Geography and Religious Knowledge in the Medieval World 9783110686159, 9783110685954

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Geography and Religious Knowledge in the Medieval World

Das Mittelalter Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung

Beihefte Herausgegeben von Ingrid Baumgärtner, Stephan Conermann und Thomas Honegger

Band 14

Geography and Religious Knowledge in the Medieval World Edited by Christoph Mauntel

The publication of this book has been generously supported by the Research Training Group “Religious Knowledge in Premodern Europe (800–1800)” at Tübingen University and the Mediävistenverband e.V. The peer review is carried out in collaboration with external reviewers who have been chosen on the basis of their specialization as well as members of the advisory board of the Mediävisten­ verband e.V. in a double­blind review process.

The electronic edition of this publication was made available in open access in May 2023.

ISBN 978­3­11­068595­4 e­ISBN (PDF) 978­3­11­068615­9 e­ISBN (EPUB) 978­3­11­068627­2 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950438 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Christoph Mauntel Geography and Religious Knowledge 1 An Introduction

Part I: Representing the World in Arab-Islamic and LatinChristian Geography Karen C. Pinto It’s a Bird. It’s a Plane. No, it’s the World! An Exploration of the Spiritual Meanings Underlying the Bird Forms Used in 39 Islamicate World Maps Christoph Mauntel The T-O Diagram and its Religious Connotations A Circumstantial Case 57

Part II: Compiling Geographical Knowledge According to Religious Ideas Nathalie Bouloux Ordering and Reading the World The Maps in Lambert of Saint-Omer’s ‘Liber Floridus’

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Kurt Franz The Divine in Yāqūt’s ‘Lexicon of Peopled Places’ 109 A Reduction Jean-Charles Ducène Al-Idrīsī, la géographie et les religions

141

Part III: Presenting Religious Knowledge in New Forms Felicitas Schmieder The Globe as Mappa Mundi? Reflections on Terrestrial Globes from around 1500 163

VI

Contents

David A. King The Culmination of Islamic Sacred Geography I: The World about the Kaaba (Folk Astronomy), and II: The World about Mecca (Mathematical Geography)

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Stefan Schröder Religious Knowledge within Changing Cartographical Worldviews Spatial Concepts and Functions of Maps in Marino Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum 189 fidelium crucis’ (c. 1321)

Part IV: Depicting, Transforming and Experiencing the Holy Land in Maps Emmanuelle Vagnon When Religious Geography meets the Geography of Humanists The Tabula moderna Terrae Sanctae in the Copies of the ‘Geography’ of Ptolemy in the Fifteenth Century 223 Ingrid Baumgärtner and Eva Ferro The Holy Land Geography as Emotional Experience Burchard of Mount Sion’s Text and the Movable Map

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Raoul DuBois Getting There by Manipulating the Medium Material Dimensions of Virtual Pilgrimages to the Holy Land Note on Contributors Index

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Geography and Religious Knowledge An Introduction

Keywords: Medieval Geography, Medieval Cartography, Religious Knowledge, LatinChristian Geography, Arabic-Islamic Geography This volume brings together two different fields of knowledge that are not inherently linked to each other: geography and religion. On the one hand, geography is interested in the spatial relation and location of places, people, and objects and is often based on observation and measurement.¹ Although modern day geography is mostly concerned with ‘scientific knowledge’ (in a reproducible manner), it is often also influenced by cultural characteristics (for example the orientation or centre of a map). Religion, on the other hand, transcends space, as it is inherently spiritual and transcendental;² often, it is more concerned with social behaviour, inner human conditions and otherworldly topics than with worldly places and territories. In the cultural traditions of Latin Christian Europe and the Arabic Islamic (or Islamicate) world,³ both fields merged in a number of different ways – a fact that was not so apparent in the ancient world. Most Greek and Roman geographical texts, for example, were interested in religion only insofar as they were able to name and locate certain temples and places of worship. And whereas the Greeks – according to mythological stories – imagined the centre of the world to be located in Delphi at the Temple of Apollo, the Romans shifted the ‘navel of the world’ to their imperial capital in Rome and thus chose a political and administrative urban centre as the focal point of their cosmos.⁴ While the religious world of antiquity was rather pluralistic, the

 For the sake of simplicity, I refer to ‘geography’ in a basic sense, i. e. a description or depiction of the known world (after the Greek γεωγραφία), in contrast to ‘cosmography’ which deals with the wider cosmos. See Daniela Dueck, Geographie in der antiken Welt, Darmstadt 2013, pp. 7– 8.  The question of what ‘religion’ is, is difficult one to answer, especially from a historical perspective. For the scope of this volume, the term ‘religious knowledge’ (as explained on p. 10) forms our term of reference. On the term ‘religion’, see e. g. Michael Bergunder, What is Religion? The Unexplained Subject Matter of Religious Studies, in: Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 26 (2014), pp. 246 – 286; Jonathan Z. Smith, Religion, Religions, Religious, in: Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Chicago 1988, pp. 269 – 284; Brent Nongbri, Before Religion. A History of a Modern Concept, New Haven, London 2013; Peter Biller, Words and the Medieval Notion of ‘Religion’, in: Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), pp. 351– 369.  On terminology, see pp. 10 – 11.  Dueck (note 1), p. 88. Dr Christoph Mauntel, University of Tübingen, Department of History – Institute of Medieval History, Wilhelmstrasse 36, 72074 Tübingen, [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-001

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emergence of monotheistic beliefs brought with them a claim of exclusiveness regarding God and redemption. Monotheistic societies follow one God only, often pray in a sacred direction toward a sacred place, and tend to have a more or less clear hierarchy of sacred places.⁵ Hence, geography and religion become intermingled. This volume presents several case studies focussing on the questions of how and to what extent geography and religion were entangled in different contexts and societies. On a second level, this volume aims at opening up the comparative analyses between the Arabic Islamic and Latin Christian worlds. In recent years, this comparative approach has become more common, bringing together results from in-depth analyses in both fields.⁶ However, as Michael Borgolte noted in 2008, it remains unclear how far religious knowledge influenced the geographic and cartographic representations of the world.⁷ This shall form the main question of this volume.

 See e. g. Thomas Römer, L’invention de Dieu, Paris 2014 (English translation: The Invention of God, Cambridge/MA 2015); Jan Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus, Munich 2003; Hans Köchler, The Concept of Monotheism in Islam and Christianity, Vienna 1982.  See for example Alfred Hiatt (ed.), Cartography between Christian Europe and the Arabic-Islamic World, 1100 – 1500, Leiden 2021; Jeremy Francis Ledger, Mapping Mediterranean Geographies. Geographic and Cartographic Encounters between the Islamic World and Europe, c. 1100 – 1600, PhD-thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2016, Evelyn Edson/ Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos, Oxford 2004; Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby/ Katrin Kogman-Appel (eds.), Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 9), Berlin, Boston 2019; Rosamund Allen (ed.), Eastward Bound. Travel and Travellers, 1050 – 1550, Manchester, New York 2004; Christoph Mauntel et al., Mapping Continents, Inhabited Quarters and The Four Seas. Divisions of the World and the Ordering of Spaces in Latin-Christian, Arabic-Islamic and Chinese Cartography in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries. A Critical Survey and Analysis, in: Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 5/2 (2018), pp. 295 – 367; Christoph Mauntel/ Jenny Rahel Oesterle, Wasserwelten. Ozeane und Meere in der mittelalterlichen christlichen und arabischen Kosmographie, in: Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich/ Christian Rohr/ Michael Stolz (eds.), Wasser in der mittelalterlichen Kultur/ Water in Medieval Culture. Gebrauch – Wahrnehmung – Symbolik/ Uses, Perceptions, and Symbolism (Das Mittelalter, Beihefte 4), Berlin, Boston 2017, pp. 59 – 77; Michael Borgolte, Christliche und muslimische Repräsentationen der Welt. Ein Versuch in transdisziplinärer Mediävistik, in: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berichte und Abhandlungen 14 (2008), pp. 89 – 147 (re-printed in: Id./ Tillmann Lohse (eds.), Mittelalter in der größeren Welt. Essays zur Geschichtsschreibung und Beiträge zur Forschung (Europa im Mittelalter 24), Berlin 2014, pp. 283 – 335; Patrick Gautier Dalché, Géographie Arabe et géographie Latine au XIIe siècle, in: Medieval encounters 19/4 (2013), pp. 408 – 433.  Borgolte (note 6), p. 93.

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Merging of Traditions In both religious traditions, Christianity and Islam, the main sources of revelation, the Bible and the Quran respectively, do not offer any comprehensive cosmology.⁸ In early Christian times, the tension between the inherited antique lore of secular geography on the one hand and Christian religious thinking on the other led to rather strong opinions in some fervent Christian thinkers, who called for the entire GrecoRoman body of knowledge inherited from antiquity to be dismissed as pagan and thus useless. Irenaeus, a second-century bishop of Lyon, for example, mocked the scientific argumentation of antique scholars for not coming to a single, and thus in his eyes, correct conclusion to explain the cosmos and location of the earth within it.⁹ The plurality of solutions provided by ancient texts, as well as the fact that different scholars contradicted each other was seen by early Christian apologists as proof of their inadequacy: there was no single truth in their text. The fact that the Bible, the only point of reference for these Christians, also did not give any coherent answer to such cosmological and geographical questions, only showed how irrelevant these questions were in the first place, as Basil of Caesarea argued.¹⁰ Religious authorities, such as Augustine and Ambrose, even rejected any theoretical thinking about cosmological and geographical topics as a matter of principle: “What does it matter to me”, wrote Augustine, “if the sky completely encloses the earth like a sphere, placed in the middle of the world struggling to keep its balance, or if it covers it like a disc from one side only?”¹¹

 Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Cosmographical Diagrams, in: John B. Harley/ David Woodward (eds.), Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (The History of Cartography 2/1), Chicago, London 1992, pp. 71– 89, here pp. 71– 72; Ahmad Nazmi, The Muslim Geographical Image of the World in the Middle Ages. A Source Study (Orientalia Polona 1), Warsaw 2007, pp. 15 – 18 and 78 – 112.  See Hervé Inglebert, Interpretatio Christiana. Les mutations des savoirs (cosmographie géographie ethnographie histoire) dans l’antiquité chrétienne (30 – 630 après J.-C.) (Collection des études augustiniennes: Série antiquité 166), Paris 2001, p. 35.  Basilio di Cesarea, Sulla genesi. (Omelie sull’Esamerone), ed. Mario Naldini (Scrittori greci e latini), Rome 1990, pp. 270 – 272 (IX.1). See Frank Schleicher, Cosmographia Christiana. Kosmologie und Geographie im frühen Christentum, Paderborn 2014, pp. 85 – 86; Charlotte Köckert, Christliche Kosmologie und kaiserzeitliche Philosophie. Die Auslegung des Schöpfungsberichtes bei Origenes Basilius und Gregor von Nyssa vor dem Hintergrund kaiserzeitlicher Timaeus-Interpretationen (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 56), Tübingen 2009, pp. 312– 322.  Aurelius Augustinus, La Genèse au sens littéral en douze livres. De genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, 2 vols., ed. Paul Agaësse/ Aimé Solignac (Bibliothèque Augustinienne 48, 49), Paris 1972, vol. 1, p. 174 (II.9.20): Quid enim ad me pertinet, utrum caelum sicut sphaera undique concludat terram in media mundi mole libratam a eam ex una parte desuper uelut discus operiat? See also Ambrosius, Exameron, in: Karl Schenkl (ed.), Sancti Ambrosii Opera. 1. Exameron, de paradiso, de Cain et Abel, de Noe, de Abraham, de Isaac, de bono mortis (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 32/1), Prague, Vienne, Leipzig 1896, pp. 1– 261, here pp. 208 (VI.2.7) and 17– 18 (I.6.20 and 22).

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However, no late antique scholar could escape the tradition of antique knowledge, even if he rejected it. In this regard, Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Greek merchant and Nestorian Christian from Alexandria, chose a unique approach when he tried to produce a description of the world that was strictly based on biblical specifications.¹² His ‘Christian Topography’ (Χριστιανικὴ Τοπογραφία) is a singular example of early Greek Christian geographic thinking; however, his work was hardly received and only rarely copied. For the Latin West, Hervé Inglebert has shown how Christian authors little by little adopted antique knowledge and transformed it to suit their needs.¹³ Describing the creation as a mirror of God, Ambrose and Augustine explained that studying and exploring the natural world (i. e. God’s creation) was a means to better understand God himself.¹⁴ In this regard, the geographic thinking of early Christian authors did not immediately lead to a Christian (or even biblical) geography, as Inglebert pointed out.¹⁵ Instead, geographic knowledge was first approached from a Christian point of view, and then later ‘Christianised’. The Christian transformation of geographic thinking was a process that did not begin before 180 and unfolded around 230.¹⁶ Still, as Richard Raiswell has suggested, the Bible was an authoritative source that could not be avoided or ignored.¹⁷ In early Christian as well as Islamic times, any work on cosmology or geography had to combine different scientific traditions, to find common ground between different ways of reasoning, and to be careful not to contradict any religious truth. Indeed, both geographic traditions have the same (antique) foundations, although the Arabic scientific tradition was more influenced by Greek authors, whereas the Latin world was more under the influence of Roman knowledge.¹⁸ Furthermore, in neither tradi-

 Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographie chrétienne, 3 vols., ed. Wanda Wolska-Conus (Sources chrétiennes 141, 159, 197), Paris 1968 – 1973.  Inglebert (note 9).  Ambrosius, Exameron (note 11), p. 14 (I.5.17): Est enim hic mundus diuinae specimen operationis, qua dum opus uidetur, praefertur operator. Aurelius Augustinus, De doctrina christiana. De vera religione. [Aurelii Augustini Opera IV.1], ed. Klaus-Detlef Daur/ Janet Martin (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 32), Turnhout 1962, p. 67 (II.32.50): Sicut enim qui narrat ordinem temporum, non eum ipse componit, et locorum situs aut naturas animalium uel stirpium uel lapidum qui ostendit, non res ostendit ab hominibus institutas, et ille qui demonstrat sidera eorumque motus, non a se uel ab homine aliquo rem institutam demonstrat. See Natalia Lozovsky, The Earth is our Book. Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400 – 1000 (Recentiores: Later Latin texts and contexts), Ann Arbor 2000, pp. 10 – 14.  Inglebert (note 9), pp. 77 and 104.  Ibid., p. 192.  Richard Raiswell, Geography is Better than Divinity. The Bible and Medieval Geographical Thought, in: Canadian Journal of History 45 (2010), pp. 207– 234.  Sonja Brentjes, Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (800 – 1700) (Studies on the Faculty of Arts. History and Influence 3), Turnhout 2018; Lozovsky (note 14) Keith D. Lilley (ed.), Mapping Medieval Geographies. Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300 – 1600, Cambridge 2013.

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tion did geography have a place of its own in the scientific curriculum: in the Latin world, it was subsumed under ‘geometry’ as one of the seven liberal arts. In the Arabic-Islamic tradition, it was closely linked to other fields of knowledge, such as trade, administration, or astrology. Hence, geographic knowledge was always deeply interwoven into different contexts, which have to be considered when discussing the notion of geography. Apart from theoretical reflections, the wish or need to travel was another potentially important moving force for merging geography with religion. The Quran, for example, quite clearly calls all believers to visit the ‘House of God’ (bayt Allāh), that is the Kaaba in Mecca.¹⁹ Like all travels, the pilgrimage to Mecca – the Hajj – required some geographical knowledge as well as exact timing, since it is performed on certain days in the last month of the Islamic calendar.²⁰ From the seventh century onwards, we can trace how Muslims travelled to Mecca, by sea or via the desert on a path laid out by Caliph Hārūn al-Raschīd and his wife, Zubayda, the so-called darb Zubayda. ²¹ The Hajj not only brought about the building of roads, it also stimulated the production of texts, as seen for example in the pilgrimage accounts of travellers like Nāṣir-i Khusraw, a Persian writer who performed the Hajj four times while travelling through the Islamic world (1046 – 1052). The account of his travels, the ‘Safarnama’, is a valuable source for geographic as well as ethnologic knowledge, as is Khusraw’s detailed description of Mecca and the Kaaba.²² Another evident proof of the religious importance of Mecca for Islam is the direction of prayer. ²³ As David A. King shows in his contribution to this volume, since early Islamic times the need to find this direction, the qibla, led to two different strategies. On the one hand, the location of the Kaaba was determined according to the tradition of folk astronomy, on the other hand using mathematical geography it was possible to calculate the exact position of Mecca.²⁴ Religious needs and scientific reasoning thus went hand in hand.

 Quran 3,97.  Bernard Lewis/Arent Wensinck/ Jacques Jomier, Ḥad̲j̲d̲j̲, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, vol. 3 (1986), pp. 31– 38.  This way was used by pilgrims from the province of al-Iraq. See Travis Zadeh, The Early Hajj. Seventh-Eighth Centuries CE, in: Eric Tagliacozzo/ Shawkat M. Toorawa (eds.) The Hajj. Pilgrimage in Islam, Cambridge 2016, pp. 42– 64; Francis E. Peters. The Hajj. The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places, Princeton 1994.  Naser-e Khosraw. Safar-nāma. Book of Travels, transl. and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston, Albany/NY 1986.  Quran 2,144.  David A. King, The Sacred Geography of Islam, in: Teun Koetsier/ Luc Bergmans (eds.), Mathematics and the Divine. A Historical Study, Amsterdam, Boston 2004, pp. 161– 178; id, The Sacred Direction in Islam. A Study of the Interaction of Religion and Science in the Middle Ages, in: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 10/4 (1985), pp. 315 – 328; id./ Arent Wensinck, Ḳibla, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, vol. 5 (1979), pp. 81– 88.

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In the Christian world, pilgrimage accounts are also among the first geographic texts that survive. One early and well-known example is the account of an inhabitant of Bordeaux who travelled to the Holy Land in 333 – 334.²⁵ For the most part, the account is a rather dry list of distances and cities that the traveller passed through, becoming only more detailed when describing Jerusalem and its surroundings.²⁶ This focus of the text is due to the religious importance of the sight. Maya Maskarinec has shown how, for example, the city of Rome in the eighth century was perceived by its (Christian) inhabitants as well as by visitors as a space shaped by sacred sights, and by the stories of holy men and women and their relics.²⁷

Merging of Media Without any direct connection, the text of the Bordeaux pilgrim seems to have a parallel in a sixth- century map, the mosaic map of Madaba (35 km south of Amman), dated to before 565.²⁸ The remains of the map, which supposedly originally measured 16 x 6 metres, were found in 1894 on the floor of a Christian church. The map depicted the coast of the Levant with Jerusalem (still visible today) at its centre – indicating its Christian origins. It is thought to have served as an orientation guide for pilgrims as well as been used for liturgical purposes.²⁹ Both, (early) pilgrimage accounts as well as the Madaba map, show that the merging of geography and religion did not depend on a certain medium, and while the early accounts of pilgrims were not illustrated by drawings or maps, the Madaba map most probably was also not accompanied by a larger text. However, the growing interest in biblical places seems to have led to exegetical maps which served as “heuristic aids and didactic tools” for biblical studies.³⁰ The close connection between exegetical or otherwise religious texts and geographic knowledge (be it in textural or visual form) is in this regard

 Itinerarium Burdigalense, in: Paul Geyer et al. (eds.), Itineraria et alia Geographica (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 175), Turnhout 1965, pp. 1– 26. See also Edward D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Late Roman Empire AD 312– 460, Oxford 1982.  Another quite early account is more detailed, see Egeria, Itinerarium. Reisebericht. Mit Auszügen aus Petrus Diaconus, De locis sanctis. Die heiligen Stätten. Lateinisch-deutsch, ed. Georg Röwekamp/ Dietmar Thönnes (Fontes Christiani 20), Freiburg/Breisgau 1995.  Maya Maskarinec, City of Saints. Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages, Philadelphia 2018.  Herbert Donner, The Mosaic Map of Madaba. An Introductory Guide (Palaestina antiqua 7), Kampen 1992, p. 13.  Ibid., pp. 30 – 31.  Catherine Delano-Smith, Maps and Religion in Medieval and Early Modem Europe, in: David Woodward/ Catherine Delano-Smith/ Cordell D. K. Yee (eds.), Plantejaments i objectius d’una història universal de la cartografia. Approaches and Challenges in a Worldwide History of Cartography. 11è curs. 21– 25 de febrer de 2000 (Monografies 23), Barcelona 2001, pp. 179 – 200, here pp. 182– 183; ead, The Intelligent Pilgrim. Maps and Medieval Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in: Allen (note 6), pp. 106 – 130.

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a peculiarity of the Christian tradition. One striking example is the eighth-century ‘Commentary of the Apocalypse’ written by the Cantabrian monk Beatus of Liébana: no less than 14 of the surviving 34 manuscripts are illustrated by a two-sided world map.³¹ The exemplar from Burgo de Osma (ca. 1086) contains small depictions of the twelve apostles, scattered all over the known world, thus claiming the world as a Christian space.³² Intermediality became a common feature of many premodern works on geography: Diagrams, maps, images, and text went hand in hand, and in the sixteenth century even printed Bibles were illustrated with maps and plans.³³ Moreover, as Felicitas Schmieder shows in her contribution, the first globes constructed at the end of the fifteenth century represented a new form or medium with which to depict the earth, and these were characterised by religious features that were also typical for the earlier Christian mappaemundi. For several years now, academic research has hinted at the close ties between different medial forms and has increasingly focussed on the relation and interdependency of text and image.³⁴ This guiding principle not only applies to the inscriptions that marked nearly all premodern maps and diagrams, but also to the graphic and codicological context of these depictions. Most medieval and premodern maps we know today stem from (manuscript or later printed) books in the Latin Christian as well as in the Arabic Islamic tradition. Thus, the placement of a given map or diagram requires close scrutiny: where exactly is the depiction placed and why? What context do the surrounding texts offer? The Flemish canon Lambert of Saint-Omer, for example, construed numerous maps and diagrams in close connection to the text of his ‘Liber Floridus’, as Nathalie Bouloux shows in this volume. We cannot, however, expect that text and image always conform regarding the content and ideas they present. This may partly be due to a production process that was based on the division of labour. Stefan Schröder, for example, argues that the author Marino Sanudo and the cartographer Pietro Vesconte worked together closely for their thirteenth-century Crusade treaty. Their world map, however, was

 On the Beatus-tradition, see Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, The Beatus maps. The revelation of the world in the Middle Ages, Burgos 2014. On the development of the maps, see Ingrid Baumgärtner, Visualisierte Weltenräume. Tradition und Innovation in den Weltkarten der Beatustradition des 10. bis 13. Jahrhunderts, in: Hans-Joachim Schmidt (ed.), Tradition, Innovation, Invention. Fortschrittsverweigerung und Fortschrittsbewusstsein im Mittelalter (Scrinium Friburgense 18), Berlin, New York 2005, pp. 231– 276.  Burgo de Osma, Archivo de la Catedral, Ms 1, fol. 34v–35r.  Delano-Smith (note 30), pp. 183 – 184. Catherine Delano-Smith/ Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 1500 – 1600. An Illustrated Catalogue, Geneva 1991.  See for example Jörg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago mundi cartographica. Studien zur Bildlichkeit mittelalterlicher Welt- und Ökumenekarten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 53), Munich 1984; Margriet Hoogvliet, Pictura et scriptura. Textes, images et herméneutique des mappae mundi, XIIIe–XVIe siècle (Terrarum orbis 7), Turnhout 2007.

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framed by a rather conventional text on the world and the three know continents that had no direct connection to the innovative map or to the content of the text. Thus, we have to pay close attention to the degree to which different media conform regarding the content and ideas they present. As Jean-Charles Ducène highlights in his contribution, the geographer al-Idrīsī was indeed interested in different religious places and cults – a fact the maps accompanying his text do not mirror. Furthermore, the manuscript tradition of premodern times means that each copy of a given work must be treated as a unique artefact. Different copies of the same text or map may share many similarities, but they also disclose differences that may have been intentional alterations by the scribe or down to different skills of copyists. Nathalie Bouloux, for example, bases her analysis of Lambert’s ‘Liber Floridus’ mainly on the surviving autograph, but also refers to later copies of the work, since some parts of the autograph are missing today. Analysing the use of the Holy Land map originally included in Marino Sanudo’s Crusade treaty, Emmanuelle Vagnon points out that in the process of copying and adapting the map for other works, details were altered, legends were changed, and errors were introduced. With regard to the topic of this volume, it is worth asking whether one copy of a work is more inclined to highlight religious knowledge than others. This is, for example, the case with specific T-O diagrams included in Isidore of Seville’s early medieval encyclopaedia, the ‘Etymologies’, as Christoph Mauntel’s contribution shows. Whereas some diagrams only depict the three parts of the earth, others include the three sons of Noah or even highlight the Christian paradise, thus making the religious content and context of the map explicit. This deliberate choice was ultimately down to the individual inclination of the scribe drawing the diagram – or perhaps to the template that he copied.

Scope and Aim of the Volume The papers assembled in this volume are case studies on specific works of premodern geography that mostly combine text and cartographic depictions and often survive in more than one copy. These criteria offer ample possibilities of analysis and comparison, as they combine different media of presenting geographic thinking as well as the possibility of looking at several copies of one work in comparison. The limited focus on the Arabic Islamic and Latin Christian traditions is a deliberate choice, and it was made in light of two considerations: First, both geographic traditions stem from similar antique origins in Greek and Roman geographic knowledge and both traditions share the same roots in Judaism. They share many aspects in common and at the same time developed different forms of geographic representation over time, especially with regard to the scope of religious influence. Thus, the Arabic Islamic and Latin Christian traditions offer an excellent basis for comparison. On the basis of this argument, it would be logically consistent to also include examples from the Jewish and Greek geographic traditions. However – and this leads us to the second argument – neither Judaism nor the Greek world developed

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geographic traditions that are comparable in scope to those studied in this volume.³⁵ Few Jewish/Hebrew or Greek works bring together text and image in a comparable way. Although a basic mention of some singular works will be included in this introduction for the sake of comparison, the articles of this volume will focus on detailed analysis of the premodern Latin Christian and the Arabic Islamic geographic tradition, and thus further studies including Jewish, Greek, Buddhist, and other possible equivalents may be a task reserved for another project. All the case studies assembled here follow the main question of how and in what form geographical knowledge was influenced and marked by religious ideas. Religious knowledge can be traced on different levels: in the content of the work itself (e. g. by highlighting certain places, names, ideas), in its form (e. g. the inclusion of religious symbols, or the religious interpretation of forms), or in its composition (a start or beginning determined by religious reasoning, e. g. the Christian paradise in the east or Mecca). Separate from the structure and composition of the work, the type of religious influence may vary as well as the extent. We can differentiate between direct citations from revelatory sources (the Bible or the Quran), and indirect references or mere hints and allusions to mystical or apocryphal texts or legends. With regard to the extent of religious influence, a certain work may directly describe or reflect a religious worldview, or it may be a ‘secular’ text that primarily follows non-religious intentions and arguments but is nevertheless marked by religious knowledge. Indeed, on the basis of existing research we can assume that Latin Christian geographical sources are by trend more clearly influenced by religious ideas than Arabic Islamic geographical texts. Linked to this difference is the question of how far religious ideas in geographic texts serve a certain purpose. A text may unconsciously reflect an inherent religious worldview, or an author or scribe may have wished to highlight a specific religious idea or fact, a certain place or name, maybe even as an addition to a new copy of an already existing work. The comparison of several copies of the same work may hint particularly to such individual traces of accentuation or alteration. Thus, we can differentiate if a given source is inherently influenced by religious ideas, or if these traces only occur in certain contexts or manuscripts. Furthermore, both geographic traditions were of course not isolated from one another. We are able to trace the transfer of knowledge between both traditions in multiple instances: Arabic place names were adopted by Latin authors, and Muslim authors like al-Idrīsī heavily drew on Christian geographic knowledge. As the contributions of Jean-Charles Ducène and Emmanuelle Vagnon show, Christian content survived the adaption of Latin-Christian sources in works that were dedicated for Muslim rulers. Stefan Schröder complements this by discussing a rather rare example, a Christian map highlighting Mecca, the sacred place of Islam (a city which, as clarified by Ducène, is not depicted in the maps of al-Idrīsī, for example).

 See Mauntel et al. (note 6), p. 298.

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Following on from these questions and ideas, the articles in this volume will offer in-depth analyses of specific texts and their individual ideas, and, at the same time, will facilitate comparative perspectives between different works as well as between the Latin Christian and the Arabic Islamic traditions of geographical thought in general. The volume aims at two things: first, to scrutinise in detail the extent and importance of religious ideas in premodern geographic thought, and second, to pursue and push forward the path laid out by recent research, tackling interdisciplinary and comparative analyses between the two neighbouring cultural traditions of Latin Christianity and the Arabic Islamic world.³⁶

A Note on Terminology It must be noted, that the terms ‘Latin-Christian’ and ‘Arabic Islamic’ are used in this volume for lack of a better alternative: apart from their vagueness, both terms are problematic and misleading primarily because of the inherent connection between language (Latin/Arabic) and religion (Christian/Islam), which may indirectly evoke notions of cultural homogeneity and temporal stability.³⁷ In this volume, the inclusion of religious denomination to identify the areas under study is particularly problematic, since the impact of religious ideas coming from this area and tradition is indicated in advance. Furthermore, both terms cloud the importance of Jewish intermediaries in the transfer of knowledge. The well-known example of the socalled Catalan Atlas (ca. 1375), drawn by Abraham and Jehude Cresques, two Majorcan Jews, proves this point.³⁸ However, the alternative terms of ‘Europe’ or ‘the Arabic world’ are equally problematic as they focus purely on space but nonetheless often convey cultural ideas.³⁹ In a geographical sense, Spain and Sicily might belong to Europe, but were for many centuries under Muslim rule and/or influence. For the Arabic Islamic world, Marshall Hodgson has proposed the term ‘Islamicate’ to refer

 See note 6.  On this see Daniel G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West. Tracing the Emergence of medieval Europe, Oxford 2015, pp. 1– 5; Alfred Hiatt, Introduction. Cartography between Europe and the Arabo-Islamic World, in: id. (note 6), pp. 1– 39.  The atlas is today preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Esp. 30. See Katrin Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps and Jewish Books. The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325 – 1387) (Terrarum orbis 15), Turnhout 2020. See also the forthcoming contribution of Emmanuelle Vagnon in: Hiatt (note 6). On the relevance of Jewish communities in the transmission of geographical knowledge in Majorca, see Ingrid Houssaye-Michienzi/ Emmanuelle Vagnon, Commissioning and Use of Charts Made in Majorca c. 1400. New Evidence from a Tuscan Merchant’s Archive, in: Imago Mundi 71/1, 2019, pp. 22– 33.  For the notion of ‘Europe’, see Klaus Oschema, Bilder von Europa im Mittelalter (Mittelalter-Forschungen 43), Ostfildern 2013; Id., Medieval Europe – Object and Ideology, in: von Beata Cieszyńska/ José Eduardo-Franco/ Teresa Pinheiro (eds.), Ideas of/for Europe. An interdisciplinary approach to European identity, hg., Frankfurt/Main 2012, pp. 59 – 73.

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to a cultural sphere dominated by Muslim societies, but not in an absolutely religious sense.⁴⁰ The term has been discussed and mostly accepted since; it seems, however, less fitting for a project that focusses explicitly on the religious character of a field of knowledge. This said, the terms ‘Latin-Christian’ and ‘Arabic Islamic’ have been employed here with a full awareness of the problems each bring with them. For the purposes of this introduction, ‘Islamicate’ is used when referring to the overall cultural sphere in which many of the given authors and works are embedded.⁴¹ The term ‘religious knowledge’⁴² refers to a complex socio-historical and historico-cultural phenomenon that since the Middle Ages greatly influenced the history of Europe, primarily of Christianity, but also of other monotheistic religions. Judaism, Christendom, and Islam are religions based in divine revelation. The knowledge gained through revelation, namely the Torah, the Bible or the Quran, is seen as their intangible basis. However, this revelation knowledge became relevant to action only through special kinds of transfer and transformation. The result of these timeand culture-dependent adaptations can be defined as ‘religious knowledge’. The basic assumption is that knowledge about the divine revelation has to be adapted to fit contemporary needs and contexts. Thus, what a certain era or society perceives as ‘divine revelation’ already is the result of a contemporary interpretation. By analysing synchronic and diachronic processes of transfer, and transformation of religious ideas we can see that these ideas continuously produced new forms and interpretations of religious knowledge.

Geography and Religious Knowledge One main aim of this volume is to use the concept of ‘religious knowledge’ to trace such adaptions, transformations, and transfers of religious ideas in premodern geographic thinking, and to ask whether these ideas directly refer to any source of revelation by analysing how different authors and works used, interpreted, and framed this religious knowledge. Premodern maps indeed “were constantly entangled with

 Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols., Chicago 1974, vol. 1, p. 59.  On the question of what ‘Islamic’ is, see Adam J. Silverstein, The Medieval Islamic Worldview. Arabic Geography in its Historical Context, in: Kurt A. Raaflaub/ Richard J. A. Talbert (eds.), and Ethnography. Perceptions of the World in Pre-modern Societies (The ancient world comparative histories), Malden/MA 2010, pp. 273 – 290, here pp. 279 – 283; apart from a definition focussed on the Quran, Silverstein proposes to subsume under ‘Islamic’ “those works that, in part or in whole, are the unique product of medieval Islamic civilization”. (p. 280).  Referring to the Tübingen-based Research Training Group Project ‘Religious Knowledge in Premodern Europe (800 – 1800)’ (running 2011– 2020). See Renate Dürr et al., Einleitung, in: ead et al. (eds), Religiöses Wissen im vormodernen Europa. Schöpfung – Mutterschaft – Passion, Paderborn 2019, pp. 1– 20. For a critical overview on notions of ‘religion’, see the literature cited in note 2.

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religious ‘Weltbilder’”⁴³, as Ingrid Baumgärtner, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, and Katrin Kogman-Appel argue. This is certainly true for all three monotheistic religions. On the basis of examples from premodern Christian cartography, Catherine Delano-Smith has offered an overview of different kinds of religiously framed geographic depictions and contexts, differentiating between biblical scholarship and its exegetical diagrams, biblical geography, and biblical maps; the more exclusive sacred geography focussing on ‘holy’ places; regional cartography focussing on important areas, as for example Israel, the ‘Holy Land’ or the Arabian Peninsula; and cosmological maps with a religious imprint and maps for propagandistic means.⁴⁴ Of course, these categories overlap and a specific map or diagram may serve more than one purpose, but the list still illustrates how tightly geography and religious knowledge were interwoven: maps or diagrams directly referred to texts, and texts were often perceived as being in need of visual illustrations. To be sure, this tradition did not come to an end with the religious and social disruptions that came about in early sixteenth-century Europe. Analysing different early modern examples, Zur Shalev uses the term “sacred geography” to outline how religion still “serve[d] as a model for new or revived understandings of human spatiality”⁴⁵ apart from a secular view of the world. Seen from the angle of intermediality, text and image not only complemented each other, they were descriptive and interpretative means with their own value, offering substantially different possibilities for the representation of any given information.⁴⁶ A map accompanying a text does not just transfer the same information into a different medium, since each medium (text, list, diagram, map, image, etc.) has its own characteristics and possibilities. On the one hand, cartographic depictions followed their own traditions and could easily deviate from the accompanying text, as the contributions by Schröder and Ducène show in the examples of Vesconte’s and al-Idrīsī’s world maps. On the other hand, Ingrid Baumgärtner and Eva Ferro prove in their case study that an already existing map could be used as the core for a newly composed codex that was compiled in order to provide a useful context for the map. This example furthermore reminds us how important it is to analyse every map and text according to its own context. That a given cartographic ‘solution’ was well thought out and had its own artistic and scientific value (at least for its creator) is emphasised by the fact that Latin authors repeatedly expressed concern that maps could (with or without intent) be altered and changed when they were cop-

 Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby/ Katrin Kogman-Appel, Maps and Travel. An Introduction, in: Ead. (note 6), pp. 1– 13, here p. 2.  Delano-Smith (note 30), pp. 182– 200.  Zur Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds. Geography, Religion and Scholarship 1550 – 1700 (History of Science and Medicine Library 21), Leiden 2012, p. 3.  Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Introduction to Islamic Maps, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 8), pp. 3 – 11, here p. 5, hints at the question of the independence of maps from the accompanying text.

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ied.⁴⁷ Diagrams, on the other hand, were rather destined to be modified: variability was the standard case.⁴⁸ Separate from the question of what religiously influenced diagrams or maps reveal, we might also ask how they depict their content. Though premodern cartography deals with the representation of the physical world, it does not limit itself to standards of mathematical accuracy and mimetic precision – it is also figurative and symbolic and also depicts values and ideas.⁴⁹ The “pictorial nature” of premodern maps, as Kahlaoui argues, is part of a “larger visual language” and is embedded in its historical and cultural context.⁵⁰ Thus, maps may include depictions of persons, animals, cities, and other beings or objects, as well as religious symbols.

The Latin-Christian World Roman geographic thinking was quite quickly ‘christianised’ in the first and second centuries of the common era. This Christian framing of geographic knowledge partially applied to the content (i. e. the accentuation, addition, or deletion of certain places or names) as well as to the form (i. e. the composition and arrangement of the content). Most Christian descriptions of the world highlighted the east and began their description with the Asian continent and the Christian paradise in the uppermost part of the east.⁵¹ For Christian cartography in particular, the framing and orientation of the world map has been identified as religiously influenced.⁵² Early examples of this can be seen in the world maps of the already mentioned Beatus-tradition, dating back to

 See for example Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia. Recreation for an emperor, ed. Shelagh E. Banks/ James W. Binns (Oxford Medieval Texts), Oxford 2002, p. 526 (II.25) and Paulinus Minorita, cited by Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Ut describeretur universus orbis. Zur Universalkartographie des Mittelalters, in: Albert Zimmermann (ed.), Methoden in Wissenschaft und Kunst des Mittelalters (Miscellanea mediaevalia 7), Berlin 1970, pp. 249 – 278, here pp. 260 – 261.  This, as Jean-Claude Schmitt argued, is typical for diagrams. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Penser par figures. Du compas divin aux diagrammes magiques, Paris 2018, p. 11. See also Kathrin Müller, Irritierende Variabilität. Die mittelalterliche Reproduktion von Wissen im Diagramm, in: Britta Bußmann et al. (eds.), Übertragungen. Formen und Konzepte von Reproduktion in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Trends in medieval philology 5), Berlin 2005, pp. 415 – 436.  As Woodward argued, David Woodward, Introduction, in: Id. (ed.), Art and Cartography. Six Historical Essays, Chicago 1987, pp. 1– 19 See also Rehav Rubin, Portraying the Land. Hebrew Maps of the Land of Israel from Rashi to the Early Twentieth Century, Berlin, Boston 2018, p. XXII.  Tarek Kahlaoui, Creating the Mediterranean. Maps and the Islamic Imagination (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1: The Near and Middle East 119), Leiden, 2018, pp. 17– 18. On Kahlaoui’s book see the rather critical review by Karen C. Pinto in: Imago Mundi 71/2 (2019), pp. 209 – 210.  See Inglebert (note 9) and the contribution of Mauntel in this volume.  Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Die Rahmung der ‘Welt’ auf mittelalterlichen Karten, in: Stephan Günzel/ Lars Nowak (eds.), KartenWissen. Territoriale Räume zwischen Bild und Diagramm (Trierer Beiträge zu den historischen Kulturwissenschaften 5), Wiesbaden 2012, pp. 95 – 119.

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the tenth century. Together with many others, the Beatus-maps form what is mostly referred to as the mappaemundi tradition.⁵³ These maps can be found in such different contexts as the ‘Commentaries of the Apocalypse’ of Beatus of Liébana, encyclopaedias or other compendia (see the articles of Bouloux and Schröder), psalters, or chronicles.⁵⁴ Most famously, however, are the large world maps painted on separate and often huge glued parchments sheets. The largest surviving exemplar of these traditional mappamundi is the Hereford map (ca. 1290), measuring 135 cm × 165 cm.⁵⁵ With a width and height ca. 3,6 meters, the Ebstorf word map was even bigger – but the original was destroyed in 1943.⁵⁶ There are several common features of these mappaemundi, many of which prove their religious character: they were commonly oriented towards the east and were framed by as well as interwoven with Christian iconography. On the Hereford map, for example, the figure of Christ thrones above the world, while on the Ebstorf map Christ embraces it with his whole body or even represents the world with his body; commonly, in such maps, paradise is depicted in the uppermost east, and Jerusalem is placed in the centre. The numerous legends not only refer to geographical and historical locations, but also to places that are important for Christian salvation history, such as for example paradise, Jerusalem, or Mount Ararat (in modern day Turkey), where according to Christian mythology Noah’s Ark was grounded after the deluge. Furthermore, the Hereford as well as the Ebstorf map seem to have been placed originally in ecclesiastical contexts.⁵⁷ Many smaller world maps, such as for example the so-called Psalter-map, which is only 9 cm in diameter, follow the mappaemundi tradition and are equally marked by religious attributes (fig. 1): the figure of Christ towers above the eastward orientated world, with paradise located in the uppermost east and Jerusalem at the centre;

 Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300 – 1492. The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation, Baltimore, MD 2007, pp. 14– 32; Ead, Mapping Time and Space. How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (Studies in Map History 1), London 1999, pp. 132– 163; David Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, in: John B. Harley/ David Woodward (eds), Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (The History of Cartography 1), Chicago, London 1987, pp. 286 – 370. For an attempt to scrutinise the depiction of Christian spaces on these maps see Jeffrey Jaynes, Christianity beyond Christendom. The Global Christian Experience on Medieval Mappaemundi and Early Modern World Maps (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 149), Wiesbaden 2018.  See the chapters in Edson, Mapping (note 53).  Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map. An English mappa mundi, c. 1300, New Haven/CT 2016; Paul D. A. Harvey (ed), The Hereford World Map. Medieval World Maps and Their Context, London 2006; Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought. The Hereford Paradigm, Woodbridge 2001; Paul D. A. Harvey, Mappa mundi. The Hereford World Map, Toronto 1996. The map is edited in: Scott D. Westrem (ed.), The Hereford Map (Terrarum orbis 1), Turnhout 2001.  Hartmut Kugler/ Eckhard Michael (eds.), Ein Weltbild vor Columbus. Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte. Interdisziplinäres Colloquium 1988, Weinheim 1991. The map is edited in Hartmut Kugler, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, 2 vols., Berlin 2007.  However, Kupfer reminded us not to mistake this early modern use of the Hereford map for the medieval way of display: Marcia Kupfer, Medieval World Maps. Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames, in: Word & Image 10/3 (1994), pp. 262– 288.

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Fig. 1: The so-called Psalter map (ca. 1260), a traditional Latin Christian mappaemundi, however, on a small scale. London, British Library, Add 28681, fol. 9r

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even Noah’s Ark is shown on this map.⁵⁸ Furthermore, the map is bound into a Psalter, and thus into a deeply religious context, perhaps as an invitation to the reader to contemplate on the world as God’s creation.⁵⁹ Mappaemundi are, at least in some regards, visualisations of Christian theology. The alignment of paradise and Jerusalem in the east-western direction on these maps links space and time and reveals the march of Christian Salvation history from the origin of humanity in the uppermost east to the place where Christ died in the west, where, according to Christian theologians, the Apocalypse will begin. Felicitas Schmieder called this amalgam of space, time, and Christian thinking “geographies of salvation”, meaning that alongside geographical features, the “past, present, and future were represented according to their Christian meaning”⁶⁰. The mappaemundi are surely the best-known variant of Latin-Christian cartography. However, there are many other traditions that are not as manifestly religious. The verso of the Psalter-Map mentioned above is one example of a map which may illustrate another widespread variant, the T-O map or diagram. These depictions represent the eastward orientated world, but do not show geographical details, instead limiting themselves to the diagrammatic depiction of the three continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the Psalter, this diagram is just like the world map framed by the body of Christ; however, this format is rather unusual for T-O diagrams. In the debate around whether or not these diagrams can be considered antique and thus pagan in origin or genuinely Christian images of the world, Christoph Mauntel strongly argues for the latter, presenting a chain of evidence that suggests that the T-O diagrams represent the Christian worldview as it developed since the fifth century. Furthermore, Mauntel proves that the diagrams had been perceived as inherently Christian by contemporaries since at least the ninth century. While world maps often reserved an expanded space for the Holy Land, this area was also a frequently chosen focus of Latin-Christian regional maps. In general, the first regional maps date to the twelfth and thirteenth century and mostly come from England and Flanders – and Holy Lands maps are no exception to this rule.⁶¹ Paul Harvey supposes that the earliest of these maps were extracts from larger world maps.⁶² Holy Land maps can be found in works relating to the Bible, in commentaries or exegetical works, and also often in pilgrimage accounts or text stemming from

 London, British Library, Ms Add 28681, fol. 9r. See Edson, Mapping (note 53), pp. 135 – 137.  LaureLee Brott and Heather Wacha recently showed that the map was glued into a cut out frame of an existing parchment page, which opens up the question of datation, see LaureLee Brott/ Heather Gaile Wacha, Reframing the World: The Materiality of Two Mappaemundi in BL, Add. MS 28681, in: Imago Mundi 72/2 (2020), pp. 148 – 162.  Felicitas Schmieder, Geographies of Salvation. How to Read Medieval Mappae Mundi, in: Peregrinations 6/3, 2018, pp. 21– 42, here p. 24.  Paul D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land, London 2012, pp. 10, 16 and 155. On this topic, see also Pnina Arad, Christian Maps of the Holy Land. Images and Meanings, Turnhout 2020.  Harvey (note 61), p. 155.

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Crusade contexts (see the contributions of Baumgärtner/Ferro, Schröder, and Vagnon).⁶³ These maps supposedly served quite different purposes: the so-called Tournai maps, for example – often falsely attributed to Saint Jerome – illustrate exegetical works focussing on the Bible and its historical places, helping readers to study and understand biblical texts in their geographical context;⁶⁴ they enabled monks or laypeople to undertake mental pilgrimages to the Holy Land, as for example in the maps of Burchard of Monte Sion;⁶⁵ and they were used to support plans for a renewed Crusade, as for example the maps of the Italian cartographer Pietro Vesconte illustrating the treatise of Marino Sanudo.⁶⁶ Usually, such maps depict and name places of importance in biblical history, especially those linked to the life and passion of Jesus, thus highlighting the importance of this area for Christianity. The information they provide, however, does not come directly from the Bible, but was rather adopted from the accompanying texts that listed and described the holy places of the Levant. Although Palestine was a region that was also politically relevant, we find no boundaries on these or hints as to the existence of the Crusader states maps; only occasionally are Crusader or Muslim castles depicted.⁶⁷ Emmanuelle Vagnon traces how the Holy Land map of Pietro Vesconte and Marino Sanudo was adapted to different contexts and contents, including the “secular and mathematical work”⁶⁸ of Claudius Ptolemy. However, the religious content of the map was emphasised in certain editions, which leads Vagnon to question if perhaps individual editors wanted to transform the secular character of Ptolemy’s work in order to make it more fitting for a Christian audience. The adaption of the map turned Ptolemy’s work into a mix of pagan and biblical lore. With their in-depth analysis of the Florentine Holy Land map and its codicological context, Baumgärtner/ Ferro prove that the map was originally a separate sheet bound into a small and light booklet: thus, it was easy to rotate the map in order to read all the inscriptions and to follow one’s own mental or virtual pilgrimage.⁶⁹ Raoul DuBois highlights sim Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 99; Harvey (note 61), pp. 1– 2, 6 – 7, and 156.  London, British Library, Ms 10049, fol. 64r and 64v, late twelfth century. See Harvey (note 61), pp. 40 – 59.  The work of Burchard survives in numerous versions and manuscripts, see Harvey (note 61), pp. 94– 106 for earlier maps and ibid. pp. 128 – 140 for later ones. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Burchard of Mount Sion and the Holy Land, in: Peregrinations 4/1 (2013), pp. 5 – 42.  The treatise of Marino Sanudo also survives in several copies, often illustrated by a set of maps, see Harvey (note 61), pp. 107– 126; Emmanuelle Vagnon, Cartographie et représentations de l’Orient méditerranéen en Occident (du milieu du XIIIe à la fin du XVe siècle) (Terrarum orbis 11), Turnhout 2013, pp. 131– 169; Nathalie Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle (Terrarum orbis 2), Turnhout 2002, pp. 45 – 68.  Harvey (note 61), pp. 3 – 4.  See the contribution of Vagnon in this volume, p. 230.  On the idea of a ‘virtual pilgrimage’ see Rubin (note 49), p. XXIII; Daniel K. Connolly, Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris, in: The Art Bulletin 81/4 (1999), pp. 598 – 622; Catherine Delano-Smith, Intelligent Pilgrim (note 30); Kathryn Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent. Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages, Turnhout 2011.

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ilar examples, for example the woodcut depiction of the Holy Land that was added to the pilgrimage account of Bernhard of Breydenbach: this 120 cm-long view of the Holy Land, produced by the Dutch specialist Erhard Reuwich, had to be unfolded and thereby offered different perspectives that allowed the viewer to experience a pilgrim’s approach to Jerusalem. The codicological context as well as the materiality of the object can thus hint to historical practices of reading, meditating, and reflecting on the Holy Land. The same approach could be applied to the itinerary maps drawn, for example, by the English monk Matthew Paris in the mid-thirteenth century. The painted itinerary extends over several pages and depicts the route from London to the Holy Land. By following the line of cities, column after column, page after page, the reader undertakes a mental journey towards Jerusalem.⁷⁰ The idea of a vellum-based virtual pilgrimage was also implemented in the Jewish tradition. The late medieval ‘Yiḥ us ha-Avot’ (‘Genealogy of the Fathers’) describes and depicts several Jewish sacred sites – mostly tombs of biblical and rabbinical holy men – in Palestine and the neighbouring regions.⁷¹ The text survives in many different versions (interestingly enough, mostly scrolls). It has been argued that the ‘Yiḥ us ha-Avot’ was supposed to enable diaspora communities to pursue a mental pilgrimage to the sacred sights of Judaism.⁷² Recently, Rachel Sarfati has discussed the socalled ‘Florence Scroll’, a largely image-based travelogue depicting a voyage from Egypt to the Land of Israel up to Lebanon that was made in early fourteenth-century Egypt. The scroll appears to illustrate a voyage that was part real and part fiction, suggesting a “symbolic pilgrimage that reflects a correspondence between the painter’s real journey and the biblical narrative of the Exodus and the Israelites’ itinerary as they wandered in the desert for forty years.”⁷³ Since the thirteenth century, sea or portolan charts formed another distinct tradition that primarily centred on the Mediterranean or the Black Sea or on coastal areas like the coast of West Africa, depicting the coastlines and numerous seaports.⁷⁴

 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 26, fol. 1r–4r. Another copy is London, British Library, Royal MS 14 C VII, fol. 2r–5r. A similar sketch map is London, British Library, Ms Cotton Nero D I, fol. 183v–184r. See Connolly (note 69).  Rachel Sarfati, The Illustrations of Yiḥus ha-Avot. Folk Art from the Holy Land, in: ead, (ed.), Offerings from Jerusalem. Portrayals of Holy Places by Jewish Artists, Jerusalem 2002, pp. 21– 30.  E. g. Marci Freedman, The Casale Pilgrim. A Journey into Jewish Visual Representations of the Holy Land (talk given at the International Medieval Congress 2018 in Leeds, 2 July 2018). On actual Jewish Pilgrims see Elka Weber, Sharing the Sites. Medieval Jewish Travellers to the Land of Israel, in: Allen (note 6), pp. 35 – 52.  Rachel Sarfati, Real and Fictive Travels to the Holy Land as Painted in the Florence Scroll, in: Baumgärtner/ Ben-Aryeh Debby/ Kogman-Appel (note 6), pp. 232– 251. The scroll is today preserved in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Ms. Magll. III 43.  Catherine Hofmann/ Hélène Richard/ Emmanuelle Vagnon (eds.), L’Âge d’or des cartes marines, Paris 2012; Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, Les Cartes portolanes: La representació medieval d’una mar solcada/Portolan Charts: The Medieval Representation of a Ploughed Sea, Barcelona

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A navigational use for these map has been discussed, but this has recently been disputed by scholarly research since portolan charts may have offered navigational instructions and lists of seaports, but the scale of most is too small to have been useful for navigation; furthermore, the surviving charts do not show any signs of actual use, and were clearly made for representational purposes. We have, however, clear evidence that there must have been some kind of map that was used for navigation purposes.⁷⁵ Mostly, portolan charts have often been depicted as a more ‘modern’ cartographic tradition compared with the mappaemundi tradition; this point is still controversial. Although the layout and design as well as the cartographic technique of these maps is certainly new and innovative, their content often shares characteristics of the mappaemundi tradition: portolan charts are by no means generally oriented towards north (in fact the alignment of the inscriptions prove that they had to be rotated to be read) and they often highlight religious places (such as Jerusalem) and depict religious symbols (such as figures of Saints, see Baumgärtner/Ferro).⁷⁶ Late medieval world maps combined these different traditions and produced a type of its own: large world maps such as the those by Pietro Vesconte (1321), Andrea Bianco (1436), Andreas Walsperger (1448), an unknown Catalan cartographer (the socalled Modena world map, ca. 1450) and Fra Mauro (1459) reveal an interest in newly acquired geographical information and thus included information gathered from different sources, such as translations of Arabic texts, travel accounts like that of Marco Polo, or even the orally transmitted knowledge of seafarers. These maps attempt to outline coastlines with exactitude and are mostly oriented towards south, possibly due to the Arabic influence; however, they do not generally abandon traditionally important characteristics like the depiction of paradise or the highlighting of Jerusalem.⁷⁷ The translation of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ into Latin in 1406 by Jacopo d’Angelo paved the way for Latin scholars’ access to a first-hand list of antique place names as

2007; Edson, World Map (note 53), pp. 33 – 59; Tony Campbell, Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500, in: Harley/ David Woodward (note 53), pp. 370 – 463; Vagnon (note 66), pp. 200 – 220; Piero Falchetta, The Use of Portolan Charts in European Navigation during the Middle Ages, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/Hartmut Kugler (eds.), Europa im Weltbild des Mittelalters. Kartographische Konzepte (Orbis mediaevalis 10), Berlin 2008, pp. 269 – 276.  See some examples in Christoph Mauntel, Linking Seas and Lands in Medieval Geographic Thinking during the Crusades and the Discovery of the Atlantic World, in: Nikolas Jaspert/ Sebastian Kolditz (eds.), Entre mers—Outre-mer. Spaces, Modes and Agents of Indo-Mediterranean Connectivity, Heidelberg 2018, pp. 107– 128, here pp. 117– 119.  On this see the contributions in Michele Bacci/ Martin Rhode (eds.), The Holy Portolano. The Sacred Geography of Navigation in the Middle Ages. Fribourg Colloquium 2013: Le Portulan sacré (Scrinium Friburgense 36), Berlin, Boston 2014, stressing the importance of churches, chapels or other landmarks as ‘holy’ signs of orientation.  See the relevant chapters in Edson, World Map (note 53). See also Bouloux (note 66).

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well as a fundamentally new cartographic practice.⁷⁸ Most Latin scholars studying Ptolemy were humanists who were interested in antiquity rather than in a new cartographic model of the world; however, the developments went hand in hand.⁷⁹ Furthermore, although the geographic knowledge provided by Ptolemy was, of course, free of any Christian influence, his work was quickly adapted to a Christian context, for example, by the inclusion of Holy Land maps, as Vagnon shows. Furthermore, Ptolemaic maps were soon being used in a broad variety of contexts, partly with a Christian framing, as the famous example of Hartmann Schedel proves: in his ‘World chronicle’ that was printed 1493 in Nuremberg, the German humanist included a Ptolemaic map that was framed by the three sons of Noah.⁸⁰

The Arabic Islamic/Islamicate World Whereas the religious imprint on Latin Christian geographic and cartographic representations is beyond doubt and lingered on well into the early modern age, the Arabic Islamic geographic tradition at first sight seems not to have been so obviously influenced by religious knowledge: “Islamic maps,” as Yossef Rapoport states, “were not, generally speaking, religious artefacts. They were guides to the world, not to salvation.”⁸¹ In the past, the Arabic Islamic geographic and cartographic traditions have not attracted the same amount of attention as their Latin Christian counterparts.⁸² Fortunately, this has recently changed and the cartographic representation of the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and other seas has been scrutinized in more detail, as well as in light of more general aspects of Islamicate spatial thinking and representation.⁸³ However, as Karen C. Pinto argues, the data basis of maps, the dating, and the codicological context in many cases still pose considerable problems.⁸⁴  Patrick Gautier Dalché, La géographie de Ptolémée en Occident (IVe–XVIe siècle) (Terrarum orbis 9), Turnhout 2009.  Didier Marcotte (ed.), Humanisme et culture géographique à l’époque du Concile de Constance autour de Guillaume Fillastre. Actes du colloque de l’Université de Reims 18 – 19 novembre 1999 (Terrarum orbis 3), Turnhout 2002; Bouloux (note 66), pp. 5 – 15.  Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum, Nürnberg 1493, fol. 12v–13r. See Arentzen (note 34), pp. 188 – 189; Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Universalkartographie und geographische Schulkenntnisse im Inkunalbelzeitalter (unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des ‘Rudimentum Novitiorum’ und Hartmann Schedels, in: Ead., Studien zur Universalkartographie des Mittelalters, ed. Thomas Szabó (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 229), Göttingen 2008, pp. 263 – 296.  Yossef Rapoport, Islamic Maps, Oxford 2020, p. 8. See also the overview of Karen C. Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps. An exploration, Chicago, London 2016, pp. 9 – 22.  Borgolte (note 6), pp. 141– 142.  See e. g. Nazmi (note 8); Christophe Picard, Sea of the Caliphs. The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World. Cambridge 2018; Kahlaoui (note 50); Jenny Rahel Oesterle, Arabische Darstellungen des Mittelmeers in Historiographie und Kartographie, in: Michael Borgolte/ Nikolas Jaspert (eds.), Maritimes Mittelalter. Meere als Kommunikationsräume (Vorträge und Forschungen 83), Ostfil-

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As in the Latin Christian world, Arabic Islamic geographic knowledge was a mixture of Persian-Iranian, Indian, Arabic, and Greek tradition.⁸⁵ The biggest of these influences was possibly the Greek heritage with its focus on astronomy and mathematics, while the Latin tradition, represented by encyclopaedias as written by Pliny or Macrobius, was largely ignored.⁸⁶ Indeed, from around ca. 750, Baghdad became a centre of science and knowledge, and a place where many Greek texts were translated into Arabic. Of primary importance was, for example, the ‘Almagest’ of Ptolemy (‘Megale syntaxis’; ‘al-mijisti’) which tried to develop a model of the cosmos based on rational theory.⁸⁷ Very influential was the concept of different climate zones (iqlīm) that divided the world into specific zones. The concept had its roots in Greek mathematical astronomy that originally differentiated five zones, and later seven.⁸⁸ The division of the world into these zones was, however, not purely climatic in meaning; they were also interpreted in a cultural light, for it was believed that the climatic characteristics of each zone influenced the mentality as well as the outer appearance of the people living there. We may trace here the influence of the Persian kishvar concept, a system that arranged seven circular regions around a central seventh one (which actually was the fourth kishvar, i. e. Persia).⁸⁹ The seven kishvar originally represented spheres of political influence as well as ideas about morality and customs, as the Persian scholar al-Bīrūnī pointed out.⁹⁰ While this idea of climatic zones exemplifies the often natural scientific character of the texts or maps in question, some works also include religious invocations, such as the ‘Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems’ (‘Murūǧ aḏ-ḏahab wa-maʿādin al-

dern 2016, pp. 149 – 180. See also Karen C. Pinto, Cartography and Geography, in: Richard C. Martin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, New York 2004, pp. 128 – 132. The papers of a conference organised by Kurt Franz, Zayde Antrim, and Jean-Charles Ducène in Tübingen (30.03.– 01.04. 2017) will be published soon: Kurt Franz/ Zayde Antrim/ Jean-Charles Ducène (eds.), Spatial Thought in Islamic Societies, 1000 – 1600. The Politics of Genre, Image, and Text, Leiden (forthcoming).  Pinto (note 82), pp. 15 – 18.  Silverstein (note 41); Karamustafa (note 46), pp. 3 – 4.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 75.  Ibid., pp. 30 – 31.  James S. Romm, Continents, Climates, and Cultures. Greek Theories of Global Structure, in: Raaflaub/ Talbert (note 41), pp. 215 – 223; David R. Dicks, The ΚΛΙΜΑΤΑ in Greek Geography, in: Classical Quarterly 49 (1955), pp. 248 – 255; Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. The GraecoArabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society, London 1988.  See Silverstein (note 41), p. 276 and 284– 285; Karamustafa (note 46), 7– 8; Id. (note 8), p. 77 and 80, fig. 3.10.  Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī, The Determination of the Coordinates of Positions for the Correction of Distances between Cities, ed. Jamil Ali (Centennial publications), Beirut 1967, p. 102.

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ǧauhar’) of the Baghdadi historian al-Masʿūdī⁹¹ or the ‘Lexicon of Peopled Places’ (‘Muʿjam al-buldān’) by the traveller and savant Yāqūt, analysed by Kurt Franz. Whereas the ‘Lexicon’ of Yāqūt followed an alphabetical order and thus a decidedly scientific arrangement that “obstructs the idea that notions of the Divine effectively characterize the body of articles”⁹², al-Masʿūdī composed his work according to the history of humankind from God’s creation to his own days, and thus takes on a religiously informed order. Another example for a composition determined at least partially by religious reasoning is the ‘Book of Routes of the Realms’ (‘Kitāb al-Masālik wa l-mamālik’) by the Iranian traveller al- Iṣṭakhrī, who starts the description of the world with the countries of Islam.⁹³ However, the decision to highlight the dar alislam may have been for political reasons. The tradition of Arabic Islamic geography was closely linked to political powers (i. e. mainly the Caliph); indeed, André Miquel has even described Arabic geography as the “daughter of the caliphate of Baghdad”⁹⁴. It has been argued that the primary interest of geography was to show the legitimacy and extent of the Caliph’s rule, whether he was an Abbasid, Fatimid, or an Ottoman ruler.⁹⁵ However, Silverstein has noted that even imperial geographies were linked to religious ideas where, for example, the direction of prayer (qibla) or pilgrims’ routes were concerned; in the end, both motivations for writing geographic texts presumably came together.⁹⁶ The focus on the Islamic world of al-Iṣṭakhrī “created the world of Islam as much as [it] reflected it”⁹⁷―it became characteristic for the Arabic Islamic geographic tradition. Silverstein interpreted this as a shift away from the antique tradition towards “Medieval Islamic geography”⁹⁸, since from the tenth century onwards, personal observation became more important, or, vice versa, older models that passed on older geographical knowledge and tried to assemble an “inventory of the world”⁹⁹ were increasingly seen as insufficient and it was debated which sources were most reliable. The focus on the authority of personal experience had the effect that authors only described what they had actually seen themselves; thus, the range of regions described in geographic accounts was limited to those areas that were actually accessible. Authors like Ibn Ḥawqal, al-Iṣṭakhrī, al-Yaʿqūbī, and al-Muqaddasī thus limited

 Maçoudi [al-Masʿūdī], Les prairies d’Or. Texte et traduction, ed. Barbier de Meynard/ Pavet de Courteille, 9 vols. (Collection d’ouvrages orientaux), Paris 1861– 1877, vol. 1/1, pp. 1 and 24.  See the contrubition of Franz in this volume, p. 139.  Al-Istachrī [al-Istachrī], Das Buch der Länder von Schech Ebu Ishak el Farsi el Isztachri, ed. Andreas David Mordtmann/ Carl Ritter (Schriften der Akademie von Ham 1/2), Hamburg 1845, pp. 1 and 3. See Silverstein (note 41), pp. 275 – 276; Rapoport (note 82), pp. 40 – 63.  André Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du XIe siècle, 4 vols., Paris 1973 – 1984, vol. 1, pp. 1– 3.  Kahlaoui (note 50), pp. 263 – 264; Silverstein (note 41), pp. 282– 283; Picard (note 83), p. 87.  Silverstein (note 41), p. 283.  Rapoport (note 82), p. 46.  Silverstein (note 41), p. 283.  Picard (note 83), p. 87.

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their accounts to the Islamic lands and its people.¹⁰⁰ In this sense, many works do not focus on the world as such, but rather on a specific part only. A map of the world may have existed at the court of the Calif al-Ma’mūm (r. 813 – 833), perhaps only for representational purposes; however, the map does not survive.¹⁰¹ What does survive is a tenth-century text written by the Persian geographer Suhrāb, which gives instructions on how to draw a (rectangular) world map with the help of his list of coordinates.¹⁰² Indeed, the Arabic Islamic geographic tradition offers several different ways to map the world. The maps included in the works of Ibn Ḥawqal, al-Iṣṭakhrī, and al-Muqaddasī are often subsumed as the Balkhī-school, named after the Persian geographer and mathematician Abū Zayd al-Balkhī (850 – 934). Although no map survives directly from al-Balkhī’s oeuvre, he is believed to have considerably influenced the subsequent generations of scholars. Most world maps stemming from this tradition are based on geometric forms and do not have a similarly clear religious imprint as their Christian counterparts; instead they tend to depict a schematic and abstract view of the world.¹⁰³ Figurative representations of cities, animals, or persons are rare on these maps, possibly because they were not allowed for religious reasons.¹⁰⁴ Linked to the name of the Iranian scholar alBīrūnī are extremely schematic sketch maps that mainly present the distribution of land and water. For instance, in contrast to the opinion of Ptolemy, on his maps Africa is dwarfed to a small island.¹⁰⁵ Karen C. Pinto has recently suggested the use of the acronym KMMS to label these maps, referring to the most common name of geographical text collections, the ‘Kitāb al-masālik w’al-mamālik’ (‘The Book of Routes and Realms’), which are often accompanied by images, surat. ¹⁰⁶ The Word ṣūra (‫‘ ﺻﻮﺭﺓ‬image’) was used for maps as well as for every other work of art (e. g. paintings or sculptures). In contrast, the modern Arabic word for ‘map’, kharīṭa (‫)ﺧﺮﻳﻄﺔ‬, in early Arabic sources did not designate maps but rather large pieces of paper.¹⁰⁷ Sometimes, the design of these maps was compared and linked to the image of a bird, for example by the Egyptian scholar Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam or the Arab geographer al-Muqaddasī.¹⁰⁸ Apart from their geographic content, the KMMS world maps are

 Silverstein (note 41), pp. 283 – 284; Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 63.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 62; Tibbetts, Later Cartographic Developments, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 8), pp. 137– 155, here pp. 95 – 96.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 62; Gerald R. Tibbetts, The Beginnings of a Cartographic Tradition, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 8), pp. 90 – 107, here pp. 104– 105.  Karamustafa (note 8), p. 74; Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 75.  Karamustafa (note 46), p. 5.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), pp. 63 – 64; Tibbetts (note 101), pp. 141– 142; Pinto (note 82), pp. 28 – 30.  Pinto (note 82), pp. 3 and 55 – 57.  Ahmad, S. Maqbul, K̲h̲arīṭa (or K̲h̲āriṭa), in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (1979), pp. 575 – 587. See also Kahlaoui (note 50), pp. 11– 12.  Kahlaoui (note 50), pp. 265 – 266; Tibbetts (note 101), pp. 90 – 91

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shaped by an additional symbolic layer visually embedded in the map, that hints to a religious interpretation. Karen C. Pinto explains in her contribution that according to Neoplatonic ideas the bird was perceived as a mediator between God and man, thus creating a link between the divine and the earthly world. It seems thus that Islamic cartographers were supposed to depict the world not according to descriptions or perceptions, but rather according to ready-made (and possibly easily memorable) forms.¹⁰⁹ Religious content that was discussed in texts such as the importance of Mecca, how to identify the four rivers of paradise, or eschatological elements such as Gog and Magog were only rarely displayed on maps.¹¹⁰ World maps linked to the work of the Arab historian Ibn al-Wardī (ca. 1290 – 1357), the ‘Pearl of wonders and the Uniqueness of strange things’ (‘Kharīdat al-ʿAjā’ib wa farīdat al-gha’rāib’), are interesting in this regard as they seem to be centred partly and rather unusually on Mecca.¹¹¹ A telling example that shows how ‘Islamic’ features almost incidentally mark Islamicate maps is the world map of Maḥmūd ibn al- Ḥusayn ibn Muḥammad, called al-Kāshgharī (fig. 2). Between 1072– 1077, he compiled a ‘Compendium of the Languages of the Turks’ (‘Dīwān lughāt al-Turk’), which survives in a single copy written in Damascus in 1266.¹¹² The manuscript features a world map that focusses on the location of Turkish tribes and regions (marked with yellow dots); indeed, it was intended as a didactic aid to learn Turkish. However, the eastward-orientated map also depicts Adam’s descent to earth in Sri Lanka and Gog and Magog behind Alexander’s wall (a red semicircle in the upper right corner); however, Mecca and Medina are not mentioned. A table-like list at the lower part of the map names the major countries of the Islamic world, from Iran to Spain – this was possibly an addition by the thirteenth century copyist Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr. Arabic Islamic regional maps mostly focus either on the Mediterranean or on the Muslim world, depicting political borders rather than geographical details or religious sights. Like world maps, they are mostly schematic and consist of geometric forms.¹¹³ These characteristics can be traced in the so-called ‘Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eye’ (‘Kitāb Gharā’ib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al‘uyūn’), a singular and exceptional work composed in Egypt between 1020 and

 Kahlaoui (note 50), p. 266.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), pp. 65 – 66; Nazmi (note 8), pp. 96 – 102. See also the contribution of Jean-Charles Ducène in this volume.  See for example Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms ar. 2188, fol. 2v–3r (ca. 1479 – 883). See Pinto (note 82), pp. 32– 33.  Istanbul, Millet Genel Kütüphanesi, Ms. Ali Emiri 4189, fol. 22b–23a. On the map see Andreas Kaplony, Comparing al-Kāshgharī’s Map With His Text. On the Visual Language, Purpose and Transmission of Arabic-Islamic Maps, in: Philippe Forêt/ Andreas Kaplony (eds.), Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road (Brill’s Inner Asian Library 21), Leiden, Boston 2010, pp. 137– 153.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), pp. 85 – 86.

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Fig. 2: The world map of al-Kāshgharī (1072 – 77, copy 1266). Istanbul, Millet Genel Kütüphanesi, Ms. Ali Emiri 4189, fol. 22b-23a

1050.¹¹⁴ Among other illustrations, the book offers a set of world and regional maps that mostly focus on the Muslim world: even the rectangular world map does not show the entire ecumene, but leaves out large parts of southern Africa, northern Europe and Asia, thus focussing entirely on the Islamic world (fig. 3).¹¹⁵ The Arabian Peninsula is represented as disproportionally large, prominently displaying Mecca with the symbol of a yellow horseshoe, in contrast to all other cities which are depicted by red dots. In the northeast (i. e. lower left corner), the wall built by Alexander to enclose Gog and Magog is also depicted. On many maps, routes are shown, suggesting that the author was interested in trade and travelling.¹¹⁶ Also singular are

 The only known copy today is 150 years younger: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Arab. c. 90. The work is edited by Yossef Rapoport/ Emilie Savage-Smith (eds.), An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe. The Book of Curiosities, Leiden 2014. See also Yossef Rapoport/ Emilie Savage-Smith, Lost Maps of the Caliphs. Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo, Chicago 2018; Rapoport (note 82), pp. 66 – 91.  The map seems to be an amalgam of different Islamicate traditions, see Rapoport/ SavageSmith, Lost Maps (note 114), pp. 75 – 100.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), pp.75 – 83.

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Fig. 3: The rectangular world map of the ‘Book of Curiosities’ (Egypt, ca. 1020 – 1050), oriented towards south. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Arab. c. 90, fol. 23B–24 A.

regional maps and the maps focussing on seas.¹¹⁷ Like their Christian equivalents, these sea maps were most likely not created for navigational, but rather for representational purposes.¹¹⁸ A different set of regional maps is offered by the twelfth-century Moroccan geographer Muḥammad al-Idrīsī, who worked for the Norman king, Roger II of Sicily.¹¹⁹ In his work, he divided each of the seven climatic zones into ten districts, resulting in a set of 70 regional maps.¹²⁰ While he explained this setup in his work, he did not mention the world map that his work is most famous for today. It has been suggested that this world map originally stemmed from the ‘Book of Curiosities’ and was added to a later copy of his work.¹²¹ In his thorough analysis of al-Idrīsī’s description of foreign religions and cults, Jean-Charles Ducène shows that al-Idrīsī did not highlight places of special importance for Islam (in contrast to, for example, al-Muqaddasī); however, he had a tendency to interpret foreign religious practices on the basis of Muslim doc-

 Ibid., pp. 85 – 98.  Kahlaoui (note 50), p. 265.  Francisco Herrera Clavero (ed.), El mundo del geógrafo ceutí al-Idrisi, Ceuta 2011; Rapoport (note 82), pp. 95 – 123; S. Maqbul Ahmad, Cartography of al-Sharif aI-Idrisi, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 8), pp. 156 – 174.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), pp. 63 – 65.  Ibid., pp. 80 – 81.

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trines. Interestingly enough, the depiction of Jerusalem shows the city as rather dominated by Christian sacred places. In contrast to his text, with a few exceptions, the maps of al-Idrīsī do not focus on religious knowledge. For the world map, Ducène concludes that religious knowledge was plainly “insignificant”.¹²² Apart from regional and world maps, the important task of finding the right direction of prayer to the Kaaba in Mecca (qibla) produced a literature and diagrams of its own (see the contribution of King in this volume).¹²³ Indeed, the task of estimating the direction and distance from one place to another was not a trivial one. In the ninth century, the Persian scholar Ibn Khurradādhbih developed a scheme for finding the qibla that even included Tibet and China.¹²⁴ Such calculations and treatises varied in scope and thus reveal different cultural settings and intentions. In 1196, for instance, the Egyptian scholar al-Dimyāṭī wrote a treatise on the qibla that was also illustrated by different diagrams, one of which focussed on the regions under Islamic rule in the Near East only.¹²⁵

Entangled Knowledge – Independent Traditions Although mostly treated separately, the Latin Christian and Arabic Islamic geographic traditions are by no means isolated. In fact, as several studies have shown, both spheres have influenced each other beyond doubt.¹²⁶ The degree of entanglement, is however, still disputed.¹²⁷ Many case studies demonstrate, how (in most cases) Latin works adapted geographical ideas from Arabic texts. Barbara Obrist, for example, has argued that some aspects of William of Conches’ ‘Dragmaticon’ (ca. 1050) were influenced

 See the contribution of Ducène in this volume, p. 147.  Quran 2, 144. See David A. King, World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca. Innovation and Tradition in Islamic Science (Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science 26), Leiden 2014, pp. 47– 127. See also Rapoport (note 82), pp. 155 – 179.  David A. King/ Richard P. Lorch, Qibla Charts, Qibla Maps, and Related Instruments, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 8), pp. 189 – 205; Borgolte (note 6), pp.105 – 107.  Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Marsh 592, fol. 88v. See King/ Lorch (note 124), p. 192; Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 65.  See note 6. In more general terms, also see Henry Laurens/ John Tolan/ Gilles Veinstein, L’Europe et l’Islam: Quinze siècles d’histoire, Paris 2009 (English translation: Europe and the Islamic World: A History, Princeton 2013); Emilia Calvo et al. (eds.), A Shared Legacy. Islamic Science East and West. Homage to professor J.M. Millàs Vallicrosa, Barcelona 2008; Andreas Speer/ Lydia Wegener (eds.), Wissen über Grenzen. Arabisches Wissen und lateinisches Mittelalter (Miscellanea Mediaevalia 33), Berlin, Boston 2006; Isabelle Draelants/ Anne Tihon/ Baudouin van den Abeele (eds.), Occident et Proche-Orient. Contacts scientifiques au temps des Croisades. Actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 24 et 25 mars 1997 (Réminisciences 5), Turnhout 2000; Dionisius A. Agius/ Richard Hitchcock (eds.) The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe. Folia Scholastica Mediterranea (Middle East Cultures Series 18), Reading 1994.  On this see Hiatt (note 37).

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by a cosmological treaty attributed to the Abbasid Jew Māshāʾallāh b. Atharī († ca. 815).¹²⁸ Some decades earlier, Guido of Pisa included a singular world map into his encyclopaedic work (dated 1118 – 1119); due to its geometric design, the map evoked models from the Islamicate world.¹²⁹ And Pisa was indeed a hub for the exchange of ideas and knowledge in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.¹³⁰ The world map of the Venice-based cartographer Pietro Vesconte is another wellknown example of this cross influence.¹³¹ Vesconte was not only the first Latin cartographer to include knowledge provided by the travelogue of Marco Polo in his map, he also used place names of Arabic origin, as Stefan Schröder demonstrates.¹³² The other direction of the transfer of knowledge (i. e. from Latin sources to Arabic ones) is not equally well analysed, but we know of several telling examples. In the tenth century, the geographic opening chapter of Orosius’s ‘History against the Pagans’ (written ca. 417) was translated into Arabic, presumably in Córdoba.¹³³ The

 Barbara Obrist, William of Conches, Māshā’allāh, and the Twelfth-Century Cosmology, in: Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 76 (2009), pp. 29 – 87; Gautier Dalché (note 6), pp. 413.  Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Ms 3897– 3919, fol. 53v. The indicated folio number of the map varies: (1) fol. 52v (Gautier Dalché (note 6), p. 425). (2) fol. 53v (Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Fines terrae. Die Enden der Erde und der vierte Kontinent auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten (Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae historica 36), Hannover 1992, p. XX). (3) fol. 55v (Edson, Mapping (note 53), p. 117; Arentzen (note 34), p. 254). Upon request, the KBR in Brussels informed me that fol. 53v is correct. On the possible Arabic template see Margherita Pinna, Il Mediterraneo e la Sardegna nella cartografia musulmana dall’ottavo al sedicesimo secolo, 2 vols., Nuoro 1996, vol. 1, p. 80; Francesco L. Pullé, Cartografia antica dell’India (Studi italiani di filologia Indo-Iranico 5), vol. 2, Pisa 1901, p. 21.  Michele Campopiano, La culture pisane et le monde arabo-musulman. Entre connaissance réelle et héritage livresque, in: Un exotisme littéraire médiéval ? Actes du colloque du Centre d’Études Médiévales et Dialectales de Lille 3, Université Charles-de-Gaulle – Lille 3, 6 et 7 octobre 2006 (‘Bien dire et bien aprandre’ 26), Willeneuve d’Ascq 2008, pp. 81– 95; Gautier Dalché (note 6), pp. 425 – 426.  See e. g. Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Weltbild und Weltkenntnis in der Kartographie um 1308. Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte und die Rundkarte im Portulan-Atlas des Pietro Vesconte, in: Andreas Speer/ David Wirmer (eds.), 1308. Eine Topographie historischer Gleichzeitigkeit (Miscellanea mediaevalia 35), Berlin, New York 2010, pp. 13 – 26; Evelyn Edson, Reviving the Crusade. Sanudo’s schemes and Vesconte‘s maps, in: Allen (note 6), pp. 131– 155.  Stefan Schröder, Wissenstransfer und Kartieren von Herrschaft? Zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Macht bei al-Idrīsī und Marino Sanudo, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Martina Stercken (eds.), Herrschaft verorten. Politische Kartographie im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 19), Zurich 2012, pp. 313 – 333; Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Stefan Schröder, Weltbild, Kartographie und geographische Kenntnisse, in: Johannes Fried/ Ernst-Dieter Hehl (eds.), Weltdeutungen und Weltreligionen, 600 bis 1500 (WBG-Weltgeschichte 3), Darmstadt 2010, pp. 57– 83.  Hans Daiber, Orosius’ ‘Historiae adversus paganos’ in arabischer Überlieferung, in: Jan Wilm Wesselius et al. (eds.), Tradition and Re-interpretation in Jewish and Early Christian Literature: Essays in Honor of Jürgen C. H. Lebram (Studia Post-Biblica 36), Leiden 1986, pp. 202– 249. Edition: Kitāb Hurūšiūš, ed. Mayte Penelas, Madrid 2001.

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Fig. 4: A T-O diagram with Arabic inscriptions in a Latin manuscript of the ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville, mostly enumerating the names of different people (Iberian Peninsula, ninth century). Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Vitr. 14 – 3, fol. 116v.

adaption of Orosius in Córdoba is one good example of the circulation of texts in a transcultural and multi-religious setting such as the Iberian Peninsula. Another striking example in this regard is a T-O diagram with Arabic inscriptions in a ninth-century copy of the ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville (fig. 4).¹³⁴ The text is in Latin, but

 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional España, Ms Vitr. 14– 3, fol. 116v. See Karen C. Pinto, Interpretation, Intention and Impact. Andalusi Arab and Norman Sicilian Examples of Islamo-Christian Cartographic Translation, in: Patrick Manning/ Abigail Owen (eds.), Knowledge in Translation. Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000 – 1800 CE, hg. von, Pittsburgh 2018, pp. 41– 57, esp. pp. 43 – 47; Stefan Schröder, Kartographische Entwürfe iberischer Provenienz. Zu Raum- und Ordnungsvorstellungen auf der Iberischen Halbinsel in Karten des 9. bis 12. Jahrhunderts, in: Matthias Maser et al. (eds.), Von Mozarabern zu Mozarabismen. Zur Vielfalt kultureller Ordnungen auf der mittelalterlichen iber-

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the manuscript is scattered with Arabic annotations and glosses, dating to the tenth or eleventh centuries. The map itself is obviously the most spectacular addition in Arabic. The inscriptions list, as in many Christian models, the three sons of Noah and their descendants living in different parts of the earth. Unlike Christian T-O diagrams, the Arabic exemplar, however, does not name the continents.¹³⁵ This mirrors the fact that the three parts of the world were important only to the Latin Christian cartographic tradition, and not to the Arabic Islamic one.¹³⁶ In the twelfth century, the Moroccan geographer al-Idrīsī composed his ‘Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands’ (‘Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq’) in Sicily for the Norman king Roger II. Indeed, we can trace traditional Latin as well as explicitly Christian knowledge in his text, for example in his description of the Christian churches in Jerusalem.¹³⁷ One last, again cartographic, example is the so-called Maghrib chart that presumably dates to the first half of the fourteenth century and depicts the western part of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. ¹³⁸ The chart is quite probably based upon a Latin portolan chart and although all inscriptions are in Arabic, they reveal a linguistic mixture of Arabic, Catalan, Castilian, and Italian influences; religious knowledge is, however, not a topic influencing this map.¹³⁹ The examples scantly outlined above attest how geographical names, cartographic ideas, and whole texts were exchanged between Latin and Arabic scholars – often through the hands of Jewish intermediaries. Indeed, it is worth at least a glance at the Jewish mapping tradition, which can, however, only be traced from a relatively late period. There seems to be no map of Israel predating that of the medieval French rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki († 1105), better known under the acronym Rashi (RAbbi SHlomo Itzhaki).¹⁴⁰ For Rashi’s maps and those based upon his model, Rehav Rubin has used the term “Hebrew or Jewish Maps” and defined these by three criteria: they were drawn or printed by Jewish authors (“cartographers in the service of religion”¹⁴¹, as he calls them), they stemmed from the Jewish world of knowledge, and were drawn or printed in Jewish contexts.¹⁴² According to Rubin, these maps, mostly depicting the land of Israel and its surrounding countries, integrally belonged to the Biblical or Talmudic texts they accompanied, and they helped the reader to under-

ischen Halbinsel (Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft, 41), Münster 2014, pp. 257– 277, esp. pp. 268 – 276.  I rely here on the translations of Pinto (note 134), p. 45.  Mauntel et al. (note 6), pp. 304– 305, 317– 318.  See the contribution of Ducène in this volume.  Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Ms S.P. II 259.  Ledger (note 6), pp. 176 – 236; Gautier Dalché (note 6), pp. 423  On Rashi see Rubin (note 49), pp. 1– 22; Harvey (note 61), p. 22.  Rubin (note 49), p. XXII.  Ibid., p. XIX.

