twelfth century, as we shall see later,[274]
William of Conches and Giraldus Cambrensis made curious combinations of
the theories of Paul the Deacon with those of Macrobius.
THE LANDS
There was no science of geomorphology in the Middle Ages. The medieval
mind interested itself for the most part only in those natural phenomena
that force themselves upon the attention or seem out of the ordinary.
Commonplace and static elements of the earth’s surface such as hills,
valleys, and plains were taken more or less for granted by those who
sought to explain the secrets of Nature. In the geographical writings of
the period, on the other hand, not a little space was devoted to
volcanoes and earthquakes. Their violent and spectacular qualities have
made these the object of interest throughout all time. And yet in the
early Middle Ages there seems to have been no originality in observing
them or in speculating about their causes. Men were content uncritically
to accept what classical writers had said.[275] Isidore, for example,
following Aristotle and Pliny, wrote that volcanoes were burning
mountains rather than vents for deep-seated terrestrial fires and that
the whole of Sicily was filled with seams of sulphur and bitumen,
readily kindled by the winds into flame. The eruption of Etna, more
especially, was caused by winds driven down into the interior of the
earth by the waves of the Strait of Messina.[276] This theory of
vulcanism was reiterated by Bede, Dicuil, and the multitude who copied
from Isidore’s work. Other writers explained volcanoes as the outlets of
profound subterranean fires,[277] a view fostered by Plato and one that
gained authority in the minds of many of the Church Fathers as well as
of laymen through the widespread belief, derived from classical
mythology[278] as well as from the Bible, that the heart of the earth is
the seat of Hell.[279]
_THE MEDIEVAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS LANDSCAPE AND SCENERY BEFORE 1100 A. D._
Man has been accustomed to look upon the geographical elements of the
earth’s surface from widely different points of view. So far we have
been concerned with the record of his scientific or pseudo-scientific
investigations of these elements. Let us now turn for a moment to his
emotional attitude toward them. The impression made upon the heart and
imagination by the aspects of countryside, mountain, and sea has
constantly changed with changing religious and philosophical beliefs and
with shifting social régimes. We may estimate the character of these
changes in a multitude of descriptions of landscape and scenery
scattered throughout the whole realm of literature.
ESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF NATURE IN ANTIQUITY
It is probably safe to assert that there prevailed in antiquity a
genuinely esthetic appreciation of nature. If the Greeks seldom made
conscious efforts to paint word pictures of the form and colors of their
land, their poetry and drama none the less show in many a turn of phrase
that they were alive to its beauty. The Romans rejoiced in the tranquil
serenity of mild and cultivated landscapes as an escape from the welter
of city life.[280] Perhaps the Roman attitude toward nature was tinged
with pessimism, with regret that beauty is transient, that man’s span of
life is short, and that all too soon we must cease to find solace in the
loveliness of the world.[281] With the crystallization of Latin literary
forms there appeared a stereotyped conception of the ideal landscape in
which the essential elements were always the same: a rich meadow shaded
by laurels, myrtles, and elms and watered by a murmuring stream, clear
and cool; a placid spot where eternal spring prevails and where rain and
storm, frost and heat are alike unknown.[282] This formula was used by
the Latin poets in describing the blessed Isles of the Hesperides and
the Elysian Fields; ultimately it was employed by the Christians in
picturing the terrestrial Paradise.[283]
EARLY CHRISTIAN ATTITUDE TOWARDS NATURE
A new and different spirit pervaded the early Christian’s attitude
towards nature. His thoughts were turned to the world to come and to the
glory of the Kingdom of God.
The more austere and ascetic of the Church Fathers believed that, as it
is sinful to take pleasure in things of this world, so also sin must
lurk in the breast of him who derives personal and esthetic satisfaction
from scenes of natural beauty. This is one of the reasons why hermits
retired to deserts and rugged mountains, where they might no longer be
tempted either by things of the flesh or by the charm of green and level
meadows or of rolling, cultivated hillsides. Among some of the hermits
there arose an actual love for the grandeur of the very wildernesses to
which they betook themselves. Jerome regarded the desert as a place of
beauty: in deep valleys, rough mountains, and steep rocks he saw not
only negative excellence, in so far as these were free from the
pollutions of “civilization,” but also a congenial background for his
work and thought.[284] The eremitic movement was primarily
characteristic of the Eastern branch of Christendom, but it extended to
the West, where its influence was powerful during the early centuries of
our era.[285] Nevertheless an ascetic disdain for the haunts of man and
glorification of the wilderness was, at best, alien to Western modes of
thought. The normal habit of the Occidental Christian was, rather, to
take joy in the immensity of earth and heaven and in the marvelous
detail of the created world because these stand as manifestations of the
unity and glory of the Deity, symbols of the omnipotence of God.
REVIVAL OF ESTHETIC FEELING IN THE MIDDLE AGES
On the other hand, pleasure in a landscape by reason of the merely
personal satisfaction it affords the beholder was exceptional before the
time of the Renaissance. But, though exceptional, an esthetic as
distinguished from a religious or transcendental love of nature was by
no means wholly lacking. Certainly from the eleventh century onward we
find many poems and letters that testify to the existence of a truly
pagan enjoyment of scenery. Whether this can be said of the earlier
periods is more doubtful. Ganzenmüller, whose important study of the
feeling for nature in the Middle Ages we are following in this
connection, maintains that the term “Carolingian Renaissance” is more or
less of a misnomer because under Charlemagne the classical spirit was
lacking, even though classical forms of expression were revived; that
the classical influence on descriptions of landscape was but rarely
felt; and that we find at that time nothing of the subjective and
pessimistic attitude of the Roman poets. In short Ganzenmüller concludes
that the feeling for nature was altogether Christian.[286]
However this may be, there is no question that throughout a century or
more before the age of the Crusades individuals not only among the laity
but even in the monasteries were openly writing poems of earthly love
and openly lauding the beauty of natural scenery in more or less the
vein of the Romans.[287] This was but one aspect of the worldly tendency
in Church and society which brought about the Cluniac and later
movements of reform.
_MATHEMATICAL GEOGRAPHY AND CARTOGRAPHY_
MATHEMATICAL GEOGRAPHY
We may pass over the mathematical geography of the Christian period
before 1100; no discoveries were made, nor were there any attempts to
apply the results of older discoveries. Gerbert, indeed, in his _Liber
de astrolabio_, gives a few details of the division of the earth’s
surface into seven climates, details which he had probably derived
entirely from Latin authors like Pliny and Martianus Capella.[288]
Though Gerbert owed much to Arabic writers, he did not draw from them
the semi-geographical portions of his writings. Certainly in the strict
application of mathematical geography to the determination of
positions—latitudes and longitudes—nothing was done in the West. Ptolemy
was forgotten, and the labors of the Arabs in this field were as yet
unknown.
MAPS
Though very few maps dating from these centuries are actually in
existence, maps were then made in no inconsiderable numbers.[289] Three
circumstances convince us of the truth of this statement. In the first
place, we find frequent references to lost maps in contemporary
literature. Then again, many of the cosmographies and encyclopedic
works, such as those of Orosius, Isidore, and the Ravenna geographer,
show undeniable indications that they were either compiled from maps or
else were accompanied by maps as illustrations. And, finally, most of
the examples of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century cartography can
only have been derived from older models, some of which in the final
analysis may well have been inspired by the cartography of the period of
the Roman Empire.[290]
With a few exceptions[291] the existing specimens of the cartography of
Western Europe dating from before 1100 may be classified as regards form
in four more or less well-defined groups, representatives of each of
which are also found from the Crusading age and even later. The
character of the maps was largely determined by the purposes intended to
be served.[292]
_Macrobian Maps_
The first group consists of outline diagrams illustrating Macrobius’
division of the earth’s surface into zones and is to be found in
manuscripts from as early as the ninth century. This group cannot
properly be said to include true maps.[293]
_T-O Maps_
The second group is made up of simple representations of the three
continents, often called T-O maps (Figs. 1a-1b). On these the known
world is shown as a circle within which a T is drawn dividing it into
three parts. East is at the top. The upper compartment, that above the
crossbar of the T, represents Asia; the two lower compartments, Europe
and Africa. The surface is usually unadorned with vignettes or
conventional symbols of any sort, and the legends are reduced to a
minimum. It seems likely that Augustine had before him such a diagram
when he wrote a passage in _De civitate dei_ which describes to
perfection the division of the known world as the T-O maps show it, and
it may well be that the map which Orosius must have used when he wrote
the geographical chapter of his history was a modified example of the
same type. An extremely large number of T-O maps are to be found in
codices dating from the eighth century onward, illustrating the writings
of Isidore, Bede, Raban Maur, and others.[294]
[Illustration:
FIG. 1—Types of T-O and Sallust maps. (Figs. 1a and 1b from Santarem,
_Essai_, 1849–1852, atlas, vol. i, pl. 5, figs. 5 and 1; Fig. 1c
from Miller, _Mappaemundi_, vol. iii, 1895, fig. 43.)
]
_Sallust Maps_
Closely akin to the T-O maps, but somewhat more elaborate, are the
sketches of the third group (Fig. 1c). These accompany manuscripts of
Sallust’s works and may have been drawn to illustrate a passage in
Sallust’s _De bello Jugurthino_ describing briefly the countries of the
known world. The T-O form is carefully followed, but legends and
pictures add a touch of life. The oldest example (tenth century) is
strictly classical and fails to show Jerusalem, a stock feature in most
medieval maps. Later specimens reveal the influence of the Christian
tradition, and upon them Jerusalem figures as an immense church or
castle.[295]
_Beatus Maps_
The fourth group is by far the most interesting. In the latter part of
the eighth century a priest, Beatus, of the Benedictine abbey of
Valcavado in northern Spain wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse,
destined to become very popular in later times. To demonstrate
graphically the division of the world among the twelve apostles, which
is spoken of in a passage included in this commentary, either Beatus or
one of his contemporaries drew a map. Though the original of this is not
now extant, no less than ten subsequent maps for which it served as a
model are preserved in manuscripts of the tenth century and later. The
researches of Miller[296] have shown that three of these ten were
probably derived from a fairly full and faithful copy of the original,
but that the others represent merely a generalized outline. The best
example, the so-called St. Sever map, dating from about 1050 and now in
the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, displays an immense wealth of
detail, legends, vignettes, and pictures of all sorts (Fig. 2).
[Illustration:
FIG. 2—St. Sever Beatus map. In the original, east is, as here, at the
top. The geographical features (e. g. the Mediterranean, the Nile
and its delta) may be recognized more readily, however, by viewing
the map with north at the top. (From Miller, _Mappaemundi_, vol. i,
1895, colored reproduction in pocket.)
]
_REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY_
LIMITED GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
In the first chapter, under the heading “The Expansion of Regional
Knowledge,” was discussed the expansion of actual knowledge of the
earth’s surface, and a careful distinction was made between that section
dealing with actual knowledge and the preceding sections of the chapter
which had been concerned with theories. We cannot make this distinction
in speaking of the regional geographical ideas of the early Christian
centuries, for fact and fancy were irrevocably blended. In the Greek and
Roman age knowledge of the earth’s surface was widened by exploration,
trade, wars, and conquests; but in the early Middle Ages the limits of
the accurately known world contracted, and the ocean, Asia, Africa, even
Western Europe itself, became domains of legend and fable.
This does not mean that exploration, trade, and conquest did not
progress. Commerce in silk flourished in the sixth century between
Byzantium and the nations of Central Asia, and much knowledge of those
distant countries was thereby acquired in the Greek world.[297] Between
the eighth and the beginning of the twelfth centuries the Northmen had
penetrated in their open ships to the innermost recesses of the White
Sea[298] and westward as far as Iceland, Greenland, and the shores of
America. Throughout the Middle Ages there was an intermittent flow of
pilgrims to and from the Holy Land. At a very early date the Italian
cities began to lay the foundations of their great Levantine trade. Why,
then, was geographic knowledge not enriched by all this activity? There
were many reasons. The spirit of the age turned the scholar’s mind
almost exclusively to religious and theological matters. He felt no
particular interest in voyages unless they had some religious
significance. He cared nothing about the exploits of piratical Norse
rovers in subarctic seas or about things that Byzantine traders and
diplomats might have seen in the heart of Asia. Even if he could have
read the languages in which the stories of these discoveries were
written, he probably would not have troubled to investigate them. The
pilgrim, forcing his way through hardships and privations to the Holy
Land, was certainly stirred by no interest in the geography of the lands
and seas through which he passed beyond that of finding the best and
quickest practicable route. Once arrived in Palestine, he may have felt
some slight enthusiasm about studying out the topography of the sacred
places. On the whole, however, pilgrim narratives added as little to
Western geographical knowledge of the East as American soldiers’ letters
during the World War added to our geographical knowledge of France.
MEDIEVAL CONCEPTION OF THE KNOWN WORLD
The usual medieval conception of the known world was of a circular or
oval area, divided into three continents. Asia occupied the eastern
portion and was cut off from Europe by the Tanaïs (Don) and from Africa
by the Nile. The Mediterranean, piercing the center of the western
section, separated Europe from Africa. The relative size of the
continents was variously represented; Asia was usually thought to be
much larger than either Europe or Africa. The two latter were believed
to be of about the same size.
PARADISE
One of the principal Biblical contributions to medieval geography was
Paradise with its four rivers.[299] In the maps of the period, the
garden is drawn at the easternmost limits of the world in accordance
with the words of Genesis (ii, 8), “And the Lord God planted a garden
eastward in Eden.”[300] Martianus Capella, however, by following a Greek
tradition which placed the Hyperboreans in a favored and delightful
country of the far north, caused certain of the Church Fathers to look
northward for Paradise.[301] Modeling their account of Paradise on the
Biblical description and on the ideal landscape of the Roman poets,[302]
the men of the Middle Ages conceived of the garden as a deliciously cool
and shady meadow, made beautiful with flowers of many sorts, watered by
murmuring streams, and redolent with sweet odors.[303] Many theories
were elaborated concerning the surroundings of the forbidden
garden.[304] In order that men be kept out, an impassable barrier must
have encircled it. Some believed that this was an immense wall; others,
a ring of flames; others, mountains and deserts. Some placed Paradise on
an island in the ocean; Cosmas removed it beyond the ocean to the shores
of unknown lands in the east; Augustine, Origen, and Philo regarded it
as allegorical and not real at all.
