Only two specimens of Roman cartography have come down to us, viz. parts of a plan of Rome, of the time of the emperor Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), now in the Museo Capitolino, and an itinerarium scriptum, or road map of the world, compressed within a strip 745 mm. in length and 34 mm. broad. Of its character the reduced copy of one of its 12 sections (fig. 5) conveys an idea. The map, apparently of the 3rd century, was copied by a monk at Colmar, in 1265, who fortunately contented himself with adding a few scriptural names, and having been acquired by the learned Conrad Peutinger of Augsburg it became known as Tabula peutingeriana. The original is now in the imperial library of Vienna.[19]
| Fig. 5.—A Section of Peutinger’s Tabula. |
| Fig. 6.—The World according to Cosmas Indicopleustes (535). |
| Fig. 7.—Map of Albi (8th century). |
Map-Making in the Middle Ages.—In scientific matters the early middle ages were marked by stagnation and retrogression. The fathers of the church did not encourage scientific pursuits, which Lactantius (4th century) declared to be unprofitable. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was still held by the more learned, but the heads of the church held it to be unscriptural. Pope Zachary, when in 741 he condemned the views of Virgilius, the learned bishop of Salzburg, an Irishman who had been denounced as a heretic by St Boniface, declares it to be perversa et iniqua doctrina. Even after Gerbert of Aurillac, better known as Pope Sylvester II. (999-1063), Adam of Bremen (1075), Albertus Magnus (d. 1286), Roger Bacon (d. 1294), and indeed all men of leading had accepted as a fact and not a mere hypothesis the geocentric system of the universe and sphericity of the globe, the authors of maps of the world, nearly all of whom were monks, still looked in the main to the Holy Scriptures for guidance in outlining the inhabited world. We have to deal thus with three types of these early maps, viz. an oblong rectangular, a circular and an oval type, the latter being either a compromise between the two former, or an artistic development of the circular type. In every instance the inhabited world is surrounded by the ocean. The authors of rectangular maps look upon the Tabernacle as an image of the world at large, and believe that such expressions as the “four corners of the earth” (Isa. x. 12), could be reconciled only with a rectangular world. On the other hand there was the expression “circuit of the earth” (Isa. xl. 22), and the statement (Ezek. v. 5) that “God had set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations and countries.” In nearly every case the East occupies the top of the map. Neither parallels nor meridians are indicated, nor is there a scale. Other features frequently met with are the Paradise in the Far East, miniatures of towns, plants, animals, human beings and monsters, and an indication of the twelve winds around the margin.
| Fig. 8.—Anglo-Saxon Map of the World (9th century). |
The oldest rectangular map of the world is contained in a most valuable work written by Cosmas, an Alexandrian monk, surnamed Indicopleustes, after returning from a voyage to India (535 A.D.), and entitled Christian Topography. According to Cosmas (fig. 6) the inhabited earth has the shape of an oblong rectangle surrounded by an ocean which breaks in in four great gulfs—the Roman or Mediterranean, the Arabian, Persian and Caspian Sea. Beyond this ocean lies another world, which was occupied by man before the Deluge, and within which Cosmas placed the Terrestrial Paradise. Above this rise the walls of the heavens like unto the tent of the Tabernacle. Far more simple is a small map of the world of the 8th century found in a codex in the library of Albi, an archiepiscopal seat in the department of Tarn. Its scanty nomenclature is almost wholly derived from the “Historiae adversum paganos” of Paulus Orosius (418). Far greater interest attaches to the so-called Anglo-Saxon Map of the World in the British Museum (Cotton MSS.), where it is bound up in a codex which also contains a copy of the Periegesis of Priscianus. Map and Periegesis are copies by the same hand, but no other connexion exists between them. More than half the nomenclature of the map is derived from Orosius, an annotated Anglo-Saxon version of which had been produced by King Alfred (871-901). The Anglo-Saxons of the time were of course well acquainted with Island (first thus named in 870) Slesvic and Norweci (Norway), and there is no need to have recourse to Adam of Bremen (1076) to account for their presence upon this map. The broad features of the map were derived no doubt from an older document which may likewise have served as the basis for the map of the world engraved on silver for Charlemagne, and was also consulted by the compilers of the Hereford and Ebstorf maps (see fig. 11).
| Fig. 9.—T map from Isidor of Seville’s Origines. |
The map or diagram of which Leonardo Dati in his poem on the Sphere (Della Spera) wrote in 1422 “un T dentre a uno O mostra il disegno” (a T within an O shows the design) is one of the most persistent types among the circular or wheel maps of the world. It perpetuates the tripartite division of the world by the ancient Greeks and survives in the Royal Orb. A diagram of this description will be found in Isidor of Seville’s Origines (630), see fig. 9.
T maps of more elaborate design illustrate the MS. copies of Sallust’s Bellum jugurthinum; one of these taken from a codex of the 11th century in the Leipzig town library is shown in fig. 10.