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stand and contemplate its meaning.¹⁴³ In this regard they are comparable to their Christian counterparts.¹⁴⁴ Rashi indeed seemed to have been the founding father of Jewish cartography, and although no autograph of his works survives, his writings seem to have been collected by his students.¹⁴⁵ In later copies, some of his works include up to six schematic maps.¹⁴⁶ To give one example, they depicted the ‘Promised Land’ as it was described in the Torah portion of ‘Mas’ei’ (‘Travels’), the final portion of the ‘Book of Numbers’. In this passage, the voyage of the Israelites from Egypt to the Jordan valley is described in great detail. Rashi’s commentary reflected on the Land of Canaan and its relation to its southern neighbours, namely Egypt, Edom, and Moab – and the accompanying map or diagram mirrored this passage.¹⁴⁷ Facing north, the drawing shows ‘Eretz Yisrael’ and its eastern and southern neighbours in rectangular shape¹⁴⁸ (fig. 5). Other maps, also depicting the borders of the ‘Promised land’, are similarly schematic, and they are not all orientated towards north but also to the east.¹⁴⁹ Kedar argues, that the design of these drawings was influenced by Christian or even Muslim traditions.¹⁵⁰ Rubin doubts this, as Rashi’s diagrams have no similarity regarding the content of Christian maps: they neither depict Jerusalem, not list important names of people; instead, they focus on regional borders, which is rather uncommon for Christian maps.¹⁵¹ According to Rubin, Rashi’s diagrammatic maps originated in the context of rising Jewish-Christians tensions and disputes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the question of, among others, to whom the Levant actually belonged: to the Muslims who controlled it, to the Christians who were trying to conquer it, or to the Jews, who claimed ownership by command of God?¹⁵² In any case, Rashi’s maps seemed to have influenced similar maps, drawn for example by Richard of St Victor († 1173) for a commentary on the book of Ezekiel,  Ibid., pp. XXIII–XX.  See Pnina Arad, Cultural Landscape in Christian and Jewish, in: Baumgärtner/ Ben-Aryeh Debby/ Kogman-Appel (note 6), pp. 74– 88.  Rubin (note 49), p. 1.  Ibid., p. 22.  Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Herb. 5(1), fol. 139v. See Benjamin Z. Kedar, Rashi’s Map of the Land of Canaan, ca. 1100, and its Cartographic Background, in: Richard J. A. Talbert/ Richard W. Unger (eds.), Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (Technology and change in history 10), Leiden, Boston 2008, pp. 155 – 168. There is a rendering of the map in Eva Wajntraub/ Gimpel Wajntraub, Hebrew Maps of the Holy Land, Vienna 1992, fig. 1b. See also the information on the Munich Rashi-manuscript provided by the Center of Jewish Art of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, URL: http://cja.huji.ac.il/?mode=alone&id=20440 (accessed on 10.06. 2020).  Rubin (note 49), pp. 3 – 5.  Ibid., pp. 4– 21.  Kedar (note 147).  Rubin (note 49), pp. 18 – 20.  Ibid., p. 17.

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Fig. 5: Map of Canaan and the neighbouring regions, oriented towards north, based on the work of Rashi (Commentary on the Bible, Würzburg-region, ca. 1233). München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Hebr. 5(1), fol. 139v.

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and by Nicholas of Lyra († 1349) for his book on the literal understanding of the Bible (‘Postilla literalis’).¹⁵³ Paris, Pisa, Venice, the Iberian Peninsula, Majorca, and Sicily were hotspots of intellectual exchange and transcultural encounters as well as places where different scientific traditions became entangled.¹⁵⁴ The twelfth century certainly symbolizes a peak in the process of exchange and translation.¹⁵⁵ However, as fascinating as the examples briefly outlined above may be, Gautier Dalché expresses scepticism about the extent of the entanglement. He argues that the different Latin and Arabic ways of dealing with descriptive geography and cartography remained largely isolated, if we leave certain spectacular exceptions aside.¹⁵⁶ Furthermore, he argues that Arabic texts translated to Latin mostly conveyed Greek knowledge and ideas to Latin scholars, not ‘Arabic Islamic’ ideas.¹⁵⁷ Indeed, in Latin Europe, scholars gained access to many Greek works (mostly Aristotle) by translations only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These translations sparked a renewed interest in philosophy and astronomy as well as an immense enthusiasm for questions of natural philosophy and cosmology: for example, the philosopher Peter Abelard and his beloved Héloïse even named their son ‘Astrolab’.¹⁵⁸ In the end, the extent to which both traditions were entangled is difficult to assess.¹⁵⁹ The case studies collected in this volume show on the one hand that there were connections and entanglements, even with regard to the sphere of religious knowledge. On the other hand, it becomes clear that the religious imprint on geographic knowledge was mainly a characteristic feature of the Latin Christian tradition (which thus may be called so by right). The Arabic tradition of geographic knowledge was ‘Islamic’ insofar, as it often focussed on the Islamicate world and in individual cases was influenced by religious knowledge.

On this Volume The volume is divided into four sections in order to make it easier for the reader to access. The choice of this order is, of course, only one of many possibilities one could

 Catherine Delano-Smith, The Exegetical Jerusalem: Maps and Plans for Ezekiel Chapters 40 – 48, in: Lucy Donkin/ Hanna Vorholt (eds.), Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West (Proceedings of the British Academy 175), Oxford 2012, pp. 41– 76; Harvey (note 61), p. 22; ead., Some Contemporary Manuscripts of Nicholas of Lyras Postula Litteralis (1323 – 1332). Maps, Plans and Other Illustrations, in: Nathalie Bouloux/ Anca Dan/ Georges Tolias (eds.), Orbis disciplinae. Liber amicorum Patrick Gautier Dalché, Turnhout 2017, pp. 199 – 232.  Gautier Dalché (note 6), p. 427.  Hiatt (note 37).  Gautier Dalché (note 6).  Ibid., pp. 410 – 411.  Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 6), p. 44.  Hiatt (note 37).

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think of to highlight connections between the different papers; the sections are not intended to emphasise one interpretational scheme and hopefully they will not prevent readers from finding further connections or drawing different conclusions. On a pragmatic level, the sections aim at grouping different papers around common subjects and thus aim to open up a comparative perspective. In a first step, Karen C. Pinto and Christoph Mauntel interpret the basic visual depictions of Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian geographic thinking in a religious way: respectively, the ‘bird’ embedded in the KMMS world map-tradition and a Christian reading of the T-O diagrams. A second group of papers answers the question of how different authors dealt with the task of collecting and compiling geographical knowledge according to religious specifications. Nathalie Bouloux, Jean-Charles Ducène, and Kurt Franz analyse how Lambert of Saint-Omer, al-Idrīsī, and Yāqūt arranged and ordered their works, and they ask what place was allowed for religious knowledge. The third section focusses on innovative forms to locate and depict geographical and religious knowledge. Felicitas Schmieder interprets the first Latin globes from around 1500 as three-dimensional mappaemundi; David A. King presents two different solutions based on folk astronomy and mathematical geography, called by him the ultimate medieval solutions in both cases, in in order to determine the sacred direction in Islam (i. e. to the Kaaba in Mecca); and Stefan Schröder analyses how author Marino Sanudo and the cartographer Pietro Vesconte combined different sources of knowledge in order to compile a multimedia Crusade treaty. The papers of the fourth section focus on descriptions and depictions of the Holy Land: Emmanuelle Vagnon shows how the Holy Land map of Sanudo/Vesconte was adapted into different late medieval geographical treatises, among them Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, and traces how the religious character of the map changed in this new context. The main source for this Holy Land map was the late thirteenth-century travel account of Burchard of Mount Sion, analysed by Ingrid Baumgärtner and Eva Ferro. In an in-depth analysis of a Florentine manuscript, they not only reveal how an existing map was embedded in Burchard’s text, but also how this map could be used to stimulate emotional responses from the viewers who were also contemplating it. Raoul DuBois’s paper deepens this focus on the material usage and experience of texts and maps as means of virtual pilgrimages. He shows how texts as well as maps tried to guide the readers’ response to the work, partly by making them rotate or unfold it. Thus, the manuscript as a material object comes into focus. As the Latin proverb says, books have their own fate.¹⁶⁰ And for this book I owe a debt of gratitude first and foremost to the authors who tolerated being pestered by

 The saying goes back to a second century poem by Terentianus Maurus, De litteris, de syllabis, de metris, in: Heinrich Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini. Vol. 6: Scriptores artis metricae, Leipzig 1923, pp. 313 – 413, here p. 363 (v. 1286): Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli.

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a pushy editor to finish their texts soon after the conference, which took place in Tübingen on 11– 12 April 2019. Neither the conference nor this book would have been possible without the generous financial backing of the Research Training Group (‘Graduiertenkolleg’) “Religious Knowledge in Premodern Europe (800 – 1800)” in Tübingen, which was funded by the ‘German Research Foundation’ (‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’, DFG). Furthermore, I am very thankful to the Mediävistenverband e.V. for its generous support in publishing this book. I would like to thank Laura Burlon, Antonia Mittelbach and Robert Forke from deGruyter and the series editors Stephan Conermann, Thomas Honegger, and especially Ingrid Baumgärtner who have ensured that the process of bringing this book to print has been a very smooth one. Last but not least, I would also like to thank Benoît Dutilleux, who helped me prepare the manuscript for print.

Part I: Representing the World in Arab-Islamic and Latin-Christian Geography

Karen C. Pinto

It’s a Bird. It’s a Plane. No, it’s the World! An Exploration of the Spiritual Meanings Underlying the Bird Forms Used in Islamicate World Maps

Abstract: This article explores the spiritual underpinnings of the forms used in Islamicate world maps. After a brief overview on the ‘Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik’ (‘Book of routes and realms’ – abbreviated to KMMS) Islamicate mapping tradition, it examines the meaning behind the form of a bird that constitutes the shape of the landmasses of the old world. In Islamic culture the bird is an oft-repeated motif with a multitude of meanings related to the bird’s reflection of soul and its ability to be closer to the heavens and God. Through an examination of the bird in the world map this article points to the multitude of Islamic cultural, philosophical, and spiritual signs embedded in Islamicate cartography. Keywords: Islam, Islamic, Islamicate. Islamic Cartography, Cartography, World Map, Bird, Pigeon, Dove, Cosmographical, God, Spiritual, KMMS, Istakhri, Kitab al-masalik wa-al-mamalik, Sufism

Introduction The medieval Islamicate mapping tradition dating back at least to the ninth/tenth century through internal evidence but eleventh for earliest extant examples¹ is at

Note: This article is based on a chapter in this author’s forthcoming book “What is ‘Islamic’ about Islamic Maps?” Amsterdam University Press. The first part of the title of this article is based on the television slogan for Superman, which in turn was based on the 1966 musical composed by Charles Strouse, “It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman.” Access via https://www.playbill.com/production/ its-a-birdits-a-planeits-superman-alvin-theatre-vault-0000000891 (accessed 20. 07. 2020). This article is dedicated to the memory of the great Peter Heath, scholar of Ibn Sina and Neoplatonic thought, former President of the American University of Sharjah and former Provost of the American University of Beirut, who was taken from us too early and who kindly encouraged my work on Islamic cartography. Heath’s work inspired this Neoplatonic reading of the bird in the KMMS Islamicate map: Peter Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ). With a Translation of the ‘Book of the Prophet Muhammad’s Ascent to Heaven’, Philadelphia 1992. This article benefits from the insights of Zümrüt Alp at Columbia University (1995 – 2000) for her [unfinished] doctoral dissertation research on the significance of the bird in Islamic culture.  Definitive dating of the start of the Islamic mapping tradition is an on-going two-century old desideratum. Although written mention of the commissioning of maps dates back to the earliest Islamic Karen C. Pinto, Associate Visiting Professor, Loyola University Maryland, 4501 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210 – 2699. email: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-002

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first blush strange to our modern eyes. Composed of a series of puzzling circles, semi-circles, squares, rectangles, elongated trapezoids, obtuse triangles, parabolas, hooked and plane-like forms, and a plethora of indescribable abstract geometrical shapes, our eyes cry out for a decoding in order for us understand how these strange forms add up collectively to form a map of the world. In keeping with the focus of this volume on geographic and religious knowledge, this article examines the world maps of the ‘Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik’ (KMMS) Islamicate mapping tradition² from the perspective of their spiritual underpinnings. Specifically, I seek to understand why the medieval Islamicate mapping tradition depicted the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe in the form of a bird and how the Encircling Ocean (Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ) reinforces this unusual rendition of the world.³ To understand the concept of a transparent map, think of the screen in a film theatre. Like the screen on to which the film is projected, a map vanishes behind the information it displays. The map becomes merely a device for objective knowledge or reality. Knowledge and reality are the objects of investigation, not the archiving process or the medium […]. Most conspicuously, it is based on a conception of image and representation as an imitation of an external and objective reality. It involves the belief in the map as a neutral, purely informative device. Now think again about the screen in the film theatre. Consider the projector and the film itself as a set of optical, chemical and technical devices, and ask how these material objects produce a visible space and influence the image on the screen. The opaque map then comes to the fore, and the historian is considering the object itself and the way it displays information […]. [Thus] it is possible to consider maps as visual artefacts and to study them from graphic, aesthetic and structural points of view and see in them a complex architecture of signs.⁴

conquests of the seventh century, extant examples before the eleventh century are as of yet unconfirmed. For a discussion on the dilemmas surrounding the dating of the tradition, see, Gerald R. Tibbetts, The Beginnings of a Cartographic Tradition, in: John B. Harley/ David Woodward (eds.), Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (The History of Cartography 2/1), Chicago, London 1992, pp. 90 – 107; For recent corrections see Karen C. Pinto, Revisiting the History of Islamic Cartography: Updating the work of Tibbetts with New Discoveries, presented at the Frontier Forum on Cartographic History & International Seminar on The History of Cartography Translation Project, Yunnan University, Kunming, China (paper presented on Aug 24– 27, 2019). https://www. academia.edu/40126781/_Revisiting_the_History_of_Islamic_Cartography_Updating_the_work_of_ Tibbetts_with_New_Discoveries_for_Frontier_Forum_on_Cartographic_History_and_International_ Seminar_on_The_History_of_Cartography_Translation_Project_YunnanU-Kunming_Aug_24-27 (accessed 20.07. 2020). Recent books on Islamic cartography, such as, Zayde Antrim’s Mapping the Middle East, London, 2018, pp. 19 – 21, barely address this crucial matter of dating the Islamic mapping tradition.  For greater detail on the KMMS mapping tradition, please see Karen C. Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps. An Exploration, Chicago 2016, pp. 59 – 77.  On the depiction of the continents in different traditions see Christoph Mauntel et al., Mapping Continents, Inhabited Quarters and The Four Seas. Divisions of the World and the Ordering of Spaces in Latin-Christian, Arabic-Islamic and Chinese Cartography in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries. A Critical Survey and Analysis, in: Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 5/2 (2018), pp. 295 – 367.  Christian Jacob, Toward a Cultural History of Cartography, in: Imago Mundi 48 (1996), pp. 191– 198, here pp. 191– 192.

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As Christian Jacob reminds us, we need to make transparent the geographic underpinnings of the KMMS world map through the analytical lens of mimesis in order to seek objective reality without which readers will not easily recognize its images as maps. Once we establish that Islamicate KMMS world maps are indeed maps of the old world—i. e. Africa, Asia, and Europe (no Americas depicted yet)—then, “based on a conception of image and representation as an imitation of an external and objective reality,”⁵ we can reveal the opaque background in order to grasp the spiritual world that lies between the surface of the map and its cartographic artist.

Making the KMMS Mimetic A continent which, by its mass, deflects light rays and thus cannot be seen, deflects lines of force and thus cannot be encountered, deflects the radiation of conceptual influences and thus cannot be conceived. Such a mental object no doubt exists, but we shall never see it, except to spot the subtle distortion it engenders in reality. It is by pure analogy that we can sense it, by pure divination that we can call on it; it exists only when our eyes are closed, like a lysergic phantasm on the retina or the eyelids. But it is enough to focus on it briefly to make it give off a complementary radiance. This is the metaphysics of the Green Ray: every sphere resolves down to an equatorial point between day and night. This is the absolute horizon of thought.⁶

Medieval Islamic maps are like the Baudrillard quote: cool, albeit, distant memories of a millennial-old mental conception of the world that we can never completely uncover. It is precisely in this inability to be fully understood that the undying attraction of these maps lie. Unlike modern maps, medieval Muslim cartographers shunned mimesis. They did not seek to represent the Earth in its precise form and shape because Muslim scientists understood well the impossibility of drawing a sphere accurately.⁷ Rather they chose to create stylized images that can be best described as ideational maps presenting a world both as they saw it and as they wished it to be understood. Some thousand years later these images are reminders of bygone worldly imaginings; a tantalizing enigma of shapes and markings amidst an array of vivid colors that entice us into a raptured gaze (fig. 1). From our vantage point of today it is hard at first to reconcile this image as a map of the world. We are so used to modern maps of the world which purport to show us ‘exact mimetic representations’ of the world, that Islamic maps seem like a lysergic phantasmagoria of shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, perhaps even plane-like forms amidst strange, unfathomable shapes, with lines spinning off in multi-directions on a variety of backgrounds ranging from plain paper to elaborate gold leaf with an exquisite multi-colored floral decoration.

 See note 4.  Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories II, English translation by Chris Turner, Durham 1996, p. 1.  Ahmad Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History, New Haven 2010, pp. 68 – 99.

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Fig. 1: Typical KMMS World Map, ‘Ṣūrat al-Arḍ’ (Picture of the World). 1193 CE / 589 AH, 41.5 x 59.3 cm Leiden University Libraries, Cod. Or. 3101, fol. 4b-5a. Head of bird is in Arabian peninsula; one wing is represented by the over-extended African continent; the other wing, chest and body of the bird is represented by the Asian continent; while Europe represents the tail of the bird. To understand the layout of this map please refer to figures 2b, 3a, and 3b.

Because of the nature of the artwork and illumination, those of us familiar with the tradition of medieval icons may be inclined to think of these images as a medieval Islamic variation of the classical icon. In tests of recognition that I conducted with these maps on a random sampling of students, respondents identified them as yin-yang symbols, life cycle charts, architectural blueprints, astrological or navigational diagrams, animal figures, rugs, tapestries, or possibly instruments. Very few identified this image as a map. In fact, the identification of it as a map seemed to have little correlation with language. Respondents tended to identify them with similar objects from their cultural backgrounds. Curiously, respondents from a Middle Eastern background were less likely to see these as maps in spite of their familiarity with Arabic. They were more likely to see them as a blue-print for a pre-modern instrument of some kind.⁸

 This test of recognition was conducted by author in random classrooms at Columbia University (with the permission of the instructors) in the mid-1990’s while author was completing the research

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Recognizing these images as ‘maps’ in fact requires familiarity with pre-modern cartography and an openness to geographical spatiality that is not tied to seeing the world in only one pre-determined modern way. Identifying them specifically as maps of the world requires a willingness to go beyond the penchant for mimesis that the multitude of contemporary maps and satellite images has instilled in us. If we are willing to stretch our imagination, blur the outlines of the world that have been so deeply etched into our subconscious eye, and banish—at least temporarily—our propensity for northward orientation, then there is indeed a way of looking at these images and comparing them to a present-day ‘mimetic’ map of the world through which we can begin to see a semblance of mimesis—albeit rudimentary—in the classical tenth century Muslim representation of the world. As the Baudrillard quote implies, none of us can ever really ‘see’ the world. It is out there somewhere, captured only by sophisticated cameras and flying machines. Without the work of modern cartographers, we would have no precise idea of what the world looks like. The image of the world as it has been drummed into our psyche, in fact, does not really exist. For it to exist the world would have to cease being a sphere. It could no longer be three-dimensional. It would be flat. Satellites can only capture a portion of the world at a time; never the whole. The map of the world that we have grown so accustomed to and which we accept without qualification as correct exists as a purely mental object, a figment of our imagination that we can never ever actually see. By this token we could argue that any map is a lysergic phantasm on the retina— contemporary and pre-modern—because none can be qualitatively better than the other because all are and can only ever be but figments of our imagination. Identifying the Islamicate KMMS maps as maps the ‘world’ demands expertise and a keen eye along with a willingness to go beyond the mimetic structure of ‘the world’ that is lodged deeply in our minds from the multitude of contemporary maps and satellite images that assail us on a daily basis. Members of the specialized branches of science and illustrated manuscripts may have encountered them before, but, even in their case, precise recognition of the specific forms and how they match up mimetically with the world as we know it from modern maps, is slow and imprecise. To easily enable the process of identification I have selected one of the simplest versions of the KMMS maps from the latter half of the fifteenth century that were made for new libraries in Constantinople by Mehmed II following the Ottoman conquest (fig. 2a and b).⁹

and writing of her doctoral dissertation. Further details on the results of these surveys please refer to the author’s doctoral dissertation: Karen C. Pinto, Ways of Seeing. 3: Scenarios of the World in the Medieval Islamic Cartographic Imagination, PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003. Access via https://staff.aub.edu.lb/~kp02/research.htm#dissertation (accessed 10.07. 2020).  Karen C. Pinto, The Maps Are the Message. Mehmet II’s Patronage of an ‘Ottoman Cluster’, in: Imago Mundi 61 (2011), pp. 155 – 179.

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Fig. 2a: Commoner’s version of a KMMS world map. This version represents a break from the earlier elaborately illustrated renditions. It is part of the KMMS Ottoman Cluster KMMS maps and must have been intended for a non-elite audience (see Pinto (note 2), 219 – 278) 878 AH/1473 CE. Light blue gouache labelled with red and black ink on paper. Diameter 19.5 cm. Courtesy: Istanbul, Sülemaniye Camii Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 2971a, fol. 3a. (Photo: Karen Pinto) Fig. 2b: Translation of KMMS world map based on Ottoman Cluster map (fig. 2a). Source: Karen Pinto with assistance from Damien Bovlomov, photo editor of Imago Mundi.

Maps can be oriented in any direction. Our present custom of orienting maps with north on top is a practice begun by Renaissance map-makers indicating the rising importance of northern Europe from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards. Prior to the Renaissance, medieval European cartographers oriented their maps mostly with east on top towards the Oriens (Orient), hence the source of the meaning ‘to orient a map’.¹⁰ Muslims chose to orient their world maps towards South. We are still not sure why. One possible hypothesis is that since these maps were produced somewhere in the heartlands of the Abbasid caliphate, north of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, they would naturally point south towards the Arabian Peninsula in the same way that medieval European maps pointed east towards Jerusalem. Within this neat, aesthetically well-packaged ‘ideograph’ are all the features standard to the classical medieval Islamic vision of the world. We see the doubleedged circle of the Encircling Ocean which shows the Pacific and Atlantic as one might ring encasing the world and called Bahr al-Muḥīṭ in Arabic. It rings the world along with four other seas, seven rivers, and the three major landmasses of  On this, see Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space. How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (Studies in Map History 1), London 1999. However, some late medieval world maps chose to put south on top (e. g. Fra Mauro, the so-called Modena-world map etc), see Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300 – 1492. The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation, Baltimore 2007.

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Africa, Asia, and Europe (listed here in order of size). The key to comprehending the medieval Muslim conception of the world is being able to assimilate and internalize the basic shapes of the landmasses and the seas, along with the map’s southerly inversion. Once we realize that the crescent-shaped landmass is in fact the continent of Africa, we recognize that the double-headed, bulging form in the lower left-hand corner corresponds to the continent of Asia. The bulge connecting Africa to Asia is the Arabian Peninsula, and the tiny triangle marooned in the lower right-hand sector of the image is none other than Europe. Africa loomed large in the medieval Islamic imagination whereas comparatively Europe didn’t count for much.¹¹ How did the medieval Muslim cartographers arrive at this image of the world? Why the emphasis on symmetry and geometric forms? Why the elaborate ornamentation? Why are the coastlines perfectly even and—more often than not—mirror images of each other? Why do certain forms dominate the template? What lies behind the seemingly repetitive harmony of forms? How do these combine to generate a dynamic image that incorporates the macro, hidden, deeper meaning? These are some of the questions that come to mind when one encounters the ‘typical’ classical medieval Islamic mappamundi and leads to the analysis of the form of the world as bird and the discussion of the opaque map that lies behind the names and border demarcations.

Making the Map Opaque to Reveal the Bird Having satisfied our inbred thirst for mimesis and showing that the hooks, bulges, circles, triangles, and abstract shapes add up to a map of the old world, we can move onto the next step of stripping cartographic significators from the map. What if we were to erase all names and borders carving up the medieval Islamicate world map what emerges? Stripped of its cartographic significations, what does the medieval Islamicate world map resemble? Here the answer is both simple and extremely complex. The mid-fifteenth century example from an al-Iṣ ṭ akhrī manuscript housed in Aya Sofya that was used for fig. 2, once cleared of the clutter of names, reveals its central form clearly (fig. 3a and b). When the surface of the map is wiped clean of names, then the form of a bird constituting the combined all-white landmasses of the old world unfurls out of the map. Head in Arabia, robust round body rendering Asia, a marooned triangular tail for Europe, with the Arabia, Asia, and Europe shielded by the large crescent-shaped arching wing that constitutes Africa.

 On knowledge about Europe in the Islamic geographic tradition see Jean-Charles Ducène, L’Europe et les géographes arabes du Moyen Âge (IXe–XVe siècle). ‘La grande terre’ et ses peuples. Conceptualisation d’un espace ethnique et politique, Paris 2018.

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Fig. 3a and 3b: Revelation of the bird form that represents the old world in KMMS world maps by eliminating territorial names, borders, and other markings on the map. For specific indications refer to indication on fig. 3b of the head of the bird, its wings, body, and tail.

Additional examples ranging from the earliest extant copy from the eleventh century to the latest known copies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, show that the form of the world in KMMS maps is consistently based on the form of a bird. The bird representing world-form morphs from a large angry-looking bird, possibly an eagle, in the earliest extant al-Iṣ ṭ akhrī manuscript from 589 AH/ 1193 CE housed in Leiden (fig. 1) to a graceful light swallow or dove-like bird in Sülemaniye’s mid-fifteenth century Aya Sofya manuscript (fig 2, 3a and b).¹² Identification of the specific birds represented in the overall form of the world is challenging owing to their stylized nature.¹³ Birds are often used as a motif in Islamic art but identification is rare–unless as in the case of Ibn Bakhtīshū’s (d. 1058 CE) ‘Kitā b Naʿt al-Ḥ ayawā n’ birds are named and described along with their illustrations.¹⁴ Often discussions on birds are filed under the generic label of aniconism in Islamic art and thought, rarely questioned and never analyzed.

 For more on the history behind Sülemaniye’s Aya Sofya manuscripts please see Pinto (note 9).  A detailed analysis of the different bird forms that the KMMS maps take needs to be factored into this picture of the “bird in the KMMS world map” but the details lie beyond the scope of this article. I therefore point readers to author’s forthcoming book “What is ’Islamic’ about Islamic Maps?” (see introductory note), which will address questions related to the specific birds as signalled by different manuscript renditions of the KMMS world map.  See, for instance, plates and discussion of Ibn Bakhtīshū‘s birds in Anna Contadini, A World of Beasts. A Thirteenth-Century Illustrated Arabic Book on Animals (the Kitā b Naʿt al-Ḥ ayawā n), Leiden 2012, plates 52– 69.

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Textual References to the ‘Bird in the World Map’ This is not simply the case of just ‘seeing’ and, perhaps, for that reason, imagining a bird in the KMMS world map. If the viewer is directionally oriented—as any good Muslim praying five times a day in the direction of Mecca needs to be—then the form of the world in the KMMS maps could have been easily memorized as a mental mneumonic resembling a bird. As the ‘Ad Herennium’ (3.30), the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric tells us: The artificial memory includes locations and images. By locations I mean such scenes as are naturally or artificially set off on a small scale, complete and conspicuous, so that we can grasp and embrace them easily by the natural memory—for example, a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch, or the like. An image is, as it were, a figure, mark, or portrait of the object we wish to remember; for example, if we wish to recall a horse, a lion, or an eagle, we must place its image in a definite location.¹⁵

Memorization of the Quran for Muslims bestows the highest honor of Hāfiz, namely protector. Therefore the practice of mnemonics is instilled early and can be applied to other areas of life such as the kind of mapping that travels and extensive territorial conquests brings with it. There is written mention of a bird form constituting the shape of the landmass of the world in the Islamicate world map dating back to the seventh century, raising the tantalizing possibility that the earliest Islamic conquerors may have been using this easily transportable mental image of the KMMS world as a bird from the earliest days of their lightening seventh century conquests. The earliest mention of the concept of the landmass of the old world in the form of a bird in an Islamic context dates back to the mid-seventh century and the earliest days of the rise and spread of Islam. They are said to have been the utterances of the famous Arab general Amr ibn al-ʿĀ ṣ who led the Islamic conquest of Egypt. Specifically, the reference comes from a key chronicle on the conquest of Egypt ‘Futū ḥ Miṣ r’ by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 257 AH/ 871 CE) of the powerful Banū ‘Abd al-Ḥakam tribe that also introduced Malikism to Egypt. Introduced in this article for the first time is a correction to an unfortunate translation error that appears to have misled some scholars in Islamic geography. Abū al-Qāsim ‘Abd al-Raḥman ibn ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam told us, Muḥammad ibn Ismā‘īl al-K‘abi told us (2), my father told me, on the authority of Ḥarmla ibn ‘Umrān al-Tajībī, on the authority of Abū Qabīl, on the authority of ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Amr ibn al-ʿĀ ṣ , who said: The world was created in five images: In the image of the bird with its head, chest, wings and tail. The head is Mecca, Medina and Yemen, and the chest is Syria and Egypt and the right wing is Iraq, and behind Iraq is a nation called a Wāq and behind Wāq there is a nation called Wāq Wāq, and behind that of the nations is what only God Almighty knows. And the left wing is Sind, and be-

 Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), translated by Harry Caplan, London 1954, p. 209 (III.30).

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hind Sind is India, and behind India is a nation called Nāsik, and behind Nāsik is a nation called Mansik, and behind that are nations that only God Almighty knows. And the rear of the same pigeon is towards the Maghrib of sunset and the worst part of a bird is its tail.¹⁶

The error appears to have started with Maqbul Ahmad’s 1965 Brill encyclopedia entry on ‘D̲j̲ug̲h̲rāfiyā’. In this the location of the head of the bird in this crucial seventh century depiction of the landmasses was mis-cited as China instead of “Mecca, Medina, and Yemen” throwing off its application to the extant visual record especially the KMMS series.¹⁷ A double-checking of the original edited Arabic text of ‘Futū ḥ Miṣ r’ edited by Toorey reveals an exact match for the form of the KMMS world landmass as described in the section above called “Making the KMMS World Mimetic”. This amounts to a major discovery because it definitively pegs the KMMS world map in bird form to at least the late ninth century on the basis of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 257 AH/ 871 CE) and possibly as early as the seventh century when the great Arab general Amr ibn alʿĀ ṣ himself tells us how he sees the world in five parts. That Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s description matches the format of the form of the world in the KMMS world maps with the head of the bird in the Arabian peninsula as indicated by the KMMS maps, provides for the reading that is the basis of this article that the KMMS image of the old world is indeed in the form of a bird. In doing so it provides backing for the article. Due to a mistranslation in the 1960’s of this passage this proof is being revealed in this article for the first time. A double-checking of the original edited Arabic text reveals this crucial quote from Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s ‘Futū ḥ Miṣ r’ was misquoted with the error that ‘China’ was the head of the bird not the Arabian peninsula as indicated in the KMMS world map. Gerald Tibbetts for some reason did not seek to rectify Maqbul Ahmad’s error by double checking the original Arabic text and instead only noted the nonsensical nature of the misquoted information.¹⁸ It is for this reason that Tibbetts says

 Abū al-Qāsim ‘Abd al-Raḥman ibn ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, Kitāb Futū ḥ Miṣ r, The History of the Conquest of Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, ed. Charles C. Torrey, New Haven 1922, p. 1. For clarity, I am including the passage in Arabic: ،‫ ﻋﻦ ﺣﺮﻣﻠﺔ ﺑﻦ ﻋﻤﺮﺍﻥ ﺍﻟﺘﺠﻴﺒ ّﻰ‬،‫ ﺣﺪﺛﻨﺎ ﻣﺤﻤﺪ ﺑﻦ ﺇﺳﻤﺎﻋﻴﻞ ﺍﻟﻜﻌﺒ ّﻰ ﺣﺪﺛﻨﻰ ﺃﺑﻰ‬،‫ﺣﺪﺛﻨﺎ ﺃﺑﻮ ﺍﻟﻘﺎﺳﻢ ﻋﺒﺪ ﺍﻟﺮﺣﻤﻦ ﺑﻦ ﻋﺒﺪ ﺍﻟﻠﻪ ﺑﻦ ﻋﺒﺪ ﺍﻟﺤﻜﻢ‬ ‫ ﻗﺎﻝ‬،‫ ﻋﻦ ﻋﺒﺪ ﺍﻟﻠﻪ ﺑﻦ ﻋﻤﺮﻭ ﺑﻦ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﺹ‬،‫ﻋﻦ ﺃﺑﻰ ﻗﺒﻴﻞ‬: ‫ﺧﻠﻘﺖ ﺍﻟﺪﻧﻴﺎ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺧﻤﺲ ﺻﻮﺭ‬: ،‫ﻋﻠﻰ ﺻﻮﺭﺓ ﺍﻟﻄﻴﺮ؛ ﺑﺮﺃﺳﻪ ﻭﺻﺪﺭﻩ ﻭﺟﻨﺎﺣﻴﻪ ﻭﺫﻧﺒﻪ‬ ،‫ ﻭﺧﻠﻒ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺍﻕ ﺃ ّﻣﺔ ﻳﻘﺎﻝ ﻟﻬﺎ ﻭﺍﻕ ﻭﺧﻠﻒ ﻭﺍﻕ ﺃﻣﺔ ﻳﻘﺎﻝ ﻟﻬﺎ ﻭﺍﻕ ﻭﺍﻕ‬،‫ ﻭﺍﻟﺠﻨﺎﺡ ﺍﻷﻳﻤﻦ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺍﻕ‬،‫ ﻭﺍﻟﺼﺪﺭ ﺍﻟﺸﺄﻡ ﻭﻣﺼﺮ‬،‫ﻓﺎﻟﺮﺃﺱ ﻣ ّﻜﺔ ﻭﺍﻟﻤﺪﻳﻨﺔ ﻭﺍﻟﻴﻤﻦ‬ ‫ ﻭﺧﻠﻒ ﺍﻟﻬﻨﺪ ﺃﻣﺔ ﻳﻘﺎﻝ ﻟﻬﺎ ﻧﺎﺳﻚ ﻭﺧﻠﻒ ﻧﺎﺳﻚ ﺃ ّﻣﺔ‬،‫ ﻭﺧﻠﻒ ﺍﻟﺴﻨﺪ ﺍﻟﻬﻨﺪ‬،‫ ﻭﺍﻟﺠﻨﺎﺡ ﺍﻷﻳﺴﺮ ﺍﻟﺴﻨﺪ‬،‫ﻭﺧﻠﻒ ﺫﻟﻚ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻷﻣﻢ ﻣﺎ ﻻ ﻳﻌﻠﻤﻪ ﺇ ّﻻ ﺍﻟﻠﻪ ﻋ ّﺰ ﻭﺟ ّﻞ‬ ‫ ﻭﺷ ّﺮ ﻣﺎ ﻓﻰ ﺍﻟﻄﻴﺮ ﺍﻟﺬﻧﺐ‬،‫ ﻭﺍﻟﺬﻧﺐ ﻣﻦ ﺫﺍﺕ ﺍﻟﺤﻤﺎﻡ ﺇﻟﻰ ﻣﻐﺮﺏ ﺍﻟﺸﻤﺲ‬،‫ ﻭﺧﻠﻒ ﺫﻟﻚ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻷﻣﻢ ﻣﺎ ﻻ ﻳﻌﻠﻤﻪ ﺇ ّﻻ ﺍﻟﻠﻪ ﻋ ّﺰ ﻭﺟ ّﻞ‬،‫ﻳﻘﺎﻝ ﻟﻬﺎ ﻣﻨﺴﻚ‬  The error appears to have started with Maqbul Ahmad, D̲j̲ug̲h̲rāfiyā, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, vol. 2 (1965), pp. 575 – 587. It was an error that was picked up and amplified unfortunately by Tibbetts in Tibbetts (note 1), pp. 90 – 91.  Whereas Kramers’ entry fifty years earlier gets the information correct and is clear about ‘Abd alḤakam’s contribution on the matter of the head of the bird and its significance for the metahistorical record of forms and their inter-connectivity: Johannes H. Kramers, D̲j̲ug̲h̲rāfiyā, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st edition, suppl. vol. 9 (1979), pp. 61– 73.

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this and makes the error of presuming that the date of the KMMS tradition must be later than these mentions since the head of the bird of the KMMS world landmass is clearly in the Arabian peninsula: The tradition may be Iranian. However, the world maps of the al-Balkhī school (tenth century AD) show this bird clearly with Arabia as the head, Asia and Africa as the wings, and Europe as the tail. So the tradition may be a much later idea gained from looking at a map of this sort.¹⁹

In point of fact, the KMMS world mapping tradition in which the world is shown in the form of a bird is part of a tradition that dates back at least to the late ninth century CE when Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam was writing. And, if his information is indeed from a saying of the great Arab general Amr ibn al-ʿĀ ṣ then it would not be a far cry to assert at the very least that the KMMS world map may have been useful in or developed during the course of the lightening seventh century conquests of the Muslims— which would add to this being a find of great significance on many fronts! A millennium earlier, Abū al-Qāsim ʿAlī al-Naṣībī Ibn Ḥ awqal (hereafter Ibn Ḥ awqal) (fl. second half of tenth century), one of the architects of the Islamicate carto-geographical tradition echoed Tibbetts thoughts and concurs that the landmasses of the world only adds up to the form of a bird if the Arabian peninsula and Syria are its head. In doing so Ibn Ḥ awqal reinforces this author’s interpretation in the section above on the KMMS world map having at its core the embedded form of a bird with its head in the Arabian Peninsula and its body and one wing in Asia and the other in Africa with Europe as its tail. Les spécialistes des routes terrestres et quelques mathématiciens réputés pour leur connaissance de l’astronomie ont envisagé d’un commun accord une théorie sur la configuration de la terre, à savoir qu’elle revêt la forme d’un oiseau: Bassorah et l’Egypte sont les deux ailes; la Syrie, la tête; la Haute Mésopotamie, la poitrine; et le Yémen, la queue. C’est un racontar dont je n’ai jamais vu la con- firmation et, d’ailleurs, s’il en était ainsi, il faudrait exclure de la terre le Fars, le Séistan, le Kerman, le Tabaristan, l’Azerbaidjan et le Khorassan. Ces provinces n’entreraient donc pas en ligne de compte et la terre ne comprendrait que les régions citées et point d’autres. Pour discuter cette thèse on a besoin de faire appel à une compréhension générale et à la saine raison, afin de pouvoir discerner le vrai du faux. La place donnée à la Haute Mésópotamie est très proche de l’assertion fournie si l’on est amené à considérer que la Syrie forme la tête de cet oiseau, et j’ai l’impression que l’auteur de cette spéculation a soutenu autre chose que ce qu’on a voulu lui faire dire et que son propos est différent de celui qu’on lui a prêté. S’il a voulu, par cette comparaison, évoquer spécialement le territoire de l’Arabie, la description est exacte.²⁰

Indeed, as the translators of Ibn Ḥ awqal’s oeuvre tell us, “La littérature sur ce sujet est trés abondante et l’on en trouvera une bibliographie dans Maqrīzī.”²¹ André Mi-

 Tibbetts (note 1), p. 91.  Ibn Ḥ awqal, Configuration de la Terre (Kitab Surat al-Ard), ed. Johannes H. Kramers and Gaston Wiet, 2 vols. Beirut, Paris 1964, vol. 1, p. 203.  Ibid.

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quel also mentions the bird in the map and refers repeatedly to: “l’oiseau-monde d’Ibn al-Faqīh.”²² But thus far no one has sought to explain the metaphor: Why did the KMMS cartographers choose to depict the world in the form of a bird? Tibbetts and Ahmad suggest that the motif may be pre-islamic and/or Iranian but provide no specific examples.²³ Nor is there an exploration of the possible weltanschauung behind the form of the world as bird.

Why is the KMMS World in the Form of a Bird? Oh that I could be a bird and fly I would rush to the Beloved! Anonymous sixteenth-century Sufi poet²⁴ There are many more worlds beyond the stars There are many more tests of love These spaces are not empty of life Here are hundreds of more caravans [on the move] Do not be content with the world of the senses There are many more meadows and many more nests If one nest has been lost, do not grieve For there are many more places to sigh and lament about You are a falcon, and flying is your nature Ahead of you are many more heavens Do not get ensnared in the unrelenting cycle of day and night You have many more worlds and abodes [to explore]!²⁵

Beyond specific bird identifications the challenge lies in explaining why Muslim cartographers elected to depict the old world of Asia, Africa, and Europe in the form of a bird? The answer to this question is broad and deep because of the ubiquitous presence of birds in Islamic literature, art, and philosophy to such an overwhelming extent that no definitive answer is possible. In the absence of a specific explanation by the carto-geographers of the KMMS tradition, our best explanations lie in the domain of theoretical explanations. The quotes above by an anonymous medieval Sufi poet and the modern famous South Asian poet, Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), provide a range of the way in which

 André Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du XIe siècle. Géographie et géographie humaine dans la littérature arabe des origines à 1050, Paris 2001 (first publ. 1967), pp. 19, 29, 70, 141, 288, 506, 508, and 529. It’s a mystery why so many scholars settled mostly on Ibn al-Faqīh’s strange description of the bird in the world with its head in China that is only possible with a different map not the KMMS one.  Tibbetts (note 1), p. 91; Ahmad (note 17).  Quoted but not referenced by Ali Asani, “Oh that I could be a bird and fly, I would rush to the Beloved”. Birds in Islamic Mystical Poetry, in: Paul Waldau/ Kimberley Patton (eds.), A Communion of Subjects. Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, New York 2006, pp. 171– 175, here p. 171.  Muhammad Iqbal, Bal-i Jibril, 14th ed., Lahore 1965, pp. 89 – 90.

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the bird is seen as a crucial mediator in Islamic traditions between the cosmos and this world, capable of flying to the Beloved (i. e. God) in an instant. The bird alone has the freedom to explore the multitude of worlds, abodes, and heavens beyond the stars that we sinful mortals on earth can only dream about. Like a soul, the bird can be caged or liberated. Hence for Sufi romantics like Rūmī your soul can only escape the corruption and destitution of this world in the form of a bird—ideally a falcon (bāz). Because only a bird can liberate itself at any instant and fly to the heavens.²⁶ Especially famous in the context of ‘bird epics’ is Farīd ad-Dīn ‘Attār’s astounding twelfth-century philosophical poetic thought-experiment in spirituality and proverbial lessons of the limitations of each bird in his treatise on ‘Mantiq ut-ṭayr’ (‘Conference/Stations of the Birds’) that is devoted to the mystical journey and spiritual development of the soul. Thirty birds get together under the leadership of the hoopoe to fly to Jabal Qāf—the mythical mountains that surround the earth and are also indicated on some medieval Islamicate maps—in order to reach the mythical Almighty Simorgh, a mythical bird in Iranian mythology and literature. The 4500-verse odyssey of the ‘Conference of the Birds’ to the end of the world and the heavens beyond until they enter upon the blinding white presence of the Almighty is a veritable handbook on Islamic bird culture in all its meaning and glory. It is replete with mentions of the earth and the shoreless encircling sea such as this one: You think your monarch’s palace of more worth Than Him who fashioned it and all the earth. The home we seek is in eternity; The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea, Of which your paradise is but a drop. This ocean can be yours; why should you stop Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew? The secrets of the sun are yours, but you Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams. Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems – Which matters more, the body or the soul? Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole.²⁷

The tie between the earth and the Almighty Simorgh through the birds is unmistakable. The birds collectively equal the Almighty. It is therefore logical that, at least in certain Islamic Sufi circles, the world would be cast in the form of a bird. In this way then the world in the form of bird could be read as a reflection of God if we read Simorgh as another name for God.²⁸  Alan Williams, Rūmī’s Spiritual Ornithology: Falcons in Mathnawī, Book II, in: Mawlana Rumi Review 5/1 (2014), pp. 171– 179.  Farīd ud-Dīn ‘Attār, The Conference of the Birds, ed. Afkham Darbandi/ Dick Davis, New York 1984, lines 832– 843.  Blasphemous indeed which is why ‘Attār was tried for blasphemy and banished.

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The idea of a reflection/refraction of God or the best way for our souls to reach God is deeply embedded in the KMMS concept of the world. We encounter it again in the tenth century work of the renowned philosopher Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). In his ‘Risālat at-ṭayr’ the soul makes an allegorical journey to God through the embassy of a liberated bird who takes off for the heavens.²⁹ The late eleventh/early twelfth century philosopher al-Ghazali also penned a like-named treatise on the bird and the suffering it had to endure on its path to spirituality.³⁰ Writing treatises on the journey of souls in the form of birds was, clearly, an important milestone for Islamic philosophers of the medieval age, providing yet another example of the primacy of the bird in the Islamic spiritual imaginary. In Neoplatonic philosophy, the rational soul is symbolized as a bird. In his ‘Ode on the Soul’, Avicenna tells of the misfortune of the dove/soul. Deprived of its natural intellectual ability (symbolized by the ability to fly), the bird/soul falls captive to the instincts and passions of the lower faculties of the animal soul. Imprisoned by

Fig. 4: The bird unfurls dramatically clothed in the whiteness of the page against an elaborately foliated gold background with ultramarine gouache and black ink against on paper from this gorgeous mid-fifteenth century Timurid rendition of the typical KMMS world map from al-Iṣṭakhrī’s ‘Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik’ (Book of Routes and Realms). 827 AH/1424 CE, Diameter 24 cm. Courtesy: Istanbul, Topkapı Saray Müzesi Kütüphanesi, Bağdat 334, fol. 2b. (Photo: Karen Pinto)

 Ibn Sīnā, Risālat at-ṭayr, ed. Louis Cheikho, in: al-Mashriq 4 (1901), pp. 882– 924, here 882– 887.  Ibid., pp. 918 – 924.

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the physical demands of matter, it is condemned to endless exile among the desolate wastelands and meaningless signposts of earthly existence. At a larger metaphoric level, the bird/dove/pigeon symbolizes the plight of the rational souls of all humanity and therefore it can be used as a metaphorical representation for the world and its plight: There descended upon you from that lofty realm, A dove, glorious and inaccessible Concealed from the eye of every seeker [‘arīf], Although openly disclosed and unveiled. Reluctantly she came to you, And reluctant, in her affliction, will she depart. She resisted, untamed; then upon her arrival She grew accustomed to this desolate waste. She forgot, I think, promises of sanctuary and abodes from which she had been unwilling to leave. She became attached to the D of her Descent, (moving) from The C of her Center down to these sandy dunes, Until the W of her Weightiness clung to her, and she fell prostrate among (their) signposts and deserted campsites.³¹ Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) d. 1037

In the ‘Epistle of the Bird’ Avicenna informs us that all hope is not lost and that the bird can forget its nets and cages and learn to fly again. In this sense, the bird also symbolizes redemption and the possibility of return to the Universal Intellect, so long as the bird learns through the study of philosophy how to revive its wings and how to remove the chains and snares that hold it back on earth. The Neoplatonic doctrine of Emanation (fayd) creates a link between God and man. We can use the eleventh century work of Ibn Sīnā to explain how the Neoplatonic cosmological system of Emanation worked in order to understand how it can be applied to the KMMS world maps. Through the process of emanation the celestial beings of the ten Intelligences emerge from the Necessary Existent: The First, or Universal, Intelligence emanates directly from the Necessary Existent itself and then gives rise to three other existents; the Second gives rise to the three below it, and so on, until the final tenth Active Intelligence emerges. There is also a horizontal emanation in that the Intelligence intellects its essence, the sphere (falak) with its soul (nafs) and its body (jirm) and the body of the sphere existing because of it (whether stars or planet) are made necessary. In such fashion the Second and other, lower Intelligences continue to be generated until the final emergence of the Tenth Intelligence, also known as the Active Intelligence (al-‘aql alfa‘‘āl).³²

 Cited after Heath (see introductory note), p. 92.  Ibid., p. 37.

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This Tenth/Active Intelligence forms the corrupted basis of our world. Interestingly it is also known as the ”Giver of Forms/Pictures” (wāhib aṣ-ṣuwar). By the time the level of the tenth Intelligence is reached the energies of cosmic emanation starting with the Necessary Existent are so dissipated that they are too weak to form another celestial sphere and so splits up into the four simple forms of the elements (Earth, Water, Air, and Fire) that make up our world. At this point terrestrial life comes into being—plants, animals, and humans – each ultimately deriving its animation and powers of activity from the World Soul of Generation and Corruption. It is only humans who retain the fragmented forces of Intelligence in themselves; only human beings rely on rational thought rather than blind instinct. Thus, through the study of Neoplatonic philosophy we can understand both the lack of mimesis underlying the depiction of the world and its profound reflection of the rational soul symbolized by a fluttering bird/ rock-dove caged within the tombstone of the “Tenth Active Intelligence—World of Generation and Corruption” as explained by the Islamic Neoplatonistic Tri-partite System of Emanation charted below. Table 1: The Islamic Neoplatonistic Tri-partite System of Emanation (Intelligence—Soul—Sphere) charted:³³ Intelligence First/Universal Intelligence Second Intelligence Third Intelligence Fourth Intelligence Fifth Intelligence Sixth Intelligence Seventh Intelligence Eighth Intelligence Ninth Intelligence Tenth active Intelligence

Soul Necessary Existent Universal Soul second Soul third Soul fourth Soul fifth Soul sixth Soul seventh Soul eighth Soul ninth Soul World of Generation & Corruption The Four Elements Minerals Plants Animals

Sphere Heaven of Heavens Heaven of Zodiac Sphere of Saturn Sphere of Jupiter Sphere of Mars Sphere of Sun Sphere of Venus Sphere of Mercury Sphere of the Moon

The resonating hallmark of Platonism and Neoplatonism is how little the philosophy is studied in Christian and Muslim traditions. Rich, nuanced thinking that was of prime importance in the earliest days of the spread of Islam as signaled by the work of eighth century Jābir ibn Ḥayyān as one of the earliest contributors and

 Ibid., p. 38. Additional examples in Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Cosmographical Diagrams, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 1), pp. 71– 89, here pp. 75 – 76.

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the eminent ninth century philosopher-scientist, al-Kindī, being a close second. The late ninth century CE quote from Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, cited in the section above, does suggest that the KMMS world map may have been developed at a time when Neoplatonism was the dominant guiding philosophy. Given that birds feature as the beating heart of this philosophy it is not surprising to find that a world map conceived under Neoplatonic influence would single out the form of a bird as the KMMS map’s symbolic world-landmass marker. One key philosophical root appears to be through the masters of Neoplatonic thought, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā,’ which would fit with a ninth century genesis of the KMMS world mapping tradition.³⁴ These philosophical doctrines were controversial and severely criticized from the late twelfth/thirteenth century onwards. Once revealed and established their influence continued to reside in non-mainstream crevices, such as those of maps and Sufism.³⁵ Indeed, as the Quran, hadith, and historical annals from the earliest days of Islam tell us, birds have done their share to protect Muslims, such as when God sent bomber birds to attack the elephant forces of Abraha in order to protect the Kaaba in the Year of the Elephant (approximately 570 CE) the very same auspicious year in which the Prophet was born as narrated in the Quran (105). Rock Doves saved the Prophet from the Quraysh when he was hiding in the cave of Thawr outside Mecca en route to perform the crucial Hijra (Emigration) that comes to define Islam and to which the Muslim calendar is dated.

Conclusion The map of the pre-modern world, Africa, Asia, and Europe, is thus drawn collectively in the shape of a bird and it fits with the Islamic Neoplatonic conception of the bird as the ultimate mediator between God and the people in communication with the cosmos and God’s angels through the process of emanation. The meaning of the bird in the map is explained through the Neoplatonic doctrine of Emanation (fayd) and the link it creates between God and human. Behind the bird-like world lies the hierophany of the Encircling Ocean that stands as the marker for the final frontier and the cosmos beyond which only flights of fancy lie. Hundreds of stories emerge from its depths, ranging from Alexander the Great’s mythical traversing of the Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ (Arabic version of Encircling Ocean) to the site of ancient cosmogonies whence gods were created and annihilated and as the Quran tells us God’s throne lies (11:7). It is not surprising then to find that the

 Ian Richard Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’), Edinburgh 1991, p. 5.  The analysis of Islamic art through the lens of medieval Islamic Neoplatonic philosophy is not new. See, for instance, Gülru Necipoğlu, The Scrutinizing Gaze In The Aesthetics Of Islamic Visual Cultures: Sight, Insight, And Desire, in: Muqarnas 32 (2015), pp. 23 – 61. What is new, however, is my application of the lens of neoplatonism to the study of medieval Islamicate maps.

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waters of the Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ swing from the sacred to profane. The ocean is variously prayed to and cursed; depicted as magical and terrifying. In it the Devil (Iblīs) alternately holds sway and is held at bay by world-defining battles for good and evil. Iblīs’ mischief-making Jinn frolic here as do fish five days long as depicted in some of the maps. All these evil creatures come together to harass the good Muslim sailor, preventing him from getting to the emerald Jabal al-Qāf mountains beyond that herald Paradise. The ever-wise hoopoe who advised King Solomon is the only bird who makes it across these primordial waters to meet God. Only exceptional humans like Dhu’l-Qarnayn (Alexander the Great), Khiḍr (the mythical green man), King Soloman, and the perfect Sufi who has attained fanā’ (annihilation of self) can attempt such a crossing. Polytheistic and monotheistic traditions unite along the shores of the enigmatic medieval Islamic Encircling Ocean, turning it into a veritable hierophanic ring. The Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ is a marker of the quixotic nature of the sacrality of the encircling waters that encases the bird-world in a glove akin to the ultimate battle between good and evil as refracted through anthropomorphisms.³⁶ Beyond lies the multiplicity of encircling heavens and eventually the abode of the Almighty in the Tenth sphere that can only be reached by angels, birds, and winged creatures.³⁷ Images and stories of birds inhabit all walks and corners of Islamic culture in one form or another and it should come as no surprise that the Muslim cartographers used the form of a bird to symbolize the earth. There are too many connections to and implications for understanding Islamic cartography through the lens of the cultural significance of birds to enumerate all their connections in a single article. I invite readers to explore this and other related questions in What is ‘Islamic’ about Islamicate Maps? ³⁸

 For greater detail on the Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ and the role that it plays in Islamic maps, please refer to Pinto (note 2), pp. 79 – 185; ead, In God’s Eyes. The Sacrality of the Seas in the Islamic Cartographic Vision, in: Espacio, Tiempo, y Forma, Serie VII, Historia del Arte, 5/1 (2017), pp. 55 – 79.  Karamustafa (note 33), pp. 75 – 76.  A great deal more can be said on the bird in the KMMS maps and their connection to the rest of the Islamic thought and culture. For further details on this subject and on other aspects of Islamic spirituality embedded in Islamic maps, please see author’s forthcoming book on the subject of “What is ’Islamic’ about Islamic Maps,” through Amsterdam University Press.

Christoph Mauntel

The T-O Diagram and its Religious Connotations A Circumstantial Case Abstract: With over 1000 surviving examples, the T-O diagram is the most common geographical depiction of the world in the Latin Middle Ages. It depicted the three parts of the known world in a memorable and easily replicable way. The origins of the diagram are still unclear and the subject of debate: Some scholars assert that its origin is antique – that is, rooted in non-Christian traditions – while others argue for its formation in a Christian context. The debate on the origins of the T-O diagram is directly linked to the question of whether or not it can be interpreted as a Christian sign of the world. This paper considers two questions: First, whether or not the T-O diagram was ever originally intended to be a Christian sign, and second – independently from this – since when the diagram was traceably interpreted as a religious image of the world. While a Christian design of the diagram is possible (and in the author’s view even probable), it cannot be proven beyond a doubt; however, it is clear that the diagram was understood as a Christian sign by contemporaries from the late eighth and early ninth century onwards. Keywords: Medieval Geography, Medieval Cartography, T-O Diagram, Isidore of Seville The T-O diagram is the most common medieval representation of the world.¹ It is a very simple graphic depiction of the known world: A circle represents the ocean that surrounds the earth, which is divided by a T-shaped form into three parts of unequal size. The three parts form an east-oriented image of the three continents known to the medieval world: Africa, Asia and Europe (fig. 1).² The concept of continents is, of course, antique in origin and was handed down to the Middle Ages through

 A closer analysis of the concept of continents and the T-O diagram is part of the author’s ongoing research project.  To date there is no profound study of the concept of continents in the Middle Ages. This lacuna forms an ongoing project for the author. As a popular introduction see Christian Grataloup, L’invention des continents. Comment l’Europe a découpé le monde, Paris 2009. On the artificial nature of the concept, see Martin W. Lewis/ Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents. A Critique of Metageography, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1997, esp. pp. 21– 46. Dr Christoph Mauntel, University of Tübingen, Department of History – Institute of Medieval History, Wilhelmstrasse 36, 72074 Tübingen, [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-003

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Fig. 1: The oldest known T-O diagram in a manuscript of Isidore’s ‘On the nature of things’ (Escorial, Real Biblioteca, R.II.18, fol. 24v)

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Roman encyclopaedic and geographic works.³ According to this worldview, Asia is traditionally imagined as twice as big as the other continents and forms the eastern half of the world, while Africa and Europe, being of equal size, comprise the western half. In the simplest variant of the diagram, the three parts are not even named, since the diagram could be easily understood without inscriptions. In most cases, however, the names of the continents and often the cardinal directions are added. Sometimes the lines forming the T are identified by inscriptions as the waters constituting the boundaries between the continents: the Mediterranean separates Africa from Europe, and the rivers Nile and Don separate Asia from Africa and Europe. ⁴ As these most basic versions of the diagram do not really represent ‘true’ geographical features but rather an abstract idea, most scholars prefer to call the drawing a ‘diagram’ rather than a ‘map’ – I will do the same.⁵ The success of the diagram was supposedly due to its simple and memorable form. As Wesley Stevens put it, the design “appears to be so simple as to require no discussion.”⁶ Indeed, past research has mostly focussed on the larger and more elaborately designed world maps (mappaemundi).⁷ If the T-O diagram is mentioned  On the antique origin of the concept, see James S. Romm, Continents, Climates, and Cultures. Greek Theories of Global Structure, in: Kurt A. Raaflaub/ Richard J. A. Talbert (eds.), Geography and Ethnography. Perceptions of the World in Pre-modern Societies (The Ancient World Comparative Histories), Malden/MA 2010, pp 215 – 235; Benet Salway, Putting the World in Order. Mapping in Roman Texts, in: Richard J. A. Talbert (ed.), Ancient Perspectives. Maps and their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece & Rome (The Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography 16), Chicago 2012, pp. 193 – 234; Klaus Zimmermann, Hdt. IV 36,2 et le développement de l’image du monde d’Hécatée à Hérodote, in: Ktema 22 (1997), pp. 285 – 298.  On the importance of water(ways) for medieval geographic thinking, see Christoph Mauntel, Vom Ozean umfasst. Gewässer als konstitutives Element mittelalterlicher Weltordnungen, in: Friedrich Edelmayer/ Gerhard Pfeisinger (eds.), Ozeane. Mythen, Interaktionen und Konflikte (Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur der iberischen und iberoamerikanischen Länder 16), Münster 2017, pp. 57– 74; Christoph Mauntel/ Jenny Rahel Oesterle, Wasserwelten. Ozeane und Meere in der mittelalterlichen christlichen und arabischen Kosmographie, in: Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich/ Christian Rohr/ Michael Stolz (eds.), Wasser in der mittelalterlichen Kultur. Gebrauch – Wahrnehmung – Symbolik. Water in Medieval Culture. Uses, Perceptions, and Symbolism (Das Mittelalter, Beihefte 4), Berlin, Boston 2017, pp. 59 – 77.  See Margriet Hoogvliet, Pictura et scriptura. Textes, images et herméneutique des mappae mundi, XIIIe–XVIe siècle (Terrarum orbis 7), Turnhout 2007, p. 39; Ildar H. Garipzanov, The Rise of Graphicacy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, in: Viator 46/2 (2015), pp. 1– 21, here pp. 14– 15., called the sign “concept representation”.  Wesley M. Stevens, The Figure of the Earth in Isidore’s ‘De natura rerum’, in: Isis 71 (1980), pp. 268 – 277, here p. 273.  The literature on medieval cartography is vast. Useful introductions are as follows: Folker Reichert, Das Bild der Welt im Mittelalter, Darmstadt 2013; Evelyn Edson/ Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos, Oxford 2004; Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space. How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (Studies in Map History 1), London 1999; Ead., The World Map, 1300 – 1492. The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation, Baltimore 2007; and of course, the relevant volume of the History of Cartography-series: John B. Harley/ David Woodward (eds.), Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (The History of Cartography 1), Chicago,

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in more detail at all, it is usually the origin of the graphic sign that is discussed. It is at this crucial junction in the debate around the origins of the T-O diagram that my paper will join the discussion: first, I will argue that the design of the diagram is best understood against a Christian background; and second, I will show that the diagram was understood by contemporaries as a Christian sign from around the ninth century onwards. With regard to the focus of this volume, an analysis of the religious connotations of the T-O diagram will form the main part of this paper. For this analysis, I will assess circumstantial evidence (if the reader may grant me this judicial analogy), because clear proof, as I will demonstrate, is difficult to find: in short, we lack clear sources to direct us to the formation of the diagram or to explain its (original) meaning. Moreover, existing research is sceptical of the notion of the T-O scheme as Christian in character. Before gathering together the existing evidence, I will briefly outline what we already know about the emergence of the diagram, its design and the contexts in which it was used.

Opening Plea: On the Origins and the Christian Character of T-O Diagrams As mentioned, the T-O diagram was the most common geographical depiction of the world in the Latin Middle Ages. In the 1960s, Marcel Destombes collected a corpus of ca. 660 T-O diagrams for the period between 700 and 1500.⁸ The shortcomings of this collection have been identified, but despite the fact that many more diagrams can be found in medieval manuscripts (an updated version edited by Patrick Gautier Dalché will list 600 items for the period leading up to 1200 alone), Destombes’ work is still a valuable resource. Taking the works of Destombes and Gautier Dalché into consideration, an estimate exceeding 1000 extant medieval T-O diagrams does not seem wide of the mark.⁹ It is remarkable to note that the form of the diagram remained stable over so many centuries. From the first known exemplars from the seventh or eighth centuries

London 1987. On the cartographic depiction of the continents, see Christoph Mauntel et al., Mapping Continents, Inhabited Quarters and The Four Seas. Divisions of the World and the Ordering of Spaces in Latin-Christian, Arabic-Islamic and Chinese Cartography in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries. A Critical Survey and Analysis, in: Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 5/2 (2018), pp. 295 – 367.  Marcel Destombes (ed.), Mappemondes A. D. 1200 – 1500. Catalogue préparé par la Commission des Cartes anciennes de l’Union Géographique Internationale (Monumenta Cartographica Vestustiores Aevi 1), Amsterdam 1964, p. 21. See also, Patrick Gautier Dalché, De la glose à la contemplation. Place et fonction de la carte dans les manuscrits du haut Moyen Âge, in: Testo e immagine nell’alto Medioevo. 15 – 21 aprile 1993, 2 vols. (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 41), Spoleto 1994, vol. 2, pp. 693 – 771, here pp. 706 – 707.  See Destombes (note 8), p. 21, who lists 441 exemplars for the later Middle Ages. The actual number is surely far bigger.

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up to the fifteenth-century printed editions of the ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville, the T-O diagram remained virtually unchanged. However, the contexts in which the diagrams can be found are as manifold as the exemplars demonstrating stability of its design: They have been discovered in manuscripts illustrating geographical, historiographical and astronomical texts as well as in bibles and genealogical tables; also, they can be found on medieval altarpieces (reredos), paintings of Christ, and even drawn on or carved into the walls of churches. In short, the T-O diagram persisted for over 700 centuries and in many different media. In contrast to the diagram’s presence in the medieval Latin-Christian world, existing research has mostly focussed on larger, more elaborate world maps and has seldom discussed these small diagrams in more detail. In those cases where the T-O diagram was scrutinised in more detail, the question of its origin was the main focus. The exact origin of the T-O diagram remains, however, unclear.¹⁰ The first diagrams can be found in a seventh or eighth-century manuscript of Isidore of Seville’s ‘On the nature of things’ (‘De natura rerum’) originating from the Iberian Peninsula (fig. 1).¹¹ After the first draft of the work was finished in 612, Isidore added another chapter describing the tripartite world order. It is this surplus chapter, added to the manuscript at the end of the seventh or in the early eighth century, that was illustrated by two T-O diagrams found at the lower margin of the page.¹² Because Isidore’s ‘On the nature of things’ was illustrated with several round diagrams, contemporaries called it the liber rotarum, the “book of circles.”¹³ That the T-O diagram was  Hoogvliet (note 5), p. 37, fn. 36; Hervé Inglebert, Interpretatio Christiana. Les mutations des savoirs (cosmographie géographie ethnographie histoire) dans l’antiquité chrétienne (30 – 630 après J.-C.) (Collection des études augustiniennes: Série antiquité 166), Paris 2001, p. 102; Garipzanov (note 5), p. 15.  Escorial, Real Biblioteca, R.II.18. On the manuscript see the Codices Latini Antiquiores-database 11/1631– 1634 (based on Elias Avery Lowe’s CLA (1934– 1971)), URL: https://elmss.nuigalway.ie (accessed 10.06. 2020); Carlos Benjamín Pereira Mira, Éxodo librario en la biblioteca capitular de Oviedo. El Codex miscellaneus ovetensis (manuscrito escurialense R.II.18), in: Territorio, Sociedad y Poder 1 (2006), pp. 263 – 278; Bernhard Bischoff, Die europäische Verbreitung der Werke Isidors von Sevilla, in: Manuel Cecilio Díaz y Díaz (ed.), Isidoriana. Colección de estudios sobre Isidoro de Sevilla, publicados con ocasión del 14 centenario de su nacimiento, León 1961, pp. 317– 344, here pp 318 – 319; Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal, Mozárabes y asturianos en la cultura de la alta edad media, in: Bolétin de la Real Academia de la Historia 134 (1954), pp. 137– 291., here pp. 156 – 158. The relevant part is the oldest of the codex; it is written in Visigoth Uncial and capitalis rustica and surely originated in an Iberian scriptorium. Bischoff (see above), pp. 318 – 319, argues for a southern-Spanish scriptorium; Menéndez Pidal (see above), pp. 154– 159, implicitly assumes a northern-Spanish origin.  Menéndez Pidal (note 11), p. 168, argues that the left diagram is the older one, whereas the right one is a later copy. See likewise: Simone Pinet, The Task of the Cleric. Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia, Toronto 2016, pp. 14– 15; Calvin Kendall’s Commentary in Bede, On the Nature of Things and On Times, ed. Calvin B. Kendall/ Faith Wallis (Translated Texts for Historians 56), Liverpool 2010, p. 164.  See Barbara Obrist, La cosmologie médiévale. Textes et images. I: Les fondements antiques (Micrologus library 11), Florence 2004, p. 24; Jacques Fontaine, Introduction, in: Isidore de Séville, Traité de la nature, ed. Jacques Fontaine (Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études Hispaniques 28),

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drawn in a circular form may on the one hand be explained by the numerous other circular diagrams in Isidore’s “book of circles”; on the other hand, the circular form was common also for geographical and cosmological diagrams of non-Christian origin.¹⁴ Thus, the exterior form of the diagram is rather difficult to interpret.¹⁵ The T-O diagram as we find it in Isidore’s work does, however, not seem to belong to those diagrams originally created for the work by the author himself: it is not mentioned in the text and deviates from the rather complex design of the other diagrams.¹⁶ We may therefore conclude from this that the bishop of Seville was probably not the inventor of the diagram. Instead, it appears to have been added to the earliest surviving copy of the text, perhaps by a scribe or reader who felt that the additional chapter should be illustrated by a diagram as well.¹⁷ In the centuries to come, the diagram was frequently copied into manuscripts of Isidore’s works, but scribes also adapted it to illustrate geographical passages of other texts. Referring to the earliest known exemplars, many researchers have concluded that the T-O diagram was a late antique or medieval invention. David Woodward, for example, argues that the autograph of the ‘Etymologies’ was presumably illustrated by a T-O diagram that merged the Greco-Roman idea of a tripartite world order with early Christian patristic writings, for example the attribution of the continents to the three sons of Noah.¹⁸ Ildar Garipzanov also sees the diagram as characterised

Bordeaux 1960, pp. 1– 163, here pp. 15 – 17; Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Séville. Genèse et originalité de la culture hispanique au temps des Wisigoths (Témoins de notre histoire), Turnhout 2000, pp. 297– 300; Evelyn Edson, Maps in Context. Isidore, Orosius, and the Medieval Image of the World, in: Richard J. A. Talbert/ Richard W. Unger (eds.), Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (Technology and Change in History 10), Leiden, Boston 2008, pp. 219 – 236, here pp. 225 – 226. On the diagrams, see Bernard Teyssèdre, Les illustrations du De natura rerum d’Isidore. Un example de survie de la figure humaine dans les manuscrits précarolingiens, in: Gazette des Beaux-Arts 66 (1960), pp. 19 – 34; Obrist (see above), pp. 273 – 278; Michael Gorman, The Diagrams in the Oldest Manuscripts of Isidore’s ‘De natura rerum’ with a Note on the Manuscript Tradition of Isidore’s Works, in: Studi medievali 42/4 (2001), pp. 529 – 545.  See e. g. the diagrams in Macrobius’ ‘Commentary on the Dream of Scipio’, on this Obrist (note 13), pp. 171– 194; also see Alfred Hiatt, The Map of Macrobius before 1100, in: Imago Mundi 59 (2007), pp. 149 – 176.  To my knowledge, there is only one T-O diagram in rectangular shape, as an eleventh-century gloss in a ninth-century manuscript of Orosius: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 621, p 35.  Usually, Isidore refers to the diagrams in his text: see e. g. Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum [Traité de la nature], ed. Jacques Fontaine (Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études Hispaniques 28), Bordeaux 1960, p. 211 (X.2: Quorum circulorum diuisiones talis distinguit figura), p. 213 (XI.1: subiecta expressi pictura. Haec figura solida est…). See Fontaine (note 13), pp. 151– 161; Stevens (note 6), pp. 272– 273.; Gautier Dalché (note 8), p. 707; William D. McCready, Isidore, the Antipodeans, and the Shape of the Earth, in: Isis 87,1 (1996), pp. 108 – 127, esp. pp 113 – 127.  Gautier Dalché (note 8), pp. 706 – 708. Edson (note 13), p. 226.  David Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 7), pp. 286 – 370, here pp. 299 – 301 and 328. See also John Williams, Isidore, Orosius and the Beatus Map, in: Imago Mundi 49 (1997), pp. 7– 32, here p. 13.

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by this presumably biblical information. ¹⁹ However, the first surviving T-O diagrams do not include the sons of Noah, nor does the bible link the three parts of the earth to the three sons.²⁰ Hence, the medieval (and Christian) origin of the T-O diagram cannot be deduced from the (later) inclusion of religious knowledge. In contrast to this position, many researchers have argued that the diagram is of antique Roman origin. This view was mainly established in the nineteenth century by Konrad Miller, who claimed that the circular shape as well as the T form of the diagram were owing to antique specifications. Furthermore, Miller stated that (late) antique authors such as Sallust or Augustine effectively described the T-O model in their works.²¹ Miller’s argument was broadly accepted, and an antique origin for the diagram was often claimed.²² However, as there are no surviving maps from antiquity, we cannot securely conclude that the notion of the three parts of the earth was mapped at all, let alone in a circular shape oriented towards the east and with a 2:1:1 size relation between the continents (that is, Asia twice as big as Africa and Europe) – all of these can be identified as rather later, medieval characteristics. Gautier Dalché took a middle-ground position and argued that the diagram developed in late antique writing schools (third to sixth centuries).²³ However, this argu-

 Garipzanov (note 5), p. 16. The figure Garipzanov refers to is (interestingly enough) not a manuscript source but rather a rendering by the author (including the sons of Noah).  Edson, Mapping (note 7), p. 15. See also Klaus Oschema, Bilder von Europa im Mittelalter (Mittelalter-Forschungen 43), Ostfildern 2013, pp. 115 – 116.  Konrad Miller, Mappae mundi. Die ältesten Weltkarten, 6 vols., Stuttgart 1895 – 1898, vol. 3, pp. 116 – 122 (chap. 13: “Die T-Karten”). See also ibid., pp. 110 – 115 (chap. 12: ‘Die Sallustkarten’).  Uwe Ruberg, Mappae mundi des Mittelalters im Zusammenwirken von Text und Bild. Mit einem Beitrag zur Verbindung von Antikem und Christlichem in der principium- und finis-Thematik auf der Ebstorfkarte, in: Christel Meier-Staubach/ Uwe Ruberg (eds.), Text und Bild. Aspekte des Zusammenwirkens zweier Künste in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, Wiesbaden 1980, pp. 550 – 592, here p. 555, claims a “Roman origin” for the T-O diagram. Edson/ Savage-Smith (note 7), p. 44, interpret the T-O model as passed down to the Middle Ages by the (antique) works of Sallust and Lucan. As the Arabic-Islamic world did not know these works the T-O diagram remained unknown to their cartographic tradition (ibid., 90). Similar: Inglebert (note 10), p. 102; Jörg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago mundi cartographica. Studien zur Bildlichkeit mittelalterlicher Welt- und Ökumenekarten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 53), Munich 1984, pp. 64 and 124; Paul Zumthor, La mesure du monde. Représentation de l’espace au Moyen Âge, Paris 1993, p. 236; Edson, Mapping (note 7), p. 4; Edson, World map (note 7), pp. 9 – 11; Christian Jacob, L’empire des cartes. Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoire (Bibliothèque Albin Michel: Histoire), Paris 1992, p. 180.  Dating from the fifth to sixth centuries: Patrick Gautier Dalché, Principes et modes de la représentation de l’espace géographique durant le haut moyen Âge, in: Uomo e spazio nell’alto medioevo. 4– 8 aprile 2002, 2 vols. (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 50), Spoleto 2003, vol. 1, pp. 117– 150, here pp. 133 – 134.; Id., La ‘Descriptio mappe mundi’ de Hugues de Saint-Victor. Texte inédit avec introduction et commentaire (Collection des études augustiniennes: Série Moyen-âge et temps modernes 20), Paris 1988, pp. 62– 77. Dating from the third to sixth centuries: Id., L’Héritage antique de la cartographie médiévale. Les problèmes et les acquis, in: Talbert/ Unger (note 13), pp. 29 – 66, here pp. 37– 38. Like Gautier Dalché, also Gorman (note 13), p. 529,

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ment also suffers from a lack of secure evidence from sources: there are no surviving diagrams from that time and those late antique authors Gautier Dalché presents as examples (i. e. Eumenius and Julius Orator²⁴) did not even mention the continents in their works; thus, it is questionable whether they were ever even mapped at all. Closely linked to this problem of the chronologic origin is the question of whether the T-O diagram can be considered a genuinely Christian depiction of the world. In 1981 Jonathan Lanman interpreted the T as an early form of the cross – the Christian symbol per se.²⁵ A few years later, David Woodward also referred to the diagram as genuinely Christian, highlighting the various religious contents the map was associated with, namely the city of Jerusalem, the three sons of Noah as the progenitors of humankind after the deluge, and the figure of Christ, which sometimes frames these diagrams or similar maps.²⁶ Indeed, although the T-O diagram has often been understood as a Christian image of the world, in most cases this has been more of a claim than an argument.²⁷ Of the sceptical voices opposing this notion, most notable is perhaps Gautier Dalché, who critically revised Woodward’s argument by mentioning the chronology: the first known T-O diagrams do not depict Jerusalem, the sons of Noah, or the figure of Christ. Indeed, all these characteristics were clearly later additions.²⁸ Moreover, Gauter Dalché opposed Lanman and argued that the T inscribed in the diagram was in no way specifically ‘medieval’ or ‘Christian’.²⁹ Equally sceptical, Michael Borgolte noted that the orientation to the east of the T-O diagrams should not be interpreted as Christian, since the diagrams in the manuscripts of Sallust and Lucan – which he claims to be antique and pre-Christian – were similarly oriented.³⁰ However, as there are no extant antique manuscripts of these works and the earliest medieval ones date to the ninth century and are not all illustrated with diagrams, it is quite unlikely that the T-O diagram originally belonged to any of them.³¹

considers the diagrams as “obviously” stemming from late-antique schoolbooks. Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map. An English mappa mundi, c. 1300, New Haven/CT 2016, p. 138, also follows Gautier Dalché.  Gautier Dalché, L’Héritage (note 23), pp. 38 – 39.  Jonathan T. Lanman, The Religious Symbolism of the T in T-O maps, in: Cartographica 18 (1981), pp. 18 – 22.  David Woodward, Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps, in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985), pp. 510 – 521, here p. 515.  See for example Garipzanov (note 5), p. 16.  Gautier Dalché, L’Héritage (note 23), pp. 54– 57.  Ibid., pp. 133 – 134.  Michael Borgolte, Christliche und muslimische Repräsentationen der Welt. Ein Versuch in transdisziplinärer Mediävistik, in: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berichte und Abhandlungen 14 (2008), pp. 89 – 147, here pp. 111– 112, fn. 88.  The first known Sallust-manuscripts with a diagram are Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3328, fol. 13v (c. 1000, the diagram might be a later addition) and Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Ms 1607, fol. 1r (9th c., the map might be a later addition). Other manuscripts from the ninth century do not feature diagrams: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 16024 (9th c.); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 16025 (late 9th c.). The first known Lucan-manu-

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In my view, we cannot deduce an antique and pre-Christian origin of the T-O diagram simply because the idea of a tripartite world stemmed from antique authors.³² Furthermore, the examples above have shown that the reasoning around the origins and the Christian character of the T-O diagrams requires closer scrutiny of chronology and the manuscript tradition. In the following, on the basis of the first known exemplars I intend to understand T-O diagrams as genuinely medieval inventions, an assumption that has naturally led me to the next logical question of whether or not they can even be considered Christian depictions of the world. Hereinafter, I will focus on the three main aspects of T-O diagrams mentioned above that seem relevant to the question of their Christian character.

Gathering of Evidence Item #1: Orientation The first piece of evidence is a rather basic one and constitutes the central characteristic of nearly every T-O diagram: its orientation towards the east.³³ The east was, without a doubt, the most important cardinal direction for Christianity. It is important to note that this accentuation was not rooted in the bible itself, which does not indicate a clear preference for any cardinal direction,³⁴ instead this primacy of the east is owing to socio-historical developments in early Christianity: the Christian writer Tertullian, for example, around the year 200 described the sunrise as a symbol for Christ.³⁵ Further evidence emphasises that early Christians laid great emphasis on

script with a diagram is Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 45, fol. 44v (Fleury, 2nd third 9th c.). Other manuscripts from the 9th c. do not show diagrams: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 7502 (Tours, c. 820); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 10314 (9th c.).  Indeed, this is not my own argument, but that of Gautier Dalché (note 8), p. 707: “En réalité, il faut distinguer les idées qui se trouvent à la base de la tripartition du monde, et qui certes sont d’origine antique, de leur traduction sous forme figurée, dont il n’existe pas d’indices qu’elle soit antérieure au haut Moyen Age.”  As a note, I want to mention that there are some T-O diagrams orientated towards north, south, and west as well. They are, however, few in number, mostly date from later centuries, and in some cases do not depict the continents, but only use the T-O form in order to illustrate other concepts, e. g. the elements, as it is the case in the thirteenth-century ‘Breviari d’amor’ of Matfre Ermengaud, see Kaja Laske-Fix, Der Bildzyklus des Breviari d’Amor (Münchener kunsthistorische Abhandlungen 5), Munich 1973, pp. 49 and 151.  On this, see Ulrich Hübner, Himmelsrichtungen, in: Neues Bibel-Lexikon, vol. 2 (1995), col. 161; Alexander Podossinov, Himmelsrichtung, in: Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 15 (1991), col. 233 – 286.  Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, Adversus Valentinianos, ed. Emil Kroymann, in: Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, Opera, 2 vols. (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 1– 2), Turnhout 1954, vol. 2, pp. 751– 778, here pp. 754– 755 (III.1– 2): Nostrae columbae etiam domus simplex, in editis semper et apertis et ad lucem. Amat figura spiritus sancti orientem, Christi figuram.

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the east because this is where the sun rose.³⁶ Hence, an astronomical phenomenon became commonly interpreted from a religious angle. It is noteworthy that Christianity is far from the only religious group to give prominence to the east by aligning their sacred buildings and their prayer direction accordingly.³⁷ Experts suggest that Christianity was influenced by late antique cults that emphasized the movement of the sun, and therefore the east as the direction of sunrise.³⁸ Indeed, we can trace the impact of this development by comparing the way in which antique and Christian authors ordered their description of the world. On the one hand, pre-Christian encyclopaedias and geographical texts did not follow any coherent orientation: Polybius began his description of the world in the east, whereas other Roman authors, including Pomponius Mela or Pliny, chose to start in the west.³⁹ Consequently, there was no clear order to the way in which the three continents were listed in antique sources. All in all, there are six possible ways of ordering a set of three items, and all six ways of ordering the names of the continents can be found in the antique sources, as Sallway has shown.⁴⁰ Early Christian authors, in contrast, chose to highlight the east for religious reasons and listed the continents accordingly: Jerome, Augustine, Orosius and Isidore of Seville set the tone and named Asia first, Europe second, and Africa third – which was to become the standard order for centuries to come.⁴¹ Accordingly, almost

 See Martin Wallraff, Christus verus sol. Sonnenverehrung und Christentum in der Spätantike (Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum: Ergänzungsband 32), Münster 2001.  See Podossinov (note 34). On the eastward orientation of sacral buildings see Heinrich Nissen, Orientation. Studien zur Geschichte der Religion, 3 vols., Berlin 1906 – 1910. Focussing on synagogues: Friedrich Möbius, Ostung, in: Lexikon der Kunst. Neubearbeitung, vol. 5 (1991), pp. 343 – 345.  Wallraff (note 36), pp. 29 – 39.  Polybius, The Histories, ed. Brian C. McGing/ Robin Waterfield (Oxford World’s Classics), Oxford 2010, pp. 158 – 159 (III.36 – 37); Pomponius Mela, De chorographia libri tres, ed. Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome 1984, p. 116 (I.24); Plinius Secundus, Gaius, Historia naturalis. Natural History, 10 vols., ed. Harris Rackham/ William H. S. Jones/ David E. Eichholz (The Loeb Classical Library), London 1938 – 1962, vol. 2, p. 4 (III.3 – 4).  Salway (note 3), pp. 214– 216.  S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera I,4. Commentariorum in Hiezechielem libri XIV, ed. Glorie François (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 75), Turnhout 1964, p. 56 (II.5.5 – 6): Hierusalern in medio mundi sitam, hic idem propheta testatur, umbilicum terrae eam esse demonstrans; […] A partibus enim orientis cingitur plaga quae appellatur Asia; a partibus occidentis eius quae vocatur Europa; a meridie et austro Libya et Africa; a septemtrione Scythis, Armenia atque Perside et cunctis Ponti nationibus. Augustinus, Aurelius, De civitate Dei, 2 vol, ed. Bernhard Dombart/ Alphons Kalb (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 47– 48), Turnhout 1955, vol. 2, p. 521 (XVI.17): Asiam nunc dico non illam partem quae huius maioris Asiae una prouincia est, sed eam quae uniuersa Asia nuncupatur, quam quidam in altera duarum, plerique autem in tertia totius orbis parte posuerunt, ut sint omnes Asia, Europa et Africa; quod non aequali diuisione fecerunt. Paulus Orosius, Histoires (contre les Païens). Historiae adversus paganos, 3 vol. ed. Marie–Pierre Arnaud-Lindet (Collection des universités de France, Série latine), Paris 1990 – 1991, vol. 1, p. 13 (I.2.1): Maiores nostri orbem totius terrae, oceani limbo circumseptum, triquadrum statuere eiusque tres partes Asiam, Europam et Africam uocauerunt. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae sive origines libri XX, 2 vol. ed. Wallace Martin Lindsay

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every Christian geographical text starts its description of the world in the east, which Isidore explicitly described as the first of all the cardinal directions.⁴² The oldest T-O diagrams that survive today are placed in exactly this context: they illustrate the description of the world in the encyclopaedias written by Isidore of Seville. Like the text, they highlight the east and Asia (fig. 1).⁴³ The religious importance and primacy of the east led to the orientation of the Christian worldview and to an accentuation of the Asian continent. As we do not find these characteristics in pre-Christian texts, they can best be explained by originating from a genuinely Christian worldview. Moreover, other (circular) diagrams that are probably indeed of non-Christian origin, for example the figures illustrating the fifth-century ‘Commentary on the Dream of Scipio’ by Macrobius, are mostly orientated towards the north.⁴⁴ The eastward orientation of the T-O diagram fits with the Christian background of Isidore’s works, particularly as he lists the Christian Paradise as the first province of Asia.⁴⁵ Indeed, according to early bible versions (‘Septuaginta’ and ‘Vetus Latina’) and exegetical texts, the Christian Paradise was to be found in the far east (Gen 2,8: κατὰ ἀνατολὰς bzw. ad Orientem).⁴⁶ Following this, later medieval maps famously depicted Paradise in the far east, including it as a part of the natural world, though not accessible to humankind.⁴⁷ An earlier precursor of this cartographic tradition is the highlighting of the east in early T-O diagrams: Since the eighth or ninth century, we find the upmost east on some of these drawings marked with a small cross (fig. 2). This can be understood as

(Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Oxoniensis), Oxford 1911, XIV.2.1– 3: Divisus est autem trifarie: e quibus una pars Asia, altera Europa, tertia Africa nuncupatur.  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (note 41), XIV.3.2– 3: De quattuor partibus caeli. Climata caeli, id est plagae vel partes, quattuor sunt, ex quibus prima pars orientalis est, unde aliquae stellae oriuntur. See also ibid., III.42.1 and XIII.1.3. Isidore frames this quite similarly in Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum (note 16), pp. 207– 208 (IX.3): Nam partes eius quattuor sunt. Prima pars mundi est orientis.  On the manuscript, see note 11. The text of Isidore’s ‘On the nature of things’ deviates from the ‘Etymologies’, as he cites an earlier astronomic text by Hyginus, see Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum (note 16), p. 325 (XLVIII.2): Regio autem terrae diuiditur trifarie, e quibus una pars Europa, altera Asia, tertia Africa uocatur. Compare Hyginus, De Astronomia, ed. Ghislaine Viré, Stuttgart, Leipzig 1992, p. 11 (I.9). Hyginus can most likely be identified with Hyginus Mythographus (early 2nd c.), see Alan Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World (American Classical Studies 48), Oxford, New York 2004, p. 11. Thus, Isidore’s text of ‘On the nature of things’ does not show the same Christian characteristics as the ‘Etymologies’.  Obrist (note 13), pp. 119 – 120 and 147. On Macrobius: ibid., 171– 194; Gautier Dalché, L’Héritage (note 23), p. 36.  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (note 41), XIV.3.1: [Asia] Habet autem provincias multas et regiones, quarum breviter nomina et situs expediam, sumpto initio a Paradiso.  Jerome, by contrast, highlighted the ambivalent connotation of the Hebrew original which can be understood in a spatial as well as temporal way. Accordingly, he translated that the Paradise was created a principio, i. e. “at the beginning”. See Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise. A History of Heaven on Earth, London 2006, p. 35.  On this, see ibid.