RIVERS OF PARADISE
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it
was parted, and became into four heads” (Gen. ii, 10).[305] These four
heads were the sources of the four rivers of Paradise: the Pison, later
thought to be either the Indus, the Ganges,[306] or, sometimes, the
Danube; the Gihon, or Nile; the Hiddekel, or Tigris; and, finally, the
Euphrates. It was a little difficult for some persons at first sight to
understand how all these rivers, whose upper reaches were known in
reality to be very far apart, could actually spring from one
source.[307] Many cosmographers were even tempted to place Paradise in
Armenia, near the known sources of the Euphrates and Tigris. In general
an appeal to the simple theory of the existence of subterranean
watercourses sufficed to solve the problem and to explain the otherwise
absurd belief that the Nile had its headwaters in the far east beyond
the Red Sea.
ASIA
_Gog and Magog_
Asia was frequently made the scene of Paradise and of the creation of
man. Here, too, medieval tradition placed Gog and Magog,[308] whose
advent at the Last Day should bring destruction to the world. There are
three different Biblical accounts of Gog and Magog. On the basis of
Genesis (x, 2), which makes Magog a son of Japhet, a Jewish tradition
conceived of this shadowy and fearful personage as the progenitor of the
Scythian tribes. In the book of Ezekiel (xxxviii, xxxix) we read the
prophecy of the ravages and destructions of “Gog, the land of Magog, the
chief prince of Meshech and Tubal,” who should issue with his terrible
hordes from the north and bring death and devastation to the lands of
Israel. Finally, in Revelation (xx, 7) we are warned that “when the
thousand years shall be finished, Satan shall be loosed out of his
prison, and shall go forth and seduce the nations which are over the
four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, and shall gather them
together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea.” Here “Gog
and Magog” are not the names either of men or of a country, but rather
of savage tribes. Most medieval writers, following the Jewish tradition,
thought of these tribes as Scythian barbarians of the north—so Josephus,
Jerome, and Isidore, though Eusebius believed that they were Kelts, and
Jerome referred to a certain history which identified them with the
Goths; one chronicle even made the Aquitanians their descendants.[309]
The apocalyptic story of Gog and Magog spread widely in the Orient as
well as through the Christian world. In the East, curiously enough, it
was made a part of the Romance of Alexander. We read in the Koran[310]
that the “two-horned Alexander” built a great wall of bronze and pitch
and brimstone, behind which he enclosed the wild peoples of Yajūj and
Mājūj (Gog and Magog) until they should break forth on the day of the
Last Judgment. This story was probably told for the first time in
connection with Alexander the Great by Procopius in his _De bello
Persico_.[311] It formed one of the most important parts of the
immensely popular work, the _Pseudo-Methodius_, which foretold with
considerable detail the events of the Last Day.[312] It entered into
later versions of the Romance of Alexander itself, although it formed no
part of the versions of the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_ or of the translation
of Julius Valerius.[313]
_Romance of Alexander the Great_
The Romance of Alexander, one of the most widely known of the various
cycles of medieval legend, deserves some comment here because the scene
of most of Alexander’s exploits was laid in Asia. The Romance contains
some fantastic geographical details concerning the East in general and
India in particular. The classical stories of the monsters and marvels
of these mysterious lands are here preserved in attractive form. We meet
with Amazons and mermaids, griffons, and men who live on the smell of
spices. We have a text of correspondence between Alexander and the
Brahmin king, Dindimus, in which the latter explains to the Macedonian
conqueror his religion and the simple habits of the Brahmins.[314]
_St. Thomas in India_
India was also supposed in the Middle Ages to have been visited by St.
Thomas, the Apostle,[315] who was said to have built therein a great
castle for King Gundophorus. Though little geography is to be gleaned
from the apocryphal legends of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew in India
and of St. Matthew in Ethiopia, they served to carry the reader’s mind
to distant corners of the earth and are of passing interest to us
because certain elements of the story of St. Thomas became part of the
fabric of the great twelfth-century legend of Prester John. If we are to
believe the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_,[316] an Englishman visited India in
the ninth century, for we are told that King Alfred sent a certain
Sighelm to the shrines of Saints Thomas and Bartholomew in A. D. 883.
AFRICA
Africa was utterly neglected. Unlike Asia, it did not become the habitat
of legend and fable. Supposedly of small extent and made up mostly of
desert, it failed to arouse much interest until long after our period.
The universal testimony of cosmographer and cartographer during the
entire age under consideration was to the effect that the African
continent stops well to the north of the equator at the borders of the
sea.
EUROPE
Europe was of course less a land of romance than Asia, but geographical
ideas concerning it were crude enough, as a glance at any contemporary
map or at the brief and dry catalogue of facts given in the encyclopedic
works will show. Isidore, Orosius, and Bede added little to what
classical writers had already said. Local mythology tended to creep into
the geographical conceptions of the best-known countries and to blur
what had been in classical times fairly distinct and clean-cut
conceptions.
EXPLORATIONS TO THE NORTH
In one quarter, however, to the north, the horizon of geographical
knowledge was immensely widened. The inner shores of the Baltic, of
which the Romans and early Christians had known next to nothing, became
from the eighth century familiar ground to the Northmen. Furthermore,
the widespread rovings of these adventurous seamen carried them not only
westward and southward to harry Britain, France, and Spain and to
penetrate into the Mediterranean but also northward along the long
stretch of Norwegian coast. Alfred the Great appended to his translation
of Orosius an account of the journey in 890 of Othere of Halogaland
around the North Cape and into the White Sea even as far as the shores
of Biarma Land (near modern Archangel; the word “Biarma” is said to be
related to the Russian “Perm”). In later years Norse expeditions visited
the remote coasts of Finnmark and Biarma, seeking trade and carrying war
and destruction.[317]
THE ATLANTIC
The maritime wanderings of the early Irish and their successors, the
Northmen, gave rise to a circle of legends regarding fabulous islands in
the Atlantic and fabulous voyages among them. The poetic imagination of
both Kelt and Viking contributed marvelously to the growth of these
tales. Great and often misguided ingenuity has been shown in modern
times in attempts to find the seeds of truth from which these stories
may or may not have sprung.[318] The most famous legend and the one
destined to exert the strongest influence on the imagination of the
future told of St. Brandan’s journeyings among enchanted isles and
fantastic seas to the west and northwest of Ireland. Actual discovery in
these quarters is recorded in the pages of the ninth-century Dicuil, who
narrates the finding of Thule by Irish priests some thirty years before
his time (825 A. D.) and describes the cold of those regions and the
long twilights at the time of the summer solstice, when one day merges
into the next.[319] The Northmen reached Iceland in 860 and settled
there a few years later; Greenland was discovered by them in 877, though
it was not colonized until the close of the following century.
AMERICA REACHED BY THE NORSEMEN
Icelandic rovers also reached America in the latter years of the
tenth century.[320] The _Landnámabók_, compiled from an original
version written about 1200, tells how, about the year 983, Ari
Marsson “was driven out of his course at sea to White-men’s-land
(_Hvitramanna-land_), which is called by some persons Ireland the
Great (_Irland-it-mikla_); it lies westward in the sea near Wineland
the Good; it is said to be a sail of six _doegr_ west of Ireland”
(Reeves’s translation).[321] Though we may not be certain whether
this brief passage is rightly to be interpreted as referring to
America, it is undeniable that soon after Ari Marsson’s discovery
the northeastern shores of our continent were visited by Biarni, the
son of Heriulf, and by Leif, the son of Eric the Red, and that the
latter were followed by Thorfinn Karlsefni and others.[322] Sailing
southwestward, these adventurers came to the shores of a barren
country of flat stones which they called Helluland; thence they
coasted southward past the forested Markland and past long beaches
and sand reefs, until they reached Wineland, with grapevines, a mild
climate, and savage inhabitants (or Skraellings). From some of the
latter, captured by Karlsefni in Markland, the Icelanders learned
that “kings governed the Skraellings” and that “there was a land on
the other side over against their country which was inhabited by
people who wore white garments and yelled loudly and carried poles
before them to which rags were attached” (Reeves’s translation).
This land they identified with White-men’s-land, or Ireland the
Great.
CHAPTER III
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MOSLEMS
There is no necessity here of giving a general review of the very broad
field of Arabic geography. The works of the foremost Mohammedan
geographers, Al-Masʿūdī, Ibn Ḥauqal, Al-Iṣṭakhrī, were unknown in Europe
during the Middle Ages, and formal Arabic geography certainly
contributed next to nothing to the knowledge of the earth possessed by
the Occidentals of the Crusading age.
_SOURCES_
Other branches of Arabic science, however, profoundly influenced the
development of European thought at this time. As transmitters of
classical learning to the West, the Saracens reintroduced fragments of
the geographical lore of the Greeks. The two classical authors in whom
they had taken the deepest interest were Aristotle and Ptolemy. Their
most important contribution to Western geographical knowledge was to
make known to the West geographical speculations in the works of these
men and in the various treatises which the Moslem writers themselves had
composed under Peripatetic and Ptolemaic influences.
INFLUENCE OF ARISTOTLE
Aristotle held a position of preëminent authority among the Moslems in
all matters scientific. Arabic scholars had received his writings both
through Syriac translations and direct from Greek texts. Vast
commentaries on his works were made by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980–1037
A. D.) in the Eastern Caliphate and by Averroës (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198
A. D.) in Spain. Aristotelian astronomy, as distinguished from
Ptolemaic, was reproduced with modifications in the work _On the Sphere_
of Al-Biṭrūjī of Cordova, known to the Christians as Alpetragius.[323]
By the end of the twelfth century, owing to the rising interest in
Aristotelianism in Europe (the “flood of Aristotelianism,” as Duhem
calls it), translations had been done from the Arabic into Latin of a
large number of Aristotelian works on astronomy, physics, meteorology,
and many other subjects.[324] It was in these works that most of
Aristotle’s thought and observation in geography had found expression.
Aristotelian physical geography, transmitted through these channels, was
destined to dominate the geographical speculations of many Christian
writers of the thirteenth century.
INFLUENCE OF PTOLEMY’S “ALMAGEST”
The Moslems of the Eastern Caliphate also had become familiar with
Ptolemy’s _Almagest_ and _Geography_ through Syriac translations and
through versions of the original Greek text.[325] A manuscript of the
_Kitāb al-Majisṭī_, or _Almagest_, was translated into Arabic in the
days of Hārūn ar-Rashīd by that caliph’s vizier, Yaḥyā, and other
translations appeared during the middle part of the ninth century. Study
of the _Almagest_ stimulated Arabic scholars and incited them to write
such original treatises of their own as Al-Farghānī’s (Alfraganus’) On
the _Elements of Astronomy_, Al-Battānī’s _On the Movements of the
Stars_, or _Astronomy_,[326] and Ibn Yūnūs’ _Ḥakīmī Tables_.
INFLUENCE OF PTOLEMY’S “GEOGRAPHY”
Furthermore, Ptolemy’s _Geography_ was certainly known to the Moslems in
Syriac translations and probably also in copies of the original Greek
text.[327] With the _Geography_ as a model a number of Arabic treatises,
usually entitled _Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ_, or _Book of the Description of
the Earth_, were composed at an early period of Islam and served as
bases on which later geographical writers built more complex systems.
One of the most significant was the _Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ_ of
Al-Khwārizmī, composed about the time of Al-Maʾmūn (813–833 A. D.), the
full text of which was discovered forty-four years ago by Spitta.[328]
From another book of the same sort and title Al-Battānī derived the
geographical details included in his _Astronomy_.[329] The latter was
translated into Latin during the twelfth century; and Al-Khwārizmī’s
work was known in Europe at second hand.[330]
AZ-ZARQALĪ AND THE “TOLEDO TABLES”
Ptolemy was studied in the western as well as in the eastern centers of
Islam. Toledo, notwithstanding its conquest by the kings of Castile in
1085, long remained a scientific center, where the Arabic spirit of
investigation lingered on among Jew, Christian, and Moor. It was largely
through Spanish channels that the Latin West found its Oriental
inspiration in astronomy and astrology.[331] About 1080 Az-Zarqalī, of
Toledo,[332] who had devised a new type of astrolabe, wrote various
works on astronomical subjects, including a commentary on a series of
astronomical tables that had been constructed by a group of Jewish and
Moslem scholars before his time.[333] These so-called _Toledo Tables_,
with Az-Zarqalī’s _Canons_ explaining them, contained some incidental
geographical information derived in part from Ptolemy’s _Geography_ and
from Al-Khwārizmī.[334] They were rendered into Latin in the twelfth
century by the famous Gerard of Cremona, who probably found in Spain
most of the manuscripts from which he made his many Latin
translations.[335]
GEOGRAPHY IN SICILY
Ptolemy’s _Geography_ was also studied in Sicily under the Moslem emirs
and their successors, the Norman kings. From the eleventh century date
several Arabic descriptions of Sicily now known only in fragments but
bearing eloquent witness to a true enthusiasm for geography prevalent
among the Moslem aristocracy of the island.[336] The Normans, who became
masters of Sicily between 1060 and 1071, preserved much that was best of
Arabic traditions and culture, and Moslem scholars played a brilliant
part in the intellectual life of the court. Roger II himself was a
devotee of geography, occupying much of his spare time in collecting
Arabic geographical treatises and in questioning travelers about distant
parts of the earth. “He gave himself up to this work tirelessly for
fifteen years, never ceasing to examine personally into all geographical
questions, to search for their solution and to verify facts, in order
that he might obtain in complete form all the information that he
desired” (from Jaubert’s translation of Edrisi).[337]
EDRISI
At Roger’s instigation and with his aid Al-Idrīsī, or Edrisi (as the
name is more usually written), who had come to the Sicilian court from
Spain, undertook a great series of geographical labors. Little is known
of the life of Edrisi besides a few details to be gleaned from later
biographers[338] and what he himself tells us in the preface to his
_Geography_, as it is usually known, or, to cite its Arabic title, _The
Recreation for Him Who Wishes to Travel Through the Countries_, which
was completed in 1154 or later.[339] We know that he constructed for
Roger a celestial sphere and a disk-shaped map of the world, both of
silver. Furthermore, we are told that Roger provided him with special
facilities for the construction of maps and for the compilation of his
great treatise. It appears that the king and Edrisi together selected
“certain intelligent men, who were despatched on travels and were
accompanied by draftsmen. Just as soon as these men returned Edrisi
inserted in his treatise the information which was thus communicated to
him.” On the basis of observations made in the field, data derived from
Ptolemy and earlier Arabic geographers were correlated and brought up to
date. The book and the maps which were drawn to elucidate the book are
for this reason unquestionably among the most interesting monuments of
Arabic geography; furthermore, the book is the most voluminous and
detailed geographical work written in twelfth-century Europe. After a
very brief description of the earth as a globe, the hemispheres,
climates, seas, and gulfs, Edrisi launches into a long and minute
account of the regions of the earth’s surface. He takes up the seven
climates in order, dividing each climate into ten sections, an
arrangement that is artificial to excess. None the less, Edrisi’s works
are of exceptional quality when considered in comparison with other
geographical writings of their period, partly by reason of their
richness of detail but mainly because of the scientific method used, the
coöperative employment of many observers, and the critical correlation
of their observations—a procedure which was indeed unlike that adopted
by Latin scholars of the time.
