Hanno vere figure:
E per la Santa fede
Cristiana ancor si vede
Che’ l’ suo principio Cristo
Nel suo mezzo conquisto
Per cui prese morte
E vi pose la sorte.”
—(Rime Antiche Toscane, III. 9.)
Though the general meaning of the second couplet is obvious, the expression il colco dell’Emme, “the couch of the M,” is puzzling. The best solution that occurs to me is this: In looking at the world map of Marino Sanudo, noticed on [p. 133], as engraved by Bongars in the Gesta Dei per Francos, you find geometrical lines laid down, connecting the N.E., N.W., S.E., and S.W. points, and thus forming a square inscribed in the circular disk of the Earth, with its diagonals passing through the Central Zion. The eye easily discerns in these a great M inscribed in the circle, with its middle angular point at Jerusalem. Gervasius of Tilbury (with some confusion in his mind between tropic and equinoxial, like that which Pliny makes in speaking of the Indian Mons Malleus) says that “some are of opinion that the Centre is in the place where the Lord spoke to the woman of Samaria at the well, for there, at the summer solstice, the noonday sun descends perpendicularly into the water of the well, casting no shadow; a thing which the philosophers say occurs at Syene”! (Otia Imperialia, by Liebrecht, p. 1.)
[4] This circumstance does not, however, show in the Vulgate.