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Fig. 2: A T-O diagram with the Paradise highlighted in the east, from southern France, ca. 791 – 812 (Escorial, Real Biblioteca, P.I.8, fol. 187r)

a clear Christian accentuation of the east which reveals that the orientation of the diagram was not an arbitrary choice. The first diagram highlighting the east in this way dates to ca. 800; inside the eastern part of Asia it adds a small semi-circular form with four lines radiating westwards – surely a representation of the earthly

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Paradise with its four rivers.⁴⁸ At the same time scribes developed a slightly divergent T-O diagram that highlighted the Sea of Azov (Meotides paludes), and often these diagrams bore a cross in the upmost east.⁴⁹ To be sure, the oldest existing examples of the T-O diagram do not highlight the east in this way. However, we can conclude that at least since the late eighth or early ninth century the orientation of the diagrams was perceived to be rooted in Christian symbolism. Furthermore, I would argue that this characteristic orientation to the east can best be understood as a Christian arrangement of the diagram, conforming as it does with the importance of the east for early Christianity. This geographic feature cannot be securely linked to older, non-Christian sources. Since the ninth century, scribes may have further emphasised this Christian arrangement of the diagram by adding crosses and by highlighting the location of Paradise.

Item #2: The T as a Symbol of the Cross The cross is, as we have seen, one of the most prominent and important symbols of Christianity.⁵⁰ With regard to the T-O diagram, the idea of interpreting the T inscribed in the O as a cross rather than as a Latin letter was first presented by Jonathan Lanman in 1981. Lanman argued that the T symbolised the Christian cross in the form of the Greek letter tau (T), an early Christian variant of the cross.⁵¹ Although his argu-

 Escorial, Real Biblioteca P. I. 8, fol. 187r (ca. 791– 812, probably written in Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone (near Montpellier)), see Codices Latini Antiquiores-database (note 11), 11/1630. See Pinet (note 12), p. 15; Menéndez Pidal (note 11), p. 180 – 181; Edson, Mapping (note 7), pp. 47– 48.  Escorial, Real Biblioteca, Cod P I 7, fol. 222v (792– 842); Escorial, Real Biblioteca T II 24, fol. 175r (9th c.); Zofingen, Stadtbibliothek, Pa 32, fol. 210v (2nd qu. 9th c.); St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod Sang 236, fol. 89r (2nd half 9th c.); Tours, Bibliothéque municipale, Ms 844, fol. 110 (10th c.); Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Ms 10008, fol. 166v (11th c.); Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 630, fol. 23r (1176 – 1225); Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.90 sup 17.1, fol. 173v (13th c.); Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Inc San Román 7, p. 206 (1483, Petrus Loeslein); London British Library, Harley MS 3035, fol. 175v (1495). Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 623, fol. 110r (1276 – 1325) depicts both version of the diagram. For diagrams with a slightly different design see Escorial, Real Biblioteca, P I 8, fol. 187r (9th c.); Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Ms 25, fol 204v (946); Escorial, Real Biblioteca MS I. 3, fol 177v (1047); Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothéque municipale, Ms 0025, fol. 293r (12th c.); Pontarlier, Bibliothéque municipale, Ms 1, fol. 127v (14th c.). The manuscript London, British Library, Royal 12 F IV, fol. 135v (12th c.) depicts crosses on all four sides of the diagram.  Larry W. Hurtado, Earliest Christian Graphic Symbols. Examples and References from the Second/Third Centuries, in: Ildar H. Garipzanov/ Caroline Goodson/ Henry Maguire (eds.), Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cursor mundi 27), Turnhout 2017, pp. 25 – 44, here pp. 32– 35.  Lanman (note 25). On the early history and later (Franciscan) usage of the tau cross see Damien Vorreux, Un symbole franciscain, le Tau. Histoire, théologie et iconographie (Présence de Saint François 30), Paris 1977.

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ment is often accepted, it was never explicitly based on a firm source base.⁵² If we take into account the frequent presence of Christian signs during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in general⁵³ and the frequent and dominant use of circular and cross-like forms for diagrams in particular,⁵⁴ the link between our T-O diagram and the symbol of the cross does indeed seem plausible. Other scholars, for example Gautier Dalché, doubted that any connection could be made between the T and the sign of the cross – also without providing convincing arguments for their scepticism.⁵⁵ Considering this question, the problem is surely the lack of sources: As far as I know, there is no clear evidence that the T of the T-O diagram was interpreted as a cross. However, I also want to make a case that even if not construed as a Christian symbol from its very beginnings, the T in the T-O diagram was very quickly understood as such. In order to prove this point, we must gather together the scattered evidence. Most hints have no direct link to geographic diagrams but rather indicate that the Latin letter T was understood as a tau cross and thus as a Christian symbol. One example establishing this connection is an anonymous commentary on the Gospel of Mark, written between 600 and 800. The author first related the cross to the four cardinal directions and then compared this form to a flying eagle, a swimming man, and the mast of a sailing ship. Starting with a four-ended cross, he transformed this through his comparisons into a three-ended one. In conclusion, the author wrote that the tau, the Greek letter, “is the sign of salvation and the cross.”⁵⁶  Dietrich Briesemeister, Apuntes sobre la cartografía figurativa. Alegorías, símboles y emblemas en mapas y globos de la Edad Media y temprana Modernidad, in: José Ortega Valcárcel/ Dietrich Briesemeister (eds.), Mapas de Heinrich Bünting Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae. Siglo XVI, Burgos 2010, pp. 69 – 216, here p. 73, states the T referred to the ‘cross of the saviour’ (“la T remite a la cruz del Salvador”). Hartmut Kugler, Himmelsrichtungen und Erdregionen auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten, in: Jürg Glauser/ Christian Kiening (eds.), Text – Bild – Karte. Kartographien der Vormoderne (Rombach Litterae 105), Freiburg/Breisgau 2007, pp. 175 – 199, here p. 176, sees the tau projected on the world. Similar: Horst Wenzel, Noah und seine Söhne oder die Neueinteilung der Welt nach der Sintflut, in: Steffen Martus/ Andrea Polaschegg (eds.), Das Buch der Bücher – gelesen. Lesarten der Bibel in den Wissenschaften und Künsten (Publikationen zur Zeitschrift für Germanistik 13), Bern, et al. 2006, pp. 53 – 84, here pp. 67– 68.  Garipzanov (note 5). Hurtado (note 50) refers to examples from the second and third centuries.  Bianca Kühnel, Carolingian Diagrams, Images of the Invisible, in: Giselle de Nie/ Karl F. Morrison/ Marco Mostert (eds.), Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Papers from ‘Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible 400 – 1000’ (Utrecht 11– 13 December 2003) (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 14), Turnhout 2005, pp. 359 – 389, states that in this way, cosmology, geography, and chronology were linked with eschatological motifs. See also Bruce Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens. Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance, Leiden, Boston 2007, p. 373.  Gautier Dalché, Principes (note 23), pp. 133 – 134. Similar: Borgolte (note 30), p. 115.  Expositio Evangelii Secundum Marcum, ed. Michael Cahill (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 82), Turnhout 1997, p. 73 (15.21): Ipsa species crucis, quid est nisi forma quadrata mundi? Oriens ‘de vertice fulget’; ‘arcton dextra tenet’; auster leua consistit; occidens sub plantis firmatur. Unde apostolus dicit ut sciamus quae sit ‘altitude’, et ‘latitude’, ‘longitude’, et ‘profundum.’ Aues quando uolant ad

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Because of the resemblance to the simple twin-beamed cross, the Greek letter tau became an early Christian sign and was thought of as the symbol of the crucified Christ.⁵⁷ Moreover, the sign also evoked the words of the prophet Ezekiel (9,4) who stated that God had his believers marked with a tau on their front to spare them from the imminent divine punishment of Jerusalem.⁵⁸ The tau as a salvific sign for true believers also was interpreted as the symbol the Israelites painted on their doorposts to save their first-born children from death during their Egyptian exile (Ex 12,7). This story was well known in the Middle Ages, and Isidore even relates the biblical episode when describing the letter tau. ⁵⁹ Later, the vision of the prophet Ezekiel was also implemented visually, for example in a twelfth-century stained-glass window in the former Cucuphas-Chapel of the Cathedral of Saint-Denis.⁶⁰ We can find similar depictions in other stained-glass windows or on enamel plates, mostly dating to the twelfth century and thus proving the ongoing importance and popularity of the scene.⁶¹ Hence, the tau cross was already used in early Christian times as a symbol for the Christian cross and was present in ecclesial contexts in the high Middle Ages. However, this finding cannot be simply transferred to all diagrammatic or cartographic

ethera formam crucis assumunt. Homo natans per aquas uel orans forma crucis uehitur. Nauis transiens maria antenna cruci similata sufflatur. T tau littera, signum salutis et crucis describitur. See Piotr Kochanek, Die Vorstellung vom Norden und der Eurozentrismus. Eine Auswertung der patristischen und mittelalterlichen Literatur (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 205), Mainz 2004, pp. 215 – 216.  See the impressive collection of citations from patristic sources in Kochanek (note 56), pp. 215 – 216, fn. 191.  Ez 9,4: Et dixit Dominus ad eum: Transi per mediam civitatem, in medio Jerusalem, et signa thau super frontes virorum gementium et dolentium super cunctis abominationibus quæ fiunt in medio ejus.  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (note 41), I.3.9.  The window, today in the chapel of Sainte-Geneviève, was renewed during restoration works in the nineteenth century under Viollet-le-Duc. However, some older parts from the twelfth century survived and were incorporated into the new window. See Louis Grodecki, Les vitraux de Saint-Denis (1). Étude sur le Vitraul au XIIe siècle (Corpus vitrearum Medii Aevi – France: Série études 1), Paris 1976, pp. 54 and pp. 103 – 105.  The ‘window of redemption’ (before 1147) in the cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Châlons-en-Champagne depicts how a man paints a tau on a door frame. The motif was also used on enamel crosses, e. g. the base of the cross of Saint-Bertin, which depicts the tau as a Christian sign even two times: firstly, on the foot in connection with Ex 12,7 and secondly, on the post in connection with Ez 9,4 (Saint-Omer, Musée de l’Hôtel Sandelin, Inv. 2800 bis (1175 – 1180, Saint-Omer, Abbey of Saint-Bertin)). See http://collection.musenor.com/application/moteur_recherche/consultationOeuvre.aspx? idOeuvre=394476 (accessed 10.06. 2020) and http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/memsmn_fr?ACTION= CHERCHER&FIELD_98=OBJT&VALUE_98=Pied%20de%20croix%20de%20Saint-Bertin (accessed 10.06. 2020). Similarly: Typological cross: Brussels, Musée Cinquantenaire, Collection Art mosan et roman, Inv. 2293 (ca. 1150 – 1175, Meuse region). Reliquary cross: London, British Museum, Inv. 1856, 0718.1 (1160 – 1170, Belgium, Mosel region). Enamel plate: Baltimore, Walters Art Mus, Inv. 44.616 (Mid-12th c., Mosel region).

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representations from the early Middle Ages.⁶² To build this bridge, further evidence is needed. Such evidence may, for example, be found in the wall inscriptions in the abbey of Centula in Saint Riquier dating to the mid-ninth century. After praising God and the local scriptorium, a monk named Micon described images of Christ that were presumably painted on the walls of the scriptorium.⁶³ Micon subsequently reflected on these images which seemed to depict the crucified Christ, the cross itself, and possibly a map of the tripartite world: “Here is seen pictured an image of the world destined to perish / spread out, the world is contained in three parts, / of which the first place is Asia, the second Europe; finally / Africa occupies its end.”⁶⁴ The close connection between the cross and a map of the tripartite world as described by Micon suggests a drawing according to the T-O scheme. The T-shaped map would then have mirrored the shape of the body of the crucified Christ or, to put it differently, the figure of the crucified Christ invited monks to reflect on the tripartite world order.⁶⁵ The visual similarity between the shape of the Latin letter T, the Greek tau and the figure of the crucified Christ is also the background for numerous illuminated T initials. As a letter, they represent a Latin T; as an image, they depict the crucified Christ.⁶⁶ We can trace these initials back to the second half of the eighth century, often in manuscripts of the Canon of the Mass, illustrating the first word of the prayer Te igitur, ⁶⁷ but they can also be found in other works and contexts.⁶⁸ Combinations of T-shaped crosses and crucified Christs became increasingly popular in this period.⁶⁹ One exceptionally noteworthy example with regard to a

 See Garipzanov (note 5), p. 16.  Carmina Centulensia, in: Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, vol. 3, ed. Ludwig Traube (Monumenta Germaniae Historica Poetae 3), Berlin 1896, pp. 265 – 368, here pp. 296 – 2197 (VIII–XII).  Ibid., p. 297 (XIII): Hic mundi species perituri picta videtur, / Partibus in ternis qui spatius inest, / Quarum Asia primumque locum hinc Europa secundum, / Possidet extremum Africa deinde suum.  See Marcia Kupfer, Medieval World Maps. Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames, in: Word & Image 10/3 (1994), pp. 262– 288, here p. 265; Edson, Mapping (note 7), p. 5.  Arentzen (note 22), pp. 232– 236. On the relation between painted initials and diagrams, see Patrizia Carmassi, Übergänge. Ornamente und Diagramme zwischen Text, Buchstabe und Bild in Handschriften des Frühmittelalters, in: Das Mittelalter 22/2 (2017), pp. 408 – 430; Kathrin Müller, Formen des Anfangs. Sphärendiagramme aus dem 13. Jahrhundert, in: Horst Bredekamp/ Angela Fischel (eds.), Diagramme und bildtextile Ordnungen (Bildwelten des Wissens 3,1), Berlin 2005, pp. 85 – 96.  See Rudolf Suntrup, Te igitur-Initialen und Kanonbilder in mittelalterlichen Sakramentarhandschriften, in: Meier-Staubach/ Ruberg (note 22), pp. 278 – 366, here pp. 278 – 281. An early example is the so-called Sacramentary of Gellone, dating ca. 780, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 12048, fol. 143v (Meaux or Cambrai ?).  See, for example, a manuscript of Gregories Homiliae in Hiezechielem: Munich, Bayerische Staatbibliothek, Clm 9511, fol. 24v. (mid-12th c.), or the sacramentary of bishop Abraham of Freising: Munich, Bayerische Staatbibliothek, Clm 6421, fol. 33v (ca. 984– 994, Freising).  Arentzen (note 22), pp. 232– 236. Patrizia Licini hinted to the VD-monograms as a possible parallel to T-O-diagrams: Graphic combinations of the first words of the hymn (vere dignum et iustum est)

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(later) Christian interpretation of the T-O diagram is a depiction that dates from the thirteenth century and can be found in a copy of Isidore of Seville’s encyclopaedia, marking the beginning of the chapter on the earth (fig. 3).⁷⁰ Here the T (for Terra) is elaborately embellished: a figure stands before a construction, holding with raised arms a circle with an inserted T in which the names of the three continents are inscribed. The figure seems to represent Christ carrying the world.⁷¹ Next to the depiction, an inscription states that “he bears this whole world with [his] stretched out body.”⁷² The T-initial highlights the close connection between a human figure with outstretched arms (or crucified) and the T-O model – a composition also found in other cartographic depictions, such as the Ebstorf world map or the Psalter-map (and its reverse image of a T-O diagram).⁷³ Whereas these famous examples also date to the thirteenth century, there may be an early forerunner of this tradition. During excavations of a Slavic hill fort in Spandau (near Berlin) in 1982, archaeologists found a small clay mould, close to an aisleless church dating from the 980s. The cast from the mould, the so-called ‘cross of Spandau’, reveals a stylised crucified figure framed by a circle with a diameter of 2,6 cm (fig. 4).⁷⁴ The dating of the object is rather difficult and varies between the tenth and eleventh century,⁷⁵ and the cast which was presumably used as a Christian

within the Exsultet, a proclamation sung during Easter Vigil, can be found in so-called Exsultet-rolls that were common in southern Italy between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, see Patrizia Licini, A Multilayered Journey. From Manuscript Initial Letters to Encyclopaedic Mappaemundi through the Benedictine Semiotic Tradition, in: Paul D. A. Harvey (ed.), The Hereford World Map. Medieval World Maps and their Context, London 2006, pp. 269 – 292.  Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Conv. Soppr. 319, fol. 90v.  Arentzen (note 22), pp. 235 – 236. Quite in contrast, Ingrid Baumgärtner, Die Welt in Karten. Umbrüche und Kontinuitäten im Mittelalter, in: Das Mittelalter 22/1 (2017), pp. 55 – 74, here 65, interprets the figure as a personification of the world (terra).  Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Conv. Soppr. 319, fol. 90v: Baiulat h[ic] mu[n]dum extento corpore totu[m].  For the Psalter-map, se fig. 1 of the introduction of this volume. The Ebstorf world map dates from ca. 1300 and was destroyed in 1943. However, photographic documentation and several reproductions survive to this day. The Psalter-map and its reverse today are in London, British Library, Add 28681, fol. 9r and 9v. Traditionally, they are dated to ca. 1260, but LaureLee Brott and Heather Gaile Wacha recently showed that the map was glued into a cut out frame of an existing parchment page, which opens up the question of datation, see LaureLee Brott/ Heather Gaile Wacha, Reframing the World: The Materiality of Two Mappaemundi in BL, Add. MS 28681, in: Imago Mundi 72/2 (2020), pp. 148 – 162.  Adriaan von Müller, Das Spandauer Kreuz, in: Alfons Kluck/ Burkard Sauermost (eds.), 75 Jahre Bistum Berlin. Glaube für die Zukunft, Spuren der Geschichte, Konturen des Lebens, Berlin 2005, p. 176.  von Müller (note 74), dates the cross to the tenth century. The Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin, where the cast is preserved today, dates it to the second half of the eleventh century.

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Fig. 3: An illuminated T-initial from a thirteenth-century ‘Etymologiae’ manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Conv Soppr. 319, fol. 90v)

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Fig. 4: The ‘cross of Spandau’ (Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, DP 11329 (Photo Claudia Plamp))

pendant, may have adopted earlier (non-Christian) traditions.⁷⁶ But with its striking design, the ‘cross of Spandau’ bears a close resemblance to T-O diagrams, though we cannot know for sure if such a link was intended or made by contemporaries. Another textual source picks up the same visual impression and reads as a precursor to this tradition of merging circular forms and crucified or circle-holding figures. The text dates to the ninth century and explains and interprets the letter of the Latin alphabet. The anonymous author chose to put the letter T in a cosmological context and wrote that “Christ pulls the whole world to himself with stretched arms.”⁷⁷ Not only is the T here associated with Christ stretching out his arms, the sur-

 One could think of so-called wheel pendants dating back to the Bronze Age, see von Müller (note 74).  Auctores anonymi de litteris, in: Anecdota Helvetica, ed. Hermann Hagen (Grammatici Latini, Supplementum), Leipzig 1870, pp. 302– 308, here p. 306: T. Extensio brachiorum Christi totum ad se colligit orbem ipso dicente: “cum exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad me ipsum” [Joh. 12, 32], ortatu, quo dicit: “venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et onerati estis et ego vos reficiam” [Matth. 11, 28].

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rounding world is joined to this imaginative picture and shows how widespread this visual representation was by the ninth century. To sum up: The evidence presented cannot prove that the T in the T-O diagram was intended to symbolize a Christian cross. Additional textual evidence, however, suggests that the Greek letter tau was understood as a symbol of the cross already by the seventh or eighth century, if not earlier. The cross of Spandau, dating to the tenth/eleventh century is the first material hint indicating that the form of the T-O diagram could well be interpreted as an allusion to the figure of Christ encompassing the world. Illuminated T-initials from the eighth century onwards further support this hypothesis, and from this point, contemporaries closely associated the Latin letter T, the tau cross and the figure of Christ crucified (or holding the earth) and interpreted these forms as related.

Item #3: The Three Sons of Noah The religious background of the T-O diagram is commonly argued by virtue of the association of the three continents with the three sons of Noah.⁷⁸ According to the bible, Noah’s sons became the progenitors of humankind after the deluge (Gen 9 – 10). However, the close connection drawn between the three sons and the continents is not biblical. The book of Genesis only assigns a set of peoples as the descendants to each son, not a clearly bound region, let alone a continent. It was only later that Jewish and Christian commentators linked the three sons and the three continents and thus established a simple and memorable solution: The eldest son Sem was assigned to the biggest part, Asia; Japheth got Europe; and Cham Africa. Again, the chronology of the development is of primary importance.⁷⁹ The first isolated textual examples for a link between both triads emerged in the sixth century and became more common in the eighth century. The connection between the concepts was, however, far from unanimously accepted, as Klaus Oschema has shown.⁸⁰ Many medieval authors still attempted to find more accurate descriptions. Isidore, for example, seemed to be torn between both solutions: In his ‘Etymologies’, he tried to be accurate and to describe the settlement areas in detail;

 Woodward (note 18), p. 328; Garipzanov (note 5), p. 16; Edson, Mapping (note 7), p. 15; Johannes Gießauf, Historische Wissensspeicher: Erinnerte Geschichte(n), in: Wernfried Hofmeister (ed.), Mittelalterliche Wissensspeicher. Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Verbreitung ausgewählten ‘Orientierungswissens’ im Spannungsfeld von Gelehrsamkeit und Illiteratheit (Mediävistik zwischen Forschung, Lehre und Öffentlichkeit 3), Frankfurt/Main et al. 2009, pp. 61– 86, here p. 62.  Eva Wajntraub/ Gimpel Wajntraub, Noah and his family on medieval maps, in: Harvey (note 69), pp. 381– 388; Wenzel (note 52).  Oschema (note 20), pp. 112– 117 und 336 – 344, here pp. 115 – 116.

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in his ‘History of the Goths’, by contrast, he used the simple equation between the three sons and the three parts of the world.⁸¹ On a graphic level, the first T-O diagrams that include the names of the sons of Noah as inscriptions, again in manuscripts of Isidore’s works, date from the ninth century.⁸² It is noteworthy that the accompanying text does not indicate this link – Isidore mentions the sons of Noah only in a different chapter.⁸³ The inclusion of the sons of Noah in the diagram is obviously a later addition, probably from the ninth century, although its intellectual roots can already be traced back to exegetical texts from the sixth and seventh centuries. ⁸⁴ By including the names of the three sons, the scribes or copyists transcended the content of Isidore’s text. Van Duzer and Sáenz-López Pérez argue that the names of Noah’s sons might have been added to the diagram because readers or scribes perceived them as missing.⁸⁵ In this case, the connection between both concepts must have been already quite strong. Indeed, we can trace the quest for a fitting graphic representation of the settlement areas to the early ninth century. In some manuscripts, we find another, competing graphic solution for this desideratum: the so-called V-in-□ diagram (fig. 5). This slightly odd name was modelled after the designation of the T-O scheme, as the graphic in question consists of a rectangle with an inscribed V-like form. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to it as Vdiagram. The diagram enjoyed very little close analysis until 2012, when Chet van

 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (note 41), IX.2.37: Haec sunt gentes de stirpe Iaphet, quae a Tauro monte ad aquilonem mediam partem Asiae et omnem Europam usque ad Oceanum Brittanicum possident, nomina et locis et gentibus relinquentes; de quibus postea inmutata sunt plurima, cetera permanent ut fuerunt. Isidore of Seville, Historia Gothorum, Vandalorum, Suevorum, in: Chronica minora. Saec. IV. V. VI. VII., 3 vol., ed. Theodor Mommsen (Monumenta Germaniae Historica Auct. Ant. 9, 11, 13), Berlin 1892– 1898, vol. 2, pp. 241– 390, here p. 304 (Dedication, Add I): tres filios Noe, id est Sem, Cham et Iapheth scriptura sacra esse testatur: ab ipsis quippe omnium hominum genus per tripertitam mundi regionem, id est Asiam Europam et Africam, est disseminatum. filii Sem orientalem partem, scilicet Asiam, cum filiis Ioniti filii Noe, qui post diluvium natus est, possederunt: filii Iaphet septentrionalem, scilicet Europam, filii Cham meridionalem, id est Libyam sive Africam, inhabitaverunt, sed tempore procedente terram Chanaan in Asia violenter obtinuerunt.  To cite just some examples: Escorial, Biblioteca Real, Cod. P.I.7, fol. 222v (between 792– 842); London, British Library, Harley MS 3941, fol. 177r (2nd half 9th c.; the diagram may be a later addition); Zofingen, Stadtbibliothek, Pa 32, fol. 210v (2nd half 9th c.); Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 834, fol. 90v (2nd half 9th c.). In Escorial, Real Biblioteca R.II.18, fol. 25r (8th c.), the names of the sons of Noah were added to the diagram (date unclear). Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 524, fol. 74v (earlier than 811) has a T-O diagram next to a V-diagram. On this see Chet van Duzer, A Neglected Type of Medieval mappamundi and its re-imagining in the mare historiarum (BnF MS lat. 4915, fol. 26v), in: Viator 43 (2012), pp. 277– 302. See also note 48 and 49.  See Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (note 41), IX.2.9, 25 and 37 (see note 81 and 89).  See note 80.  Chet van Duzer/ Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, Tres filii Noe diviserunt orbem post diluvium. The World Map in British Library Add. MS 37049, in: World and image 26 (2010), pp. 21– 39, here pp. 32– 33.

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Fig. 5: A V-diagram next to a T-O diagram (dated before 811) (Rouen, Bibliothèque municipal, MS 524, fol. 74v)

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Duzer published an article on the type.⁸⁶ In most cases, the V-diagram appears right next to a classical T-O diagram, usually in manuscripts of Isidore’s ‘Etymologies’.⁸⁷ The combination of both diagrams indicates that the V-diagram was intended as a supplement to the older T-O diagrams. The first known example of this combination dates to before 811 (fig. 5).⁸⁸ Obviously, scribes or copyists found it necessary or desirable to map the areas of settlement and struggled to find an adequate solution. In contrast to the T-O diagram, the V-diagram highlights that the Noachide’s areas of settlement were not congruent with the continents. Indeed, the text of the ‘Etymologies’ lists the peoples descending from the three sons in great detail and then sums up that the descendants of Sem occupied the southern region, from the upmost east to the Levant; the people of Cham lived in the region from Sidon (Lebanon) to Gibraltar; and finally that the progeny of Japheth inhabited the land between the Taurus Mountains (in modern day Turkey) and the northern part of Asia, as well as the whole of Europe.⁸⁹ The V-diagram is the result of an effort to precisely map this geographical information. However, the coalescence of the four cardinal directions and the three parts of the world did not work out evenly. Since the fifth century, Europe was commonly associated with the west,⁹⁰ thus, the names of the cardinal directions in the V-diagram had to be re-ordered: East is on top, as in the T-O diagram; to the right follows the south; and to the left, the north is replaced by the west (see fig. 5). What van

 Van Duzer (note 82), p. 278. The diagram is shortly mentioned by Gießauf (note 78), p. 62; Woodward (note 18), p. 347; Michael C. Andrews, The Study and Classification of Medieval Mappae Mundi, in: Archaeologia 75 (1926), pp. 61– 76, here p. 70.  Van Duzer (note 82), pp. 280 – 281, fn. 14, lists three V-diagrams that are neither drawn into manuscripts of the ‘Etymologies’ nor next to T-O diagrams.  Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 524, fol. 74v (earlier than 811).  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (note 41), IX.2.9, 25 and 37: Haec sunt gentes de Sem stirpe descendunt, possidentes terram meridianam ab ortu solis usque ad Phoenices. […] Haec sunt gentes de stirpe Cham, quae a Sidone usque ad Gaditanum fretum omnem meridianam partem tenent. […] Haec sunt gentes de stirpe Iaphet, quae a Tauro monte ad aquilonem mediam partem Asiae et omnem Europam usque ad Oceanum Brittanicum possident. See van Duzer (note 82), p. 282, shortly refers to this passage but focusses more on Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (note 41), XIV.2.2. This passage, however, cannot explain the design of the V-diagram sufficiently, as Van Duzer (note 82), pp. 280 – 281, himself states.  See for example the fifth-century Liber generationis, in: Chronica minora (note 81), vol. 1, pp. 78 – 140, here p. 112: Filiorum igitur trium Noe tripartitum saeculum divisum et quidem Sem primogenitus accepit orientem, Cham autem mediterraneam, Iafet occidentem. Similar also Sulpice Sévère, Chroniques. Introduction, texte critique, traduction et commentaire, ed. Ghislaine Senneville-Grave (Sources chrétiennes 441), Paris 1999, p. 98 (I.3.3). The fifth-century bishop of Lyon, Eucherius, included even the names of the continents, Eucherius of Lyon, Instructiones, in: Eucherii Lugdunensis opera 1, ed. Carmelo Mandolfo (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 66), Turnhout 2004, pp. 77– 216, here p. 87 (I.19): Notandum uero est tres Noe filios tres post diluuium terrae partes occupasse, Sem namque posteritas in Asiam uel Orientem, Cham in Africam uel Meridiem, Iafeth cum parte Asiae in Europam se Occidentemque porrexit. See Oschema (note 20), p. 114.

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Duzer calls “a strange error”⁹¹ is proof of the diagrammatic flexibility and pragmatism of medieval scribes for whom a close link to the text was more important than the rigorous naming of the cardinal directions. The complex solution of the V-diagram, however, was misunderstood by readers and scribes in the twelfth century, who changed the names of the cardinal directions to the seemingly ‘correct’ order.⁹² Directly below the first known V-diagram (fig. 5), an inscription explains the relation to the neighbouring T-O-diagram and invites the reader to “see how the earth was divided among the sons of Noah after the deluge.”⁹³ This explanatory legend was copied into many other manuscripts of the ‘Etymologies’ showing a T-O-Noachide diagram.⁹⁴ It suggests that the division of the earth among Sem, Japheth, and Cham seemed (at least in some cases) to be more important than the threefold division of the earth. The T-O-Noachide diagram – that is, the simple equation of the three parts of the earth and the three sons of Noah – was, however, an easier and more memorable solution to the problem of depicting the settlement areas of the Noachides; it became far more popular and widespread than the V-diagram.⁹⁵ The connection between the T-O-Noachide diagram and the work of Isidore of Seville remained closely linked up to the fifteenth century,⁹⁶ even if the inclusion of the three sons did not become the norm for T-O diagrams in general (the majority of the diagrams do not include their names). Nevertheless, the inclusion of the sons of Noah into the diagram was one of the most influential Christian framings of the diagram, and it can be clearly traced from the ninth to the fifteenth century.

 Van Duzer (note 82), pp. 293 and pp. 278 – 279. Marcia Kupfer, The Noachide Dispersion in English Mappae Mundi, c. 960 – c. 1130, in: Peregrinations 4/1 (2013), pp. 81– 106, here pp. 89 – 90, fn. 14, states that the design is not a mistake, but that an explanation for this arrangement is missing.  See for example Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 239, fol. 76v (12th c.); Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 125, fol. 106v (15th c.). Van Duzer (note 82), p. 281, writes that these ‘corrected’ diagrams would correspond to Isidore’s text (chap. XIV.2.). This, however, does not explain why the majority of the V-diagrams show the divergent way of ordering.  Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 524, fol. 74v: Ecce sic diuiserunt terram filli noe post diluuium. Many other V-diagrams have this legend as well: Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 221, fol. 134v (12th c.); Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 318, fol. 112v (3rd quarter 12th c.); Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 320, fol. 109r (Mid-12th c.); Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Acq. e doni 80, fol. 189r (14th c.); Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14334, fol. 177r (1442, Regensburg).  See for example St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 236, fol. 89r (2nd half 9th c.); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 10293, fol. 139r (11th c.); Auxerre, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 76, fol. 91v (12th c.); Melun, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 46, fol. 125r (12th c.). The manuscript Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 1058, fol. 107r (13th c.) even has the legend, although the names of the Noachides are not inscribed into the diagram.  Van Duzer (note 82), p. 279 lists 35 surviving examples.  See van Duzer/ Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez (note 85), pp. 32– 33.

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Final Plea The T-O diagram depicted the three parts of the known world in a memorable and easily replicable way. It was the most successful (i. e. the most frequently drawn) representation of the medieval world. The origin of the diagram is however still unclear and the subject of continued debate: Some scholars assert that its origins lie in nonChristian, antique traditions, while others argue for its formation within a Christian context. Indeed, the oldest surviving copy is from the seventh or eighth century and the diagram was closely linked to the works of Isidore, bishop of Seville, from its very beginnings. The debate around its origin is therefore directly connected to the question of whether or not the diagram can be interpreted as a Christian sign of the world. This paper has focussed mainly on two questions: first, whether or not the T-O diagram was intended to be a Christian sign; and second – supposing this not to be the case – how far back the diagram can be traceably interpreted as a religious image of the world. I would argue that the T-O diagram was a genuinely Christian image of the world: the orientation to the east as well as the continents’ fixed size ratio of 2:1:1 are features that can be better explained within the context of Christianity rather than non-Christian antiquity. On the one hand, the orientation of the diagram mirrors the importance of the east in early Christian thought and theology. On the other hand, the idea that Asia is twice as big as Africa and Europe is a notion that was famously suggested by Augustine and adopted by many other authors, such as Orosius und Isidore, thereby establishing what would become a widespread medieval tradition. Regarding the T-shaped division of the diagram, it is possible that the form was intended to symbolise a tau‐cross which had been known and used as a Christian sign since late antiquity. This hypothesis is based on circumstantial evidence and cannot be proven beyond doubt. What the sources have shown quite clearly is that from the eighth and ninth centuries onwards, the T-O diagram was designed, framed, and understood on different levels as a Christian sign of the world. The top of the diagram (i. e. east) was marked with small crosses, accentuating the religious importance of the east as well as the location of the Christian Paradise. Furthermore, texts and images highlighted that the connection between the form of the letter T and the taucross was widely known and interpreted as a symbol for the crucified Christ. The T-O form fits quite well into this pattern. Another early Christian addition to the diagram was the inclusion of the names of the three sons of Noah, which shifted the meaning of the diagram from a geographic to a religious level. With this addition, the diagram depicted how the three continents were increasingly linked to areas believed to be settled by the sons of Noah and thus closely more connected the idea of the continents to a biblical passage. The examples analysed in this paper reveal how the T-O diagram translated geographic and religious ideas into graphic form. The diagrammatic character of this

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form made it easy to add further content and thus potentially to alter the meaning of the sign. In the case of the T-O diagram, I would argue that the evidence presented here revealed the original Christian design of the diagram by highlighting several individual features. It is nonetheless surprising that there seems to be no textual source that allows us to make this connection directly. Indeed, one of the rare textual descriptions of the T-O diagram from medieval times can be found in a geographic educational poem dating to the early fifteenth century. The poem is as strippeddown to its essentials as the diagram itself: “A T within an O shows us the image of how the world was divided into three parts.”⁹⁷

 La Sfera. Libri quattro on ottava rima, scritti nel secolo XIV da F. Leonardo di Stagio Dati, aggiuntovi due altri libri (La Nuova Sfera di F. M. Tolosani da colle; L’america di Raffaello Gualterotti), ed. L’america di Raffaello Gualterotti), ed. Gustavo Camillo Galletti (Biblioteca rara), Milan 1865, p. 30 (III.11): Un T dentro ad un O mostra il desgeno / Come in tre parti fu diviso il Mondo.

Part II: Compiling Geographical Knowledge According to Religious Ideas

Nathalie Bouloux

Ordering and Reading the World The Maps in Lambert of Saint-Omer’s ‘Liber Floridus’ Abstract: The ‘Liber Floridus’, written ad laudam et gloriam Domini Christi ac redemptoris omnium around 1111– 1115/1121 by Lambert, canon of Saint-Omer, is an exceptional testimony of the intellectual and spiritual life of an early twelfth-century scholar. This paper examines the various maps (mappamundi, regional map of Europe, and cosmographic diagrams) in connection with the descriptive texts and in their complex codicological context, in the autograph manuscript (Ghent, University Library, Ms 92) and another copy (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibliothek, Gudeanus lat. 1), in order to analyse how the maps explain Lambert’s worldview, from a spiritual and eschatological perspective. First, I describe Lambert’s work, his working method, and his aims. Then, I explore the eclectic nature of the maps he inserted in the ‘Liber’, and how he produced his remarkably original maps. Finally, I examine the relation between maps and the natural world, maps and history, and maps and eschatology. Keywords: Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber Floridus, cartography, history, eschatology, Antipodes The ‘Liber Floridus’ (‘Book of Flowers’) was composed in the first decades of the twelfth century by Lambert of Saint-Omer, a Flemish canon. We know almost nothing about the author, apart from what he says about himself in his autograph manuscript. The ‘Liber Floridus’ is an instructional work grounded in a collection of excerpts selected and organized by Lambert, which he supplemented with additional chapters that he wrote himself. The manuscript, which survives in nine copies, is illustrated with original pictures, astronomical and geographical diagrams, maps, and tables. Lambert of Saint-Omer’s maps have long attracted the attention of historians of cartography, albeit always in a somewhat piecemeal fashion.¹ Nevertheless, some reNote: I would like to warmly thank Michelle Magneron and Camille Serchuk for their help with the text of this article.  One exception is Patrick Gautier Dalché, De la glose à la contemplation. Place et fonction de la carte dans les manuscrits du haut moyen âge, in: Testo e immagine nell’alto Medioevo. 15 – 21 aprile 1993, 2 vols. (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 41), Spoleto 1994, vol. 2, pp. 693 – 771, here pp. 740 – 749. The ‘Liber Floridus’ generally finds a prominent place in studies on history of cartography, see for example Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space. How Medieval Dr Nathalie Bouloux, Université de Tours, Département d’histoire, 3 rue des Tanneurs, BP 37041 Tours Cedex 1, [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-004

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cent studies invite reconsideration of Lambert’s work as a whole, including his working method and his aims for his work.² I will focus on these aspects in my study of the role of the maps in the ‘Liber Floridus’, placing them in the context of the essential themes of the work. First, I will set out his work, his working method, and his aims. Then, I will explore the eclectic nature of the maps he inserted in the ‘Liber Floridus’, and how he produced his remarkably original maps. Finally, I will examine the relation between maps and the natural world, maps and history, and maps and eschatology. The entire ‘Liber Floridus’ is imbued with an eschatological vision of the world, which must be understood in the context of the ‘Gregorian Reform’ and of the first Crusade.³ This vision serves as the foundation of the text’s religious thought, and also guides what the maps specifically illustrate.

Overview on the ‘Liber Floridus’ Lambert was a canon of the collegiate Church of Our Lady in Saint-Omer, near the great Benedictine abbey of Saint Bertin. The two institutions were linked and shared the same cultural universe, although they were also in competition.⁴ Most of the books used by Lambert were in the Saint Bertin’s library, which also benefited from connections to the count of Flanders. Lambert’s father (d. 1077) was himself a canon at the Church of Our Lady. In the Ghent manuscript, Lambert inserted a family tree (fol. 154r) and included a self-portrait that shows him at work below a picture of the city of Saint-Omer (fol. 13r), demonstrating the strong bond between him, his city and the act of writing. So, although he seems above all to have been a compiler,

Mapmakers viewed their World (Studies in Map History 1), London 1997, pp. 105 – 111. Karen De Coene/ Martine de Reu/ Philippe De Maeyer (eds.), Liber Floridus 1121. The World in a Book, Tielt 2011, devote considerable attention to the maps; the mappamundi in particular has been the focus of scholarly investigation, see in particular Danielle Lecoq, La mappemonde du Liber Floridus ou la vision du monde de Lambert de Saint-Omer, in: Imago Mundi 39 (1987), pp. 9 – 49.  Albert Derolez’s codicological studies of the autograph manuscript are essential: Lamberti S. Audomari canonici Liber floridus: codex autographus bibliothecae universitatis Gandavensis, ed. Albert Derolez, Ghent 1968; Id, Lambertus qui librum fecit. Een codicologische studie van de Liber Floridus of Lambert of Saint-Omer, Brussels 1978; Id., The Autograph Manuscript of the Liber Floridus. A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer, (Corpus Christianorum. Autographa Medii Aevi 4), Turnhout 1998; Id., The Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus. A Study of the Original Manuscript, Ghent, University Library MS 92, Turnhout 2015.  On the institutional and religious context, see Wim Blockmans, A la recherche de l’ordre divin. Le Liber floridus de Lambert de Saint-Omer en contexte (1121), in: Revue du Nord 100/424 (2018), pp. 11– 31.  Because of conflicts between the two institutions, some historians have believed that Lambert could not have had access to the Saint-Bertin library. Derolez demonstrated that, despite this, Lambert used the manuscripts of Saint-Bertin. See Albert Derolez, The Abbey of Saint-Bertin, the Liber Floridus, and the Origin of the Gesta Francorum Hierusalem expugnantium, in: Manuscripta 57 (2013) pp. 1– 28 ; Id., The Making (note 2), pp. 40 – 42 and p. 183 – 184.

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he seems to have had some authorial self-awareness, which was relatively uncommon in the early twelfth century. He may have been the school master⁵ at the Church of Our Lady in Saint-Omer, even though his own level of education and Latin skills were not especially high. By contrast, the visual elements that he designed and drew to accompany his works were of a very high level of complexity and meaning. In the wake of Albert Derolez’s research, any study of the ‘Liber Floridus’ must consider how the manuscript was made, and how the making of the manuscript reflects Lambert’s own ideas and the changing nature of his project. To understand Lambert’s aims, the Ghent manuscript, which is autograph, is the most important. But because some of its quires have disappeared, we must also examine the Wolfenbüttel manuscript (second half of the twelfth century), the first, closest, and most reliable copy of the ‘Liber Floridus’.⁶ Codicological and textual analysis show that Lambert worked nearly alone, without the help of a scriptorium. Moreover, it is very likely that he single-handedly produced all of the illustrations.⁷ In the prologue, Lambert announces the general aim of the ‘Liber Floridus’ as having been written ad laudam et gloriam Domini Christi ac redemptoris omnium: For the praise and glory of our Lord and Redeemer of all, it is meet that we should wish to investigate His great and wonderful works diligently, and through this investigation commend them to ears of the faithful so that Creation may burn all the more in love for his Creator, once it has recognized that He has created ineffably even more marvellous and mysterious things.⁸

So Lambert’s first aim was to write an instructional book for the use of the canons of the collegiate church of Our Lady. In this work, he compiled extracts of other authors’ texts in order to show the resplendence of the world and to offer a feast for the eyes of his reader by means of contemplation of the Creation. So says the prologue, but close scholarly examinations of the book have also shown that his purpose was more complicated. Like many ecclesiastical writers, Lambert was passionately interested in the destiny of the world, the hidden meaning of the Creation and

 Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 33.  Ghent, University Library MS 92 (online: https://lib.ugent.be/viewer/archive.ugent.be%3A018970 A2-B1E8 – 11DF-A2E0-A70579F64438#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&r=0&xywh=-1063%2C0%2C14124%2C 9279); Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, MS Gudeanus lat. 1. (online: http://diglib.hab.de/wdb. php?pointer=0&dir=mss%2F1-gud-lat) (accessed 27.10. 2020). For a facsimile edition with commentary see: Patricia Carmassi/ Christian. Heitzman (eds.), Der Liber Floridus in Wolfenbüttel. Eine Prachthandschrift über Himmel und Erde, Darmstadt 2013. Both manuscripts are described and analysed in Vorholt (note 1), especially the one in Wolfenbüttel.  Derolez, Autograph (note 2), p. 22.  Ghent, Ms 92 (note 6), fol. 3v: Ad laudem et gloriam domini nostri ac redemptoris omnium pertinet eius magnalia operaque mirabilia diligenter perscrutari nos velle et perscrutando ea fidelium auribus commendare, ut eo amplius creatura in creatoris sui amorem exardescat, quo eum mirabiliora et magis inaudita ineffabiliter condidisse recognoverit, For the English translation, see Vorholt (note 1), pp. 10 – 11.

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the coming of the Apocalypse.⁹ He attempted to discover the invisible beneath the visible and, as Jay Rubenstein has shown, his principal concern was not when the Apocalypse would come, but what the signs were that it had already begun.¹⁰ So Lambert’s book had two additional aims: the first was to serve the contemplation of the Creation, with the goal of fully understanding God’s plan, and the second was to search for the signs for the End of Time. This is why Lambert not only compiled extracts, but also tried to demonstrate the signs and significance of these aspects by associating items or themes;¹¹ this also explains why extracts or texts are used or repeated in multiple sections of the ‘Liber Floridus’. The fact that the composition of the ‘Liber Floridus’ continued from about 1111 to 1121 invites us to consider how Lambert’s intentions might have changed over time. In addition to the strictly religious themes (scriptural texts, biblical commentaries, doctrinal and theological considerations), Lambert shows a broad interest in history (universal as well as local, profane as well as sacred), and in the natural world (notably bestiaries), in cosmology (time and space), as well in eschatology. These themes are obviously linked and are part of a more general view of the universe as the divine creation. Mappaemundi played an important role in all of these categories.

An eclectic cartography Lambert uses a wide variety of cartographic images and forms: diagrams, local maps, and world maps. I will present them as they are found today in the Ghent manuscript, adding the maps and diagrams that are no longer extent in the Ghent manuscript, but that are known from other copies of the text. – The first one is a TO map, entitled Gentes Asie Europe Affrice diverse (fol. 19r), with a list of people in Asia and in Europe and a list of provinces in Africa (fig. 1). The lists are extracted from the ‘Cosmographia’ of Pseudo-Aethicus, which Lambert could have read in a manuscript from the library of the Chapter of Our Lady. Around the map, Lambert has inserted a description of the world that is a summary of the one written by Orosius in the ‘History Against the Pagans’, which Lambert could have read in the same manuscript.¹² The map precedes several historical cir Penelope C. Mayo, The Crusaders Under the Palm. Allegorical Plants and Cosmic Kingship in the Liber Floridus, in: Dumbarton Oak Papers 27 (1973), pp. 31– 67; Daniel Verhelst, Les textes eschatologiques dans le Liber Floridus, in: Werner Verbeke/ Daniel Verhelst/ Andries Welkenhuysen (eds.), The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, Leuven 1988, pp. 299 – 305; Derolez, The Making (note 2), pp. 186 – 187.  Jay Rubenstein, Lambert of Saint-Omer and the Apocalyptic First Crusade, in: Nicholas Paul/ Suzanne Yeager (eds.), Remembering the Crusades. Myths, Image and Identity, Baltimore 2012, pp. 69 – 95, here p. 70.  Vorholt already insists on this aspect, see Vorholt (note 1), p. 15.  Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 717, second half of the eleventh century; fol. 1v–63r: Paulus Orosius, ‘Historiae adversus paganos’; fol. 63v–66r: Ps.-Aethicus, ‘Cosmographia’; fol. 66r–

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Fig. 1: Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms 92, fol. 19r (CC BY-SA 4.0)

cular diagrams of the Ages of the World (fol. 19v: Ordo regnorum principaliter regnantium, fol. 20v: Mundi aetates usque ad Godefridum regem).

81v: Iordanes, ‘De origine actibusque Getarum’ (incomplete); fol. 82r–172r: ‘Historia ecclesiastica tripartita’. Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 197.

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On fol. 24r, Lambert has drawn a diagram of the winds with a TO map at the centre, entitled Ordo ventorum XII et natura ipsorum. ¹³ It is one of the numerous cosmographic rotae in the ‘Liber Floridus’. This diagram illustrates and explains events that occur in the sphere of the air. A text in the upper right quarter describes the nature of the winds; another, in the lower left quarter, treats thunder, lightning and earthquakes. These are derived from Bede.¹⁴ On the verso (fol. 24v), we find a Macrobian map (entitled Spera Macrobii de quinque zonis) (fig. 2).¹⁵ Macrobian maps come from the ‘Commentary of the Dream of Scipio’ by Macrobius, a well-known and widely circulated Late Antique text, which they illustrate.¹⁶ One of the Macrobian map types is quite simple: it shows the division of the earth into frigid, temperate, and torrid zones. The second is more complex: it illustrates the locations of the two oceans, and it depicts a meridian circle running from pole to pole, as well as an equatorial one. The two circles intersect at right angles and thereby explain the theory of the tides, which are produced by the clash of the oceans’ currents at the two poles (a phenomenon that Macrobius describes as refusio). The map also describes the general form of the habitable lands, the narrowness of the ocean and the origins of the Mediterranean, of the Red Sea, of the Indian Ocean (although it is not visible on Lambert’s diagram) and of the Caspian Sea, and all the gulfs of the Ocean. Lambert used a Macrobian map and modified it, adding, for instance, a drawing of the course of the zodiac. He gave graphic expression to information gleaned from his reading of Macrobius. Thus, the two islands he drew in the northern temperate zone refer to a passage where Macrobius mentions two islands created by the Ocean.¹⁷ The text at the bottom of the map also comes from Macrobius, to which Lambert adds some remarks of his own.¹⁸ This is but one example of the many Macrobian maps in the ‘Liber Floridus’. The world map (Mappa vel or[m]esta mundi)¹⁹ (fig. 3). This famous map is no longer in the Ghent manuscript. It is known by means of the copy in the Wolfenbüttel manuscript, where it occupies a problematic place, on fol. 69v–70r. On the

 Lambert added the Flemish names of the winds, see Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 65.  Beda, De natura rerum, in: Beda Venerabilis, Opera VI, 1. Opera didascalica: De temporum ratione, ed. Charles W. Jones (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 123 A), Turnhout 1975, pp. 173 – 234, here pp. 26, 28 – 30, 49.  The map is followed by three circular diagrams: (fol. 25r: Cursus solis solsticialis et equinoctialis; fol. 25v: Cursus lunaris et anni descriptio; fol. 26r: Spera Apulei vitae et mortis).  On Macrobian maps and their function, see Gautier Dalché (note 1); Alfred Hiatt, The Map of Macrobius before 1100, in: Imago mundi 59 (2007), pp. 149 – 176.  Macrobius, Commentaire au Songe de Scipion, ed. Mireille Armisen-Marchetti, livre II, Paris 2003, p. 41 (II.9.4): Inter nos et australes homines means ille per calidam totamque cingens et rursus utriusque regionis extrema sinibus suis ambiens, binas in superiore atque inferiore terrae superficie insulas facit.  Ibid., pp. 22– 24 (II.5.2– 3, II.5.11– 12).  This is the title in the table of contents in the Ghent manuscript. In the Wolfenbüttel manuscript the text that accompanies the map begins with Hormista regnorum mundi (fol. 69v).

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Fig. 2: Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms 92, fol. 24v (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Fig. 3: Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Cod. Guelf. Gud. lat. 1, fol. 69v-70r (CC BY-SA)

verso are texts about marriage, and the map precedes the history of Flanders, so it is now partly situated in a historical context. Originally, in the Ghent manuscript, the map was in the quire VI bis, which contained geographical texts, and which has since disappeared. The map is drawn on a bifolium. The northern hemisphere occupies the verso, while the southern hemisphere occupies the facing recto; the Ocean surrounds the exterior of both hemispheres of the world. Between them, the annual course of the sun is indicated. The map is unusual because it includes a fourth part of the world; Lambert wanted to show the entire globus terrae and not only the orbis terrarum or the inhabited world, as is customary in the detailed mappaemundi. ²⁰ The map’s title (Mappa vel or[m]esta mundi) shows the influence of Orosius and has a moral and religious connotation.²¹ The dimensions of the terrestrial globe are provided in the texts around the map, and are drawn from the ‘Cosmographia’ of Pseudo-Aethicus.²²

 Another world map, dated 1055 from Ripoll, shows a similar aspect and disposition. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 123, fol. 143v–144r.  Ormista mundi sometimes refers to the ‘Historiae adversus Paganos’ of Orosius. As Gautier Dalché notes, Lambert probably read the term in the manuscript of Saint-Omer that contains Orosius’

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Fig. 4: Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms 92, fol. 92v-93r (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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On fol. 92v–93r is a zonal map (fig. 4).²³ The drawing of the map required more space than was available on the page, so Lambert added a strip of parchment to extend the upper margin. The drawing depicts a Macrobian map, inserted in the middle of the system of the spheres. At the centre of the earth, the ecliptic (the sun’s path during the year) is painted in red, and on it is traced a diagram of the

text with the prologue: Sciendum est quod hec ars nominatur ormesta, id est miserabilis uel genitus, eo quod miseras mundi continent. See Gautier Dalché (note 1), p. 746, n 141. Lambertus, Liber floridus, ed. Derolez (note 2), p. 388.  As the map has disappeared from the autograph manuscript, the question about the degree of fidelity of the mappamundi preserved in the Wolfenbüttel manuscript arises. As Marcia Kupfer notes, some elements like graphic aspects, and the similarity to the zonal map of the Ghent codex (fol. 92v–93r) argue in favour of the great fidelity of the Wolfenbüttel’s copyist, see Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map, New Haven, London 2016, p. 60. Another detail must be noted: the map of Europe (fol. 241r, see infra) is identical to this part of the world on the Wolfenbüttel mappamundi.  Derolez thinks that the folio predates the other parts of the quire, Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 103.

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zodiac, in other words, the course of the planets during one year. In the zone inhabited by mankind, Lambert has placed some names.²⁴ The map illustrates the relationship between heaven and earth. On fol. 94v, an astronomical diagram, entitled Circuli septem cursusque septem planetarum, depicts the course of the planets. This diagram also shows, in the center of the seven planetary rings, a TO map (Terra, Asia, Europa, and Africa). A lost diagram, which survives on fol. 64v of the Wolfenbüttel manuscript, represents the spheres surmounted by a Christ in majesty in a mandorla, with a schematic TO map in the middle. It shows the cosmos with the constellations, the planets, the zodiac, and the location of the eight superior Angelic Choirs and of Paradise.²⁵ In the part of the ‘Liber Floridus’ that recounts the history of the First Crusade, a plan of the city of Jerusalem, drawn from a model in a manuscript of Gesta Francorum Iherusalem expugnantium, that belonged to the abbey of Saint Bertin, has also disappeared.²⁶ Today, it is only found in copies of the ‘Liber Floridus’ preserved in Leiden and in Paris.²⁷ On fol. 138r, Emperor Augustus, enthroned, is represented with a TO map (Asia, Europa, Africa) in his left hand. The text that precedes it recalls the edict ordering the census of the peoples of the Empire by Julius Caesar. The text on the facing page concerns the Sixth Age.²⁸ As Derolez notes, this picture, which was moved to this position from the beginning of the ‘Gesta Romanorum’, ²⁹ demonstrates the link between profane history and salvation history.³⁰ At the end of the ‘Liber Floridus’, Lambert composed several cosmographical texts and diagrams:³¹ six diagrams show the relationship between heaven and earth:

 Historiae adversus Paganos: Mare Caspium, India, Gog Magog, mare Indicum, Babilon, Asia, Tanais, Nilus, Roma, Europa, Lybia, Africa, Ispania, Adlans, Calpe, Gades, Mediterraneum/Mare Nostrum.  For a description of the diagram and his correlation with a chapter titled ‘On the Orders of Angels’ see Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 105.  See Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms 776, fol. 50v. Reproduction Vorholt (note 1), p. 29, fig. 12.  Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken, Ms. Voss. lat. fol. 31r, fol. 85v ; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 8865, fol. 133r.  The folio has been lost. For an analysis of the image, see Kupfer (note 22), p. 35, who thinks that the illustration is linked with the beginning of the Sixth Age (that opens with the reign of Augustus).  Derolez, Autograph (note 2), p. 126.  Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 123.  They are preceded by diagram of the five regions of the world (where are localised different kind of demons), a table of contents of Calcidius’ ‘Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus ‘and a lambda diagram, that shows the construction of the world soul (Spera Platonis de mundi anima) surrounding by extracts of the ‘Somnium Scipionis’ (fol. 221v–222r) and then on the fol. 222v–224r, the text of the ‘Somnium Scipionis’.

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A Macrobian map of the world with the phases of the moon (fol. 225r); An astronomic diagram, entitled Circuli VII planetarum VII (fol. 225v), which shows the celestial spheres with a TO map in the middle, along with other diagrams (Lunar phases, eclipses of the Sun and of the Moon…). – On fol. 226’v-226’’r, part of an added bifolium, Lambert draws the system of the spheres with a TO map in the middle; he also shows the location of the seven heavens, the phases of the moon, and the times of sunrise and sunset throughout the year. On fol. 226v, astronomical extracts explain the previous diagram. – On fol. 227v, a diagram (Ordo VII planetarum et spera celi et terre secundum Macrobium) illustrates the projection of the celestial zones onto the earth, and thus the earth’s division into five zones. – On fol. 228r, the earth with its five zones is depicted in the middle of circles indicating the planets (Septem circuli caelorum divisi septem planetarum et signa XII). On fol. 241r, a unique map of Europe (Europa mundi pars quarta) is depicted (fig. 5), which, for codicological and textual reasons, Derolez believed was originally associated with a chapter about the division of the Frankish empire.³² This famous map, found only in the Ghent manuscript, shows political borders painted in red.³³ It was created by enlarging a detail from a larger world map, the Mappa vel Or[m]esta mundi mentioned above.³⁴

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Lambert of Saint-Omer gathered an impressive collection of maps of different kinds that reveal his heightened and sophisticated awareness of cartographic forms, which he used and manipulated to serve different purposes. Lambert’s work should be viewed in the context of the enhanced status of visual culture, expressed by means of the increased use of diagrams, which was characteristic of the twelfth century.³⁵ The intellectual habits of Lambert (his associative logic and the close bond be-

 Derolez, Autograph (note 2), pp. 151– 152.  On the map, see Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Europa in der Kartographie des Mittelalters, in: Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 55 (1973), pp. 289 – 304, esp. pp. 295 – 302 and Hartmut Kugler, ‚Europa pars quarta‘. Der Teil und das Ganz im ‚Liber Floridus‘, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Hartmut Kugler (eds.), Europa im Weltbild des Mittelalters. Kartographische Konzepte (Orbis mediaevalis 10), Berlin 2008, pp. 45 – 61.  Although nothing in the texts or images explicitly confirms this, the relationship between them is immediately obvious when the two maps are placed side by side.  Eckart Conrad Lutz/ Vera Jerjen/ Christine Putzo (eds.), Diagramm und Text. Diagrammatische Strukturen und die Dynamisierung von Wissen und Erfahrung. Überstorfer Colloquium 2012, Wiesbaden 2014; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Qu’est-ce qu’un diagramme ? A propos du ‘Liber Floridus’ de Lambert de Saint-Omer (ca. 1120) in: ibid., pp. 79 – 94; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Penser par figures. Du compas divin aux diagrammes magiques, Paris 2018. A study of Lambert’s diagrams and their eschatological significance can be found in Katrin Müller, Mutmaßungen über figura und substantia der Welt. Die Diagramme im Liber Floridus des Lambert von Saint-Omer, in: Christian Kiening/ Kath-

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Fig. 5: Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms 92, fol. 241r (CC BY-SA 4.0)

arina Mertens Fleury (eds.), Figura: Dynamiken der Zeiten und Zeichen im Mittelalter, Würzburg 2013, pp. 173 – 204.

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tween his texts and images) explain his understanding of the function of maps as well as how he made them.

An original cartography Lambert appears to have drawn his own maps, which he produced by combining several types of established maps and diagrams, thereby creating a unique and original corpus of cartography. Texts and diagrams were considered two complementary paths to the knowledge and understanding of the world’s structure.³⁶ Lambert’s cartographic representations are systematically combined with texts written around the maps or inserted in them. Such is the case, for example, of the TO map on fol. 19r, in which Lambert inserted extracts from the ‘Cosmographia’ of Pseudo-Aethicus. The diagram unites a text (Cosmographia) and an image. The ‘Cosmographia’ of Pseudo-Aethicus is composed of a list of geographical names arranged in four parts according to the four cardinal directions. In the TO map, the list of names has no geographic organization: Lambert simply adapts the division of the ‘Cosmographia’ into four parts within the diagram, which only divides the orbis terrarum into three parts (Asia, Europe, Africa)³⁷. The depiction is framed by extracts from Orosius (1, 2, 2– 11) and from Martianus Capella on the dimensions of the earth (6, 609). The composition of the image on fol. 225r demonstrates yet another example of Lambert’s efforts to produce a new type of image by combining different diagrams. It shows a Macrobian world map, with the five climate zones, the two oceans, and the currents that produce tides according to Macrobius. Around the earth, the diagram also includes the phases of the moon. Lambert also summarized extracts from Macrobius about the phenomena of the tides and moon phases and inserted them around the diagrams. As Hanna Vorholt has noted, Bede relates the tides to the moon in his ‘De natura rerum’.³⁸ Thus, the diagram combines two explanations about tidal phenomena, which Lambert found in two different sources. Lambert offers a synthesis of all this information by means of a new and original diagram. The Macrobian world map on fol. 92v–93v is also a composite. Here, Lambert has inserted a diagram that visualizes the course of the planets as seen in the zodiac:³⁹ this diagram also appears in another quire devoted to cosmography (fol. 226r). Once again, Lambert composes his map by making explicit associations between complex

 See Barbara Obrist, La cosmologie médiévale. Textes et images. I. Les fondements antiques, Florence 2004.  See Nathalie Bouloux, La liste géographique entre forme de représentation de l’espace et pensée graphique (Occident latin, Ve-XVe siècle), forthcoming.  Vorholt (note 1), p. 17  As Derolez notes, a similar graph occurs in commentaries on Bede’ ‘De temporum ratione’, see Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 152.

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forms and concepts. These associations connect different parts of the manuscript, which imposes some harmony on the apparent disorder of the compilation. The mappamundi from the Wolfenbüttel manuscript is produced by means of the same process.⁴⁰ It associates three different cartographic types, each of which has an impact on the overall appearance of the resulting map. As I have already noted, the map shows the entire globe, not only the orbis terrarum. The overall scheme is that of a climatic world map, but Lambert greatly enlarges the two temperate zones, because he needs space to depict their content. He also indicates the torrid zone as a narrow strip of land bathed by the equatorial ocean and the austral frigid zone, but he omits the northern frigid zone. The main objective of the map is to define and describe the habitable space on the sphere. The Antipodes are located the southern habitable zone, ⁴¹ and mankind inhabits the northern one, which is the orbis terrarum. The layout perfectly reflects the division between two hemispheres that cannot communicate. The orbis terrarum is drawn on the verso of a folio, and the southern hemisphere (where the plaga australis potentially inhabited by the Antipodes is located), is painted on the facing folio. The fact that the southern habitable zone contains only text reinforces this idea and underlines the unknowable character of the southern hemisphere. On the contrary, in the northern zone, the orbis terrarum is depicted in detail. The general structure is a TO map. This seems unremarkable but actually, despite frequent scholarly claims to the contrary, there is no other detailed mappamundi that is so obviously based on a TO map.⁴² Lambert used also a detailed mappamundi from which he probably took most of the elements of his own map.⁴³ As a result, some aspects of the map seem strange. On a TO map, the T represents the water (the Mediterranean, the Nile and the Don or Tanais) that divides the three parts of the earth. But in fact, because Lambert joins a detailed mappamundi and a schematic diagram, the T in this map can only represent the Mediterranean. The Tanais is mentioned in the terrestrial interior of the continents, just like the Nile, the delta of which opens in the southern branch of the T. At the same time, the names (Grecia, Mace-

 Marcia Kupfer has previously noted the composite character of the map, see Marcia Kupfer, Mappaemundi: Image, Artefact, Social Practice, in: Paul D.A. Harvey (ed.), The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context, London 2006, pp. 255 – 267, here p. 257.  An island inhabited by other antipodes is drawn in the ocean near the Orbis terrarum. It is discussed below.  But some schematic mappamundi combine a TO map with a Macrobian map. See for example: El Escorial, Biblioteca San Lorenzo, Lat. S-III-5, fol. 115r; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 18275, fol. 46r; London, British Library, Harley 2799, fol. 241v.  He probably found a model in a manuscript (or perhaps a wall map). Furthermore, the geographical texts on fol. 47v–53r seem to have been closely based (in a practice that Patrick Gautier Dalché has noted elsewhere) on the reading of a map. See Patrick Gautier Dalché, Maps in Words. The Descriptive Logic of Medieval Geography, from Eighth to the Twelfth Century, in: Paul D. A. Harvey (ed.), The Hereford World Map. Medieval World Maps and their Context, London 2006, pp. 223 – 242, esp. pp. 228 – 229.

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donia, Achaia, Capua, Apulia) that surround the northern branch of the T clearly indicate that the T represents the Mediterranean⁴⁴. And of course, as is often the case on a TO map, the T is connected to the circular ocean. Yet on Lambert’s mappamundi, the Mediterranean opens to the northern ocean, which is geographically absurd, as Lambert certainly knew. This strange error was perhaps an inevitable result of the graphic synthesis obtained from the combination of the detailed world map and a TO map. Cartographical diagrams aim either to graphically express concepts and ideas, or to represent the general structures of the orbis terrarum (as it is the case on TO map). Combining a detailed mappamundi with a diagram is thus to join two different ways of shaping knowledge. Another consequence of Lambert’s way of combining different kinds of maps and textual information is that he gives the name mediterraneum mare not to the sea (our Mediterranean Sea) that divides the three parts of the orbis terrarum, but to the equatorial ocean that divides the northern hemisphere from the southern. A legend written in the plaga australis speaks of the mare mediterraneum (literally the sea “in the middle of the lands”) that extends from east to west and divides the terrestrial globe into two. This mare mediterraneum originates from the Lambert’s understanding of the work of Macrobius, as can be read on fol. 24v, where the same sentence can be found above the Macrobian map.⁴⁵

Recurrent themes Most of the elements found on the maps can be associated with other parts or maps in the ‘Liber Floridus’. In a way, the different cosmographic and geographical components of the ‘Liber Floridus’ pose the same question. In this context, I want to examine the question of the habitability of the earth and of the existence of Antipodes.⁴⁶ The question of the existence of the Antipodes was widely discussed in ecclesiastical schools, and Lambert’s approach is certainly related to these discussions. As Augustine said in the ‘City of God’, since an impassable ocean separates the two

 This is also evident on the regional map of Europe, itself derived from the world map. On the interior of the northern branch of the T one can read: Euxini Pontus, mare Meotis, Brachium Georgii, mare Macedonicum, insula Tenedos, Cypros, Rodus, mare Ponticum. This cannot be the arm of the Tanais.  Ghent, Ms 92 (note 67), fol. 24v: Mare mediterraneum quod ab ortu solis ad Occidentem tendit et orbe terrae dividit. On the map on fol. 92v–93r, we find the same allusion (Mare mediterraneum et zona perusta per medium a fervore solis per zodiacum currentis), but in the northern temperate zone, Lambert mentions the Mediterraneum as an equivalent of Nostrum mare.  See Patrick Gautier Dalché, Guillaume de Conche, le modèle macrobien de la sphère et les antipodes: antécédents et influence immédiate, in: Barbara Obrist/ Irène Caiozzo (eds.), Guillaume de Conches: Philosophie et science au XIIe siècle (Micrologus Library 42), Florence 2011, pp. 219 – 251; Alfred Hiatt, Terra incognita. Mapping the Antipodes before 1600, London 2008, pp. 106 – 109.

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parts of the world, the Word of God cannot reach the inhabitants of the other hemisphere; because of this they cannot be saved, and therefore they cannot exist.⁴⁷ This theological argument does not constitute an obstacle to queries about the Antipodes, which has led scholars sometimes to adopt a variety of different positions.⁴⁸ In Lambert’s mappamundi, the austral temperate zone is declared as habitable by Antipodes, as the philosophi assert, but Lambert asserts that the plaga australis is totally unknown and absolutely inaccessible by mankind because of the impossibility, for climatic and astronomical reasons, of crossing the ocean that separates us from it.⁴⁹ Lambert adds that the seasons are reversed there; the northern stars are invisible; the days and nights are of equal length, and there are two winters.⁵⁰ In his diagrams, which are derived from the Macrobian world maps, Lambert always refers to the Antipodes as unknowable and unattainable. For instance, on the Macrobian map on fol. 24v (the first one in the autograph manuscript), Lambert introduces some modifications: the map is oriented to the east (most of the Macrobian maps are oriented to the north); he sets two islands on either side of the terrarum orbis; he indicates the annual course of the sun and of the Milky Way in the middle of the sphere; in the inhabitable zone of the southern hemisphere, a legend says zona australis temperata habitabilis sed incognita hominibus nostri generis (temperate southern habitable zone but unknown to men of our kind). Around the map, a text explains that the Mare Mediterraneum divides the two hemispheres but cannot be seen by human eyes because of the heat.⁵¹ Another inscription says that the southern plaga is the one of the Antipodes but that it is unknowable to the son of Adam.⁵² The same idea is repeated for instance on the Macrobian map on fol. 225r⁵³ and on the map on fol. 92v–93r⁵⁴ with the same arguments. Yet Lambert suggests the possibility of the existence of the Antipodes in a location that is not unreachable by mankind. In in the far west of his mappamundi, a small island in the ocean, outlined in red to separate it from the ecumene, is

 See Gautier Dalché (note 46). Of course, Lambert would have known the ‘De civitate dei’ which he cites on the folio 53v, in a chapter titled De creature diversis.  Ibid.  Wolfenbüttel, Ms Gudeanus lat. 1 (note 6), fol. 70r: Plaga australis temperata, sed filiis Ade incognita, nichil pertinens ad nostrum genus. Mare namque mediterraneum, quod ab ortu solis ad occidentem defluit et orbem terre diuidit humanus oculus non uidit, quoniam solis ardore semper illustratum qui desuper per lacteum currit circulum, accessus repellit hominum, nec ulla ratione ad hanc zonam permittit transitum.  The source for this can be found in Martianus Capella, ‘De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii’, 6, 605 – 607.  Ghent, Ms 92 (note 6), fol. 24v: Mare mediterranum, quod ab ortu solis ad occidentem tendit et orbem terrae dividit, humanus occulus non vidit, quoniam solis ardore semper illustratum accessus repellit.  Ibid.: Zona australis habitabilis filiis Adae incognita est.  Ibid., fol. 225r: Zona australis filliis Adae incognita temperata antipodarum.  Ibid., fol. 92r–93v: Zona australis temperata filiis Adae incognita. Plaga antipodum.

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drawn with a legend that says that ‘our’ Antipodes live here, and they have days when we have nights.⁵⁵ These Antipodes are probably the inhabitants of the other side of our northern hemisphere, but their position in the ocean does not make them totally inaccessible, or at least Lambert does not indicate otherwise.⁵⁶ As for those who might live in the southern hemisphere, Lambert suggests that they have reversed seasons. These scientific considerations create a kind of symmetry between the Antipodes of the plaga australis, which cannot be evangelized, and ‘our’ own Antipodes, which could be reached and therefore evangelized. An additional reference to the Antipodes is located on the lower part of fol. 64r of the Wolfenbüttel manuscript, near the diagram representing the spheres, surmounted by a Christ in majesty. As Derolez notes, this diagram is probably connected to a text entitled ‘On the Orders of Angels.’⁵⁷ The texts copied around the diagram deal with cosmography (the sun, the moon, the seven heavens) but also with thunder (including extracts of Bede’s ‘De natura rerum’ [28 – 30]). In the lower right corner of the folio is a summary of the aspect of the cosmos that ends as follows: Omnis terra quae colitur parua insula est circumfusa mari occeano, quae in parte septentrionali a filiis Ade colitur media, partem uero australem, ut ferunt, Antipodes obtinent. (“All the land we inhabit is a small island surrounded by the ocean. In the northern part, the sons of Adam inhabit the middle part, while, as reported, the Antipodes are in the southern part”).⁵⁸ The use of the indicative (obtinent) to signify the habitation of the southern zone (certainly tempered by ut ferunt) suggests that Lambert envisions the existence of the Antipodes as possible. The addition of this sentence next to the illustration of the cosmos surmounted by Christ suggests, furthermore, that what concerns Lambert is not only the depiction of the physical reality of the world, but also the spiritual contemplation of cosmos, in which the question of the existence of the Antipodes can only be posed in the context of their potential evangelisation and salvation.

The relationship between maps and matter Overall, in the ‘Liber Floridus’, maps contribute to Lambert’s discussions of cosmology, history and eschatology. In the context of the relationship between maps and cosmology, it is important to note Lambert’s position with regards to the changing conception of the universe during the twelfth century. Lambert is not in contact

 Wolfenbüttel, Ms Gudeanus lat. 1 (note 6), fol. 69v: Hic antipodes nostri habitant sed noctem diversam diesque contrarios perferunt et estatem.  For complementary interpretations that take into account the ambiguity of Lambert’s map, see Kupfer (note 40); ead. (note 22), pp. 59 – 60; Hiatt (note 46), pp. 108 – 109.  Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 105.  Wolfenbüttel, Ms Gudeanus lat. 1 (note 6), fol. 64v. See Macrobius, Commentaire, ed. ArmisenMarchetti (note 17), p. 41 (II.9.6).

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with the scholarly circles, notably in Chartres or Paris, which have access to the first scientific translations of Arabic texts, nor is he aware of the most advanced theological currents. His conception of the cosmos comes from the Latin and Carolingian traditions, especially from Bede and from the computus manuals. Generally speaking, before the twelfth century, cosmographic diagrams, which represent the Platonic cosmos, include the seven or eight celestial spheres surrounding the earth, but not the sublunar elements (spheres of water, air and fire).⁵⁹ Lambert’s scientific thinking belongs to this tradition. He is not influenced by the Aristotelian cosmos, which becomes dominant only during the second part of the twelfth and to a greater degree during the thirteenth century, nor by the theological views that lead to the invention of “spiritual” spheres, of the aqueous heaven and the Empyrean.⁶⁰ Although in terms of cosmological content, Lambert’s work is not particularly original, he always frames cosmological knowledge according to his own perspective. One of the most remarkable aspects of his work is the almost systematic inclusion of TO maps in cosmographical images, which reinforces the tremendous significance of the connection between heaven and earth, a fundamental conception of the world during the Middle Ages. Thus, it is the projection of the heavenly circles around the earth that determine the five climatic zones. This connection appears on almost all of the cartographic images in his manuscripts. The diagram on fol. 227v depicts the projection of the heavenly circles on the earth. The map on fol. 92r -93v depicts the hemisphere surrounded by seven circles bearing the names of the six planets and, for the outermost circle, the signs of the zodiac. It is also obvious on the mappamundi, in which he includes both the climate zones and the course of the sun. Moreover, the choice to highlight the TO map leads the reader to associate the mappamundi with the numerous cosmic diagrams of the ‘Liber Floridus’ in which TO maps are drawn in the centre, thus placing the mappamundi in both a cosmic and Christian perspective, as suggested in particular by the drawing of the cosmos surmounted by Christ in majesty. History is another one of the central themes in the ‘Liber Floridus’. Lambert not only deals with universal history, the history of Salvation and the history of the Crusades,⁶¹ but also with regional and local history. He shows great interest in the history of the north-west part of Europe (Normandy, England) and Flanders, where he  See Obrist (note 36).  Barbara Obrist, Démontrer, montrer l’évidence visuelle. Les figures cosmologiques, de la fin de l’Antiquité à Guillaume de Conches et au début du XIIIe siècle, in: Lutz/ Jerjen/ Putzo (note 35), pp. 45 – 78. It should be noted however that Lambert creates diagrams that unite astronomical knowledge and theological ideas. This is the case in particular in the diagram on folio 226r, where he offers a theological description of the celestial spheres. On this point see the analysis of Müller (note 35), p. 199.  Lambert played a role in the production and transmission of the ‘Gesta Francorum Hierusalem expugnantium’, which are the fruit of the collaboration between Lambert and monks of Saint Bertin as Derolez has shown, see Albert Derolez, The Abbey of Saint-Bertin, the Liber Floridus and the Origin of the ‘Gesta Francorum Hierusalem expugnantium’, in: Manuscripta 57 (2013), pp. 1– 28.

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lives and where he hears the echoes that reverberate from the wider world.⁶² In fact, the mappamundi, the map of Europe, the TO map at the beginning of the manuscript and the plan of Jerusalem all have a subtle connection with history. Of course, their accounts are not explicitly historical (their principal function is to depict the geography of the orbis terrarum) but their placement in the manuscript illustrates the link between history and geography, the link between the knowledge of the world and the sovereignty over the world, and the question of the settlement of the orbis terrarum. One example is the TO map with the lists of nations extracted from the ‘Cosmographia’ of Pseudo-Aethicus. As I have previously noted, it is located before two diagrams dedicated to the Ages of the World. Although Derolez believed otherwise, the TO map is in an appropriate location in the manuscript because it shows the space of history and the settlement of the orbis terrarum: this is why Lambert names only the nations on the map, at least in Europe and Asia and not the rivers, towns etc., that he could have found in the ‘Cosmographia’.⁶³ The main purpose of the map is to associate the ‘geography’ of the gentes with the Ages of the World; Lambert also links the division of space between the gentes to the division of time, which is shown on the diagrams of the Ages of the World. The geographical list in the form of a map establishes the framework in which the history of mankind takes place. In addition, this aspect is reinforced in the Wolfenbüttel manuscript, where the copyist placed the TO map above the illustration of the six Ages of the World.⁶⁴ The explanation for the position of the mappamundi in the manuscript is a bit more complicated. The mappamundi in the Ghent manuscript was at first associated with geographical elements on fol. 47v–53r.⁶⁵ Lambert then transferred the map to another location, which can be identified today by means of the Wolfenbüttel manuscript (which probably reflects the state of the autograph manuscript when the Wolfenbüttel codex was copied from it). Derolez has shown, almost certainly correctly,  On the role of history in the ‘Liber Floridus’, particularly local history, see Albert Derolez, British and English History in the Liber Floridus, in: id (ed.), Liber Floridus Colloquium (note 1), pp. 59 – 70; Raoul Charles van Caenegem, The Sources of Flemish History in the ‘Liber Floridus’, in: id. et al. (eds.), Law, History, the Low Countries and Europe, London 1994, pp. 71– 95.  In Africa, Lambert notes that the gentes are numerous but impossible to enumerate and to understand because of vast deserts. This comment, which explains the absence of the gentes in Africa and the decision to place the names of the Roman provinces, derives from the Cosmographia of PseudoAethicus (ed. Alexander Riese, Geographi latini minors, Heilbronn 1878, pp. 71– 103, here p. 90).  Wolfenbüttel, Ms Gudeanus lat. 1 (note 6), fol. 5v.  The map was first located with a set of texts dedicated to geography, fol. 47v–53r (fol. 47v: De gentium vocabuli; fol. 48r–49r: De provintiis mundi; fol. 49r–49v: Gentes Asiae, Europae et Africae. Nomina a regnis et regibus vel a situ regnorum gentibus imposita; fol. 49v–50r: De civitatibus: fol. 50r–51r: Marcianus Felix Capella de gentibus diversis et monstris; fol. 51r: Asiae urbium antiqua nomina nunc vero mutata; fol. 51v: De insulis, fol. 51v: Regnorum irrigatio. De paradisi fluuiis; fol. 52r: image of paradise; fol. 52v: Flumina orientis. Flumina occidentis. Flumina oceani septentrionalis. Flumina oceani meridiani. De tribus mundi partibus; fol. 53r De fluviis et fontibus et lacis. De creaturis diversis). The loss of a quire has made some of the geographical texts disappear, especially the chapter intitulated De V famosis civitatibus and the beginning of the De provinciis mundi.

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that this new location is the result of a lack of parchment.⁶⁶ If we consider the texts that follow the map,⁶⁷ we can see that with them, Lambert forged a new link between maps and local history. On the verso of the map, he added lists of terms related to the geography of Flanders, a list of the relics of saints venerated in Flanders, and a list of rulers; by means of these Lambert displays the history of Flanders and the counts of Flanders. Furthermore, the name Morini (the ancient name of the inhabitants of Flanders) is written on the map, which is unusual; it shows Lambert’s particular interest in his region. Certainly, the mappamundi was first conceived in relation to geographical elements on fol. 47v–53r. But when Lambert was led to modify the structure of the manuscript, he chose to introduce an additional historical meaning to the map. The map of Europe has the same type of relocation. Because of the red line on the map that delimits the boundaries of the Carolingian empire, Derolez thinks that the map was first facing fol. 216v, in the historical part of the text that deals with the division of this empire.⁶⁸ This was the first purpose of the map, but its new location now also associates the map with lists of rulers: a list of bishops appears before the map (fol. 240v), while a list of rulers (especially kings, popes and Carolingian emperors) follows. To some extent, Lambert had already established this association between the list of rulers and geographical data. Indeed, the geographical elements collected by Lambert on fol. 47r–53r (where the mappamundi was originally located) are preceded by a list of bishops of the regions of the world (De provinciarum episcopatibus), which created an association between the lists of rulers and geographical data. The two locations both link the maps to history and, above all, to lists of rulers; thus, a second focus appears: the current location of the regional map of Europe establishes a connection with the idea of sovereignty. And if we accept the idea that the whole manuscript makes implicit—and sometimes explicit—connections among its parts, then the reader can relate it to other images which express the same idea: the representation of Augustus with a TO map in his left hand (fol. 138v), which is associated with the text that evokes the edict ordering the census of the whole world,⁶⁹ and the image showing Christ in Majesty sitting on top of the whole universe with a TO map in the middle (now missing from the autograph manuscript). The first image is characteristic of a conception of the world where imperial sovereignty  “One might suppose that the reverse of the map was blank and that the author needed the blank parchment in order to write the additional chapters under discussion”, Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 116. On the contrary, Hanna Vorholt suggests that the location of the mappamundi in the Wolfenbüttel manuscript could be a choice made by the Wolfenbüttel’s scribe, and that Lambert never moved the mappamundi. It is, of course, a possibility, albeit difficult to prove, see Vorholt (note 1), p. 75.  In the Wolfenbüttel manuscript, as the entire quire has disappeared from the Ghent manuscript.  Derolez, The Making (note 2), p. 169.  On fol. 138v, the image is situated between the description of the fifth and the sixth age. The text encircling the depiction quotes the Bible: Exiit edictum a Cesare Augusto ut describeretur universus orbis (Luc., 2, 1) and Octavianus Augustus viii idus ianuarii clausit portas lani.