INFLUENCE OF SICILO-MOSLEM GEOGRAPHY
The question of the full extent to which the fruits of this Sicilian
geographical school became known in the Latin Europe of the late twelfth
and early thirteenth centuries is a matter that awaits further
investigation.
Certainly the influence of Edrisi’s _Geography_ could not have been
great in the world of letters or else traces of it would more easily be
detected in Western literature. Unlike a multitude of Arabic writings of
far less intrinsic value, the _Rogerian Description_ (as the _Geography_
of Edrisi is often called) found no Gerard of Cremona to put it into
Latin, and the authoritative geographical knowledge of the Western world
was destined to develop unenriched by the treasures which Roger and
Edrisi together had amassed.
On the other hand, there is no question but that the Sicilo-Norman
enthusiasm for geography exerted an indirect influence on the evolution
of geographical knowledge, an influence that was to make itself felt
more especially after the close of our period. This enthusiasm for
geography was the product of a mingling of Arabic scientific and
scholarly traditions with Norman maritime enterprise in an island which
occupied a central position in relation to the world of its day. It was
an enthusiasm that arose partly from pure love of knowledge but also in
very large degree from the practical necessities of a sea-faring people,
and it was early applied to the solution of the problems of navigation.
In the words of De La Roncière, “The use of coast charts was destined to
become general in Sicily; a rational method of navigation to be
substituted for the routine of pilotage, and thus the way was prepared
for the progressive conquest of the world.”[340] As De La Roncière goes
on to point out, the Genoese learned the arts of navigation from the
Sicilians in the early thirteenth century and transmitted them
subsequently to the Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and English; and a
new science of the sea was developed upon the foundations originally
laid by Sicilian Moslems and Normans.[341]
ORIENTAL IDEAS TRANSMITTED TO THE WEST
Besides the classical heritage, the Moslems also transmitted some
peculiarly Oriental ideas to the West. Al-Khwārizmī was the author of a
treatise with astronomical tables, the translation of which by Adelard
of Bath usually goes under the name of _Khorazmian Tables_.[342] The
original work was a redaction of a book drawn ultimately from Hindu
sources and known as the _Little Sindhind_.[343] Thus it was from Hindu
sources, as is shown by this work, that the Mohammedans got their idea
of the world center of Arin. Hindu religion, furthermore, contributed
something toward the molding of Greek and Moslem doctrines of the
periodicity of the universe and of the Great Year—doctrines which became
widely known in the West through Hermann the Dalmatian’s Latin
translation of the Persian Abū Maʿshar’s book, _The Great Book of the
Introduction_, entitled in the Latin, _Liber introductorius in
astrologiam_.[344] Hindu influences were also felt in an anonymous but
widely read Arabic treatise falsely attributed to Aristotle in the
Middle Ages and called _Liber de proprietatibus elementorum_.[345]
_ASTRONOMICAL GEOGRAPHY; THEORIES OF THE TIDES_
Turning now from the sources to the material substance of the
contribution of the Moslems, we find that, except in so far as it
brought a knowledge of Aristotle to Europe, it added little to Western
notions either of physical or of regional geography. Though the Moslems
entirely failed to share with the Western World their wide practical
acquaintance with lands and seas, the Arabic writers did nevertheless
introduce some new ideas in the fields of astronomical—or, better,
astrological—geography and in the closely allied study of tidal
phenomena.
THE GREAT YEARS
The theory of the Great Years was very popular among the Orientals,
possibly because it appealed to their fatalistic spirit. Arabic
astronomers adopted Ptolemy’s calculation of the length of the Great
Year at 36,000 terrestrial years[346] and seem to have believed that
after every complete revolution of the sphere of the fixed stars, the
planets, as well as the fixed stars, will find themselves in the same
relative positions that they held at the beginning of the
revolution.[347] The Arabic work on this subject most read in the Latin
West was Hermann the Dalmatian’s translation of Abū Maʿshar’s book, in
which it was explained that astral influences—especially the perpetual
circulation of the fixed stars—are the cause of everything which is born
and dies and of everything which occurs between birth and death on this
earth.
COSMIC CYCLES AND GEOGRAPHICAL CHANGES
In much the same way that the Chaldeans, Hindus, and Greeks had done,
the Moslems worked out a theory of the supposed influence of these
cosmic cycles on geography.[348] The most striking elaboration of the
theory was made by the “Brothers of Piety and Sincerity,” who formed a
philosophical school in the tenth century after Christ. In the great
encyclopedic work[349] produced by this school (which, incidentally,
contains many other interesting speculations on the subject of physical
geography) gradual alterations in the relative position of land and sea
are ascribed to almost imperceptible changes in the longitude of the
fixed stars resulting from the precession of the equinoxes. Not only do
lands and seas change places, but various types of terrain; in the
course of time “cultivated land becomes desert, desert becomes
cultivated land, steppes become seas, and seas become steppes or
mountains.”[350]
Whereas this curious theory was accepted by the Aristotelian Al-Biṭrūjī,
the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian _Liber de proprietatibus
elementorum_ vigorously opposed to it the following argument.[351] If
the fixed stars revolve around the earth in 36,000 years, the land ought
to revolve around the 34,000 miles which he believed make the
circumference of the earth in the same time, or, as we may infer, at a
rate of slightly less than a mile per year. We should therefore expect
to find certain cities much nearer the coast and other cities farther
from the coast than they used to be. The anonymous author says that if
the theory were valid one ought to be able to observe great changes in
the position of such places as Arin, Ceylon, Byzantium, and Rome in
relation to the sea. But since, as a matter of fact, no such changes are
apparent, the whole theory of the transposition of land and sea falls to
the ground.
Obvious as it may seem to us, this reasoning is remarkable at a time
when actual observation as a foundation for, or check on, theorizing was
rare indeed; and hence it is gratifying to note that the _Liber de
proprietatibus elementorum_ with its argument against the Great Year,
rather than the encyclopedia of the “Brothers of Piety and Sincerity”
with its argument for it, was the work on this subject that was read by
Occidental scholars.
THEORIES OF THE TIDES
The Moslems did not add much to the classical theories of the tides
which they transmitted to Christendom. Their fundamental work concerning
tides was that treatise of Abū Maʿshar which we have already mentioned,
a work from which, as Duhem says, all the Middle Ages learned the laws
of the ebb and flood.[352] Here, in the chapters on the moon,[353] a
full description is given of the various characteristics of the tides
together with copious speculations regarding their causes. The actual
observations of fact were exact and careful. Abū Maʿshar explains with
not a little accuracy the relation of the tides to the moon’s rising and
setting, to her phases, and to the position of the sun; he understood
that winds might cause exceptionally high water; he recognized the
influences of local topographic features, that some seas display
different tidal phenomena from others and that the flood waters may be
retained by reefs, or valleys, or deep bays. On the other hand, Abū
Maʿshar’s treatment of the causes of the tides was less successful.
Though he believed firmly that the moon produces the ebb and flood, he
failed to account for the presence of the high tide at the time of the
moon’s opposition. His explanation of the moon’s attraction of the
waters was in keeping with astrological methods of reasoning. Our
satellite was supposed by astrologers to be of peculiarly aqueous nature
and for that reason exceptionally capable of governing the movements of
the liquid element of the earth.
Other theories of the tides entered the West from Arabic sources.
Al-Biṭrūjī’s _On the Sphere_ ascribed their origin not to the moon but
to the general circulation of the heavens.[354] Averroës, in a
commentary on the _Meteorology_ of Aristotle, devoted a confused
chapter[355] to an attempt at showing that ebb and flood are the results
partly of currents produced by differences in level between the ocean
and certain seas and partly of the moon’s attraction of the waters. The
possibility of differences in level between seas and ocean had probably
become known to the Spanish scholar through some garbled rendering of
Eratosthenes’ observations on the currents and levels of the
Mediterranean.[356]
MEASUREMENT OF A TERRESTRIAL DEGREE
That the Saracens also were interested in the more strictly mathematical
aspects of astronomical geography is emphatically proved by the fact
that they undertook actually to measure the length of a terrestrial
degree[357] and thereby to determine the circumference of the earth.
Some knowledge of this great work came to the Western world in our
period through translations of the _Astronomy_ of Al-Farghānī.[358]
GEOGRAPHICAL POSITIONS
The Arabic investigations, however, which most profoundly interested the
men of the West were those concerned with the determination of the
location of places on the earth’s surface rather than those whose aim
was to find the size of the globe. Stimulated by their interest in
Ptolemy, the Moslems felt a special need for the accurate knowledge of
positions, for upon such knowledge depended the construction of mosques,
which, according to religious law, must face in the direction of Mecca.
Astrology also necessitated this type of investigation. In order to cast
a horoscope one must know what stars are overhead at a particular
moment; and, to ascertain this, one must know latitude and longitude. In
the Arabic astronomic works there occur rules for determining positions
and tables of the latitudes and longitudes of places throughout the
world.[359]
One of the most practical results of Arabic investigations in this field
was a reduction of Ptolemy’s exaggerated estimate of the length of the
Mediterranean Sea. The Greek geographer gave the length as 62° or about
half again too long. Al-Khwārizmī cut this figure down to about 52°,
and, if we are right in our interpretation of the available data,
Az-Zarqalī still further reduced it to approximately the correct figure,
42°. As we shall see in a later chapter, the results of these
corrections became known in the medieval West.[360]
The Moslems, as a general rule, measured longitudes from the prime
meridian which Ptolemy had used, that of the Fortunate Islands (now the
Canaries), situated in the Western Ocean at the westernmost limit of the
habitable earth; but individual writers came to make use of another
meridian farther west, a meridian destined to become known to the
Christian world as that of the True West as distinguished from the
supposed border of the habitable West.[361] Abū Maʿshar, on the other
hand, referred his prime meridian to a fabulous castle of Kang-Diz, far
to the east in the China Sea.[362]
ARIN
The western prime meridian was commonly supposed to be 90° from a
mythical city called Arin (or Arim) situated on the equator, halfway
between the farthest east and the farthest west. This city was said to
have neither latitude nor longitude, and its meridian came arbitrarily
to be placed at 10° east of that of Baghdad. The idea of Arin probably
originated among the Hindus,[363] who believed that the city of Langka
in Ceylon (or perhaps Sumatra)—the abode of devils—lies on the equator.
They traced their prime meridian from Langka through Odjein, a place in
India, to Mount Meru at the north pole—the abode of angels. Odjein was
transliterated into Arabic as “Arin” or “Arim” and was shifted by the
Moslems to the equator. It was made known to the Christian world through
such works as Adelard of Bath’s translation of the _Khorazmian Tables_
(which, as we have already seen, was an Arabic redaction of a Hindu
work) and Plato of Tivoli’s translation of Al-Battānī’s _Astronomy_. In
the latter, Arin was represented as a cupola or tower; and on Christian
maps and diagrams of the Middle Ages it was not infrequently so
depicted.
_ARABIC EXPLORATION AND TRAVEL_
This sums up briefly a few of the more significant original ideas that
the Moslems added to twelfth-century geographical knowledge in the
West. By way of contrast, it is not out of place briefly to recall
what they had actually accomplished in the field of geographical
investigation.[364] Moslem trade between the seventh and ninth
centuries reached China by sea and by land; southward it tapped the
more distant coasts of Africa, including Zanzibar; northward it
penetrated Russia;[365] westward Mohammedan navigators saw the unknown
and dreaded waters of the Atlantic. Al-Masʿūdī speaks of the presence
of Moslem traders in the heart of Europe, in a country to which he
gave the name Ad-Dir (probably Bohemia).[366] Arabic literature
abounds with descriptions of the lands within these wide borders; of
their products and kingdoms and marvels, true and fanciful. But all
this was destined to remain a sealed book to the man of the Latin
Occident,[367] who as a rule felt little genuine interest in the world
beyond his immediate ken. He looked to Arabic books for practical aid
in making calendars and star tables and horoscopes; he looked to
Arabic translations and commentaries on Aristotle for help toward a
better understanding of the dark and hidden meaning in the words of
Scripture. The geographical knowledge which he acquired from the
Moslems during our period was merely incidental to other interests, a
sort of flotsam borne in on the great wave of astrologic and
Aristotelian lore sweeping into Europe at this time.
CHAPTER IV
THE SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD 1100–1250 A. D.
_INTRODUCTION_
To gain anything approaching complete understanding of the status of the
geographical lore in Western Europe during the Crusading period, one
would be obliged to undertake the colossal task of ransacking
practically all the available literature of this age. From an
examination of selected specimens of various types of document, however,
we may arrive at a fairly correct conception of the kind of geographical
thought and information that was current. Certainly our view of the
subject would not be materially modified by the further accumulation of
illustrative examples. We must, none the less, look to a large variety
of sources: to the writings of theologians, philosophers, historians,
chroniclers, and topographers; to maps, poetry, romances, and even to
works of art. These show us what the sedentary man of the Middle Ages
could learn of geography through reading and study. Pilgrim narratives,
letters, commercial and diplomatic treaties, and many other
miscellaneous documents throw light upon the actual extent of travel
during this century and a half.
