The celebrated Raban Maur, of Mayence, composed in the ninth century a treatise, entitled De Universo, divided into twenty-two books. It is a kind of encyclopædia, in which he gives an abridged view of all the sciences. According to his cosmographic system the earth is in the form of a wheel, and is placed in the middle of the universe, being surrounded by the ocean; on the north it is bounded by the Caucasus, which he supposes to be mountains of gold, which no one can reach because of dragons, and griffins, and men of monstrous shape that dwell there. He also places Jerusalem in the centre of the earth.
The treatise of Honorus, entitled Imago Mundi, and many other authors of the same kind, represent, 1st, the terrestrial paradise in the most easterly portion of the world, in a locality inaccessible to man; 2nd, the four rivers which had their sources in Paradise; 3rd, the torrid zone, uninhabited; 4th, fantastic islands, transformed from the Atlantis into Antillia.
Fig 44.—Eighth Century Map of the World.
In a manuscript commentary on the Apocalypse, which is in the library of Turin, is a very curious chart, referred to the tenth, but belonging possibly to the eighth century. It represents the earth as a circular planisphere. The four sides of the earth are each accompanied by a figure of a wind, as a horse on a bellows, from which air is poured out, as well as from a shell in his mouth. Above, or to the east, are Adam, and Eve with the serpent. To their right is Asia with two very elevated mountains—Cappadocia and Caucasus. From thence comes the river Eusis, and the sea into which it falls forms an arm of the ocean which surrounds the earth. This arm joins the Mediterranean, and separates Europe from Asia. Towards the middle is Jerusalem, with two curious arms of the sea running past it; while to the south there is a long and straight sea in an east and west direction. The various islands of the Mediterranean are put in a square patch, and Rome, France, and Germany are indicated, while Thula, Britannia, and Scotia are marked as islands in the north-west of the ocean that surrounds the whole world.
Fig. 45.—Tenth Century Maps.
We figure below two very curious maps of the world of the tenth century—one of which is round, the other square. The first is divided into three triangles; that of the east, or Asia, is marked with the name of Shem; that of the north, or Europe, with that of Japhet; that of the south, or Africa, with that of Cham. The second is also divided between the three sons of Noah; the ocean surrounds it, the Mediterranean forms the upright portion of a cross of water which divides the Adamic world.
Omons, the author of a geographical poem entitled The Image of the World, composed in 1265, who was called the Lucretius of the thirteenth century, was not more advanced than the cosmographers of the former centuries of which we have hitherto spoken. The cosmographical part of his poem is borrowed from the system of Pythagoras and the Venerable Bede. He maintains that the earth is enveloped in the heavens, as the yoke in the white of an egg, and that it is in the middle as the centre is within the circle, and he speaks like Pythagoras of the harmony of the celestial spheres.