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brings peace and prosperity and increases geographical knowledge of the world through the conquest of the entire orbis terrarum. The second one evokes a sovereignty of another kind, that of Jesus Christ over the whole of creation. Time and space are thus linked in the ‘Liber Floridus’, as are secular history and the history of salvation. The Apocalypse is another essential aspect of the ‘Liber Floridus’, which gives the book its overall meaning. Lambert conceives of it as a historical event, not a symbolic one. As several researchers have already noted, Lambert wondered if the Apocalypse has already begun. Two recent facts seemed to attest to this: the successful crusade and the conflict between popes and emperors.⁷⁰ The foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is interpreted by Lambert (and others) as the sign of the fulfilment of the prophecy: in Lambert’s mind, he is living in the end of the sixth and last age of history. The idea of the Apocalypse is present in the maps. The two prophets Enoch and Elijah are mentioned in Paradise on the mappamundi. ⁷¹ This is a surprising choice: when a mappamundi represents Paradise—and not all of them do—it is usually Adam and Eve who are most often (but not always) depicted there, not Enoch and Elijah. The two prophets are important Hebrew Bible figures. Neither knew death, and their ascents to Paradise prefigure the Second Coming of the Christ.⁷² As usual with Lambert, this choice can be explained by the texts in his book. They include two chapters devoted to the Antichrist, extracted from the ‘Revelations’ of Pseudo-Methodius and from Adso of Montier-en-Der, in which the two prophets are mentioned.⁷³ Thus, according to Pseudo-Methodius and Adso, the prophets will play an important role announcing the Second Advent of the Christ, the conversion of the Jews and the struggle against the Antichrist. Another detail of the map can be associated with the work of Pseudo-Methodius: the text mentions the nations enclosed by Alexander that will be released at the end of time. By drawing Enoch and Elijah in Paradise and the nations enclosed by Alexander, Lambert gives an eschatological significance to his mappamundi. In addition, Lambert undertakes a systematic Christianization of the scientific notions he reads in Macrobius. On the Macrobian world map on fol. 225r, he puts Jer-

 Verhelst (note 9); Rubenstein (note 10).  On Apocalypse in medieval cartography, see Alessandro Scafi, Mapping the End. The Apocalypse in Medieval Cartography, in: Literature and Theology 26/4 (2012), pp. 400 – 416.  On the iconography and symbolic meaning of Elijah and Enoch, see Xavier Barral i Altet, Elie et Enoch gardiens du sanctuaire, in: Sylvie Perpestraete/ Monique Weis (eds.), Des saints et des martyrs. Hommage à Alain Dierkens, Brussels 2018, pp. 26 – 38.  Ghent, Ms 92 (note 6), fol. 108v–110r and fol. 217r–220r. On these eschatological treatises and the modifications made by Lambert, see Verhelst (note 9), pp. 299 – 305. Modern edition, translation and presentation of Pseudo-Methodius in Benjamin Gastard (ed.), Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. An Alexandrian World Chronicle, Cambridge 2012. Besides, Bede himself deals with the question of the Apocalypse and mentions the two prophets in his ‘De temporum ratione’, see Beda Venerabilis, Opera VI, 2. Opera didascalica: De temporum ratione, ed. Charles W. Jones (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 123B), Turnhout 1977, pp. 538 – 539.

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usalem in the middle of the orbis terrarum (which is not always the case on the detailed mappamundi, and even more rare on the Macrobian maps). Lambert nearly always uses the term “sons of Adam” to refer to the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone, which is an indirect reference to Augustine, for whom this formulation is linked to that of the oneness of humankind.⁷⁴ On the map on fol. 24v, the southern temperate zone is said to be unknown to the humans nostrum generis (which is the term used by Macrobius) while in the northern one, God has placed Adam and Eve.⁷⁵ And the diagram on fol. 92v–93v takes us back to the eschatological context. In the depiction of the orbis terrarum, we find names that allude to such a context, Babylon, and Gog and Magog. These names, written in black ink, were added later, which suggests that Lambert wanted to reinforce the apocalyptic significance of the map. A text in the lower left part of the diagram says that the elements that make up the earth will not be destroyed but will be transformed into something better, and that only the image of the world, not its substance, will disappear.⁷⁶ This quotation, from The ‘Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum’, by Gennadius of Marseilles, often falsely attributed to Augustine, evokes the future of the world at the end of time, the disappearance of the world, and the birth of a better new one.⁷⁷ Once again, Lambert associates the map and the end of the world. Another occurrence of the same sentence in the interior of a diagram (fol. 228v) expressing the cosmic relationships (among the four seasons, the four elements, the four temperaments and the planets) again recalls the eschatological framework of the description of the universe.

Conclusion In the ‘Liber Floridus’, Lambert develops a recursive process of association through his series of drawings and texts and the repetition of the same themes from one context to another. He uses this associative thinking to combine disparate elements to evoke the coherence of the world and the harmony of the Creation. Thus, he creates a dialogue among the parts of the ‘Liber Floridus’, which seem incoherent at first sight, but on deeper examination are very coherent. Seen in this way, the maps and the cosmographic diagrams play a key role, because they unite the materiality of the world—that is to say the arrangement of the cosmos, the relationship of heaven and earth, and the history of mankind—with the spiritual future of all of Creation. The way in which the maps are composed reflects this unified purpose, as does the rela-

 Ghent, Ms 92 (note 7), fol. 225r: Zona australis filiis Adae incognita temperata antipodarum,  Ibid., fol. 24v: Zona septentrionalis habitabilis nostra est. In hac posuit Deus Adam and Euam.  Ibid., fol. 92v: Elementa mundi, id est coelum et teram, non credamus abolenda per ignem sed in melius commutanda, figuram mundi, id est imaginem, non substantiam transituram.  See Cuthbert H. Turner, The ‘Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum’ attributed to Gennadius, in: The Journal of Theological Studies 25 (1905), pp. 78 – 99; id., The ‘Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum’. Supplenda to the J.T.S. vii. 78 – 99, in: The Journal of Theological Studies 29 (1906), pp. 103 – 114.

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tionship between the texts and the images, not only on the manuscript page, but also throughout the whole book, in which the same themes are regularly repeated. Lambert ably deploys different ways of presenting information. For the representation of space, he skilfully handles list, description, and map. However, the maps play a distinctive role in the ‘Liber Floridus’, as they have a wide range of meaning and can be moved to other locations in the manuscript without losing their relevance. Lambert is particularly conscious of the mutatio temporum, as his map of Europe, his TO map, and even the world map show. The drawing of Paradise with Enoch and Elijah evokes of course the arrival of the Apocalypse, but also implies that the world contemplated by the readers represents one age (of several) of the history of the Creation, and that this age will soon come to an end. Another characteristic feature of the ‘Liber Floridus’ is the systematic Christianization of the Platonic cosmos, by the addition of place names associated with sacred history on the maps, in particular those of Macrobius and by the correlations Lambert makes between the different maps and cosmic diagrams of his autograph manuscript. Even diagrams that do not have signs of the Christianization of space make sense in the context of his eschatological thinking, which itself must underlie any reading or interpretation of the ‘Liber Floridus’.⁷⁸ Lambert seeks to reconcile the neo-Platonic cosmos with the history of salvation. By means of the use of diagrams and maps, he offers the reader a way to contemplate the cosmic order created by God. But some aspects of the ‘Liber Floridus’ elude complete understanding, or, at least, they generate ambiguous readings. Thus, there is a contradiction between the notion of the orbis terrarum inhabited by the sons of Adam (a formulation that reflects the oneness of humankind) and the idea of the possible existence of the Antipodes (according to the philosophi) who remain completely unknown and unattainable to mankind (at least for those located in the southern hemisphere). If they exist, how can salvation be offered to them? More serious still is the problem that arises if they never have access to the divine word. According to Scripture, the salvation of humanity can take place only after evangelization is complete; if the Antipodes are never reached, salvation cannot occur. One solution to this problem is proposed two centuries later by the astronomer Barthelemy of Parma. In a book entitled ‘Liber Philosophiae Boethi in quo continetur multa secreta philosophorum’, he discusses the question of the habitation of the globus terrae. He admits the impossibility of moving between the two hemispheres, but clearly suggests that, at the end of time, the transmutation of heaven and earth could make it possible.⁷⁹ In this case,

 For example, the astronomical section (quire XII) opens on the Apocalyptic-Cosmological Composition (fol. 88r), centred on a Christ in majesty surrounded by four circles representing the four elements, thus creating a Christian framework in which astronomical drawings are understood.  Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. cl. VI, LXVIII (= 2551), fol. 45v, col. 2: Bene quidem reperitur in evangelico celum et terra transibunt id est transmutabuntur, ab uno esse in aliud esse et sic potest dici quod alter mundus fiet et alius mundus erit vel quod illi qui fuerint in una zona venient in alteram.

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the actual existence of the Antipodes is made possible, even if the word of God cannot yet reach them now, since it could reach them just before the end of the time. Of course, Lambert never expresses this idea in so many words. But his inventive approach to cartography, founded in associative logic expressed in graphic form, invites the reader to question the structure of the world and its future at the end of time.

Kurt Franz

The Divine in Yāqūt’s ‘Lexicon of Peopled Places’ A Reduction Abstract: This article raises the question to what extent the faith and religious knowledge of a Muslim geographical author necessarily affects the character and meaning of his work. The famed multi-volume ‘Lexicon of Peopled Places’ by the Ayyūbid-period encyclopaedist and literary scholar Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 626/1229) is taken for a case-study. It is argued that while the work’s preface provides a religious framing through notions of the Divine and an ingeniously related motif of the author’s own, scilicet journeying, these notions prove to have little effect in the introductory chapters and even less in the incomparably larger lexicon proper. Based first on an analysis of the lexicon’s strict formal regularity due to its alphabetical arrangement, and second on exemplary close reading of a randomized sample text, it is shown that the author allows the article division to have a disruptive and neutralizing effect on the religious meaningfulness of geographical matters. While moving the focus into other interests not pre-announced in the prolegomena, Yāqūt reduces the weight of his early framings and instead indicates an approach that can tentatively be understood as humanist and cosmopolitan. Keywords: Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, place names, lexicography, encyclopaedism, Islam, scientification

I Introduction It seems compelling to conflate geographies in Arabic by Muslim authors under the heading ‘Islamic geography’, especially when, like in the present anthology, the purpose is to put Latin European and Middle Eastern developments in context. With regard to mediaeval times, it is certainly admissible to broadly indicate in this manner a book’s provenance from the then lands of Islam, as well as its language, be it Arabic, Persian, or later on Ottoman Turkish. Any further use of ‘Islamic’ is, nevertheless, worth questioning. Would a writer’s faith determine, or even merely inspire or delimit, the attitude and meaning of his work? Would a Muslim’s geographical statements necessarily be framed by religious understandings at all? In particular, what place do notions of the Divine take in this literature – the Divine understood as

Prof. Dr. Kurt Franz, University of Tübingen, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, Department for Oriental and Islamic Studies, Wilhelmstraße 113, 72074 Tübingen, Germany, [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-005

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God’s presence and workings in the world He created – and how do such notions mould the geographical knowledge enshrined in it? These concerns have so far been discussed first of all with regard to the descriptive geographical literature of the third and fourth centuries after the Hijra (ninth and tenth centuries CE) deemed classical.¹ Much exciting research has focused on works of this period that on the one hand, subscribe to the non-religious framing of ancient Greek and Indian scientific investigation, while on the other, they are commonly saturated with Islamic religious traditions, in many cases limit their scope to the lands under Muslim rule, and often promote the centrality of the mamlakat al-islām (‘Dominion, Realm of Islam’) in the world.² However, the results of studies on literature of this nature cannot foreshadow whether later geographical writings are likewise charged with religious beliefs and their derived concepts. In fact, the Islamic Middle Period – spanning in terms of political history the centuries of Fāṭimid, Ayyūbid, and Mamlūk rule in the Middle East (969 – 1517 CE) – brought about changes that inevitably challenged the attitudes of geographical writers: a transition from caliphate to first schism and then sultanic domination; the emergence of a large-scale Islamic education system fostering novel social dynamics and diversification; and at the same time, the consolidation of Sunnite orthodoxy and the sustained region-wide establishment of Islamic civilization, with the older religious communities finally being reduced to minority status.³ Our concern is here with one of the chief works of this period’s geographical writing from the Middle East, indeed one that does not exactly nourish ideas of a simple correlation between faith and literary production. In the interdisciplinary setting of this volume, a word on this book and its author may not be undue. The ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’ or ‘Lexicon of Peopled Places’⁴ is a multi-volume work of mixed content that in three respects overshadows anything else written on geographical matters in Arabic or any other language of Islam (if not in world literature): size,  See the seminal portrayal of this literature by André Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle, 4 vols. (Civilisations et sociétés 7, 37, 68, 78), Paris 1967– 1975/Den Haag 1980 – 1988.  For mamlakat al-islām, see ibid., vol. 2; vol. 4, ch. I–III.  See Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols., Chicago 1974, vol. 3, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods.  The editio princeps and up to today the only critical edition is Jacut’s geographisches Wörterbuch, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, 6 vols., Leipzig 1866 – 1873 (in the following cited as “Yāqūt”), including commentary (vol. 5) and indexes (vol. 6). Its Middle Eastern re-editions lack the apparatus, and the few emendations that one or another of them contributes go unspecified and are thus hard to spot. English version of the prolegomena (vol. 1, pp. 1– 54): Wadie Jwaideh (tr.), The Introductory Chapters of Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-Buldān, Leiden 1959 (in the following cited as “trans.”). The only other translation into a Western language of some considerable length focuses on Iran: Charles Barbier de Meynard (tr.), Dictionnaire géographique, historique et littéraire de la Perse et des contrées adjacentes, Paris 1861. Principal subsidia: F. Justus Heer, Die historischen und geographischen Quellen in Jāqūt’s Geographischem Wörterbuch, Strasburg 1898; O. Reşer (i.e. Oskar Rescher), Sachindex zu Wüstenfeld’s Ausgabe von Jâqût’s ‘muʿǧam el-buldân’, Stuttgart 1928.

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comprehensiveness, and usability. In the words of the author, “This is a book on the names of peopled places (buldān); on mountains, valleys, and plains; on villages, post-houses, and dwellings; on seas, rivers, and lakes; on idols, graven images, and objects of heathen worship”.⁵ Being the most outstanding and influential representative of the small group of dictionaries in the field of Muslim geographical knowledge, the ‘Lexicon’ is indispensable for the study of Islamic geography and also history. Strangely enough, its fame for content-quality and intense scholarly use have helped to attract attention neither to its composition and literary character nor to its conceptual foundations and bearings. In which ways and to what extent religious notions have made an impact on the book has thus remained unexplored. Shihāb al-Dīn Abū ʿAbdallāh Y ā q ū t b. ʿAbdallāh (574/1178 – 9 or 575/1179 – 80 to 626/1229) was an encyclopaedist and literary scholar. Apparently originating from Byzantine (Rhomaian) Asia Minor – which is why he was he was also called al-Rūmī – he had been enslaved at a young age. Receiving the slave name Yāqūt (‘sapphire’, or ‘hyacinth’), he served a Baghdad-based merchant with roots in the Syrian town of Ḥamāh (Emessa) because of which further epithets of his are al-Baghdādī and al-Ḥamawī. He was manumitted in 596/1199 and then made his livelihood first as a copyist and then as a travelling book merchant. Moving across al-ʿIrāq, Iran, the Gulf and Oman, al-Jazīra, Kurdistan, Khurāsān, Khwārazm, historical greater Syria, and Egypt, he seized the opportunity to spend years with scholarly teachers and in libraries in some of the major centres of Islamic learning, notably Damascus, Mosul, Marw, and Aleppo, until he became himself an erudite private scholar.⁶ At some point, he took on the religious honorific name Shihāb al-Dīn (‘Flame of Religion’) and lastly, after having become famous, also the religious personal name Yaʿqūb (Yaaqov, Jacob) as if to make his inglorious origins as slave and convert forgotten.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 1, trans. (note 4), p. 1.  His biography is detailed in particular by Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 646/1248), Inbāh al-ruwāh ʿalá anbāh alnuḥāh, ed. Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm, 4 vols., Cairo 1369 – 1393/1950 – 1973, vol. 4, pp. 74– 79, no. 840; Ibn al-Shaʿʿār al-Mawṣilī (d. 654/1256), Book on the Poets of the Age. Qalāʾid al-jumān fī farāʾid shuʿarāʾ hādhā ’l-zamān, ed. Fuat Sezgin, Facs., 8 vols. (Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Sciences, Series C 51), Frankfurt/Main 1990, vol. 7 (pt. 9), pp. 339 – 349; and Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282), Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās, 8 vols., Beirut 1968 – 1972, vol. 6, pp. 127– 139, no. 790. English version: Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, tr. William MacGuckin de Slane, 4 vols. (Oriental Translation Fund 59), Paris 1843 – 1871, vol. 4, pp. 9 – 24. See also Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, Jâcût’s Reisen, aus seinem geographischen Wörterbuche beschrieben, in: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 18 (1864), pp. 397– 493; id., Der Reisende Jâcût als Schriftsteller und Gelehrter, in: Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften und der Georg-Augusts-Universität aus dem Jahre 1865, pp. 233 – 243 (see pp. 238 – 240 for the dating of the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’); Rudolf Sellheim, Neue Materialien zur Biographie des Yāqūt, in: Wolfgang Voigt (ed.), Forschungen und Fortschritte der Katalogisierung der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland. Marburger Kolloquium 1965, Wiesbaden 1966, pp. 87– 118, pls. XI–XXXIV, here pp. 92– 109. In brief, Claude Gilliot, Yāḳūt al-Rūmī, in: The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 11 (2002), pp. 264b–266b.

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In confessional affairs, he took a rather unusual stand. He had early become acquainted with the writings of the Khārijite variety of Islam – a religious-political faction that promoted a specific model of legitimate power and thereby had tremendous social revolutionary vigour – and sympathized with their ideas. In accordance with that, criticism of the Shia, the party of ʿAlī, proved to be a particular concern of his. Yet there is so far no clear evidence of factionalism in the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’.⁷ In 613/ 1216, when Yāqūt confronted a partisan of the Shia in dispute in a Damascus market, he spoke so disparagingly of ʿAlī that a tumult was sparked, due to which he was officially persecuted. He thus took to flight, only to settle down again for an extended stay when he arrived at Marw in Khurāsān (now Turkmenistan).⁸ It was in that town’s splendid libraries, in 615/1218 – 9, that he made designs to create a ‘muʿjam albuldān’.⁹ Having worked on this book for the better part of a decade in Mosul and Aleppo, Yāqūt had a full draft version and part of a fair copy ready when he died in the latter town in 626/1229. While a thorough study of the work’s circulation is still a desideratum,¹⁰ an impression can be gained from later Arabic literature that it did not immediately become very widespread. However, from the fact that more than 40 sets of (mostly) multi-volume manuscripts are preserved to this day,¹¹ spanning from 651 H. (1254 CE)¹² to at least 1278 H. (1861– 2 CE),¹³ we learn that the book became a steady long-term seller. It is composed of three highly unequal parts: Preface: Introduction: Lexicon:

13 pp. of printed text on methodology, not subdivided¹⁴ 41 ” ” ” ” in five thematic chapters¹⁵ 3,836 ” ” ” ” in 12,953 alphabetically arranged articles¹⁶

 Yāqūt is evasive about any Khārijite inclination of his, an issue not yet researched in full. The most significant evidence of such a tendency is reported by Ibn Khallikān (notes 6, 8). See also the appreciative account of the Khārijites of Sijistān in Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 3, pp. 42– 43 s.v. S i j i s t ā n .  Ibn Khallikān (note 6), vol. 6, pp. 127– 128, trans. (note 6), vol. 4, p. 10.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 6, trans. (note 4), p. 8.  But see Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, 2nd ed., 2 vols., Leiden 1943 – 1949, vol. 1, pp. 630 – 632 (1st ed. pp. 479 – 481); 3 suppl. vols., ibid., 1937– 1942, vol. 1, p. 880; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 17 vols. and index vol., Leiden 1976 – 1984/Frankfurt/ Main 1995 – 2015, vol. 15, Anthropogeographie. Teil 2, Frankfurt/Main 2010, pp. 35 – 36.  My own unpublished survey.  Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. or. We. 1091. Eighth volume (of ten), F–Q (F ā b i j ā n – Q a y n i y y a ). Dated to twenty-five years after the work was written, this codex is certainly based on one of the earliest copies of the autograph. See Wilhelm Ahlwardt, Verzeichniss der arabischen Handschriften, vol. 5 (Die Handschriften-Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin 17), Berlin 1893, pp. 366b–367a, no. 6041; Sezgin (note 10), vol. 15, p. 36.  Mosul, Maktabat al-awqāf al-ʿāmma, Ms. Nashʾa 11. First third of the work; it is unclear to me why Sezgin (note 10), vol. 15, p. 36, refers to it as the fourth and final volume, Q–Y. See Sālim ʿAbd al-Razzāq Aḥ mad, Fihris makhṭūṭāt Maktabat al-awqāf al-ʿāmma fī al-Mawṣil, 2nd ed., 9 vols., Baghdad 1400 – 1403/1980 – 1982, vol. 6, p. 356, no. 11.

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Together, preface and introductory chapters make up what will be referred to in the following as the work’s prolegomena. Their share in the overall volume of the work is 1/75, while the articles amount to 74/75. However, the preliminaries generally are the very place for an author to take up positions and put forward any programmatic stance visibly. This is particularly true in this case, since the form of a lexicon with its alphabetical arrangement of content is by nature hostile to making oneself heard with any special agenda. It is therefore appropriate to look into each of the three principal parts in its own right. We shall therefore consider, first, in Sections II and III, the role of the Divine and other religious notions in the two opening parts. Whether any such conceptual statements materialize in the lexicon proper, too, is an open question, to be discussed in Section IV. There we will face the quantitative imbalance between the manageable introductory pages and the massive size of the subsequent body of articles. That the lexicon part is much too voluminous to be captured in toto raises of course an analytical issue. We will approach the task on the one hand by assessing characteristic formal features, and on the other by investigating a set of randomized specimen articles by way of examples.

II The Author’s Preface The opening section of the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’, before the rule of the alphabet commences, comprises an untitled author’s preface and second, under the heading of the book’s title, five introductory thematic chapters (of which we have a commendable translation into English by Wadie Jwaideh).¹⁷ Counting in print 13 plus 42 pages,¹⁸ these prolegomena are a candidate for the most extensive introduction to any Arabic, and indeed any Muslim, book ever written on geographical matters. We hence may with some justice expect to find an extraordinarily thorough exposition of the author’s intentions and methods as well as the book’s framing concepts. Immediately upon the usual, and in fact obligatory, invocation of God, the author indeed establishes a conceptual framework in religious terms. He ingeniously adopts general Islamic understandings of God to the specific purpose of justifying the present book to its readership.

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 1– 13, trans. (note 4), pp. 1– 18. No heading.  Ibid., pp. 13 – 55, trans. (note 4), pp. 19 – 79, including five uncounted sheets with one illustration each. Headed by the book title.  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 55 to vol. 4, p. 1047. Complete manuscripts range between 1,550 pages (Saint Petersburg, Institut vostochnȳ kh rukopiseĭ Rossiĭskoĭ Akademii nauk, C 588/1– 2) and 2,890 pages (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms ar. 6600 – 6603). The article count is that of Farīd ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Jundī’s edition (7 vols., Beirut 1410/1990).  See above, note 4.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 1– 13 and pp. 13 – 55.

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In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful PRAISE BE to God who has made the earth like unto an expanse and the mountains like unto stakes, and spread therefrom peaks and gorges, deserts and towns; who has caused rivers to gush forth through the land, and streams and seas to flow; and who has guided His creatures to take dwellings unto themselves and to construct well-made buildings and homes. Whereupon they have raised edifices and founded cities, carved habitations out of mountains, and contrived wells and cisterns. He has made their eagerness to raise that which they have raised and to build that which they have built, a warning to the heedless and an example to following generations. He said, and He is the most truthful of sayers: “Have they not journeyed (yasīrū) through the land and beheld the end of those before them who were more numerous than they and mightier in strength, and who left a greater mark upon the earth? Yet all that of which they possessed themselves availed them not”. (Sura 40:82)¹⁹

These and the following lines subscribe to a set of indisputable monotheistic doctrines in their Islamic garments: the existence of an eternal yet acting Creator-god who devotes His creation to the welfare of man, in whom He sparked the impetus to make use of its opportunities, and upon whom He bestowed His guidance how to subdue the earth. More specifically, in the subsequent lines, the purposeful nature of this world pairs with God’s warning to the heedless (non-Muslims) and an example to the (Muslims’) progeny. Yāqūt next confirms, along the lines of Islamic teachings, the superiority of Muḥammad over the preceding prophets and apostles, thus implying the pre-eminence of Islam over the deprecated Jewish and Christian confessions. However, the quoted Quranic verse (from the late Meccan period of revelation)²⁰ stress a different demarcation – namely between those (among Muḥammad’s fellow-Meccans) who were receptive to the divine message, and those who remained obstinate – but the contained motif of journeying comes in handy. With its help, Yāqūt prepares to draw a line from revelation to geography as he conceives it. The quoted Quranic verse parallels the contemporary disbelievers’ actual roaming the countryside with the life journey of preceding generations; it compares the poor use which these contemporaries make of creation to the greater achievements of the forefathers regarding strength and a “mark upon the earth”. While transecting the country would have allowed the first to gather understanding and hence submit readily to Islam, their continued scepticism will finally – on the Day of Judgement – make them suffer damage, i.e. be lost, a fate that even hindsight will be unable to prevent. Two more Quranic verses are given that take the same line so as to accen-

 Ibid., p. 1, trans. (note 4), p. 1. All given numbers of Quranic verses pertain to the ‘Kufan’ count of the Quran’s Cairene official edition of 1342/1924 while any varying verse references of Jwaideh’s (note 4) – which are to the edition of Gustav Flügel (Corani textus Arabicus, Leipzig 1834) and the English version of Arthur J. Arberry (The Koran Interpreted, 2 vols., London 1955) – are added in square brackets.  According to Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorāns, 3 vols., 2nd ed., rev. by Theodor Schwally and continued by Gotthelf Bergsträsser/Otto Pretzl, Leipzig 1909 – 1938, vol. 2, p. 153.

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tuate the motif. Yāqūt is moreover anxious to impose his somewhat shifted spatial interpretation upon the reader through paraphrase: “Have they not journeyed (yasīrū) through the land? And have they not hearts to understand with, or ears to hear with? Surely as to these things their eyes are not blind, but the hearts which are within their breasts are blind”. (22:46 [45])²¹ This is a reproof to him who has journeyed (sāra) through the world and has not heeded the warning, and to him who has contemplated the departed centuries and has not been deterred. “Say: Journey (sīrū) through the land and behold the manner in which the disbelievers have met their end”. (6:11)²² In other words, consider how their dwelling places were razed, all traces of them obliterated, and their lights extinguished in punishment for disregarding His commandments and transgressing against His prohibitions.²³

Yāqūt’s express claim that his obligation to write the present book was induced and guided by the Quran itself ²⁴ thus seems to extend even to the journeying motif. An unscriptural Islamic tradition of one earlier prophet, Jesus Son of Mary (for which Yāqūt seems to be the first, if not the only, authority), is adduced not just to corroborate the motif but also expand the parallels to the peoples of antiquity: The world is a place of visitation (mathula) and an abode of transition (naqala). Be you then travellers (sayyāḥīn) in it, and take warning from what remains of the traces of the early ones.²⁵

In the same vein as the tradition of Jesus, still two more references to journeying (sayr, tanāwul) from early Islamic tradition as well as poetry are offered.²⁶ At last, it is unmistakably clear that the author presents a simile: Anyone’s actual journey exemplifies the journey of man through life on earth. Moreover, ignoring the lessons to be learnt from journeying will result in suffering the same fate of rise and decline that characterizes the Meccan disbelievers. We will see that some pages below this idea of ephemerality is enhanced with regard to entire civilizations. Roaming and understanding, finding one’s way on the ground and gaining insight into divine revelation have thus been elegantly associated. With this achieved, Yāqūt is ready to draw closer to the lexicon’s specific rationale and method, and he proceeds without ado: The means for seeing (various places, W. J.) may prove impossible of attainment, whereupon it becomes necessary to seek information pertaining thereto. It is therefore incumbent upon us to inform the Muslims of that which we know, and to come to their aid with that which God, in His beneficence, has bestowed upon us. Though the need for this particular knowledge is shared by

     

Late Meccan, too, according to Nöldeke et al. (note 20), vol. 1, p. 213. Again late Meccan. Ibid., p. 161. Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 2, trans. (note 4), pp. 1– 2. Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 1, trans. (note 4), p. 1. Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 2, trans. (note 4), p. 2. See Jwaideh’s fn. 5 on p. 2 of her translation. Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 2, trans. (note 4), pp. 2– 3.

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everyone who has had a measure of learning […], yet I have not come upon anyone who has emended the faulty nomenclature (of geography, W. J.; saqīm asmāʾihā) or who has felt himself equal to the task of rectifying information concerning the routes and regions pertaining to it (ḍaʿīf maqāṣidihā wa-anḥāʾihā).²⁷

In brief, specialist knowledge of places like his own shall help fill the gaps of the many who cannot travel. Most urgently required, Yāqūt holds, is accurate toponymy, first and foremost. Interest in that is not novel, and Yāqūt may have been informed that his predecessor al-Bakrī (see Sect. IV) had already dwelt on the necessity of that task. Without having had access to al-Bakrī’s book, Yāqūt expressly demonstrates the uses of toponymic precision in fresh ways over about the same number of lines.²⁸ As this is not the place to give a conspectus of Arabic geographical lexicography, it may suffice to say that Yāqūt later on in his articles indeed spent a greater and more consistent effort on the philology of place names than any other Muslim author before or after him. Moreover, corrections regarding routes and regions are needed, he says (this though is rather commonplace in introductions to books on geography). What is of interest to us in this place is that Yāqūt is hereby commencing a long exposition²⁹ that confronts the shortcomings of past and contemporary men of learning so as to justify his writing agenda while at the same time it contains no further references to the Divine as such. The sweeping series of arguments and evidentiary cases he puts forth, captivating even to the modern reader, exclusively strikes a scholarly chord. Yāqūt’s plea for philological precision lastly attains a larger dimension as the aforementioned motif of journeying is brought up again, now on a civilizational scale. The place names recorded by Plato, Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and their like, he says, may have been preserved but “the identity of these places remains a mystery to us, for they have fallen into oblivion with the passage of time and are now beyond recognition”.³⁰ This brings to mind the fate of “the early ones” in the aforementioned Christian tradition as well as that of the disbelievers among Muḥammad’s contemporaries (see above, Suras 40:82; 22:46 [45]; 6:11). Their having “met their end” (6:11) has already been paraphrased by Yāqūt thus (I repeat): “In other words, consider how their dwelling places were razed, all traces of them obliterated, and their lights ex-

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 2, trans. (note 4), p. 3.  Al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094), Kitāb Muʿjam mā staʿjam. Das geographische Wörterbuch des Abu ’Obeid ’Abdallah ben ’Abd el-’Azîz el-Bekrí, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, 2 vols., Göttingen, Paris 1876 – 1877, vol. 1, p. 3, l. 6 to p. 4, l. 17. Partial German version: Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, Die Wohnsitze und Wanderungen der Arabischen Stämme. Aus der Vorrede des Abu ’Obeid el-Bekrí zu seinem geographischen Wörterbuche, in: Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Historisch-philologische Classe 14 (1868 – 1869), pp. 93 – 172, here pp. 93 – 95 (offprint Göttingen 1869, pp. 5 – 7); Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 4, l. 12 to p. 6, l. 4, trans. (note 4), pp. 6 – 8.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 2– 6, trans. (note 4), pp. 3 – 8.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 7, trans. (note 4), p. 10.

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tinguished”.³¹ It is now understood that the parallelism between anyone’s actual journeying and man’s journey through life applies equally to the rise and fall of peoples and civilizations like the Greek one. But whereas before a religious interpretation was imminent, this time the lexicographical undertaking itself is the target point: The idea is that the waning of a civilization – any civilization – leaves verbal relicts of toponomy behind that literally may still be legible to posterity but are stripped of meaning. The general nagging ‘passage of time’, it goes without saying, applies to Arabs, too; and as the preceding pages on the recent confusion of place names have suggested, not even the Islamic period is exempt from such loss of knowledge. Making a lexicon of place names available, it shows, is a means to counteract transitoriness and prevent further civilizational loss. And so, the religious framing that opened the author’s preface turns out to be instrumental to a degree where Islam is not categorically different from previous civilizations as far as the impending oblivion of toponomy is concerned.

III The Introductory Chapters At this point, one might suppose that the religious aspects of the preface that do exist, although sidelined by other issues, would make an impact on the second section of the prolegomena. The five-part introduction offers ample opportunity to elaborate on religious notions as its 41 print pages make it three times as large as the preface. Since Yāqūt heads this section with the book’s title, ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’,³² he seems to suggest that the preliminaries are over and now the work proper is before the reader. Still he makes it clear, in the concluding lines of the preface, that the five chapters to follow are what he “put in front of the task” (qaddamtu amām alfarḍ).³³ Calling the body of articles a farḍ (“task”) evokes both the general notion of a task one is set to fulfil and, more specifically, a religious duty. Through these chapters, the book’s “benefits are enhanced and its bountifulness increased”.³⁴ At the transition from the preface to the introduction, an exposition of the contents is given that is more elaborate and instructive than the actual chapter headings in the text. It reads in full: Chapter I treats of the image of the earth, with an account of what the ancients have said regarding its shape and what we have transmitted from the moderns regarding its image. Chapter II treats of differences among writers concerning the definition of the word iqlīm (clime), its nature and its etymology, and the means of determining the qibla (direction of prayer) in every part of the world. Chapter III treats of the definition of terms recurring in this book, such as barīd, farsakh, mīl, kūra, and the like. Chapter IV treats of the interpretation of legal provisions governing

   

Yāqūt Yāqūt Yāqūt Yāqūt

(note (note (note (note

4), vol. 1, 4), vol. 1, 4), vol. 1, 4), vol. 1,

p. 2, trans. (note 4), p. 2. p. 13, l. 16, trans. (note 4), p. 18. p. 12, trans. and italics K. F. p. 12, trans. (note 4), p. 17.

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lands and countries conquered by the Muslims, as well as rules governing the division of fayʾ and kharāj in lands conquered by peace treaty or by compulsion. Chapter V treats of certain accounts of countries. In order to enhance the benefits of this book and enable the reader to dispense with other works on this subject, these accounts have not been confined to any one locality.³⁵

Re chapter I on the image of the earth. The chapter opens with some lines of Quranic quotations concerning the Creator-god (78:6 – 7; 40:64 [66]; 71:19 [18]),³⁶ dutifully cited only to embark immediately – with no transition – on a discussion of the history of astronomical and geographical sciences. It spans from ancient Greek authors’ (among whom Ptolemy is notable, plus one Persian) ideas of the shape of the earth to those of Muslim scholars, insisting throughout on the plurality of the models proposed. Further Quranic quotations concerning creation (65:12; 23:18)³⁷ and common-ground views such as, e.g., regarding the four streams that emerge from paradise,³⁸ are interspersed in the text, but carefully wrapped in references to scientific literature, notably al-Bīrūnī (d. 440/1048). Several lengthy extracts from his writings include diagrams of the earth’s spheres, and of the northern hemisphere.³⁹ So the chapter is in line with the origins of Arabic geography in second/eighth-century Baghdad under the impact, first of all, of Greek astronomy and mathematical geography. The acceptance of the transmission of ancient knowledge may be explained by the dearth of stories of origin that characterizes the Quran, and the inconsistency of the little it holds on cosmogony and cosmology. The Quran neither elaborates in detail on the two Biblical narrations of genesis nor supplants them with a consistent narration of its own, since, it has been remarked, it is after all not much interested in any systematic retrospect on creational origins but rather in the prospect of Divine salvation.⁴⁰ Quranic statements concerning the nature of mountains (16:15; 78:6 – 7) are also shown to be a matter of varying interpretation.⁴¹ We thus can learn from these comments that while God’s omnipresence in the world because of the creation act is of course undisputed, yet it is not a matter of scientific knowledge (in the sense of the ancient sciences), and hence it is nothing to draw conclusions from. While it is

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 12– 13, trans. (note 4), pp. 17– 18; romanization of terms K. F.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 13 – 14, trans. (note 4), p. 19.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 19 – 20, trans. (note 4), pp. 28 – 29.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 20, trans. (note 4), p. 29 with fn. 9.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 15 with fig. 1, pp. 15 – 16, pp. 20 – 21 with fig. 2, trans. (note 4), pp. 22, 22– 23, 30 – 32. Cf. al-Bīrūnī, The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology [= al-Tafḥīm li-awāʾil ṣināʿāt al-tanjīm], ed. and tr. R. Ramsay Right, London 1934, pp. 45 – 46, 118, 120 – 124 (according to Jwaideh’s notes), and al-Bīrūnī’s illustration p. 124, model to Yāqūt’s fig. 2. The author is referred to by Yāqūt as Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Khwārizmī and Abū al-Rayḥān.  See Angelika Neuwirth, Cosmology, in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, general ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 1 (2001), pp. 440a–458a, here p. 441b.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 22, trans. (note 4), p. 33.

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common for inconsistencies in scripture and tradition to seem to cause no feeling of insufficiency, one can get the impression of Yāqūt ridding himself nonchalantly of issues that he is not deeply concerned with. When next some folk narratives told by Muslim storytellers regarding the world’s creation and structure are repeated – for the sake of completeness, it appears – Yāqūt has no compunction about sharp words of rejection. He blames these narratives for “confusion and controversy, […] told with the object of awing the common people. These tales were composed in a manner commensurate with the mentality of the common people and have no basis in reason and traditional knowledge”.⁴² Clearly, the author and his addressees shall keep to reason (ʿaql) and traditional knowledge (naql). But as before, such tales are not too bizarre for him for not to resort to apologetic formulas like “God knows best”.⁴³ The discussion closes with the paradigmatic kind of tradition, those which concern Muḥammad’s life and sayings. Four Hadiths are quoted, the last one interpreting a Quranic verse. These Hadiths envisage God as He who directs clouds that produce a devastating flood against the unbelievers; indicate the altitude of the first heaven above the believers (i.e. “a walking distance of 500 years”) as well as the depth of the first earth of seven that are beneath this earth (“a walking distance of 700 years”); and state the presence of God in the lowermost of these seven earths.⁴⁴ Yāqūt concludes that “the wording of the tradition varies, but the meaning is the same”. What the precise meaning of this might be is not spelt out, nor is any comment or discussion launched – much in contrast to what precedes. After all, God’s property as the world’s creator is presented as a definite, though intransigent fact. Neither scripture nor oral transmission of the prophet’s lifetime provides a solid basis for understanding the world’s origin, composition, or qualities. Scientific knowledge as Yāqūt subscribes to it is instead characterized by diverse theoretizations, most of which even take their start from pre-Islamic foundations. Science, we learn, is an ongoing process rather than a set of permanent consensual achievements. It accordingly appears that the final Hadith references are not meant to deepen the discussion in this chapter but rather interrupt a tendency towards an agnostic position on the first things. With this in mind, already at this early stage of the book it is doubtful whether it will later on become a religiously inspired portrayal of geography. Re chapter II on the diversity of historic scholarly opinions. The examination of Greek and Persian heritage is continued when discussing the concept of iqlīm (Grk.

 Yāqūt (note 44), vol. 1, pp. 22– 24, trans. (note 4), pp. 32– 35. The author piously calls himself on this occasion “ʿUbayd Allāh”, God’s humble servant “who is in need of God”; Yāqūt (note 44), vol. 1, pp. 24, l. 5, trans. (note 4), p. 35.  Yāqūt (note 44), vol. 1, pp. 24, 36, trans. (note 4), pp. 33, 52.  Yāqūt (note 44), vol. 1, pp. 24– 25, including Sura 57:3, trans. (note 4), pp. 35 – 37.

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klíma, Per. kishwār), and again al-Bīrūnī figures most prominently.⁴⁵ In this chapter, various existing positions on etymology and meaning are presented, as before, in a pluralist way that sees no need to reconcile them. Then comes a description of the seven iqlīms according to their situation, of the lands and important cities comprised therein, their dimensions in miles and minutes, area in square miles, and association to the zodiac.⁴⁶ It is concluded by a diagram and verbal summary on the “Cities (buldān) belonging to Each of the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac”, derived from “certain zījs” (coordinates tables), but in fact from al-Bīrūnī alone.⁴⁷ In this way, geographical conditions are framed by astrology as a Graeco-Persian-based cosmology. The only genuine Islamic element comes with the diagram that is appended at the end of the chapter. It is the only one of the five illustrations included by Yāqūt in the introduction that invokes a religious concept. Similar to a compass rose, it groups the world’s major lands and cities in twelve principal miḥrābs (‘prayer niches’) – each representing a twelfth of the globe – and orients them towards the Kaaba as their centre point (Fig. 1). As the legendary foundation of that sanctuary by Abraham and Ishmael is common knowledge to Muslims, then and now, but unheeded by the other Abrahamic beliefs, we thus have here the token of a sacred geography that is Mecca-centric and genuinely Islamic. Moreover, six of the twelve symbolical prayer niches suggest an universal claim: the Kaaba is not just the navel of the Islamic parts but also of “what is beyond” (wa-mā warāʾa dhālika) since even the remotest lands – expressly including China, the islands of India, and the Atlantic Ocean (al-Ẓulumāt) – face the Meccan sanctuary, too.⁴⁸ This graphical Islamic framing has no complement in the text other than a simple mention of the Kaaba (al-Bayt al-Ḥaram, ‘The Sacred House’), and any elaboration of a Mecca-centred world view is prevented thus: “But this is a matter which bears further consideration”.⁴⁹ Also, the discussion of the qibla (direction of prayer) and how it is determined in every part of the world, announced above, is not carried out. Altogether, this panorama of opinions produces an inconclusiveness that denies readers any expectation to re-encounter any particular historic scholarly opinion as a guiding principle later on. Re chapter III on terminology. These paragraphs provide definitions and cultural background information, Islamic as well as pre-Islamic, for 26 termini technici

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 25 – 39 with fig. 3, trans. (note 4), pp. 38 – 43, redrawn from al-Bīrūnī, Bīrūnī’s Picture of the World [= Taḥdīd nihāyāt al-amākin li-taṣḥīḥ masāfāt al-masākin, part of alQānūn al-masʿūdī fī al-haiʾa wa-l-nujūm], ed. A. Zeki Valîdî Togan (Memoirs of the Archæological Survey of India 53), Delhi 1937, p. 61. See also al-Bīrūnī (note 39), illustration p. 142. Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 32 with fig. 4, trans. (note 4), pp. 42– 43, is quoted from al-Bīrūnī (note 399), pp. 137– 138.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 29 – 35, trans. (note 4), pp. 44– 51.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 35 – 36 with fig. 5, trans. (note 4), pp. 51– 52, quoted from, and drawn according to al-Bīrūnī (note 399), p. 220.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, fig. 5 opposite p. 36, trans. (note 4), p. 51.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 36, trans. (note 4), p 52.

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Fig. 1: Untitled illustration of the world’s twelve major prayer directions oriented towards the Meccan Kaaba (south on top). From Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, opposite p. 36. (Courtesy MENAdoc, Universitätsund Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle)

that are said to recur throughout the work.⁵⁰ Seven of them are metrological (barīd, farsakh, mīl, ṭūl, ʿarḍ, daraja, daqīqa),⁵¹ seven refer to units of political administration (kūra, iqlīm, mikhlāf, istān, rustāq, ṭassūj, jund),⁵² three denote highways (sikka) or towns (ābādh, miṣr),⁵³ and nine are of a fiscal nature, rooted in the Arab conquests (1st–2nd/7th–8th c.) and pertaining to the historic terms of towns’ surrender and the division of booty among the fighters (ṣulḥ, silm, ʿanwa, kharāj, fayʾ, ghanīma, ṣadaqa,  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 37– 48, trans. (note 4), pp. 53 – 67.  Postal stage, parasang, mile, longitude, latitude, arc degree, arc minute.  District, clime, tribal area (Yemen), province (Persia), district (Persia), subdistrict (Persia), military province.  Town (Persia), garrison town.

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khums, qaṭīʿa).⁵⁴ Especially with these fiscal terms, Hadith quotations are interspersed⁵⁵ and some Quranic analogies (2:208 [204]; 5:18 [21]; 23:72 [74]; 49:9; 59:6 – 7) are pointed out.⁵⁶ As they help to trace back some of the terms under review to original situations and events, nothing supernatural is invoked. Clearly, the character of these pages, serving as notes to the reader, is technical and explanatory. Re chapter IV on legal provisions. Here, the author fully immerses in the legal history of the first two centuries of Islam.⁵⁷ Throughout, Muḥammad’s deeds and sayings are the point of reference for the manifold discussions of Muslim scholars at a time when Islamic law and the professions of jurists had only begun to emerge (but were to unfold a most long-standing impact on the legal system of the lands of Islam). The discussion of kharāj, ṣadaqa, and other concepts introduced in chapter III is now continued by specifying legal provisions, notably when enumerating different kinds of tithe (ʿushr) and fifth (khums) lands and their historic backgrounds.⁵⁸ Yāqūt indulges in juridical specialist language and seems to take pride in laying out technical details. This legal shop-talking of his is suited to lend himself authority before the reader in a field of Islamic learning which he otherwise could not claim to be particularly educated in. Besides, dealing with religious law in two of the introductory chapters in a way prepares the ground, although tacitly, for the immense attention paid later on in the lexicon articles to the fuqahāʾ – religious-legal scholars – of the Islamic Middle East. Thus, it is the professional sphere of the jurists that frames these pages. Re chapter V “on some accounts of countries”. The final chapter of the introduction consists entirely of a series of unacknowledged quotations with no transitional comments. First come two fictitious historical dialogues between first/seventh-century Islamic rulers and a knowledgeable subject (taken from Ibn al-Faqīh, fl. ca. 290/ 903) concerning the character of the Arab population in various regions.⁵⁹ The judgements turn out disparaging but at the same time provide an amusing ambiguousness, such as, e.g., regarding the people of Syria: “Of all people, [they are] the

 Armistice, peace treaty, force(ful capture), land tax, spoils obtained with no use of force, forcibly obtained spoils, alms, fifth, tax-farming estate.  E.g., Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 38, 44, 45, trans. (note 4), pp. 54, 62– 63.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 43 – 45, trans. (note 4), pp. 61– 62.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 48 – 52, trans. (note 4), pp. 68 – 74.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 50 – 52, trans. (note 4), pp. 71– 74.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 52– 53, trans. (note 4), pp. 75 – 76. Cf. Ibn al-Faqīh, Compendium libri Kitâb al-boldân [= Mukhtaṣar kitāb al-Buldān], ed. Michael Jan de Goeje (Bibliotheca geographorum Arabicorum 5), Leiden 1885, pp. 114, 135, and for the latter narration also Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (d. 328/ 940), Kitāb al-ʿIqd al-farīd, ed. Aḥmad Amīn/Aḥmad az-Zain/Ibrāhīm al-Abyārī et al., 7 vols., Cairo 1359 – 1372/1940 – 1953, vol. 6, p. 250 (identified by Jwaideh (note 4), p. 75, fn. 3; p. 76, fn. 1). French version of the former: Ibn al-Faqīh, Abrégé du livre des pays, tr. Henri Massé, Damascus 1973, pp. 139, 161.

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most obedient to man and the most disobedient to God”.⁶⁰ The subsequent quotation (from al-Masʿūdī, d. 345/956) refers to an ancient custom to rank the kings of the world. Superiority over all of them is awarded to Babylon’s shāhānshāh (‘King of Kings’), while the lowest on the ladder is the malik al-Rūm (‘King of the Byzantines’), below whom all other kings are said to rank equally.⁶¹ Last comes another fictitious dialogue (again from al-Masʿūdī) that wittily produces ambiguous verdicts on the major Islamic lands, too.⁶² While this is a continuation of chapters I and II (and part of III) regarding divisions, although only on the regional scale, a fresh focus is put on varieties of the Arabs’ character, mostly problematic, and the unruliness of many parts ensuing from it. The mention of cities (buldān) in the heading, each understood here as emblematic for a country, is not due to any geographical significance of theirs but with regard to shades of Arab ‘nationality’ and the difficulties of political domination. Abruptly affixed are the closing words: “And God is the guide to what is right. To Him we revert, and to Him is our ultimate return”.⁶³ Unconnected as it is to the preceding theme of character and political domination, this reference to the Divine is at best clumsy if not outright haphazard. Clearly, Yāqūt forgoes the chance to conclude the introductory chapters with an appealing supernatural framing. Whether he simply misses the opportunity, as if through a lack of writerly skills, or on the contrary deliberately desisted from such framing, cannot be answered on the grounds of the prolegomena alone. Yet these pages already indicate that Yāqūt made a choice not to dwell much on themes of faith. Whereas the preface starts off with his quranically-based motif of journeying and thereby strongly refers to the Creator-god, the five introductory chapters do nothing to actually establish it

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 53, trans. (note 4), p. 76. German version of these lines by Heer (note 4), pp. 11– 12.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 53 – 54, trans. (note 4), pp. 76 – 78. Cf. al-Masʿūdī, Les prairies d’or [= Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar], ed. Charles Barbier de Meynard/Abel Pavet de Courteille, 9 vols. (Collection d’ouvrages orientaux, 1st series, 2), Paris 1861– 1877, vol. 1, pp. 357– 359; Jwaideh (note 4), p. 76, note 2; rev. ed. Charles Pellat, 7 vols. (Manshūrāt al-Jāmiʿ al-lubnāniyya. Qism al-dirāsāt al-tārīkhiyya 11), Beirut 1965 – 1979, vol. 1, pp. 189 – 190, §§ 395 – 397. The quotation contains six lines of verse by Ibrāhīm b. Badhām, known as ʿIṣāba al-Jarjarāʾī, see Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 2, pp. 54– 55 s.v. J a r j a r ā y ā . Four of these appear again, with variations, in the ‘Muʿjam’ of Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 2, pp. 413 s.v. K h u r ā s ā n (the poet’s name being misspelt “al-Jurjānī”) and are obviously taken from Ibn al-Faqīh (ed. de Goeje (note 59), p. 316); Jwaideh (note 4), p. 77, note 6. For a French version of the latter, see al-Faqīh, tr. Massé (note 59), pp. 374– 375. For ʿIṣāba’s approximate lifetime (3rd–4th/9th–10th c.), due to his transmitter ʿAwn b. Muḥammad al-Kīndī, see Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum, Islam. Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition (The American Anthropological Association Memoir 81; Comparative Studies of Cultures and Civilizations 4), Menasha, Wis. 1955, p. 50, note 34.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 54– 55, trans. (note 4), pp. 78 – 79. Cf. al-Masʿūdī (note 61), vol. 3, pp. 130 – 131; rev. ed. Pellat (note 61), vol. 2, pp. 183 – 184, § 985; Jwaideh (note 4), p. 79, note 1, cf. note 2.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 55, trans. (note 4), p. 79.

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as a leitmotif. Instead, no less than four framings are put forth. In descending order of their elaborateness, these are: (1) Science based on Greek and Persian learning (chs. I–III). The mathematical and astronomical basis of the ancients’ geography is laid out first, including a brusque rejection of Islamic folk narratives on cosmogony and cosmology (ch. I); then follow astrological and cosmological aspects, still on Graeco-Persian foundations, stressing continuous theroretization more than actual consensus (ch. II); and finally come definitions of the technical terminology applied to the book (ch. III). (2) Law, especially rulings on land tax. Inseparable as they are from their historical roots in the formative period of Islam, they are discussed first of all because of their persistent importance to administrative theory and practice (ch. IV; see also the fiscal part of ch. III). (3) Arab character and political domination as another field of practice, though not detailed (ch. V; see also the political part of ch. III). (4) Divine revelation and inspiration. Quotations from the Quran and references to the Hadith are interspersed in all five chapters (the latter notably in chs. I and III) but neither is their meaning commented upon nor are they related to the respective subject matter. Only two out of five chapters at least promise to tackle specifically Islamic concepts that relate to geo-space (qibla in ch. II; kharāj, fayʿ, etc. in ch. III), whereas the announced discussion of the qibla ⁶⁴ does not in fact materialize. The closing religious references are unspecific and as dutiful as the indispensable invocation of God at the beginning. In sum, the Divine is the least elaborate and influential of the four framings suggested by Yāqūt. Far from having the potential to integrate the prolegomena, the pertinent quotations and clauses appear to give a coat of religious paint to a writing programme that is actually dedicated first and foremost to scientific knowledge along Graeco-Persian terms, and in the second degree, at least seemingly, to practical aspects of administration and governance – as if in order to prevent readers’ criticism in these orientations. It may be noted that the concept of al-ʿumrān and its lexical field – ‘the inhabited earth, the human oecumene’⁶⁵ – promises to be much more fertile, but this is worth a study of its own. So, while Yāqūt as person confesses to Islam, so far his ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’ cannot be considered to offer a characteristically religious perspective. This said, it should be borne in mind that the prolegomena’s 55 (print) pages make up a mere seventy-fifth of the whole work. It is hence expedient to take a candid look at its main part, asking to what degree Yāqūt repeats, actualizes, or enriches the noted religious stances.

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 13, trans. (note 4), p. 18; see the above quotation, p. 118  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 7, l. 4, cf. trans. (note 4), p. 18, etc. See below, note 92.

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IV The Lexicon One may wonder whether any modern person apart from Ferdinand Wüstenfeld and his Arab re-editors and indexers has ever had the curiosity and the inclination to read the articles of Yāqūt’s ‘Peopled Places’ in their vast entirety, i.e. from the first on a l - ʾĀ b ā r a l -A ʿ r ā b through the 12,953rd on Ya y i n . Full command of this corpus seems next to unattainable, nor was the present writer able to indulge in so demanding a task for this one article. How, then, can the unwieldy material be reasonably approached? The key, I argue, is the perfect regularity of the lexicon’s outward form, namely the letter-by-letter arrangement of lemmas. While it applies throughout, we will see that the Arabic alphabet provides no simple mechanism of arrangement but offers options that require a choice on the author’s part. I therefore propose for one thing to explore the technical principles of alphabetical organization, asking which choices they betray and in what way these choices facilitate or impede references to the Divine. For another, I suggest that the work’s formal regularity allows us to expect that a specimen text can be representative as regards content, too. Close reading will then permit us to understand to what extent typical content is apt to convey religious notions. We first turn to the organizational principle of the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’ and the issue of its significance. Unsurprisingly, the articles are arranged into 28 kitābs (‘books’) each of which covers one letter of the Arabic alphabet. Here, it must not be overlooked that the letters of the alphabet underwent various ways of sorting according to period and region.⁶⁶ While the original letter sequence was based on the Aramaic abjad order (Table 1), Yāqūt basically keeps to the later hijāʾ order. This was introduced by the early Arabic anthologists of poetry and lexicographers (ca. 2nd/8th c.) in order to reorganize the letter sequence along graphemic similarities; it endured for a long time in Islamic North Africa and al-Andalus.⁶⁷ Still Yāqūt chooses its even younger Eastern variety, which departs from the older one from the twelfth letter on (Table 1). Moreover, he differs from the everyday recitation of the beginning of the alphabet (alif bāʾ) in that he observes the lexicographers’ practice of setting in the first place – instead of alif – the character for the voiceless glottal plosive [ʔ], the hamza (ʾ), which in Arabic grammar books is considered a consonantal letter in its own right.⁶⁸ Accordingly, Yāqūt’s first ‘book’ is on Hamza,⁶⁹ while there is none on alif.  Gerhard Endress, Die arabische Schrift, in: Grundriß der Arabischen Philologie, vol. 1, Sprachwissenschaft, ed. Wolfdietrich Fischer, Wiesbaden 1982, pp. 165 – 209, here pp. 176 – 178, 181– 182.  Ibid., pp. 177– 178.  E.g., Sībawayh (d. ca. 180/796), Le livre de Sîbawaihi [= Kitāb Sībawayh]. Traité de grammaire arabe, ed. Hartwig Derenbourg, 2 vols., Paris 1881– 1889, vol. 2, pp. 339 – 340, 344– 346. German version: Sîbawaihi’s Buch über die Grammatik […], tr. Gustav Jahn, 2 vols., Berlin 1895 – 1900, vol. 2/1, p. 696, § 509, no. 1; p. 698, § 510, no. 1; pp. 701– 702, § 512, no. 1. The intricacies of Arabic script are the source of many a subtle debate over the interlace of phonemes, graphemes, and characters. See Henri

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Both specifications also apply to the subdivision of the ‘books’ into second-tier bābs (‘chapters’). The heading of each of them states the first and second letters of the place names covered, e.g. “The Chapter on B and T, etc.”. As, however, not all conceivable letter combinations prove productive in reality, most ‘books’ actually hold less than 28 chapters. The first occurrence of an incomplete range is in the book on B. It numbers 25 chapters since the record contains no place names with the initial consonant combinations B·z, B·f, or B·h. The lexicon’s content thus falls into some 700 chapters. Table 1: Select historic orders of the Arabic alphabet Old abjad Al-Bakrī’s hijāʾ Yāqūt’s hijāʾ

ʾ, b, j, d, h, w, z, ḥ, ṭ, y, k, l, m, n, ṣ, ʿ, f, ḍ, q, r, s, t, th, kh, dh, ẓ, gh, sh ʾ, b, t, th, j, ḥ, kh, d, dh, r, z

ṭ, ẓ, k, l, m, n, ṣ, ḍ, ʿ, gh, f, q, s, sh, h, w, y s, sh, ṣ, ḍ, ṭ, ẓ, ʿ, gh, f, q, k, l, m, n, w, h, y

While in Yāqūt’s time, alphabetical sorting was a long-established feature of language dictionaries, the same principle had but rarely been applied to geography before.⁷⁰ The approach is indeed alien to geo-spatial conditions, and most of the contemporary readership was not accustomed to its use for the purposes of descriptive geography. We therefore must not exclude the possibility that Yāqūt took pains to justify the lexicographical approach because he reckoned that readers might find it odd. So Yāqūt’s decision, today not studied in depth, should give us pause. On the positive side, it goes without saying that alphabetical order facilitates browsing like no other principle of arrangement. At a time when neither tables of content nor indexes were common practice, the alphabet would suit the immediate retrieval of information on any particular place in mind, and it would also support an incidental, playful exploration of unknown ground alongside these. Meanwhile, the implications of an alphabetical arrangement for the message of the work are sweeping. Whereas Arabic geographies of all other kinds strive to bring plastic order to their material so as to create a holistic image of the world, arrangement according to letter sequence is counter-intuitive. As neighbouring or otherwise related places get scattered over the work’s chapters and volumes, the ties of geo-

Fleisch, Hamza, in: The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 3 (1971), pp. 150a–152b. Suffice it to say for non-Arabists that alif in initial position is considered by grammarians of post-Quranic Arabic a mere carrier character, or Mater lectionis, of the glottal plosive. Therefore, the sorting of Yāqūt’s lexicon reveals that a phonologically influenced notion (hamza) is given precedence over the scriptoral (alif). Note besides that in this article [ʾ]a, [ʾ]ā represent alif (alif ṭawīl) while á is for final yāʾ (alif maqṣūra).  The ‘book’s’ first chapter is singular in that only here the heading letter (hamza) is not eligible to show in the second place, too. So instead of inconceivable *hamza.hamza, the chapter is entitled “on hamza and alif, etc.”. Already so in al-Bakrī (note 28), vol. 1, p. 59.  See below, note 72.

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graphical proximity are negated, country divisions and historical interrelation become insubstantial, itineraries are dissected, and administrative divisions become invisible. With virtually all sorts of consistency intentionally torn apart, the geographical record is subjected to atomization. Accordingly, alphabetical arrangement is likely to have a fundamentally disruptive effect on the presentation of the material since it frustrates, if not altogether denies, any idea of a meaningful order of the world. Whatever notional framings the prolegomena may have provided beforehand, including the motif of journeying, Yāqūt does not allow them to govern the lexicon. Instead, any one article is a stand-alone product of deconstruction. This the readership could have found disturbing. Yet the book was well received without any basic criticism of its arrangement that we know of. For the time being, it may be asked, but cannot be answered, whether this circumstance suggests an insensitivity to the work’s uncommon quality, or whether it bespeaks its ready adoption by an audience who valued usability higher than the problem of little (overt) meaningfulness. It may also be noted that the sorting of almost 13,000 lemmas poses a technical task that is far from easy, seeing the numerous graphemic, phonemic, and morphosyntactic peculiarities of Arabic. Yāqūt was aware of these challenges and worked out solutions that, however, vary and lack outright consistency. It remains to be shown on another occasion what the significance of these imperfections is and to what extent it influences the presentation of contents. Yāqūt took the idea of alphabetical order from earlier works but the unprecedented scale and scope of his lexicon prevented him from relying entirely on existing procedures. It is especially useful to contrast his lexicon with that of his already mentioned Andalusian predecessor al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094), entitled ‘Muʿjam mā staʿjam’ (‘Lexicon of What [Toponymy] Has Become Obscure’).⁷¹ This is not only the first truly alphabetical geographical work that has come down to us⁷² but it also meant  Al-Bakrī (note 28). See Brockelmann (note 10), vol. 1, pp. 627– 628 (1st ed. p. 476); suppl. vol. 1, pp. 875 – 876; Sezgin (note 10), vol. 15, pp. 25 – 26; Jean-Charles Ducène, al-Bakrī, Abū ʿUbayd, in: The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, fasc. 4/2011, pp. 64b–66a.  Most of the preceding works of geographical lexicography are lost, and of the others few have been studied and proven to show an alphabetic instead of thematic division, see Sezgin (note 10), vol. 15, pp. 1– 24; p. 16: Shamir b. Hamdawayh (d. 255/869); p. 23: Abū Bakr b. Mardawayh (d. 410/ 1019). The array of place names in ‘al-Iklīl’ by al-Hamdānī (d. 334/945) still comes in the typically early Islamic form of a contained list, and it specializes in names that occur in more than one place. See Albrecht Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition. A Source-Critical Study, rev. Engl. ed. Lawrence I. Conrad (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 3), Princeton/NJ 1994, pp. 96 – 104; al-Hamdanī, Südarabisches Muštabih. Verzeichnis homonymer und homographer Eigennamen aus dem Berliner Unikum des Iklīl (Bibliotheca Ekmaniana Universitatis Regiae Upsaliensis 57), ed. Oscar Löfgren, Uppsala 1953. The presumably first full-fledged geographical lexicon – the ‘Asmāʾ al-amākin’ by Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad al-Aswad al-Ghandajānī (d. 436/1044) – is lost. See Joseph von Hammer, Uebersicht der Quellen arabischer, persischer und tuerkischer Geographie, in: Hertha 3 (1825), pp. 46 – 93, here p. 55, no. I/27 (under the name “En-nesamet” and the presumed year of death 428/1036); Miquel (note 1), vol. 1, pp. 262– 265; Sezgin (note 10), vol. 8, Lexikographie bis ca. 430 H., Leiden 1982, p. 237; vol. 15, p. 24. See also Brockelmann (note 10), suppl.

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a lot to Yāqūt as a source of inspiration in principle. He knew about it through intermediaries but needed to write independently from it, since he says of it “which I have not been able to find though I have searched for it and inquired about it time and again”.⁷³ The volume of al-Bakrī’s lexicon is less than a quarter of that of Yāqūt’s. For the sorting of his 28 ‘books’ (in 507 chapters),⁷⁴ al-Bakrī adopted the original, then Maghrebian-Andalusian style of the hijāʾ order (Table 1). Yāqūt, who certainly knew about this decision, chose a different order and so distanced his lexicon from his revered predecessor’s. This is on the one hand understandable, as the habits of regional readerships could not easily be ignored. On the other, Yāqūt pays no care to the convenience of readers to whom the older work is available, too; rather he changes the sequence and complicates a synoptic reading of both writings. Moreover, he applies alphabetical sorting not just to the first and second letters as al-Bakrī did, but to all the letters of the lemma, whether consonant or vocal character. He thus produces a very different sequence of lemmas in every chapter. This makes it still more difficult to switch and compare between the two lexicons. We would not be wrong to assume that by this Yāqūt wanted to suit the familiarity of his presumed readership – seated first of all in the countries he was living in – with the eastern order of the alphabet, while neglecting the theoretical chance of collation with a text he himself had never seen. What is more, alphabetical organization seems to take different effects with the two works. Unlike Yāqūt after him, al-Bakrī observes a clear temporal and geographical focus. He is concerned with the toponymy of the Arabian Peninsula as it occurs in Old Arabian poetry and the early Islamic poetry modelled after it, the ayyām alʿArab (‘Battle Days’) tradition, Quran and Hadith, and chronicles and geographically-oriented books relating to the area.⁷⁵ This antiquarian narrowing makes the work come close to a thematic monograph, i.e. a regional study of late ancient and early Islamic western Arabia, emphasizing the Hejaz during and after the lifetime of Muḥammad. It follows that readers are not forced at every turn of the page to jump across regions, epochs, cultures, and mentalities. This relative consistency of the reading experience is thus suited to moderate the potentially disruptive effect of alphabetical order on the ‘Muʿjam mā staʿjam’, in comparison to Yāqūt’s lexicon. Our second approach concerns the articles’ contents. Owing to the regularity of the lexicon’s outward form, as said, it is expected that already a small part can indicate the articles’ general scope for references to the Divine. We therefore need to

vol. 1, pp. 40, 160, 503. Therefore, al-Bakrī’s work is in fact the first preserved alphabetically arranged work of geography. See also Ducène (note 71), p. 66a.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 11, trans. (note 4), p. 12.  Translation by Wüstenfeld (note 28), p. 95 (offprint p. 7), note 4. Al-Bakrī’s claim to have written a total of 728 chapters ignores that 221 theoretically possible letter combinations have no chapter, see al-Bakrī (note 28), vol. 1, p. 4.  See Régis Blachère/Henri Darmaun (eds.), Extraits des principaux géographes arabes du Moyen Âge (Études arabes et islamiques, Sér. 1), Paris 1957, p. 255.

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select an extract unbiased by previous knowledge of its content. For this purpose, we may imagine an historical reader who has read, and got caught by, the prolegomena. Supposing that this person is now eager also to taste the main body of text, the choice may fall on the very opening articles that immediately follow. In this case, the first encounter is with four articles that range between two and five lines (a l ʾĀ b ā r a l -A ʿ r ā b , ʾĀ b a j , ʾĀ b u r, ʾĀ b a s k ū n ) before the first somewhat extended presentation (ʾĀ b i l ) follows, which amounts to 24 lines or one page. This rather rhythmic alternation of article sizes continues. It takes until the twelfth page that the first article that explores a major town in even more considerable detail appears (ʾĀ m i d , now Diyarbakır, five pages). Alternatively, the presumed reader may be anxious to overcome any special concern of the author with the exposed beginning and instead will flip the volume open somewhere at random. A reader experience such as would entail from this kind of procedure is what the following pages aim to emulate as an example. Opening vol. 1 of the editio princeps at a random place and moving forward – for the purpose of clear demonstration – to the first page that starts on top with a fresh lemma, we reach p. 750 (Fig. 2). It happens that here a new section opens, headed “The Chapter on B and W, etc.”. (marked in print by centring and larger font size). The page contains eight mostly very short articles (lemmas overlined): B a w ā ʾ (1 l.), B a w ā d i r (2 ll.), B a w ā r (1 l.), B a w ā z i n (3 ll.), a l - B a w ā z ī j (7 ll.), B u w ā ṭ (6 ll.), B u w ā ʿ a (1 l.), and B u w ā n (3 ll., until p. 751). Now what do they offer? All of them consist in the first place of the respective lemma, which comes with the full diacritical mark-up that can be added to the Arabic consonantal script in order to fix vowels, vowellessness, letter reduplication, and diptote or triptote declension (final u or un). This is followed in all cases but one by a verbal statement singling out one or more notable properties of spelling, pronunciation, or both. For example, “B a w ā ʾ u : with fatḥ [on the first letter, i.e. diacritical vocal sign a] and madd [on the second, i.e. Āʾ]”; it is also said to be often cut short in poetry (meaning *Bawaʾ). In addition, the morphology of the lemma can be exposed, like with “B a w ā d i r u : plural of bādira”, or a synonym can be given for the clarification of literal meaning as with “B a w ā r u : […] meaning al-halāk (‘the perdition, ruin’)”. So far, the articles do every justice to the author’s claim to the philological thoroughness of a lexicographer. In the next place, all articles show a succinct one-word classification of the denoted settlement or physical feature. Twice we meet a wādī (‘valley’); another two are balads (‘village’); and two more denote a mawḍiʿ (‘place’, mostly used for an unpeopled locality in the countryside); one is a ṣaḥrāʾ (‘wasteland’). In three cases out of six, this classification is accompanied by a rough geographical localization. In the case of Buwāʿa, a mountain’s name as well as the respective tribal attribution is provided, which in the minds of Yāqūt and part of his readers is as good as a geo-localization. As concerns authorship, the multi-line articles on Bawādir, Bawāzin, and Buwān are basically one-liners of Yāqūt’s, expanded by quotations from poetry. The text of these six very short articles (vol. 1, p. 750 to 751, l. 2) is rendered here

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Fig. 2: The beginning of chapter B·w, articles B a w ā ʾ to B u w ā n , in Yāqūt’s ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’, ed. Wüstenfeld (note 4), vol. 1, p. 750. (Courtesy MENAdoc, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle)

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in full. (I comment upon them, and what follows below, in notes 76 and 79 so as to show their substantial and verifiable character.) 2 3

5

6

22

23

1

B a w ā ʾ u With a and madd (Āʾ). Valley in the Tihāma. Many a poet shortened it. B a w ā d i r u Plural of bādira (‘stirring’). Place in the poetry of Subayʿ b. al-Khaṭīm where he said: “And there came back to her, what time the water for her drinking became scant · the memory of days of spring and summer spent in the sand-skirt of Nawādir.” B a w ā r u With a. From the term al-bawār, meaning al-halāk (‘the perdition, ruin’). Village in al-Yaman, of which there is an account in the historical reports [transmitted] on the authority of Naṣr. B a w ā z i n u After the alif (Ā) a Z with i, and an N. Zayd al-Khayl the Ṭāʾite said: “Thuʿal settled a debt and likewise did we repay · Salāmān an heavy obligation in Bawāzin. So they became noble free men in the evening and · slaves of ʿUnayn and Māzin against their will in the morning.” […] B u w ā ʿ a t u With undotted ʿayn (ʿ ). Wasteland next to which is the waterhole at the Two Little Horns belonging to the Banū Jarm. B u w ā n u With N. [Also] Dhū Buwān. Place in the land of Najd. Al-Zafayān said: “ What do you recall of the sedan chairs · coming up from the direction of Dhū Buwān?” Some of them relate that he had well-known Buwāna in mind but then omitted the H for the rhyme.⁷⁶

 B a w ā ʾ u 2 Tihāma: desert on Arabia’s Red Sea coast. – In some of the re-editions: Bawāʾun. B a w ā d i r u 4 Line of verse by Subayʿ b. al-Khaṭīm (fl. 5th or 6th c. CE), included in the dīwān of Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī (d. 160s/780s). The rendering is Lyall’s, see The Mufaḍḍalīyāt. An Anthology of Ancient Arabian Odes, ed. and tr. Charles James Lyall, index by Anthony A. Bevan, 3 vols., Oxford 1918 – 1924, vol. 1, p. 728, no. CXII, v. 8 (tr. vol. 2, p. 311; comm. ibid., p. 312). The variant form Nawādir appears also in Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 4, p. 815 s.v. B a w ā r u 6 Naṣr: authority of the said “historical reports” (akhbār), i.e. Abū al-Fatḥ Naṣr b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Iskandarī (d. 560/1165), author of the lost ‘Kitāb al-Buldān wa-l-amkina wa-ljibāl wa-l-miyāh’. See Heer (note 4), p. 19; Brockelmann (note 10), suppl. vol. 1, p. 615; Sezgin (note 10), vol. 14, p. 50; vol. 15, pp. 29 – 30. B a w ā z i n u 7– 8 Two lines of verse by Zayd b. Muhalhil al-Khayl (confessed Islam 9/630, d. no later than 23/644). Yāqūt is the only authority for these. See Shiʿr Zayd al-Khayl al-Ṭāʾī, ed. Aḥmad Mukhtār al-Bizra, Damascus 1408/1988, p. 171, no. 44. On the poet, see ibid., pp. 11– 44; Fuat Sezgin (note 10), vol. 2, Poesie bis ca. 430 H., Leiden 1975, pp. 223 – 225. Thuʿal, Salāmān: subgroups of the Ṭayyiʾ tribe, with the Salāmān springing from the Thuʿal, see al-Kalbī (d. 204/819?), Nasab Maʿadd wa-l-Yaman al-kabīr, ed. Nājī Ḥasan, 2 vols., Beirut 1408/1988, vol. 1, pp. 233, 246 – 247; ʿUmar Riḍá Kaḥ ḥ āla, Muʿjam qabāʾil al-ʿArab al-qadīma wa-l-ḥadītha, 5 vols., Damascus 1368 – 1395/1949 – 1975, vol. 1, p. 142b sub Thuʿal b. ʿAmr; vol. 2, p. 848b sub ʿUnayn b. Salāmān. ʿUnayn: another sub-

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However short, these articles touch upon matters of philology, settlement including the tribal situation, physical geography with topography and hydrology, and historical or poetic tradition. Meanwhile, not a word about religion. It should be noted that the absence of relevant references from the present sample is not at all incidental. It typically characterizes the one- and two-liners among the articles throughout, such as can be found on virtually any page. One of the reasons for this absence is obviously the insignificance of the very many tiny and outlying places that the lexicon records. No place is too trivial for Yāqūt to include it in the lexicon. The criterion for including a name is not importance of any sort, to say nothing of religious significance, but the mere fact that the place’s name is known. A name is worth preservation alone because it forms part of traditional or present-day knowledge as a matter of fact, Yāqūt suggests to us. The author is hence ready to accept articles of the utmost brevity such as, e.g., this one: Sanāʾu

With madd (Āʾ). Another, distinct place.⁷⁷

group of the Ṭayyiʾ tribe, offspring of the Salāmān b. Thuʿal, see Ibn al-Kalbī (this note), vol. 1, pp. 233, 246. Māzin: tribal group of uncertain relatedness to the previous ones, possibly the subgroup of the Murra tribe mentioned by Kaḥ ḥ āla (this note), vol. 3, p. 1024a. “Obligation”: kayl, a dry measure of capacity, particularly for grain (see Walther Hinz, Islamische Maße und Gewichte, umgerechnet ins metrische System, 2nd ed. (Handbuch der Orientalistik, suppl. vol. 1/1), Leiden 1970, p. 40: in Syria between 6.56 and 22.08 litres), also in the figurative sense ‛measure’. – Bawāzin may hypothetically be localized in the Mount Ajaʾ area (see Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 142b; this note, on l. 22) or in what is now the hilly al-Bawāzim (sic) area in south-central Saudi Arabia, halfway between al-Aflāj and Qaryat al-Fāw (ca. 46°9ʹ E, 20°53ʹ N). B u w ā ʿ a t u 22 “the Two Little Horns”: radhat al-Qurnayayn in the edited text. For rad·ha, see Nigel Groom, A Dictionary of Arabic Topography and Placenames, Beirut and London 1983, pp. 227, 234. While variants read al-Qaryatayn (‘of the two villages, Twin Village’), etc. (Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 5 p. 89, commentary of Wüstenfeld), another mention by Yāqūt (ibid., vol. 4, p. 80 s.v. a l - Q u r a y y i n a y n ) confirms the spellling al-Qurnayayn as edited. In the singular, the diminutive qurnayn refers to a small horn-shaped mound. Banū Jarm: a subgroup of the Ṭayyiʾ whose homestead from time immemorial comprised the Mount Ajaʾ area. – The location of Buwāʿā and those twin mounds must have been next to the well of that name, southwest of Mount Ajaʾ, see Ulrich Thilo, Die Ortsnamen in der altarabischen Poesie. Ein Beitrag zur vor- und frühislamischen Dichtung und zur historischen Topographie Nordarabiens (Schriften der Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung 3), Wiesbaden 1958, p. 38. This is in the area of today’s Mount Buwāʿa (40°45ʹ E, 27°6ʹ N) and the Qaṣr Buwāʿa wells (40° 46ʹ E, 27°6ʹ N), some 110 km southwest of Hāʾil. See also Alois Musil, Northern Neǧd. A Topographical Itinerary (Oriental Explorations and Studies 5), New York 1928, pp. 82, 96; id., Northern Arabia, map section in 4 sheets, 1:1,000,000, New York 1926, field 13r: al-Bwâʿa. B u w ā n u 1 Line of verse by ʿAṭāʾ b. Usayd al-Zafayān (fl. ca. 73/692). See Wilhelm Ahlwardt (ed.), Sammlungen alter arabischer Dichter, 3 vols., Berlin 1902– 1903, vol. 2, Die Dīwāne der Reḡezdichter Ela̓ ḡḡāḡ und Ezzafajān, p. 98, no. 10, v. 1. On the poet, see ibid., pp. lx–lxi; Sezgin (note 10), vol. 2, p. 370. – 2 H: in final position and pausa, the letter H (Tāʾ marbūṭa) is pronounced a.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 3, p. 153. S a n ā ʾ u 20 “Distinct”: different from Sanā, which is dealt with in the previous article (l. 19).

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It appears that Yāqūt includes articles of negligible information like this one for the sake of comprehensiveness. He prefers to forego meaningfulness when such is not available, rather than renouncing a potential article. The weight of this kind of articles must by no means be underrated. As practically every of the roughly 3,800 print pages contains a one- or two-liner, and most pages seem to have two or more of them, the total of very brief articles may be estimated at over double the page count, meaning that at least every second article is a very short one. As a result, only less than half of all articles is even eligible to relate to religion. Among the short articles one important group is easily identifiable, namely those that are included because the relevant place name occurs in poetry or in the ayyām al-ʿarab, Old Arabia’s ‘Battle Day’ narrations.⁷⁸ ‘Poetry’ includes a great deal of preIslamic verse. In our above randomized sample, two out of three quoted poets belong to the pre-Islamic period. The author owes another large number of place names to the ayyām genre, which entirely precedes the coming of Islam. Neither of these kinds of sources can be expected to contribute on religiosity in the Islamic sense. Longer articles would of course recommend themselves more than these brief ones for references to the religious sphere. Our random sample page also holds two medium-size entries of 7 and 6 lines, respectively: 9

16

a l - B a w ā z ī j u After the Z a mute Y (Ī) and a J. Village near Takrīt at the mouth of the Lower Zāb where it discharges into the Euphrates. It is also called Bawāzīj al-Malik, which is mentioned in the historical reports and the [traditions of the] conquests. Today, it is one of the districts of Mosul. A number of religious scholars trace themselves back to it, among them, of the moderns, Manṣūr b. al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. ʿĀdhil b. Yaḥyá al-Bawāzījī al-Bajalī, a religious scholar with an excellent and fine [tradition of the Prophet’s] vita. He studied religious law with Abū ʿAlī al-Fīrūzābādhī and moreover heard the Hadith from him. He passed away in the year 501. – Bawāzīj al-Anbār is a distinct place. Aḥmad b. Yaḥyá b. Jābir says that ʿAbdallāh conquered Bawāzīj al-Anbār. A family of his clients lives there to date. […] B u w ā ṭ u With u and an undotted Ṭ in the end. One of the valleys oriented like the qibla [as is transmitted] on the authority of al-Zamakhsharī and ʿAlī al-ʿAlawī

 See Werner Caskel, Aijām al-ʿArab. Studien zur altarabischen Epik, in: Islamica 3/5 (1930), pp. 1– 99; Egbert Meyer, Der historische Gehalt der Aiyām al-ʿArab (Schriften der Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung 7), Wiesbaden 1970.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 750. a l - B a w ā z ī j u 9 Takrīt: now Tikrīt, in Iraq. – 10 Bawāzīj al-Malik: “Royal al-Bawāzīj”. – 12 Manṣūr […] al-Bawāzījī al-Bajalī: fl. during the reign of ʿUmar I (13 – 23/634– 644). – 13 Abū ʿAlī alFīrūzābādhī: not known to me. – 14 AH 501: 1107– 8 CE. Aḥ mad b. Yaḥyá b. Jābir: al-Balādhurī, see the following. – 15 ʿAbdallāh: Jarīr b. ʿAbdallāh al-Bajalī; Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 5, p. 89, commentary by Wüstenfeld, emendation according to al-Balādhurī (d. 279/892), Liber expugnationis regionum [=

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after him. The genuine [vocalization] is the ʿUdhrite one. That which the elders of the Maghāriba dictate reads Bawāṭ with a, but the first is better known. It is said that it is one of the mountains of the Juhayna in the area of Raḍwá. The Prophet, praise be upon him, raided it in the month of al-Rabīʿ I in the second year of the Hijra when campaigning against the Quraysh, and returned without having encountered a stratagem. One of them [with him] said: “Whose homestead is it that fell waste in Buwāṭ?”⁷⁹ These articles at first observe the same content order that we already noticed with the shorter ones, and then exceed it by mentioning either a famous person or an historical event linked to the place. Regarding al-Bawāzīj, biographical details on a religious scholar are added, including reference to his most important teacher. In the lexicon, religious scholars form by far the majority of the famous sons of a place. Prosopographical information on them, their origins and wanderings, teacher–student relations, and characteristic expertise is a most recurrent feature of the lexicon that altogether may amount to well over a quarter of its volume. Here, Yāqūt is in his element, having authored as his first magnum opus, from 594/1198 to 626/1229, the even larger biographical collection ‘Irshād al-arīb ilá maʿrifat al-adīb’ (‘Guidance for the Wise Man towards the Knowledge of a Man of Letters’), also referred to as ‘Muʿjam al-udabāʾ’ (‘Lexicon of Men of Letters’).⁸⁰ It is admissible to think that Yāqūt conceived the scholars’ biographies in the work on place names as a complement to the ‘Irshād’ in the religious sphere, thereby transferring a well-known and proven method of arranging materials from one realm of activities to another. It

Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān], ed. Michael Jan de Goeje, Leiden 1866, p. 246. English version: The Origins of the Islamic State […], vol. 1, tr. Philip Khûri Hitti (Studies in History, Economics and Public Law 68/1), New York 1916, p. 395. – Al-Bawāzīj was situated in the eastern part of upper Mesopotamia, see Guy Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate. Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (Cambridge Geographical Series 4), Cambridge 1905, p. 91. It seems to be identical with the ‘Abbasid site’ near Tall ʿAlī in Iraq, which features the (now blown-up) tomb of one Imām Ismāʿīl (43°39ʹ E, 35°20ʹ N), see Cecil J. Edmonds, An Abbasid Site on the Little Zab, in: The Geographical Journal 80 (1932), pp. 332– 333. B u w ā ṭ u 16 “Like the qibla”: directed towards the Kaaba in Mecca. Al-Zamakhsharī: died 538/ 1144, wrote the ‘Kitāb al-Jibāl wa-l-amkina wa-l-miyāh’ (various editions), a precursor to Yāqūt’s lexicon. – 16 – 17 ʿAlī al-ʿAlawī: not known to me. – 17– 19 ʿUdhra, al-Maghāriba, Juhayna, Quraysh: tribes of North Arabia. – 18 Raḍwá: mountain massif, 140 km west of Medina. – 19 AH 2: 623 CE. – 21 This line of verse is not part of the Hadith. For the transmission regarding the ghazwat baṭn Buwāṭ, see Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj (d. 261/875), Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim bi-sharḥ al-imām Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nawawī, ed. Khalīl Maʾmūn Shīḥ ā, 18 vols. and index vol., Beirut 1417/1996, vols. 17/18, p. 336, no. 7438 (book 53, Kitāb al-zuhd wa-l-riqāq, ch. 18). English version: Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim […], tr. Abdul Hamid Siddiqui, 18 vols., Lahore 1971– 1974; transcript of Shīḥ ā’s translation of this Hadith at https://sunnah.com/muslim/55/94. – Some 50 km northeast of Medina, Wādī Buwāṭ is known to this day. It held the pilgrims caravan route and also lent its name to the Hejaz Railway’s 1909 Buwāṭ station (39°13ʹ E, 24°42ʹ N).  Yāqūt, ‘Muʿjam al-udabāʾ’, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās, 7 vols., Beirut 1993.