Writers of the Middle Ages did not specialize as we do at the present
day. They treated subjects of the most diverse nature within the pages
of the same book. We shall group their productions into a few broad
categories: philosophical and theological writings that were read for
the most part by the scholar and churchman; translations from Arabic
scientific treatises and other works written under Arabic influence;
encyclopedic compilations or attempts to encompass the whole range of
human learning, also for the scholar, and popularizations of these in
prose and verse for the intelligent layman; histories and chronicles;
pilgrim narratives and other records of travel; topographical works;
and, finally, maps.
Other more instructive classifications might well be made. One in which
the works were grouped according to the type of thought of which each is
the expression might bring out the conflicting intellectual
crosscurrents of the age. In such a classification the great
differentiation could be emphasized between writers bound by respect for
authority and writers of originality and independence; between those who
interpreted the words of Scripture literally, those who interpreted them
allegorically, and those who went so far as to neglect or to doubt them.
The classification which follows, based upon the purposes which the
various groups of writings were intended to serve, is merely one of
convenience.
_THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS_
The distinction between theology, philosophy, and the physical and
natural sciences was not sharply drawn during the earlier Middle Ages.
Only after the ninth century did the tendency to mark off theology and
philosophy as separate spheres of thought become gradually evident,[368]
and it remained for a much later age to set off the physical and natural
sciences from philosophy.
THEOLOGICAL WORKS
Though not much geography is found in the strictly theological writings
of our period, those portions of them which deal with the Creation
embody cosmogonic and cosmographic speculations which have a geographic
character for reasons that have already been explained.[369] Many of the
philosophical writings, on the other hand, are rich in passages of
geographical interest; for the physical geography, like the natural
history, of the Middle Ages was the province of the philosopher.
_Peter Abelard_
Among the outstanding theologians of the twelfth century was Peter
Abelard (1079–1142), whose tragic history is well remembered. In his
_Expositio in hexaemeron_, _Sermones_, and more famous _Sic et non_ we
find a few scattered observations of a geographical character. Though
Abelard’s fame rests upon the keenness of his reasoning and the
destructive brilliance of his dialectic, his position when dealing with
the Works of the Six Days was that of mystic.[370] We shall have
occasion to see how the geographical passages from his works reveal a
love of elaborate allegory.
_Hugh of St. Victor_
The monastic school of St. Victor in Paris was preëminently a center of
twelfth-century mysticism.[371] A leading figure here was Hugh of St.
Victor, who held the direction of studies after about the year 1125 and
who enjoyed during his lifetime (he died in 1141) a great reputation for
learning in things divine.[372] Among Hugh’s writings we find
_Adnotationes elucidatoriae in Pentateuchon_, containing speculations on
the Creation, and the curious treatises _De arca Noë mystica_, _De arca
Noë morali_, and _De vanitate mundi_,[373] which display a love of
symbolism and include the exposition of a strange theory of the westward
course of the tide of civilization.[374]
_Hildegard of Bingen_
Hildegard (1098–1179 or 1180), abbess of a Benedictine convent near
Bingen on the Rhine, was another lover of the symbolic. Her mystic
exaltation took the form of visions in which were revealed to her the
secrets of the universe. With the knowledge thereby attained she served
her fellow man as a prophetess and healer of disease. Besides a series
of letters, she wrote three works recording her visions: _Scivias sive
visionum ac revelationum libri tres_ (1141–1150), _Liber vitae
meritorum_ (1158–1162), and _Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis_
(1163–1170). She was also probably the author of two treatises,
_Subtilitates diversarum naturarum creaturarum_ and _Causae et curae_,
which, though not avowedly the record of visions, could hardly have been
written except as the result of some form of religious experience.[375]
Her “cosmology and physiology,” as Thorndike points out, were none the
less in essential conformity with “the then prevalent theories of
natural science” although she “displays no little originality in giving
a new turn to the familiar concepts.” She does not, however, “evolve any
really new principles of nature.”[376]
_Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor_
To turn from the imaginative and visionary writings of Hugh and
Hildegard to the more coldly intellectual theology and philosophy of the
age, we find in the _Sic et non_ of Abelard the first example of a new
method of handling philosophical and theological questions. This
so-called didactic method was destined to find its culminating
expression in the mighty volumes of Thomas Aquinas. Its essence was to
incite discussion by placing in juxtaposition divergent and
contradictory Scriptural and patristic texts on the same subject.
Abelard did this in the _Sic et non_ without giving interpretations of
his own. Peter Lombard (died 1164), who in his _Sententiae_ followed
Abelard’s method, usually gave in addition his own views on a subject,
though not infrequently the reader was left faced by two or more
conflicting theories. It might almost be said that the _Sententiae_
served to standardize the orthodox doctrine of the age. Shortly after
Peter Lombard’s death Peter Comestor (the “eater”), at one time dean of
the cathedral church in Troyes and lecturer in Paris, produced an
extensive treatise entitled _Historia scholastica_. This compilation of
commentaries on Scripture enjoyed an immense popularity at a later
period, especially towards the close of the thirteenth century.[377]
Comestor, like Peter Lombard, represented the more orthodox point of
view.
THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES: ITS INTELLECTUAL INDEPENDENCE
Unusual intellectual independence was displayed during the twelfth
century by the philosophical writers of the school of Chartres[378] and
by those who came under their influence. Well known early in the
eleventh century, this cathedral school had acquired, in the first half
of the twelfth, a European reputation, founded on the boldness and
originality of its masters and on the widespread influence which they
exerted through their pupils and associates.
_Bernard and Theodoric of Chartres_
Two brothers stand out preëminently among them, Bernard and Theodoric
(or Thierry). Very little in detail is known about the life of either.
Bernard was probably born late in the eleventh century and was
chancellor between 1124 and 1126.[379] He enjoyed an immense reputation
and was called by John of Salisbury the most perfect Platonist of his
century.[380] It seems likely that he died before 1130 and was not the
same man as Bernard Sylvester of Tours, with whom he has often been
confused.[381]
We know even less of Theodoric, who enjoyed a contemporary fame as great
as, if not even greater than, that of his brother. Theodoric was
mentioned by a disciple as the foremost philosopher of the whole of
Europe.[382] Master of the school (_magister scholae_) in Chartres in
1121, the successor to Gilbert de la Porrée as chancellor in 1141, he
produced a large work on the seven liberal arts (the _Heptateuchon_) and
a treatise describing the Creation.[383] The latter, entitled _De sex
dierum operibus_, was in many respects unique, representing a remarkably
rationalistic discussion of a subject in the treatment of which any
display of reason or independence almost inevitably was deemed
heresy.[384]
_Adelard of Bath; Hermann the Dalmatian; Robert of Retines_
Bernard and Theodoric maintained scholarly connections throughout
Western Europe and counted many famous men among their disciples. The
Englishman Adelard of Bath[385] belongs to their broader circle, for it
is likely that he was acquainted with the Chartres scholars, at least by
reputation, and his important work, _Quaestiones naturales_[386] (dating
from between 1107 and 1142), shows that he held many ideas in common
with the most famous of Bernard’s pupils, William of Conches. In his
wide travels[387] and in his translations from the Arabic[388] Adelard
exemplifies another phase of the awakening intellectual life of the age,
a turning to Moslem literature for new sources of information and
inspiration beyond the standard and easily available collections of
classical, Scriptural, and patristic authorities.
Among the disciples of Theodoric may also be counted the travelers and
translators from the Arabic, Hermann the Dalmatian (or Hermann the
Carinthian) and Robert of Retines, to whose translations we shall later
have occasion to refer.[389]
_Bernard Sylvester_
Very closely akin in spirit with the scholars of Chartres was Bernard
Sylvester, who taught at Tours in the fifth decade of the twelfth
century.[390] It has long been a moot point whether or not Bernard
Sylvester was the same as Bernard of Chartres. There are very potent
arguments in favor of identifying them, among the most convincing being
the remarkable manner in which the philosophy of the _De mundi
universitate_ (or _Cosmographia turonense_),[391] written by Bernard
Sylvester between 1145 and 1148, gives expression to theories which John
of Salisbury ascribes to Bernard of Chartres. Yet, despite these
extraordinary similarities, the weight of evidence seems opposed to the
theory that the two names refer to the same man.[392] In any case, if
Bernard Sylvester was not the brother of Theodoric of Chartres, he was
acquainted with Theodoric and with the latter’s work, for it was to
Theodoric that he dedicated the _De mundi universitate_.
_William of Conches_
Another member of the Chartres group, William of Conches, was a disciple
of Bernard of Chartres in his youth. He taught at Chartres probably as
early as 1126. Between 1140 and 1150 he acted as tutor to the young
Henry and Geoffrey Plantagenet.[393] Hauréau says that William believed
that “la philosophie tient subordonnées à ses principes généraux, comme
deux sciences subalternes, la théologie et la physique.”[394] His most
significant book, the _De philosophia mundi_,[395] throughout
exemplifies this attitude and reveals to us a mind deeply interested in
physics and natural science for their own sakes and a desire to explain
the phenomena of the universe according to natural and observable laws.
The rationalism of his philosophy brought him into conflict with the
ecclesiastical authorities and necessitated his retracting various
opinions late in life.[396] He died either in 1150 or 1154.
ALEXANDER NECKAM
The scholars of the Chartres group formed the intellectual élite of
their age. More in keeping with the normal habit of the period than
their mode of thought was the manner in which the Englishman Alexander
Neckam dealt with matters of natural science. Born in 1157, Neckam had
become a professor at the University of Paris by 1180; later in life he
returned to England, became abbot of Cirencester in 1213, and died in
1217.[397] His principal works were _De naturis rerum_, in prose, and a
verse paraphrase and enlargement of it entitled _Laus sapiencie divine_,
or _De laudibus divinae sapientiae_.[398] In these works we see that
Neckam, though inspired by a lively curiosity and even by some degree of
understanding of experimental and observational science, was on the
whole less original and less courageous intellectually than either
Theodoric of Chartres or William of Conches. Instead of trying to
explain rationally the phenomena of nature as these earlier writers had
done, he was nearly always content merely to describe these phenomena as
facts and to draw lengthy moral lessons from them.
* * * * *
These are merely a few characteristic representatives of the host of
theologians and philosophers of the twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries. Their works serve to illustrate widely diverse tendencies of
thought: the heretical independence of the scholars of Chartres as
contrasted with the mysticism of Hugh of St. Victor, the orthodoxy of
Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor, and the cautious inquisitiveness of
Alexander Neckam. Though these men differed in mental caliber, their
learning was based almost exclusively on the Latin writings of classical
and earlier Christian authors, and most of their geographical knowledge
was borrowed from the sources we have discussed in Chapters I and II.
But our period was also memorable by reason of the influx of a new body
of learning destined to bring about profound modifications in the
methods of European scholarship and to add materially to the sum total
of European knowledge. This new body of learning was made available
through translations from the Arabic.
_TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ARABIC; WORKS WRITTEN UNDER ARABIC INFLUENCE;
ARISTOTELIANISM AND ITS OPPONENTS_
The enthusiasm for the work of translation which prevailed during our
period foreshadowed a far broader enthusiasm of the same sort that
marked the great age of the Renaissance. Only a relatively few scholars,
however, were familiar with Greek; and the number of direct translations
from the Greek was limited.[399] The men of the Crusading age received
the results of Greek scientific investigation primarily through the
medium of the Moslems.
We saw in Chapter III how the Moslems had translated certain works of
Aristotle, of Ptolemy, and of the Hindus and had themselves composed
sundry treatises under Peripatetic, Ptolemaic, and Hindu influences.
Many of these Arabic translations, in turn, were converted into Latin by
Occidental scholars of our period.[400]
Western interest in Moslem science centered at first on the translation
of astronomical and mathematical treatises and somewhat later on Arabic
versions of Aristotle. Indirectly through both of these channels
important geographical conceptions gained currency in Europe.
ADELARD OF BATH; PETER ALPHONSI
Among the early translators of astronomical and mathematical treatises
was Adelard of Bath, whose connections with the school of Chartres we
have already mentioned. Through Adelard’s Latin version of the so-called
_Khorazmian Tables_[401] of Al-Khwārizmī, made in the year 1126,[402]
knowledge of the Hindu conception of a world center, Arin, was
introduced into Europe. The _Khorazmian Tables_ had found their way to
Spain by the beginning of the eleventh century and were there adapted
from the era of Yezdegerd to that of the Hejira by a certain Maslama
al-Majrīṭi of Madrid.[403] In addition to Adelard’s version of Maslama’s
work, there is reason to believe that the _Khorazmian Tables_ were also
put into Latin by Hermann the Dalmatian.[404]
A contemporary of Adelard of Bath was the Jew, Peter Alphonsi[405] (or
Petrus Anfusi), who was baptized in 1106 at the age of forty-five and
subsequently became an ardent devotee of Christianity. His _Dialogus cum
Judeo_ contains references to Arin and a few significant observations on
astronomical geography.
JOHN OF SEVILLE; PLATO OF TIVOLI
In 1135 John of Seville (also known as Johannes Hispanensis, or John of
Luna) translated Al-Farghānī’s _On the Elements of Astronomy_,[406] a
work from which John of Holywood borrowed much of the materials that he
incorporated into his _De sphaera_ and which thereby was fated to
produce a profound effect on the future development of astronomical
geography during the later Middle Ages. Gerard of Cremona also
translated the same work.[407]
From about 1140 dates Plato of Tivoli’s version of the _Astronomy_ of
Al-Battānī,[408] a close rendering into Latin of Al-Battānī’s chapters
on the theory of astronomy but not of the astronomical and geographical
tables that followed in the original Arabic. Our interest in the
chapters lies in the fact that they contain (Chapter 6) a brief general
description of the inhabited earth widely differing from those found in
contemporary Latin geographical works.
