Near the river that empties itself into the Caspian Sea it is written: "This river comes from the infernal regions; it enters the sea after having descended from mountains covered with wood, and it is there, they say, that the mouth of hell opens."
To the south of this river, and to the north of Hyrcania, is represented a monster having the body of a man, the head, tail, and feet of a bull: this is the Minotaur. Further on are the mountains of Armenia, and the ark of Noah on one of its plateaux. Here, too, is seen a large tiger, and we read: "The tiger, when he sees that he has been deprived of his young, pursues the ravisher precipitately; but the latter, hastening away on his swift horse, throws a mirror to him and is safe."
Elsewhere appears Lot's wife changed into a pillar of salt; the lynx who can see through a stone wall; the river Lethe; so called because all who drink of it forget everything.
Numerous other details might be mentioned, but enough has been said to show the curious nature and exceeding interest of this map, in which matters of observation and imagination are strangely mixed. Another very curious geographical document of that epoch is the map of the world of the Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis. This belongs to the fourteenth century. The capitals here too are represented by edifices. The Mediterranean is a vertical canal, which goes from the Columns of Hercules to Jerusalem. The Caspian Sea communicates with it to the north, and the Red Sea to the south-east, by the Nile. It preserves the same position for Paradise and for the land of Gog and Magog that we have seen before. The geography of Europe is very defective. Britannia and Anglia figure as two separate islands, being represented off the west coast of Spain, with Allemania and Germania, also two distinct countries, to the north. The ocean is represented as round the whole, and the various points of the compass are represented by different kinds of winds on the outside.
Fig. 49.—Cosmography of St. Denis.
This was the general style of the maps of the world at that period, as we may perceive from the various illustrations we have been able to give, and it curiously initiates us into the mediæval ideas. Sometimes they are surrounded by laughable figures of the winds with inflated cheeks, sometimes there are drawn light children of Eolus seated on leathern bottles, rotating the liquid within; at other times, saints, angels, Adam and Eve, or other people, adorn the circumference of the map. Within are shown a profusion of animals, trees, populations, monuments, tents, draperies, and monarchs seated on their thrones—an idea which was useful, no doubt, and which gave the reader some knowledge of the local riches, the ethnography, the local forms of government and of architecture in the various countries represented; but the drawings were for the most part childish, and more fantastic than real. The language, too, in which they were written was as mixed as the drawings; no regularity was preserved in the orthography of a name, which on the same map may be written in ten different ways, being expressed in barbarous Latin, Roman, or Old French, Catalan, Italian, Castilian, or Portuguese!
During the same epoch other forms of maps in less detail and of smaller size show the characters that we have seen in the maps of earlier centuries.
Marco Polo, the traveller, at the end of the fourteenth century, has preserved in his writings all the ancient traditions, and united them in a singular manner with the results of his own observations. He had not seen Paradise, but he had seen the ark of Noah resting on the top of Ararat. His map of the world, preserved in the library at Stockholm, is oval, and represents two continents.