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may even be that Yāqūt, while working on his first lexicon, had put notes aside in view of the later work. By analogy, he avoids referring to contemporary littérateurs in the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’ so as not to double his previous work (and is also reluctant to dwell much on rulers and other political figures). The question arises, however, whether knowledge of religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) and legal specialists (fuqahāʾ) among them in particular would also match our concern with references to the Divine. Information in the articles’ prosopographical sections is highly standardized regarding matter and elaboration. Usually, a scholar’s place of origin is specified, followed by his travels in pursuit of knowledge and study with recognized teachers in various disciplines of religious and legal learning, his settling down, his education of students, the traditions he may have had license to transmit, the works he wrote, his official career as professor, preacher, judge, or anything else, then his place of death, and lastly his afterlife as an authority of later generations of scholars. To these an appraisal of that man’s personality and piety may be added. Now, all of these notifications pertain first to individuals and the professional curriculum vitae they undertook, and second to the whole of the sphere of religious scholars. Their occupation and human dealings must not be confused with the religious knowledge of society nor with individual expressions of faith such as we are looking for. In fact, Yāqūt’s keen and steady interest in religious scholars derives neither from the faith (īmān)⁸¹ he himself will have felt in the supernatural nor from religion (dīn)⁸² as decreed by God. What he cares about is the specialized personnel who actively run religion as a system of organized communal worship and thereby legitimize political and legal institutions. This concern of his comes as a surprise since is it not pre-announced anywhere in the prolegomena.⁸³ In turn, the interest which the preface has attributed to pre-Islamic (Hejazian and Arabian) “idols, graven images, and objects of heathen worship”⁸⁴ falls far short of becoming a noteworthy feature of the lexicon (but see below). Both ways, the prolegomena misrepresent the nature of the book. It makes one wonder why the author allowed these discrepancies, if we are not to conclude that they escaped him. At the same time, the importance attributed to the ʿulāmaʾ and fuqahāʾ is positively consistent with one of the lexicon’s principal feats, i.e. the geo-localization of place names. Every scholar bears at least one name of origin (nisba) and can be

 See, e.g., Sura 95:6: [a]l-ladhīna amanū (“those who believe”), and all occurrences of the participle muʾminūn (“believers”).  See, e.g., Suras 5:3 [5]: [a]l-yawma akmaltu lakum dīnakum […] wa-raḍītu lakumu l-islāma dīnan (“Today I have perfected your religion for you […] and I have approved Islam for your religion”); 3:83 [77]; 24:2; 110:2: dīni llāhi (“God’s religion”, etc.); 9:29, 33; 48:28; 61:9: dīni l-ḥaqqi (“the religion of truth”); 9:36; 12:40; 98:5 [4]: dīnu l-qayyimati (“the right religion the religion, of the True”); 2:132 [126]: inna llāha ṣṭafá lakumu l-dīna (“God has chosen for you the religion”).  But see the above mention of its tacit foreshadowing (Sect. III re Yāqūt’s fifth chapter).  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 1, trans. (note 4), p. 1.

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named under the relevant lemma, as is the case with that al-Bawāzījī who in the article on the Mesopotamian village of al-Bawāzīj is said to originate from there. That the village is situated in the vicinity of Takrīt is a sufficiently precise indication under the terms of the time. So, the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’ works as a geographical key to uncounted nisbas.⁸⁵ Again, it is an eminently worldly affair to pinpoint scholars’ whereabouts and make their life itineraries traceable. In reverse, knowledge of many a minor town or small village will only have been preserved to the time of Yāqūt and then ours precisely because of a scholar who bore a pertinent nisba and attained some fame. A third strand that cuts across the lexicon is broached in the article on Buwāṭ when Yāqūt mentions the raid directed by Muḥammad against this valley in the area of Mount Raḍwá. A considerable amount of information is offered on the movements and actions of Muḥammad and his companions and successors during the Medinan and conquest periods. The former appear of course mostly in articles on Hejazi places, while the latter spread over articles on the lands of the Levant (Transjordan in particular), al-ʿIrāq, Iran, and also Egypt. They frequently pertain to the battle sites, domiciles, tombs, shrines, and mosques that are related to these historical actors.⁸⁶ While on the whole these theatres of the formative period of Islam can be said to form tokens of a ‘sacred’ early history of Islamdom, the mention of tombs and other places of ongoing veneration, if not pilgrimage, is equally as important. As much as Yāqūt pursues an historical interest, he appears also to acknowledge the contemporary importance of these places as lieux de mémoire and sites of believers’ religious practice. Whereas our specimen text has so far well represented what can be found on virtually every page of the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’, it happens not to bring up a fourth obvious strand of content, that is dynastic history. Less significant than the record of religious scholars and actors of the earliest period, information on the ruling houses of Islamic polities is still eminent. The Umayyads and early ʿAbbāsids until about the third/ninth century appear frequently. This seems to be due rather to their temporal proximity and political sensitivity to the reverberating issues of the earliest period than to a particular wealth of available documentation. The fourth/tenth and fifth/ eleventh centuries figure less prominently although they are closer to Yāqūt’s time and sources were not scarce. Characterized by the weakening of the caliphate’s upper hand, the rise of regional successor states, schism, Byzantine incursions, and in parts hybrid Bedouin emirates, these centuries may have been deemed comparatively inglorious, and it so is no wonder that Yāqūt, not a determined historian anyway, neglects them. The record becomes richer again when, with the advent of the Crusader principalities and later the Ayyūbid sultanate, the author’s contemporary

 It would seem promising to look into the intensive use which Yāqūt made of the lexicon of alSamʿānī (d. 562/1166), ‘al-Ansāb’ (various editions), see Heer (note 4), pp. 39 – 40.  Pre-announced by Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 3, trans. (note 4), p. 4.

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history dawns and military confrontation with non-Muslim invaders occurs. Among the many valuable accounts of the most recent half century, Yāqūt’s lines on the war for Dimyāṭ (Damietta; 615 – 618/1218 – 1221) during the Fifth Crusade stand out as the very first Arabic record of the events we have at all.⁸⁷ There is of course still more to the ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’ than what our short specimen text can possibly comprise. In particular, analysis is needed of some of the extensive articles on cities of the highest religious significance because of their sanctity, such as Mecca (11 printed pages) and Jerusalem (12 pp.), or because of their role in the history of theology, e.g. Basra (17 pp.).⁸⁸ Besides, various themes pertaining to faith and religion not broached here can be gleaned from Rescher’s (incomprehensive) ‘Sachindex’.⁸⁹ A few entries there indeed touch on pre-Islamic Arabian beliefs (Dschâhilijja, Dschinn, Idole). A larger number pertains to Quranic revelation, including Biblical references, and the Hadith (Antichrist, Auferstehungstag, Baraka, Charaktereigenschaften, Christentum, Dschihâd, Gericht, Hadith, Jakobsleiter, Juden [cf. Wein], Loth, Moses, Paradies, Prädestination, Religionsgeschichtliches, Scheitân, Stein, Testament, Thora, Vorhersagung, Wunder, Zahl 2, Zahl 3, etc.). However, by far the most references are made to secondary religious practices, superstitions, and religious institutions (Abdâl, Aberglaube, Askese, Bildzauber, Dschinn, Fanatismus, Feuer, Gebetsverkürzung, Glaubensbekenntnis, Gräber, Heilige, Heiligengräber, Heiligenkult, Heiligenwunder, Heilkraft, Höhlen, Koraninterpretation, Koranverse, Lichterscheinungen, Mahdi, Mihna, Muʿtazila, Religionsstreitigkeiten, Talisman, Toleranz, Unglaube, Vergöttlichung, Verwandlungen, Zahl 2, Zahl 3, etc., Zauber, and the various denominations of Islam such as, e.g., the Azâriqa). Among all these, the societal manifestations of dīn (‘religion’) are preeminent over scriptural and traditional foundations, which corroborates the above findings. It also becomes clear that Yāqūt, despite his aforementioned rejection of folkloristic images of the world,⁹⁰ takes a lively interest in popular forms of īmān (‘faith’). Without subscribing to these, he observes what has developed apart from the religious knowledge of educated traditionists and the legal schools of thought. As an analogy to his view beyond the horizon of the Islamic parts and his certain reticence about supernatural framings of geography, Yāqūt seeks to offer a varied and notionally neutral portrayal of believers’ religious practices rather than insisting in an orthodox way on God’s workings in the world below.

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 2, p. 602 s.v. Dimyāṭ. See Kurt Franz, Franciscus ignotus. Zur zeitgenössischen orientalischen Schau des Kreuzzuges gegen Damietta, in: Amir Dziri/Angelica Hilsebein/Mouhanad Khorchide/Bernd Schmies (eds.), Der Sultan und der Heilige. Islamisch-christliche Perspektiven auf die Begegnung des hl. Franziskus mit Sultan al-Kamil (1219 – 2019), Münster (forthcoming), pp. 1– 53, here pp. 14– 16.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 3, pp. 616 – 626 s.v. Makka; ibid., pp. 590 – 602 s.v. al-Maqdis; vol. 1, pp. 636 – 653 s.v. al-Baṣra.  See above, note 4.  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 22– 24, trans. (note 4), pp. 34– 35.

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V Conclusion The suggestion driving the present volume that in the pre-modern world geographical knowledge was influenced by religious ideas and beliefs finds faint support in Yāqūt’s ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’. The highest concentration of the little that there is appears in the comparatively short prolegomena. Divine creation, revelation, and final salvation are given the most significance in the thirteen-page preface, right when the author is out to partially found his writing programme on established elements of Islamic Weltanschauung (above, Sect. II). It is with conspicuous force that scripture and tradition are incorporated into the author’s line of argument that precise knowledge of places and their names are essential for all sorts of activities, be it the creation of poetry or scholarship and administration, if they are to outlast the natural transitoriness of things. Quranic and Hadith references, etc. are overtly instrumental in underpinning a framing concept of Yāqūt’s own that tends to overarch Islam. Journeying, he suggests for a simile, is not just what individuals undergo but man on his circle of life in general does, and even entire civilizations along with their knowledge. Looking more closely at the idea of the waning of civilizations and of their toponymies with them, it appears that Yāqūt trusts less in the steady progress of Islamic history from the Hijra to the Day of Judgement and rather sees adverse tendencies at work, too. His quest to preserve as much toponymic heritage as possible lest it fall into oblivion can be understood as meaning that even Islamdom is no exception from impeding civilizational decline. In the introductory chapters that follow (above, Sect. III), the religious charge is further reduced. Mentions of scripture and tradition are scattered and not precisely conducive to the manifold matters under discussion. The author concentrates on Greek and Persian knowledge of mathematical geography, astronomy, and astrology, belittles superstitious Islamic folklore, and goes to great lengths to demonstrate proficiency in various fields of learning, most of which are of pre-Islamic origin. He thus makes it clear that he is pursuing first and foremost an agenda of scientification. Second come framings by legal history, and third by Arab character and political domination. Especially the exposition of the latter two, in the third to fifth chapters, seem arbitrary and prove not very persuasive. But as Yāqūt subscribes to the plurality of learned positions when concepts diverge irreconcilably – like, e.g., in the first, second, and fifth chapters on the image of the world – he allows for the paucity of his expertise in astronomy, jurisprudence, etc. to shine through, rather than to resort to available religious concepts. His real mainstays, it turns out in the lexicon proper (above, Sect. V), are the philology of place names, already demonstrated by him with pride early in the preface;⁹¹ an unprecedented command of topological information for the purpose of places’ relative geo-localization; and, not least, a painstaking prosopography of religious  Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 4– 6, trans. (note 4), pp. 6 – 8.

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scholars. In the specimen text we studied (and found largely representative), notions of the Divine are residual and occur in particular when a place plays a role in the formative, ‘sacred’ period of Islam. Other localities are mentioned because their significance to the Muslim community as places of veneration continues into the author’s own time. In stark contrast, a plethora of tiny places with no religious significance to them at all is listed. It seems that Yāqūt does so not merely for the sake of thoroughness and completeness but also for the purpose of an even treatment of central and outlying areas, urban and rural spaces, cultivated lands and stretches of steppe or desert. Open to handling extra-Islamic parts in the same way, too, he seems prevented from going farther only by the dearth of reliable sources. In sum, the alphabetical design of the lexicon together with its comprehensiveness and the incorporation of many a minor place obstructs the idea that notions of the Divine effectively characterize the body of articles. Looking back from the lexicon to the introductory chapters, the open question why Yāqūt has forgone the opportunity to conclude them with an appealing supernatural framing is now closer to an answer. Yāqūt, it seems, deliberately desisted from providing such a frame as he had chosen to implement an impartial approach to places in the lexicon, under the neutralizing effects of alphabetical order. Finally, the question remains what propelled Yāqūt to favour a design based on lexicography and the alphabet? The Islamic concepts he invokes in the prolegomena are meant to help justify this approach, but they do so rather inadequately and, above all, provide no plausible rationale for his unconventional venture. Also, it is utterly unreasonable to suspect that Yāqūt would have limited himself thoughtlessly, considering his previous experience with, and inclination towards, alphabetical order during more than a decade of intense writing. To close instead with an interpretation: Yāqūt has a model concept (above, end of Sect. III) that he not only refers to on at least fifteen occasions in the course of the prolegomena⁹² but which is also fully consistent with the structure and character of the lexicon to follow. This is alʿumrān, al-maʿmūr(a), or al-ʿimāra, ‘the inhabited earth, the human oecumene’ in its full temporal and spatial extension. Stretching out over a boundless geo-space regardless of confessionalism, it is able to provide the book with an overarching concept that fits all parts of it equally. Yāqūt, a pious Muslim no doubt and an aficionado of the whereabouts of religious scholarship, thus suggests to the readers, or rather: users, of his ‘Muʿjam al-buldān’ a humanist and cosmopolitan view of one world.

 Yāqūt (note 4), vol. 1, p. 7, l. 4: dhikr al-ʿumrān; p. 16, l. 2: maʿmūran; p. 17, l. 19: al-ʿumrān, l. 22: almaʿmūr; pp. 20, ll. 10, 12; 21, l. 14; 25, l. 16: al-maʿmūra; p. 25, l. 19: al-ʿumrān; pp. 27, l. 7; 28, l. 13; 29, l. 1: al-maʿmūr; p. 35, l. 9: al-ʿimāra; p. 35, l. 20: al-ʿumrān; p. 42, l. 20: al-ʿimāra, trans. (note 4), pp. 10, 23, 26, 30, 32, 38, 40, 42, 44, 50, 52, 60.

Jean-Charles Ducène

Al-Idrīsī, la géographie et les religions Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine whether al-Idrīsī used religious ideas as a structuring element in his geographical, cartographic and descriptive work. Al-Idrīsī incidentally integrates a description of religious practices in his geographical work as a distinguishing feature of the populations he places on the oecumene, in proportion to the information received about them. In that respect, al-Idrīsī never explains or shows the boundaries of the Muslim world, but he describes it by mentioning some local cults for Africa, India and the Turcs, sometimes anachronistically, sometimes ethnographically correct. Inside the Muslim world, the explicit mark of the Muslim devotion is limited to the description of Mecca and Medina, whereas Jerusalem is described as a Christian city. The religious practices or beliefs seem to be secondary in a geographic description primarily centred on towns and itineraries. However, when the non-Muslim cult is described, it is not reprobated but simply mentioned. As for the map, it is not marked by a religious structuring of space nor does it show places specifically marked by religious tradition. Keywords: Religions, geography, maps, Al-Idrīsī

I Introduction: les religions chez les géographes arabes Face à la diversité religieuse, l’islam médiéval développe une littérature savante qui tente de décrire et d’expliquer ce foisonnement de croyances et de comportements cultuels. Comme le but des auteurs était plus de décrire que de comprendre, on ne peut parler d’histoire des religions, mais plutôt de doxographie. Ces écrits apparaissent au Xe siècle, citons l’ouvrage précoce d’al-Nawbakhtī (m. 912), ‹ Al-ārā’ wa-ldiyānāt ›, ¹ qui traite tel que nous le connaissons des croyances orientales ou encore le ‹ Fiṣal fī-l-milal wa-l-ahwā’ › d’Ibn Ḥazm (m. 1064)² qui est plus marqué par le caractère polémique. Evidemment, le point de repère de nos observateurs est l’islam, religion révélée, exclusive et universelle.³ Les auteurs s’adossent à une supériorité et

 Joel L. Kraemer, al-Nawbakhtī, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème édition, vol. 7 (1993), pp. 1046 – 1047.  Ali b. Aḥmad Ibn Ḥazm, Al-Fiṣal fī-l-milal wa-l-ahwā’ wa-l-niḥal, 5 vol., Beirout 1980.  Guy Monnot, Les écrits musulmans sur les religions non bibliques, in : Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’ètudes Orientales 11 (1972), pp. 5 – 48 ; Idem, L’histoire des religions en Islam. Ibn alKalbî rt Râzî, in : Revue de l’histoire des religions 188/1 (1975), pp. 23 – 34 ; Jacques Waardenburg, Dr Jean-Charles Ducène, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes/Sorbonne, 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, France, [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-006

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une véracité supposées par rapport aux autres religions, comprises au prisme de l’histoire de la révélation, telle que conçue par l’islam. Le monothéisme apparaît comme premier et naturel, alors que le polythéisme est perçu comme une dégradation de cet état premier. La démarche des auteurs reste toutefois identique puisqu’ils se situent dans les catégories issues de la mise en place de l’islam avec le sentiment de la supériorité de celui-ci. Ils considèrent que tous les peuples ont accepté le créateur, puis ils traitent des religions préislamiques essentiellement asiatiques avant de détailler les courants de l’islam. Des notations plus ethnographiques peuvent toutefois apparaître, ainsi Abū l-Ma‘ālī (écrit en 1092) indique que le dieu des Turcs est Tengri et que les Zanj ont un seigneur suprême, s’appuyant en cela sur al-Mas‘ūdī.⁴ Dans cette littérature, pour l’Europe, seuls les Rūm, vus comme chrétiens sont pris en compte. Cet attrait pour les non-musulmans se retrouve aussi ailleurs, ainsi Ibn al-Nadīm (m. 987) dans son catalogue de livres circulant à Bagdad consacre dans l’avant-dernier chapitre une section à des sectes anciennes ou encore existantes liées plus ou moins au christianisme et une section aux religions indiennes et chinoises.⁵ Soulignons que dans ce dernier cas, il s’appuie notamment sur les dires du voyageur arabe Abū Dulaf.⁶ Quant à Shahrastānī⁷ (m. 1153), il aborde le monde musulman, les religions scriptuaires orientales et les philosophes, point les religions sans révélation déclarée, hormis les Arabes d’avant l’islam et certains Indiens. Pour ces auteurs, en dehors de l’islam et des religions du livre, on ne trouve que des kuffār (sing. Kafīr, «infidèle») et des mušrikūn (« associateurs », « polythéistes»), catégories que la dogmatique, l’hérésiographie et le droit détailleront.⁸ Et ces « infidèles » se situent essentiellement pour nos «historiens » en Iran et en Inde, notamment quand il s’agit d’idolâtrie. En outre, leur culte est directement interprété comme « idolâtrie »⁹ ou ‘ibādāt al-aṣnām ce qui l’amalgame aux cultes préislamiques¹⁰ vilipendés par la prédication du Prophète et par l’islam plus tard.

Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey, Oxford 1999. Que les synthèses soient en arabe ou en persan, elles ne traitent quasiment pas des religions polythéistes hormis indiennes, voir Henri Massé, L’exposé des religions par Abou ‘l-Maâlî, in : Revue de l’histoire des religions 94/1 (1926), pp. 17– 75.  Al-Mas‘ūdī, Les prairies d’or, tr. Charles Barbier de Meynard/ Abel Pavet de Courteille, rev. Charles Pellat, 5 vol., Paris, 1962– 1997, vol. 2, pp. 329 – 330.  Ibn al-Nadīm, The Fihrist. A Tenth-century Survey of Muslim Culture, éd. Bayard Dodge, 2 vol., New York 1970, vol. 2, pp.745 – 842.  Alfred von Rohr-Sauer, Des Abû Dulaf Bericht über seine Reise nach Turkestan, China und Indien neu übersetzt und untersucht, Stuttgart 1939.  Šahrastānī, Livre des religions et des sectes, éd. Guy Monnot/ Jean Jolivet, 2 vol., Louvain 1986 – 1993.  Walter Björkman, Kafīr, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème édition, vol. 5 (1974), pp. 425 – 427, et Daniel Gimaret, Shirk, in : Encyclopédie de l’islam, 2ème édition, vol. 9 (1996), pp. 503 – 504.  Guy Monnot, Wathaniyya, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème édition, vol. 11 (2005), pp. 192– 193. Sans qu’il y ait unanimité chez les lexicographes, le terme de waṯan désignerait plutôt une statue, timṯāl, alors que ṣanam ne serait pas forcèment anthropomorphique.

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Toutefois, en dehors de cette doxographie, la littérature historique ou géographique¹¹ a développé également un intérêt important pour le fait religieux certes observé à l’intérieur du monde musulman mais surtout à l’extérieur, puisque c’était là qu’il était le plus différent. Nous serions même enclin à parler de littérature ethnographique dans certains cas tant le fait observé est relaté avec détachement et sans condamnation péremptoire. C’est cette littérature par exemple qui a conservé des notations sur des pratiques religieuses non-chrétiennes en Europe¹². En effet, dès les premiers textes à contenu géographique au milieu du IXe siècle, les pratiques cultuelles voire les croyances religieuses des populations situées sur l’œkoumène et parfois rencontrées sont notées. Ainsi dans les ‹ Akhbar al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind › (851), sont relatées les funérailles avec sati d’un souverain du Śri Lanka comme les pratiques des yogins en Inde.¹³ Quant à la ‹ Relation anonyme › (ca 890) conservée par Ibn Rustah, elle consacre systématiquement quelques lignes aux traditions religieuses de huit populations d’Europe orientale dont la situation géographique et politique ainsi que les modes de subsistance sont décrits.¹⁴ Il apparaît bien de la sorte que la caractéristique religieuse est alors enregistrée comme d’autres puisqu’elle fait partie du catalogue des pratiques, des mœurs, des coutumes qui, par leur acceptation dans un groupe humain, lui confère une unité et une identité, en tout cas, vu de l’extérieur. Et par ricochet, ces éléments permettent à l’observateur de s’en différencier. Lorsque le discours géographique devient partie intégrante de l’encyclopédisme au Xe siècle,¹⁵ l’enregistrement des us et coutumes religieux des populations entourant l’empire musulman devient systématique autant que celle des religions non-musulmanes tolérées à l’intérieur de celui-ci. Le fait religieux observé est une spécificité consignée comme élément de l’altérité et de la différence qui permet de situer un groupe social considéré par rapport à soi ; certes, la nature descriptive et réaliste du texte géographique empêche l’auteur d’entrer dans des considérations abstraites ou dogmatiques, mais cette curiosité alimente une véritable géographie humaine.¹⁶ Or, l’œuvre géographique d’al-Idrīsī relève de la géographie descriptive – quoique son texte soit organisé à partir d’un projet cartographique –, on peut ainsi se

 A ce propos, l’ouvrage qui reste déterminant dans l’approche des auteurs médiévaux est ceux de Hišām ibn al-Kalbī, Kitāb al-aṣnām, éd. Wahib Atallah, Paris 1969.  André Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle. Géographie et géographie humaine dans la littérature arabe des origines à 1050, Paris 1975, pp. 257– 481.  Jean-Charles Ducène, L’Europe et les géographes arabes du Moyen Âge, Paris 2018, pp. 137– 140.  Aḥ bā r aṣ -Ṣ īn wa l-Hind. Relation de la Chine et de l’Inde, rédigée en 851, éd. Jean Sauvaget, Paris 1957, p. 22.  Ibn Rustah, Kitāb al-a‘lāq al-nafīsa, éd. Michael Jan De Goeje, Leyde 1892, pp. 139 – 148 ; Ducène (note 12), p. 102.  Mahmoud Tahmi, L’encyclopédisme musulman à l’âge classique. ‹ Le Livre de la création et de l’histoire › de Maqdisî, Paris 1998, pp. 150 – 168 ; Ahmad Shboul, Al-Mas‘udi and His World. A Muslim Humanist and His Interest in Non-muslims, Londres, 1979, pp. 151– 225 et pp. 285 – 298.  Miquel (note 11), pp. 683 – 689, index s. religions.

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demander s’il a intégré dans son texte l’appartenance religieuse des populations qu’il décrit comme un matériau de la géographie humaine ? Et si cela était le cas, comment sa culture musulmane du VIe siècle de l’hégire aurait-elle pu modeler sa perception ou du moins ses commentaires ?

II Al-Idrīsī et les religions Aborder la représentation de la religion dans l’œuvre géographique d’al-Idrīsī est particulièrement intéressante car l’auteur travaille au XIIe siècle en tant que musulman arabe dans un contexte chrétien, dans une Sicile normande où le pouvoir est chrétien mais dont une part importante de la population est arabe et encore musulmane. Comme al-Idrīsī le souligne lui-même, ce serait Roger II qui aurait commandité l’œuvre, mais celle-ci est terminée comme l’indique la critique interne, en 1158, quatre ans après la mort du roi.¹⁷ Le but recherché par le souverain dans cette commande nous échappe car elle n’est pas unique, par exemple, dans le domaine de l’histoire ecclésiastique, il commanda à Neilos Doxapatrès (XIIe siècle) une ‹ Histoire des cinq patriarcats ›, en grec. Par ailleurs, cet ouvrage de géographie universelle n’a aucune utilité directe hormis de donner à voir et à lire une description des réalités de géographie physique et humaine du monde, en sachant que la géographie humaine se réduit aux localités, aux villes, à leurs productions et aux routes qui les mettent en contact. L’auteur ne donne à connaître aucune réalité politique ou militaire. La consultation de l’ouvrage pouvait au mieux montrer la vastitude du monde connu, l’extension de la place des hommes et leur diversité. C’est une œuvre qui assouvirait la curiosité d’un roi savant en lui donnant une connaissance systématisée et globale du monde. Le contexte de la coexistence entre les communautés chrétienne et musulmane en Sicile ne doit pas occulter les relations belliqueuses ailleurs en Méditerranée, que ce soit les guerres de «reconquête» en Espagne et au Levant, dans le conflit que l’Europe connaît comme étant «les croisades».¹⁸ Al-Idrīsī ayant laissé une œuvre cartographique commentée, l’exercice demande que l’on interroge ces deux composantes, à savoir les cartes et son commentaire textuel, en gardant en tête que si le commentaire suit la carte dans son ordonnancement, il est autonome en tant qu’œuvre. Sans que nous en ayons les détails, alIdrīsī présente la carte comme étant première dans l’ordre de son travail, le commentaire n’étant selon lui que la compilation des informations qu’il ne pouvait montrer sur la carte. En réalité, l’étude parallèle de la carte et du texte indique que si  Roberto Rubinacci, La date della geografia di al-Idrīsī, in: Studi Magrebini 3 (1970) pp. 73 – 78 ; Jean-Charles Ducène, Les oeuvres géographiques d’al-Idrīsī et leur diffusion, in : Journal asiatique 305/1 (2017), pp. 33 – 41, ici p. 33.  Annliese Nef, Conquérir et gouverner la Sicile islamique aux XIe et XIIe siècles, Rome 2011, pp. 67– 119.

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celui-ci suit bien la carte dans l’ordonnancement de son énumération, il est néanmoins conçu comme une synthèse de géographie descriptive.

II.1 La carte L’œuvre cartographique d’al-Idrīsī présente deux types de cartes, d’une part une mappemonde circulaire dont l’origine reste sujette à débat et un corpus de 70 cartes régionales rectangulaires. En effet, l’auteur a suivi la division de l’oekumène en sept climats et a subdivisé celui-ci en dix sections, chacune de celle-ci constituant un chapitre de son ouvrage, chaque fois accompagné d’une carte. Assemblées¹⁹, ces cartes nous donnent à voir en quelque sorte la représentation du monde à laquelle al-Idrīsī a abouti suite à ses travaux. Si le tracé de la carte d’al-Idrīsī nous paraît original, il faut garder à l’esprit qu’il s’appuie d’abord sur le modèle d’al-Khwārizmī et celui-ci dans sa structure reprenait en substance celui de Ptolémée. Al-Khwārizmī avait-il eu accès directement au texte de la ‘Géographie’ de l’auteur alexandrin ? Non, mais l’ouvrage d’al-Khwārizmī témoigne que l’auteur a eu sous les yeux une carte, dont il a repris les coordonnées, les toponymes, et dont il décrit l’iconographie et les couleurs utilisées. En d’autres mots, il s’agit du relever d’une carte. C’est dire que les conceptions qui président à cette représentation de l’œkoumène sont d’abord mathématiques : le monde s’étend sur 180° de longitude et 66° de latitude et les objets géographiques avaient été situés à l’origine selon leurs coordonnées en latitude et longitude, matière dans laquelle la religion n’intervient pas.²⁰ Il n’y a pas de centre symbolique religieux à cette carte et le méridien central passe à 90° Est de la côte atlantique, ce qui place le centre géométrique de la carte quelque part au nord de la Syrie, dans le Hauran. En revanche, le choix des objets géographiques représentés pourrait avoir été influencé par un critère religieux. Qu’en est-il ? L’observation des cartes d’al-Idrīsī nous montre que les localités a priori importantes de ce point de vue à son époque comme La Mecque (fig. 1), Médine, Jérusalem et Rome, sont représentées par le même symbole que toute autre localité : la rosace. Bien que nous n’ayons pas les cartes autographes d’al-Idrīsī, celles-ci devaient sans doute également montrer la même équanimité ou neutralité vis-à-vis des lieux marqués par la tradition religieuse. Cependant, deux objets géographiques qui trouvent leur origine dans des conceptions religieuses sont effectivement représentés. Il y a tout d’abord la Muraille des Gog et Magog et puis une idole auprès de laquelle on viendrait en pèlerinage en Haute Asie.

 Konrad Miller, Weltkarte des Arabers Idrisi vom Jahre 1154, Stuttgart 1981.  Jean-Charles Ducène, Les coordonnées géographiques de la carte manuscrite d’al-Idrīsī (Paris, BnF ar. 2221), in : Der Islam 86/2 (2009), pp. 271– 285.

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Fig. 1 : La Meque. Al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (copie de la fin du XIIIe – début du XIVe s.). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Ms Arabe 2221, fol. 61r

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Fig. 2 : Porte des Gog et Magog. Al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (copie de la fin du XIIIe – début du XIVe s.). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Ms Arabe 2221, fol. 334r

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Dans le cas de la Muraille des Gog et Magog (fig. 2), nous sommes en face de la représentation d’un élément de l’eschatologie musulmane qui s’appuie sur une évocation coranique (Coran, XVIII, 92– 99) qui, elle-même, remonte à l’eschatologie juive (Ezéchiel, 38, 2 ; 39, 6) et au ‹ Roman d’Alexandre ›. L’origine²¹ de ce récit et la construction de cette notion ne nous intéressent pas ici, mais il est certain que la Muraille des Gog et Magog se retrouve dans la littérature géographique depuis le récit de Sallām al-Turjmān, rapporté par Ibn Khurradādhbih²² et son positionnement par al-Khwārizmī²³ au IXe siècle. Or, on soulignera qu’al-Idrīsī a comme modèle cartographique une carte semblable ou très proche de celle d’al-Khwārizmī et que le récit qu’il donne du voyage de Sallām al-Turjmān²⁴ à la muraille, quoique démarqué de Jayhānī, est semblable à celui d’Ibn Khurradādhbih. Quant à « l’idole » représentée en Haute Asie (fig. 3), son origine est plus difficile à établir. Dans son texte, al-Idrīsī dit qu’il s’agit de l’idole de Lālān qu’il voit comme une statue de marbre située dans la ville de Lālān, au pied d’une haute montagne, à laquelle la population de la région venait faire des sacrifices.²⁵ Konrad Miller l’identifiait avec les ruines d’un stupa décrit par Sven Hedin dans le désert du Lop Nor, à Loulan selon la prononciation chinoise.²⁶ Nous pensons qu’il s’agit peut-être plus modestement de la « tour » de pierre que Ptolémée représentait au même endroit (‹ Géographie ›, I.12.1 ; I.12.8) et qui réapparaît chez al-Khwārizmī comme la Burj ḥijjāra. ²⁷ Ce symbole aurait alors été réinvesti par al-Idrīsī de traditions qu’il aurait transposées d’autres cultes, le pèlerinage étant un comportement cultuel des plus répandus. Bref, sur la carte, le fait religieux est en tant que tel insignifiant. En revanche, le texte intègre cette dimension comme caractéristique liée moins à des lieux et plus à certaines populations, sans cependant qu’il y ait de systématisation.

 Travis Zadeh, Mapping Frontiers across Medieval Islam. Geography, Translation and the ’abbasid Empire Library of Middle East History, Londres 2011, pp. 179 – 187; Emeri van Donzel/ Andrea Schmidt, Gog and Magog in Early Eastern Christian and Islamic Sources. Sallam’s Quest for Alexander’s Wall (Brill’s Inner Asian Library 22), Leyde 2010.  Ibn Khurradādhbih, Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik (Liber viarum et regnorum), éd. Michael Jan De Goeje (Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum 6), Leyde 1889, pp. 162– 170.  Al-Kwārizmī, Das Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ des Abū Ǧa‘far Muhammad Ibn Mūsā al-Huwārizmī, éd. Hans von Mžik (Bibliothek arabischer Historiker und Geographen 3), Leipzig 1926, p. 60; Hubert Daunicht, Der Osten nach der Erdkarte al-Ḫuwārizmīs. Beitrage zur Historischen Geographie und Geschichte Asiens. Bd. 4, erster Teil, Bonn 1970, pp. 6 – 26.  Al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī iḫtirāq al-āfāq. Opus geographicum sive ‹ Liber ad eorum delectationem qui terras peragrare studeant ›, éd. Alesio Bombaci et al., 8 vol., Leyde, Naples 1970 – 1984, rééd. Al-Qāhira, s.d., 2 vol., vol. 2, pp. 994– 998.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, p. 816.  Ibid., pp. 716 – 717 ; Konrad Miller, Mappae arabicae. Arabische Welt- und Länderkarten, 6 vol., Stuttgart 1929 – 1931, vol. 4/2 (Nord- und Ostasien), p. 85.  Klaudios Ptolemaios, Handbuch der Geographie. Griechisch – Deutsch, 3 vol., éd. Alfred Stückelberger/ Gerd Graßhoff, Basel 2006 – 2009, vol. 1, p. 87 et p. 89; Al-Kwārizmī (note 23), p. 58.

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Fig. 3 : Idole de Lālān. Al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (copie de la fin du XIIIe – début du XIVe s.). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Ms Arabe 2221, fol. 250r

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II.2 Le texte a) Territoires musulmans et chrétiens D’abord, que dit al-Idrīsī de lieux emblématiques comme La Mecque, Médine, Constantinople ou Rome par exemple ? Dans les trois premiers cas, il se cantonne à la description topographique des localités sans exprimer une quelconque dévotion. La description du sanctuaire de la Kaaba à La Mecque se réduit à une page qui en donne une idée générale, alors que l’auteur s’étend sur la prospérité commerciale de la ville.²⁸ Pour Médine, d’une manière tout à fait incroyable et inattendue, il ne mentionne ni décrit la mosquée du Prophète, pourtant modèle paradigmatique de la mosquée.²⁹ Rien n’est dit du fait que la localité fut le théâtre d’une partie de la révélation coranique ! Al-Idrīsī préfère évoquer la pauvreté de la ville et ses moyens d’approvisionnement en eau. A Constantinople, il ne mentionne pas Sainte-Sophie pour focaliser son intérêt sur le palais et l’hippodrome.³⁰ Rome cependant représente un cas particulier car bien qu’écrivant en Sicile, ses informations sur la topographie de la ville sont anachroniques, remontant à Ibn Ḥawqal et Ibn Khurradādhbih.³¹ AlIdrīsī est cependant original sur un point comme l’a montré Daniel König, quand il confère au pape sa fonction de guide spirituel, en accord avec la définition chrétienne de la papauté à ce moment-là. On voit à Rome le palais du prince (malik) qu’on nomme pape. Ce prince est supérieur en pouvoir à tous les rois ; ceux-ci lui sont inférieurs et le respectent à l’égal du Créateur. Il gouverne avec justice, punit les oppresseurs, protège les faibles et les misérables, et empêche qu’il ne soit commis de vexations. Ses décisions s’appliquent à tous les rois de la chrétienté, et nul d’entre eux ne peut s’opposer à ses arrêts.³²

En réalité, avec cette observation, on sort de la religion pour entrer dans les prétentions politiques du fait religieux. Al-Idrīsī aurait-il accordé un intérêt plus circonspect aux lieux mentionnés dans la révélation coranique ? Effectivement, en Anatolie, il rappelle l’existence d’un lieu de dévotion, la caverne des sept dormants (aṣḥāb al-kaḥf), évoqué par le Coran (XVIII, 1– 27), que les textes chrétiens antiques d’ailleurs³³ comme les textes géographiques arabes³⁴ abordent déjà. Mais selon nous,  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, pp. 139 – 141.  Ibid., p. 143.  Ducène (note 12), pp. 92– 93.  Ibid., pp. 79 – 80; Ibn Khurradādhbih (note 22), pp. 113 – 116.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, pp. 751– 752 ; Al-Idrîsî, La première géographie de l’Occident, éd. PaulAmédée Jaubert, rev. Henri Bresc/ Annliese Nef, Paris 1999, p. 374 ; Hannes Möhring, Konstantinopel und Rom im mittelalterlichen Weltbild der Muslime, in : Peter Moraw (éd.), Das geographische Weltbild um 1300. Politik im Spannungsfeld von Wissen, Mythos und Fiktion (Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, Beiheft 6), Berlin 1989, pp. 59 – 95, ici p. 75; Daniel König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West. Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe, Oxford 2015, pp. 243 – 244.  Rudi Paret, Aṣḥāb al-ḳahf, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème édition, vol. 1 (1960), pp. 712– 713.

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il s’agit ici d’une réminiscence littéraire, appuyée sur un emprunt à Ibn Khurradādhbih qui relate le voyage de Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir pour le calife alWāthiq et non la volonté recherchée de localiser l’endroit.³⁵ Ceci dit, le Levant et Jérusalem représentent un cas intéressant car à lire al-Idrīsī, on a du mal à croire qu’il s’agit d’un auteur musulman. Jérusalem est d’abord décrite comme une ville possédant des bâtiments chrétiens à commencer par l’église de la Résurrection, dont il présente la première description consécutive aux travaux d’agrandissement du milieu du XIIe siècle, puisqu’elle est consacrée en 1149. Il lui donne d’abord son appellation « d’église de la Résurection» (kanīsa al-qiyāma)³⁶ avant de préciser que les musulmans l’appellent l’église de «l’ordure» (al-qumāma), reprenant ici un ancien jeu de mots dépréciatif qui s’appuie sur la proximité phonétique entre qiyāma « résurection » et qumāma «ordure». Ce dénigrement apparaît au Xe siècle.³⁷ C’est l’aspect complexe de l’édifice qui prévaut car celui-ci se déploie sur deux niveaux et il est recouvert par une coupole décorée intérieurement par des peintures, en fait des mosaïques.³⁸ On pénètre dans la partie basse où se trouve le Saint-Sépulcre (al-maqbara al-muqaddisa) par la porte Santa-Maria (Shant Mariya) qui ouvre sur un escalier de trente marches.³⁹ Le Saint-Sépulcre lui-même est un édicule surmonté d’une coupole. Sa porte sud, dite porte de la Crucifixion, ouvre dans la direction du clocher (qanbinār, cfr. it. campanile).⁴⁰ Les autres établissements chrétiens de cette ville sont décrits dans leur situation topographique, par exemple il écrit à propos de l’église du Notre-Père, au sud du Mont des Oliviers : Sur la route qui monte vers cette colline, se trouve une immense église, très bien bâtie, appelée l’église du Pater Noster⁴¹ (Bātir Nuṣtir) et au sommet de la colline, on en voit une autre très vénérée où se trouvent des hommes et des femmes reclus⁴² qui cherchent par cela la récompense de Dieu Très Glorieux. En descendant un peu vers le sud, on aboutit au tombeau de Lazare⁴³ (al-

 Al-Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī ma‘rifat al-aqālīm, éd. Michael De Goeje, Leyde 1906, pp. 153– 154; Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems. A description of Syria and the Holy Land from A. D. 650 to 1500, Londres 1890, pp. 274– 286; Miquel (note 11), pp. 460 – 461.  Giovanni Oman, Osservazioni sulle notizie biografiche comunemente diffuse sullo scrittore arabe al-Šarīf al-Idrīsī, in: Annali dell’Istituto orientale di Napoli, Nuova serie 30 (1970), pp. 209 – 238, ici p. 221 et al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 266, note; Ibn Khurradādhbih (note 22), pp. 106 – 107.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 358.  Le Strange (note 34) p. 202.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, pp. 358 – 359 ; Augustin Sébastien Marmardji, Textes géographiques arabes sur la Palestine, Paris 1951, p. 185; Le Strange (note 34) pp. 206 – 207 ; Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 4 vol., Cambridge 1993 – 2009, vol. 3, p. 20, selon l’auteur al-Idrīsī s’est basé sur des témoignages de voyageurs.  Pringle (note 38), vol. 3, p. 42, cette porte tirerait son nom de la chapelle Sainte-Marie, située au nord de la rotonde.  Pour l’identification des deux derniers éléments, nous renvoyons à Ibid., p. 20  Ibid., pp. 117– 124.  Il faudrait y voir l’abbaye établie près de Sainte-Marie de la vallée de Josaphat, ibid., pp. 289 – 290.  Marmadji (note 38), p. 163.

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‘Azar), qui fut ressuscité par le seigneur le Messie (Jean, XI, 1– 44). A deux milles du mont des Oliviers, se trouve le village⁴⁴ où fut amenée l’ânesse sur laquelle le seigneur le Messie monta lors de son entrée à Jérusalem (Ūrushalīm). Le village est aujourd’hui en ruine et plus personne n’y vit.⁴⁵

Remarquons que les Evangiles (Mt XXI, 1– 9, Mc XI, 1– 10, Lc XIX, 28 – 40) parlent de la localité de Bethphagé et d’un ânon, et que seul Matthieu mentionne que l’ânon en question était avec une ânesse, sa mère. Al-Idrīsī situe également l’église de SainteMarie à Gethsémani, l’église de Sion (Ṣahyūn), où la salle dans laquelle le Christ mangea a été conservée ainsi que la table.⁴⁶ A proximité de Jérusalem, il localise la source de Siloé (al-silwān), en précisant que le Messie y rendit la vue à un aveugle (Jean IX, 6 – 7). Si le Coran (V, 110) fait bien état de ce miracle du Christ, seul al-Idrīsī le place effectivement à Siloé, mais bien selon la tradition musulmane, puisque d’après l’évangile de Jean (IX, 6 – 7), Jésus envoie l’aveugle se laver à la fontaine de Siloé après lui avoir mis de la boue mélangée à sa salive sur les yeux.⁴⁷ Ce n’est pas lui qui rend directement la vue à l’aveugle. Au sud de la ville, al-Idrīsī localise un champ que le Christ a acheté pour la sépulture des étrangers.⁴⁸ En réalité, selon Matthieu (XXVII, 3 – 8), ce sont les gens du temple à qui Judas avait rendu leur argent qui achètent avec ces trente pièces d’argent un champ dit du potier pour en faire la sépulture des étrangers. Quant à la description des monuments musulmans de « l’esplanade des mosquées », à savoir la mosquée al-Aqṣā et le Dôme du rocher, respectivement transformés par les Francs en établissement pour les Templiers et en église. Al-Idrīsī décrit d’abord la mosquée d’al-Aqṣā qu’il considère comme un bâtiment extrêmement grand, seulement dépassé par la mosquée de Cordoue.⁴⁹ Quant au Dôme du rocher (Qubbat al-ṣakhra) proprement dit, son bâtiment est décrit avec précision quoiqu’à la fin de la notice, al-Idrīsī indique qu’à l’extérieur du bâtiment, existe une magnifique église appelée « le Saint des saints », soit le Dôme du Roc.⁵⁰ Il ajoute seulement qu’au moment où il écrit, cette mosquée a été conquise par les chrétiens (Rūm) qui l’ont transformée en demeures pour les templiers (al-dāwīya).⁵¹ Le caractère sibyllin de cette affirmation, sans imprécation, la retenue de l’auteur dans l’explication du changement d’affectation des bâtiments, donnent à penser qu’al-Idrīsī ne l’a pas compris ou qu’il s’est autocensuré. Et quant au reste de la Palestine, ce sont aussi les lieux chrétiens qui nous sont rappelés ainsi que les lieux liés aux miracles du Christ. A Naplouse, il signale la        

Ibid., p. 24. Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 361 ; Le Strange (note 38), 1890, p. 211. Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 362 ; Pringle (note 38), pp. 261– 287. Marmadji (note 38), p. 153 et p. 203. Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 362 ; Marmadji (note 38), p. 56. Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 359 – 360 ; Le Strange (note 34), pp. 107– 108. Pringle (note 38), vol. 3, pp. 400 – 404. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 420 – 421

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présence du puits de Jacob, où le Christ demanda de l’eau à la Samaritaine (Jean IV, 1– 45).⁵² A Bethléem, il décrit l’église de la nativité avec ses colonnes et la grotte où se trouvait la crèche,⁵³ c’est donc bien la basilique constantinienne qui est décrite.⁵⁴ Il évoque également l’église consacrée aux anges qui annoncèrent aux bergers la naissance du Christ (Lc II, 8 – 14). Etonnement, aucun lieu musulman n’est mentionné et aucune imprécation n’est ajoutée quand il décrit la présence chrétienne, ce qui est inaccoutumé pour un auteur musulman en pleine période des croisades. L’auteur fait preuve d’une même réserve pour un autre « front chaud » à son époque, c’est-à-dire les reconquêtes chrétiennes en Andalous, dont il est pourtant originaire. Quand il fait état de la conquête d’une ville par un camp ou par un autre, il mentionne simplement qu’elle est sortie d’un pouvoir pour entrer dans un autre, sans jamais utiliser de formules d’anathème contre les ennemis de l’islam, formules ne seraient-ce que rhétoriques pourtant d’usage chez ses coreligionnaires. Par exemple, lorsque sa description s’arrête à Tolède, il ajoute que c’est la capitale du prince chrétien des deux Castilles (sulṭān al-Rūm al-Qashtālaynī) soit Alphonse VII de León et de Castille, et à Coria, il précise simplement qu’elle est aux mains des chrétiens, ce qui est vrai depuis 1124.⁵⁵ La mosquée qui est la mieux décrite, pour ne pas dire arpentée, est celle de Cordoue que l’auteur connaissait de visu. ⁵⁶ Il lui consacre ainsi plus de quatre pages alors qu’il se limite à une page pour la mosquée de La Mecque où il mentionne principalement les dimensions de la Ka‘ba et quelques édicules. Si la mosquée de Cordoue l’emporte, ce n’est pas à cause de son importance religieuse mais parce qu’il en parle par expérience personnelle, en tant que lieu vécu pourrions-nous dire. Par ailleurs, en Sicile aussi, notamment à Palerme, il fait preuve d’une réserve étonnante quand il évoque l’importance passée de la mosquée de la ville écrivant : « C’est là qu’est située la grande mosquée ou du moins le bâtiment qui en tenait lieu dans le passé et est redevenu aujourd’hui ce qu’il était auparavant». Cette évocation énigmatique témoigne que l’auteur sait que la grande mosquée, construite à l’emplacement de la cathédrale byzantine, est redevenue une église à son époque, mais il ne le dit pas explicitement ; seuls ceux qui connaissent l’histoire de Palerme comprennent l’allusion.⁵⁷

 Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 356 ; Marmadji (note 38), p. 198 ; Le Strange (note 34), p. 513.  Marmadji (note 38), p. 25 ; Le Strange (note 34), p. 299.  Pringle (note 38) vol 1. pp. 137– 149.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, p. 536 et p. 731 ; Ducène (note 12), pp. 204– 205.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, pp. 575 – 579 ; Al-Idrîsî (note 32), pp. 294– 298.  Ferdinando Maurici, Palermo normanna. Vicende urbanistiche d’una città imperiale, 1072– 1194 Palermo 2016, pp. 34– 35 ; Id, La ciudad e Rogerio II e Idrisis. Palermo en el siglo XII, in : Francisco Herrera Clavero (ed.), El mundo del geógrafo ceutí al Idrisi, Ceuta 2011, pp. 13 – 52, ici p. 41.

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Ailleurs, dans les terres où l’islam prédomine, rare sont les mentions de la présence d’un autre culte, par exemple, en Iran, près de Qāshān, il situe un village de mages (majūs), comprenons de Zoroastriens.⁵⁸ Si al-Idrīsī reste discret par rapport aux sanctuaires musulmans et qu’il est plus loquace sur la «Terre sainte» des chrétiens, il est à remarquer qu’il ne s’étend pas non plus sur les églises chrétiennes ailleurs, alors lieux de pèlerinage. Il en mentionne trois : l’église des corbeaux au cap Saint-Vincent, celle de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle et celle du Mont Saint-Michel.⁵⁹ C’est l’église de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle qui retient plus longuement son attention : Cette église est célèbre pour le pèlerinage dont elle est l’objet. Les chrétiens y viennent de toutes parts, et, si l’on excepte l’église de Jérusalem, il n’en est pas de plus imposante. Elle peut être comparée à ‘l’ordure’ (al-qumāma – manière péjorative de désigner l’église de la résurrection, cfr supra), pour la beauté, la grandeur des constructions, l’importance des richesses qu’elle renferme et l’abondance des aumônes. On y remarque quantité de croix d’or et d’argent enrichies de pierreries telles que le saphir, l’émeraude et d’autres. […] Elle est entourée de diverses maisons où logent les prêtres, les moines, les diacres et les chantres.⁶⁰

Ceci dit, l’islam lui-même en tant que religion ne voit guère ses différents courants situer ici ou là à l’intérieur du monde musulman. L’exception notable est la mention de l’existence des Ibāḍites dans le Sud tunisien et à Jerba.⁶¹ Les Shiites sont absents de son texte : Kerbelā’ est évoqué comme l’endroit où se situe la tombe d’al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī, mausolée (mashhad) qui suscite le pèlerinage à plusieurs moments de l’année.⁶² Quant aux territoires encore soumis à un pouvoir faṭimide ou ismaélien comme l’Egypte et le Yémen, seules leur prospérité est décrite⁶³ alors que cette spécificité religieuse est passée sous silence. Enfin, si les chrétiens et les musulmans ont un ancrage relativement bien marqué ou attendu, les juifs sont mentionnés mais sans que leur particularité religieuse ne soit soulignée car le lecteur les connaît comme communauté différenciée. Ainsi, hormis la mention de la présence juive en Afrique de l’ouest (cfr infra), al-Idrīsī en localise à Kaboul, au sud du Maroc, à Tarragone, à Lucena et à Burgos.⁶⁴ Ce n’est qu’à propos de la ville de Tustar, en Iran, qu’il souligne la présence du tombeau de Daniel que les juifs vénéraient notamment pour obtenir de la pluie. Par la suite, le

 Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, p. 684.  Ibid., p. 543, p. 728, p. 858 ; Al-Idrîsî (note 32), p. 263, p. 355 et p. 420.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, p. 728.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1 pp. 305 – 306 ; Virginie Prévost, Une minorité religieuse vue par les géographes arabes : les Ibādites du Sud tunisien, in : Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 52/2 (2006), pp. 193 – 204, ici pp.199 – 200.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, p. 668.  Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 52– 54 et pp. 322– 324.  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 196, p. 235, pp. 395 – 396 ; vol. 2, p. 555, p. 571 et p. 732. On ajoutera qu’il mentionne aussi une île imaginaire peuplée de juifs en mer Rouge, vol. 1, p. 136.

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tombeau aurait été déplacé par les musulmans. Al-Idrīsī⁶⁵ n’emploie cependant pas l’ethnonyme Yahūd mais l’expression «gens du Livre» (ahl al-Kitāb) pour désigner ces dévots.

b) Les territoires « païens» Cependant, c’est quand il s’écarte des mondes chrétien et musulman qu’al-Idrīsī s’arrête avec plus de détails sur les comportements religieux, mais comme caractéristique parmi d’autres d’une population à localiser. Ainsi, en Afrique de l’ouest, au sud du Sahara, il est le premier à mentionner une présence juive en insistant aussi sur la déliquescence de leur croyance, selon ses informateurs.⁶⁶ Plus à l’est, dans le Sahara tchadien, il signale expressément que les Zaghawa – les Toubous actuels – sont des Noirs « païens (majūs) sans foi déterminée ».⁶⁷ En Afrique de l’est, sur la côte swahilie, près de Dar es Salam, il signale que les populations locales jouent du tambour lors de leur culte.⁶⁸ A Malindi, au Kenya, il rapporte que les habitants par leur magie parviennent à rendre inoffensifs les serpents et les animaux sauvages et qu’ils possèdent un sorcier du nom d’al-maqanqā, que François Viré a rapproché du swahili mganga « médecins-guerisseur.»⁶⁹ Au nord de l’Inde, il décrit encore le temple indien de Multan et son idole, en démarquant Ibn Ḥawqal, alors que ce lieu de culte n’existe plus à son époque.⁷⁰ Il signale également l’existence de temples vénérés à Daybul, assertion anachronique car le stupa en question a été détruit au VIIIe siècle lors de la conquête musulmane de la ville.⁷¹ De même à Nahrwāra, il note que le souverain, le ballahrā, voue un culte à l’idole (ṣanam) al-bud. ⁷²  Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 395 – 396.  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 19, p. 105, à Qamnuriyya, Daw et Mallal; Michel Abitbol, Juifs maghrébins et commerce transsaharien (VIIIe-XVe siècle), in : Revue française d’histoire d’Outre-mer 242– 243 (1979), pp. 177– 193, spc. p. 181.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 119 ; Al-Idrîsî (note 32), p. 112.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, pp. 60 – 61. Localité mentionnée est Albābis, non identifiée, François Viré la situait au niveau de Dar es Salam ou à Tanga, François Viré, L’océan Indien d’après le géographe Abû ‘Abd Allâh Muhammad ibn Idrîs al-Hammûdî al-Hasanî dit Al-Šarîf al-Idrīsī (493 – 560H/1100 – 1166). Extraits traduits et annotés du ‹ Livre de Roger ›, in: Paul Ottino (éd.), Etudes sur l’océan Indien, Saint-Denis de la Réunion 1979, pp. 13 – 45, ici p. 19, note 1.  Alphonse Lenselaer, Dictionnaire suahili-français, Paris 1983, p. 121.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, pp. 176 – 177 ; Ahmad Maqbul, India and the Neighbouring Territories in the Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq al-‘āfāq of al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī, Leyde 1960, pp. 49 – 50. Voir Ibn Ḥawqal, Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ. Opus geographicum auctore Ibn Ḥawqal, éd. Johannes Hendrik Kramers, Leyde 1939, pp. 321– 322.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 181 ; Maqbul (note 70), p. 55 ; Ibn Khurradadhbih (note 22), p. 62, mais avec une variante qui donne un sens différent ; voir A. S. Bazmee Ansari, Daybul, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème éd., vol. 7 (1955), pp. 194– 195.

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Plus au sud, il s’étend en détails sur les pratiques religieuses au Śri Lanka (Sarandīb) ou coexistent notamment quatre communautés à la cour du souverain : Le roi a seize ministres, quatre d’entre eux sont de sa confession (millatihi), quatre sont chrétiens, quatre musulmans et quatre juifs. Il a organisé un endroit pour eux où les gens de religion se réunissent et discutent de leurs fois (adyānihim), chacun expose son argument et apporte sa preuve en soutien de sa foi. Le roi leur permet cela. On prend note de leurs preuves et de leurs histoires. Des groupes de gens et plusieurs factions réunissent les savants de chaque religion, je veux dire les chrétiens, les hindouistes, les musulmans et les juifs, et ils prennent note à partir d’eux de l’histoire de leurs prophètes et de leurs souverains anciens. [Les savants] les instruisent dans leurs pratiques religieuses (sharā’i‘ihim) et ils leur expliquent ce qu’ils ne savent pas. Le roi possède une statue en or dans son temple, et la valeur ce qu’elle porte comme perles, rubis et pierres précieuses est inestimable.⁷³

Cette liberté d’expression religieuse accordée comme une faveur royale n’est peutêtre pas relevée par l’auteur de manière gratuite. Nous pourrions y voir la volonté d’al-Idrīsī de mettre en exergue une tolérance religieuse pratiquée quelque part dans l’océan Indien. En outre, l’île est célèbre pour le pic d’Adam : [dans l’île] se trouve la montagne où est tombé Adam, c’est une très haute et impressionnante montagne qui s’élève dans le ciel et que les marins aperçoivent de leurs bateaux à plusieurs jours de distance. Son nom est ‘jabal al-rahūn’. Les brahmanes (al-barāhima)⁷⁴ – qui sont les dévots (‘ubbād) de l’Inde – prétendent que l’on voit dans cette montagne la trace du pied d’Adam, de soixante-dix coudées de long, enfoncée dans la pierre, qu’une lumière brillante comme l’éclair illumine perpétuellement et que son deuxième pied arriva dans mer, quand il fit un pas.⁷⁵

On insistera sur le fait que l’auteur⁷⁶ consacre plusieurs pages à distinguer les sectes religieuses indiennes et certaines pratiques cultuelles, parce qu’il a eu soit un informateur précis, soit une source écrite détaillée à ce sujet. Il donne ainsi une définition de la caste des brahmanes : Ce sont les dévots de l’Inde. Ils s’habillent avec des peaux de léopards ou d’autres animaux. Il arrive parfois que le brahmane se mette debout tenant un bâton en main et les gens se rassemblent autour de lui, il reste ainsi debout toute la journée jusqu’au soir, tenant au sermon à la population, lui rappelant Dieu (Allāh) Tout Puissant et lui décrivant ce qui anéantit les peuples du passé. Ces brahmanes ne boivent pas de vin ni de jus fermentés. Ils pratiquent le culte des idoles en les considérant comme intermédiaires vers Dieu Tout Puissant.⁷⁷

 Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 188 ; Maqbul (note 70), p. 59  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 73; Ahmad Maqbul (note 70), p. 28.  F. Rahman, Barāhima, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème éd., vol. 1 (1960), pp. 1062– 1063.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 73; Maqbul (note 70), p. 27; Sauvaget (note 13), p. 4; Ibn Khurradadhbih (note 22), p. 64.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, pp. 96 – 97 ; Maqbul (note 70), pp. 36 – 37; pp. 145 – 151.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 96

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Al-Idrīsī subdivise aussi l’hindouisme en quarante-deux sectes en démarquant Ibn Khurradādhbih⁷⁸ ou peut-être une source antérieure également utilisée par Marwāzī⁷⁹ et qui remonterait à un rapport, écrit à la demande du Barmakide Yaḥyā ibn Khālid sur les religions de l’Inde. Ces détails ne nous intéresseront pas ici car l’important est de souligner qu’al-Idrīsī s’y est attardé. Sa description des îles de l’Asie du sud-est est confuse si on considère qu’il confond par moment Madagascar et certaines îles de l’archipel de la Sonde, néanmoins il enregistre parfois des informations nouvelles qu’il intègre à un fonds livresque antérieur.⁸⁰ Ainsi, selon lui trois îles de l’océan Indien appartiennent à un roi du nom de Jāba, qui est aussi le nom d’une des îles, et ce souverain «vénère un temple » (al-bud).⁸¹ Le terme budūd désigne les temples (alkanā’is) dans la langue des Indiens. Le temple du roi est une magnifique construction, très bien réalisée. Toutes ses parois ont été recouvertes de marbre. A l’intérieur, sur tout le pourtour, se trouvent des idoles en marbre blanc qui portent sur la tête des couronnes incrustées et elles sont habillées notamment de vêtements et d’autres étoffes tissées d’or. Leurs prières dans ces temples sont comme un chant mélodieux, accompagné par un léger battement des mains. Les jeunes femmes qui ont une belle chevelure dansent et exécutent des différents jeux avec légèreté et sans entrave. Tout se déroule devant les fidèles et ceux réunis dans le temple. Chacun de ceux-ci possède un certain nombre de ces jeunes femmes qui sont nourries et habillées aux frais du temple. En effet, dès qu’une femme donne naissance à une belle fille, bien proportionnée, elle en fait don au temple. Lorsqu’elle grandit et devient belle, elle est habillée de vêtements très précieux. Sa mère la prend par la main alors que sa famille, hommes et femmes, l’entoure. Elle est conduite ainsi jusqu’au temple à qui sa mère la donne. Elle la confie à ses serviteurs puis s’en va. La jeune fille est conduite par ceux-ci auprès de femmes expertes en danse, en mouvements de pieds et en jolis jeux adéquats. Quand elle a acquis cet enseignement, elle est habillée du plus beau tissu et porte la plus belle des parures. Elle est alors attachée au temple (al-bud), il lui est impossible d’en sortir ou d’y renoncer. C’est une coutume des Indiens qui vénèrent le Bouddha.⁸²

 Ibn Khurradādhbih (note 22), p. 71.  Sharaf al-Zamān Tāhir Marvazī, On China, the Turks and India, ed. Vladimir Minorsky, Londres 1942, p. 125.  Jean-Charles Ducène, Formes de l’océan Indien dans la cartographie arabe, in : Emmanuelle Vagnon/ Eric Vallet (dir.), La fabrique de l’océan Indien, Paris 2017, pp. 57– 72, ici pp. 61– 69.  Pour le sens de «bud» qui peut désigner un temple, Bouddha ou une idole en général, voir Bernard Carra de Vaux, Budd, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème éd., vol. 1 (1955), p. 1323. Mais selon Jean-Claude Rolland, le terme aurait comme étymon « but» en pehlevi avec pour sens «idole», JeanClaude Rolland, Etymologie arabe, Paris 2015, p. 40.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 81; Viré (note 68), p. 37, note 1, considère que toute cette description provient du supplément d’Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī au texte des Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind, mais la comparaison infirme ce rapprochement. Abū Zayd décrit des prostituées sacrées en Inde mais sans l’ensemble des détails d’al-Idrīsī, voir Joseph Toussaint Reinaud, Relation des voyages faits par les Arabes et les Persans dans l’Inde et à la Chine, Paris 1845, réimpr. Osnabrück 1988, ar. p. 129.

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En Chine, il précise la religion de l’empereur (baġbūġ)⁸³ disant « l’empereur des Chinois pratique un culte des idoles, proche de celui des Indiens.»⁸⁴ On peut comprendre qu’il a en tête qu’il est bouddhiste ou simplement pour notre auteur, c’est une religion asiatique qu’il connaît mal. Mais il précise néanmoins que ces Asiatiques – Indiens et Chinois – tout en étant idolâtres ne nient pas l’existence du créateur, reconnaissent sa sagesse et sa puissance éternelles, et bien qu’ils n’admettent ni les prophètes ni les livres saints, ils ne s’écartent pas des principes de la justice et de l’équité.⁸⁵

Accordons à notre géographe qu’il fait là une profession de foi humaniste bien singulière au milieu du XIIe siècle ! En Asie centrale, chez les Tughuzghuz, comprenons les Ouighours, il indique la présence de manichéens et de païens qui adorent le feu.⁸⁶ L’information est bien entendu tout à fait anachronique et remonte en réalité au récit de Tamīm ibn Baḥr. Cet ambassadeur énigmatique parvient à la fin du VIIIe siècle jusqu’à la capitale des Ouïghours, Khara-balghasun, sur l’Orkhon, dans l’actuelle Mongolie, en passant au sud du lac Issyk-Kul.⁸⁷ A partir de la même source, al-Idrīsī renseigne de la présence chez les Kimaks de manichéens et de païens, aussi adorateurs du feu.⁸⁸ Enfin, il y a ce pèlerinage à l’idole de « Lālān » en Haute Asie qu’il mentionne sans autre précision. Quant à l’Europe, à l’époque où al-Idrīsī écrit, elle est globalement chrétienne mais l’auteur signale cependant encore l’existence, dans les confins septentrionaux du continent, quelque part à l’est des pays Baltes, du peuple des Madsūna, population païenne (majūs) qui adore des feux.⁸⁹

 Pour le titre, voir François Viré, Faghfūr, in : Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 2ème édition, vol. 2 (1958), pp. 756 – 757. La forme arabe provient du persan «faghfūr », transcription de l’avestique « baghaputhra » («fils de dieu»), transposition de la titulature chinoise de l’empereur désigné comme «fils du ciel».  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 1, p. 98.  Ibid.  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 511.  Fuat Sezgin, Mathematical Geography and Cartography in Islam and their Continuation in the Occident. 1. Historical presentation. Part 1, Francfort-sur-le-Main 2005, pp. 531– 534. Vladimir Minorsky, Tamīm ibn Baḥr’s Journey to the Uyghurs, in : Bulletin of the School of the Oriental and Asiatic Studies 12/2 (1948), pp. 275 – 305 ; Vladimir Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-‘ālam. The Regions of the World, Londres 1937, pp. 263 – 270.  Al-Idrīsī (note 24), vol. 2, p. 718.  Ibid., p. 954.

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III Conclusion On peut dire que les cartes d’al-Idrīsī ayant comme modèle avant tout un ouvrage de géographie mathématique, ne sont pas conçues sur une structuration religieuse de l’espace. Seuls deux éléments iconographiques relèvent de la tradition religieuse : le mur des Gog et Magog et l’idole de Lālān, mais on est en droit de se demander s’il ne s’agit pas plutôt d’un legs de son modèle. Quant à son commentaire, il n’y aborde la composante religieuse, d’aventure, que lorsque l’information collectée pour une localité ou une population la lui donne, il n’y a aucune focalisation systématique d’al-Idrīsī à ce sujet. Contrairement à alMuqaddasī⁹⁰ par exemple, il ne discute pas des endroits qui, dans la tradition musulmane, ont une importance religieuse sur l’œkoumène car mentionnés dans le Coran mais parfois dont la situation réelle est controversée. De même, les lieux de pèlerinages secondaires ou les sanctuaires consacrés par la tradition (les tombeaux des prophètes) ne sont pas signalés, à l’inverse de ce que fera al-Harawī.⁹¹ Quand il parle de Djedda, il indique que certains prétendent que c’est là qu’Eve est descendue du paradis, sans plus. Plus étrange, la description de Médine fait l’économie de sa mosquée et inversement, au Levant, c’est bien une géographie évangélique qui est enregistrée et non musulmane, sans doute à cause de ses informateurs qui étaient des Croisés ou des pèlerins qui revenaient de Terre sainte. L’islam d’ailleurs est tacitement présenté comme uniforme, car seuls les Ibadites sont mentionnés alors que les Faṭimides sont ignorés. Mais c’est vrai qu’al-Idrīsī est avare de toute géographie politique. Ailleurs dans son texte, le fait religieux n’apparaît que comme traits caractéristiques d’une population – certaines tribus turques, les Zaghāwa, les Indiens – lorsque le discours ethnographique est intégré à la géographie pour caractériser une population particulière, nous entrons là dans la géographie humaine. Cependant, l’analyse de certaines de ces affirmations montre qu’il s’agit plus d’emprunts à des sources arabes antérieures, qu’al-Idrīsī répète ici par souci d’exhaustivité et pour noter quelque chose, faute d’information à jour. Cette information peut se vouloir objective et, indépendamment des déformations dues à la transmission, elle est marquée par une interpretatio islamica : tant en Inde qu’en Chine, le dieu suprême est considéré comme le créateur et le culte reçoit pour al-Idrīsī trois formes : le pèlerinage, l’adoration d’image et la danse. Pour l’intérieur du monde musulman, il serait hasardeux d’expliquer son mutisme ou sa retenue par des raisons conjoncturelles liées à la coexistence des différentes communautés dans la Sicile du milieu du XIIe siècle, car nous ignorons tout de sa biographie et de ses relations avec ses contemporains à Palerme.

 Al-Muqaddasī (note 34), p. 46.  Al-Harāwī, Kitāb al-ishārāt ilā ma‘rifat al-ziyārāt, éd. Janine Sourdel-Thomime, Damas 1952.

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Bref, al-Idrīsī n’enregistre l’information religieuse – qu’elle soit ancienne et liée à un sanctuaire ou récente et attachée à une population – que lorsqu’elle fait partie des renseignements caractérisant un endroit à localiser dans l’espace, ce qui est l’objet premier de sa carte et de son discours géographique.

Part III: Presenting Religious Knowledge in New Forms

Felicitas Schmieder

The Globe as Mappa Mundi? Reflections on Terrestrial Globes from around 1500 Abstract: The Latin-European ‘discovery’ of America is usually considered one of the most important events that defines the epochal watershed between medieval and modern. Especially in the field of cartography the necessity of adding much more new land to the old ideas had to have deep impact, and impact that has usually been considered the basis for the decision to finally drop traditional concepts of representations and, again, to stick with recently developed more modern ones. Especially the representation of the earth on an actual globe (not just the representation of the globe on a flat surface like in the Mappae Mundi) seems to be proof of this interpretation of cartographic developments. But are the globes and the Mappae Mundi really two opposing, antipodal points in a wide range of possible means of representation? Do the obviously different approaches to representing the physical earth include a similarly different approach to represent its meaning, as a whole and in detail? Had the religiously charged ‘geography of salvation’ really outlived its usefulness in favor of a modern one pointing to a ‘rational’ future? The paper will propose answers to this in many ways very basic and definitive question on the example of especially the globes by Martin Behaim (1492/93) and Johannes Schöner (1515 and 1520). Keywords: Geography of Salvation, Quattuor senses scripturae, Martin Behaim, Johannes Schöner, Three Magi, Atlantic Islands Why did Latin European cartographers around 1500 choose the terrestrial globe more and more often as a means of representing the sphere of the earth when before flat maps seem to have been enough? It was not because people did not know about the spheral form of the earth, because they did. One of the main reasons usually given is that the terrestrial globe made it easier to represent the much larger lands, and even more important, the seas that now had to be known and more and more became known. While this is certainly one good reason – I will return to this point below ‐ it has a tendency to go together with another not-so-well reasoned conclusion that this shift in knowledge and its representation also led to dropping other features connected to the ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ Mappae Mundi and more or less suddenly boosted cartography from the medieval into the modern age. But are the terrestrial globes and the Mappae Mundi, clearly different in their approaches to representing the physical earth, also two completely different modes of representing the meaning of the world? Had the religiously charged ‘geography of salvation’ really outlived its usefulProf. Dr. Felicitas Schmieder, FernUniversität in Hagen, Historisches Institut, Universitätsstr. 33, 58084 Hagen, https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/geschichte/lg1/team/felicitas.schmieder.shtml https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-007

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ness in favor of a modern view looking to a ‘rational’ future? Before going deeper into this question by looking at two early terrestrial globes attributed to Martin Behaim and made by Johannes Schöner I am going to discuss a few of the concepts I am applying.

The ‘Geography of Salvation’ More than 1000 Mappae Mundi, medieval world maps, of different origins throughout Latin Europe have survived from between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries – mostly included in manuscripts and hence quite small, some of much larger scale and more or less detailed in terms of the information they include.¹ They are either round or more or less oval in shape. They show the earth as a mass of land surrounded by the Okeanos and structured by the Mediterranean, the Red Sea/ Nile and the Black Sea/ Don regions into the three known continents. Normally, they are oriented with the East/ Asia at the top, Asia takes up more or less twice as much space as Europe and Africa each, and the Holy City of Jerusalem is placed in the center – they are made to represent a Christian world view.² The more elaborate maps are full of colorful images and often quite extensive inscriptions. Mappae Mundi have rightly been described as painted world chronicles because one of their special features is the fact that they not only represent space, but time as well. Memories from earlier times are visibly connected to a place on earth as if the events, persons, places were still there. The mapmakers depicted, for example, Terrestrial Paradise and the peoples of the Endtime (Gog and Magog), Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the Queen of Sheba, and the three Magi travelling towards Bethlehem. But these maps do not simply include past, mostly biblical, memories. They show, for example, the tombs of the apostles in places all over the world where, according to the History of the Apostles, they preached, died, and were buried. This is not only a reminiscence of early Christian history, it also reminds the learned ‘reader’ that Christ’s order to go and teach all peoples may have started well but still remains to be fulfilled. This includes the eschatological meaning of the command that all the world has to be Christianized before the Second Coming of Christ. The mapmaker is embedding the time of

 Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space. How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (Studies in Map History 1), London 1999; Peter Barber, Medieval Maps of the World, in: Philip D. A. Harvey (ed.), The Hereford Map. Medieval World Maps and Their Context, London 2006, pp. 1– 44; David Woodward, Medieval Mappae Mundi, in: John B. Harley/ David Woodward (eds.), Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (The History of Cartography 1), Chicago, London 1987, pp. 286 – 370. On the problem of continuity and changes see id., Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change, in: David Woodward (ed.), Cartography in the European Renaissance (The History of Cartography 3/1– 2), Chicago, London 2007, vol. 3/1, pp. 3 – 24.  On this see the contribution of Christoph Mauntel in this volume.

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the world between Creation and the Apocalypse into the space of the earth and including many features important for biblical history and the history of Christianity. I suggest that they should be read in a special way. Since their affinity to God and His Creation is clearly visible, it stands to reason that Mappae Mundi were ‘written’ and must be read like the bible and other texts close to God. This meant according to the multiple sensus scripturae, distinguishable between literal and spiritual senses, or in more detail among the four senses: on one hand, the literal-historical, on the other hand the moral, the allegorical-typological, and the eschatological.³ An example is Terrestrial Paradise, regularly depicted on Mappae Mundi: ⁴ It is usually placed on the very east of the world, clearly recognizable with Adam and Eve and the four rivers springing from it. In the historical or literal sense that the physical earth represented in Mappae Mundi, Paradise was the first place to be created and is decisively connected to the Last Times. Thus, it was considered a place still existing on earth although unreachable by humans at present. In the allegorical or typological sense, which emphasizes that the history of Christianity still has meaning for today and for the future, Paradise is a mirror of the sins of humankind, God’s punishment, and hope for His forgiveness. The moral sense reminds Christians of their duties in the present and for the future and demands corrective action against a sinful life from Christians today. This is again connected to the eschatological sense that promises eternal joy/ Paradise for good Christians at the end of time. The biblical text and other texts and images derived from it represent and actualize revealed knowledge – in this case maps are representations of Creation. They do not function on only one level and do not have only one meaning, but several meanings at the same time that are inseparably woven into the text or an image, but not without what we would perceive as contradictions. The one-and-only-correct interpretation that we are accustomed to is a concept foreign to medieval thought. A Mappa Mundi, thus, not only has to represent the earth with its mountains, towns, peoples, animals, and so on, but at the same time include the ‘why’ of God’s creation and the history of salvation, the ‘where from’ and ‘where to,’ and the responsibility of Christianity to fulfil the purpose of creation, etc.⁵ On the spiritual level, this is a complex system of references able to address highly diverse needs depending on the interpretation of the world and its reason for being that the author of the map wanted to express. But the natural features are important, too, a Mappa Mundi relies on the literal sense as well as the spiritual ones and is indebted to the physical reality of the Earth and its inhabitants. At least for medieval (but probably also for early modern) mapmakers all of the levels of understanding, a literal sense and spiritual ones that

 Frans van Liere, An Introduction to the Medieval Bible, Cambridge 2014, pp. 120 – 123.  Alessandro Scafi, Mapping paradise. A History of Heaven on Earth, London 2006.  Felicitas Schmieder, Geographies of Salvation: How to Read Medieval Mappae Mundi, in: Peregrinations. Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 6/3 (2018), pp. 21– 42, URL: digital.kenyon.edu/perejournal/vol6/iss3/2/ (accessed 10.06. 2020).

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pointed beyond it, were inherent in the map at the same time, and equally important to it.

Terrestrial Globes Around 1500 Why terrestrial globes around 1500? What were the advantages of this medium and what problems did it create? A map can represent the globe and remains the usual means to do so even today. We know as well as medieval mapmakers about the shortcomings of projecting a spherical object onto a flat surface; some of the dimensions get distorted; Greenland looks nearly as big as Africa to mention only one wellknown example. The Mappae Mundi showed everything their makers considered relevant; normally that was the landmass of the continents surrounded by the parts of the ocean close to the coastlines and also islands in relation to the nearest coast. Neither the seas as such nor the islands within these seas were of interest and thus were not visible on this type of map.⁶ Maps that try to show an overview of the whole world, like zonal maps that show the climate zones on both hemispheres, are rarely detailed in terms of concrete geographical features and they usually represent the northern areas with the landmass surrounded by the ocean (and similarly a southern continent). The back of the map, so to speak, which would show how much water was between, say, Europe and Asia, became of greater interest only now, and earth globes turned out to be one convincing solution for representing the newly needed situations.⁷ Although no globe has been preserved from before the end of the fifteenth century, there are hints that the idea was not new; it is possible, for example, that the monks at Saint Gall’s experimented with a representation of the earth on a globe around 1000.⁸ Around 1500, several map makers started to experiment

 Marianne O’Doherty, A peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East in late-medieval Thought, Report, and Cartography, in: Liz Mylod/ Zsuzsanna Reed Papp (eds.), Postcards from the Edge. European Peripheries in the Middle Ages (Bulletin of International Medieval Research 15/16 for 2009 – 2010), Leeds 2011, pp. 14– 59 – traces a development from the Mappae Mundi around 1300 towards fifteenth century maps and claims a different perception of what we call the Indian Ocean, not the least depending on experience.  There are also projection attempts in the tradition of Ptolemy’s world maps (drawn according to the measurements Ptolemy had written down in the second century BC in his now newly translated ‘Geographia’): a good overview is given by Baron Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (ed.), Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography, Stockholm 1889, tables xxix, and xxxii–xxxiv.  A spera is mentioned on which the places of all peoples (gestelle allero gentium) could be found: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 825, p. 97, URL: http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/csg/0825/97/ small (accessed 10.06. 2020). Patrick Gautier Dalché has claimed that these early experiments were used more to show cosmological correlations and less to represent the detailed surface of the earth: Patrick Gautier Dalché, Avant Behaim: Les globes terrestres au XVe siècle, in: Médiévales 56 (2010) [Humansime et découvertes géographiques], pp. 43 – 61.

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with earth globes, which also force one to actually imagine the ‘back’ of the earth and its poles. ⁹ The Behaim Globe is a painted globe 51 cm in diameter that was produced in Nuremberg c. 1492/ 93 – that is, before the results of Columbus’ first voyage to ‘India’ were known – based on a Ptolemaic world map and on information provided by the Nuremberg burger Martin Behaim (1459 – 1507).¹⁰ Behaim was connected to the Portuguese endeavors to explore the African Atlantic coast, and his father-inlaw was the Flemish governor of Faial, an island of the Azores, which Behaim calls New Flanders on his globe and marks with a Flemish flag (among all the Portuguese and Spanish flags around it).¹¹ The globe is no longer easy to read, as can be seen especially on the digital version now available.¹² In the nineteenth century, Ernest Ravenstein edited what he thought he could read and created a colored re-drawing. Although his work is not reliable enough to be completely close to the original, I will mostly use it here because it gives the easiest access to what the globe’s message might have been. The Behaim globe is the only one extant that shows the image of the world that Columbus and others of his time must have had in their heads when planning to sail out into the Atlantic. It is important for the contemporary assessment of this image that it not only shows a sea connection between the European West and the Asian East coast, but it also shows many islands in the Atlantic Ocean. These islands could be read as stepping stones by which Columbus hoped to reach China and Japan (Zipangu/ Cipangu, according to a tradition derived from the report of the famous Venetian traveler Marco Polo, d. 1324¹³).

 Elly Dekker, Globes in Renaissance Europe, in: Woodward (note 1), vol. 3/1, pp. 135– 173. – At the same time, since the thirteenth century there had also been coastline maps (portulans) giving representations very close to the natural measurements of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, later more and more of the European and African Atlantic coast. Sometimes these maps were enlarged to also include the eastern coast of America, often making the Atlantic Ocean the central piece of the maps. On portulan maps in general, see Tony Campbell, Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 1), pp. 371– 463, and on the first example of a portolan that included the Atlantic, by Juan de la Cosa 1500 (which you will find reproduced very often): America. Das frühe Bild der neuen Welt. Ausstellung der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München, Munich 1992, pp. 44– 45.  Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Inv-Nr. WI 1826. The edition of the texts as much as he could read or even thought to amend them can be found in Ernest G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim. His Life and His Globe, London 1908. Research on the globe has been revised in Collected studies on the globe and its contexts Focus Behaim Globus. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, 2. Dezember 1992 bis 28. Februar 1993, 2 vols. (part 1: articles; part 2: catalogue), Nürnberg 1992. The Germanische Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg lately provided a digitized version under ‘marble’, see URL: https:// marble.kde.org/maps.php (accessed 10.06. 2020).  Ravenstein (note 10), pp. 48 – 49, has the story.  See note 10.  Only one of the many versions: Marco Polo, Milione. Prima edizione integrale, ed. Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, Florence 1928, pp. 163 – 164 (ch. CLX). Cf. Folker Reichert, Zipangu – Japans Entdeckung

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These islands were also, in themselves, objects for research by the seafarers of the later fifteenth century. All these islands were known from older books and seafarers’ lore and although today we tend to see most of the stories as legendary, that is misleading:¹⁴ Firstly, it does not take into account the fifteenth-century acceptance of truth, legend, and possibilities. Secondly, it also overlooks the actual efforts undertaken at the time to find these islands under the impact of the much more important (at least from our later point of view) ‘discovery’ of America. Considering that before the eighteenth century it was practically impossible (due to the problem of determining longitude exactly) to define the position of an island in the open sea in a way that made it certain to find the way back to that same island,¹⁵ no one was particularly astonished if islands were only known from older books and had not been visited again more recently.¹⁶ But one could always try. A good example is the island of Brasil. On the portolan maps that showed, from the fourteenth century onwards, islands in the Atlantic off the coasts of Portugal and Ireland, this island can appear once, twice, or even three times in different positions. In 1480, the English king sponsored an – unsuccessful – expedition from Bristol to Brasil. ¹⁷ A comparable example is the island of Antilia or Island of the Seven Cities. Behaim (following in the footsteps of older maps) marked it as well as prazil on his globe and also gave a relatively elaborate version of the legend connected to it: When the Muslims conquered the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century, Christian

im Mittelalter, in: Doris Croissant (ed.), Japan und Europa 1543 – 1929. Eine Ausstellung der 43. Berliner Festwochen im Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Berlin 1993, pp. 25 – 36; Id., Zipangu. Marco Polos Japan und das europäische Weltbild zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (2003), in: id., Asien und Europa im Mittelalter. Studien zur Geschichte des Reisens, Göttingen 2014, pp. 387– 404; Rebecca S. Catz, Cipangu (Japan), in: Silvio A. Bedini (ed.), The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, New York 1992, pp. 120 – 123.  Richard Hennig, who collected in (for the second edition) four volumes of lore, legends, travel reports from Antiquity up to Columbus, also calls many of the islands we are mentioning here legendary: Richard Hennig, Terrae Incognitae. Eine Zusammenstellung und kritische Bewertung der wichtigsten vorcolumbischen Entdeckungsreisen anhand der darüber vorliegenden Originalberichte, 4 vols., 2nd ed. Leiden 1944. He nevertheless has looked into all the ‘legends’ meticulously and very often states a geographical core that ‘had to’ come from autopsy: see explicitly vol. 2, p. 104.  William J. H. Andrewes (ed.), The Quest for Longitude, Cambridge/MA 1996.  See only Domenico Silvestri, De insulis et earum proprietatibus, ed. Carmela Pecoraro, in: Atti di Palermo 4/14 2. 2 (1954), pp. 5 – 319, on the ‘lost island’ of Perdita see p. 183.  James A. Williamson, The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII, Cambridge 1962, pp.187– 189 on the search of Brasil from Bristol. Documents on this event also contextualized by Hennig (note 14), vol. 4, pp. 285 – 307 (ch. 190). Cf. Evan T. Jones, Henry VII and the Bristol Expeditions to North America. The Condon documents, in: Historical Research 83 (2010) pp. 444– 454. On the possible background stories Matthias Egeler, Islands in the West. Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination, Turnout 2017; Barbara Freitag, Hy Brasil. The Metamorphosis of an Island. From Cartographic error to Celtic elysium, Amsterdam 2013 (which again focuses on the little helpful ‘error’ narrative in the brief cartographic part).