“MARSEILLES TABLES” AND “TOLEDO TABLES”
Preserved in a twelfth-century manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale
is a set of astronomical tables for Marseilles dating from 1140, the
work of a certain Raymond of Marseilles.[409] The _Canons_, or
introductory explanation, of these tables are drawn largely from the
astronomical _Canons_ of Az-Zarqalī;[410] the tables are an adaptation
for the meridian of Marseilles of the _Toledo Tables_. Both Az-Zarqalī’s
_Canons_ and the _Toledo Tables_, with their modifications like the
Marseilles set, contained not a little incidental material of importance
from the point of view of astronomical geography, including a list of
cities with their latitudes and longitudes derived ultimately from
Al-Khwārizmī.[411] That this material enjoyed wide popularity during our
period and later is proved by the existence of a large number of
manuscripts.[412] One of the translations of Az-Zarqualī’s _Canons_ was
done by the hand of the famous Gerard of Cremona, as we have already
seen in Chapter III.[413]
ROBERT OF RETINES; HERMANN THE DALMATIAN; DANIEL OF MORLEY
It is almost certain that before 1143 the _Astronomy_ of Al-Battānī was
again put into Latin, this time by Robert of Retines[414] (or Robert of
Chester). We do not, as in the case of Plato of Tivoli’s version,
possess the text of this translation, though we have what was probably
Robert’s adaptation to the meridian of London of Al-Battānī’s and
Az-Zarqalī’s astronomical tables. This adaptation, for 1149–1150, forms
a continuation of tables for the meridian of Toledo in 1149.[415]
Furthermore, Al-Battānī is cited, and some of the geographical ideas
expressed in his _Astronomy_ are reflected, in the as yet unpublished
_Liber de essentiis_ of Hermann the Dalmatian, who was a close associate
of Robert and a student of Theodoric of Chartres. The _Liber de
essentiis_ was written at Béziers in 1143.[416] Robert also adapted
Adelard’s _Khorazmian Tables_ to the meridian of London.[417] Another
Englishman, Roger of Hereford, was probably the maker of tables for the
meridian of Toledo and certainly of a series for Hereford dating from
1178, based on tables for Toledo and Marseilles.[418] Towards the end of
the century, still another Englishman, Daniel of Morley, journeyed to
Spain in search of Arabic astronomical lore. Here, at Toledo, he came in
contact with Gerard of Cremona. On his return to England he took with
him “a precious multitude of books” and, “to explain the teaching of
Toledo to Bishop John of Norwich” (1175–1200),[419] wrote a work called
_De philosophia_, or _Liber de naturis inferiorum et superiorum_, the
astronomy of which, as in the case of John of Holywood’s _De sphaera_,
was mainly based on the writings of Al-Farghānī.
GERARD OF CREMONA; JOHN OF HOLYWOOD (SACROBOSCO)
At about the same time, Gerard of Cremona produced a short independent
treatise, the _Theorica planetarum_,[420] which became a stock text from
which later writers borrowed extensively. This is merely a summary of
the _Almagest_, produced apparently before Gerard made his famous
translation of that great work in 1175,[421] and is of interest to us
because it contains an account of methods of transposing astronomical
tables to different longitudes. It had certainly been read by the author
of the London tables of 1232,[422] a set which, in addition to being of
astronomical value, contains a few incidental notes of geographic
importance.
The _De sphaera_[423] of John of Holywood (also known as John of
Halifax, or John Sacrobosco), dating from the very end of our period,
includes citations from Al-Farghānī’s _Astronomy_ as well as from
classical authors and was the most influential work in the field of
astronomical geography of its century, though the intrinsic value of its
contents was not great.
ARISTOTELIANISM INTRODUCED THROUGH ARABIC WORKS
The translators of Arabic mathematical and astronomical works during the
twelfth century prepared the way for an event of the first magnitude in
the intellectual history of the Middle Ages—the reintroduction of
Aristotelian learning into the West.[424] It would lead us far beyond
the bounds of this study to try to discuss the immense influence of
Aristotelianism on the development of European philosophy and theology
in and after the thirteenth century. Something of the geographical
content of Aristotle’s writings on physics and natural science, however,
was indicated in Chapter I, and it was during the closing years of the
twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries that these works
began to gain a hold on European thought. Their influence at this time
was for the most part exerted through roundabout channels: probably in
some cases through Latin translations of Arabic translations from the
original Greek; unquestionably in others through Latin translations of
Arabic translations of Syriac translations from the original Greek; and
in still others through Latin translations of Arabic commentaries on
Aristotle or of works inspired by his writings. The desire or ability to
tap the sources of Aristotelian lore by direct recourse to Greek texts
themselves was exceptional before the middle of the thirteenth century.
The precise date when the Occident became acquainted with the _Physics_
and _De caelo_ is a matter of some doubt. It is likely that Avicenna’s
version of these two books had been converted into Latin at Toledo
before the middle of the twelfth century by Dominicus Gondisalvi,[425]
who worked there under the patronage of Archbishop Raymond, but the
extent to which these early translations influenced European science is
a subject of controversy. It has been suggested by Duhem that Latin
translations of Aristotle were known to the scholars of the Chartres
school, Theodoric, Gilbert de la Porrée, and William of Conches,
passages in whose works certainly reveal some familiarity with
Peripatetic theories.[426] On the other hand, there are no actual
citations of Aristotle which would enable us to prove that the passages
in question show first-hand knowledge of the books of the
Stagirite.[427] The fact that much Peripatetic thought had been brought
to the West through the writers of the late Roman and earlier Christian
periods often makes it difficult, in the absence of actual citations, to
distinguish between what had been learned from these earlier sources and
what was contemporaneously derived from the Moslems.
_Gerard of Cremona_
We are on much firmer ground when we turn to the work of Gerard of
Cremona,[428] for we know as a fact that before his death in 1187
this indefatigable translator had put into Latin, of the works of
Aristotle of geographical interest, the first three books of the
_Meteorology_,[429] the _Physics_, the _De caelo et mundo_,[430] and
the _De generatione et corruptione_.[431]
_Michael Scot_
Michael Scot, who died in 1236[432] and was remembered by later ages as
a great magician, was another student of Aristotelian science. After
studying in Spain this Scotsman became court astrologer of the Emperor
Frederick II in Sicily. He learned Arabic and composed treatises on
astronomy, astrology (_Liber introductorius_ and _Liber particularis_)
and physiognomy under the influence of Moslem learning. He also
undertook the translation of sundry works on alchemy and astronomy,
among them the treatise of Al-Biṭrūjī, based on Aristotelian astronomy,
and Aristotle’s _De caelo_ with Averroës’ commentary. Associated with
the _Liber particularis_ we have the text of a questionnaire[433] which
Frederick II presented to Michael and which reveals something of that
versatile Emperor’s burning interest in cosmology and physical
geography. The philosopher’s “brief statements” in reply “concerning
hell, purgatory, heaven, and the terrestrial paradise are followed by an
account of the marvels of nature—strange lakes and rivers of the East,
wondrous metals, stones, plants, drugs, and animals, with their
respective virtues” (Haskins).[434] Michael in this connection also
gives expression to familiar, traditional opinions on the earth as a
sphere, though he includes some original observations on volcanoes and
hot springs.[435]
_Aristotelianism in the Thirteenth Century_
By the time of Michael Scot Aristotelian theories of physics and of
physical geography as introduced through Moslem channels were finding
fairly general currency in the West. Arnold the Saxon, for instance, in
his encyclopedic treatise written perhaps about 1225, gave citations
from the _De caelo et mundo_, the _Meteorology_, and the _Physics_, as
well as from Averroës and other Arabic admirers of Aristotle.[436]
Aristotelian cosmology, astronomy, and metaphysics, however, were not
accepted by Western scholars until after a strenuous intellectual battle
had been waged over them. Serious efforts were made to place these
teachings forever under the ban of the church. In 1210 and 1215 strict
prohibitions against the study of the Averroïstic versions of the
_Physics_ and _Metaphysics_ were issued by the authorities of the
University of Paris.[437] This shows that by that time not only had the
commentaries of Averroës been translated but that they must have become
popular.[438] Indeed, the popularity of Aristotle and Averroës was
destined to increase despite all prohibitions, and after their works, by
the middle of the thirteenth century, had been purged of objectionable
matter by the ecclesiastical authorities, they became prescribed studies
in the curriculum of the University of Paris. Aristotelianism dominated
the scientific thought of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries;
and the physical geography of the great encyclopedist, Albertus Magnus,
was largely based upon it. Albert, indeed, was sometimes unjustly called
Aristotle’s ape.
OPPONENTS OF ARISTOTELIANISM
On the other hand, there were many individuals who, though accepting the
teachings of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators in regard to specific
facts and theories, were none the less sternly opposed to blind and
uncritical adoption of them.
_William of Auvergne_
William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 to his death in 1249, was
leader of the ecclesiastical party that stood out against the study of
Aristotelian philosophy and theology in that city. It was nevertheless
true, as Duhem tells us, that William’s erudition “had received in
abundance additions from sources which had not enriched the erudition of
earlier centuries: that is from the works of Aristotle and Arabic
authors.”[439] The _De universo_ of William contains much material on
cosmology and natural history.
_Robert Grosseteste_
The great English churchman, Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln from
1235 until his death in 1253, presents an even more striking example of
the scholar, well read in Aristotelian and Arabic learning, who was
prone to question many of the Peripatetic doctrines. Grosseteste
deserves a high place in the history of medieval science by reason of
the depth of his scholarship and the originality of his ideas. His
style, however, is often difficult and obscure. From the geographical
point of view several of his treatises are of unusual interest. The _De
sphaera_ is devoted to problems of astronomical geography. In the _De
impressionibus aëris seu de prognosticatione_ rules are laid down for
the preparation of weather forecasts based upon astrological
considerations. The _De luce seu de inchoatione formarum_ explains
Robert’s theory of the Creation. The _De natura locorum_, in which the
influences of celestial rays upon the earth’s surface are discussed,
gives expression to many views that were elaborated in fuller detail by
Robert’s more famous pupil and intellectual successor, Roger Bacon.[440]
_ENCYCLOPEDIC WORKS_
Our period was marked by the production of encyclopedic works the object
of which was to bring together as much human knowledge as possible in
convenient, readable, and, frequently, in popular form. These
encyclopedias carried on the traditions of Pliny, Solinus, Isidore,
Bede, and other earlier writers and for the most part were lacking in
originality. Made up of paraphrases and word-for-word excerpts from
older books, they exemplify better than any other type of literary
production the respect which the man of the Middle Ages felt towards the
authority of the written word and his lack of critical acumen. Their
immense popularity shows that they satisfied a distinct want: the lore
contained in them, however worthless and puerile it often may seem to
us, formed an important part of the intellectual cargo of the medieval
mind. It is imperative, therefore, that representatives of this type of
work should be consulted by anyone who wishes to arrive at a just
estimate of the status of medieval knowledge.[441]
Most of the geography of the encyclopedias was a geography handed down
from classical times, a geography but distantly related to contemporary
facts and one in which fabulous elements tended to persist and multiply
at the expense of sound and accurate information. Yet it was the
geography of the majority of the lettered men, and the man who did not
himself actually travel found here practically the only convenient means
of learning about the countries of the world. He might pick up
occasional details of routes to Rome and Palestine from pilgrims,
traders, or soldiers; but only in the pages of the encyclopedias could
he find anything approaching a systematic treatment of the earth and its
various parts.
“DE IMAGINE MUNDI”
The most widely read book of this nature was the _De imagine mundi_,
which dates from about 1100. Though this has often been attributed in
recent years to Honorius of Autun (it has also been ascribed to St.
Anselm and with far greater probability to an unknown Honorius
Inclusus), the evidence at hand is insufficient to warrant us in coming
to any definite conclusions on the vexed question of its
authorship.[442] The general character of the compilation is illustrated
by a remark at the close of the dedicatory letter: “I place nothing in
this work except that which is approved by the best authorities.”[443]
The main source of the geographical chapters was the _Etymologiae_ of
Isidore, though the author also drew directly from Orosius.[444] It
seems likely, indeed, that the geographical chapter of Orosius served as
a basis for the entire compilation and provided an outline which was
embellished by copious excerpts of detail from the more elaborate
writings of Isidore, Augustine, and Bede. Furthermore, it is even
probable that the unknown author had a map before him.[445] He appears
to have borrowed directly from the _Collectanea rerum memorabilium_ of
Solinus his account of the marvels of India, though elsewhere he taps
Solinus at second hand through the medium of Isidore.[446]
LAMBERT’S “LIBER FLORIDUS;” GUIDO’S ENCYCLOPEDIA
Dating from approximately the same period is a similar work, the _Liber
floridus_ of Lambert. Practically all we know of the author is that he
was a canon of St. Omer early in the twelfth century.[447] His book, a
hodgepodge of notices, geographical and otherwise, from Isidore, Bede,
Martianus Capella, Raban Maur, and others, though it did not enjoy
popularity comparable to that of the _De imagine mundi_, nevertheless by
no means lapsed into obscurity during the centuries that followed. There
are at least eight manuscripts of it preserved in the libraries of
Europe, and it was referred to with high praise by writers of the
thirteenth century.[448] The manuscripts are illustrated by crude maps,
among the few remaining relics of twelfth-century cartography.
Of much the same nature is an encyclopedic compilation made by a certain
Guido, probably an Italian, in 1119.[449] It contains excerpts from a
variety of sources, including Isidore, the Romance of Alexander, Paul
the Deacon, and, more especially, the anonymous Ravenna geographer.
“LUCIDARIUS”
The _De imagine mundi_ became an important source for later writings. It
was a standard authority during the closing years of the Middle Ages for
those who deliberately undertook to give a geographical description of
the earth. The _Lucidarius_ (or _Aurea gemma_) was a popular
encyclopedia written in German towards the end of the twelfth century at
the order of Henry the Lion. Though embodying the peculiar and fabulous
features of the _De imagine mundi_, it omitted the drier but more
correct geographical and topographical details.[450] The principal
source of much of the natural science in the _Lucidarius_ was William of
Conches’ _De philosophia mundi_. The _Lucidarius_ was translated at a
later date into Danish, Dutch, and Bohemian,[451] and from it were
derived the geographical portions of the famous _Hortus deliciarum_ of
the abbess Herrad of Landsperg.[452]
GERVASE OF TILBURY
Another widely read book that came under the influence of the _De
imagine mundi_ was the _Otia imperialia_ of Gervase of Tilbury,[453] a
protégé of Otto IV and by him appointed marshal of the kingdom of Arles.
