Those writers who in the early part of the Middle Ages occupied themselves with such worldly things as geography, confined themselves mostly to repeating, and in part further confusing, what Pliny and later Latin authors had said on the subject. The most widely read and most frequently copied were Solinus and Capella, also Macrobius and Orosius. This was the intellectual food which replaced the science of the Greeks. Truly the course of the human race has its alternations of heights and depths!
Cosmas’s representation of the Universe, with the mountain in the north
behind which the Sun goes at night. The Creator is shown above
But even if the migrations had for a time interrupted peaceful trading intercourse with the North, they were also the means of new facts becoming known, and it was inevitable that in the long run these migrations, and subsequent contact with the northern peoples, should leave their mark on the science of geography. The knowledge of the North shown in the literature of the early Middle Ages is thus to be compared with two streams, often quite independent of one another; the one has its source in classical learning and becomes ever thinner and more turbid; the other is the fresh stream of new information from the North, which we find in a Cassiodorus or a Procopius. Sometimes these two streams flow together, as in an Adam of Bremen, and they may then form a mixture of like and unlike, in which it is often hopeless to find one’s way.
Cosmas Indicopleustes, 6th century
It is true that some were found, even in the early Middle Ages, who maintained the doctrine of the earth’s spherical form, whereas early Christian authors, such as Lactantius (ob. 330) and Severianus (ob. 407), had asserted that it was a disc; the latter also thought that the heaven was divided into two storeys, an upper and a lower, with the visible heaven as a division; the earth formed the floor of this celestial house. One ancient notion (in Empedocles, Leucippus, Democritus) was that this disc of the earth stood on a slant, increasing in height towards the north, which was partly covered by high mountains, the Rhipæan and Hyperborean ranges (as in Ptolemy’s map). These childish ideas took their most remarkable shape in the “Christian Topography,” in twelve books, of the Alexandrine monk, Cosmas Indicopleustes (sixth century). In his younger days he had travelled much as a merchant and seen many wonderful things, amongst others the wheel-ruts left by the Children of Israel during their wanderings in the wilderness. The Jews’ tabernacle, he thought, was constructed on the same plan and in the same proportions as the world. Consequently the earth’s disc had to be made four-cornered, with straight sides, and twice as long as it was broad. The ocean on the west formed a right angle with the ocean on the south. On the north was a high mountain; behind it the sun was hidden in its course during the night.[127] As the sun in winter traverses the sky in a lower orbit, it appears to us as though it receded behind the mountain near its foot, and it stays away longer than in summer, when it is higher. The whole vault of heaven was like a four-cornered box with a vaulted lid, which was divided by the firmament into two storeys. In the lower one were the earth, the sea, the sun, moon and stars; in the upper one the waters of the sky. The stars were carried round in circles by angels, whom God at the creation appointed to this heavy task. It was impossible for the earth to revolve, simply because its axle must be supported by something, and of what kind of material could it be made? He had nothing else worth mentioning to say about the North. But notions such as these had their influence on the earliest mediæval maps.
Cassiodorus, 468-570 A.D.
The first mediæval author who, so far as we know, definitely gave new information of value about the countries and peoples of the North, was the Roman senator and historian Cassiodorus (born at Scylaceum, it is supposed about 468), who was an eminent statesman under Theodoric, King of the Goths (493-526). After the victories of Belisarius in Italy, Cassiodorus retired into a monastery in southern Italy (Bruttium), which he himself had founded, and died there, perhaps 100 years old (about 570). He wrote several valuable works, amongst them, probably by order of Theodoric, one in twelve books on “The Origin and Deeds of the Goths,” which was perhaps completed about 534. This work has unfortunately been lost, and we only know it through the Goth Jordanes, who has made excerpts from it. There is reason to believe [cf. Mommsen, 1882, Proœmium, p. xxxvii.] that Cassiodorus’s knowledge of Gothic was defective, and that he has borrowed his information about the North, especially Scandinavia, from a contemporary, or perhaps somewhat older writer, Ablabius, who is referred to in Jordanes’ book as “the distinguished author of a very trustworthy history of the Goths,” but who is otherwise unknown. Through the Norwegian king Rodulf and his men (see below, under Jordanes), or other Northerners who visited Theodoric, and who were “mightier than all the Germans in courage and size of body,” first-hand information was brought concerning the countries of the North, which Ablabius, who certainly knew Gothic, may have written down, and from him Cassiodorus has thus derived his statements, which again are taken from him by Jordanes. In addition to various classical authors, some Latin and some Greek, of whom Jordanes mentions many more than he has made use of, it is probable that Cassiodorus has also drawn upon the maps of Roman itineraries [cf. Mommsen, 1882, Proœmium, p. xxxi.], and perhaps also Greek maps.
Jordanes, circa 552