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refugees set out into the ocean, found the island, and settled on it (therefore also called Seven Cities Island).¹⁸ Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, the Italian mathematician who provided the calculations for Columbus’ trip, mentions Antilia in a letter and notes that he has drawn a map to show how it all fit together – how the island of Antilia could serve as a stepping stone between the Azores and the longed-for East Asia.¹⁹ Looking back from better knowledge in the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish Dominican and bishop in Mexico, Bartolomé de las Casas (d. 1566), in his ‘Historia de las Indias’, criticized how much money and effort had been spent in vain by the Portuguese (direct rivals of the Spanish) to find this island.²⁰ But Brasil and Antilia were found in the end: The names stuck to the countries they were given to around 1500. The Antilles were ‘found’ basically where Toscanelli and others expected Antilia to be (for Brasil see below). The cartographers of the early ‘age of exploration’ and probably also the seafarers themselves had kept these lost islands in mind and tried to identify them in the newly reached lands, not the least to balance traditional knowledge with new facts. This is the literal level of mapping: What did people expect when they sailed into the Atlantic, what did they find, how did they try to interpret and successfully identify it? A particularly interesting example of experiments with identifying and determining the shapes and natures of newly reached or maybe old lands can be seen on the globe by Johannes Schöner from 1515.²¹ The globe shows a slim slice of the north of what would later be called America and a much larger southern island. But this, for him, was not yet the region to find Brasil. He proposes to identify it with the northern tip of the huge Southern continent opposite what he considered the southern tip of “America”.²² This attempt at naming shows that, indeed, a connection existed be-

 Ravenstein (note 10), D 52, p. 75 (prazil), B 22, p. 77 (Antilia/ septe citade).  For the Toscanelli letter, see Henry Vignaud, Toscanelli and Columbus. The letter and the Chart of Toscanelli […], London 1903, p. 290.  The relevant extract from Las Casas work in English translation is in Williamson (note 17), pp. 179 – 183 (among other texts on Antilia).  The globe is used here in the copy preserved in Frankfurt/Main, Historisches Museum, Inv. X14610. See Frank Berger (ed.), Der Erdglobus des Johannes Schöner von 1515, Frankfurt/Main 2013; Chet van Duzer, Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515. Transcription and Study, Philadelphia 2010.  Van Duzer (note 21), pp. 101– 103 discusses the background of the ideas shown on the globe. On the Southern Continent Ann M. Scott et al. (eds.), European Perspectives of Terra Australis, Farnham 2012. Cf. Friedrich Wieser, Magalhaes-Strasse und Austral-Continent auf den Globen des Johannes Schöner, Innsbruck 1881. Also Chet van Duzer, Cartographic Invention: The Southern Continent on Vatican MS Urb. Lat. 274, Folios 73v–74r (c.1530), in: Imago Mundi 59/2 (2007) pp. 193 – 222, and on the Schöner-tradition Id. The Cartography, Geography und Hydrography of the Southern Ring Continent, 1515 – 1763, in: Orbis Terrarum 8 (2002) pp. 115 – 158. Ravenstein remarks to Behaim’s brasil that earlier attempts to identify Brasil in Portolan maps made it the Azore island Terceira which still has a cape named Morro do Brazil (monte Brasil today?), see Ravenstein (note 10), D 52 p. 75. And just as an aside, Schöner has an island west of Ireland that he calls viridis insula, the green island, see Van Duzer (note 21), pp. 20 – 21. While it has been assumed that this is a duplication of Greenland – which is well possible since this kind of duplication happens time and again – it is re-

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tween the names of the ‘legendary’ but intensively sought islands and the naming of places on newly reached (or yet-to-be-reached) lands. Johannes Schöner (1477– 1547)²³ was a Franconian priest in Bamberg with ties to Nuremberg. Schöner printed his globes, of which two of the versions from 1515 and one from 1520 are preserved, also based, in principle, on a world map with Ptolemaic features. I here take the older and smaller globe, 27 cm in diameter, as an example and use the copy preserved in the Historical Museum at Frankfurt/Main. The 1515 globe has the additional advantage that a cosmographical work by Schöner exists from the same year that has rightly been read as a kind of additional explanation for the globe (or the globe as an illustration for the book) by Chet van Duzer, called ‘Luculentissima quaedam terrae totius descriptio’.²⁴ Schöner was connected to other cartographers of his time, among others Martin Waldseemüller, which probably resulted in Schöner in 1515 accepting the name Waldseemüller had tentatively given in 1507 to the southern part of the newly found land: America. ²⁵ For Schöner, the South Pole was mostly covered by a southern continent while the North gave additional room for geographical entities that had, due to lack of knowledge, not been fitted into the old form. A good example is Scandinavia, which had led a very marginal life in medieval maps until recently and which on Schöner’s globe (as already on Behaim’s) reaches far out into the polar region: north of Norway, Finland, Gothia and Russia lies Engroveli (Greenland) and Pilape, an abbreviation for Pilappelandia (which might be a mixture of Finland and Lapland).²⁶ Towards the North also lay the need for one more decision by the map makers of the time, in particular the makers of terrestrial globes. Was the newly found landmass connected to Asia or was it a separate continent – or were there even two continents because the South is separate? And since – in the opinion of his contemporaries, not his own – Columbus missed his goal: How much further would a ship

markable that this island looks and is placed like one of the Brazils on earlier maps: That could mean that Schöner renamed the old Brasil because he had identified Brasil in the south of the new continent.  On Schöner: Berger (note 21). Norbert Holst, Mundus – Mirabilia – Mentalität. Weltbild und Quellen des Kartographen Johannes Schöner. Eine Spurensuche, Frankfurt/Oder, Bamberg 1999.  Print Johannes Schöner, Luculentissima quaedam terrae totius descriptio, Norimberga, 1515, ex. http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00014669 – 5 (accessed 10.06. 2020).  For good insight in Waldseemüller’s interpretations of geography John W. Hessler/ Chet van Duzer, Seeing the World Anew. The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps, Washington 2012.  Engroveli on the globe is Gronelandia or Engronelandia in the ‘Luculentissima’ and groenland on the Behaim globe, Pilape on the globe is Vuildlappmanni, quorum regio est Pilappelandia in the ‘Luculentissima’ and wildt laplant on the Behaim globe, see Van Duzer (note 21), p. 28; Schöner (note 24), fol. 23r; Ravenstein (note 10), E 70 and E 68, p. 78. On the development of cartographic representation of Scandinavia Ulla Ehrensvärd, The History of the Nordic Map. From Myths to Reality, Helsinki 2006.

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have to sail once it had left the new landmass behind; how far, that is, would it be from America to Zipangri (Japan), and the great amounts of gold there?²⁷

The Religious on Globes Up to now, I have mostly shown the possible problems, decisions, and changes that had to be made on the factual level, that is, the literal sensus scripturae. The problems that had to be solved if the earth was to be shown as a terrestrial globe and if the newly found lands were to be represented correctly physically on the maps have been noted above. But is it justifiable at all to speak of globes as if describing a Mappa Mundi? Is there any religious weight at all, and if yes, does it convey meaning on any of the spiritual levels? The religious knowledge on the globes may convey a message (or messages). Here it is particularly important to keep in mind that one example is a globe from before the life-changing discoveries, and one globe – only about twenty years younger – that had to swallow the shock and deal with the changes productively. One could trace certain traditional features; both Brasil and Antilia were themselves charged with religious meaning that was transported to the places where the names ended up. Antilia was a place of exile for Christians; Brasil was possibly connected to the Irish Saint Brandan’s sea voyage(s) to many islands in the western ocean, which resulted in an ‘Island of Saint Brandan’ on many maps, including the Behaim globe (fig. 1).²⁸ But that would not be enough. Traditional elements of the geographies of salvation appear – not the terrestrial Paradise, but the rivers of paradise. Although the Euphrates and Tigris did not need any identification, the Gyon was (quite traditionally in the Later Middle Ages) identified with the Nile and the Phison with the Ganges (also that no longer unusual). In the case of Behaim, the identification is noted on the globe (fig. 2); in the case of Schöner – whose globe from 1515 is much smaller – in his ‘Luculentissima’.²⁹ To

 On Schöner’s Globe, Zipangri is very close to the Western coastline of the new found land, see Van Duzer (note 21), p. 98; Schöner (note 24), fol. 55r.  The Brandan island on the Behaim globe Ravenstein (note 10), A 7, p. 77. On the basic legend that came to us in several languages and many versions only one quite recent work: Giovanni Orlandi/ Rossana E. Guglielmetti (eds.), Navigatio sancti Brendani. Alla scoperta dei segreti meravigliosi del mondo, Florence 2014. There are many attempts to identify the roots of the island or even islands (since two or even three of them appear on late medieval maps) of Brasil. One option might be that Brasa ilha, fire island in Portuguese, is a translation of the fire island reached by Brandan, cf. Felicitas Schmieder, Der Fall von der Erdscheibe, oder: Wie begrenzt war die Welt im Spätmittelalter?, in: Achim Landwehr (ed.), Grenzerfahrungen (Studia Humaniora. Düsseldorfer Studien zu. Mittelalter und Renaissance 48), Düsseldorf 2015, pp. 51– 73.  Behaim identifies the Nilus with the Gihon close to its source in the Mons Lune (the mountain of the moon), Ravenstein (note 10), E/ F 18, p. 97; on the identification of the Phison with the Ganges

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Fig. 1: The islands in the Atlantic Ocean on Behaim’s globe. From left to right: Saint Brandan island; island of Antilia septe citade; island perzil (re-drawing by Ravenstein, Behaim)

the beginning of the world is added the history of the end (fig. 3): On Schöner’s globe information appears about Christians in East Asia (Christiani nestorini/ ecclesiae christianorum) that had been brought to Europe during the later Middle Ages and had raised hopes that the world mission might soon be fulfilled.³⁰ Moreover, close to these Christians are the iudei clausi, the enclosed Jews, the biblically wellknown³¹ ten lost tribes that, according to tradition, Alexander the Great had enclosed behind Iron gates in the Caspian mountains and that would break out at the end of times as Gog and Magog to help the Antichrist destroy the world. While Schöner’s see below. Schöner (note 24), fol. 44r (Ganges and Phison; 52v the Ganges as border in India). The mapping of the rivers of paradise refers to Gen. 2, 10 – 14.  Van Duzer (note 21), pp. 58 and 60; Schöner (note 24), fol. 53v. Cf. Felicitas Schmieder, Jenseits der Peripherien. Die Päpste und die Ungläubigen außerhalb der Christianitas, in: Gisela Drossbach/ Hans-Joachim Schmidt (eds.), Zentrum und Netzwerk. Kirchliche Kommunikationen und Raumstrukturen im Mittelalter (Spicilegium Friburgense 22), Freiburg/CH 2008, pp. 329 – 357.  2. Kg. 17, 6; Van Duzer (note 21), pp. 59 – 60; Schöner (note 24), fol. 53v. Cf. Felicitas Schmieder, Gogs und Magogs ‘natürliche Milde’? Die Mongolen als Endzeitvölker im Wandel von Wissen und Wünschen, in: Wolfram Brandes/ Felicitas Schmieder/ Rebekka Voß (eds.), Peoples of the Apocalypse. Eschatological Beliefs and Political Scenarios (Millennium Studien 63), Berlin 2016, pp. 111– 125, and ead., Gog and Magog as Geographical Realities, forthcoming.

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Fig. 2: The religious imprint on Africa on Behaim’s globe. From north to south: One of the three Magi in Saba; St. Matthew apostle of the region; source of the Nile of Gihon (re-drawing by Ravenstein, Behaim)

Caspian mountains lay in northeast Asia, the Behaim globe shows the most usual alternative, enclosure in the Caucasus (the Iron Gates, porta de feri).³² Noah’s Ark marked another distinctive step in the history of mankind and in traditional geography since the Earth was distributed among Noah’s sons after the Flood.³³ Behaim made a globe that showed the possible ways to India,³⁴ and consequently he was especially interested in the wide lands known and expected in South Asia,

 Ravenstein (note 10), F 43, p. 96 (porta de feri) and F 41, p. 81 (arche Noe). For the Endtime peoples Gog and Magog, however, usually thought to have been enclosed behind the mountains, Behaim chose the more secular interpretation of some travel reports: Og and Magog are living un-enclosed in northeast Asia, ibid., J 34, J 38, p. 96.  On this tradition, see, for example: Chet van Duzer/ Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Tres filii Noe diviserunt orbem post diluvium’. The World Map in British Library Add. MS 37049, in: World & Image 26 (2010), pp. 21– 39.  ‘India’ in the Middle Ages meant, inherited from Antiquity, mostly the whole of the eastern and southern parts of Asia, often subdivided into three parts (India minor, maior, tertia) and filled with additional information over time especially in the later Middle Ages when travelers reached regions considered to be (within) India. For an overview see Marianne O’Doherty, The Indies and the Medi-

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Fig. 3: Christians and Jews on Schöner’s globe (Christiani Nestorini/ iudei inclusi/ Ecclesie christianorum) (Schöner globe 1515, Historisches Museum, Frankfurt/Main)

thereby not the least finding places not usually mapped at the time (fig. 4). Around the Ganges (the Phison), he firstly identified the gold land of Hevilla (Evilat), through which, according to the book of Genesis, the Phison flowed, connecting to it Ophir, from where King Solomon received ships full of gold.³⁵ Secondly, he notes that Hieronymus mentioned, in his prologue to the bible, that Apollonius came here, referring to Apollonius of Tyana, known as a philosopher contemporary with Jesus. The latter entry could be an abbreviated version of a remark on the huge mid-fifteenth century world map by Fra Mauro (who also had Portuguese sources) who added several peoples a traveler met after crossing the Phison River. All this shows how widely and intensively Behaim and the Portuguese looked for religious legitimization for the quest for India, a legitimization that is clearly represented on the globe used here the same way as the Mappae Mundi had been used earlier.³⁶

eval West. Thought, Report, Imagination, Turnhout 2013; Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance. South India Through European Eyes, 1250 – 1625, Cambridge 2000.  Havila and the Phison Gen. 2, 11; connection to Ophir Gen. 10, 29. Ophir as land where gold could be found 1. Kg. 9, 28. Cf. Ravenstein (note 10), H 19, p. 94.  Ravenstein (note 10), H/ I 23, p. 95. Ravenstein identified the similar legend on the Fra Mauro map, cf. ed. Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (Terrarum Orbis. 5), Turnhout 2006, pp. 444– 447 (# 1308). Using Mappae Mundi for religiously legitimizing: Cf. Schmieder (note 5), on the mid-15th century Catalan World Map from the Estense library where Paradise is transferred

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Also, the apostle Saint Thomas was known to have come to India. Behaim notes several burial places of apostles on his globe. Besides Santiago de Compostela there is an image and inscription for Matthew near the Horn of Africa (fig. 2), and for Thomas Behaim gives a collection of information on the place of his martyrdom and burial compiled from different travel reports.³⁷ On Behaim’s globe this hope is connected to India far beyond the Ganges, where the three kings (Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior) had made “Prester John” governor and his descendants and the many kingdoms under them were good Christians.³⁸ Schöner, in a comparable way, notes in his ‘Luculentissima’ that his Brasil on the Southern Continent is not far from Mallaqa in India, where the Apostle Thomas was martyred – thus not far from the Christian promise of salvation.³⁹ This Prester John, the legendary Christian hope for support against the Muslim enemies at their backs since the twelfth century (fig. 4), is commemorated in several places in India on the Behaim globe.⁴⁰ Knowledge on the three kings, the biblical Magi who discovered, from the mons Vaus (also shown on the globe, fig. 4⁴¹), the star that would lead them to find the new-born Christ in Bethlehem,⁴² was widespread in the Middle Ages far beyond what is mentioned in the canonical bible (Mt. 2). The stories that many of us know from Christmas stem from an apocryphal

to East Africa in connection with Portuguese attempts to find the Prester John there close to the sources of the Nile whom they wanted to use against the Mamluks in Egypt.  Ravenstein (note 10), D 43, p. 79 (Santiago), F 5, p.102 (dis landt ist bekert von sant matheus), I 20, 24, 27, 35, pp. 94– 95 (Thomas); the land egtisilla corresponds with Schöner’s Egrisilla – Van Duzer (note 21), p. 74; the land maabar with Mallaqa, p. 75.  Ravenstein (note 10), I 37, p. 96, where Ravenstein has collected more encouraging entries of this kind.  Schöner (note 24), fol. 61v; Behaim has Maabar, see Ravenstein (note 10), I 35, p. 94.  Prester John: Ravenstein (note 10), pp. 95 – 96. Schöner mentions him on the globe thrice: twice in Asia, and once on Africa, see Schöner (note 24), p. 76, and fol. 54r (in the context of the iudei clausi), ibid., fol. 39r. The literature on Prester John is legion, so I mention just one recent work: Keegan Brewer, Prester John. The Legend and its Sources, Farnham 2015. In the context of the Portuguese endeavors Peter Edward Russell, A Quest too Far. Henry the Navigator and Prester John, in: Ian MacPherson/ Ralph Penny (eds.), The Medieval Mind. Hispanic Studies in Honor of Alan Dyermond, Woodbridge 1997, pp. 401– 416; Andrew Kurt, The Search for Prester John. A Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540, in: Journal of Medieval History 39 (2013) pp. 297– 320.  Ravenstein (note 10), p. 95. Schöner notes the Latin version of Mons Victorialis on the globe and in the ‘Luculentissima’ Faus, see Van Duzer (note 21), p. 72 (close to the Mons Victorialis lies the first burial place of the Magi, p. 73), and Schöner (note 24), fol. 52v–53r.  Manuela Beer et al. (eds.), Die Heiligen Drei Könige. Mythos, Kunst und Kult, Munich 2014; Richard C. TREXLER, The Journey of the Magi. Meanings in History of a Christian Story, Princeton 1997; Karl Meisen, Die heiligen drei Könige und ihr Festtag im volkstümlichen Glauben und Brauch, Cologne 1949; Hugo Kehrer, Die Heiligen Drei Könige in Literatur und Kunst, 2 vols., Leipzig 1908 – 1909.

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Fig. 4: The religious imprint on India on Behaim’s globe. From left to right: One of the three Magi in India and one in Tarsis; gold land Hevilla according to Genesis; Apollonius according to Saint Jeremy; the mountain Vaus; two entries referring to Prester John (re-drawing by Ravenstein, Behaim)

Fig. 5: The Magi on Schöner’s globe: Balthasar magus in Ethiopia sub Egypto; Gaspar magus in Arabia felix (Schöner globe 1515, Historisches Museum, Frankfurt/Main)

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gospel, the so-called Protoevangelium or Infancy gospel of James.⁴³ Although these biblical books were not part of the canonical bible, some of them were widespread and well-known, like the story of the Magi present on countless medieval paintings showing the Epiphany of Christ (January 6).⁴⁴ Connected to them is a very specific entry on both of these two globes concerning an allegorically important topic. The inclusion of this entry shows an innovative elaboration on the past by the globe makers and underlines that the religious elements are not simply remnants of the Mappa Mundi-tradition that somehow ended up on the globes without their makers giving it much thought. Nearly every medieval Mappa Mundi shows the three Magi. They were one of the most important allegories for Christian missionary efforts among heathen peoples since they were converted by Christ himself and they were the first to experience this. At least one Mappa Mundi, by Andrea Bianco from 1436, made the Magi’s epiphany the center of its specific reading of the geography of salvation.⁴⁵ From their visit at the manger, the Magi returned home and continued apostolic work avant la lettre, as apocryphal biblical tradition had it. This tradition charged the episode of the Magi with the moral sense of the Christian challenge of world mission – which in itself is a highly eschatological topic. The magi were usually represented somewhere in Asia and their homeland, Tarsis, was placed somewhere between Persia and India. This no longer seems to have been enough for the Behaim globe maker nor even more for Johannes Schöner – possibly/ probably because they were working on reshaping the representation of the earth in the literal sense. Both picked up (and Schöner was possibly working from Behaim’s ideas) the elaborate legend of the Magi composed by the Carmelite John of Hildesheim c. 1364.⁴⁶ For him, the Magi came from different realms, and when mapping them, these realms could and had to be fitted into different places on earth (fig. 2, 4 and 5).⁴⁷

 Evangelia infantiae apocryphae – Apokryphe Kindheitsevangelien, transl. and pref. by Gerhard Schneider, Griechisch – Lateinisch – Deutsch (Fontes Christiani 18), Freiburg/Breisgau et al. 1995; Paul Foster, The Apocryphal Gospels. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2009.  On the part apocryphal books played for the medieval bible cf. van Liere (note 3), pp. 53 – 79 (ch. 3).  Felicitas Schmieder, Venedig als Umschlagplatz von Weltwissen im Spätmittelalter, sichtbar gemacht auf zwei Mappae Mundi, in: Romedio Schmitz-Esser (ed.), Venezia nel contesto globale – Venedig im globalen Kontext, Rom (Venetiana 20), Venice 2018 pp. 27– 43.  The legend exists in many different versions in several languages and is not properly edited. Best to use is Johannes von Hildesheim, Historia trium regum. The Three Kings of Cologne. An Early English Translation of the ‘Historia trium regum’ by John of Hildesheim, ed. Carl Horstmann, London 1886.  Felicitas Schmieder, Christlicher Weltfrieden global. Die Heiligen Drei Könige auf den Globen des Martin Behaim (1492/93) und Johannes Schöner (1515), in: Michael Mann/ Jürgen G. Nagel (eds.), Europa jenseits der Grenzen. Festschrift für Reinhard Wendt, Heidelberg 2015, pp. 335 – 354.

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Behaim assigned three places on earth – Tharsis, India, and Saba – to the three kings as rulers.⁴⁸ Schöner then added the names of the kings, whom he also placed slightly differently: Balthasar in Ethiopia, Caspar in the Arabia felix, and Melchior in Central Asia, close to the Greater Indian realm of Prester John.⁴⁹ The Magi had acquired, at the latest when John of Hildesheim gave them different homelands, an additional potentially spatial quality for the biblically pre-figured Christian world mission. By spreading the kings over the old world, the cartographers heightened the meaning of terrestrial globes in terms of a geography of salvation. Implicitly at least they seem to have referred to John of Hildesheim’s work, which was then widespread and translated into several vernacular languages. Thus, on two early globes, versions of an old legend were represented and further elaborated, which (reassuringly?) spread the spiritually charged rulers and their realms visibly and geographically more widely than before across important parts of the (old) world at the moment when the ways of this world were being rethought (Behaim) and even the world itself had to be rethought (Schöner). But what about America in terms of the geography of salvation? Although Johannes Schöner was interested in the relevant features of the ‘old world,’ he was quite cautious about the new one. But others were not, and make it possible to trace the geography of salvation much deeper into the early modern period – as when the Florentine cartographer Francesco Rosselli, as early as 1507, at least hinted at Paradise and its four rivers in Brasil.⁵⁰ And even looking ahead into the eighteenth century Terrestrial Paradise is shown, for example, in Nova Svecia (a place known today as Philadelphia).⁵¹

 Ravenstein (note 10), H 40, H 15, F 10, pp. 95 – 96.  Van Duzer (note 21), p. 45 (Balthasar), p. 57 (Melchior), p. 64 (Gaspar).  Francesca Fiorani, Places of Renaissance Mapping, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Martina Stercken (eds.) Herrschaft verorten. Politische Kartographie des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 19), Zürich 2012, pp. 125 – 142, here p. 138.  Charlotta Forss, The Old, the New, and the Unknown. The Continents and the Making of Geographical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century Sweden, Turku 2018, fig. 17 (p. 193).

David A. King

The Culmination of Islamic Sacred Geography I: The World about the Kaaba (Folk Astronomy), and II: The World about Mecca (Mathematical Geography) Abstract: In Islam, the sacred direction or qibla is toward the sacred Kaaba in Mecca, which edifice is astronomically aligned. Various ritual acts from prayer to burial are to be performed in the sacred direction. Muslim scholars devised two sets of solutions for finding the qibla from any locality. The first involved a sacred geography with the world divided around the Kaaba and the qibla in each sector defined by an astronomical horizon phenomenon. The second involved mathematical geography with the qibla calculated by exact or approximate mathematical procedures, albeit using medieval geographical coordinates. This dichotomy to some extent explains the orientation of medieval Islamic religious architecture. In this paper, the ultimate achievements in each tradition will be presented and compared; a serious investigation of orientations is a task for the future. Keywords: Sacred geography, medieval, Islam, Ka’ba, Mecca, qibla, mosque, orientation, folk astronomy, mathematical geography, wind-catcher, Cairo, Egypt, Karl Schoy, Edward S. Kennedy The sacred geography of Islam functioned in two different ways. Essentially, we can associate these with the world about the sacred Kaaba and the world centred on Mecca on a terrestrial globe. These activities belong to the scientific traditions of the Muslims which focussed on inner-Islamic ideas. None of what they did in this field was / would have been of any practical interest to anyone in medieval Europe or anywhere else outside the Muslim world. The Islamic tradition of folk astronomy developed in the seventh century out of pre-Islamic astronomical folklore of the Arabs of the Peninsula. It was adapted to meet the needs of the developing Muslim society and flourished until the early modern period. The Islamic tradition of mathematical astronomy developed out of Muslim contact with Indian, Persian and Hellenistic/Byzantine Greek sources in the eighth and ninth centuries. In a remarkable renaissance that is not yet really understood, it adapted itself to the needs of the new Muslim society on a different/ higher/ more sophisticated level. It flourished in various regional manifestations from the Maghrib

David A. King, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, [email protected], www.davidaking.academia.edu https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-008

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to Central Asia and the Yemen at least until the sixteenth century but continued under its own momentum and without any further innovation until the nineteenth century.¹ The Quran enjoins Muslims to face the sacred Kaaba in prayer and in other acts of religious observance, because it is a pointer to the presence of the Divine. The direction one faces is called qibla in all languages of the Islamic world.We shall observe that the two different approaches to the qibla problem are associated with two different views of the world: the world about the Kaaba, and the world about Mecca. To find the direction of a sacred edifice that one cannot see, but whose layout is known, without serious scientific knowledge, demands a certain amount of ingenuity. To find the direction of a distant city one needs to know where one is, where the city is, and how to find the direction from one to the other. The task for historians is to document the ways in which the different authorities – scholars of the sacred law and scientists – in the different medieval communities from al-Andalus to Central Asia to the Yemen did this.

The folk geographical tradition of qibla determination The Quranic injunction to pray toward the Kaaba was delivered in a Hejazi milieu where it was known that the corners of the edifice were roughly cardinally aligned if not also that the major and minor axes of its rectangular base were more precisely oriented toward specific astronomical horizon phenomena (fig. 1).² When the first mosques were built, they were oriented toward such directions as winter sunrise or winter sunset or the rising of the south-marker star Canopus.³ But well before ca. 1000 the perimeter of the Kaaba was theoretically divided into segments, each associated with a sector of the world about the Kaaba. The associated qibla was an appropriate astronomical horizon phenomenon. Such schemes developed over the centuries from ca. 850 onwards and some 20 different schemes are documented in some 30 different medieval Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts, most illustrated, some merely described in words. The majority of the schemes deal with 8, 11, 12, 13, 20, 34, 40 and 72 sectors about the Kaaba. Figure 3 presents a diagram unique in the known Islamic sources, remarkable not least because it is in a treatise by a scholar of the sacred law of

 On the background of Islamic mathematical astronomy and the regional schools see David A. King/ Julio Samsó, Astronomical Handbooks and Tables from the Islamic World (750 – 1900), in: Suhayl. International Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilisation 2 (2001), pp. 10 – 105, here pp. 15 – 17.  See David A. King/ Gerald S. Hawkins, On the Orientation of the Kaaba, in: Journal for the history of astronomy 13 (1982), pp. 102– 109.  David A. King, The Orientation of Medieval Islamic Religious Architecture and Cities, in: Journal for the History of Astronomy 26 (1995), pp. 253 – 274, an edited version can be found in id., In Synchrony with the Heavens. Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, 2 vols., Leiden 2004– 2005, pp. vol. 1, pp. 741– 771 (chap. VIIa).

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Fig. 1: The orientation of the Kaaba as described in medieval astronomical texts and confirmed by satellite images (with adjustments for the local horizon). The base is rectangular with sides in the ratio of roughly 8:7. The major axis points toward the rising of Canopus and the setting of the stars of the handle of the Plough. The minor axis pointes toward summer sunrise and winter sunset. For the latitude of Mecca, these two directions are roughly perpendicular. The orientation of the Kaaba underlies over a thousand years of Islamic sacred geography on the non-scientific level. In this tradition the qibla was defined in terms of astronomical horizon phenomena.

Islam (fig. 2): four cities are shown with their qiblas associated with different segments of the perimeter of the Kaaba.⁴ An achievement for our scholarly community was to get these charts accepted as ‘qibla-maps’, if nothing else, in the splendid volume of the ‘History of Cartography’ in 1992.⁵ They are maps, but they are based not on location, but on direction toward a central edifice. Recently, I discovered the spectacular image of a previously-unknown 40-sector scheme (fig. 3).⁶ It is not difficult to attribute this to the sixteenth-century cartographer ‘Alī al-Sharafī from Sfax in Tunisia, because two 40-sector schemes by him are known

 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Marsh. 592, fol. 88v, courtesy of the Bodleian Library.  David A. King/ Richard P. Lorch, Qibla Charts, Qibla Maps, and Related Instruments, in: John B. Harley/ David Woodward (eds.), Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (The History of Cartography, vol. 2/1) Chicago, London 1992, pp. 189 – 205. Some 50 medieval sources are listed in David A. King, Finding the qibla by the sun and stars – Islamic sacred geography – A survey of the sources, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabischen-islamischen Wissenschaften 22 (2020), pp. 91– 141.  London, The Khalili Collection, inv. no. MS 0765, courtesy of the Khalili Foundation, London.

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Fig. 2: A diagram showing the relative positions Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo with respect to the perimeter of the astronomically-aligned Kaaba. Each city is associated with a different segment of the perimeter of the edifice, this scheme is found in the most detailed known legal treatise on the qibla, authored by the twelfth-century Egyptian legal scholar al-Dimyāṭī. The same author presents a scheme of sacred geography with 13 sectors of the world around the Kaaba. [From Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Marsh. 592, fol. 88v, courtesy of the Bodleian Library.]

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Fig. 3: The most spectacular known scheme of sacred geography, attributable to the sixteenthcentury cartographer Aḥmad al-Sharafī of Sfax in Tunisia. Two other diagrams by him are known. All three display 40 sectors of the world about the Kaaba, with significant variations in choice of localities and arrangement of groups of three or more localities. [London, The Khalili Collection, inv. no. MSS 0765, courtesy of the Khalili Collection, London]

already, each different from the other, and all three are in the same script.⁷ This new example is even more visually spectacular than the other two, particularly in the way the sectors are arranged around the Kaaba. The choice of localities and the order in  The first two have been investigated by Mónica Herrera Casais, Geografía sagrada islámica en dos atlas náuticos tunecinos del siglo XVI, in: Sergio Carro Martín et al. (eds.), Mediterráneos: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultures of the Mediterranean Sea, Newcastle upon Tyne 2013, pp. 457– 473.

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which they are arranged around the Kaaba are different in all three charts. (The source of this information has yet to be determined; it cannot be al-Sharafī himself, because nobody would do that to one’s own data.) The care with which the Kaaba is represented, with its corners facing the cardinal directions, is therefore not matched by the accuracy of the directions assigned to different localities, but that is actually typical of the folk tradition. I have no reservations in labelling this new scheme the culmination of Islamic folk geography or cartography. I doubt that these Tunisian diagrams were actually used by people to find the qibla of their locality. The same holds for most of the earliest schemes of sacred geography.⁸ In each major locality there had already for centuries been a palette of qibla-directions that were accepted by different interest groups. These qibla-charts were more decorative than useful.

The mathematical tradition of qibla determination Since the nineteenth century it has been known that Muslim astronomers devoted considerable attention to the determination of the qibla using mathematical methods applied to the available geographical data. In the eighth and early ninth century in Baghdad calculations were made not only for Baghdad and nearby locations using approximate and also exact solutions. In addition, tables were prepared starting in ninth-century Baghdad which showed values of the qibla ‘for the whole world’ in degrees and minutes for each degree of longitude and latitude difference from Mecca (based on an approximate formula). In the first half of the twentieth century the prolific German historian of Islamic science Karl Schoy (1877– 1925) published several mathematical procedures by prominent Muslim scientists and around the year 1930 contributed the article ‘Qibla’ to the first edition of the authoritative ‘Encyclopaedia of Islam’.⁹ In the second half of the twentieth century the American historian of Islamic science Ted Kennedy published a translation and commentary of the book on mathematical geography by the leading scientist of the medieval Islamic world, al-Bīrūnī of Ghazna, in which the author determines the qibla at Ghazna (now in Afghanistan) by a monumental tour de force. ¹⁰  David A. King, The Earliest Islamic Mathematical Methods and Tables for Finding the Direction of Mecca, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 3 (1986), pp. 82– 149, repr. in id., Astronomy in the Service of Islam (Variorum collected studies series 416), Aldershot 1993, chap. XIV. See also id., The Sacred Geography of Islam, in: Teun Koetsier/ Luc Bergmans (eds.), Mathematics and the Divine. A Historical Study, Dordrecht 2005, pp. 161– 178, repr. in id., Islamic Astronomy and Geography (Variorum collected studies series 1009), Farnham 2012, pp. 163 – 178.  Karl Schoy, Ḳibla, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 4 vols., 1st edition, Leiden 1913 – 1938, vol. 2 (1927), pp. 985 – 989.  al-Bīrūnī wrote the most important single Muslim work on the mathematical determination of the qibla. al-Bīrūnī, Taḥdīd nihāyāt al-amākin, ed., Pawel G. Bulgakov, Cairo 1962. English translation: The determination of the coordinates of cities: al-Bīrūnī’s Taḥdīd nihāyāt al-amākin, ed. Jamil Ali,

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It has mainly been generations of Kennedy’s students who have published more and more medieval methods for determining the qibla by scientific means.¹¹ In 1979 I contributed the article ‘Qibla’ to the second edition of the ‘Encyclopaedia of Islam’.¹² At that time I was working on Islamic sacred geography and by 1987 I was able to include an overview thereof in the ‘Encyclopaedia’ under the rubric ‘Mecca as centre of the world’.¹³ Karl Schoy was a mathematician and was so interested in the qibla problem that in 1917 he published a cartographical solution based on modern mathematics.¹⁴ His map of the reasonable part of the world with Mecca at the centre of a complicated longitude/latitude grid could be used to find not only the direction of any locality toward Mecca but also the distance (fig. 4). His map attracted little serious interest outside the burgeoning field of mathematical cartography. However, in 1989 a medieval version of the same kind of map engraved on brass appeared at Sotheby’s of London and is now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Kuwait.¹⁵ The object is unsigned and undated but is clearly from seventeenth-century Isfahan, a milieu where there was flurry of interest in astronomical instrumentation, but, as far as we know, not much scientific innovation (fig. 5). Since then, two other similar world-maps have shown up, each signed by a son of the leading mathematician of Safavid Iran.¹⁶ The solution is fully within the medieval tradition of qibla-determinations in the sense that it is the sine of the distance-arc rather than the distance itself that is to be read on the diametral rule; for this reason the longitude lines on the map are rectilinear. The data on the maps goes back to fifteenth-century Central Asia, probably to Kish near Samarqand. We have from there a remarkable list of 275 localities with their longitudes and latitudes, their qiblas, and their distances to Mecca,

Beirut 1966; Edward S. Kennedy, A commentary upon al-Bīrūnī’s Taḥdīd nihāyāt al-amākin, Beirut 1973.  Edward S. Kennedy (with colleagues and former students), Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences, ed. David A. King/ Mary Helen Kennedy, Beirut 1983. (Includes articles on the mathematical determination of the qibla, esp. pp. 621– 629)  David A. King/ Arent Wensinck, Ḳibla, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, vol. 5 (1979), pp. 81– 88.  David A. King, Makka (as the Centre of the World), in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, vol. 6 (1991), pp. 180 – 187.  Karl Schoy, Die Mekka- oder Qiblakarte (Gegenazimutale mittabstandstreue Projektion mit Mekka als Kartenmitte), in: Kartographische und Schulgeographische Zeitschrift 6 (1917), pp. 184– 185 (reprinted in Id., Beiträge zur arabisch-islamischen Mathematik und Astronomie, 2 vols., Frankfurt/Main 1988, vol. 1, pp. 157– 159.  Kuwait, Museum of Islamic Art, inv. no. LNS 1106 M (courtesy of the Museum of Islamic Art), denoted as A in David A. King, World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca. Innovation and Tradition in Islamic Science, Leiden, London 1999.  Now in private collections in Paris and Boston. On the Paris piece see King (note 15), ‘B’ passim, and on the Boston piece see id, In Synchrony with the Heavens (note 3), vol. 1, pp. 823 – 846 (VIIc). See also id., Safavid World-maps Centred on Mecca. A Third Example and Some New Insights on their Original Inspiration, in id., Synchrony (note 3), vol. 1, pp. 823 – 846 (chap. VIIc).

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Fig. 4: The world-map preserving direction and distance to Mecca at the centre published by Carl Schoy (note 14, pp. 184 – 185) in 1917. Both longitude and latitude curves are based on complex modern mathematical procedures, far beyond medieval capabilities.

with calculated values accurate to the nearest minute of arc.¹⁷ More of a challenge was to determine the mathematical inspiration for the grids. However, my colleague Jan Hogendijk has shown that the mathematics underlying the grids goes back to treatises on conic sections from tenth-century Baghdad and eleventh-century Isfahan.¹⁸ These world-maps from Safavid Iran represent the culmination of the Muslim achievement in matters scientific relating to the qibla. At least in their Safavid manifestation they appeared too late on the scene to be of much practical use, not least because qibla-values for hundreds of cities were available in manuscript form or engraved on many other Safavid instruments such as astrolabes and sundials. Even centuries earlier they would have constituted something of an excès de délicatesse amidst all the other information that was circulating about the qibla. But from a mathematical point of view they are very nice, and nobody would have appreciated them more than Karl Schoy. They have aroused no serious interest outside Iran, so that, for example, they are not mentioned in the article ’Qibla’ in Wikipedia.¹⁹

 London, British Library, Ms Or. Add. 7489, fol. 53r–58v. Table published in King (note 15), pp. 149 – 168 and 456 – 477.  Jan-Pieter Hogendijk, Het mysterie van de Mekkawijzers van Isfahan, in: Nieuwe Wiskrant 22/2 (2002), pp. 4– 11; id, Three instruments for finding the direction and distance to Mecca: European cartography or Islamic Astronomy?, in: Rewaq. History & Heritage 5 (2018), pp. 24– 31, URL: http:// www.jphogendijk.nl/publ/Qatar.pdf and http://www.jphogendijk.nl/talks/qib.pdf (accessed 10.06. 2020) – shows that the inspiration is Islamic.  URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibla (accessed Sept. 2019).

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Fig. 5: The Safavid world-map from seventeenth-century Isfahan discovered in 1989 which achieves the same goal as that of Schoy. The longitudes are represented by non-uniformly-spaced straight lines, and the latitude curves by a set of non-uniformly-spaced arcs of circles which approximate with remarkable precision arcs of ellipses. The diametrical rule bears a non-uniform scale for the sine of the distance arc, which immediately suggests an Islamic origin for the grid. The original inspiration was probably in ninth-century Baghdad, and the underlying mathematics has been found by Jan Hogendijk in treatises on conic sections from tenth-century Baghdad and eleventh-century Isfahan. [Image courtesy of the Museum of Islamic Art, Kuwait.]

We see that both in folk geography and in mathematical cartography Muslim scholars produced remarkable solutions to the qibla-problem. The fact that the two remarkable examples that form the focus of the present paper stem from Tunis and Iran, respectively, is indicative of the regional nature of Islamic science after the formative period of the eighth to eleventh centuries. In the eighteenth century reliable geographical data was available for the first time, and both traditional and mathematical

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estimates for the qibla essentially based on medieval coordinates were generally abandoned in favour of the „new“ values which most Muslims use nowadays. ²⁰ ²¹

 Ibid.  Finally, I wish to thank Christoph Mauntel for organizing the most successful Tübingen Conference. My participation involved far more than I had expected. During the conference I was struck by how many of the speakers, be it on Islamic or medieval European topics, mentioned the winds. (For the medieval Islamic world there is no equivalent to Obrist’s study on wind diagrams, see Barbara Obrist, Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology, Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 33 – 84.) Upon my return to Frankfurt I was moved to compose a monograph that should be of interest to a wider audience, entitled „The wind-catchers of medieval Cairo and their secrets – 1001 years of renewable energy“. From the tenth century onwards most buildings in Cairo had a wind-catcher on the roof to force the favourable winds from the north down into the living-quarters below. These devices, large and small, were astronomically aligned.Why? The answer casts new light on the lay-out of the medieval city. See for the first investigation David A. King, Astronomy and Architecture. The Ventilators of Medieval Cairo and their Secrets, in: Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984), pp. 97– 133. The new version is available as The Wind-Catchers of medieval Cairo and their secrets – 1001 years of renewable energy, in 2 pts., 2020, available at www.academia.edu/43996180 (pt. I: text) & www.academia.edu/43996333 (pt. II: illustrations), and in it I present the evidence in historical texts, travellers’ reports, poetry and astronomical texts, to document the medieval tradition, as well as over 150 artists’ and photographers’ images which show what was left of this tradition after ca. 1800. It is not without interest to see how this splendid tradition has been overlooked, if not deliberately disregarded, by historians of Islamic architecture, and, as a result, is virtually unknown to those who write about vernacular architecture and environmentally-friendly solutions to cooling living-space in a hot climate.

Stefan Schröder

Religious Knowledge within Changing Cartographical Worldviews Spatial Concepts and Functions of Maps in Marino Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum fidelium crucis’ (c. 1321) Abstract: This chapter analyses the relationship between elements of geographical and religious knowledge in the maps that accompany Marino Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum fidelium crucis’. The author, a Venetian patrician, wrote the text as a call for a new crusade between 1318 and 1321, and he kept updating it throughout his entire life. The maps include representations of the entire Earth, of the Eastern Mediterranean (including the Levant and Egypt), of other parts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and of the Holy Land, as well as city plans of Jerusalem and Acre. The design of the maps was produced by Pietro Vesconte, a Genoese mapmaker whose workshop was based in Venice, and it differs considerably from other contemporary maps, such as the mappae mundi of Ebstorf and Hereford or the so-called ‘situs maps’ that present an idealised depiction of the city of Jerusalem. In total, the maps seem to focus on the transmission of geographic rather than religious knowledge, thus conveying the impression of a more ‘accurate’ view of the physical reality. As a consequence, they have been interpreted as marking the beginning of a new phase in the history of cartography that led towards modern practices of map-making. In this chapter I argue, however, that Vesconte’s maps do not represent a fundamental change concerning religious aspects in the perception of the world. Analysing the relations between text and image (including alterations made in later copies), I demonstrate that the noticeable focus on geography partly results from the use of ArabicIslamic templates as well as techniques that characterise Portolan charts. Taken together, both features allowed the reader of Sanudo’s text to better visualise the author’s complex plan. Nevertheless, they did not diminish the maps’ potential to make it possible to contemplate God’s creation and to follow salvation history, an essential function of pre-modern maps. As will be shown on the basis of the manuscript tradition, some elements of the maps even introduced new details of religious knowledge. Keywords: Marino Sanudo, Pietro Vesconte, Paulinus Minorita, al-Idrīsī, Book of Curiosities, Crusades, Holy Land, transmission of knowledge

Dr. Stefan Schröder, Academy Research Fellow, Faculty of Theology / Department of Church History, P.O. Box 4 (Vuorikatu 3), FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Phone: + 358 (0)2941 23055, Email: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-009

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The loss of Acre in 1291, the last major stronghold of the crusader states, had a considerable impact on societies in Western Europe. Discussions about military campaigns to the East became more intense, and calls for a new crusade, which – apart from Louis IX of France – European leaders in the thirteenth century responded to rather half-heartedly, were renewed. Moreover, approximately 30 proposals written in the aftermath of the events of 1291 outlined more or less specific plans on how to wrest the Holy Land from the hands of the ‘infidels’.¹ Among them, the ‘Liber secretorum fidelium crucis’ (‘The Book of Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross’) by the Venetian patrician Marino Sanudo the Elder (c. 1270–c. 1340), stands out in length, layout and detail.² It consists of three books divided into several parts and is comprised of various chapters aiming to provide answers regarding all aspects of the organisation and planning of such an enterprise. Detailed geographical information in the text and ample maps further underlined Sanudo’s argumentation and increased – as a side effect – the material value of his book. The author himself can be regarded as a determined advocate of the crusade idea. Whereas other writers of crusade treatises had been personally appointed by the Pope to come up with a plan (e. g. Fidentius de Padova), or else were part of the ruling elites with immediate ties to crusading activities (e. g. Jacques de Molay, the last grandmaster of the military order of the Templars), Sanudo’s engagement with the topic seems to have been personally motivated and done without (official) backing by his hometown of Venice. In fact, he dedicated most of his life and, we can assume, a great deal of money to the enhancement of his work and to the development of networks that helped him to promote his plan. In 1321, he even travelled to Avignon to present the ‘Liber secretorum’ to Pope John XXII (1244– 1334) in person. Afterwards, Sanudo travelled to the French court of Charles IV (1294 – 1328) to present his plan yet again. Until his death, he continued to work on his œuvre by updating and adding material to the text and by writing letters and sending manuscript copies to influential individuals.³

 For more analysis of these proposals, see Antony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land. The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries, Ashgate 2000; Sylvia Schein, Fideles crucis. The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land 1274– 1314, Oxford 1991. For crusading in late medieval times in general, see Norman Housley, The later Crusades, 1274– 1580: From Lyons to Alcazar, Oxford 1992.  Marino Sanudo, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis super Terrae sanctae recuperatione et conservation, ed. Jacques Bongars, Hannover 1611, Repr. ed. Joshua Prawer, Jerusalem 1972; Marino Sanudo, The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross. Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis, transl. and ed. Peter Lock (Crusade Texts in Translation 21), Farnham 2011.  For more on Sanudo’s life, see Gloria Allaire, Sanudo, Marino, in: John Block Friedman/ Kristen Mossler Figg (eds.), Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages. An Encyclopedia, London, New York 2000, pp. 535 – 536; Frank Frankfort, Marino Sanudo Torsello. A Social Biography, Cincinnati 1974. For Sanudo’s letters, see Sherman Roddy, The Correspondence of Marino Sanudo Torsello, Philadelphia 1971; Friedrich Kunstmann, Studien über Marino Sanudo den Aelteren mit einem An-

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Given the context of the work and the motives of the author, it is striking that, at first glance, the maps accompanying the ‘Liber secretorum’ neither highlight the religious dimension of the text, nor support its crusade rhetoric. Rather, they accentuate the geographical dimension of the work.⁴ Eight of the 17 known copies of the ‘Liber secretorum’ contain maps.⁵ The copy given to Pope John XXII in 1321 is the first one to include a total of six maps: a map of the world, a map of the Eastern Mediterranean with its adjoining provinces and four Portolan charts that cover parts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Together, these maps constitute an annex of the manuscript and they were probably added to strengthen Sanudo’s case when receiving the honour of an audience with the Pope.⁶ Most of the copies with maps produced after 1321 tend to include the same maps, even though their position and sequence vary. Sometimes individual maps are missing entirely, while others could be added.⁷ The maps were not produced by Sanudo himself, but by the skilled mapmaker Pietro Vesconte († after 1347), one of the first cartographers who manufactured maps professionally in a specialised workshop in Venice that operated around the years 1311 to 1327.⁸ An atlas that Vesconte produced in either 1320 or 1321, probably as a sample for Sanudo, already includes most maps found later in manuscripts of Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’.⁹ They differ from the ones in the ‘Liber secretorum’ only in certain details. It remains unclear, however, if this particular atlas was also presented to the Pope in 1321, as previous research has suggested.¹⁰ Based on the indication in an inventory, it

hange seiner ungedruckten Briefe, in: Abhandlungen der Historischen Classe der Königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 7 (1855), pp. 697– 819.  For studies on the maps within Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, see Evelyn Edson, Reviving the Crusade. Sanudo’s schemes and Vesconte’s Maps, in: Rosamund Allen (ed.), Eastward bound. Travel and travellers, 1050 – 1550, Manchester, New York 2004, pp. 131– 155; Nathalie Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle (Terrarum orbis 2), Turnhout 2002; Emmanuelle Vagnon, Cartographie et repre´séntations de l’Orient méditerranéen en Occident (Terrarum orbis 11), Turnhout 2013.  For an overview of the number and sequence of the maps within the manuscript tradition of Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, see Bernhard Degenhart/ Annegrit Schmitt, Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto. Zwei Literaten des 14. Jahrhunderts und ihre Wirkung auf Buchillustrierung und Kartographie in Venedig, Avignon und Neapel, in: Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 14 (1973), pp. 1– 137, here p. 105; Bernhard Degenhart/ Annegrit Schmitt, Corpus der Italienischen Zeichnungen 1300 – 1450, vol. 2/1, Berlin 1980, p. 41; Edson (note 4), pp. 151– 152; Sanudo, Book of Secrets (note 2), pp. 13 – 15.  Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], Vat. lat. 2972.  In one manuscript, dated to the fifteenth century, the maps are unfinished. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana [BML], Plut. 21.23, fol. 138v–139r.  On Vesconte, who is never mentioned by Sanudo, see Gloria Allaire, Vesconte, Pietro/Perrino, in: Friedman/ Figg (note 3), pp. 627– 628.  Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 1362a. The atlas bears an inscription with Vesconte’s signature and the date on fol. 3v. Since the inscription is fragmentary, research gives the date either as 1320 or 1321. See Konrad Kretschmer, Marino Sanudo der Ältere und die Karten des Petrus Vesconte, in: Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 26 (1891), pp. 352– 370. Michelina Di Cesare, Studien zu Paulinus Venetus De mapa mundi (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Studien und Texte 58), Wiesbaden 2015, pp. 32– 37 and 43 – 46.  See, for instance, Degenhart/ Schmitt, Marino Sanudo (note 5), 64 and 68.

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might be the case that in the sixteenth century the atlas was in the possession of the humanist Ulrich Fugger, whose agents frequently acquired books for Fugger’s library in Venice. After his death, his collection became part of the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg that, in turn, was transferred to the Vatican Apostolic Library eventually in 1622. ¹¹ The general focus of the maps in the ‘Liber secretorum’ is on topographical specifics of the regions and places that Sanudo considered to be relevant for the military campaign. As a consequence, they are characterised in prior research as having a relatively sober and quasi-objective appearance and can be seen as representing a ‘rational’ approach that entails a high level of accuracy, which was designed to impress or convince the papacy and members of Europe’s high nobility to finance Sanudo’s plan. The world map, for instance, provides a representation of the geography of the entire known world that differs considerably from more or less contemporary mappae mundi, such as the Ebstorf and Hereford maps – iconic maps that are widely seen as encapsulating the medieval Christian worldview par excellence. ¹² The numerous references to biblical knowledge that are characteristic of mappae mundi have been largely omitted from Vesconte’s work. Jerusalem, for example, is prominently displayed in a central position in the Ebstorf and Hereford maps. In the map of Vesconte and Sanudo, however, the ultimate goal of Sanudo’s enterprise is not even mentioned. Though the map centres on the Holy Land, it is the city of Baldac (Baghdad) that is highlighted in red ink. Moreover, the map is partly based on an Arabic-Islamic template and introduces new geographical and cultural knowledge to Latin-Christian cartography. Regarding these differences, prior scholarship has viewed the maps done by Vesconte for the ‘Liber secretorum’ as the beginning of a new phase in the history of cartography. This gave rise to the somewhat problematic and criticised perspective that mappae mundi, like the Ebstorf and Hereford maps, represented more traditional medieval-religious thought, whereas Vesconte’s world map, the oldest representative of the category of so-called ‘transitional maps’, foreshadows the mathematicallyoriented mapping of modern times, which abandons religious concepts in favour of geographical accuracy.¹³ But do the maps in the ‘Liber secretorum’ actually represent a

 Cf. Ludwig Schuba, Die Quadriviums-Handschriften der Codices Palatini Latini in der Vatikanischen Bibliothek (Kataloge der Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg 2), Wiesbaden 1992, pp. 46 – 47. For Fugger, see Irmgard Bezzel, Fugger, Ulrich, in: Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens Online, 2017, URL: https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/lexikon-des-gesamten-buchwesens-online/fugger-ulrich-COM_060929?s.num=363&s.start=360; 2.4. 2020 (accessed 10.06. 2020).  One example would be Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, London 2012.  The category ‘transitional maps’ was created by David Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, in: Id./ John Brian Harley (eds.), Cartographic in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (The History of Cartography 1), Chicago, London 1987, pp. 286 – 370, here p. 314. Di Cesare (note 9), p. 45, presents Vesconte’s world map as the first modern mappa mundi in the history of cartography. For critical comments, see Marianne O’Doherty, A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East in late-medieval Thought, Report, and Cartography, in: Bulletin of International Medieval Research 16

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fundamental change in the mapping of religious knowledge? What role and meaning do the maps have for Sanudo’s text, which recurrently stresses the importance of defending the Christian faith against its religious enemies and, consequently, relies heavily on knowledge of the Bible and a history of Christianity? The article provides a thorough analysis of the maps’ graphic symbols and inscriptions in order to investigate how and to what extent the geographical and religious dimensions are interrelated. It argues that Vesconte’s maps support Sanudo’s plan, even if text and image are not entirely correlated, and that the transmission of religious knowledge is one purpose of the maps, even if the sheer quantity of references to the Bible covered by mappae mundi in the style of the Ebstorf and Hereford maps is lacking. After briefly introducing Sanudo’s thoughts on recovering the Holy Land (section 1), I examine the world map and further cartographical representations included in the ‘Liber secretorum’ in its manuscript context (sections 2– 3), showing that the differences between it and the mappae mundi are rather the consequence of using an Arabic-Islamic template and of general changes in mapmaking at the time. Some features of the map even introduce new religious knowledge. Finally, I take Sanudo’s significant redactions and modifications introduced after 1321 into account (section 4). These involve especially book three of the ‘Liber secretorum’, which deals extensively with the past and future of the Holy Land, the ultimate goal of his recovery mission. These modifications resulted in adding a map of the Holy Land and city plans of Jerusalem and Acre, which, as explored below, can be seen as his concession to accentuating the religious significance of these places. Once again, some features introduce new religious knowledge. However, the geographical dimension of the maps is prominently highlighted as well, making it possible to visualise, at least to some extent, Sanudo’s strategic ideas for liberating the territories once under Christian rule.

I Sanudo’s plan to recover the Holy Land Sanudo completed a first version of his plan to recover Jerusalem, entitled ‘Conditiones Terrae Sanctae’, between 1306 and 1309. Dedicated to Pope Clement V (c. 1264– 1315), the short treatise already included the core ideas of how to organise a new crusade and was in line with most contemporary proposals. From 1318 onwards, Sanudo significantly redacted and modified the text, now entitled ‘Liber secretorum fidelium crucis’. While the first two books predominantly address logistical and strategical issues, provide a general outline of how the plan will be implemented and offer background information on the Mamluks in Egypt as the most dangerous ad-

(2010), pp. 14– 59, here pp. 42– 44; Stefan Schröder, ‘Transitional’ or ‘transcultural’ maps? Impact and Function of Islamic Elements in Latin-Christian Cartography of the first half of the 14th century, in: Alfred Hiatt (ed.), Cartography between Christian Europe and the Arabic-Islamic World, 1100 – 1500, Leiden 2021 (forthcoming).

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versary of the Christian kingdoms, book three encompasses a more geographical and historical perspective by focusing on the Holy Land and the previous crusades.¹⁴ Altogether, Sanudo put his enterprise within a global perspective. According to his plan, liberating the Holy Land would not just alter the political situation in the Near East, it would also lead to a fundamental change of the geo-political situation in the known world.¹⁵ Embracing and further developing the ideas of other authors proposing the need for a crusade, as a first step he called for a strict naval blockade of the Mediterranean Sea for three years, suppressing all trade especially of wood, iron, weapons and slaves, but also of food, between Christian merchants and their Muslim counterparts. At the same time, the spice trade from India, the main source of income for the Sultan of Egypt, should be re-directed to northern trade routes in the regions around the Caspian and Black Sea. As a result of this economic warfare, the Mamluks would be significantly weakened. A skilled and carefully trained expedition force should then invade Egypt and occupy strategic locations along the Nile Delta, further undermining the Mamluk reign by controlling the economic heart of Egypt itself. At the final stage, a large crusader army would easily be able to defeat the remaining Muslim forces and liberate the Holy Land and its sacred centre of Jerusalem. In promoting a blockade and a passagium particulare to Egypt in order to weaken the Mamluk realm, Sanudo’s main arguments were no different than those found in other contemporary proposals.¹⁶ However, his text did more to engage the reader with detailed information on all aspects of the enterprise, from information on the military strength of the Sultan’s army to discussions of the economic situation in Egypt and its dependence on Indian spices and what types of ships would be best for navigating the Nile Delta and the skills required by the soldiers and sailors. His meticulous calculations of the costs of such a campaign include wages for soldiers and the ships’ crews, the expenses for food and equipment of all kinds as well as the cost of supporting the Georgians and Armenians defending Christianity in the East and the money needed to bribe the Mongols and Ethiopians to join the Latin Christians.¹⁷

 For the history of the ‘Liber secretorum’ and the different redactions, see the detailed studies by Degenhart/ Schmitt, Marino Sanudo (note 5); Franco Cardini, Per un’edizione critica del Liber secretorum fidelium crucis di Marin Sanudo il Vecchio, in: Ricerche Storiche 6/1 (1976), pp. 191– 250.  See also the counterfactual historical study of Helmut G. Walther, Die Wiedereroberung des Heiligen Landes durch ein gesamtabendländisches Kreuzfahrerheer 1325/28 und die Öffnung des Seeweges nach Indien, in: Stephan Freund/ Klaus Krüger/ Matthias Werner (eds.), Von der Veränderbarkeit der Welt: ausgewählte Aufsätze von Helmut G. Walther. Festgabe zu seinem 60. Geburtstag, Frankfurt/Main 2004, pp. 49 – 66.  Apart from Leopold (note 1) and Schein (note 1), see also Stefan K. Stantchev, Spiritual Rationality. Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice, Oxford 2014. Gion Wallmeyer, Wie der Kreuzzug marktfähig wurde. Überlegungen zur Anwendung des Marktbegriffs auf das höfische Ratgeberwesen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts, in: Marian Füssel/ Philip Knäble/ Nina Elsemann (eds.), Wissen und Wirtschaft. Expertenkulturen und Märkte vom 13. bis 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen 2017, pp. 279 – 312.  For more on calculating the costs, see Franco Cardini, I costi della crociata. L’aspetto economico del progetto di Marin Sanudo il Vecchio, in: Id., Studi sulla storia e sull’idea di crociata, Rome 1993,

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Sanudo, therefore, drew a rather rational line of argumentation underlining that the costs of the enterprise were a worthwhile investment that would pay off in the end. The first two books of the ‘Liber secretorum’ were composed in such a way as to make this huge enterprise seem entirely feasible. Dividing the text into many parts and chapters, each endowed with headings and guiding questions, enabled readers to orientate themselves within the work with ease. Religious references are of course not lacking from the text. Sanudo, however, was certainly aware that crusading rhetoric alone – even when necessary and part of the common political discourse of the time – was by no means enough.¹⁸ He presented himself as an expert on the matter by sticking to factual analysis and empirical information that he claimed to have acquired through his personal experiences. Sanudo referred to his travels in the Mediterranean (thus being able to present special knowledge on sailing to the Levant and navigating along the Egyptian coastline) and his journeys to Northern Europe (assuring readers that the skills of sailors in the Baltic Sea region together with Venetian mariners would be beneficial for steering through the Nile Delta).¹⁹ The maps (and the precious illuminations) in some copies of the ‘Liber secretorum’ played an important role in providing visual evidence of the locations and regions that Sanudo mentions in the text. Only one other contemporary proposal contained a map showing both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Land.²⁰ The maps in Sanudo’s text, however, are much more elaborate. In some of his letters, he proposes a close connection between the verbal and visual medium by stating that one should take a close look at the maps in order to successfully implement his plan of recovery.²¹ In particular, the world map and the map of the Eastern Mediterranean and its bordering regions allowed readers to reflect on the global outcomes of Sanudo’s

pp. 377– 411; Norman Housley, Costing the Crusades. Budgeting for crusading activity in the fourteenth century, in: Id./ Marcus Bull (eds.), The Experience of Crusading I: Western Approaches, Cambridge 2003, pp. 45 – 59.  Compare, for instance, the recurrent public announcements of taking up the cross on the one hand, and the strenuous negotiations between the papacy and the French court on financing a military campaign on the other. See Norman J. Housley, The Franco-Papal Crusade Negotiations of 1322– 3, in: Papers of the British School at Rome 48 (1980), pp. 166 – 185.  Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 35, 50 – 53, 72– 73 (II.1.2, II.3.1– 4, II.4.18); see also Leopold (note 1), p. 64.  Fidentius of Padua, Liber recuperationis Terrae Sanctae, in: P. Girolamo Golubovich (ed.), Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica della Terra Santa e dell’oriente Francescano II, Florence 1913, pp. 1– 60. On the map preserved in two manuscripts, see in particular Patrick Gautier Dalché, Cartes, réflexion stratégique et projets de croisade à la fin du XIIIe et au début du XIVe siècle: une initiative franciscaine?, in: Francia 37 (2010), pp. 77– 95; Vagnon (note 4), pp. 115 – 121; Ead., Géographie et strategies dans les projets de croisade, XIIe-XVe siècle, in: Jacques Paviot (ed.), Les projets de croisade. Géostratégie et diplomatie européenne du XIVe au XVIIe siècle (Croisades Tardives 1), Toulouse 2014, pp. 136 – 141.  See, for instance, two letters written in 1325: Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 290 – 294; Roddy (note 3), pp. 124 and 130; Frankfort (note 3), p. 222. In a letter written in 1330 to Bertrand du Pouget, Sanudo describes how he had shown the maps to King Charles IV of France a few years earlier: Kunstmann (note 3), p. 788; Roddy (note 3), p. 268; Bouloux (note 4), p. 62.

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plan by envisioning the geographical features and natural boundaries a crusader army would have to overcome to achieve its goals.

II Religious and geographical knowledge in the world map The world map appears for the first time in the copy of the ‘Liber secretorum’ that Sanudo presented to Pope John XXII in Avignon in 1321 (fig. 1).²² Six further versions are included in later copies of the ‘Liber secretorum’, while an additional one is part of the Vesconte atlas.²³ The map is surrounded by a detailed geographical description of the various regions of the three known parts of the world composed from authoritative sources, and it focuses entirely on geographical features without making any reference to religious knowledge.²⁴ It was probably assumed that such a strategy would enable a better understanding of the pictorial representation, even when the toponyms used in the world map and the legend surrounding it differ. In this way, Sanudo und Vesconte might have taken the advice of Sanudo’s acquaintance, Paulinus Minorita (c. 1270/74– c. 1344), who requested in the prologue of his ‘De mapa mundi’ that one needs both a textual and a visual source of the places and regions in order to fully understand and follow historical narratives.²⁵ A further note at the bottom of the folio page, included in the versions of the world map after 1321, states that it is impossible to show everything on such a map of the world, demonstrating Sanudo’s awareness that the decision to depict certain geographical features on a map necessarily includes the omission of other elements.²⁶ Regarding the design of the world map itself, it is quite certain that among other oral, textual and visual sources available in Venice, it is based on an Arabic-Islamic template. As research has already presumed, Sanudo and Vesconte must have had access to a circular world map quite similar to the one that is part of the twelfth Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 2972, fol. 112v–113r.  Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 1362a, fol. 1v–2r.  A transcription of the text based on the world map in the Vesconte atlas is provided in Kretschmer (note 9), pp. 366 – 370.  For this text, see Di Cesare (note 9); Isabelle Heullant-Donat, Entrer dans l’Histoire. Paolino da Venezia et les prologues de ses chroniques universelles, in: Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome. Moyen-Age, Temps modernes 105, 1 (1993), pp. 381– 442, here pp. 402– 404; Patrick Gautier Dalché/ Christiane Deluz/ Nathalie Bouloux (eds.), La terre. Connaissance, représentations, mesure au Moyen Âge (L’atelier du me´die´viste 13), Turnhout 2013, pp. 355 – 357 (prologue). According to the redactions in Paulinus’ chronicle, this text also varies in the preserved manuscripts.  Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), p. 285. It is not part of the early versions, Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 2972, fol. 112v–113r, and Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 1362a, fol. 1v–2r; it might therefore have been added later on by Sanudo himself. For the text, see Bouloux (note 4), p. 62; Edson (note 4), p. 139; Gautier Dalché/ Deluz/ Bouloux (note 25), pp. 357– 359; Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300 – 1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation, Baltimore 2007, p. 68.

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Fig. 1: World map in Marino Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, c. 1321 (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2972, fol. 112v-113r).

century ‘Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq al-āfāq’ (‘The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands’) by al-Idrīsī (c. 1100 – 1166). ²⁷ This monumental geographical work  The parallels between the maps of al-Idrīsī and Sanudo and Vesconte have been noted and to a certain extent examined inter alia by Joachim Lelewel, Géographie du Moyen Age, vol. 2, Breslau 1852, pp. 19 – 35; Konrad Miller, Mappae arabicae. Arabische Welt- und Länderkarten des 9.–13. Jahrhunderts in arabischer Urschrift, lateinischer Transkription und Übertragung in neuzeitliche Kartenskizzen, 6 vols. (Islamic Geography 240), Stuttgart 1926 – 1931, Repr. Frankfurt/Main 1994, vol. 2, p. 51; Tadeusz Lewicki, Marino Sanudos Mappa mundi, in: Rocnik Orientalistycny 38 (1976), pp. 169 – 195; Carsten Drecoll, Idrísí aus Sizilien. Der Einfluß eines arabischen Wissenschaftlers auf die Entwicklung der europäischen Geographie (Deutsche Hochschulschriften 1187), Egelsbach 2000. For a detailed analysis, see Schröder (note 13), and the results of my forthcoming book on the transmission of knowledge between Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian cartography. See also the contribution of JeanCharles Ducène in this volume.

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consists of 70 sectional maps depicting the seven climate zones of the Northern Hemisphere; it is frequently seen as representing the apex of Arabic-Islamic cartography and was produced at the court of the Norman King Roger II.²⁸ Some of the extant manuscript copies from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries include a world map at the very beginning that provides an overview of the whole earth, before displaying its particular regions.²⁹ Al-Idrīsī, however, did not mention the map in his text at all, and the very similar round world map, which is part of a late-twelfth or an early thirteenth-century copy of the eleventh-century work ‘Ġarā’ib al-funūn wa mulaḥ al‘uyūn’ (‘The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes’) has sparked new discussions about the origin of this map type and of our understanding of ArabicIslamic cartography as such.³⁰ Regardless of the (unresolved) question as to when and how Sanudo and/or Vesconte acquired such a template, the transcultural adoption of geographical (and not religious) knowledge becomes visible via graphic symbols, such as the Mountains of the Moon and the Caspian Sea, and stylistic parallels in how the mountain chains are depicted and several place names and phrases employed.³¹ However, Sanudo and Vesconte did not copy their template entirely, but adjusted it according to their needs and to Latin-Christian conventions of mapmaking. The relation between Sanudo’s and Vesconte’s world map and an Arabic-Islamic template is also not as clear as one assumes when focussing on the place names.³² From the many names that might have

 For an edition of the text see al-Idrīsī, Opus geographicum, sive Liber ad eorum delectationem qui terras peragrare studeant, ed. Enrico Cerulli et al., 9 vols., Rome 1970 – 1984. For a French translation, see al-Idrīsī, Géographie d’Édrisi traduite de l’Arabe en Français, ed. Amédée Jaubert, 2 vols., Paris 1840. For more on Idrīsī’s life, see, with further references, Allaoua Amara/ Annliese Nef, Al-Idrīsī et les Hammudides de Sicile: nouvelles données biographiques sur l’auteur du Livre de Roger, in: Arabica 48 (2001), pp. 121– 127. Jean-Charles Ducène, Al-Idrīsī, Abū ʿAbdallāh, in: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Three, Leiden, Boston 2018, pp. 91– 99.  Several of the preserved maps show some significant modifications in layout and content. See S. Maqbul Ahmad, Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrīsī, in: John Brian Harley/ David Woodward (eds.), Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (The History of Cartography 2/1), Chicago, London 1992, pp. 156 – 174; Jean-Charles Ducène, Les œuvres géographiques d’l-idrīsī et leur diffusion, in: Journal Asiatique 305 (2017), pp. 33 – 41.  Oxford, Bodleian Library [BL], MS Arab. c. 90. For a critical edition, see Yossef Rapoport/ Emilie Savage-Smith (eds.), An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe. The Book of Curiosities, Leiden, Boston 2014. For the latest analysis, see Yossef Rapoport/ Emilie Savage-Smith, Lost Maps of the Caliphs. Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo, Chicago 2018.  In the case of the Caspian Sea that was inserted two times in Asia (one in the Caucasus region one further to the East), such new geographical information caused problems in harmonising different worldviews. For more on this feature, see Schröder (note 13); Felicitas Schmieder, „Den Alten den Glauben zu entziehen, wage ich nicht…“ Spätmittelalterliche Welterkenntnis zwischen Tradition und Augenschein, in: Gian Luca Potestà (ed.), Autorität und Wahrheit. Kirchliche Vorstellungen, Normen und Verfahren 13. bis 15. Jahrhundert (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs 84), Munich 2012, pp. 65 – 77.  For a transcription of the place names and legends with its minor variations in the world map of Sanudo and Vesconte see Konrad Miller, Mappaemundi. Die ältesten Weltkarten, 6 vols., Stuttgart 1895 – 1898, here vol. 3, pp. 132– 136. For a transcription of place names in the world maps of al-Idrīsī

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been derived from the Arabic language, only some have a distinct relation to copies of Idrīsī’s world map as well as to the one that accompanies ‘the Book of Curiosities’ in terms of phonetic analogies and of their position on the particular maps (Provincie Oburge, hec et Ethiopia inferior; Habesse vel Terra Nigrorum; Carab terra destructa; Insula Lince dicitur Camar; and Zinc et idem Zinciber).³³ Nevertheless, by using these Arabic malapropisms and adding explanatory information on their meaning, Sanudo (and Vesconte) displayed in-depth knowledge, which served his purpose of selling himself as an expert. More notably, the combination of these verbal and graphic elements draws the attention of the observer to the regions decisive for his elaborate plan to recover the Holy Land. Through mention of Oburge, a reference to the nomadic tribe of the Beja (al-bujah),³⁴ and Habesse as a transcription of the Arabic al-Ḥabaša, a reference to Ethiopia and/or the Ethiopian people,³⁵ Sanudo was helping to define Egypt’s border regions and drawing attention to the Ethiopian’s access to the Nile near the Mountains of the Moon. Camar, probably derived from the Arabic al-kamar or Jazira al-Qumr, refers to the largest island in the Indian Ocean, whereas the East African shoreline is called Zinc et idem Zinciber in reference to the black population (as-Zanj).³⁶ The newly introduced names further accentuate the geographic dimensions of the Indian Ocean as an important region of the world due to the spice trade, indicated moreover by insula piperis in the Far East.³⁷ The term Carab, found near the Caspian Sea, might have been obtained from the Arabic expression al-kharāb for ruin or destruction.³⁸ This expression is extant only in one late copy of al-Idrīsī’s work, but it was likely inscribed in the model used by Sanudo and Vesconte. It is used several times in the equivalent sectional maps of

and of ‘the Book of Curiosities’ see Miller (note 27), vol. 5, after p. 160; Rapoport/ Savage-Smith (note 30), pp. 160 – 162 and 439 – 441.  Lewicki’s analysis (note 27) is rather optimistic. Gaulolia, Nubia, Sym, Sycia sive regnum Cathay and Castrum Gog et Magog, for instance, have no of Arabic origin. Others, like Locacessim (Locessim), Chus, Kis, Neze (Nese), nebile, termelit, flumen Gyon and Bedoni might be derived from written and/or oral Arabic sources as well, but not necessarily from al-Idrīsī. With Chus and Kis appearing along the shores of eastern Africa, for instance, there are some analogies to names in sectional maps of the Nuzhat al-mushtāq. However, they are not part of the round world maps that are preserved and there is no logical argument why Vesconte and Sanudo chose, of all possible names, these and only these names.  Bertrand Hirsch, L’espace nubien et éthiopien sur les cartes portulans du XIVe siècle, in: Médiévales 9, 18 (1990), pp. 69 – 92, here p. 76. For the Beja in Islamic maps, see Karen C. Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps. An Exploration, Chicago, London 2016, pp. 187– 218.  Hirsch (note 34), p. 74.  For more on the term, see Alexandre Popovic, al-Zandj, in: Peri J. Bearman (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition, Volume 11, W-Z, Leiden 2002, pp. 444– 446.  Though not having here explicit parallels to travel reports, such as those by Marco Polo and Odorico of Pordenone, Sanudo’s and Vesconte’s design certainly accommodates the increasing level of knowledge about the Indian Ocean in Europe at that time. See Marianne O’Doherty, The Indies and the Medieval West. Thought, Report, Imagination, Turnhout 2013.  Lewicki (note 27), p. 194; Drecoll (note 27), p. 42.

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north-eastern Asia found in the ‘Nuzhat al-mushtāq’, where Idrīsī refers to a devastated area (bilād al-kharāb) near the border to the lands of Gog (Yājūj) and Magog (Mājūj).³⁹ Together with inscriptions concerning the original and current dwelling places of the Mongols, the terms on Sanudo’s and Vesconte’s map hint at the completely altered geopolitical situation in Asia due to the devastations of war. In this way, the strategic aspects of Sanudo’s plan can be more easily identified; the current state of the world is more visible. This could not have been achieved via a mappa mundi like the Ebstorf and Hereford maps. The numerous biblical references included therein would rather have distracted the observer from the geographical setting of Sanudo’s political and economic claims. Relying on an Arabic-Islamic template meant, moreover, that Sanudo and Vesconte embraced the predominant geographical and topographical perspective of the ‘Idrīsīan maps’. Comparing Latin-Christian and Arabic-Islamic cartography, Michael Borgolte concluded that Arabic-Islamic maps in general might have been produced in a religious context, yet in and of themselves they in most cases do not represent a religious worldview.⁴⁰ Other studies have also come to the conclusion that the dominant religious layer of the mappae mundi, such as the Ebstorf and Hereford maps, can be seen as a distinctive feature that separates Western European pre-modern cartography from, for instance, Arabic-Islamic and Chinese cartography.⁴¹ Such overall verdicts still require validation, however. As Borgolte himself acknowledges, qibla-charts that indicate the prayer directions to Mecca are not the only maps that provide images of sacred space. Also, some world maps as well as regional maps of the Arabian Peninsula within the so-called Balkhī-school show the Ka‘ba, thus explicitly highlighting Islam’s most sacred site. Further examples, such as a late copy of al-Qazwīnī’s popular ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt’ (‘Wonders of Creation’), display the Kaaba as well, thereby demonstrating that the content and design of a map varies from manuscript to manuscript. It was open to modifications by the particular scribe and/ or illustrator copying the manuscript. It should also be noted that numerous maps of European provenance, for instance maps dividing the Earth into different zones based

 It is not used in the maps found in Ġarā’ib al-funūn. Regarding the world maps accompanying Nuzhat al-mushtāq, it is only marked in the Oxford, BL, MS Pococke 375, fol. 3v–4r version, but is missing from all other copies. Due to the condition of the map, researchers cannot decide whether it appeared in the copy in Paris. For more on the sectional maps, see Miller (note 27), vol. 1, 3, p. 99 and vol. 6, fig. 58 and 68.  Michael Borgolte, Christliche und muslimische Repräsentationen der Welt. Ein Versuch transdisziplinärer Mediävistik, in: Berichte und Abhandlungen der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 14 (2008), pp. 89 – 147, here p. 101.  See Christoph Mauntel et al., Mapping Continents, Inhabited Quarters and the Four Seas. Divisions of the World and the Ordering of Spaces in Latin-Christian, Arabic-Islamic and Chinese Cartography in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries. A Critical Survey and Analysis, in: Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 5/2 (2018), pp. 295 – 367.

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on particular climate conditions (zonal maps; climate maps), to a large extent lack a distinct religious dimension as well.⁴² In the case of the ‘Idrīsīan maps’, however, religious knowledge is not prominently marked apart from the apocalyptic tribes of Gog and Magog in north-east Asia, following the Quranic tradition.⁴³ The Arabian Peninsula is situated almost at the centre of the map and could have triggered a religious reading of the map.Yet, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are not depicted. In fact, al-Idrīsī’s world map focusses exclusively on providing names for regions and different ethnic people. Cities as potential hubs for holy rites or any other signs of monuments, shrines and human architecture are neglected.⁴⁴ This approach stands in some contrast to al-Idrīsī’s text and his sectional maps, where references to religious knowledge relating to all monotheistic creeds can be found, even when al-Idrīsī apparently sought to downplay sensitive religious issues given the extraordinary situation of a Muslim scholar writing in commission for a Christian king.⁴⁵ The lack of religious knowledge, and even more, the absence of Jerusalem on Sanudo’s and Vesconte’s world map can thus partly be explained by adopting an Idrīsīan template. However, this does not mean that the world map does not transmit any religious knowledge at all or that such knowledge is even abandoned in favour of offering a more accurate view on the geography of the world. On the contrary, by placing Mecca at the centre of the Arabian Peninsula and marking it prominently with an architectural symbol, Sanudo and Vesconte introduced new elements that refer to religious knowledge. That is to say, the city cannot be seen without its religious connotation, even when pointing to Islam rather than Christianity.⁴⁶ It is probably the

 Alfred Hiatt, The Map of Macrobius Before 1100, in: Imago Mundi 59 (2007), pp. 149 – 176; Stefan Schröder, Die Klimazonenkarte des Petrus Alfonsi. Rezeption und Transformation islamisch-arabischen Wissens in Europa, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Paul-Gerhard Klumbies/ Franziska Sick (eds.) unter Mitarbeit von Mareike Kohls, Raumkonzepte. Disziplinäre Konzepte, Göttingen 2009, pp. 257– 277.  For more on Gog und Magog within the cartographical traditions, see Andrew Gow, Gog and Magog on Mappaemundi and Early Printed Maps. Orientalizing Ethnography in the Apocalyptic Tradition, in: Journal of Early Modern History 2 (1998), pp. 61– 88; Keith Lewinstein, Gog and Magog, in: Encyclopaedia of the Quran, vol. 2, Leiden, Boston 2002, pp. 331– 333; Scott D. Westrem, Against Gog and Magog, in: Sylvia Tomasch/ Sealy Gilles (eds.), Text and Territory. Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, Philadelphia 1998, pp. 54– 75; Borgolte (note 40), p. 100.  This applies also for the round world map in the ‘Book of Curiosities’, which, in the case of the Arabian Peninsula, refers only to the ports of al-Shiḥr and Oman. See Rapoport/ Savage-Smith, Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide (note 30), p. 440.  See the contribution by Jean-Charles Ducène in the present volume.  Cities like Rome and Constantinople, which similarly trigger religious connotations for (Christian) observers, are in most cases inscribed. However, they are less visible than Mecca because of the density of additional place names in these areas, which results in the abbreviation of Constantinople in some maps. Only in one copy of the map is Rome marked by an architectural symbol in red ink (London, BL, Add. MS 27376, fol. 187v–188r).

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very first Latin-Christian map inscribing the city at all.⁴⁷ For the contemporary observer, it triggered well-known images concerning the Muslim Ḥajj and legends regarding Muhammad’s tomb situated there (and not in Medina). As visualised in later maps, such as the famous Catalan Atlas (c. 1375), which draw on Christian polemics against Muhammad and Islam, the city became the counterpoint to Jerusalem: whereas Christian pilgrims travel to the empty tomb of the true redeemer within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Muslims worship the tomb of a false prophet who even in his death continued to deceive his followers by being buried in an iron coffin miraculously floating in the air by some hidden magnetic stones.⁴⁸ In the context of Sanudo’s call for a crusade, the depiction of Mecca might have provoked associations with gaining access to the city once Egypt had been conquered, thus putting an end to the evil heresy of Islam. Close to the city of Mecca, moreover, the map includes an inscription informing viewers where emeralds can be found (Hic inveniuntur smaragdi). Probably building on ancient ideas of the richness of the Arabian Peninsula, this could be seen as further (economic) motivation for pursuing Sanudo’s project and gaining access to the Peninsula’s commodities.⁴⁹ The reference to Prester John (India inferior Johannis presbyteri) in the Far East introduces yet another example of religious knowledge. Depicted for the first time in Latin-Christian cartography, the inscription refers to the very popular twelfth-century legend of a mighty Christian emperor ruling over 72 kingdoms near an earthly paradise

 According to Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Herausragende Plätze der antiken Geschichte im Bild der mittelalterlichen Ökumene-Karte (9. bis beginnendes 14. Jahrhundert), in: Dagmar Unverhau (ed.), Geschichtsdeutung auf alten Karten. Archäologie und Geschichte (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 101), Wiesbaden 2003, pp. 23 – 53, here p. 39, Mecca is mentioned in the Vercelli-map, dated c. 1270. I could, however, not confirm this in the edition by Carlo F. Capello (ed.), Il mappamondo mediovale di Vercelli (1191– 1218 ?) (Memorie e studi Geografici 10), Turin 1976. For references to Mecca and the Ḥajj in further Portolan charts, see Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, La peregrinación a la Meca en la Edad Media a través de la cartografía occidental, in: Revista de poética medieval 19 (2007), pp. 177– 218; Michelina Di Cesare, The Dome of the Rock in Mecca: A Christian Interpretation of Muḥammad’s Night Journey in a Fourteenth-Century Italian Map (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, ms. parm. 1612), in: Le Muséon 128 (2015), pp. 203 – 228.  Folker Reichert, Der eiserne Sarg des Propheten. Doppelte Grenzen im Islambild des Mittelalters, in: Ulrich Knefelkamp (ed.), Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung im Mittelalter. 11. Symposium des Mediävistenverbandes vom 14.–17. März 2005 in Frankfurt/Oder, Berlin 2007, pp. 453 – 469; Folker Reichert, Mohammed in Mekka. Doppelte Grenzen im Islambild des lateinischen Mittelalters, in: Saeculum 56 (2005), pp. 17– 31.  There is no reference to emeralds in Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’. It might have derived from a tradition that is later inscribed in Portolan charts, such as the Catalan Atlas (c. 1375), which speaks of an abundance of gems to be found there; see Georges Grosjean (ed.), Mapamundi: der katalanische Weltatlas vom Jahre 1375, Zürich 1977, p. 84. One origin of this tradition goes back to Isidore of Seville, who speaks of the many precious stones of Arabia. In one other chapter, he differentiates between several types of emeralds to be found inter alia in India and Egypt. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum, 2 vols., ed. Wallace M. Lindsay, Oxford 1911, XIV.3.15 and XVI.6.2– 7.

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who would come to help Western Christianity in fighting the infidels.⁵⁰ Yet, when looking at Sanudo’s text, it is evident that he relied in this case neither on the infamous letter by Prester John nor on the ‘Relatio de Davide’, a related text that describes the vast victories of David, a claimed son of Prester John, against the Mongols.⁵¹ Instead following Vincent of Beauvais’ version in his ‘Speculum maius’ (‘De interfectione David Indie regis a tartaris’), Sanudo told the more tragic story of how king David, the successor of Prester John, was defeated by the Mongols, his whole royal family having been killed except for one daughter, who was forced to marry Genghis Khan.⁵² Prester John’s kingdom, therefore, did not exist anymore. Help from Christians living in the East could not be expected any longer. Thus, the reference to Prester John in the map is not necessarily a sign of hope for the contemporary viewer, but even more one of concern. Whether this goes as far as to transmit an eschatological meaning, however, is open to discussion. If the Mongols were understood as the offspring of the tribes that, according to medieval traditions based on Revelation 19:11– 21:8, should herald the Apocalypse, their march to the lands of Latin Christianity might suggest that the end time was near.⁵³ Sanudo’s and Vesconte’s world map indicates the Western advance of the Mongols by pointing to their abandoned region of origin (Hic fuerunt inclusi Tartari), located in the Far East behind a mountain chain with the inscription castrum Gog and Magog. A further legend notes a multitude of Mongols near the Indus River and north of India magna (Hic convenit multitudo Tartarorum), while north of the Caspian Sea the entries Incipit regnum Cathay and probably also Hic stat magnus canis refer to the Mongol Empire that was known from the descriptions of Marco Polo, Hayton of

 For more on the Legend of Prester John, see Friedrich Zarncke (ed.), Der Priester Johannes. Zwei Teile in einem Band, Leipzig 1876; Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, comp. and transl. by Keagan Brewer (Crusade texts in translation 27), Farnham 2015. For recent studies, see Udo Friedrich, Zwischen Utopie und Mythos. Der Brief des Priester Johannes, in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 122 (2003), pp. 73 – 92; Bettina Wagner, Die „Epistola presbiteri Johannis“: Lateinisch und deutsch, Überlieferung Textgeschichte Rezeption und Übertragungen im Mittelalter, mit bisher unedierten Texten (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters 115), Tübingen 2000; Andrew Kurt, The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c. 1200–c. 1540, in: Journal of Medieval History 39, 1 (2013), pp. 1– 24.  Zarncke (note 50), pp. 46 – 59 (‘Relatio’), pp. 62– 63 (‘De interfectione David’); Prester John: The Legend and its Sources (note 50), pp. 101– 122 (‘Relatio’), 155 – 159 (‘De interfectione David’). See Jean Richard, The ‘Relatio de Davide’ as a Source for Mongol History and the Legend of Prester John, in: Charles F. Beckingham/ Bernard Hamilton (eds.), Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes, Aldershot 1996, pp. 139 – 158.  Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 234– 235. (III.13.4). For Vincent of Beauvais’ adaptation see Richard (note 51), p. 148. A similar version of the story (but referring to Prester John instead of David) was included, for instance, in the travelogue of Marco Polo and can be found in further texts, see Polo, Marco, Le Devisement du Monde, ed. Philippe Ménard, 6 vols. (Textes littéraires français 533, 552, 568, 575, 586, 597), Geneva 2001– 2009, here vol. 2, pp. 25 – 29.  O’Doherty (note 7), p. 272.