The _Otia_, composed to entertain the emperor during the leisure moments
of his struggle with Frederick II, is in large measure a compilation of
facts, fables, and theories borrowed from earlier works. The
cosmological chapters are drawn from Peter Comestor’s _Historia
scholastica_, the geographical ones from Orosius, Isidore, and, more
particularly, the _De imagine mundi_, which furnished a framework into
which the statements of the other writers were made to fit.[454] The
large number of manuscripts of the _Otia_ bears witness to its great
popularity.
JACQUES DE VITRY
Jacques de Vitry, bishop of St. John of Acre until 1220, in his
_Historia hierosolymitana_[455] also borrowed from the _De imagine
mundi_, especially in describing Palestine and Asia. His interest in the
remarkable caused him to include, as had been done by the authors of the
German _Lucidarius_, most of the fabulous elements of the earlier book
as well as to add fabulous stories from other sources. It was these
stories, derived in part from the _Historia hierosolymitana_ and in part
directly from the _De imagine mundi_, that accounted for the great
popularity of a poem to which we must now turn.
“L’IMAGE DU MONDE”
This poem, the _Image du Monde_,[456] destined to be read for over three
centuries, was decidedly the most important of the many works that felt
the influence of the _De imagine mundi_. Like its Latin predecessor, it
is an attempt at the popularization of universal knowledge. The work of
popularization, however, was here carried to the stage of translation
into a popular tongue, which rendered the book available to a much
broader circle of readers. The style was vivid and not lacking in
originality, and the subject matter contained sufficient of the
grotesque and unexpected to assure the poem a long-lived success. Though
the question of authorship and exact date is a somewhat perplexing one,
it seems likely that the _Image du Monde_ was partially composed in Metz
in 1245 or 1247 by a certain Gossouin and within the following two or
three years was added to either by Gossouin himself or by a certain
Walter of Metz, to whom the entire work has occasionally been
attributed.[457] Prior, however, to the composition of the second verse
redaction by Gossouin or Walter, the poem had been put into a prose
form,[458] from which translations were subsequently made into Hebrew,
Judeo-German, and English (the last by Caxton in 1480).
“KONUNGS-SKUGGSJÁ”
From the very end of our period there dates an Icelandic dialogue of
more or less encyclopedic scope, a work which might well be called a
northern counterpart of the _De imagine mundi_. This _Konungs-Skuggsjá_,
or _King’s Mirror_,[459] written about the year 1250 or perhaps as late
as 1260, contains chapters that reveal to us something of the status of
Scandinavian knowledge of the geography and natural phenomena of
Iceland, Greenland, and the Arctic seas. But, like the Sagas, so far as
we know, it was not translated into Latin or into the vernacular
tongues, and the type of knowledge contained in it remained until the
great age of discovery virtually the exclusive property of the peoples
of Iceland and of the far north of Europe.[460]
GREAT ENCYCLOPEDIAS OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
We cannot well leave the subject of encyclopedic compilations without
mentioning such gigantic thirteenth-century productions as the _Specula_
of Vincent of Beauvais,[461] the various writings of Albertus
Magnus,[462] and the relatively less ambitious popularizations of
Bartholomew Anglicus,[463] Brunetto Latino,[464] and others.[465] The
_Opus majus_ of Roger Bacon is also encyclopedic in scope. These great
works contain a wealth of reference the systematic study of which would
unquestionably shed much additional light on the substance of medieval
geographical knowledge. The innumerable pages of Albertus Magnus,
indeed, show not a little originality; and Roger Bacon stands somewhat
apart from his contemporaries as a fearless exponent of scientific
method.[466] On the whole, however, there is no very essential
difference between the geography of these men and that of their less
well-informed and perhaps less diligent predecessors. This is one reason
why we have felt justified in failing to treat them in detail. Another
reason is that adequate treatment of the geography of the
thirteenth-century encyclopedists would fill another volume at least the
size of the present one.
DANTE
A figure, however, whom we cannot refrain from mentioning in this
connection, though he lived after 1250 and though his genius far
transcended that of any encyclopedist of any age, is Dante. Much of the
information amassed by the laborious compilers of encyclopedic works
(especially Brunetto Latino) was fused by the poet into the _Divine
Comedy_ and molded into his various prose writings. The universality of
Dante’s knowledge embraced the geography and cosmography of his age.
Though we shall not attempt to deal with Dante’s geographical lore[467]
in the pages which follow, it would be a serious mistake to omit all
reference to one who flourished so soon after the end of our period and
who, besides being a poet of all time, was an outstanding figure in
medieval scholarship and, incidentally, in the history of medieval
geography.
The reader who wishes to investigate the geography of Dante and of the
encyclopedists of the thirteenth century will find brief summaries and
references in Notes 92–98 to the present chapter.
_HISTORIES, CHRONICLES, SAGAS, EPIC POEMS_
The writings of the historians and chroniclers of the Middle Ages,
though they do not as a rule include systematic expositions of
geography, nevertheless often contain incidental geographical matter of
no slight interest. The present section is devoted to a very few
selected specimens of historical narrative of the Crusading age, whether
prose or verse, that are of particular significance from the
geographical point of view.
OTTO OF FREISING
Among the outstanding medieval historians was Otto of Freising.[468] A
man of intelligence and breadth, steeped in the academic literature of
his age, Otto, though never going out of his way to write of
geographical subjects, always maintained an attitude of open and
receptive interest toward all branches of science. The range of his
literary and scholarly learning is a key to the intellectual attainments
of the average man of the world of his period. Born about 1114 or 1115
of a noble or even royal family—his maternal grandfather was the Emperor
Henry IV—Otto studied in Paris probably early in the second quarter of
the century. After his return to Germany in 1132 or 1133, he became a
Cistercian and was subsequently made bishop of Freising. His principal
works were a _Chronicon_, running from the beginning of the world to the
year 1146, and the _Gesta Friderici_, recording the deeds of Frederick
Barbarossa down to the year 1156 and continued after that date by
Ragewin (or Rahewin).[469] Among other classical authorities Otto may
have used Seneca’s _Quaestiones naturales_: most of his geographical
ideas, however, were derived from Isidore and Orosius and from certain
unknown “topographers” whom he cites as giving details on the rivers of
Europe.[470]
GUNTHER OF PAIRIS
On the _Gesta Friderici_ was based an historical poem composed about
1186 by Gunther of Pairis (in Alsace), of whom we know next to
nothing.[471] This work, the _Ligurinus_, adds little of material nature
to the sources from which it was taken, although the poet converts the
simple, straightforward narrative of Otto and Ragewin into a poem
vividly expressed. It has been shown that the _Ligurinus_, even though
the work of a German author, is a typical product of the poetical school
of France of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.[472] Where
the writer expands and converts into verse Otto’s and Ragewin’s words
describing natural features of the earth’s surface and geographical
regions, he displays a sense of color and a feeling for nature that are
striking,[473] even though the actual epithets employed are hackneyed
and drawn from well-known classical models. Furthermore, in the
description of Germany he departs so widely from his literary sources
that it seems more than likely that he actually based his lines on
personal acquaintance with the country.[474]
WALTER OF CHÂTILLON; WILLIAM THE BRETON
Two other historical poems of the same school and of analogous character
to the _Ligurinus_ are the _Alexandreis_[475] of Walter of Châtillon
(also known as Walter of Lille), written about 1180, and the _Philippis_
of William the Breton, published about 1225.[476] These are Latin
hexameter epics modeled on Virgil and Lucan; full of allusions to Latin
literature and mythology, they also show originality and a power of
accurate description of scenes and country.[477] The _Alexandreis_ sings
the deeds of Alexander the Great; the _Philippis_ the exploits of Philip
Augustus of France.
HISTORIANS AND HISTORIES OF THE CRUSADES
Our period was the age of the reopening of the Levant and the regions of
the Black Sea to Western knowledge through the Crusades and through the
expansion of commerce that came in their train. The historians of the
Crusades, consequently, furnish us with geographical notices of a kind
differing from the stereotyped and secondhand geography of the
encyclopedias. The items in the Crusaders’ records are often the results
of actual experience. They give us an impression of freshness lacking in
the pages of dry compilations like the _De imagine mundi_. But the
Crusaders were not geographers and were without any true geographical
instinct. They rarely felt an interest in anything besides the immediate
events they were undertaking to describe or in matters not purely
practical or utilitarian.[478]
The most important work, from this point of view, is the _Historia rerum
in partibus transmarinis gestarum_ of William of Tyre (born 1130).[479]
This covers events in Palestine and in the Crusaders’ states during the
years between 1095 and 1185 and abounds in observations on the products
and appearance of the country, on the habits of the Arabs—whose language
William had probably learned[480]—and on other peoples of the East.
The _Gesta regis Ricardi_, which has sometimes been erroneously ascribed
to Benedict of Peterborough,[481] records the voyage of Richard
Coeur-de-Lion to the Holy Land in 1190. In the description of the routes
to and from Palestine[482] we find a wealth of detail about the
countries, isles, and seas traversed. The distinctly nautical style and
content in places make it seem not at all improbable that a part of the
book at least was derived from some sailing manual. Roger of Hoveden in
his _Chronica_[483] (to the year 1201) made use of the same sources as
those on which the author of the _Gesta regis Ricardi_ drew, though
Roger’s account is fuller and more detailed, especially regarding Spain.
Another source for the Crusade of Richard Coeur-de-Lion is the _Estoire
de la guerre sainte_ by Ambroise,[484] a professional writer, who took
part on the expedition and who described the Holy Land with less
understanding than William of Tyre almost exclusively from the point of
view of the sufferings and hardships experienced by the Crusaders.
The _Prise de Constantinople_[485] of Robert de Clari, a history of the
Fourth Crusade by a participant, is the work of a man of relatively
humble estate but of a man who felt more or less genuine interest in
strange peoples and their customs. This interest is manifested
particularly by the data that he gives on the Komans of the Russian
plains, some of whom he undoubtedly had seen on the streets of
Constantinople.
A letter from the patriarch of Jerusalem to Innocent III, entitled _La
devision de la terre de oultremer et des choses qui i sont_,[486] was
composed about 1200 in reply to a request from the Pope for information
concerning the Saracen countries. In this anonymous work a geographical
sketch of Egypt and Palestine shows that its author had no limited
acquaintance with the Moslem faith and the Mohammedan peoples.
SCANDINAVIAN HISTORICAL WORKS
The geographical knowledge acquired by the Crusaders became the common
property of all Western Europe. That which was acquired by the Vikings,
on the other hand, was disseminated practically not at all among the
peoples of the Latin West. Brief mention, therefore, must suffice for
the Scandinavian sources, even though of all European folk the Vikings
were the most adventurous voyagers and their geographical horizon the
widest.
The introduction of Christianity marked the end of the heroic age of
Norwegian and Icelandic history. It also ushered in an extraordinary
period of literary productivity, the age of the Sagas[487] and
Eddas.[488] The composition of the Sagas began in the twelfth and lasted
on into the fourteenth century, but the events which they relate
occurred far back in pagan days. For the most part bald but telling
narratives of adventure, war, and litigation, they devote little space
to comment or description; and the numerous place names mentioned are
referred to as if the reader were already familiar with them.
The records of the farthest voyages of the Vikings to the shores of
Wineland the Good were not given the final written form in which we now
know them until after the close of the thirteenth century.[489] On the
other hand, the history of Iceland was told by Ari Frodhi (1067–1148) in
his _Íslendingabók_;[490] and the chronicles of the settlement of the
coasts of this isle and of the discovery of Greenland are recorded in
the _Landnámabók_,[491] or _Book of Settlements_, the original of which
probably dates from the twelfth century. The famous _Heimskringla_ of
Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of early Scandinavian historians, records
the history of the kings of Norway. Its title means “the Round World,”
and the prelude consists of a brief geographical description of the
principal countries of the world. The text includes no less than sixteen
Sagas, among them that of Sigurd the Crusader chronicling an adventurous
voyage (1109) of a king of southern Norway to the Holy Land by way of
the Strait of Gibraltar and homeward overland. Scattered geographical
references are found in other Sagas and in the _Icelandic_[492] and
_Greenland Annals_[493] which, though written after our period, throw
light on events that took place before the mid-thirteenth century.
LATIN HISTORIES OF THE NORTH
Besides the Sagas, three historical works written in Latin by Northern
writers of our age deserve particular mention inasmuch as they all
contain geographical descriptions of the Scandinavian world. The first
of these is the history of Adam of Bremen. On strictly chronological
grounds Adam, who died about 1076, belongs before the opening of the
Crusading age. We shall discuss him, however, among the historians of
the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, to whose works his writings
are more akin in spirit than to those of the earlier Middle Ages. Adam
was canon of Bremen and master of the cathedral school of that city in
the time of the great Archbishop Adalbert, who had “made Bremen an
Arctic Rome and his court the greatest center of Northern learning”
(Beazley).[494] The archiepiscopal province of Bremen was the largest in
the entire medieval church, including all of Scandinavia, Iceland,
Greenland, the Orkneys, the Faroes, and the Hebrides. Adam was thus
placed in a most favorable position to gather together materials on the
geography and history of these northern lands. His great work (called
sometimes _Gesta Hammenburgensis ecclesiae pontificum_, sometimes
_Historia ecclesiastica_, and sometimes _Bremensium praesulum historia_)
is in four books, the last of which deals with the geography of the
North. Much of this was based on information derived from
contemporaries; but Adam was also well read in Latin literature and
often quotes and copies from the works of Macrobius, Martianus Capella,
Solinus, and Orosius.
From somewhat more than a century later we have another Latin history of
the Scandinavian North—if Saxo Grammaticus’ curiously heterogeneous
combination of mythology, folklore, poetry, and accurate observation
deserves the name of history. The first book of this work, known as the
_Gesta Danorum_, contains a formal geographical sketch of Denmark, the
Baltic, the Scandinavian Peninsula, and remoter countries and isles
beyond the Atlantic, wherein fact is blended with romance. There are
also occasional observations of geographical interest scattered through
the later books.