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Corycus and others.⁵⁴ In the fourteenth century, however, though authors still identified the Mongols as ethnic descendants of Gog and Magog, they were not necessarily presented in the context of an impending Judgement Day.⁵⁵ Sanudo, for his part, provides no indication of an eschatological interpretation of the Mongols in his text. They are rather depicted as a new political player that should be brought to the Christian side through diplomacy and the offer of financial incentives.

III Religious and geographical knowledge in depicting the Mediterranean and the Levant In contrast to the world map, the other maps attached to the 1321 version of Sanudo’s text include no elements derived from an Arabic-Islamic map. If Sanudo and Vesconte did indeed have access to a complete copy of Idrīsī’s ‘Nuzhat al-Musthaq’, then they did not make further use of the geographical and cultural knowledge that is transmitted in this monumental work. This includes, for instance, Idrīsī’s detailed information regarding Egypt with the Nile Delta, North Africa with its hinterland or the Mamluk-controlled Levant – data that could have been useful for Sanudo’s plan.When taking into account the other maps included in the ‘Liber secretorum’, it becomes obvious that the predominant geographical dimensions and the relative lack of religious knowledge contained in the world map cannot be explained by relying solely on an Arabic-Islamic template. The four maps showing segments of the Mediterranean and Black Sea do not include many religious references either. Sanudo and Vesconte based them on the design of the Portolan charts, a new map type developed over the course of the thirteenth century that focusses in particular on coastlines, islands and seaside towns.⁵⁶ When looking at the early and less ornamental Portolan charts known today,

 Miller (note 32), p. 135. An additional legend referring to recent battles in the Caucasus region (Planities Mongan in qua Tartari yemant) is only part of two later maps of the ‘Liber’.  See Felicitas Schmieder, Europa und die Fremden. Die Mongolen im Urteil des Abendlandes vom 13. bis in das 15. Jahrhundert, Sigmaringen 1994; Id., Gogs und Magogs ’natürliche Milde’? Die Mongolen als Endzeitvölker im Wandel von Wissen und Wünschen, in: Wolfram Brandes/ Felicitas Schmieder/ Rebekka Voss (eds.), Peoples of the Apocalypse. Eschatological Beliefs and Political Scenarios, Berlin, Boston 2016, pp. 111– 125, here pp. 118 – 120.  For more on the Portolan charts, whose origins and functions are rather controversially discussed in research, see Tony Campbell, Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 13), pp. 371– 463; Corradino Astengo, The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean, in: David Woodward (ed.), Cartography in the European Renaissance (The History of Cartography 3/1), Chicago, London 2007, pp. 174– 262; Gautier Dalché/ Deluz/ Bouloux (note 26), pp. 433 – 504; Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, Les Cartes Portolanes. La representació medieval d’una mar solcada, Barcelona 2007; Vagnon (note 4), pp. 199 – 269; Kevin Eric Sheehan, The Functions of Portolan Maps. An Evaluation of the Utility of Manuscript Nautical Cartography from the Thirteenth through Sixteenth Centuries, Doctoral Thesis, Durham 2014.

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including the additional maps and atlases ascribed to Vesconte, it seems that places with a significant religious meaning are usually not highlighted.⁵⁷ Rome and Avignon, for instance, the most important centres of the Catholic Church, are accentuated with red ink in the maps of the Mediterranean that accompany Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, just like any other important harbour or town along the coastline, or else such places are not considered at all. The only graphic symbols that perhaps transmit a religious connotation are some heraldic signs in the form of flags.⁵⁸ They serve as decorative elements to enrich the map’s aesthetic and to generate spatial hierarchies that help viewers orientate themselves in relation to the map.⁵⁹ In some cases, they point to political and religious settings. The heraldic signs of Venice, Zadar and other towns, for instance, refer to the cities’ patron saints. Other flags include crosses of various forms and different colours as well as crescents that refer to Muslim realms in northern Africa. As a result, they might have been understood by the viewer as markers of a religious frontier between Christian and Muslim territories. However, the maps do not always express accurate knowledge of the current situation in situ. As a result of a lack of standards and information and erroneous readings, some heraldic signs are just creative designs arrived at by the mapmaker as he tried to imagine spatial and cultural contexts in distant places.⁶⁰ Vesconte’s use of the crescent moon is, after all, a rather general sign referring to some Muslim territories without any specification. When looking at other Portolan charts produced by him, but not in the context of Sanudo’s work, it becomes obvious that these signs were interchangeable and indeed had been exchanged without any specific reason being given.⁶¹ On the map showing the Eastern Mediterranean and adjoining regions (fig. 2), the option of introducing heraldic signs as signs of power was not used at all. This map,

 Other atlases produced by Vesconte differ in generating a framework for the maps that consists in some cases of figural depictions (or their symbolic counterparts) of the four evangelists, therefore referring to the religious sphere. An early exception that includes more graphic symbols and does highlight some places because of their religious significance is the Portolan chart by Giovanni Carignano, produced approximately 1327. The map (Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte Nautiche 2) was destroyed in a fire in 1943. For a photographic reproduction, see URL: http://www.archiviodistato.firenze.it/archividigitali/unita-archivistica/?id=35 (accessed 10.06. 2020).  Inscribing flags and other symbols became a device that Vesconte used only in later times. The first map assigned to him dates from the year 1311 and does not include any heraldic signs. See Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte Nautiche 1.  See Philipp Billion, Die Funktion von Herrschaftszeichen auf mittelalterlichen Portolankarten, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Martina Stercken (eds.), Herrschaft verorten. Politische Kartographie des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 19), Zürich 2012, pp. 229 – 252; Patricia Licini, European and Ottoman Landmarks from a Portolan Chart at the Time of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Hartmut Kugler (eds.), Europa im Weltbild des Mittelalters. Kartographische Konzepte (Orbis Mediaevalis. Vorstellungswelten des Mittelalters 10), Berlin 2008, pp. 191– 218.  Campbell (note 56), pp. 398 – 401, esp. p. 399.  Billion (note 59), p. 236.

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Fig. 2: Map of the Eastern Mediterranean and its adjoining regions in Marino Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, c. 1321 (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2972, fol. 108v-109r).

contained in nine illustrated copies of the ‘Liber secretorum’, is a hybrid mix of the techniques used for the Portolan charts and for the world map.⁶² Providing a detailed view of the coastlines and seaside towns, it zooms in on the areas vital for Sanudo’s recovery plan: the Holy Land up to Mesopotamia, Egypt until its border with Ethiopia and the Arabian Peninsula, encompassed by the Indian Ocean, together with the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. As such, the map covers all the core areas important to the origins of the three monotheistic religions along with their most sacred sites.⁶³ Even if there was space enough to pinpoint cities and (holy) places, there are just a small number of entries on the map in general and only a few references to religious knowledge. That it was once a Christian region is indicated by an inscription and depictions resembling three church buildings in Egypt (abbatie in des[er]to usus occidens). A lengthy legend placed in the south-eastern corner of the map equally refers in its latter part to the many monks or hermits who once dwelled in Egypt’s desert (…in

 Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 2972, fol. 108v–109r.  In focusing on these areas, Sanudo’s and Vesconte’s design goes far beyond the map by Fidentius of Padua. It is quite possible that they were aware of a version of that particular map and loosely based their map on Fidentius’ idea of showing the main ports and places important for his recovery plan (as a result, Antioch and Alexandria are emphasised in one of the two preserved versions). His map, however, is much more abstract and does not include the hinterland with Jerusalem and Cairo, much less the Arabian Peninsula.

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qua olim conversabatur monachorum multitudo).⁶⁴ Names defining geographical features, such as the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, could of course also conjure up relevant episodes from the Bible in the viewer’s eyes. In some cases, for instance by using the word lex near Mount Sinai, the location is even directly linked to a biblical event, namely the reception of the Decalogue by Moses (Ex 19 – 20). Lastly, the map shows two huge towers to denote the location of the pyramids in the desert (Istus ij turres fecit pharao in capite solitudinis), which viewers could connect to the LatinChristian tradition of interpreting them as Joseph’s granaries.⁶⁵ Nonetheless, Jerusalem and Nazareth, the only two settlements shown in the Holy Land, can easily be overlooked with their small architectural emblems. What catches the eye of the viewer are the much more prominently depicted cities of Babylon (babilonia) between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and Cairo (kairo and babilonia) in Egypt. The first refers to the city that is supposed to be the place where the Tower of Babel was built and the confusion of tongues occurred (Gen 11:1– 9). It also echoes the meaning of the city as the capital of the first of the four kingdoms of Daniel and thus has an eschatological connotation (Dan 2:37– 41).⁶⁶ Additionally, it is a reference to contemporary Baghdad, once seat of the Abbasid Caliphate that, as Sanudo evokes in his text, came to an end with the capture of the city in 1258 by the Mongols.⁶⁷ While this city is prominently inscribed in red ink also on the world map, Cairo, as the capital of the Egyptian Sultan and thus of central importance in Sanudo’s scheme, figures only on the map of the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, the city is depicted as consisting of two towns: the Fatimid foundation of Cairo and the Roman foundation named Babylon, which was later absorbed by al-Fusṭāṭ. Both are connected by a channel and well protected by two castles, one on a river island (castrum de Gise) and the other on an adjacent mountain (castrum in monte). Indicating the size and strength of the city, the depiction provides strategic information useful in case of a military attack. The graphic symbol of a bridge close to Cairo that, according to the inscription, was built by Sultan Baibars I to counter the annual inundation of the Nile, further points to the specific environment of this region, which would need to be taken into account when launching an attack on the city. Following the tradition of the world map, Mecca is inscribed on the Arabian Peninsula, again pointing to the most sacred place of Islam. This time, however, a church building located on top of a mountain chain extending far into the Peninsula refers to the monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, a Christian pilgrimage site

 There is no direct link to Sanudo’s text. However, in his description of Egypt, he refers to the desert of Thebaydos, ‘where there was a multitude of monks in former times’. See Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), p. 261 (III.14.12).  Ibid.  Brincken (note 48), pp. 33 – 34.  Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 221 and 237– 238 (III.12.6, III.13.7).

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that became increasingly popular in late medieval times.⁶⁸ Once more, Sanudo and Vesconte introduced new religious knowledge. Whereas Mount Sinai is inscribed on most mappae mundi, the monastery itself is rarely highlighted.⁶⁹ Sanudo and Vesconte, in contrast, present the friary like a Christian stronghold that seems to block or allow access to the Arabian Peninsula, ignoring the fact that the monks followed the Greek-Orthodox rather than the Latin rites. Overall, this map shows the potential of cartographical representations to generate and accentuate knowledge of a specific space via graphic signs and inscriptions. The selection of elements might not be entirely consistent with Sanudo’s text. However, in comparison to the depictions of these regions in the mappae mundi, such as the Ebstorf and Hereford maps, religious knowledge is not superimposed on top of everything else. The focus is more on the geographical dimension of space, differentiated by carefully (but not necessarily consciously) engraved graphics and inscriptions that allowed viewers to concentrate on the relevant strategic aspects of Sanudo’s plan.

IV Later Modifications in the ‘Liber secretorum’: Jerusalem, Acre and the Holy Land After presenting the ‘Liber secretorum’ to Pope John XXII, Sanudo’s crusade proposal was evaluated by a committee of experts. Their encouraging assessment, however, did not lead to a papal decision to actually organise a crusade according to Sanudo’s plan.⁷⁰ Despite – or because of – this, Sanudo continued to work on his proposition by modifying parts and adding additional information. The most noteworthy modification concerns book three, which elaborates in detail on the history of the crusades starting with the population of the Holy Land after the Great Flood and re-narrating the subsequent series of events through the time of Christ until Sanudo’s own time. Moreover, it links the past with the future by providing in the very last chapters recommendations on how to rebuild the Kingdom of Jerusalem after successfully liberating it, thus giving advice on how to avoid the mistakes made in the past and ensure that the Holy Land would never again be lost to the infidels.⁷¹ In copies of Sanudo’s œuvre that were produced after 1321, book three consists of 15 parts instead of 12, some of which have even been enhanced by additional chapters.⁷² Sanudo included a his See Anne Simon, The Cult of Saint Katherine of Alexandria in Late-Medieval Nuremberg, Farnham 2012. As a consequence, the monastery is also reconsidered more prominently in later Portolan charts.  The Ebstorf map, for instance, shows an unnamed (church?) tower near Mount Sinai that might refer to the monastery.  Sanudo included the assessment in the prologue of his work, see Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 3 – 4.  Ibid., pp. 262– 281 (III.15).  Degenhart/ Schmitt (note 5), p. 23.

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torical summary of the Christian Church in the Near East until the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad (part 2), followed by a detailed description of Muhammed’s life and of the history of Islam until the first crusade (part 3) and a detailed geographic description of the Holy Land (part 14). These substantial enhancements actually filled a lacuna. Debasing the religious ‘Other’ and outlining why Islam constituted the greatest threat to Christianity helped to promote the urgency of Sanudo’s plan. As a result of these pseudo-biographical details on the „false prophet“ and „seducer Mahumeth“, the dangerous threat that Islam posed to Christianity became fully visible.⁷³ An additional detailed description of the Holy Land provided the reader with a full account of each of the sacred sites, thus driving home the argument that the enterprise was meant to be an undertaking that sought to finally bring back the places that had once been blessed by Christ’s presence. After all, liberating Jerusalem and the Holy Land was the ultimate goal of Sanudo’s recovery plan. According to Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, these additions go along with a change in rhetoric: from this point onwards, the author started to increasingly use biblical references,⁷⁴ an effect that might also have resulted from his reliance on such historiographical works as William of Tyre’s ‘Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum’ (in its French continuations), Jacques de Vitry’s ‘Historia Hierosolimitana’ and Burchard of Mount Sion’s ‘Descriptio terrae sanctae’. The alterations, moreover, led to changes in the cartographical representations. One world map that is part of a later copy, probably produced around 1329, shows the name Jerusalem in red ink and even marks it with a red cross, thus accentuating the city’s role as the geographical and religious centre of the world.⁷⁵ In addition, possibly borrowing the image used in the map of the Eastern Mediterranean, the monastery of Saint Catherine is (at some distance from Mecca) incorporated as well. The map of the Eastern Mediterranean was also altered in one copy produced shortly after 1321 and dedicated to Robert VII, count of Boulogne and Auvergne. It gives much more space to the Nile Delta, thus highlighting the importance of the Delta for the second phase of Sanudo’s recovery plan. Moreover, it inscribes an itinerary listing place names and distances between the city of Gaza and Cairo.⁷⁶ The latter feature directly links the map to a part of Sanudo’s text that, in turn, is based on an anonymous itinerary from the late thirteenth century and/or beginning of the fourteenth century. This itinerary,

 Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 123 – 127 (III.3.1– 5).  Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Die „Nationes christianorum orientalium“ im Verständnis der lateinischen Historiographie von der Mitte des 12. bis in die zweite Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts, Cologne, Vienna 1973, p. 457.  Rome, BAV, MS Reg. lat. 548, fol. 138v–139r. For dating, see Degenhart/ Schmitt (note 5). They provide no details on the history of the manuscript or for whom it might have been produced.  Oxford, BL, MS Tanner 190, fol. 204v–205r. For more on the manuscript, see Degenhart/ Schmitt (note 5), p. 17. Probably as a result of enlarging the area of the Nile, other details such as Mount Sinai and the inscriptions lex and ydumea are omitted. Also, Nazareth is missing.

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which is preserved in slightly different versions, provided the reader with elaborate details on the condition of the routes as well as available food and water supplies along the way. By including it in the ‘Liber secretorum’, Sanudo transmitted valuable knowledge on how to manage the logistics of crossing the desert with a crusader army.⁷⁷ In several other versions of the map, including the earlier ones accompanying the manuscript given to the Pope and the Vesconte atlas, the way is already marked with some small houses resembling villages, attesting to the fact that Sanudo and Vesconte knew of the itinerary, but the text of the itinerary itself was added to the ‘Liber secretorum’ only as a result of the additions made to part 14. Likewise, the place names and distances were only added to the version of the map that is today kept in the Bodleian Library, allowing the viewer to conceive of the region in a more concrete manner. While it is not known if such individual, but not insignificant, changes were made by Sanudo,Vesconte or the particular illustrator of the manuscript,⁷⁸ the incorporation of further cartographical material was certainly a decision made by Sanudo himself. All copies of the ‘Liber secretorum’ that were produced after 1321 and contained maps provide further cartographic representations: a map of the Holy Land and two blueprints showing the cities of Jerusalem and Acre. They provide visual evidence of the places Sanudo frequently referred to and enabled the reader of the text to locate and envision the (now further expanded) abundant historical and geographical data provided in book three. All three drawings were already part of the atlas produced by Vesconte in 1320.Why they were not included in the copy that Sanudo presented to the Pope is unclear. The highlighting of religious knowledge is one important aspect of these illustrations. The city plan for Jerusalem includes, for instance, all major holy places of the city and its close vicinities, most notably the Mount of Olives, embellished with many trees.⁷⁹ Some places, in particular those along the Via Crucis and the area around the Temple Mount, are emphasised by images of churches, towers and a magnificent

 Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 261– 262 (III.14.12). For the itinerary, which is partly entitled La devise des chemins de Babiloine, see Jacques Paviot, Introduction, in: Id. (ed.), Projets de Croisade (v. 1290- v. 1330) (Documents relatifs à l’histoire des Croisades 20), Paris 2008, pp. 9 – 51, here pp. 47– 48; Richard Hartmann, Die Straße von Damaskus nach Kairo, in: Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 64 (1910), pp. 665 – 702, here pp. 688 – 690; Robert Irwin, How Many Miles to Babylon? The Devise des Chemins de Babiloine Redated, in: Malcom Barber (ed.), The Military Orders: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, Aldershot 1994, pp. 57– 63. Angela Codazzi, Viaggiatori e descrittori italiani dell’Egitto fino alla metà del secolo XVI, in: Roberto Almagià (ed.), L’opera degli Italiani per la conoscenza dell’Egitto e per il suo risorgimento civile ed economico 1, Rome 1926, pp. 105 – 133, here p. 110.  According to Edson (note 26), p. 67, a small depiction of Noah’s Ark was included by one recipient in a copy of the world map preserved today in London, BL, Add. MS 27376, fol. 187v–188r (c. 1330).  For a detailed analysis, see Evelyn Edson, Jerusalem under Siege. Marino Sanudo’s Map of the Water Supply, 1320, in: Lucy Donkin/ Hanna Vorholt (eds.), Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West, Oxford 2012, pp. 201– 218.

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palace (templum salominis, resembling the al-Aqṣā Mosque with its colonnade), whereas the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is displayed at ground level, allowing viewers to locate Mount Calvary and Christ’s tomb. The Muslim presence in and control of the city is, in contrast, neglected. Rather, the capital of the crusaders’ kingdom is recalled by showing a city surrounded by unbroken walls and without marking any changes following the loss of the city in 1187 or the devastations of 1219 and 1244. In spite of this, the map offers a view of the city’s shape, size and topography from a familiar and seemingly realistic vantagepoint. Especially in comparison to the socalled ‘situs maps’ of the Holy Land that feature Jerusalem as an ideal round city in the centre,⁸⁰ Sanudo and Vesconte’s scheme places the city within the surrounding landscape and shows its network of streets, gates and main crossroads in a manner that made it easy for viewers to reliably orientate themselves. As Evelyn Edson has outlined, the map closely follows Sanudo’s verbal description. Moreover, it gives special attention to the water resources that could be of relevance in the case of laying siege to the city, thereby providing a „dual image“ of the city, one that was „designed to inspire the Crusaders of the future, while guiding them to their real-life goal“.⁸¹ The map of Acre focusses on topography as well.⁸² As in the case of Jerusalem, it displays conditions in the city before its loss of 1291, e. g. marking the Venetian and Genoese quarters and the headquarters of the Hospitallers and Templars. The most impressive feature of the map are the city’s fortifications, with its two enormous circular walls and huge towers (including the turris maledicta, the position through which the Mamluk forces broke through in 1291, even though the tower is in fact depicted in the wrong place). Consequently, looking at the map almost involuntarily led viewers to weigh military and strategical options, whether remembering the dramatic battle of 1291, which was part of the collective memory of Latin Christianity, or imagining the recapture and restoration of the city in the near future. Whereas the city plans for Jerusalem and Acre have no known precursors, the case of the map of the Holy Land is different (fig. 3).⁸³ Sanudo and Vesconte most likely derived the design, including its overlying grid, from templates somehow related to the pilgrimage report of Burchard of Mount Sion. Though it is not certain if Burchard

 One other exceptional example is a plan of Jerusalem (c. 1140) in the shape of a rhomb, today preserved in a manuscript today in Cambrai, Centre Culturel, MS 437, fol. 1r. For the map type, see Rudolf Simek, Hierusalem civitas famosissima. Die erhaltenen Fassungen des hochmittelalterlichen Situs Jerusalem (mit Abbildungen zur handschriftlichen Überlieferung), in: Codices Manuscripti 16 (1992), pp. 121– 153; Hanna Vorholt, Touching the Tomb of Christ. Notes on a Twelfth-Century Map of Jerusalem Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, in: Imago Mundi 61, 2 (2009), pp. 244– 255.  Edson (note 79), p. 217.  For more on this map, see the detailed analysis of historiographical and archaeological findings by David Jacoby, Crusader Acre in the Thirteenth Century: Urban Layout and Topography, in: Id. (ed.), Studies on the Crusader States and on Venetian Expansion (Collected Studies Series 301), Northampton 1989, pp. 1– 45.  Oxford, BL, MS Tanner 190, fol. 205v–206r.

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Fig. 3: Map of the Holy Land in Marino Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, after 1321 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Tanner 190, fol. 205v-206r).

himself included a map with his account, several preserved maps clearly show that the report at least served as the foundation for cartographical representations of the Holy Land.⁸⁴ Burchard’s popular report, written in the 1280s, is extant in both a long and short redaction.⁸⁵ It is not an itinerary in the sense that one can follow his actual travel route from one place to another. Rather, it is structured according to wind directions and provided the reader with a systematic description of the Holy Land, including detailed topographical and cultural information. The starting point is not Jerusalem, but Acre; hence, it displays the changed political realities in the Near East shortly before the loss of the city and the definitive end of the crusader states.

 For maps of the Holy Land that are somehow related to Burchard and show striking parallels to the one by Sanudo and Vesconte, see Paul D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land, London 2012; Reinhold Röhricht, Marino Sanudo sen. als Kartograph, in: Zeitschrift des Deutschen PalästinaVereins 21 (1898), pp. 84– 126. Following the labelling of Harvey, it consists of the earlier large Burchard map (Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carta nautica 4), the later large Burchard maps (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 877; Bruges, State Archive, Chartes avec numéro bleu 11458; Oxford, BL, MS Douce 389, that is the map of William Wey) and the small Burchard map (Florence, BML, MS Plut. 76.56, fol. 97v–98r). Additionally, there are some maps of the Holy Land connected to the Tabula moderna in Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’. See note 86 below.  For recent research on the manuscripts in Burchard’s texts, see Jonathan Rubin, Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terrae Sanctae. A Newly Discovered Extended Version, in: Crusades 13 (2014), pp. 173 – 190, and the article by Ingrid Baumgärtner and Eva Ferro in this volume.

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An innovation made by either Sanudo or Vesconte might well have been the use of a grid that divided the Holy Land by 28 vertical and 83 horizontal lines to systematically locate places mentioned in Burchard’s adapted text.⁸⁶ The grid included numerous places that are mentioned in relation to their distances from each other (given in, e. g. leagues or bowshots) and occasionally supplemented by further material regarding events from the Old and New Testament (including quotes from the Bible), natural history and economic references, such as the fertility of lands. Religious knowledge is therefore directly addressed and allowed for a spiritual reading of the map. Interestingly, this perspective is not particularly supported by graphic symbols on the map. Most places are marked by small red dots that, in some cases, even lack an inscription for the name of a place. A holy place that is not part of a village and stands on its own was rarely included, and if, for instance, a chapel along the River Jordan was meant to depict the place where Jesus was supposedly baptised by Saint John, the red spot can easily be overlooked.⁸⁷ The only exceptions are the inscriptions and boundary lines in red ink pointing to the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the tombs of Job, Rachel and the Maccabees.⁸⁸ Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Damascus are accentuated as important holy places (fig. 4). Probably as a result of dividing the Holy Land by grid lines into small squares, however, they are not highlighted in a very significant way.⁸⁹ Two other graphic symbols relating to religious knowledge would have caught the eye of contemporary viewers (fig. 4). Both, quite surprisingly, refer to the book of Judges. Firstly, the map shows the palm tree of Deborah (Judges 4,1) near Bethel and Rama, and secondly, a tent near the city of Asor (Hazor) in Galilee, identified as Tabernaculum Eburnei, the tent of Heber the Kenite (Judges 4,11).⁹⁰ These two highlighted elements have no parallel in other mappae mundi or situs maps. They seem to be new features introduced by cartographical representations that are based on Burchard’s text, where both places are briefly mentioned. At least the tent is marked on other maps related to his work, from which we can conclude that it was not an original addition by Sanudo and Vesconte.⁹¹

 At least it is the first extant case where Burchard’s text and the grid map are directly related to each other. Other ‘Burchard maps’, such as Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carta nautica 4, include a grid or traces of such lines, but they are preserved as single maps without accompanying text. See Harvey (note 84), pp. 102, 116.  This might be the reason why a later hand added a sketch of a chapel at this position in the Oxford version.  In addition, the tomb of Joshua is marked, though without the symbol of a tomb, but with a red dot.  The large maps related to Burchard’s text instead mark Jerusalem as a round circle with a red cross.  For the transcription, see Harvey (note 84), p. 124.  Burchard of Mount Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. John R. Bartlett (Oxford Medieval Texts), Oxford 2019. Deborah’ palm tree is mentioned both in the long and short redaction (pp. 104– 105 and 256 – 257); Heber’s tent is only referred to in the long version (pp. 40 – 41). A tent is depicted in the earlier large Burchard map and the later large Burchard map in New York and the one by William Wey (the fragmentary map in Bruges has not been consulted). It is also part of a similar fifteenth century

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Fig. 4: Signs indicating biblical sites and castles on Oxford, Ms Tanner 190, fol. 205v-206r. From top left to bottom right: Deborah’s palm tree, the tent of Heber, Castrum Peregrinorum, Alba specula, Jerusalem, Hebron.

Nevertheless, they kept these prominent graphic symbols in place, meaning that viewers could still mobilise the related religious knowledge for political purposes. The graphic symbols refer to the story of how the prophetess Deborah and the military leader Barak liberated the people of Israel after 20 years of oppression by defeating

map of the Holy Land with an inset showing the city plan of Jerusalem copied from one version of Sanudo or Paulinus Minorita. In contrast to the maps in the ‘Liber secretorum’, it includes graphic symbols referring to further biblical episodes such as the Oak of Mamre next to Hebron, Jacob’s tent on Mount Gilead and his ladder near bethel. See Pnina Arad, An Unpublished Map of the Holy Land: Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, MS Lat. X 116 (=3783), in: Imago Mundi 65/1 (2013), pp. 80 – 86. some of these symbols as well as a figure of Lot’s wife at the Dead Sea can be found also in the Burchard map in New York, but are later additions according to Harvey (note 84), p. 132. The palm tree, however, is missing in all these cases, suggesting that Sanudo and Vesconte probably used another version of this tradition as a template. Only the palm tree, and not the tent, is displayed on the map of the Holy Land that is part of a manuscript encompassing Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ produced by Nicolas Germanus (Florence, BML, Plut. 30.4, fol. 116v–117r). For a more detailed discussion of this map, see the contribution by Emmanuelle Vagnon in the present volume. The only map apart from the ones by Sanudo and Vesconte that includes both a tent and palm tree is part of a fifteenth-century codex that was made by Henricus Martellus and reproduces the maps of Christoforo Buondelmonti and of Ptolemy (Florence, BML, Plut. 29.25, fol. 58v–59r). Both elements with inscriptions are displayed in the map of the Holy Land in the Vesconte atlas (Vatican City, BAV, Pal. lat. 1362a, fol. 7v-8r). In the versions that accompany Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, for instance the one in Oxford, BL, MS Tanner 190, fol. 205v– 206r, the inscriptions identifying Deborah’s palm tree are occasionally missing.

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King Jabin of Canaan and his general, Sisera, the latter being killed by Heber’s wife Jael in the tent. The episode, therefore, evokes the memory that the Holy Land had been subjugated by gentiles and had been, with God’s help, liberated once before. It implies, consequently, that it can be freed from the current enemies again. Even if the biblical passage was discussed in medieval times particularly with respect to the question of political and religious authority granted to women,⁹² the literal-historical meaning was known as well. The illustration of Deborah’s and Barak’s fight against the Canaanites in a psalter produced for King Louis IX of France a few years before he embarked on his crusade to Tunis shows, furthermore, that it was familiar to persons greatly involved in crusading.⁹³ Together with the tomb of the Maccabees, which equally evokes a heroic fight and martyrdom in order to free the Promised Land from its usurpers and which was used by medieval authors to elevate the deeds of the medieval crusaders,⁹⁴ these symbols link the biblical past with the crusading present and future and might have influenced viewers’ opinions. In all these cases, nonetheless, no explicit connection was made to Sanudo’s recovery plan. In his ‘Liber secretorum’, he only briefly referred to Deborah’s palm tree and omitted the passage regarding Heber’s tent altogether. As with the case of including Prester John on the world map, the visual and the textual medium were not synchronised with one another, the potential not fully realised. A similar conclusion can be reached when looking at the depiction of castles. In his text, Burchard frequently mentioned strongholds or fortified places built in the times of the crusader states. Consequently, the maps related to Burchard’s report plot many of the same locations. In the case of Sanudo’s, not all of the castles mentioned by Burchard are included in the text. Of those that Sanudo did include, not all can be found in the map of the Holy Land that accompanies the ‘Liber secretorum’.⁹⁵ Others, such as the „exceedingly strong“ Castrum Peregrinorum, which once belonged to the Templars, are shown on the map in line with what Burchard and likewise Sanudo  See Joy A. Schroeder, Deborah’s Daughters. Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation, New York 2014; Sigrid Eder, Gewalt im Geschlechterverhältnis. Jaël, Sisera und die Konstruktionen von Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit im aktuellen Gewaltdiskurs, in: Irmtraud Fischer (ed.), Macht – Gewalt – Krieg. Gesellschaftliche Problematik und das Problem ihrer Repräsentation, Freiburg 2013, pp. 83 – 106; David M. Gunn, Judges, Malden/MA 2005, pp. 53 – 58.  Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], Ms lat. 10525, fol. 47r–48v. See Schroeder (note 92), pp. 63 – 67.  See Elizabeth Lapina, The Maccabees and the Battle of Antioch, in: Gabriela Signori (ed.), Dying for the Faith, Killing for the Faith: Old-Testament Faith-Warriors (1 and 2 Maccabees) in Historical Perspective, Leiden 2011, pp. 147– 159. The tomb of Baldwin I of Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre referred to him as alter Maccabeus.  For instance, the castle of Safed, characterised by Burchard as the fairest and strongest of all, is mentioned in the historiographical segments of the ‘Liber secretorum’ and is also one of the fortifications that Sanudo suggested should be rebuilt in order to protect the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, see Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), p. 280 (III.15.25). But it is not specifically described as a strategic place in the geographical segment and omitted from most maps of the Holy Land in the ‘Liber secretorum’ – the exception is Oxford, BL, MS Tanner 190.

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mention in their texts (fig. 4).⁹⁶ With respect to Castrum regium, previously a house of the Teutonic Order, and Alba specula, built by King Fulk of Jerusalem, some castles located on the map were not mentioned at all by Burchard but only by Sanudo, showing that the latter used further sources in addition to Burchard’s report.⁹⁷ In relation to the map as a whole and the many given place names, however, these castles are not prominently marked, thus they do not invite a perspective on the map wherein the commander of a crusader army would have obtained concrete information allowing him to plan routes and military tactics. Following Burchard’s example, they are rather to be seen more in the geographical dimension, as prominent landmarks, than in the context of discussing strategical specifics. Overall, the map of the Holy Land as well as the city plans for Jerusalem and Acre recall first the biblical past and secondly the crusading past. They helped viewers orientate themselves within Sanudo’s comprehensive history of the Holy Land. Finally, they enabled the reader to imagine that these areas, so crucial for the self-understanding of Christianity, could be brought back into the fold and revived under Christian control, if Sanudo’s plan would be implemented successfully.

V Conclusion The maps within Marino Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’ were not only a distinguishing feature in comparison with other crusade proposals. They also allowed readers to internalise the geopolitical views outlined in his elaborate recovery plan, even when they were at times not in line with the text. The newly introduced elements – in the case of the world map, the moderate use of graphic and textual Arabic-Islamic elements – and new mapmaking techniques taken from the Portolan charts provided a new perspective on the world as well as on the Levant, Egypt and the Holy Land, including its central cities of Jerusalem and Acre. The focus on geographical knowledge results from these changes. The design might have resulted from a deliberate decision to differentiate the maps within the ‘Liber secretorum’ from contemporary mappae mundi. In this way, they gained the attention of the anticipated audiences and drew the interest of viewers to specific places and regions. In other words, Sanudo and Vesconte were aware of and used the power of the visual medium in order to make

 Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 245 – 246 and 249 (III.14.2– 3); Burchard of Mount Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae (note 91), pp. 170 – 171. For more on the Château Pèlerin, see Ronnie Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories, Cambridge 2007, p. 286.  Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 2), pp. 245 – 246 and 249 (III.14.2– 3). For more on Castellum Regis/ Château du Roi at Mi’ilya, that is however not part of the Oxford version, but placed in the maps of the Holy Land that are part of the Vesconte atlas and further copies of Sanudo’s ‘Liber secretorum’, see Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge 1998, p. 41. For Alba specula, see Adrian J. Boas/ Aren M. Maeir, The Crusader Castle Blanche Garde and Later Remains at Tell es-Safi in Light of Recent Discoveries, in: Crusades 9 (2009), pp. 1– 22.

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those who saw the maps come to the same conclusions as the author, at least so far as Sanudo’s plan was concerned.⁹⁸ Even when the design and content of the maps introduced by Marino Sanudo and Pietro Vesconte differed profoundly from other contemporary maps, geographical knowledge did not replace religious knowledge. „Sacred geography“⁹⁹ might not have been displayed in the same way as in the world maps of Hereford and Ebstorf. Nonetheless, geographical knowledge and religious knowledge are still intertwined and complement each other. Inserting a map of the Holy Land and the city plan of Jerusalem into later copies of the ‘Liber secretorum’ can be seen as Sanudo’s effort to compensate for the lack of visual references to religious knowledge in the world map and the map of the Eastern Mediterranean. However, even without concrete symbols pointing to sacred places described in the Old and New Testament, every contemporary viewer more or less familiar with the Passion of Christ and biblical history would have been able to contemplate God’s wondrous creation and use it as a mnemonic device to deepen his/her religious understanding. That references to ‘religious’ objects did not have to be overly explicit is evident through the example of Paulinus Minorita, himself a member of the commission appointed by Pope John XXII to evaluate Sanudo’s plan and the author of comprehensive universal chronicles (entitled ‘Chronologia magna’ and ‘Satyrica historia’).¹⁰⁰ He and Sanudo stayed in contact by exchanging letters, and their works show in some parts a reciprocal influence, though they might also have used the same sources independently of each other. Paulinus included some of the maps that are also part of the ‘Liber secretorum’ in two of his manuscripts produced around 1329 and between 1334 and 1339, today preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in the Vatican Apostolic Library.¹⁰¹ The world maps contained in these manuscripts differ slightly from each other and from the versions in the ‘Liber secretorum’ (fig. 5).¹⁰² The overwhelming majority of graphic symbols and inscriptions, including their position  For more on the power of the map, see Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map. Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History, Chicago 2006. Particularly regarding Sanudo and al-Idrīsī also Stefan Schröder, Wissensaustausch beim Kartieren von Herrschaft? Zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Macht bei al-Idrīsī und Marino Sanudo, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Martina Stercken (eds.), Herrschaft ver-orten. Politische Kartographie des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 19), Zürich 2012, pp. 313 – 333.  For more on the term, see Zur Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds. Geography, Religion and Scholarship 1550 – 1700 (History of Science and Medicine Library 21), Leiden 2012, p. 3, and Christoph Mauntel in the introduction to this volume.  For more on his life and work, see Heullant-Donat (note 25). For more on the complex issue of the relation between Sanudo, Vesconte and Paulinus, see also the recent work by Di Cesare (note 13).  Paris, BnF, Ms lat. 4939; Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 1960. His manuscripts also contain some cartographical representations that are not part of Sanudo and Vesconte’s corpus, such as a map of the Italian Peninsula. For more on these manuscripts and their relation to the ‘Liber secretorum’, see Degenhart/ Schmitt (note 5); Di Cesare (note 13).  Paris, BnF, Ms lat. 4939, fol. 9r. Paulinus’ handwriting can be identified in both world maps, but he drafted them with the help of different illustrators.

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Fig. 5: World map in Paulinus Minorita’s ‘Chronologia magna’, c. 1329 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 4939, fol. 9r).

on the map, are the same though. Jerusalem and other places in the Holy Land are missing from both of Paulinus’ world maps as well, while the elements derived from the Arabic-Islamic template remain. The most notable difference with respect to the world maps of the ‘Liber secretorum’ and the Vesconte atlas might be Paulinus’ dis-

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similar understanding of the nature of the Caspian Sea.¹⁰³ However, when comparing all the maps shared by Paulinus and Sanudo and Vesconte, there are in total only a few differences, which can be described mainly as minor adjustments or accidental changes to the items that I discussed earlier when analysing the maps in Sanudo’s work.¹⁰⁴ The differences in the details show that Paulinus did not see a need to conduct major alterations in order to adjust the image to fit the manuscript’s context, which is much different from Sanudo’s crusade proposal. Paulinus’ world map in the Paris manuscript, moreover, is related to his geographical description of the world, which begins below the map and continues onto the next folio pages encompassing the map of the regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and the map of the Holy Land. The text partly overlaps with the legend surrounding the world map in the Vesconte atlas and the world maps in the ‘Liber secretorum’ as well as with Paulinus’ treatise ‘De mapa mundi’. Many of the places mentioned, for instance an earthly paradise located in the Far East, are not inscribed on the maps.¹⁰⁵ Additionally, the folio page before the world map and the geographical text contains an illustration of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood. As a result, they are chronologically placed at the moment of the Noahic covenant. The world map in particular, but also the two maps that highlight the regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Land, therefore symbolically display the resettlement of the world by Noah’s descendants instead of the situation of the world in the fourteenth century. This example shows that several readings were possible at the same time and that fewer graphic images and inscriptions with direct references to religious knowledge did not prevent it from being understood and used for religious purposes.

 See Schröder (note 13); Schmieder (note 31). One further difference are the missing references to the region of origin and current dwelling places of the Mongols.  Mecca, for instance, is not included on the world map in the Paris manuscript, but is inserted in the equivalent representation of the Vatican manuscript correspondent to in the versions by Sanudo and Vesconte. A new feature on the map of the Eastern Mediterranean and its adjoining regions in the Paris manuscript is a huge symbol and legend referring to the city of Nineveh and its meaning in the Old Testament in the north-eastern part of the map. For more on the city, see Brincken (note 47), p. 34.  For this text, see Di Cesare (note 9), pp. 101– 118.

Part IV: Depicting, Transforming and Experiencing the Holy Land in Maps

Emmanuelle Vagnon

When Religious Geography meets the Geography of Humanists The Tabula moderna Terrae Sanctae in the Copies of the ‘Geography’ of Ptolemy in the Fifteenth Century Abstract: In 1321, Marino Sanudo Torsello presented the crusade project entitled ‘Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis’, the ‘Book of Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross’ to Pope John XXII. Among the maps that accompany the project, the representation of the Holy Land is one of the best-known medieval maps, both for its content and for its original construction. Firstly, with regards to content, this map locates the main places visited by Christian pilgrims, according to the Old and New Testaments, following the description of the Holy Land by Burchard of Mount Sion (thirteenth century). Regarding its shape, the places described in the text are arranged on the map according to a grid which allows the reader, via a system of coordinates, to find the location of each placename in a precise cell of the grid. This document served as a model for a large number of representations of the Holy Land, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, in the context of pilgrimage narratives in which the religious dimension of the places appeared fully. The map was also inserted alongside the maps of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, first in the manuscript copies composed by Nicolas Germanus in the second half of the fifteenth century, and in the printed editions of the book, from the Ulm edition of 1482 and 1486, later with commentaries of Johannes Reger and Johannes Peregrinus. In Florence, the Italian author Francesco Berlinghieri included this map in his ‘Septe giornate della Geographia’, an adaptation of Ptolemy’s work in Italian verse (1482), and Henricus Martellus inserted it in his ‘Insularium Illustratum’ (c. 1490). The aim of this paper is to ask to what extent the religious character of the map of the Holy Land of Marino Sanudo, related to the context of pilgrimages and crusades during the fourteenth century, was preserved or not when inserted into Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ or other humanist geographic works. We will study how the context of reception of this map in the humanist culture of the Renaissance, in Germany and in Italy, could change its meaning and interpretation. Keywords: Maps, Holy Land, Terra Sancta, Humanism, Ptolemy, Marino Sanudo, Henricus Matellus, Francesco Berlinghieri, Jean Viator

Dr Emmanuelle Vagnon, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CNRS-UMR 8589-LAMOP, 1 rue Victor Cousin, 75005 Paris, France, [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-010

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Introduction In 1321, the Venetian merchant and statesman Marino Sanudo Torsello presented to Pope John XXII his completed manuscript of an ambitious plan for a new crusade, the ‘Book of Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross’, to reconquer the Holy Land, which at the time had been lost and fallen into the hands of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt since the siege of Acre in 1291.¹ A whole set of maps and charts came with the project, in particular a world map, nautical charts, a regional map of the Levant, city maps of Antioch, Acre and Jerusalem, and a map of the Holy Land.² This map, often reproduced, is well-known for its use of grid references which link the places described in the accompanying text to a specific position on the chart. First edited in the seventeenth century by Bongars, this map and some of its copies were studied by Röhricht, followed by subsequent works.³ It was then demonstrated that the maps accompanying Marino Sanudo’s book were very similar to those of a set of maps signed by Pietro Vesconte in 1320, a Genoese cartographer, active in Venice, author of a number of extant signed nautical charts and atlases.⁴ In addition, the maps were also copied on behalf of a Franciscan, Paolino Veneto (Paulin of Venice), who was part of the commission having examined the project of crusade of Marino Sanudo at the pontifical court in Avignon.⁵ The grid map of the Holy Land is extant in a number of sur-

 Marino Sanudo, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis super Terrae sanctae recuperatione et conservation, ed. Jacques Bongars, Hanover 1611, repr. ed. Joshua Prawer, Jerusalem, Toronto 1972; Marino Sanudo, The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross, ed. Peter Lock (Crusade Texts in Translation 219), Farnham, Burlington 2011.  See fig. 3 in the article of Stefan Schröder in this volume.  Reinhold Röhricht, Bibliotheca geographica Palestinae. Chronologisches Verzeichnis der auf die Geographie des heiligen Landes bezüglichen Literatur von 333 bis 1878, Berlin 1890 (reed. Jerusalem 1963,Vancouver 2000); Id, Marino Sanudo sen. als Kartograph Palästinas, in: Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 21 (1898), pp. 84– 126; Id, Karten und Pläne zur Palästinakunde aus 7. bis 16 Jahrhundert, in: Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 24 (1901), pp. 129 – 135; Cornelio Desimoni, Una carta della Terra Santa del secolo xiv nell’Archivio di Stato di Firenze. Marino Sanuto e Pietro Visconte, in: Achivio Storico Italiano 11, 190, (1893), pp. 241– 258.  Konrad Kretschmer, Marino Sanudo der Ältere und die Karten des Petrus Vesconte, in: Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 26 (1891), pp. 358 – 366; Roberto Almagià, Planisferi, carte nautiche e affini dal secolo xiv al secolo xvii esistenti nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,Vatican City 1944, pp. 3 – 12; Tony Campbell, Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500, in: John B. Harley/ David Woodward (eds.), Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (The History of Cartography 1), Chicago 1987, pp. 371– 463; Patrick Gautier Dalché, Cartes marines, représentation du littoral et perception de l’espace au Moyen Age. Un état de la question, in: Castrum 7 (2001), pp. 9 – 32; Ramon Pujades i Bataller, Les Cartes Portolanes. La representació medieval d’una mar solcada, Barcelona 2007. See also the article of Stefan Schröder in this volume.  Bernhardt Degenhart/ Annegritte Schmitt, Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto. Zwei Literaten des 14. Jahrhunderts in ihrer Wirkung auf Buchillustrierung und Kartographie in Venedig, Avignon und Neapel, in: Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Tübingen 1973, pp. 1– 173; Isabelle Heullant-

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viving copies of the ‘Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis’, as well as in the manuscripts of the ‘Chronologia Magna’ of Paolino Veneto. Moreover, Paul D. Harvey’s meticulous research analyzed a series of eight regional maps of the Holy Land and their various versions. Somehow different in terms of dates, styles and sizes, they appeared either in the form of isolated documents or as part of books, constituting a tradition of representation of the Holy Land and its places of pilgrimage.⁶ The maps used by Marino Sanudo and Paolino Veneto were part of this tradition, albeit adapted to fit in their respective books. These maps of the Holy Land belonged to a broader intellectual background of Western interest in the East and other sorts of mapping techniques and forms. Most of the maps and medieval descriptions dealing with the Holy Land were not limited strictly to the biblical area, but encompassed a larger region, visited by Western pilgrims, merchants and crusaders at the end of the Middle Ages. Those maps and texts may include Palestine, Egypt, Constantinople and, more widely, maritime and terrestrial routes to the Eastern Mediterranean, and could be used in different textual and cartographic contexts, long after the time of Marino Sanudo’s crusade project. For clarity, I will refer to this type of map as ‘Sanudo’s map’, knowing that he was not its creator but its first and most famous user. ⁷ The addition of this map of the Holy Land to the manuscript and printed editions of the ‘Geography’ of Claudius Ptolemy in the fifteenth century was early noticed by historians.⁸ Nevertheless, the adaptation of this specific map of the Holy Land and especially the comments associated with it have not been studied at length. The aim of

Donat, Ab origine mundi. Fra Elemosina et Paolino da Venezia. Deux franciscains italiens et l’histoire universelle au XIVe siècle. (unpublished PhD thesis), Université de Paris X-Nanterre, Janvier 1994; Nathalie Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle (Terrarum orbis 2), Turnhout 2002, pp. 45 – 68.  Paul D. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps. Symbols, Pictures and Surveys, London 1980, pp. 144– 146; Id, Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe, in: Harley/ Woodward (note 4), pp. 464– 502, here pp. 473 – 476 and pp. 496 – 497; Id, Medieval Maps, London 1991; Id, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land, London 2012. See also Patrick Gautier Dalché, Cartes de Terre sainte, cartes de pèlerins, in: Massimo Oldoni (ed.), Tra Roma e Gerusalemme nel Medioevo. Paesaggi umani ed ambientali del pellegrinaggio meridionale, Salerno 2005, pp. 573 – 612.  Emmanuelle Vagnon, PhD thesis, Université Paris 1, 2007, published as Emmanuelle Vagnon, Cartographie et représentations de l’Orient méditerranéen en Occident (de la fin du XIIIe siècle à la fin du XVe siècle) (Terrarum orbis 11), Turnhout 2013. A census of maps of the Holy Land between twelfth and fifteenth centuries is edited pp. 385 – 390. The grid map of Palestine is to be found in six manuscripts of Marino Sanudo, two of Paulin de Venise, one of Pietro Vesconte, and a number of isolated maps or sketches.  The oldest Greek manuscripts of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ are dated from the thirteenth century. The manuscripts translated in Latin and completed in the fifteenth century usually include the world map and 26 regional maps, with sometimes addition of „new“ maps. Another less common version has 64 regional maps. Joseph Fischer, Claudii Ptolemaei Geographiae codex urbinas graecus 82. vol. 1: Commentatio; vol. 2: Tabulae geographicae, Leiden 1932; Sebastiano Gentile, Firenze e la scoperta dell’America. Umanesimo e geografia nel’400 Fiorentino, Florence 1992; Patrick Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident (IVe-XVIe siècle) (Terrarum orbis 9), Turnhout 2009.

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this article is to analyze how the humanists of the fifteenth century perceived this insertion into the work of the Greek mathematician and geographer, and the association of this ‘medieval’ or so-called ‘modern’ map of the Holy Land with the ancient Ptolemaic regional maps.⁹ Indeed, some readers of the late fifteenth century accompanied this map with various types of texts (either copies of famous descriptions of the region or more personal comments), which cast a light on its interpretation. These texts help to understand how the religious content of the pilgrimage and crusade map was or was not included in the manuscripts and printed copies of the ‘Geography’ in the fifteenth century, and whether its reception in this new context could modify the use, meaning and interpretation of the sacred geography. After a discussion about the meanings of ‘religious knowledge’ and ‘modern maps’ associated with the map of the Holy Land, I will present some humanist interpretations of the map of the Tabula moderna Terrae Sanctae, following Nicolaus Germanus, Francesco Berlinghieri and Henricus Martellus.

I Religious knowledge or ‘cultural landscape’ in the map of Palestine, compared to the Quarta Asiae Tabula in Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’. The map of Palestine from Marino Sanudo is one of the best-known medieval maps, both for its content and for its original construction. Oriented toward the East (which is rather usual in Christian cartography), the topography of Palestine is displayed „from Dan to Bersabee“, in a rectangular frame starting from the Lebanon Mountains (mount Hermon) in the North, to Gaza and the Dead Sea in the South, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the lower part of the map, to the mountains East of the Jordan river.¹⁰ According to Paul D. Harvey, drawing on Röhricht’s intuition, the main source of the map used by Marino Sanudo and Paolino Veneto may have been the description of the Holy Land from the Dominican pilgrim Burchard of Mount Sion, written between 1274

 Vagnon (note 7), pp. 332– 363, and census of manuscripts p. 385, with maps of the Holy Land of Sanudo’s type, associated with Ptolemy’s maps. Nicolaus Germanus (4 mss + printed editions of 1482 and 1486); Francesco Berlingheri (2 mss + printed edition of 1482 + 1 anonymous ms related to him); Henricus Martellus (5 mss).  Limits „from Dan to Bersabee“ (from the sources of the river Jordan to Beer-Sheva) come from the Bible (Judges 20,1) and is repeated in many descriptions of the Holy Land quoting St Jerome’s ‘Liber locorum’. Sometimes Damascus is indicated in the Northern part of the map of Palestine. S. Hieronymus, Liber de situ et nominibus locorum Hebraicorum, in: Patrologia Latina, ed. Jean-Paul Migne, Paris 1845, vol. 23, col. 859 – 928; Id., Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum, ed. Paul de Lagarde, in: S. Hieronymi presbyteri opera, pars I, 1 (Corpus Christianorum, Series latina 72), Turnhout 1959, pp. 57– 161 (reed. from Paul de Lagarde, Onomastica Sacra, Göttingen 1870).

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and 1285, and regularly copied until the sixteenth century.¹¹ However, while most of the place-names and commentaries on the map effectively originated in Burchard of Mount Sion’s description, the construction of the grid map used by Marino Sanudo and Paolino Veneto is very different from that proposed in Burchard’s text. Indeed, Burchard built his description of holy sites according to sectors defined by the directions of a wind rose with twelve branches, and centered on Acre.¹² The map of Marino Sanudo, and the commentary that comes with it,¹³ follow the logic of a grid from North to South and from West to East, determining 83 × 28 squares in which place names are situated. The coordinates given in the text are not about latitude and longitude, but length and width, each square corresponding to a distance scale of one league or two miles. The map comes with a precise textual description, organized by the position of the place names in the grid, divided in five main sections designated by a letter, from A to E.¹⁴ It appears that the main function of the grid system was to serve as an aid for copying the map at different scales, with the help of the text. In addition to the explanation given by Marino Sanudo himself, other medieval texts described in detail the map and the use of the grid, but without illustrations.¹⁵ One of these texts suggests that a model of this grid map was actually hosted in Jerusalem in the convent of Mount Sion, at least in the fifteenth century, perhaps in the form of a map painted or engraved

 Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio terrae sanctae, ed. Johann C.M. Laurent, in: Johann C. M. Laurent, Peregrinatores medii aevi quatuor, Leipzig 1873, pp. 19 – 94; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Sabino de Sandoli, Itinera Hierosolymitana Crucesignatorum saec. XIIXIII: Textus Latini cum versione Italica, Jerusalem 1978 – 1984, vol. 4, pp. 119 – 219; Denys Pringle (ed.), Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 1187– 1291 (Crusade Texts in Translation 23), Farnham 2012, pp. 241– 320; Harvey, Medieval Maps (note 6), pp. 94– 104. On Burchard, see also the article of Ingrid Baumgärtner and Eva Ferro in this volume.  Emmanuelle Vagnon, Mesurer la Terre sainte. Mesures de l’espace et cartographie de l’Orient latin, du IXe au XVe siècle, in: Mesure et histoire médiévale, XLIIIe Congrès de la SHMESP, Paris 2013, pp. 293 – 309; Ingrid Baumgärtner, Reiseberichte, Karten und Diagramme. Burchard von Monte Sion und das Heilige Land: in Steffen Patzold/ Anja Rathmann-Lutz/ Volker Scior (eds.), Geschichtsvorstellungen. Bilder, Texte und Begriffe aus dem Mittelalter,Wien, Köln,Weimar 2012, pp. 460 – 507; Ead.,Winds and Continents: Concepts for Structuring the World and Its Parts, in: Ead./ Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby/ Katrin Kogman-Apel (eds.), Maps and Travel. Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 9), Berlin, Boston 2018, pp. 91– 135, esp. pp. 91– 92.  Marino Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 1), pp. 246– 255 (III.14.3): Continet situationem locorum notabilium Sanctae Terrae Promissionis.  Harvey, Medieval Maps (note 6), pp. 94– 140, comments separately the „grid map“ from what he calls the „earliest large Burchard map“ c. 1300, and the „Later large Burchard maps“ of the fifteenth century. But in fact, they are all constructed on the same grid pattern and belong to exactly the same tradition than the grid map of Vesconte, Sanudo or Paolino Veneto.  Fra Giovanni di Fedanzola da Perugia (c. 1330), Descriptio Terrae Sanctae (Ms. Casanatense 3876), ed. Ugo Nicolini/ Renzo Nelli/ Sabino de Sandoli, Jerusalem 2003. See also Mauritius Parisiensis (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 18736, fol. 201r–204v), edited by Harvey, Medieval Maps (note 6), pp. 126 – 127.

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on a wooden board (the original meaning of tabula).¹⁶ Although the grid system of the original map was not always kept apparent (usually the grid lines were removed or the grid reference numbers were missing), this same model of maps of the Holy Land, oriented to the East, with the sea below as if the land was seen from a pilgrim vessel sailing towards Jaffa, was integrated in several pilgrim accounts during the fifteenth century.¹⁷ Moreover, this grid system emphasized the major importance of the measure of distances between the visited places, according to the distances often given in pilgrimage guides of the Middle Ages, in various ways: travel days, stadiae, miles or leucae. These indications of distances were aimed to identify precisely the ‘correct’ location of each holy place – or what the tradition told to be the correct location. A map of the Holy Land in a monastery, for example the one seen by Santo Brasca during his travel in 1480, would allow the pilgrim to see in one glance the general setting of the biblical geography; it could help to prepare the actual pilgrimage.¹⁸ Moreover, this kind of maps played the role, in some cases, of a memorial object or even an object of devotion when the pilgrim came back home. As Pnina Arad has demonstrated particularly for William Wey’s map of the Holy Land in the fifteenth century (built on Marino Sanudo’s model), maps of the Holy Land used in the contexts of pilgrimage and devotion had a real sense of iconic image that could not only be a souvenir of the travel, but also a substitute for it.¹⁹ Indeed, at first sight, the content of the Marino Sanudo map and its numerous copies clearly belongs to what we may call ‘religious knowledge’. Following the tradition of the description of the Holy Land dating back to Eusebius and Hieronymus, the author of the map constructed an image of a sacred geography, where every placename echoed a pious anecdote of the biblical history. Each was associated with a caption on the map, or a description in the text, related to a passage of the Old or the New Testament; mostly of the Gospels. Now, we must remember that neither in Burchard’s description, nor in Sanudo’s crusade project the information is restricted to religious concerns. Both authors claimed to describe the actual landscape of Palestine, as seen through the eyes of travelers, and provided a broader ‘memorial geography’, that included not only religious belief and narratives, but also other elements related to the history of this specific region of the world up to the thirteenth and the

 secundum hanc tabulam quam ego N. peregrinus in Jerusalem repinxi in sancto monte Syon. Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3851, fol. 4– 5v; Vagnon (note 7), pp. 180 – 182 and edition of the text pp. 393 – 394.  Kenneth Nebenzahl, Maps of the Holy Land. Images of Terra Sancta Through Two Millenia, New York 1986; Emmanuelle Vagnon, L’apport du voyage en Terre sainte au savoir géographique. Le cas de Bernhard von Breydenbach, in: Damien Coulon/ Christine Gadrat-Ouerfelli (eds), Le voyage au Moyen Âge. Description du monde et quête individuelle, Aix-en-Provence 2017, pp. 105 – 127.  The pilgrim Santo Brasca saw a map of the Holy Land presented by a Franciscan friar while visiting a village near Ragusa. Viaggio in Terra Santa di Sancto Brasca 1480, Itinerario di Gabriele Capodilista 1458, ed. Anna-Laura Momigliano Lepschy, Milan 1966, pp. 57– 58.  Pnina Arad, Pilgrimage, Cartography and Devotion: William Wey’s map of the Holy Land, in:Viator 43/1, (2012), pp. 1– 22.

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beginning of the fourteenth centuries; notably, they mention and describe the crusader fortresses on the shore, and some houses of the Templar and Teutonic military orders. Burchard often described the present state of religious monuments and churches, sometimes in ruins. Some of the crusader castles are also labelled on Sanudo’s maps of the Holy Land, in connection with the military project that was presented to the Pope in 1321. Indeed, one of the main arguments for a new crusade was the alleged historical continuity between the biblical Holy Land, source of the Christian faith, and the recent history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the other Crusader States. Thus, by the juxtaposition of place names from the fourteenth century and biblical names, the map was intended to connect the topography of the medieval Palestine with the legendary geography of the Holy Land as described in the Bible. Sanudo’s map therefore displayed a broader ‘cultural landscape’ in which placenames were related to several layers of textual memory.²⁰ In this regard, the map of the Holy Land would not be so different in nature from other cartographic productions of the Middle Ages (mappaemundi or even Catalan portolan charts), already completed with captions and literary quotes. The difference would lie in the emotional intensity of these references on the map of the Holy Land, concentrated in a regional space where potentially each square mile would refer to the Bible, and mostly to the life, death and resurrection of the Christ, and where each place-name strongly echoed in every day of Christian liturgy.²¹ ‘Sanudo’s map’ of the Holy Land had a lasting heritage, notably by its insertion in some fifteenth century copies of the Latin translation of the ‘Geography’ by Ptolemy, under the title Tabula moderna Terrae Sanctae. Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, translated from Greek to Latin in 1410 by Jacopo d’Angelo de Scarperia in Florence, was early copied into many manuscripts, often luxurious and adorned with beautiful maps designed (according to the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci) by Francesco di Lapacino and Domenico Buoninsegni.²² The first augmented versions with ‘new’ maps (tabulae novellae in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 4802) were made by the cartographer Piero del Massaio and the copyist Hugo

 The cultural meaning of space, specially for the Holy Land, and the concept of ‘collective memory’ was first analyzed in the works of Maurice Halbwachs (1877– 1945), now finding a recent revival in the sociological field: Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre sainte. Etude de mémoire collective, Paris 1941, reed. and comment. by Marie Jaisson et al., Paris 2008. For an English bibliography about the notion of ‘cultural landscape’, following Denis Cosgrove, see Pnina Arad, Cultural Landscape in Christian and Jewish Maps of the Holy Land, in: Baumgärtner/ Debby / Kogman-Appel (note 12), pp. 74– 88.  Burchardus de Monte Sion ed. de Sandoli (note 11), p. 124: Que enim hora diei vel noctis per totum anni circulum, in qua recolat cantando, legendo, psallendo, predicando et meditando omnis devotus Christianus que facta sunt vel scripta in hac terra et civitatibus et locis eius? („How many hours of the day or night of the entire year, every devout Christian, by singing, reading, chanting, preaching, meditating, is reminded of things that happened and were written in cities and places of this Land?“)  The question of the original form of the antique maps, and whereas Ptolemy himself designed his maps, is not completely solved. See Gautier Dalché (note 8), pp. 16 – 19.

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Fig. 1: The Quarta Asie Tabula in Claudius Ptolemaeus’ ‘Cosmographia’; trad. Jacobus Angelus, copied by Johannes de Krieckenborch 1485. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 4804, fol. 138v-139r.

Comminelli de Mézières in the 1460’s, but they did not yet include the map of the Holy Land. This map was added in Florence by three main authors, between 1470 and 1490, Nicolaus Germanus, Francesco Berlinghieri and Henricus Martellus, as we will see below. In fact, the area of the Eastern Mediterranean was already represented among Ptolemy’s ancient maps under the title Quarta Asiae tabula (fig. 1). However, this „Fourth map of Asia“ was on a smaller scale, encompassing the entire Eastern Mediterranean coast from Minor Asia to Egypt. Ptolemy’s map, oriented to the North, with mathematical coordinates in latitude and longitude, provided the toponymy of the Latin provinces of Syria, Judea-Palestine, and Arabia, with no special attention to Biblical names, whilst the text next to the map, giving the coordinates, did not include any historical comment. For Ptolemy, an Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer of the second century A. D., Judea was only a province of the Roman Empire, and Jerusalem had been renamed in a Roman way Aelia Capitolina. Moreover, Ptolemy’s mathematical cartography omitted any kind of affective, emotional dimension of the representation of the area, and in this case of the Jewish Land and of the biblical holy places. The addition of Marino Sanudo’s map of the Holy Land in the secular and mathematical work of Ptolemy undoubtedly resulted from this inadequacy of the

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Quarta Asiae Tabula with regards to the expectations of a fifteenth century audience, and thus it proposed another type of cartography of the same space, constructed from other sources, historical contexts and goals. The integration of a map of the Holy Land into the universal mathematic system of Ptolemy could be an attempt to transform the mathematical ‘Geography’ into a ‘Christian chorography’, that is to say a description of the world determined by a specific religious and Christian cultural context.²³ The use of the term tabula moderna (or tabula novella) to designate this map deserves attention, even though all these tabulae modernae had their sources in medieval geographical lore. The term ‘modern’ usually refers to the consciousness, particularly highlighted by the humanists of the Renaissance, of the cultural and temporal gap between the ancient world and their present time, a gap constituted by a thousand years of what they baptized the ‘Middle Ages’.²⁴ Now, the meaning of ‘modern’ in the case of the ‘modern maps’ may be slightly different, since it also englobes maps actually made in the Middle Ages. The addition of ‘modern’ maps to the ‘Geography’ made it possible to compare the ancient toponymy and the medieval and Renaissance place names, in order to better understand the space described in Greek and Latin literature.²⁵ In this matter, the map of Palestine, which mainly provides biblical names with their explanation, is different from the ‘modern’ maps of Spain, Greece, France or Northern Europe which bear recent names and no comments next to the toponyms. Thus, the distinction made by the mapmakers between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ maps may be either linguistic (Ancient Latin place-names as opposed to vernacular medieval names), or religious (the Pagan world as opposed to the Christian

 In the first book of the ‘Geography’, Ptolemy discusses the difference between ‘geography’, seen as a mathematical description of the world (translated into ‘cosmography’ in the Latin version of Jacopo d’Angelo), and ‘chorography’, which is a regional description from a human point of view, closer to the painting of the landscape. This description was often commented in Renaissance texts. See Jean-Marc Besse, Les Grandeurs de la Terre. Aspects du savoir géographique à la Renaissance, Paris 2003, pp. 113 – 119; Sean Roberts, Poet and ‘World Painter’. Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographia (1482), in: Imago Mundi 62 (2010), pp. 145 – 160.  The terms antiquus and modernus were used during the Middle Ages in a chronological sense, referring to contemporary works as opposed to older authorities. Cassiodorus (end of the fifth century) praised a rich patron of arts of his time, for being antiquorum diligentissimus imitator, modernorum nobilissimus institutor („a most assiduous imitator of the works of the past, and a most distinguished founder of modern ones“). As Michael R. G. Spiller points out, the medieval meaning modernus conveys a sense of continuity and legacy without the more recent connotations of rupture and cultural revolution. Michael R. G. Spiller, Backwards into the Light. Cultural Modernity and the Renaissance, in: International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 1/2 (2013), pp.161– 186: „Cassiodorus is not, of course, a Renaissance figure, but as this paper will argue, the characteristic Renaissance mode of self-definition involves reaching back into the past to re-present it to the future – not to break with it, but to act as its inheritors, perhaps inferior to their parents but nevertheless determined to use their legacy wisely in an envisaged better future“ (p. 163).  See Gautier Dalché (note 8), pp. 160 – 168.

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world).²⁶ In this case, the status of Marino Sanudo’s map of the Holy Land, produced in the context of the Christian pilgrimages and the crusades, is ambiguous, as far as this map displays several historical layers of toponyms. For example, in which way could the place-names of the Old Testament be considered as ‘modern’ or ‘new’ if they are referring to a biblical history much older than Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’? ²⁷ And did the meaning of the map of the Holy Land change when confronted with the elaborate mathematical frame of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’? Was it still considered as ‘religious’ Christian knowledge or mere general and common culture? Answers to these questions may be found in the comments of the humanists associated to some later copies of the map of the Holy Land. Rooted in fifteenth-century Florence, two complementary traditions can be traced up to the beginning of the sixteenth century.

II The reception of Nicolaus Germanus’s Tabula moderna Terrae Sanctae: Johannes Reger and Jean Pèlerin Viator Marino Sanudo’s map was integrated for the first time into Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ by Nicolas Germanus (c. 1420–c. 1490), a cartographer and globe-maker from Nuremberg, working in Florence, then in Ferrara for the Duke Borso d’Este.²⁸ (fig. 2) Improving the maps of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ in three successive editions, between 1468 and 1482, he prepared the last version, dedicated to Pope Paul II (1464– 1471), with an oval map of the world, and the meridians converging to the poles, following what is called (abusively) the ‘second projection’ of Ptolemy. This version includes a number of ‘new’ maps of Northern Europe, Spain, Italy, France and the Holy Land.²⁹ The manuscript

 Toponyms on the maps follow the Latin tradition of St Jerome, except for the names of the crusader castles. On Berlinghieri’s maps they are translated in Italian. There is no Arab toponymy, contrary to some pilgrim’s reports. See Camille Rouxpetel, Redécouvrir l’Orient après la conquête mamelouke, in: Revue des sciences religieuses 90/4 (2016), pp. 539 – 560.  During the discussion of the conference, it has been suggested that this title could be a reference to the devotio moderna, a religious current at the end of the fifteenth centuy, insisting on the imitation of Christ. This remark seems to me particularly relevant, though commentaries of the map in the ‘Geography’ don’t give any further evidence of it. For the use of the map of the Holy Land by Bernhard of Breydenbach in the context of the devotio moderna, see Vagnon (note 17) and the article of Raoul DuBois in this volume.  Wilhelm Bonacker/ Ernst Anliker, Donnus Nicolaus Germanus, sein Kartennetz, seine Ptolemäus-Rezensionen und Ausgaben, in: Zeitschrift des Schweizerischen Gutenbergsmuseums 18 (1932), pp. 19 – 48, and pp. 99 – 113; Lorenz Böninger, Die Deutsche Einwanderung nach Florenz im Spätmittelalter, Leiden/ Boston, 2006; Gautier Dalché (note 8), pp. 221– 224 and 306 – 308.  Four manuscripts, copied between 1468 and 1485, contains this map of Palestine adapted by Nicolaus Germanus: Wolfegg Castle, Würtemberg; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.

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Fig. 2: The Tabula moderna Terrae Sanctae in Claudius Ptolemaeus’s ‘Cosmographia’; Nicolaus Germanus, edition de 1486 par Johannes Reger. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des Cartes et plans, GE DD-1004 (RES), fol.135v-136r.

now kept in Wolfegg castle is considered to be the model of the first printed edition outside of Italy, in the city of Ulm, Germany, in 1482, with woodcut maps, by Lienhart Holl, and of the second edition of 1486 by Johannes Reger, commented below.³⁰ We no longer see the gridlines, or the sections marked by letters, and the meticulous text description and explanation of the map square by square has been omitted. On the other hand, Nicolaus Germanus proposed other mathematical features: one is a recall of Sanudo’s grid map (83 squares from north to south, but 35 instead of 28 from East to West), while other lines, above the map, refer to climates and latitudes of the Ptolemaic maps, in an attempt to associate the two cartographic systems. As for the content, the tribes of Israel are emphasized, separated by borders in red, and indicated by

Lat. 30. 4; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3811, and the manuscript of Louis de Bruges copied in 1485, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms lat. 4804. See Vagnon (note 7), pp. 341– 345.  The first printed editions of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ are in Vicenza 1475 (without maps), and Bologna 1477 (with copper plates), Rome 1478. See Georges Tolias, The World under the Stars: Astrological Geography and the Bologna 1477 Edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Cosmographia’, in: Imago Mundi 71 (2019), pp. 125 – 150.

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names framed in gold (1-Ruben , 2-Simeon, 3-Levi, 4-Judah, 5-Issachar, 6-Zebulun, 7Dan, 8-Naphtali, 9-Gad, 10-Asser, 11-Manasseh and Ephraim (sons of Joseph), 12Benjamin). In addition, some legends that accompany the names were extracted from the explanatory text and are written directly on the map. However, the map of the Holy Land printed in Ulm includes a manifest error by the copyist. He mixed up the names of the three successive lakes of the Jordan. Unaware that the Mare Galileum is just another name for the Lacus Tiberiadis, he placed the name Galilee on the first, most northerly lake, normally called Aquae Maron. ³¹ Nicolaus Germanus’s last version had a heritage in Germany and Lorraine through the widespread diffusion of the Ulm printed edition of 1482, followed by the edition of 1486. The grid map of the Holy Land, Tabula moderna Terrae Sanctae, in this wooden engraved German version, included inverted Ns (И) characteristic of the printer Johannes Schnitzer of Arnsheim.³² The engraving is colored in different incunable copies with generally brown tones for the reliefs, yellow or pale pink for the lands, with some areas in green, and a blue or purple color for the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, lakes and streams. Whereas Nicolas Germanus himself does not seem to have left any accompanying text to this ‘modern map of the Holy Land’, the edition prepared in Ulm by Johannes Reger in 1486, for the Venetian humanist Justus de Albano, adds to Ptolemy’s work the Registrum alphabeticum super octo libros Ptolomei, an alphabetical list where each place name is associated with explanations drawn from ancient history and lives of saints, and giving if possible the modern equivalent of the ancient toponyms.³³ Comments are quoted from the ‘Mappemonde spirituelle’ of Jean Germain, bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône, dedicated to the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good.³⁴ The introductory note for this alphabetical list refers explicitly to the map of the Holy Land displayed in the codex.³⁵ The author specifies for example that one can use coordinates and the graduations of the map, with the help of two threads, to find a specific

 This error appears in the three codices attributed to Nicolas Germanus (Florence, Vatican and Wolfegg, see note 29), but not in the Bruges version of 1485 (Paris, see note 29) which comes from another Florentine model. See the notice of the BnF online catalogue (Marie-Pierre Laffitte and Emmanuelle Vagnon, 2004), URL: https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc63679t (accessed 10.06. 2020).  Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps 1472– 1500, London 1987, p. 9.  This edition contains also a commentary on the marvels of the world (‘De locis ac mirabilibus mundi’) in a medieval style. Margaret Hoogvliet, The Medieval Texts of the 1486 Ptolemy Edition by Johann Reger of Ulm, in: Imago Mundi 54 (2002), pp. 7– 16.  Paris, BnF, Ms fr. 13235. Jacques Paviot, Les cartes et leur utilisation à la fin du Moyen Age. L’exemple des principautés bourguignonnes et angevines, in: Itineraria 2 (2003), pp. 201– 228. The prologue of the ‘Mappemonde spirituelle’ is edited Ibid., pp. 222– 223. See also Thomas Leist, Jean Germain und seine Mappemonde spirituelle. Kritische Edition und deutsche Übersetzung, Munich 2010, pp. 81– 82. Vagnon (note 7), pp. 308 – 310.  Prologue of Johannes Reger, see Paris, BnF, Ge DD 1003 Rés., fol. 1v.

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place. The city of Jerusalem, given as an example, is indicated by a yellow dot.³⁶ Then the author justifies the presentation of the map and the role of the commentary: Thus three points must be considered in this register. First, the author did not intend to show the state of the Christian religion at present, but as it was in the past, so that Catholics who lament their misfortunes find a way to recover the holy places once conquered thanks to the victories of the martyrs, and which are now lost. Secondly, the author did not intend to show primarily the places where the saints are worshiped and where churches were built, and where the bodies of the saints were transported, but rather the places where they are born, where they fought and where they died. Thirdly, the reader will find only short legends written next to the names of the cities, for he will find here in the summary information about the life of the saints in the form of summaries or extracts written under the names of the cities.³⁷

Indeed, the author makes an interesting distinction: the reader will find in this alphabetic register information about the lives of the saints, whereas the map represents the places (churches, relics) usually visited by pilgrims. The text deals with history and the past, as opposed to the map, which is supposed to show the present-day geography. Most of all, the goal of this commentary, just as that of its source, the ‘Mappemonde Spirituelle’ of Jean Germain, is to describe the glorious past of Christendom in the hope of awakening Christians to make them fight for their faith in a new crusade. During the Middle Ages, the knowledge of the world was often presented as an aid for the missionary or military expansion of Christendom.³⁸ At the end of the fifteenth century, at the time of the advance of the Ottoman Turks, Christianity was on the defensive, and the map of the Holy Land evoked the tragic loss of Christian territories.

 Ibid.: Intrabo igitur litteram I et invenio Ierusalem: libro quinto capitulo sedecimo tabula quarta Asie. Intrabo quintum librum, ca. 16, et invenio Ierosolima, que nunc dicitur Capitolia, ex directo 66 gradus longitudinis et 31 2/3 latitudinis. Intrabo ergo quartam tabulam Asie cum 66 gradibus tam superius quam inferius anotatos et fac pendiculum stare sive filum. Similiter accipe gradus latitudinis scilicet 31 2/3 ex ambabus partibus, et fac iterum filum sive pendiculum stare, et precise sub cruce amborum pendiculorum positus est punctus crocei coloris qui est civitas, et scriptura posita cum puncto est Ierusalem. Sic cum omnibus et singulis est faciendum.  Ibid.: Item tria sunt consideranda in hoc registro. Primo quod a(u)ctor non intendit ostendere qualis nunc sit status religionis christiane sed qualis fuerit, ut dolentes catholici de suo dannopniam agentes providere studeant et que per victorias martyrum et sanctimonialium confessorum conquisita erant his diebus perdita recuperare procurent. Secundo quod non intendit principaliter ostendere ubi sancti veneranti et ecclesias habent constructas: aut corpora eorum translata, sed precipue ubi nati, ubi militaverunt et ubi mortui sunt. Tercio quod lector attendat brevia scripta sub civitatibus, nam ibi in summario ut plurimi de vita sanctorum inveniet aliquando brevia aut pars eorum subscribitur civitatibus.  Patrick Gautier Dalché, Cartes, réflexion stratégique et projets de croisade à la fin du XIIIe et au début du XIVe siècle. Une initiative franciscaine?, in: Francia 37 (2010), pp. 77– 95; Michele Campopiano, Écrire/décrire la Terre sainte: les Franciscains et la représentation des lieux sacrés (début du XIVe-début du XVIe siècle), in: Nathalie Bouloux/ Anca Dan/ Georges Tolias (eds.), Orbis disciplinae. Hommages en l’honneur de Patrick Gautier Dalché, Turnhout 2017, pp. 167– 182.

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The same intellectual context explains an original commentary of Ptolemy in an almost unknown manuscript (Paris, BnF, Ms lat. 11523).³⁹ This heavy and large codex (41 × 58 cm) is composed of a set of printed maps from the Ulm edition of 1482, pasted on the paper sheets of the codex, with handwritten comments in Latin in front of them. These are not draft notes hastily scribbled, but elaborate texts, carefully copied in a rather large handwriting, perhaps for educational purposes. The author of these comments is mentioned in an epigrammatic poem at the end of the book: Johannes Peregrinus (in French Jean Pèlerin, c. 1440 – 1524), also called Johannes Viator.⁴⁰ Born in Anjou, he completed a degree of licencié en droit, and at some time was attached to the court of the king of France Louis XI: he was secretarius regius and undertook some diplomatic missions. In 1470 he entered the service of the duke of Lorraine, Nicholas d’Anjou, then in 1476 of his successor René II d’Anjou. In 1483 he became a religious canon of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, then of the Toul cathedral, where some nineteenth century historians found his epitaph.⁴¹ He is known to be the author of the ‘De artificialis perspectiva’ (1505), a book dealing with principles of architecture and design prior to the famous treaty by the Italian humanist Leonardo Battista Alberti.⁴² The Parisian manuscript is obviously his ‘Commentary on Ptolemy’s Geography’, which was considered so far to be lost.⁴³ Indeed, when he was in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, he participated in the humanist circle called the ‘Gymnasium’, with Gauthier (or Vautrin) Lud, Matthias Ringmann (d. in 1511), and Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1475–c. 1518/1522), well-known for the invention of the name „America“ for the New World in a map of 1507, and the edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ (Strasbourg 1513), with additional maps of the new maritime discoveries. Unlike the comments on the other maps of the codex,

 Paris, BnF, Ms lat. 11523, Ms on paper, 41 × 58 cm, 33 ff., including 32 maps: 26 of Ptolemy’s ancient regional maps and 5 tabulae modernae (Northern Europe: Tabula moderna Prussie, Livonie, Norvegie et Gotie; Spain, France, Italy, Holy Land), then the world map. See notice of the online catalogue by Marie-Pierre Laffitte and Emmanuelle Vagnon, 2004, URL: https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/ 12148/cc730676 (accessed 10.06. 2020). This manuscript is not mentioned in Gautier Dalché (note 8). I first presented it in Vagnon (note 7), pp. 349 – 355, but at that time I had not identified its author. I will publish a full comment on the manuscript and its composition in a forthcoming article.  Memoriale monimentum in Christi nomine. Foenum cum spinis et vento reicere // Almae virtuti operam dare // Hodie et cras et semper benefacere// Confidere in Domino quam confidere in homine// In libro vitae conversum scribe, Redemptor, Deque peregrino faciat tua gratia civem. Paris, BnF, Ms lat. 11523, fol. 32v.  Anatole de Montaiglon, Notice historique et bibliographique sur Jean Pèlerin, dit le Viateur, chanoine de Toul, et sur son livre ‘De artificiali perspectiva’, Paris 1861.  Liliane Brion-Guerry, Jean Pèlerin Viator. Sa place dans l’histoire de la perspective, Paris 1962; Jean Pèlerin, De Artificiali Perspectiva (1505, 1509), New York 1973; Thomas Frangenberg, The Image and the Moving Eye: Jean Pèlerin (Viator) to Guidobaldo del Monte, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 49 (1986), pp. 150 – 171. See also Robin Halwas’s online catalogue (Bookseller. Agents and dealers in fine arts) ‘Jean Pèlerin, De artificiali perspectiva, Touls, 1505’, URL: https:// www.robinhalwas.com/index.php?controller=attachment&id_attachment=220&name=016003-Pele rin.pdf (accessed 10.06. 2020).  Montaiglon (note 42), p. 18 – 19.

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the text accompanying the map of the Holy Land is covered with a layer of brown paint, and a note explains that it was canceled (probably because the text had a personal and biographical tone). The most part can be deciphered anyway. Johannes Peregrinus explains that the map of the Holy Land helps the reader to understand the Scriptures and to memorize the location of the places described in the Bible.⁴⁴ Then the text continues with a lament over the loss of Christian territories, „to the point that the infidels not only occupy most of Asia and Africa, but after subduing Greece even dare to attack Europe.“⁴⁵ The text adds that the mortal dissensions between Christian princes, weakened by sin, rendered them incapable of uniting against the enemy of faith. The comment ends with biographical details about the author who presents himself as a close friend of the Duke of Lorraine Nicholas I, who died ‘prematurely’ in 1473, at a time of conflict between the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France Louis XI. The map of the Holy Land, from the Ulm edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ of 1482, was thus appreciated in circles of humanists in Northern Europe and Germany. The map, despite having lost much of its technical device and including some inaccuracies, still retained the two main aspects of the thirteenth century Sanudo’s map, related to pilgrimages and crusades. On one hand it was still an object of memory and culture, useful for reading and understanding the toponyms of the Bible, whilst also being a medium of religious meditation; on the other hand, it inevitably drew attention to the decline of Christian presence in the East and the loss of Jerusalem, and aimed to revive the memory of the Crusades.

III Florentine humanist approach to the map of the Holy Land: Francesco Berlinghieri and Henricus Martellus In Florence, Francesco Berlinghieri (1440 – 1500), like Nicolas Germanus, followed the idea of integrating the map of the Holy Land among the modern maps of the ‘Geography’.⁴⁶ Being a humanist, and a member of the platonic Academy of Marsilo Ficino,

 Summe notandum tum maxime pro sacris litteris veteris et novi testamenti non minimum affert intelligentiam seu intelligentis facilitatem tum etiam quam plurimum confert ad memorie firmitatem (…) ingerit exultationem mentis et fervorem fidei salutisque adauget devotis. Paris, BnF, Ms lat. 11523, fol. 30v.  Ibid. Quorumquidem infidelium potestas adeo exercuit ut nedum Asie atque Africe dominuntur sed et Europe fines Grecia subdita audeant actemptare.  Roberto Almagià, Osservazioni sull’opera geografica di Francesco Berlinghieri, in: Archivio della reale deputazione Romana di storia patria, 68 (1945), pp. 211– 255; Gautier Dalché (note 8), pp. 252– 255; Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople and the Renaissance of Geography, Cambridge 2012.

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he composed his main work, ‘The Sette Giornate della Geographia’ as an adaptation of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ in Tuscan verse, the terze rime. It was long prepared, from 1460 – 65, completed in the 1470s, and printed in 1482 with copper plate maps.⁴⁷ The eight Ptolemaic books, initially written according to the three parts of the world, were reorganized to compose a description of the world in ‘seven days’ of travel around the world. In addition, the mathematical aspects of the work were minimized in favor of a narrative and poetic structure in which the itinerant poet visited the world, guided by Ptolemy, as Virgil guided Dante in the ‘Divine Comedy’, or as Solin guided Fazio degli Uberti in the ‘Dittamondo’ of the fourteenth century. The geographical description of each region is imbued with quotations from Latin poets, such as Virgil, Properce, and Ovid, mixing references to ancient mythology with historical or biblical episodes in a characteristic humanistic tradition. Other very common geographical works in fifteenth century Florence, often illustrated with maps, were also built on this erudite description of the world rooted in greco-latin literature and mythology, for example the numerous copies of the ‘Sfera’ by Gregorio Dati or the ‘Liber insularum Archipelagi’ by Cristoforo Buondelmonti. The maps that accompany the poem are adaptations from the Latin manuscripts of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, then lavishly engraved on copper by another German artist, Niccolò Tedesco (or Niccolò de Lorenzo, distinct from the first Nicolaus Germanus mentioned above), and characterized by their elegance, and by a certain degree of stylization of the details. The map of the Holy Land for example (Palestina moderna et Terra Sancta) no longer includes any reference to the grid and distance markings of the Middle Ages or to Ptolemaic latitudes and longitudes (fig. 3). While clearly recalling the layout and informative content of the map of Marino Sanudo, the cartographer has simplified the shape of the shore and highlighted some details. The clover shape of Cape Blanc (Capo Bianco), very exaggerated, is one of the easily recognizable features of this map.⁴⁸ On the colored hand-painted specimens, the sea and the lakes of the Jordan are painted in an intense blue, nuanced with small horizontal engraved lines suggesting waves, and slightly shaded mountains in light brown. Toponyms and abbreviated captions, written in capital letters imitating Roman epigraphy, are translated

 Two extant manuscripts: Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, It. A.N.XV, 26 (for Lorenzo de’ Medici); Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 273, 1482 (for Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino). Francesco Berlinghieri, Geographia, Florence 1482 [facsimile edition by Raleigh Skelton], Amsterdam, 1966; Francesco Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della geographia di Francesco Berlingeri fiorentino allo illustrissimo Gemma sultan [facsimile edition of Florence, Niccolò de Lorenzo, 1482], Turin 2006.  Almagià (note 46), pp. 254– 255, noticed two other anonymous manuscripts of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ related to Berlinghieri: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 30 – 1, with map of the Holy Land, fol. 116v–117r; Paris, BnF, Ms lat. 8834 (no Holy Land map). Both manuscripts have links with Piero del Massaio and Francesco Rosselli. See Vagnon (note 7), pp. 346 – 347. The same „clover shape“ is on the map of the Holy Land of the Laurenziana, Plut. 30 – 1. This could be the model for the map in Berlinghieri’s ‘Sette Giornate’.