Finally, in an anonymous _Historia Norwegiae_ dating from the early
thirteenth century we find an introductory passage on the geography of
the regions with which this history deals: a concise description of
Norway is followed by briefer comments on the tributary islands,
Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys, and the Faroes. Especially interesting
are the author’s observations upon the volcanoes of Iceland. The
contents show that, like Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus, the writer
must have been familiar with the standard geographical books of the
Middle Ages, with Bede and Solinus, and perhaps with Isidore and Pliny.
The _Historia Norwegiae_, however, can never have enjoyed great
popularity, or else more than one manuscript would be known at the
present day.[495]
_LEGENDS_
Many of the legends of our period contain material of geographical
significance, and a few of these may claim our particular attention.
ROMANCE OF ALEXANDER
The stories of Alexander the Great served to direct men’s attention
eastward, for, besides narrating the adventures of the Macedonian
conqueror, they gave, as we have already seen,[496] details of a sort
about the geography of Asia, particularly of India.[497] Not only were
the earlier Latin versions derived from the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_
paraphrased and copied by historians,[498] but new elements were added
to the cycle—notably the _Iter ad Paradisum_,[499] an account of
Alexander’s journey to Paradise. Walter of Châtillon (or of Lille),
about 1180, composed in the style of Lucan a great Latin hexameter poem
entitled _Alexandreis_, based in part on the legendary stories of the
Macedonian and in part on the more authentic histories of Justin and
Quintus Curtius.[500] The widest currency, however, was given to the
Romance through its translation into the vernacular tongues. The oldest
French version, which covers the earlier portion of the Romance only,
was written by Alberic of Besançon (early twelfth century?) in
octosyllabic verse of the dialect of the Dauphiny.[501] This was
translated into German by one Lamprecht and was rendered into the
_langue d’oïl_ in decasyllabic form.[502] The Romance reached its
highest vernacular development in a version in alexandrines,[503] the
joint composition of Lambert li Tors of Châteaudun, Alexander of Bernai
(or of Paris), and Peter of St. Cloud. The existence of more than twenty
manuscripts testifies to the popularity of this great poem, which is a
sort of mosaic from various sources.[504] Much of it came from the
_Pseudo-Callisthenes_ through the medium of Valerius, the _Epitoma_ of
Valerius, Alberic of Besançon, and the decasyllabic poem; but some
elements can be traced back to Orosius, Justin, Quintus Curtius,
Eustatius, and Josephus, and the texts show many later interpolations of
unknown origin. The Romance in alexandrines was drawn upon in its turn
by later compilers. From the mid-thirteenth century there dates a poem,
probably by one Eustace of Kent, which incorporates much material from
this and other sources.[505] It includes miscellaneous geographical
elements; and certain of the manuscripts are adorned with a wealth of
magnificent miniatures, representing, among other things, the marvels of
India and all the fantastic creatures encountered by Alexander
throughout the East.
PRESTER JOHN
During our period the belief was spread abroad in the existence of a
numerous Christian population in Asia. We find an account of Christians
in India in an anonymous report of the visit of a certain Patriarch John
of India to Rome in 1122, the authenticity of which is apparently
confirmed in a letter of Odo, abbot of St. Remi in Rheims, to a certain
Count Thomas.[506] Of far greater importance was the fabulous story of
Prester John. Belief in this mighty Christian potentate and his immense
kingdom may be traced in large measure to the widely read _Letter of
Prester John_, dating in its earliest form from before 1177,[507]
addressed in some manuscripts to the Byzantine Emperor[508] and
elsewhere to other Western monarchs. The popularity of this is attested
by the fact that Zarncke, its editor, knew of no less than eighty
manuscripts. The question of the sources of the _Letter_ in its original
form is obscure, though the origins of the numerous interpolations can
nearly all be explained. Much, certainly, was borrowed from the
Alexander stories, and much from the legend of St. Thomas in India;
other parts are indubitably connected with the great Oriental reservoir
of fabulous and miraculous lore. The account of the visit of Patriarch
John to Rome and the _Letter of Prester John_ constituted the principal
sources of an anonymous and highly fanciful description of India and of
Prester John’s country found in a twelfth-century manuscript in the
Heiligenkreutzerstift, near Vienna, and commonly called the _Elysaeus_
account.[509] The _Letter of Prester John_ was not only extensively read
in its various Latin versions but was translated into French, Italian,
German, and English.[510]
ST. BRANDAN
Another legend which enjoyed perhaps an even greater popularity was that
dealing with the wanderings of St. Brandan (or Brendan) in the Western
Ocean. The story occurs in several distinct forms.[511] The Latin
version had already taken shape before our period opened and perhaps
dates back to the ninth century or earlier. From it was derived in part
an Anglo-Norman version composed in 1121, which ultimately found its way
into the _Image du monde_. The legend furthermore gained currency among
the Teutonic peoples in a somewhat different version developed probably
from a twelfth-century French original.
_PILGRIM NARRATIVES; MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS OF TRAVEL_
The travels of pilgrims and traders during the Middle Ages have been the
subject of more careful research in recent years than many other aspects
of our study.[512] Consequently, it will suffice merely to give a very
brief statement of the more significant pilgrim records dating from the
Crusading age.
CHRISTIAN PILGRIM NARRATIVES
The first pilgrim after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 who has left a
fairly complete account of the Holy Land was the Anglo-Saxon,
Saewulf,[513] a traveler who visited Palestine in 1102 and 1103,
combining trading enterprise with religious zeal. From the middle of the
century the journeys of John of Würzburg,[514] of his follower
Theoderic,[515] as well as of the Icelandic abbot, Nikulás Bergsson[516]
of Thverá, deserve mention because in these records we find a personal
touch that distinguishes them from the majority of similar narratives.
The latter as a rule show that the pilgrims, like the medieval men of
learning, suffered from that tendency, so characteristic of their age,
to copy slavishly what others had said rather than to rely on their own
powers of observation. This is particularly well illustrated by the
majority of pilgrim records dating from after the early years of the
twelfth century, when, as Beazley puts it, a decline had set in,
“hastened by the compilation of standard guidebooks, which may be
faintly described as legendary and inaccurate, and from which the later
pilgrim narratives blindly copy, to the ever growing exclusion of
anything independent or scholarly. Two of these handbooks, known as the
_Old_ and the _New Compendium_, are the source of most of the tracts on
the Holy Road which have been left us, under various names, from the
time of the Second Crusade to the close of the Middle Ages.”[517] To
this dry, guidebook type belong the narrative ascribed to Fetellus,
archdeacon of Antioch,[518] and a series of anonymous accounts of
pilgrimages dating from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.
Though several of these contain more or less original matter, the
desiccating influence of the _Old Compendium_ is nearly everywhere
apparent.[519]
Besides the pilgrims other travelers were on the road, and the records
of their travels have in some cases come down to us. The journeys of
Giraldus Cambrensis through Wales and Ireland will be discussed in the
next section, on topographical works. Narratives of travel are also
occasionally to be found in historical works and chronicles, poems, and
letters.
LETTERS OF TRAVEL
The letter was an honored form of literary expression throughout
antiquity and the Middle Ages. Carefully composed epistles of the
ecclesiastic and educated man of the world were looked upon as more than
mere media for the conveying of information. Not infrequently they were
highly polished specimens of stylistic art, worthy of finding a
permanent place in literature. From our point of view, they are of
interest for the personal accounts of journeys which they sometimes
contain.[520] Guy of Bazoches, for instance, who was precentor of the
church of St. Stephen at Châlons, gave a brilliant description of his
experiences and of what he saw on the Crusade of 1190 in a series of
letters to his nephew and to others.[521] Conrad of Querfurt, bishop of
more than one see in Germany during the last years of the twelfth
century, wrote enthusiastically of his wanderings through Italy in a
letter preserved for us in Arnold of Lübeck’s _Chronica Slavorum_.[522]
A thorough study of the epistolography of the Crusading age would surely
reveal a wealth of geographical lore.
JEWISH TRAVELERS
The Jews of the Middle Ages often journeyed farther afield than their
Christian contemporaries. Their travels, for the most part in the
interests of commerce, though in some instances in the nature of
pilgrimages to Jerusalem, a city holy to Jew and Christian alike,[523]
were facilitated by the presence of Hebrew communities in nearly all the
cities of Europe and Western Asia. Strongly imbued with the racial
consciousness of a vigorous and often oppressed people, the members of
these communities did all in their power to receive the travelers and
speed them on their way. The books composed by such Jewish wanderers as
Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Ratisbon have been preserved and are
invaluable as geographical records. It should be remembered, however,
that they were written by men of a despised race and in a tongue unknown
to the Christians of the West and that the geographical lore which may
have been widespread among the more intelligent Hebrews never became an
integral part of the geographical knowledge of Christendom. Hence in the
pages which follow and which deal primarily with the geographical
knowledge of Western Christendom but relatively little space can be
devoted to Jewish geography.
A few words, nevertheless, must be said of Benjamin and of Petachia.
_Benjamin of Tudela_
Rabbi Benjamin came from the small Spanish city of Tudela on the Ebro.
It was probably about the year 1159 that this observant wanderer
journeyed eastward from his native town, moving leisurely through
southern France, Italy, Greece, Constantinople, and thence by sea to
Syria. After a thorough examination of the cities of Syria and Palestine
he made his way overland to Baghdad. It is unlikely that he penetrated
beyond Mesopotamia, though on his homeward journey he visited Egypt
sometime before 1171 and returned to his home in Castile in 1173. He
appears to have kept a record as he went along, and from a critical
examination of his book it is possible in a general way to reconstruct
his route. He describes in detail the cities he passed through and the
distances in days’ journeys, though not the directions, from one to
another. He notes particularly the names of the leading Jews of each
place and gives estimates of the numbers of the Jewish population.
Indeed, probably one of his main purposes was to get in touch with Jews
of as many countries as possible in order to determine where they were
treated well. One result of the Crusades was an outburst of persecution
of Hebrews throughout Christendom, and Benjamin, besides traveling for
the sake of trade, was undoubtedly seeking for places “where his
expatriated brethren might find an asylum” (Adler).[524] But, as well as
revealing an interest in the Jewish inhabitants of the regions he
traversed, his book gives us many significant data in regard to commerce
and politics, monuments and natural features. For the regions actually
visited by Benjamin this information is accurate and precise, but for
the farther parts of Asia it becomes confused and often legendary.[525]
_Petachia of Ratisbon_
The second of the great Hebrew travelers of the twelfth century was
Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon in Bavaria. In the ninth decade of the
century Petachia traveled eastward from Prague through Poland, Russia,
Transcaucasia, and Kurdestan to Baghdad, whence he returned homeward by
way of Palestine. The outward journey was a most unusual exploit for
this time, traversing the steppes of Russia then infested with wild
Tatar tribes. Unfortunately, much that was most important and
significant in Petachia’s book appears to have been removed by Rabbi
Yahudi the Pious, “who acted as Petachia’s literary mouthpiece”
(Beazley).[526]
_TOPOGRAPHICAL WORKS_
We must now examine a few works on the geography and topography of local
regions.
GODFREY OF VITERBO
In a manuscript of the mid-twelfth-century writings of Godfrey of
Viterbo, and in all probability to be ascribed to Godfrey, there is a
poem entitled _Denumeratio regnorum imperio subjectorum_.[527] The
writer explains his purpose in the following terms: “Not the wars of
kingdoms are here set forth, but their fortune (pride?), their rivers,
the extent and kind of regions which constitute them, the types of
customs, the manner of harvesting and of trade.”[528] In the course of
the poem he treats of Rome, of Apulia and other Italian districts
subject to Rome, of the kingdom of the Lombards, of Venetia, of “true
France”—by which he means the lands of the Franks along the lower
Rhine—of Basel, of Alsace, of Strasburg, of Worms; but, though much of
the detail constitutes a poetic geography of peoples and cities, little
attention is paid to physical features.
GERVASE OF CANTERBURY
Among the lesser writings of the English chronicler, Gervase of
Canterbury, we find a _mappamundi_ dating from about the year 1200.[529]
This is a brief account of England, its dimensions[530] and languages,
followed by a table in three columns showing, for each county. (1) the
most important ecclesiastical officers, archbishops, bishops, abbots,
and priors; (2) the names of the churches; and (3) the religious orders
and mother churches to which the various ecclesiastics appertained.
After this there follows a list of hospitals, castles, islands, fresh-
and salt-water springs, and other curiosities.
GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS
By all means the most important topographical works of our period,
however, came from the pen of Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Barry
(_c._ 1146-_c._ 1222).[531] This active and intelligent Norman-Welsh
ecclesiastic, who at the time had already made one visit to Ireland, was
appointed chaplain to Henry II in 1184 and in the following year was
sent as counselor to the young Prince John on the latter’s expedition to
Ireland. During the expedition he collected materials for two treatises,
the first of which, the _Topographia Hiberniae_, was completed in 1188.
Though Giraldus’ knowledge of Ireland in reality was limited, barely
extending beyond the areas occupied by the English, though his
impression of the Irish people was prejudiced and hostile, and though he
overburdens us with the recitation of marvels, his books show, none the
less, that their author possessed a keen interest in natural history and
geography and that his powers of observation were far from mediocre. The
second treatise, the _Expugnatio Hiberniae_, or history of the English
conquest of the island, contains much less geographical material than
the _Topographia_.
In 1188, when Henry II was about to start out on the Crusade, he sent
Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury into Wales to preach there and urge the
people to take the cross. Giraldus accompanied the archbishop on this
tour and subsequently wrote an account of it in his _Itinerarium
Kambriae_. Together with the _Descriptio Kambriae_ that followed a few
years later, this contains many accurate and important remarks and notes
on the physical and human geography of Giraldus’ native land.
These treatises on Ireland and Wales hold a unique position in the
literature not only of our period but of the entire Middle Ages. Brewer,
in his introduction to the collected works of Giraldus, says that the
_Topographia Hiberniae_ is a “monument of a bold and original genius”
and that Giraldus “must take rank with the first who descried the value
and, in some respects, the proper limits of descriptive geography.”[532]
Though this may be a little too strong, we readily agree with Dimock’s
estimate of the treatises on Wales: “His account of the land and the
people of Wales will bear very honourable comparison with any
topographical attempt that had appeared up to his time and with any that
appeared for many ages afterwards.”[533] Giraldus was in a very real
sense the forerunner of the modern writer of the better sort of book of
travel. His works reveal to us a mind keenly interested in the results
of its own observation and not merely in collecting what others had
said. Giraldus was certainly enthusiastic, and we are almost tempted to
say that he was endowed with an “outdoor” and even “Rooseveltian”
interest in the world about him.
Before leaving the topographical works, mention should be made of a
little anonymous guide to the monuments and antiquities of Rome, the
_Mirabilia urbis Romae_,[534] dating from the late twelfth century and
widely read during the years that followed.
_MAPS_
From the age of the Crusades date several of the most characteristic
medieval maps. These highly important sources, which serve so admirably
to illustrate the geographical conceptions of the time, have been made
the object of such thorough and careful research by Konrad Miller,[535]
the results of whose investigations are well summarized in Beazley’s
_Dawn of Modern Geography_,[536] that it hardly seems necessary here to
devote a great deal of space to them. Let us merely indicate what the
more important maps were, and show in a general way their relation to
the literature of the age, leaving for Chapter XI a brief discussion of
them as typifying medieval geographical thought.
We saw in Chapter II that the maps of the world drawn before 1100 and
now extant could nearly all be classified in four groups.
ZONE MAPS
1. Of the first, zone maps, or diagrams illustrating the division of the
earth’s surface into zones, examples occur in twelfth- and
thirteenth-century manuscripts of Macrobius, of the _De imagine mundi_,
of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_ (Fig. 3), of William of Conches’ _De
philosophia mundi_, of Herrad of Landsperg’s _Hortus deliciarum_, and of
John of Holywood’s _De sphaera_.[537] The Paris manuscript of Peter
Alphonsi’s _Dialogus_ also contains two related diagrams, one showing
the eccentricity of the sun’s orbit and the other the division of the
northern hemisphere into climates. Arabic influence upon Peter Alphonsi
is revealed by the fact that south is at the top of his diagrams,
instead of east, according to the almost universal custom of medieval
Christian cartography.[538]
T-O MAPS AND SALLUST MAPS
2. The diagrammatic T-O group are also represented. By all means the
most interesting of these is a map preserved in a manuscript in St.
John’s College, Oxford, and dating from 1110. Somewhat more elaborate
than others of the same type, this one assigns Greek names to the
cardinal points of the compass, a circumstance which has given rise to a
plausible conjecture that it may have been a copy of an original found
in the Levant at the time of the First Crusade.[539]
[Illustration:
FIG. 3—Zone map in an early twelfth-century manuscript of Lambert of
St. Omer’s _Liber floridus_, viz. Ghent Codex 2, fol. 24 vo. East is
at the top. (From Miller, _Mappaemundi_, vol. iii, 1895, fig. 59.)
]
3. There also date from our period several examples of the ornamented
T-O maps drawn to illustrate Sallust’s works.[540]
BEATUS MAPS
4. We saw that the existing specimens of that series of maps of the
world drawn to elucidate a passage in Beatus’ commentary on the
Apocalypse appear to have come from two sources: (_a_) maps which were
modeled closely on the original map of Beatus or a contemporary copy and
(_b_) those which were merely generalized outlines of it.[541]
_a._ A map dating from 1203 and preserved at Osma in Old Castile comes
nearest to the original in design and form, if not in the richness of
detail (Fig. 4). Alone of all the Beatus type this shows the heads of
the twelve apostles scattered over the earth’s surface. Another map,
probably derived from the same source, is to be found in the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; though it is rich in detail, little
attempt was made to show localities in their proper relative positions,
and consequently the geography represented is chaotic to an extreme.
[Illustration:
FIG. 4—Osma Beatus map dating from 1203 showing the division of the
world among the twelve apostles. East is at the top. (From Miller,
_Mappaemundi_, vol. i, 1895, p. 35.)
]
_b._ There are also three or four maps dating from our period from the
second source. Their main interest lies in the remarkable naïveté of
workmanship.
MAPS OF LAMBERT, GUIDO, HENRY OF MAYENCE, AND OTHERS
In addition to the above, for which we have prototypes from the period
before 1100, there are a number of maps of the world of the twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries, the prototypes of which either have been
lost or never existed. Among the most notable of these is one found in
certain manuscripts of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_.[542] It was compiled
from the usual medieval authorities, Isidore, Orosius, Julius Honorius,
Martianus Capella, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_,
and the Bible, though there also appear upon it a few names that could
have been taken only from contemporary sources. The influence of
Macrobius is most strikingly revealed, for, unlike most other medieval
maps which indicate the known world (Asia, Europe, and Africa) as
occupying the entire area or by far the greater part of the world disk
(as in the Beatus group), Lambert’s map divides the disk along its
diameter by a zone representing the course of the sun and places in the
southern hemisphere an austral continent of magnitude equal to that of
the _oikoumene_.[543]
Guido’s compilation of geographical works, made in 1119, contains in two
manuscripts not only a T-O map but also a map of the world accompanying
a selection from the book of the anonymous Ravenna geographer and a
detailed map of Italy and the surrounding lands. The map of the world is
peculiar because of the enormous area which the Mediterranean occupies.
Miller believes it to be a reduced sketch of a large map of the world
and holds that the detailed map of Italy is a copy of a small portion of
this same original.[544]
A compilation of the _De imagine mundi_, put together by one Henry,
canon of the Church of St. Mary in Mayence, in 1100 and preserved in a
late twelfth-century copy in Cambridge, England, contains a world map
(see below, p. 245, Fig. 6, inset). Though indirectly made from the
sources that the writers of the _De imagine mundi_ and other medieval
cosmographies utilized, it was probably not compiled directly from the
_De imagine mundi_ but rather from a large wall map. Its affinities to
the immense late thirteenth-century world disk in Hereford Cathedral
make it seem possible that both had a common source. In addition to the
older nomenclature, about a dozen more modern place names are to be
found upon it.[545]
A map of the world which somewhat resembles that of Henry of Mayence is
also to be found in two manuscripts of the _Chronica maiora_ (or
_Historia maiora_) of Matthew Paris. Though there are many names that
have come down to modern times, the geography is meager and poor, in
striking contrast to the detail of Matthew’s map of Britain,[546] to
which reference is made below.
To complete the discussion of _mappaemundi_, mention must be made of a
very small but very neat little map in a late thirteenth-century Psalter
in the British Museum. If this was not actually drawn during our period,
it undoubtedly had predecessors much like it, and it shows marked
resemblances to the map of Henry of Mayence as well as to the Hereford
and Ebstorf maps.[547]
REGIONAL MAPS
Several of the regional maps, or maps of limited areas, dating from our
period may be merely fragments or copies of small portions of maps of
the world. This is certainly true of the map of Europe in the Ghent
manuscript of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_, which depicts that continent
crammed into slightly more than a quarter of a circle with no attempt to
show the articulations of the coast. The Guido map of Italy, as we have
already seen, probably represents a portion of a larger map, and the
same can possibly be said of the maps of the East and of Palestine which
follow a treatise by Jerome, entitled _De situ et nominibus locorum
Hebraicorum_, or _De Palestinae locis_, in a manuscript now in the
British Museum. Though these two maps were actually drawn in the twelfth
century, they represent the cartography of a very much earlier age and
perhaps may be attributed to Jerome himself.[548] They were drawn to
illustrate the Biblical geography of Palestine and the Orient, and they
show a great wealth of Scriptural legends. Other legends were taken from
profane sources, such as the writings of Isidore, Orosius, Julius
Honorius, Dionysius, and the Romance of Alexander; and affinities to the
Peutinger Table show that the draftsman was under the influence of the
cartography of the Roman imperial epoch.
Among the regional maps that had no connection with _mappaemundi_ are
plans of Jerusalem (“Situs Ierusalem”) accompanying twelfth- and
thirteenth-century manuscripts of an anonymous work written about 1109
and entitled _Gesta Francorum Ierusalem expugnantium_ (Fig. 7, p. 250,
below). Though these plans reveal many names from the early Crusading
age, their outlines as a whole—the fact, for instance, that Jerusalem is
shown to be circular instead of rectangular—make it seem probable that
they represent a schematic diagram of the Holy City going back to as
early as the sixth century and brought up to date by the anonymous
compiler of the Crusading epoch.[549]
_Matthew Paris’ Maps of Britain_
In addition to the map of the world of which we have spoken already, the
works of Matthew Paris contain no less than five regional maps.[550] Two
of these, the “Situs Britanniae” and the “Schema Britanniae,” are simple
diagrams of Britain and are of no particular importance. The other three
are far more significant. The first, a pictorial itinerary of the route
from London to southern Italy, with legends in Old French and Latin,
delineates vividly towns and principal topographic features. The second
is a map of Palestine which superficially resembles that of Jerome; the
names, however, are in French, and the legends refer to places familiar
to the contemporary pilgrim and Crusader. Finally come the three
manuscript variants of Matthew’s map of Britain, which, as Beazley
observes, “among all designs of purely medieval origin ... show the best
evidence of critical study, the most systematic attempt at the exact
delineation of a particular country”[551] (for one variant, see below,
p. 343, Fig. 9). There is a profusion of detail and accuracy in the
representation of the relative position of places refreshing when we
contemplate the confusion and credulity manifested in the earlier works.
This map is also the first example of late medieval cartography in which
north instead of east is shown at the top of the sheet.
CHAPTER V
THE PLACE OF GEOGRAPHY IN THE MEDIEVAL CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Geography in the Middle Ages did not form a distinct and separate
science. The student who learned anything of geography learned it
incidentally to the study of other subjects and never thought of it as
sufficiently dignified to enjoy a place by itself in the scholastic
curriculum. Even the word “geography” was scarcely ever used.[552] The
term _cosmographia_, sometimes employed to distinguish certain aspects
of our subject from geometry, included practically all branches of
natural history, the sciences of animals, rocks, monstrosities, and
meteorological phenomena. On the other hand, cosmography did not
comprise many of the topics with which we are concerned, particularly
those lying on the border line between geography, astronomy, and
geology. The question of the origin of the earth was in the province of
the theologian of the Middle Ages.
GEOGRAPHY INCLUDED UNDER GEOMETRY
The well-known seven liberal arts formed the foundation of the work in
the medieval schools. From them the student might advance to higher
researches in philosophy and theology, but the seven arts were the base
of all learning.[553] Martianus Capella’s _De nuptiis Philologiae et
Mercurii_ was an attractive and somewhat imaginative exposition of the
arts and had become one of the most popular of medieval textbooks long
before the twelfth century.[554] Here each art is personified as a
gorgeously clad woman, and the seven together compose the escort of
“Philosophy.”
In practical teaching, the arts were divided into two groups: the
trivium, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (or logic); and the
quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (astrology), and music.
Geoffrey of St. Victor, in his _Fons philosophiae_, gives[555] an
allegorical description of the arts as a spring which divides into two
main streams, the trivium and quadrivium, that in turn separate into
three and four lesser streams respectively. The teaching of practically
all the natural science of the Middle Ages was included in the
quadrivium. Geometry was generally expanded to include geography and
quite naturally so in view of prevalent opinions regarding its origin.
Adelard of Bath, in his _De eodem et diverso_, repeats an old story to
the effect that in the early days men began to set up stones as
boundaries.[556] Disputes about claims inevitably arose, in Libya
because of sand, and in Egypt because the Nile often obliterated or
destroyed the stones. This necessitated the invention of the science of
geometry, or surveying, by the application of which the bounds might be
replaced so that it would be “possible for all the centuries to have an
everlasting rule for the measurement of land.”[557] Out of the invention
of geometry, Adelard adds, arose subsequently the custom of subdividing
territory into areas of various sizes.[558] Thus it happened that
geometry had become closely allied in the classical and medieval mind
with matters of geographical or topographical interest. Capella includes
his long geographical discourse among chapters devoted to geometry and
makes his symbolical figure of the latter science carry in one hand a
compass and in the other a sphere to represent the terrestrial
globe.[559] Alan of Lille, in the _Anticlaudianus_, describes Geometry
as carrying a scale with which she measured the earth: “The maid carries
a rod by which she encircles the entire earth.”[560] In the sculptured
figures of the cathedrals Geometry is often depicted compass in
hand.[561]
GEOGRAPHY INCLUDED UNDER ASTROLOGY
Geography was not always placed in a subordinate position to geometry in
the quadrivium. In the _De divisione philosophiae_ of Dominicus
Gondisalvi, which follows the Aristotelian rather than the Platonic
division of knowledge, we find our science grouped under astrology. Of
the latter art, Dominicus says,[562] there are three parts: the first is
concerned with the number and shape of the heavenly bodies; the second
with their movements; and the third with the earth, those regions that
are inhabited and those that are not, the climates, and the varying
influences exerted by the location of places and the revolutions of the
universe over happenings on the earth’s surface.[563]
GEOGRAPHY AND THE ARISTOTELIAN DIVISION OF LEARNING
Both geometry and astrology belonged in the quadrivium. Where did the
higher study of the arts of the quadrivium fall in the general
classification of knowledge?
The medieval mind tended to seek for a logical and symmetrical
subdivision of the sum of all knowledge. The desire for systematization
found its supreme expression in the great philosophic structures of the
thirteenth century, the systems founded on Aristotle and devised by such
men as Albertus Magnus. Prior to the thirteenth century confusion had
reigned. According to the Platonists, who divided philosophy into logic,
ethics, and physics, the study of the mathematical and natural
sciences—and, therefore, of geography—fell under the heading of physics.
Aristotle, more logically perhaps, had divided the subject matter of all
human learning into two great categories, theoretical knowledge and
practical knowledge. Theoretical knowledge included physics,
mathematics, and metaphysics (or theology). The studies of the
quadrivium were thrown by the Aristotelians under the heading of
mathematics: geography, then, became to those who followed the
Aristotelian classification—Gondisalvi, Hugh of St. Victor,[564] Roger
Bacon—a sub-department of mathematics.
But on the whole we need not linger over this topic, because the
question of exactly where geography belonged in the artificial systems
devised by the medieval mind was largely a matter of academic interest
even in the Middle Ages and was without influence on the actual
condition of the geographical lore of that time.
PART II
THE SUBSTANCE AND CHARACTER OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL LORE OF THE TIME OF THE
CRUSADES