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Fig. 3: Palestina moderna et Terra sancta in Francesco Berlinghieri’s ‘Sette Giornate della Geographia’, 1482. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des Cartes et plans, GE DD-1990 (RES), pl. 23.

into Italian.⁴⁹ Although Roberto Almagià thought that Berlinghieri had composed his text independently of the maps,⁵⁰ in the case of the map of the Holy Land, a careful reading of this poem reveals that it constitutes a real ekphrasis of the map, and that the author leads his reader in a visual itinerary through the cartographic image, his description following neither Burchard’s nor Sanudo’s narrative order. The descriptive poem for Palestine, which takes place in the ‘fifth day’, is indeed very long (three folios arranged in two columns). The author first sets out the geographical borders of the Holy Land, and the signification of its different names;⁵¹ then he describes the co-

 Captions on the map are far less numerous than in Sanudo’s original. Some names and Italian words are spelled differently on the map and in the poem, probably showing the intervention of two copyists / typographers and two distinct stages in the composition of the printed book.  Almagià (note 46), p. 253.  Quotes from the facsimile edition by Skelton: Berlinghieri, Geographia (note 47), Liber Quintus (CXVIIII), Sito di Palestina Giudea, fol. 98r and sq.: E vogi gliochi a Terra sancta hebrea/Syria Palestina che ci aspecta/ Laqual si dice Syria anchor Giudea/Fu Palestina da Palesti decta/ O veramente innuda pel calore/O di pieta verso la diva secta/ Giudea da Giuda et non dal traditore/ Ma dal figluol di Giacobbe oda tale/Giuda d’Egypto gia dominatore/ Terminala dal lato orientale/ Et da borea Syria et Arabia/

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astline and explains the three Jordan lakes and their various names: the so-called Aqua Maron, the Sea of Galilee also called the Lake of Tiberiade or Lake of Genesareth (Kinneret), then the Asphaltidis Lake or Dead Sea (thus not committing the same error as in Nicolaus Germanus’s map).⁵² He goes on to explain the names of the holy places in Galilee, then of the kingdom of Juda and around Jerusalem, devoting a very long description to the Holy city. Let us go back to our original question: what is the place of religious knowledge in this commentary on the Holy Land by the humanist Francesco Berlinghieri? And are there still elements of the discourse of defense of the Christianity resulting from the project of crusade of Marino Sanudo? Regarding the first question, the answer is clearly positive. The captions refer mostly to the events of New Testaments (especially St John’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles), whilst the poem insists on certain major themes of the Catholic faith: the Passion of Christ, the Resurrection (that of Jesus, but also that of Lazarus, Tabitha, the son of the widow) and the Eucharist. The shared bread as a sign of the presence of God is thus a recurring theme in the poem.⁵³ It is particularly emphasized as a metaphor of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, the Hebrew word „Bethlehem“ meaning „house of the bread“.⁵⁴ In addition to biblical quotes, as Sean Roberts points out, Berlinghieri adds to the description of the Holy Land some details of the Greco-Roman mythology. To be fair, the description of the map of the Holy Land contains fewer references to pagan lore than the other parts of the book. Only two can be traced. The first one is about the port of Jaffa (Joppe), where the author recalls the myth of Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, attached to the rock to be fed to a sea monster. Fortunately, Perseus delivers the young woman „for always the divine help is granted to the innocent, and a mo-

Petrea da euro e dal vento australe/Egypto in parte collocato sia/ E le salse onde anchor dallo occidente […].  Ibid. Riga Giudea che tanto in odio ha Roma/Giordano el qual dopo Gennesarette/che Maron o Mure Aqque anchor si noma/Quivi in Tiberiade lago mecte/della cicta Tiberiade prende/el nome e le presenti onde anchor decte/son dalla urbe propinqua che qua pende/Decta Gennesarete e nominare/per ponto Galileo anchor sintende […] Giordan nell onde Asphaltide depresse/nullo animante tal lago produce/ Questo submerge tutti e non viventi/el nome importa dal suo proprio effecto/disesa e morto mar decto altrimenti.  Ex: the shared meal after the resurrection near the Sea of Galilee (Jn, 21, 11– 13) , see Ibid.: Qui si cibo di poi che ei resurrexe/Co(n) discepoli suoi hor si riduce; the miracle of the loaves and fishes (Jn, 6, 1– 15); the wedding feast at Cana (Jn, 2, 1– 12), Ibid., fol. 98v: Vedi Carnasau cho colli dati/ Ad cinque mil ache dicinque pani/ E di due pesci furon saturati/Vedesi Cana se piu tal lontani/Verso l’occaso ove dell aqqua vino/Christo fece per sarui piu Christiani; Emmaüs (Lc, 24, 13 – 35), Ibid., Che vuol dir vision la dove arresta/ El redentor el qual pel pan diviso/ A discepoli suoi si manifesta.  Ibid. fol. 99r: Bettalem vedi piena di splendore/ Per la nativita del verbo eterno/Casa di pane importa el suo tenore./ Io son pan vivo che del ciel superno/Discesi dise el qual vin naque. This sentence is partly a quote from Jesus’s speach in Capharnaum: „I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever“ (Jn, 6, 22– 58). The metaphor doesn’t appear neither in Sanudo’s very long description of Bethlehem nor in Burchard’s one, see Marino Sanudo, Liber secretorum (note 1), pp. 257– 259; Burchardus de Monte Sion ed. de Sandoli (note 11), pp. 196 – 198.

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ment later he delivered her from her chains.“⁵⁵ The other occurrence of pagan lore is about the conversion of the Roman soldier Cornelius of Caesarea, who „moved away from the Old Testament and believed in the cross and the true Jupiter“.⁵⁶ This surprising assimilation of Christ to Jupiter is presented by Sean Roberts as a possible evidence of syncretism between pagan and Christian faith.⁵⁷ We remark that it is however not an invention of Berlinghieri or fifteenth century humanism, but probably a quote from Dante Alighieri’s ‘Purgatory’, referring to Jesus Christ: O sommo Giove / che sostin ’terra per noi crocifisso. ⁵⁸ Ancient mythology thus appeared in the tradition of Dante’s poetry as a prefiguration of the Christian faith, and Jupiter as a metaphoric name for Christian God. On the whole, Berlinghieri’s poem is not strongly related to Sanudo’s project, and never quotes directly Sanudo’s or Burchard’s description. We only find a brief allusion to Saladin, compared to the Roman emperor who conquered Jerusalem, but not specifically related to Sanudo’s book.⁵⁹ Some fortresses of the knights still appear on the map, on the coast, and the Commandery of the Teutonic Knights (Manso casa dei Tedeschi) near Mount Carmel, but without any reference in the poem. Indeed, neither the mathematical frame of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, nor the grid of Marino Sanudo’s map were kept in Berlinghieri’s project. Moreover, Sean Roberts analyses Francesco Berlinghieri’s ‘Sette Giornate’ as „a case study of intercultural exchange“ between Italy and the Ottoman Empire.⁶⁰ Indeed, the manuscript version was first to be dedicated to Mehmed II; then two copies of the printed edition of 1482 were prepared for his sons Beyazid II (sultan in Istanbul) and Cem (who was exiled in France at that time). Roberts asks therefore if the printed edition had been somehow adapted to please the Turkish audience, and if so to what extent.⁶¹ Would a map of the Holy Land from a crusade project, with strong Christian references, have been considered an offense by the Ottoman princes? The answer is negative: the book was on the contrary an ode to Christian culture and propaganda for  Berlinghieri, Geographia (note 47), fol. 98r: Ioppe in quel colle vedi molto elato/ cictate anticha assai allo Ethiope/ Cepheo re regal seggio fondato / Chostui marito fu di Cassiope/E d’Andromade padre, rilegata/ A quela scoglio e dogni aiuto inope/ Ne da Perseo effenso liberata/Perche era posta in cibo alle balene/Daloro al tucto fora lacerata/ Ma perche alla innocentia sempre viene/El divino auxilio e ma non tarda/Sciolse lei quindi dalle sue cathene.  Ibid., fol 98r: Quindi Cornelio fu che si rimove/dal Testamento Antichi e molto crede/ Al crocifixo eterno e vero gioue. Cornelius does not appear on Berlinghieri’s map, not on Sanudo’s map, but the caption is present on Nicolaus Germanus’s map: in hac Petrus baptizavit Cornelium et Paulum. Cf. Isidore de Séville, Étymologies Livre 15 – Les constructions et les terres, ed. Jean-Yves Guillaumin/ Pierre Monat, Besançon 2004, pp. 2– 3 (XV.18): In qua Corneli domum Christi uidit ecclesiam (see note 71).  Roberts (note 46), p. 73.  Dante Alighieri, Le Purgatoire, avec les dessins de Gustave Doré, traduction française de PierAngelo Fiorentino, accompagnée du texte italien, Paris, 1868, p. 32 (VI.v.118).  Ristaurata poi daquel che impera/Et Elia decta dipoi el Saladino/La tolse perche fede in lei non era. Berlinghieri, Geographia (note 47), fol. 99r.  Roberts (note 46), p. 9.  Ibid., pp.12– 13 and 133 – 136.

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Florentine humanism, and it would be anachronistic to see in the author’s editorial strategies any concession to the Ottoman court. In any case, the initial crusade context of the map of the Holy land was obviously not one of the humanists’ priorities anymore. In conclusion, Berlinghieri proposed in his poem an exegesis of the map of the Holy Land, based on a literary culture that could mix references from pagan and biblical lore without contradiction. Ptolemy as Berlinghieri’s guide was identified with Antiquity, while the narrator embodied the Christian geography of the present, reading the map as a reminder of the Christian history and liturgy. Another Florentine example reinforces this interpretation of the Holy Land map as a memorial space reconciling pagan and Christian references without a sense of rupture, and reveals that this interpretation, in fact, is rooted in high Middle Ages comments on the topography of the Holy Land. According to Lorenz Böninger’s work on the German community in Florence during the fifteenth century, Henricus Martellus Germanus (1448 – 1496), also originating from Nuremberg, was a relative of Nicolaus Germanus (the first one, who prepared the maps of the Ulm printed edition of 1482).⁶² He first composed beautiful manuscripts of the ‘Geography’ by Ptolemy and of the ‘Liber insularum Archipelagi’ by Cristoforo Buondemonti.⁶³ He is also the author of famous maps of the world situating for the first time the Cape of Good Hope, as early as 1489 or 1490.⁶⁴ He also composed an illustrated book combining Ptolemaic maps, Buondelmonti island maps and new maps of the seas, further islands as well as the Holy Land. Known as ‘Insularium illustratum’, this book is available in several handwritten copies, including a luxurious copy kept today at the Chateau de Chantilly Library (fig. 4).⁶⁵

 Böninger (note 28). Roberto Almagià, I mappamondi di Enrico Martello e alcuni concetti geografici di Cristoforo Colombo, in: La Bibliofilia 42 (1940), pp. 288 – 311; Gentile (note 8), pp. 237– 238; Marica Milanesi, La rinascita della geografia dell’Europa, 1350 – 1480, in: Sergio Gensini (ed.), Europa e Mediterraneo tra medioevo e prima età moderna, Pisa 1992, pp. 35 – 59.  Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Description of the Aegean and Other Islands, from the James Ford Library manuscript, ed. Evelyn Edson, New York 2018. It is an edition of Minneapolis, James Ford Bell Library, Ms B 1475 fMA, without the map of the Holy Land. This manuscript was not mentioned in Almagià (note 62).  Chet Van Duzer, Henricus Martellus’s world map at Yale (c. 1491). Multispectral images, sources and influence, New York 2018. According to Böninger (note 28), pp. 313 – 348), Henricus Martellus could have been an employee of the Martelli, an influential Florentine family from which he would have taken his surname. But this hypothesis is refuted by other historians. Cf. Chet Van Duzer (as above), p. 3.  Almagià (note 62); Nathalie Bouloux, L’Insularium illustratum d’Henricus Martellus, in: The Historical Review / La Revue Historique 9 (2012), pp. 77– 94. For a list and description of extant Henricus Martellus’s works and bibliography, see Van Duzer (note 64), pp. 3 – 18. The map of the Holy Land is in five manuscripts (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. Cl. XIII-16, fol. 142v–143r; Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Pluteus 29 – 25, fol. 58v–59r; Leiden, University Library, VLF 23, fol. 55v-56r; London, British Library, Add. MS. 15760, fol. 58v–59r; Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 698 (483), fol. 56v–57r.

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Fig. 4: The Descriptio Terrae Sanctae in Henricus Martellus’ ‘Insularium illustratum’, c. 1490, Château de Chantilly, Ms 698 (483), fol. 56v-57r.

The map of the Holy Land appears in some of these manuscripts under the titles Descriptio Terrae Sanctae. ⁶⁶ The copy of the ‘Insularium illustratum’ in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, considered to be his working manuscript, is dated between 1480 and 1490.⁶⁷ The maps come with various texts, sometimes copied from several different hands on independent parchment sheets, then glued next to the corresponding map. Regarding the map of the Holy Land, the link with Nicolaus Germanus’s model is revealed by the same error about the Aquae Maron confused with the Sea of Galilee. But this error does not appear any more in the later manuscripts in which maps and texts have been carefully copied. A close comparison between the several versions of the map of the Holy Land by Martellus confirms other differences between the first draft of the Biblioteca Laurenziana, and some later versions. For example, the map in the manuscript of the Laurenziana provides many captions,

 The title is Sirie pars descriptio, nunc Terra Sancta dicitur in the codex of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ by Henricus Martellus, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. Cl. XIII-16, fol. 142v–143r.  Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Pluteus 29 – 25, fol. 58v–59r. The world map, showing the Cape of Good Hope south of Africa suggests a dating after 1488, but the composition of the manuscript may have been started several years before.

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hastily written in black, all over the place, and names of the tribes of Israel in red.⁶⁸ The map in the manuscript kept in the British Library looks also quite sketchy with the same captions, often related to the life and resurrection of Christ, and reminding the themes of Berlinghieri’s poem.⁶⁹ In the other hand, the more elaborated – and certainly latest- Chantilly manuscript displays the names of the tribes labelled on rolls in an Antique style, whereas the captions are shorter and written in smaller red or black letters.⁷⁰ Mountains and hills are nicely designed with brown figures and green trees, with perspective effects, and cities are sketched in form of various houses and castles with towers and walls. Moreover, in these manuscripts of the ‘Insularium Illustratum’, two texts are associated with the ‘modern’ map of the Holy Land: the first is an excerpt of Tacitus ‘Historiae’ (chapter V.6), telling the story of Palestine in Titus’ time with lengthy developments on the geography and ethnography of the Jewish people and a description of the terrible siege of Jerusalem by the Roman army. The other text is a Descriptio Terre Sancte extracted from the ‘Etymologiae’ by Isidore of Seville (Book XV: constructions and lands).⁷¹ This chapter describes the cities of the known world, and begins with the principal cities of Palestine, among which Jerusalem. I actually think that this text of Isidore of Seville is the source of Berlinghieri’s commentary on Andromeda in Jaffa.⁷² The reference to this myth is therefore not specifically humanistic, since it was inserted in the most influential encyclopedia of medieval Christian knowledge. However, Henricus Martellus’s Florentine working manuscript proves that this text had raised a new interest in the context of a critical reading of the ‘Geography’ and addition of new maps in the years 1480 – 90. The same text from Isidore of Seville also provided the source of the prophetic etymology of Bethlehem, the „house of bread“, and the analogy with the body of Christ, developed in the verses of Berlinghieri.⁷³ Clearly, the use of Isidore was common to both the Florentine humanist Francesco

 Ibid. In this manuscript a text under the map explains the dimensions of the Terra Sancta: Longitudo regni Sirie viginta dierum spatio terminatur. Latitudo vero quinque ubi plurimum. Terra Sancta est pars regnum Sirie/latitudo est a fonte Dan usque Bersabe centum sexaginta miliaria.  London, British Library, Add. MS. 15760, fol. 58v–59r. Near the Lake of Tiberias: Hic Christus apparuit discipulis piscantibus (Jn, 21, 1– 24); Mensa domini de 5 panibus (Jn, 6, 1– 16). See note 52.  The captions are slightly different from the map in the British Library manuscript. For example, near the Lake of Tiberias, we read Mensa Domini de 5 panibus et 2 piscibus, and not the caption about the apparition to the fishermen. But there is another Biblical quote added near the Lake, close to Ephrem: Hic morabatur Christus cum discipulis quando non in palam ambulabat (Jn, 11, 54).  Isidore de Séville (note 56), pp. 2– 3.  Ibid., pp. 3 – 4 (XV.19): Ioppe oppidum Palaestinae maritimum idem Palaestini aedificauerunt; ubi saxum ostenditur quod uinculorum Andromedae uestigia adhuc retinet; cuius beluae forma eminentior elephantis fuit.  Ibid., pp. 3 – 4 (XV.23): Bethleem Iuda, ciuitas Dauid, quae mundi genuit saluatorem, a Iebusaeis condita fertur et uocata primum Ephrata. Quando autem ibi Iacob pecora sua pauit, eidem loco Bethleem nomen quodam uaticinio futuri imposuit, quod domus panis interpretatur, propter eum panem qui ibi de caelo descendit.

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Berlinghieri and the German mapmaker Henricus Martellus to read the ‘modern’ map of the Holy Land.⁷⁴ However, the relationships between Nicolaus Germanus, Francesco Berlinghieri, Henricus Martellus and the other mapmakers in Italy and Germany (Francesco Rosselli, Nicolo Caverio, Martin Waldseemüller) have not been completely elucidated.⁷⁵ The last years of the fifteenth century were characterized by an extraordinary intellectual emulation around new geographic discoveries. The cartographic experiments based on the different editions of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, and the appetite to produce new printed editions was one of the results of this emulation, parallel to the incredible development of nautical charts and planispheres. The ‘Insularium Illustratum’, by Henricus Martellus, combining ancient maps and literary texts, the medieval map of Palestine (and other medieval maps), and new nautical maps showing the Portuguese discoveries in Africa, was an inspiration not only in Italy but also north of the Alps, as it was used, directly or indirectly, in the 1513 edition of the ‘Geography’ by Martin Waldseemüller and the Saint-Dié Gymnasium.

Conclusion The use of Marino Sanudo’s map of Palestine and the different commentaries in the context of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ show how this map appeared as a useful complement to ancient maps, offering a cultural and memorial reading of the space of the Holy Land. The map of the Holy Land of the fourteenth century, integrated into the ‘Geography’ of the Alexandrian scholar gave rise to a revival of interest mostly because it proposed a synthesis of places of Christian memory, complementary to the toponyms of the Quarta Asiae Tabula of Ptolemy. In some ways, biblical references could harmoniously be associated with anecdotes drawn from the historical and literary texts of the Antiquity. Rooted in the high medieval encyclopedic tradition, this literary geographic culture was highly fashionable in fifteenth century Florence. However, the interpretation of the map in the Franco-German context, related to deep religious concerns and the revival of the crusade, reveals differences from the Florentine humanist culture involved in Berlinghieri’s and Henricus Martellus’s works. Berlinghieri was dedicating his erudite printed version of the ‘Sette Giornate’ to Ottoman princes, mainly to highlight scientific and literary achievements and innovative printing techniques in Florence. At the same time, in France and Germany, other

 The two men necessarily knew each other and the common points between comments on the map of the Holy Land are not pure coincidence. We may raise the question whereas Henricus Martellus himself worked for Francesco Berlinghieri in his younger age (during the 1470 – 80’s) and maybe helped to put together the documentation necessary to write the final printed version of the ‘Sette Giornate della Geographia’. Then he elaborated himself his own cartographic manuscripts at the end of the 1480’s and 1490’s.  See Gentile (note 8), and Milanesi (note 62).

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humanists were expressing a lamentation on the decline of Christendom, and the medieval map of the Holy Land was the basis of a new call for a Christian reaction against the threat of the Ottoman empire. Nevertheless, the opposition is not so strong. It would be misleading to see in Berlinghieri’s interpretation of the map any kind of ‘secularism’ or ‘transcultural tolerance’.⁷⁶ Both in the manuscript of Johannes Peregrinus, and in Berlinghieri’s poem, the map of the Holy Land preserved its capacity to support a religious meditation on the places visited by the Christ, a kind of mental pilgrimage carried out at a distance. In a way, the history of the Holy Land during late Antiquity illustrated the triumph of Christianity over ancient paganism, just as the heroic history of the crusader states was used to illustrate the triumph of the Catholic faith over the Muslims. Eventually the religious interpretation of this map of Palestine, along with modernized versions of the Quarta Asiae Tabula found a new life in the printed editions of the Bible and in the intellectual context of the Reformation. Included in printed Bibles, such as in the ‘Cosmographic meditations’ of Mercator, the map of Marino Sanudo was then re-edited and re-interpreted in the field of Renaissance humanism with new historical and exegetic concerns.⁷⁷

 As Veronica della Dora accurately summarizes about Sean Roberts’s book, „Roberts reminds us how Renaissance geography was a quintessentially and emphatically Christian discipline (as opposed, once again, to traditional linear narratives that picture a Renaissance supplanting religion and Ptolemy as paving the way to a modern secular understanding of space)“ and „he shows the limits of current scholarly narratives that link intercultural contact to tolerance (another idealized appropriation of the past, this time reflecting the liberal aspirations of some modern scholars)“. Veronica della Dora, Review on Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World, in: H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. August, 2014, URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42370 (accessed on 10.06. 2020).  Catherine Delano-Smith/ Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 1500 – 1600. An Illustrated Catalogue. Geneva 1991; Zur Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds. Geography, Religion and Scholarship, 1500 – 1700, Leiden, Boston 2012; Patrick Gautier Dalché, Der ‘mittelalterliche’ Mercator, in: Ute Schneider/ Stefan Brakensiek (eds.), Gerhard Mercator. Wissenschaft und Wissenstransfer, Darmstadt 2015, pp. 285 – 300; Axelle Chassagnette, Savoir géographique et cartographie dans l’espace germanique protestant, 1520 – 1620, Geneva 2018.

Ingrid Baumgärtner and Eva Ferro

The Holy Land Geography as Emotional Experience Burchard of Mount Sion’s Text and the Movable Map Abstract: In this paper, we evaluate various medieval cartographic and diagrammatic representations of the Holy Land. The analysis focuses particularly on the religious dimensions of these representations and their potential for making pilgrimage accessible, creating religious symbolism and exciting spiritual emotions. The leading hypothesis is that medieval mapmakers introduced special technical features into maps and similar cartographic representations to deepen religious emotions and to stimulate intense sensory responses in the readership of narrative travel accounts. The main focus of the paper is one of the most important late medieval travel accounts on Palestine, namely Burchard of Mount Sion’s ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’. It begins with an outline of the tradition of maps and other diagrammatic representations connected with Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’. We then concentrate on one particular graphical projection, the double-paged Holy Land map in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 76.56, fols. 97v–98r). Finally, our paper contextualizes the Florence map in the late medieval reception of travel reports, exploring how cartographic visualizations could stimulate an emotional response intended to intensify the experience of pilgrimage. Keywords: Burchard of Mount Sion, Medieval Holy Land, Florence Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Plut. 76.56, geography and religion, cartography and emotion Due to their eastward orientation, their images of transcendent subjects like Paradise and Christ, and their biblical content, western medieval world maps are explicitly understood as an expression of Christian belief. Religious motives, however, can also be found in more realistic or practical cartographic representations such as nautical and regional maps. Even portolan charts, the embodiment of modern, empirical cartography during the Late Middle Ages, did not refrain from such symbolism. As far as the mapping of the world is concerned, the graphic projection of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) serves as a case in point. While its objective was clearly secular, since the treaty divided the globe between Spain and Portugal, its cartographic visualization developed a more complex dual meaning.

Prof. Dr. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Mittelalterliche Geschichte, FB 05 – Gesellschaftswissenschaften, Universität Kassel, Nora-Platiel-Str. 1, D-34127 Kassel, [email protected], https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/ Dr. des. Eva Ferro, M.A., Im Merzental 15c, D-79280 Au, [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-011

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Around 1500, Juan de la Cosa, a pilot and companion of Columbus, created his vision of this imaginary boundary between the Spanish and the Portuguese in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Today, only one copy is preserved in the form of a sea chart (fig. 1).¹ Its gifted mapmaker drew the line of demarcation in green ink definitely in the Spanish interest and left only two very small areas in the north and south of the newly discovered territories to the Portuguese. He was bold enough to represent the entire western continent as a possession of the Castilian-Aragonese Monarchy and under the patronage of Saint Christopher, who stands at the intersection of the northern and southern landmasses.² The depiction of the patron saint of seafarers conveyed a double meaning. His location at the center of the Americas, where the route to the Asian paradise and the riches of the East was assumed to be, underscored the significance of religion for the new undertakings. At the same time, the image also referred to Christopher Columbus, the principal explorer of these worlds, who symbolically bears the Christ Child on his shoulders, and furthermore to the political power behind Columbus, the Catholic king and queen. It is obvious that religious connotations are important constituents of this chart and its political meaning. This example is not unique. If we look at other maps of that time, we find that references to Christian knowledge are almost always present in any kind of premodern western map up until the portolan charts of the early modern period.³

 Madrid, Museo naval, Inv. 257; cf. Ute Schneider, Die Macht der Karten. Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis heute, 3rd. ed. Darmstadt 2012, pp. 94– 95 with illustration; Catherine Hofmann/ Héléne Richard/ Emmanuelle Vagnon (ed.), L’âge d’or des cartes marines. Quand l’Europe découvrait le monde, Paris 2012, pp. 114– 115 with illustration. On the historic background cf. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Neue Karten für die Neue Welt? Kartographische Praktiken der Exploration, in: Raimund Schulz (ed.), Maritime Entdeckung und Expansion. Kontinuitäten, Parallelen und Brüche von der Antike bis in die Neuzeit (Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte N.F. 77), Berlin, München, Boston 2019, pp. 243 – 268, here pp. 254– 257. On its history see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Maps and Exploration in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, in: David Woodward (ed.), Cartography in the European Renaissance (The History of Cartography 3/1), Chicago, London 2007, pp. 738 – 759 and Appendix 30.1, here pp. 748 – 749: „Questions have been raised concerning the authenticity even of this work. Its documented history goes back no further than the Paris bookshop where Baron CharlesAthanase Walckenaer was said to have bought it prior to 1832, when Alexander von Humboldt verified it—indeed, by his own account, correctly identified it for the first time—in the baron’s library.“  Cf. Pauline Moffitt Watts, The European Religious Worldview and Its Influence on Mapping, in: Woodward (note 1), pp. 382– 400, here pp. 386 – 387; Jeffrey Jaynes, Christianity Beyond Christendom. The Global Christian Experience on Medieval Mappaemundi and Early Modern World Maps (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 149), Wiesbaden 2018, pp. 269 – 272, here p. 269.  Cf. the contributions of Emmanuelle Vagnon and Felicitas Schmieder in this volume.

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Fig. 1: Juan de la Cosa, Sea chart; Madrid, Museo naval, inv. 257.

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In recent years, scholars have usually addressed the medieval notion of religion with the aim of exploring the history of the concept, and its related terms, in various European texts and sources, but rarely in maps or geographic representations. It has been pointed out, firstly, that no ‘system of beliefs and practices’ was present in premodern European thinking,⁴ and secondly, that there was a discrepancy between the medieval sense of religio and the modern concept of religion. Consequently, there was discussion whether scholars should use terms that did not exist and were not used in premodern texts, or if this would create misunderstandings. Therefore, the question was raised, if it would not be more appropriate to use the vocabulary of medieval sources and to study the perceptions and emotions behind it. Following this line of thinking, this paper discusses some examples of medieval Christian cartography in relation to religion and pilgrimage narratives. The aim is to examine not only maps and cartographic projections, but especially the combination of texts and images for their potential to create religious symbolism and spiritual emotions. In the following, we will attempt to contribute to the discussion with a short analysis of some medieval visual representations of the Holy Land that are closely linked to travelogues. The focus will be on whether these maps were inserted into travel reports in order to deepen religious emotions and to stimulate intense sensory responses. Our discussion focuses on one of the most important late medieval travel accounts on Palestine, Burchard of Mount Sion’s ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’, and the cartographic and diagrammatic visualizations accompanying later copies of this text. Therefore, this paper will first briefly survey the textual and cartographic representation of Palestine in Burchard’s ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’ with regard to its religious significance and its reception in later copies. Then, it will analyze the codicological framework of one of these graphical projections, the double-paged Holy Land map in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 76.56, fols. 97v–98r) and its function during the copying of Burchard’s text. Lastly, our paper will further contextualize the Florence map by exploring the role of the emotional experience of pilgrimage through cartographic visualizations in the late medieval reception of travel reports and especially in the case of Burchard’s text.

 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Une histoire religieuse du Moyen Âge est-elle possible? (Jalons pour une anthropologie historique du christianisme médiéval), in: Fernando Lepori (ed.), Il mestiere di storico del Medioevo. Atti del convegno di studio dell’Associazione ‚Biblioteca Salita dei Frati‘, Lugano, 17– 19 maggio 1990 (Quaderni di cultura mediolatina 7), Spoleto 1994, pp. 73 – 83; Brent Nongbri, Before Religion. A History of a Modern Concept, New Haven, London 2013; Peter Biller, Words and the Medieval Notion of ‘Religion’, in: Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), pp. 351– 369.

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I Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’: textual and cartographic representation The Holy Land was a multi-functional contact zone between Europe and Asia, a place of interaction between the three Abrahamic religions and one of the most important sites for Christian pilgrims. Most of the preserved European travel accounts from the Middle Ages describe this part of the world⁵ and some of the first regional maps were created to communicate the topography of exactly this region to a European readership. At least 22 maps, along with many diagrams and other representations depicting the biblical landscape are extant from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries.⁶ They all helped to convey an image of the biblical places that were so important for the Christians in the West. After the final fall of Jerusalem in 1244, and especially after the loss of Acre to the Mamluk sultan in 1291, these places and the surrounding territories acquired a new ideological relevance. Monks and priests, as well as patricians and aristocrats aspired to go on pilgrimage at least once in their lives and to share their experiences.⁷ In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, new maps and

 Werner Paravicini (ed.), Europäische Reiseberichte des späten Mittelalters. Eine analytische Bibliographie. 1. Teil: Deutsche Reiseberichte, edited by Christian Halm; 2. Teil: Französische Reiseberichte, bearb. von Jörg Wettlaufer; 3. Teil: Niederländische Reiseberichte, edited by Jan Hirschbiegel (Kieler Werkstücke D/5, 12, 14), 2. revised and supplemented edition 2001, 1999, 2000; cf. Enno Bünz, Reiseberichte, Reisegruppen, Reisewege. Bemerkungen zur neuen analytischen Bibliographie „Europäische Reiseberichte des späten Mittelalters“, in: Würzburger Diözesangeschichtsblätter 65 (2003), pp. 353 – 361. Cf. Dietrich Huschenbett/ Bettina Wagner (eds.), Deutsche Palästina-Pilgerberichte von den Anfängen bis 1500. Ein Repertorium. Würzburger DFG-Projekt 1990 – 1994, 2 vols., Würzburg (Typoskript) 1996; Stefan Schröder, Zwischen Christentum und Islam. Kulturelle Grenzen in den spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichten des Felix Fabri (Orbis medievalis. Vorstellungswelten des Mittelalters 11), Berlin 2009, pp. 49-–98.  Paul D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land, London 2012; Ingrid Baumgärtner, Das Heilige Land kartieren und beherrschen, in: Ead./ Martina Stercken (eds.), Herrschaft verorten. Politische Kartographie im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 19), Zürich 2012, pp. 27– 75; Pnina Arad, Cultural Landscape in Christian and Jewish Maps of the Holy Land, in: Ingrid Baumgärtner/ Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby/ Katrin Kogman-Appel (eds.), Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture (Das Mittelalter. Beihefte 9), Berlin, Boston 2019, pp. 74– 88; Pnina Arad, Christian Maps of the Holy Land. Images and Meanings, Turnhout 2020, pp. 9 – 62.  The patricians Sebald Rieter and Hans Tucher the Elder of Nuremberg, for example, gave separate accounts of their joint pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1479; Tucher later published his report in several editions between 1482 (Augsburg, Johann Schönsperger) and 1486; cf. Randall Herz, Die ‘Reise ins gelobte Land’ Hans Tuchers des Älteren (1479 – 1480). Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung und kritische Edition eines spätmittelalterlichen Reiseberichts (Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter 38), Wiesbaden 2002; Randall Herz, Studien zur Drucküberlieferung der ‘Reise ins gelobte Land’ Hans Tuchers des Älteren. Bestandsaufnahme und historische Auswertung der Inkunabeln unter Berücksichtigung der späteren Drucküberlieferung (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte und Kultur der Stadt Nürnberg 34), Nürnberg 2005. On the question of the intended and the actual audience cf. Kathryne Beebe, Pilgrim

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different forms of graphic representation emerged in close connection with these descriptions of Palestine. Part of this widely shared information came of course from the works of their precursors. One of them was Burchard of Mount Sion. His ‘Descriptio Terre Sancte’, written in the 1280s, provided a systematic account of the whole territory from before 1291, when it could still be explored.⁸ Like many authors of pilgrims’ accounts, the Dominican friar, who spent several years in the Near East between 1271 and 1285, wrote his report for Christians that were unable to make the journey themselves. His detailed and systematic description of a great number of sites, based on scripture and local sources, was also extremely useful for those pilgrims who were planning their journey, for many others who wanted to retrace their visit in their mind’s eye and for anyone who tried to concretize the geographic outlines on a map. In this way, all the different readers of Burchard could imagine the religious spaces of the sacred ground and share his travel experiences. Burchard’s text was extremely popular, as evidenced by the considerable number of extant manuscripts in Latin and the vernacular. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was reproduced in two different versions, a short and a long redaction. The two versions are separate works and not variants of a single text: the long version, edited by Laurent in 1864, was probably written in the Holy Land and sent to Magdeburg,⁹ while the incomplete short version, printed by Canisius in 1604,¹⁰ was

and preacher. The Audiences and Observant Spirituality of Friar Felix Fabri (1437/8 – 1502) (Oxford Historical Monographs), Oxford 2014, pp. 93 – 177.  Ingrid Baumgärtner, Reiseberichte, Karten und Diagramme. Burchard von Monte Sion und das Heilige Land, in: Steffen Patzold/ Anja Rathmann-Lutz/ Volker Scior (eds.), Geschichtsvorstellungen. Bilder, Texte und Begriffe aus dem Mittelalter. Festschrift für Hans-Werner Goetz zum 65. Geburtstag, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 2012, pp. 460 – 507; Ingrid Baumgärtner, Burchard of Mount Sion and the Holy Land, in: Peregrinations. Journal of Medieval Art & Architecture 4/1 (2013), pp. 5 – 42; Ead., Winds and Continents: Concepts for Structuring the World and Its Parts, in: Ead./ Debby/ Kogman-Appel (note 6), pp. 91– 135; Jonathan Rubin, Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terrae Sanctae. A Newly Discovered Extended Version, in: Crusades 13 (2014), pp. 173 – 190; Id., A Missing Link in European Travel Literature: Burchard of Mount Sion’s Description of Egypt, in: Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge 3 (2018), pp. 55 – 90; Susanna E. Fischer, Erzählte Bewegung. Narrationsstrategien und Funktionsweisen lateinischer Pilgertexte (4.–15. Jahrhundert), (Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 52), Leiden, Boston 2019, pp. 236 – 264.  Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio terrae sanctae, ed. Johann C. M. Laurent, in: Johann C. M. Laurent, Peregrinatores medii aevi quatuor, Leipzig 1873, pp. 19 – 94; English translation: Aubrey Stewart, Burchard of Mt. Sion, Description of the Holy Land (Literary of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society), London 1896, repr. New York 1971; Denys Pringle (ed.), Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 1187– 1291 (Crusade Texts in Translation 23), Farnham 2012, pp. 241– 320; reprint and Italian translation: Sabino De Sandoli, Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio terrae sanctae, in: Sabino De Sandoli, Itinera Hierosolymitana crucesignatorum (saec. XII–XIII), vol. 4 (Pubblicazioni dello Studium Biblicum Franciscanum 24/4), Jerusalem 1984, pp. 119 – 219.  Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio terrae sanctae, ed. Heinrich Canisius, in: Heinrich Canisius, Antiquae lectiones 6 (1604) pp. 295 – 322; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio terrae sanctae, ed. Jacques Basnage, in: Jacques Basnage, Thesaurus monumentorum ecclesiasticorum et historicum,

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compiled later. Several printed editions followed within a short period of time, the first appeared in the ‘Rudimentum noviciorum’ of 1475. Over the next 150 years, fifteen editions were published, not taking into account the many abbreviated witnesses and excerpts, or the numerous compilations that used Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’ together with other writings to create a new work. In the later manuscript tradition, some scribes combined his text with a graphic representation to provide their readers with a concrete visualization and convey the atmosphere of the Holy places even more convincingly. The ‘Descriptio’ became a bestseller that influenced most of the later regional maps and travel accounts. It became a key document for the textual and visual perception of Palestine. Even today, it is crucial for scholars working on the connection of geographical and religious knowledge, although a critical edition is still missing.¹¹ For the so-called long version, Jonathan Rubin proposed a division of the 64 manuscripts into five families (a to e) and identified the relations between them.¹² His recent analysis brings us much closer to Burchard’s original text and, at the same time, facilitates future study into specific problems related to the ‘Descriptio’s’ tradition and reception. For Burchard, religion was a very important issue that reflects a particular emotional attitude. He described, for instance, how he spent a whole night in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and joyfully kissed the stone where Christ was born and the manger in which Christ lay. In other passages about the biblical landscape, however,

sive Henrici Canisii lectiones antiquae, vol. 4, Antwerpen 1725, pp. 1– 28. This transcription of the short version is based on a manuscript which was compiled in the monastery of St. Mang in Regensburg, today in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 569, fols. 184r–210v.  The new edition by John R. Bartlett (ed.), Burchard of Mount Sion, OP. Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, Oxford 2019, is not without problems: Bartlett used only six of the 64 manuscripts of the long version for his edition, without understanding the relationships between his textual witnesses. His list of manuscripts is incomplete as it follows Thomas M. Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum medii aevi, vol. 1, Rom 1970, pp. 257– 260 without regard for the recent list by Ekkehart Rotter,Windrose statt Landkarte. Die geographische Systematisierung des Heiligen Landes und ihre Visualisierung durch Burchardus de Monte Sion um 1285, in: Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 69 (2013) pp. 45 – 106, here pp. 103 – 106. In addition, Bartlett chose the text in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Nouv. acq. lat. 288, fols. 1r–45r for his edition, which, as Jonathan Rubin (note 12) pointed out, is quite far away from the archetype. Finally, Bartletts apparatus is not as reliable as his introduction suggests, e. g. regarding the significant variants of the manuscript in London, British Library, Add. 18929; the colophon of the manuscript is treated as if it were part of Burchard’s work; the readings are sometimes misleading (e. g. p. 6 Aconiensem instead of Acconensem; p. 10 Districtam for Districtum) and the phrases raise grammatical difficulties without an explanatory note (f. e. p. 30 Qui terra Assisinorum dicuntur instead of Que terra Assisinorum dicitur). In the following, we will therefore continue to use the transcription by Laurent and the English translation by Pringle (both note 9).  For the stemma of the ‘Descriptio’s’ long version and the division into textual families of its manuscript sources see Jonathan Rubin, The Manuscript Tradition of Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terre Sancte, in: The Journal of Mediaeval Latin 30 (2020), pp. 257– 286. We thank Jonathan Rubin for sharing his knowledge and research on Burchard of Mount Sion and the ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’ with us, for his great support and illuminating conversations. His and Eva Ferro’s research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1443/17).

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Burchard expressed skepticism when he could not see the biblical features with his own eyes. But whenever he was convinced, he conveyed his own actions and experiences to his readers as directly as possible, making them part of his journey in the imitatio Christi from one religious site to the next until they reached Golgotha: „Let us therefore proceed and cross the Kidron brook between the place of His prayer in agony and the place of His arrest in Gethsemane, and let us follow – if by whatever means we are permitted to come to Golgotha – where His feet stood fixed to the Cross while flowing with blood.“ Thus, the events of the Passion became an emotional element of the mental pilgrimage whose participants alternated between the earthly suffering of corporeal pain and the tremendous joy of eternal life. „Let us die there with Christ, that with Him we may likewise rise again!“¹³ Still today, Burchard’s persuasiveness is overwhelming. He suggests that every reader should follow and perceive Jesus bodily so that he or she may see and hear Jesus preaching in the Temple, teaching the disciples on the Mount of Olives, dining on Mount Sion, washing the disciples’ feet, giving up His body and blood, praying in Gethsemane, perspiring with bloody sweat, kissing the traitor, being led away a prisoner, scoffed at, spat upon, judged, carrying the cross, stumbling under the weight of the cross in the city gate, that may be seen today, being relieved by Simon of Cyrene and celebrating the mysteries of the Passion for us on Calvary.¹⁴

Burchard strove to give his readers the impression that the past remained alive in their own time and that their individual actions were part of a collective recollection of events.¹⁵ He emphasized the continuous actuality of these religious experiences that readers should reproduce in their corporeality and individuality.

 Pringle (note 9), p. 287; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), p. 63: Procedamus ergo, et inter locum orationis eius in agonia et locum captiuitatis eius in Gethsemani transeamus torrentem Cedron et sequamur, si quomodocumque concedatur nobis uenire in Golgatha, ubi steterunt fixi in cruce fluentes sanguine pedes eius; moriamur ibi cum Christo, ut cum Eo pariter resurgamus! Cf. Bartlett (note 11), pp. 110 – 111. For the connection between the actualization of the biblical past and emotional experience in the pilgrim narratives see Camille Rouxpetel, L’Occident au miroir de l’Orient chrétien, Rome 2015, esp. pp. 19 – 42. For the emotional experiences of sound, smell and touch in Felix Fabri’s text see Fischer (note 8), pp. 230 – 232.  Pringle (note 9), p. 241; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), pp. 19 – 20: ut uideat et audiat in templo Ihesum predicantem, in monte oliueti discipulos instruentem, in monte Sion cenantem, discipulorum pedes lauantem, corpus Suum et sanguinem tradentem, in Gethsemani orantem, sudore sanguineo defluentem, traditorem osculantem, captum trahi, illudi, conspui, iudicatum, crucem baiulantem, sub pondere crucis in porta ciuitatis, sicut hodie cernitur, deficientem, Cyreneum Simonem succedentem, in Caluaria pro nobis mysteria passionis celebrantem; Bartlett (note 11), pp. 4– 5. Christian Kiening, Mediating the Passion in time and space, in: Id./ Martina Stercken (eds.), Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Cursor Mundi 32), Turnhout 2018, pp. 115 – 146, here pp. 121– 122.  Pringle (note 9), pp. 241– 242: „The memory of each and every one of these places is still as complete and clear as it was on that day when things were done in their presence“; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), pp. 20: Horum omnium locorum et sin-

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Such pious practices were usually experienced in groups. Burchard was not the only author to include his readers when he recounted his movements through the Holy Land in his itinerary: „O God […] But let us put all this aside and come to Jerusalem as quickly as possible.“¹⁶ Similar passages can be found in many other pilgrim narratives, as early as in Egeria’s ‘Itinerarium’ (fourth century), along with later accounts like those of the Dominican Felix Fabri of Ulm or the Nuremberg citizen Gabriel Muffel.¹⁷ Reading these texts, the recipient became part of a group to gain access to salvation and to stimulate his or her emotions. The journey became sensually perceivable through a personal relationship between reader and author that simulated an active participation. Pilgrims like Burchard not only moved between different places in their writing – near and far, blessed and profane, religious and secular –, but also between different temporal stages.¹⁸ They distinguished between the narration of their own actions and historical events in the past tense and the description of sites in the present tense. On the one hand, Burchard emphasized his own religious behavior with words like „I stayed one night in these two places [Christ’s birthplace and manger], kissing now one, now the other“¹⁹ and, on the other hand, he tried to describe lasting facts like the position of Bethlehem („Bethlehem stands on a mountain“²⁰) as present events. Thus, his individual historical experience in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem became present and repeatable for everybody in his audience.What occurred was a multi-level cognitive process in time and space that connected the individual with the community, the past with the present, the visit to the Holy Land with the privileged readers at

gulorum adhuc ita plena et manifesta exstat memoria, sicut in illo die exstitit, quando presencialiter erant facta; Bartlett (note 11), pp. 4– 5. Cf. Christian Kiening, Fülle und Mangel. Medialität im Mittelalter, Zürich 2016, p. 298; Kiening (note 14), pp. 121– 122; Fischer (note 8), pp. 257– 264.  Pringle (note 9), p. 287; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), p. 62: Eya Deus [….] Sed omissis omnibus ad Ierusalem quantocius ueniamus. Cf. Bartlett (note 11), pp. 108 – 109.  For Felix Fabri cf. inter alia Schröder (note 5), passim; Andrea Klußmann, In Gottes Namen fahren wir. Die spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichte von Felix Fabri, Bernhard von Breydenbach und Konrad Grünemberg im Vergleich, Saarbrücken 2012; Kathryne Beebe, Fabri und die Klosterreformen des 15. Jahrhunderts, in: Folker Reichert/ Alexander Rosenstock (eds.), Die Welt des Frater Felix Fabri, Weißenhorn 2018, pp. 75 – 87. Muffel’s report survived only in London, British Library, Egerton 1900, fol. 2r–155v, written around 1467 apparently in Passau, not in Nuremberg, and at least partially in a German translation of the Italian travelogue ‘Libro d’oltramare’ by the Franciscan friar Niccolò da Poggibonsi; cf. Clive D. M. Cossar (ed.), The German Translation of Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s ‘Libro d’oltramare’ (Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 452), Göppingen 1985, p. 120: Aber das wir noch gewiser sind ob cristus gottes Sun sey gewesen.  Cf. Kiening (note 15), p. 298.  Pringle (note 9), p. 303; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), p. 79: Ego steti nocte una in hijs duobus locis, nunc istum, nunc illum osculando. Cf. Bartlett (note 11), pp. 156 – 157.  Pringle (note 9), p. 302; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), p. 78: Bethlehem uero sita est in monte. Cf. Bartlett (note 11), pp. 154– 155.

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home. Just like the acquisition of pilgrimage badges, material relics and souvenirs, the construction of the narrative was a sign of the pilgrim’s devotion to the holy places. However, the juxtaposition of the idea of timelessness and the actuality of the journey was especially pronounced in topographical sketches and their complex spatial vision. Burchard himself described the Holy Land only in terms that would allow his audience to translate his operational instructions into cartographic images. His diagrammatic approach in the introductory prologue of the short version of the ‘Descriptio’ demonstrates his efforts to make his account comprehensible and the land imaginable for the reader. He thought „of defining a central point among them and of setting out all the land around it in due measure.“²¹ For this center he chose the city of Acre, even though it was not located in the geographical middle of the Holy Land, but rather on the western border of the territory, along the shore of the Mediterranean sea. He also explains that the reason for his decision was that Acre „was better known than others“ in his time, that is a few decades after the end of Frankish sovereignty over Jerusalem. „From it I have drawn four lines corresponding to the four parts of the world and each quarter I have divided into three, so that those twelve divisions might correspond to the twelve winds of heaven.“²² In these sectors he „placed the cities and places mentioned especially in scripture, so that the location and disposition of individual places might more easily be found.“²³ This mental mapping in accordance with traditional systems such as the parts of the world and the wind directions structured a territory that represented the religious center of the world. Visualizations followed in the form of so-called wind diagrams that were created by scribes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This visual translation is ideally realized in a Munich manuscript with the short redaction of the text (fig. 2).²⁴ Acre, a triangle with fortified towers, dominates the graphic construction oriented to the North. From there, the pilgrimage routes through Palestine expand in a fan-like pattern of double lines, which defines twelve sectors of land and water. All lines emanate

 Pringle (note 9), pp. 242– 243. Cf. Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Jerusalem sehen. Reiseberichte des 12. bis 15. Jahrhunderts als empirische Anleitung zur geistigen Pilgerfahrt, Freiburg/Breisgau 2010, pp. 191– 244; Fischer (note 8), pp. 238 – 244.  Pringle (note 9), p. 243; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), p. 21: Aduertens autem, quomodo possem hec utiliter decribere, ita ut possent a legentibus imaginatione facili comprehendi, cogitaui centrum aliquod in ea ponere et circa illud totam terram modo debito ordinare. Et ad hoc elegi civitatem achonensem, tanquam plus aliis notam. Que tamen non est in medio, sed in occidentali eius fine supra mare sita. Et ab ipsa protraxi quatuor lineas, quatuor mundi partibus respondentes, et quamlibet quartam divisi in tria, ut responderent duodecim divisiones iste duodecim uentis celi, et in singulis divisionibus posui ciuitates et loca in scripturis magis nota, ut singulorum locorum situs et dispositio posset de facili reperiri, ad quam partem mundi esset collocata. Cf. Bartlett (note 11), pp. 6 – 7; Baumgärtner, Winds (note 8), p. 91 (with a revised English translation) and p. 96.  Pringle (note 9), p. 243; Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), p. 21; Bartlett (note 11), pp. 6 – 7.  Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 569, fol. 186v. See Baumgärtner, Reiseberichte (note 8), p. 475; Baumgärtner, Winds (note 8), pp. 97– 101.

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Fig. 2: Wind diagram; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 569, fol. 186v; 15th century. By permission of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.

from the town’s center and lead to individual wind names outside the circle. Each of the seven land sectors is accompanied by a reference to local biblical events or crusading places. Evidently, this wind diagram corresponds with the structure of the text

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by showing the seven sectors of the country with their matching winds. At first glance, the diagram appears quite secular, but the dichotomic superimposition of Christian content leads to a topological reinterpretation and to an increase in its perceived importance through the diagrammatic form. The Holy Land seemed to have a special significance in this transfer from the travel account to maps and diagrams, because the commemoration of Christ’s Life and Passion took place in these topographic spaces. The visualization allowed an imagined comprehension of the pilgrimage and salvation history. Thus, for the question of religion in cartography it is important to examine the maps and wind schemes that accompany the later versions of the travel account and to analyze the pious ideas behind them.

II The Florence map and its codicological framework The most creative of these visualizations is located in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (BML) in Florence.²⁵ This map, which was probably designed by a Tuscan copyist around 1300, contains 406 entries with toponyms of very different origins, including terms from the Bible, classical antiquity, contemporary vocabulary and various languages (fig. 3). Today, the map is part of a manuscript with the long version of the ‘Descriptio’ (family d).²⁶ Although the map has been studied before, its codicological context has never been thoroughly analyzed. Therefore, the codex will be described in more detail in the following paragraphs.²⁷ The codex BML Plutei 76.56 is a manuscript of 109 parchment folia.²⁸ Each page measures today – after at least one new binding for which some of the pages where trimmed down²⁹ – around 33 × 22.5 cm. The provenance of this codex is unknown.³⁰

 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (further: BML), Plut. 76.56, fols. 97v–98r. On the map cf. Reinhold Röhricht, Marino Sanudo sen. als Kartograph Palästinas, in: Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 21 (1898), pp. 84– 126 and plates, here pp. 104– 105 and pl. 23; Harvey (note 6), pp. 141– 154; Baumgärtner (note 6), pp. 56 – 64.  Rubin (note 12), pp. 267– 269 and 271.  The codicological analysis of the Florence, BML, Plut. 76.56, was made by Eva Ferro.  The manuscript has been described briefly by Angelo Maria Bandini, Catalogus codicum Latinorum Bibliothecae Mediceae Laurentianae, vol. 3, Florence 1776, col. 124– 126; Robert Black/ Gabriella Pomaro, La Consolazione della Filosofia nel medioevo e nel rinascimento italiano. Libri di scuola e glosse nei manoscritti fiorentini. Schoolbooks and their glosses in Florentine manuscripts = Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Education, Florence 2000, pp. 105 – 106; Harvey (note 6), pp. 141– 154.  The codex presents a so called „legatura medicea“, which means that it was bound or re-bound in 1571 when the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana was founded. The pages were probably trimmed on that occasion. Cf. Black/ Pomaro (note 28), p. 105.  Florence, BML, Plut. 76.56, fols. 1– 87 are of Florentine origin, see Black/ Pomaro (note 28), p. 105.

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Fig. 3: Map of the Holy Land; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 76.56, fols. 97v–98r.

The eightteenth century manuscript catalog suggests a dating in the fourteenth century. As for its content, the manuscript preserves several Latin texts: (1) fols. 1r–2r: ‘Accessus ad Boethium’ by Nicholas of Trivet; (2) fols. 2v–87r: Boethius, ‘De consolatione philosophiae’ accompanied by a commentary from the Italian Dominican Guglielmo de Cortemilia (d. 1342);³¹ (3) fols. 88r–90v: excerpts from Eusebius’ ‘Historia ecclesiastica’; (4) fols. 91r–92r: an anonymous treatise without title about the world, its geographical parts and ages (based on excerpts of various authors, Incipit: Mundus sicut dicit ysidorus universitas omnis que constat ex celo et terra); (5) fols. 92v–93r: an excerpt from Rufinus’ translation of Eusebius’ ‘Historia ecclesiastica (ch. 22 to 30); (6) fols. 93r–93v: excerpts from Jerome, ‘Contra Iovinianum’ (Book 2, ch. 7); (7) fols. 94r–101v: Burchard’s of Mount Sion ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’ (long version, family d)³² and a map of the Holy Land; (8) fols. 102r–109r: Cicero’s ‘Partitiones oratoriae’;  This commentary was overlooked by Bandini, who identified only the excerpts from Trivet‘s commentary; cf. Black/ Pomaro (note 28), p. 106. On Guglielmo de Cortemilia see Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi, vol. 2, Rome 1975, pp. 96 – 97.  For the stemma of the ‘Descriptio’s’ long version see Rubin (note 12), p. 271.

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Although this manuscript has been mostly studied as a coherent codex, a deeper analysis reveals that we are dealing with a composite artifact. In fact, pre-existing libelli, or booklets, which originally circulated independently, were bound together to create the manuscript. This becomes clear not only by observing the change in scribal hands throughout the codex, but also by taking its codicological composition into account.³³ Three scribal hands wrote major continuous parts of this manuscript: hand one (dated second quarter of the fourteenth century)³⁴ is responsible for fols. 1– 87 (Boethius and commentary);³⁵ hand two (dated to the first decade of the fourteenth century)³⁶ wrote fols. 88 – 101; and a third hand (dated to the first decade of the fourteenth century)³⁷ wrote Cicero’s treatise on fols. 102– 109. The analysis of the quire structure of the manuscript and the traces of use on the parchment also indicate that we are dealing with three different units that were at first independent and were bound together only at a later point.³⁸ In light of the composite nature of this manuscript, the following will focus on just the second unit that contains a series of excerpts, Burchard’s ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’ and the map of Palestine. We will refer to this unit as the ‘Florence libellus’ and provide a codicological description of this part of the manuscript. The ‘Florence libellus’ is in itself composed of two sub-units, each comprising one ternio (i. e. three bifolia folded in the middle). The first sub-unit comprises fols. 88 to 93 and contains various excerpts of historical, geographical and ethnological works, like Eusebius’ ‘Historia ecclesiastica’ and Jerome’s ‘Contra Iovinianum’. The second subunit, namely fols. 94 to 101, also comprises one ternio to which a single bifolium was added in the middle of the quire. This bifolium carries the map of the Holy Land. The structure of this second sub-unit can be thus summarized as follows: fol. 94r

Burchhard’s ‘Descriptio’ fol. 97r + fol. 97v map fol. 98r + fol. 98v Burchhard’s ‘Descriptio’ fol. 101v

In particular, the analysis of the bifolium with the map of the Holy Land allows two observations: firstly, the map has been inscribed on the flesh-side of the parchment,

 The criteria for identifying booklets inside a manuscript are laid down by Pamela Robinson, The ‘Booklet‘. A self-contained unit in composite manuscripts, in: Jane Robertson/ Pamela Robinson (eds.), The History of the Book in the West: 400AD–1455, vol. 1, Farnham 2010, pp. 159 – 182.  Cf. Black/ Pomaro (note 28), p. 105.  Here also another hand added some marginalia in Greek and Latin alphabet, f. i. on fol. 9r and fol. 43v.  Cf. Black/ Pomaro (note 28), p. 106.  Cf. Ibid., p. 106.  Boethius and the commentary were written on eleven quires (a quinio, 9 quaterniones and a ternio, from which the last page was cut out), the various excerpts of fols. 88r–93v and 94r–101v were each written on a ternio and the Partitiones oratoriae on a quaternio. A big stain on the bottom margin of fol. 87v, which is completely absent from the following pages indicates that these quires were kept somewhere separate. Several stains and discolorations on the first page of the last quire (Cicero) also point to the fact that this quire circulated independently, which allowed the first page of the quire to be worn out.

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i. e. the finer, more precious side, and secondly, fols. 97r and 98v (the hair-side of the map’s bifolium) look greasy, worn out and rather dirty, especially on the outer edges at the top and bottom. These findings suggest that the map was originally carried separately as an independent parchment of c. 33 × 45 cm and that it was folded in half, probably to protect the text written inside. After quite some time, when this folded bifolium was already showing signs of wear, somebody decided to add a text to the map and chose Burchard’s treatise. The text was copied on a ternio and the bifolium with the map was put in its center. To fit Burchard’s long version of the ‘Descriptio’ on the limited space of the ternio, the text was heavily redacted, abbreviated and written in a cramped script with copious abbreviations. Furthermore, when the map was bound at the center of the libellus, the scribe copied Burchard’s text so that the description of Jerusalem went around the map and thus the very heart of the libellus. To that end, the scribe copied the last paragraphs of the tertia divisio of the ‘Descriptio’ on the third page of the ternio (fol. 96v) and then inscribed the description of Jerusalem on what were once the outer edges of the map (fols. 97r and 98v), despite the fact that they were already in bad shape. Both the codicological composition of the ‘Florence libellus’ and the characteristics of Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’ that was copied in it make it clear that the libellus was literally built around the map and that the map as well as the paragraph on Jerusalem were meant to constitute its heart and apex. These codicological observations raise questions of why the libellus was constructed this way. As Erik Kwakkel suggested some time ago, a medieval manuscript can be understood as the result of a long series of decisions made by its creator.³⁹ The way he or she intended the book to be used is reflected in every stage of its production and can thus be questioned by modern scholars to discover his or her motivations and aims. Bearing this idea in mind, we will analyze the Burchard Holy Land map in the ‘Florence libellus’ (BML, Plut. 76.56) reflecting on the motivations that led its maker to produce the libellus as it is. The codicological findings regarding the map and the libellus have already shown that the map was drawn first and only later bound into the libellus. But what was the goal of the maker of this libellus when he produced the ternio with the excerpts and Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’? Was he trying to illustrate Burchard’s text with the available pre-existing map or enlarging the map by selecting texts that would augment the graphic medium? A first indication is the fact that the map was not left in its loose state but was bound in the middle of a quire. If the map was meant to illustrate Burchard’s text, why was it bound in the first place? Why was it not kept unattached to facilitate the simultaneous consultation of map and text? Map and text, both rather small codico-

 Erik Kwakkel, Decoding the Material Book. Cultural Residue in Medieval Manuscripts, in: Michael Robert Johnston/ Michael Van Dussen (eds.), The Medieval Manuscript Book. Cultural Approaches, Cambridge et al. 2015, pp. 60 – 76, here p. 60.

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logical units, could have been stowed in the same leather cover and taken out separately.⁴⁰ A second indication is the format of the libellus. According to the criteria developed by Bozzolo and Ornato, at 33 × 22.5 cm,⁴¹ our ‘Florence libellus’ falls into the category „medium-large“.⁴² A study of hagiographical libelli pointed out that examples of this size were not very common. Rather, this size was often chosen for libelli that were given as gifts or served as representational objects.⁴³ But if the ‘Florence libellus’ was intended as a precious gift, why was the text written on parchment that was as worn out as the outer margins of the Holy Land map? In the case of the ‘Florence libellus’ it seems more probable that the reason for its choice of format lay in the size of the map: since the libellus was constructed with the map as a starting point, it was the size of the map that determined format and dimension of the libellus. Both aspects suggest that the libellus was not intended as an illustration of Burchard’s work, but rather that the document represents an augmentation of a map of the Holy Land for which additional information was sought and found in excerpts as well as in Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’. Furthermore, the scribe’s choice not to bind the map into a pre-existing or new codex, but to create a libellus instead, is also relevant to this point. If the goal was to illustrate Burchard’s long version of the ‘Descriptio’, why did he not produce a traditional codex? Such a codex would have been the best option for the transmission of Burchard’s long text: the copyist could have reproduced the ‘Descriptio’ unredacted, without any concerns about the space at his disposal, with fewer abbreviations and in a clear, unconstrained script. He could have bound the map into such a codex as well, just as it was subsequently. Despite these advantages, the scribe and maker of the ‘Florence libellus’ decided against a classic codex. He decided for a small quire, a shortened and redacted text and a crowded script replete with abbreviations.

 Medieval library catalogues speak for instance of libelli „bound in limp parchment or in pergameno“ in contrast to codices that are bound „in asseribus“. Libelli could also be kept together in ‘parchment wraps’ („couvert de parchemin“), cf. Robinson (note 33), p. 165 (the quotation can also be found there).  The libellus may have been even bigger if we take into account that it was cut when it was bound. While the result of the binding process can still be seen on the map where some lines of texts have been cut away at the top and bottom, the trimming is not apparent on the text pages of the libellus because of their large blank upper and lower margins. Thus, it is probable that the libellus was also longer, like the map. On this topic cf. Joseph-Claude Poulin, Les libelli dans l’édition hagiographique avant le XIIe siècle, in: Martin Heinzelmann (ed.), Livrets, collections et textes. Études sur la tradition hagiographique latine (Beihefte der Francia 63), Ostfildern 2006, pp. 15 – 193, here p. 25: „En règle générale, les livrets encore existants se présentent sous un format inférieur à celui de leur origine, au gré des opérations de reliure qu’ils ont dû subir à plusieurs reprises pour la plupart.“  Carla Bozzolo/ Ezio Ornato, Pour une histoire du livre manuscrit au Moyen Age. Trois essais de codicologie quantitative, Paris 1980, réimpr. 1983 (avec un supplément important), p. 218.  Poulin (note 41), p. 23.

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In addition, the texts, which the copyist filled the first sub-libellus with, indicate his intention to provide as much information as possible within the smallest codicological unit. He selected works that could be useful in the context of the map. From these opera, only those parts that were actually relevant for this objective were extracted: a severely shortened compendium of secular and religious history from the ‘Historia ecclesiastica’ (no. 3), an overview of the world and its geographical regions extrapolated from various authors (no. 4), notes on the pagan cults in the East from Rufinus (no. 5) and excerpts on the dietary habits of Arabs and Saracens from Jerome (no. 6). While a codex would have made sense from the point of view of the text’s transmission, it presented some obstacles with regard to the map and its usability. First of all, in a codex, the map could not have been opened completely and its middle part would have remained hidden within the codex’s spine. Moreover, a map on a single, unbound bifolium is very mobile – it can be held up, passed around, moved and turned – which is more difficult in the case of a codex. A book is per se bulkier, heavier and less flexible than a single page, especially when it comes in the size of our map (unfolded c. 33 × 45 cm), as compared with a slim libellus. In short, placement within a codex would have hindered the map’s usability. The transmission inside a libellus, on the contrary, allowed the maker to maintain the functionality of the map: the graphic representation remained completely visible, since the libellus could be opened flat. The whole document also stayed light and easy to move, turn and lift. To summarize, this codicological analysis of the ‘Florence libellus’ has revealed the motives and aims of its maker: the medium was chosen because it maintained the performative agility offered by the map’s unbound bifolium and at the same time allowed for the expansion of its content. Thus, in the case of the ‘Florence libellus’ we are not dealing with a ‘little book’, namely a book that was downsized in format and content, – as the term libellus would suggest – but rather with a kind of ‘hyper-map’, a graphic representation that was augmented in terms of its material form and content, while its strengths remained intact. In the end, the analysis of the ‘Florence libellus’ allows for three conclusions. Firstly, although it is unclear if it can be called a Burchard map, it is still an important example of how Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’ – thanks to its comprehensive geographical information – could be used to expand on a map. Secondly, the ‘Florence libellus’ represents an interesting case for the study of medieval maps, their phenomenology and forms of transmission. In the present case, the map, after being used as a loose bifolium, became the center of a libellus, without losing its original functionality as a representation of the Holy Land’s geography. Thirdly, this particular libellus offers further insights for the study of medieval libelli in general. While the peculiarities of the usage of libelli in the transmission of hagiographical and liturgical material have

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already been studied,⁴⁴ the ‘Florence libellus’ testifies to their use in the context of geographical literature and its visual accompaniments.

III Holy Land maps as an emotional experience The codicological analysis reveals that the sheet with the map, touched and worn out on its outer edges by many hands, had clearly existed before Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’ was written around it. Today we still see the traces of that use, but we do not know where the map came from and which routes it took. Perhaps it was made in Florence or it traveled to Tuscany with a pilgrim or a mendicant preacher. In any case, the map became the center of an eight-leaf libellus that was created around the innovative geographic visualization. On the first page of the bifolium, i. e. the reverse of the map, probably the writer of the text or a person associated to him, but not the mapmaker, drew a small sketch of the most important buildings in Jerusalem (fig. 4).⁴⁵ The eight gates, the citadel or David’s Tower and, near St Stephen’s Gate or Gate of Ephraim, the Cloudy Tower (turris nebulosa)⁴⁶ appear as parts of the pewter-crowned city walls, which enclose the Lord’s Sepulchre (sepulcrum domini) and the rest of the old Gate of Judgement: both envisioned in the space between the old and the new wall. Inside, there are small illustrations of the house of Pilate (palatium pilati), the place of the condemnation of Jesus (licostrates), the Sheep-Pool (probatica piscina) and the Temple Mount with the Dome of the Rock (templum domini). On the other side of the Kidron brook, the House of Caiaphas (domus Cayfe), the House of the Virgin Mary (domus s. marie), the great room in which Jesus shared his last meal with his disciples (Cenaculum) and the kings’ tombs are unified in a semicircle.With the exception of the house of Pilate, all of these places are mentioned in Burchard’s text, whose course the plan follows perfectly. It is in the same red and dark brown ink as the long version of the ‘Descriptio’ in this manuscript, which contains small marginal drawings illustrating the most important places of Christ’s life and deeds in the same shades and similar forms.⁴⁷

 Poulin (note 41), p. 16 and p. 18, indicated that the libellus offered some advantages for the transmission of hagiographical literature because of its flexible form. It could not only adapt to different purposes and editorial concepts, but could also be integrated with additional material once it reached its destination. Cf. Pierre-Marie Gy, The Different Forms of Liturgical Libelli, in: Gerard Austin (ed.), Fountain of Life, Washington 1991, pp. 23 – 34, who has studied the peculiarities of liturgical libelli. He was able to show that libelli in particular were used for specific rituals such as sacraments for the sick and the dead, the consecration of churches as well as the recording of new offices.  Florence, BML, Plut. 76.56, fol. 97r with a map of Jerusalem; cf. Röhricht (note 25), p. 104 and pl. 24; Harvey (note 6), pp. 144– 145.  Cf. Pringle (note 9), p. 289; Adrian J. Boas, Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades. Society, Landscape and Art in the Holy City under Frankish Rule, London, New York 2001, p. 69 and p. 272.  Florence, BML, Plut. 76.56, fols. 94r, 94v, 95r; Harvey (note 6), p. 145.

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Fig. 4: Plan of Jerusalem; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 76.56, fol. 97r.

It is obvious, that the libellus with Burchard’s text and the plan of Jerusalem were carefully constructed and composed around the map and its geographical information. The loose bifolium or sheet was easy to hold in one’s hand, to move and to turn around in all four directions. Users were able to touch and feel its materiality, the two sides of the parchment. Even as the center of eight folia in the ‘Florence libellus’, it kept its original flexibility and practicality. The map’s multi-functionality was only lost, at least in part, when the libellus later became a segment of a heavy and less mobile codex. This increased its chance of preservation, but from then on it remained locked away and hidden in a library. On the separate bifolium a contemporary observer would have recognized the short texts framed in red as pictorial elements within a spatial and temporal projection of the Holy Land’s geography. Its topographic sketch is based on the possibility of rotating the parchment around and looking at it from different perspectives. The Mediterranean coast, for example, is not orientated to one single direction. It runs from the south on the right hand to the north on the left along the bottom of the map, but it turns upwards at either end of the parchment, even though the coast actually continues northward on the left-hand side and only turns southeast along the Red Sea to the right.⁴⁸ The reason for this was probably not that the scribe realized that

 Harvey (note 6), p. 146.

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he had not left enough space to complete the shoreline in the south. It seems more likely that this turn was made on purpose and was part of a broader tradition. Following Reinhold Röhricht, Paul Harvey pointed out that two printed late fifteenth century maps and one manuscript map of the early sixteenth century followed the same outlines. These maps are in the ‘Rudimentum noviciorum’, produced by Lucas Brandis at Lübeck in 1475, in the ‘Prologus Arminensis in mappam Terresancte’, from the same press in about 1478, and in a copy of Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’ (family c according to Jonathan Rubin) in Hamburg.⁴⁹ All of them, including the Florentine bifolium, have the same dynamic shape of the coastline; they are written on a double-page opening and end with the Red Sea in the south. Three of them accompany Burchard’s work in the long version, while only the ‘Prologus’, a work in four sections, provides in his third part a narrative of Palestine, which is associated with Burchard’s text, but modifies it fundamentally. In their details, these geographic representations are designed differently. The one in the ‘Rudimentum’ consists of rounded hills with the names of towns, mountains and other locations; the one in the ‘Prologus’ contains systematically arranged place names with figures referring to the chapters of the narrative; and the Hamburg map delivers words and sentences taken from Burchard’s account. Striking is the rectangular pattern of the Florentine map, which makes it appear likewise ordered and uniform. In all these representations, the regularity is intentional. Like the hills of the ‘Rudimentum’, the 406 entries of the Florentine bifolium written in black ink within red frames are evenly distributed across the surface.⁵⁰ Each box is meant to be identifiable by a name and have a specific connotation. The (so to speak) ‘imprisoned’ characters are transformed into pictorial elements that must submit to the primacy of their regular distribution. As a result, the temporal dimensions are also leveled. Time is subjected to higher ranking principles of order. Rachel’s well and the crusader fortresses are positioned side by side, as are Cain’s tomb and the Mountain of the Leopards, where Muslims visited what they believed was the tomb of the Prophet Joshua.⁵¹ This representation of the Holy Land provides a systematic order that consists predominantly of rectangular outlines. Even Jerusalem and Acre have to obey this regularity and cannot obtrude. The order is only rarely disturbed by streets and boundaries such as the borderlines between the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch.

 Cf. Röhricht (note 25), pp. 104– 105 with pl. 7; Harvey (note 6), pp. 146 – 154 with a reproduction of the three maps. For the manuscript see Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. geogr. 59, pp. 70 – 71; cf. Rubin (note 12), pp. 265 – 267 and 271.  Baumgärtner, Reiseberichte (note 8), pp. 476 – 483 for the following.  Röhricht (note 25), pl. 23: Mons leopardorum. Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ed. Laurent (note 9), p. 28; cf. Pringle (note 9), pp. 250 – 251; Bartlett (note 11), pp. 26 – 27; Fischer (note 8), p. 249. Jacob of Verona adopted this passage including its doubt about the tomb circa 1335; cf. Liber peregrinationis fratris Jacobi de Verona, ed. Ugo Monneret de Villard, Rome 1950, c. 14.

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On these maps, we cannot discern the acts of rulers, pilgrims, and crusaders. The space follows other principles of construction. It is not to be measured. It is not even measurable. The textual and pictorial structure eradicates all linearity of space and time. If we want to read and comprehend the entries, we have to turn the page frequently and connect them to the textual description. It is clear that the meaning of these toponyms is easier to understand after reading the accompanying account, which defines the location of places with exact distances and specifies the operational framework. Such practices are seen in quite a few contemporary cartographic visualizations. Another example is Tucher’s famous pilgrim map, whose copy by his brother Endres is preserved today in Paris (see fig. 1 on p. 278 in this volume).⁵² At first glance, it shows the Way of the Cross from the palace of Pilate to Golgotha within the structure of the cardinal directions from sunrise to sunset, from east to west.What appears to be linear is, upon closer inspection, multilayered like the map in Florence. To read the different inscriptions, the page must be rotated continuously: starting at the house of Pilate, the word auffgang (sunrise) is upside down and the paragraphs on the right, which provide only rudimentary information, are readable. If we want to know more, we have to turn the page and thus receive additional information that is completely different. Finally, it becomes clear that details about locations, distances and events concerning the different sites are listed separately. They can only be connected to each other if the page is constantly turned in all four directions. The text reflects this necessary procedure that dynamizes the perception of its subject.⁵³ This approach diverges from the typical sequence of paths from site to site provided by the small guides that any pilgrim could buy. The map presents more than the linear character of the Way of the Cross. A pilgrim could start at any of the many stations and follow the local topography, instead of the chronology of Christ’s Passion. The correlation of places and events became tangible through the map. The resulting performative strategy allowed viewers to envision the holy sites in their own social and intellectual environment.⁵⁴ This flexibility and the possibility to move and rotate the map were especially important for the faithful at home to increase the intensity of their imitatio Christi. Thus, they experienced the movement from one holy place to the other, concentrated on every single site on the route and strengthened their religious emotions. They conquered the Holy Land on the arduous itinerary from one station to the next along a

 [Hans Tucher], Karte des Weges der Kreuztragung Christi: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés O2 f. 13 ad 1, fol. 6r; texts edited by Randall Eugene Herz, Briefe Hans Tuchers d. Ä. aus dem Heiligen Land und andere Aufzeichnungen, in: Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 84 (1997), pp. 61– 92, here pp. 75 – 79. Cf. Herz (note 7), pp. 648 – 654; Kiening (note 15), pp. 304– 310; Kiening, Mediating (note 14), pp. 131– 134.  Herz (note 52), p. 77, 17– 18: So man das puch legt in die vier ort, so sicht man eigenlichen, wie das des Pilatuß hauß jegen dem auffgang der sunnen gelegen ist.  Kiening (note 15), p. 310.

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path of different sites without a special sequence. On this path they could choose where they wanted to go next, instead of following a fixed sequence as defined by a site list or the description of a literary travel account with its static setting of space. Raoul Du Bois has shown how the foldable representation of the Holy Land in the printed edition of Bernhard Breydenbach’s travelogue reproduces the experience of the journey.⁵⁵ The three-folded leaflet – a woodcut designed by his traveling companion, the Dutch painter Erhard Reuwich – represents all the different parts of the landscape around Jerusalem.⁵⁶ It is fascinating to explore the process of opening the folds and to see how the picture of the city expands. It remains a perfect circle with a fold in the middle until the last opening reveals an elongated oval shape. The view of the city initially conveys the perfection of a circle that is seen yearningly from afar and then transforms into a more detailed vision of the stations where the Passion of Christ took place. The map changes from a general view of the fortified city walls to a sensual experience of seeing and touching individual houses and streets. The process of opening or turning the pages not only reflects the reader’s active participation in approaching the desired places, but also his or her ability to experience the religious sites in a sensory way. Here, as in many other pilgrimage and travel accounts, chronicles and encyclopedias, the turning of the page gains special importance. As the Ghent autograph of the ‘Liber Floridus’⁵⁷ or the sequence of maps by Matthew Paris⁵⁸ demonstrate, the physical act of turning the pages towards Jerusalem is part of a strategy to recreate and comprehend the spatial dimensions of the pilgrimage. This kind of performance becomes even more complex when we analyze different accounts with regard to their text and its instructions. For example, the Nuremberg council member Gabriel Muffel, who wrote about his journey around 1465 – 1467, instructed his readers with the words Ker vmb so vindestu die stat Ierusalem. ⁵⁹ The turnaround or ‘Umkehr’ is to be perceived as a double process of inner and outer experience as we turn the page and behold the

 See the contribution of Raoul Du Bois in this volume.  Frederike Timm, Der Palästina-Reisebericht des Bernhard von Breidenbach und die Holzschnitte Erhard Reuwichs. Die Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (1486) als Propagandainstrument im Mantel der gelehrten Pilgerschrift, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 242– 261.  Ghent, University Library, Ms 92. See Hanna Vorholt, Shaping Knowledge. The Transmission of the Liber Floridus (Warburg Institute Studies and Texts 6), London 2017. See also the contribution of Nathalie Bouloux in this volume.  London, British Library, Royal Ms 14 C VII and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library, Ms 26. See Daniel K. Connolly, Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris, in: The Art Bulletin 81 (1999), pp. 598 – 622; Daniel K. Connolly, The Maps of Matthew Paris. Medieval Journeys through Space, Time and Liturgy, Woodbridge, Rochester/NY 2009; Salvatore Sansone, Tra cartografia politica e immaginario figurativo. Matthew Paris e l’iter de Londinio in Terram sanctam, Rome 2009.  London, British Library, Egerton 1900, fol. 9r. I found the citation thanks to Raoul Du Bois, see also his contribution in this volume.

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picture of Jerusalem on the following page (see fig. 2 on p. 290 in this volume).⁶⁰ This underlines the importance of performativity in religious devotion. It seems that Reuwich staged this turning of pages most clearly in his depiction of the panoramic view of Jerusalem.⁶¹ In the act of unfolding his large image of the Holy Land a specific dramaturgy is played out, a multilayered procedure of a gradual advancement to the center of holiness. The three folds of the map illustrate – as Raoul Du Bois has excellently explained – movements in geographical space: while in the closed first variant, a moored ship and a circular Jerusalem symbolize a motionless state of longing, the gradual unfolding of the landscapes introduces movement. Entering the city and visiting the Temple Mount become steps on the way to the desired goal of spiritual and physical ascension. The opening of the map’s three folds thus represents an action that symbolically implements the narrative qualities of the Holy Land’s descriptions. The Florentine manuscript does not go so far, but the sketch map with its redframed toponyms makes it possible to experience the holy landscape and the associated religious stories. Incorporated into the codex, it becomes a memorial token, a handwritten trace of authenticity that oscillates between the act of reading and the actual stay in the Holy Land, between the observation and the emotional feeling of being there. Moreover, the Florentine copyist adapted the text to contemporary events – such as the loss of Acre – that created fear and anxiety. Burchard had written about the contraction of the Christian Holy Land due to Muslim military pressure, and the copyist updated the information further. His supplements to the text suggest that he wrote under the impression of Acre’s fall in 1291: of his own accord, he added that the city had been conquered by Muslims and razed to the ground. On that day, he wrote, when several thousand Christians had been massacred, a huge cross appeared in the sky before vespers to indicate that many people had been martyred.⁶² Such passages take their reader by the hand and lead him into a transcendent world of divine appearances, like the sign of the cross and the martyred saints, which can be traced back to the last Christian bastion in Palestine. In many other ways, Burchard’s account, which was created around the preexisting map, was adapted to strengthen the emotional experience of the audience. An additional element is provided by pictograms of buildings in the margins of the manuscript’s folios, which visualize the text’s toponyms and connect them to the places on the map. The scribe tried to make text and image interdependent, although he worked with established entities and could not change much. His notes on the margins help to topographically locate the biblical stories of the account, adding another element to the complex mediality of the map.

 London, British Library, Egerton 1900, fol. 9v.  Cf. Timm (note 56), pp. 242– 261.  Florence, BML, Plut. 76.56, fol. 94rb, lines 29 – 33.

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Later scribes provided the ‘Descriptio’ with further images. Four manuscripts – three of which contain the long version without the prologue and date from long after Burchard’s writing – include a wind diagram that divides the land into sectors as defined by the author.⁶³ The diagram in London (c. 1380 – 1420),⁶⁴ part of the manuscript family b, is rich in text and oriented to the south (fig. 5). It mainly focuses on the area east of the shoreline. The lines of seven winds or cardinal points, marked in red, divide the territory into six sections, over which the towns, castles, mountains and holy sites of Palestine (not all of which were listed by Burchard) are distributed. This diagram is also designed to be dynamic and flexible, and to be viewed from different angles as well. If one wants to read the words and individual paragraphs, one has to move the page around or turn the manuscript back and forth. Thus, the words become part of the dynamic motion of the winds. This diagram is obviously not a direct visualization but was the result of different directions for writing and reading.⁶⁵ Its multi-layered and circular structure required the rotation of the page to reveal its inscriptions. Multiple linkages gave readers the chance to open themselves up to a deeper religious experience of the Promised Land, which had been lost for the Christians after the fall of Acre. The biblical and religious dimensions of the unique landscape probably stimulated the scribes’ intentions as well as the users’ perceptions. Just as pilgrims were interested in getting mobile and portable objects, the scribes were seeking to develop dynamic visualizations for them.

5 Conclusion This paper analyzed different graphic representations of Palestine with regard to their religious significance and their capability to transfer their readers emotionally to the  London, British Library, Add. Ms. 18929, fols. 1r–50v (c. 1380 – 1420, Erfurt, St. Peter; long version, family b), fol. 51r with a wind diagram; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung, Ms. lat. oct. 293 (olim Hildesheim Gymnasialbibliothek MS 17, 14th/15th century, long version, family c), fol. 1*v with a wind diagram; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 569, fols. 184r–210v (14th c., short version), fol. 186v with a wind diagram; Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. geogr. 59, pp. 10 – 64 (16th c., long version, family c), here p. 13 with a wind diagram. Cf. Baumgärtner, Reiseberichte (note 8), pp. 470 – 476; Baumgärtner, Winds (note 8), pp. 99 – 104; for the stemma with the families cf. Rubin (note 12), pp. 264– 267.  London, British Library, Add. MS. 18929, fol. 51r; cf. Baumgärtner, Reiseberichte (note 8), p. 475; Baumgärtner, Winds (note 8), p. 101.  Sybille Krämer, Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis. Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie (stw 2176), Berlin 2016. On late medieval cosmologic diagrams in general cf. Katrin Müller, Visuelle Weltaneignung. Astronomische und kosmologische Diagramme in Handschriften des Mittelalters (Historische Semantik 11), Göttingen 2008; Eckart Conrad Lutz/ Vera Jerjen/ Christine Putz (eds.), Diagramm und Text. Diagrammatische Strukturen und die Dynamisierung von Wissen und Erfahrung (Überstorfer Colloquium 2012), Wiesbaden 2014; Henrike Haug/ Christina Lechtermann/ Anja Rathmann-Lutz (eds.), Diagramme im Gebrauch (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 22/2), Berlin, Boston 2017.

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Fig. 5: Wind diagram; London, British Library, Add. Ms. 18929, fol. 51r; c. 1380 – 1420. © British Library Board.

holy sites, thus allowing them to experience a pilgrimage from home and to perceive the Holy Land tangibly even from afar. Such cartographical projections of the Holy Land in text and image were very versatile. The different forms of visualization and organization – the wind diagrams, maps and marginalia – were developed alongside each other within a short period of time. The study focused in particular on the maps

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and wind diagrams of Palestine transmitted in the context of Burchard of Mount Sion’s ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’. One of their earliest examples is preserved in the manuscript Florence, BML Plutei 76.56. Its paleographical and codicological analysis has revealed that the map was once carried separately as an independent bifolium. Only later it was extended to a libellus containing texts about Palestine and the East. This was just one of many possible strategies employed by copyists to create graphic representations of Palestine resulting from a productive combination of text and image. Some scribes added further organizing principles and visualization methods to spark emotions or provide orientation in accordance with religious requirements. The analysis of this interplay between text and image presents an instructive model of how representations of geography and religion could interact and create innovative ideas.

Raoul DuBois

Getting There by Manipulating the Medium

Material Dimensions of Virtual Pilgrimages to the Holy Land Abstract: Attempting to mediate the experience of their journey to the Holy Land, the pilgrims of the fifteenth century experimented with different forms of representation. In descriptions including precise measurements or detailed drawings and maps, they reproduced the Holy Land and brought it back to Europe. This article explores the material and medial dimension in these reproductions of the Holy Land, by looking into processes of reorienting the book, turning the pages or unfolding maps and largescale woodcuts. Keywords: Virtual Pilgrimage, materiality, mediality, Hans Tucher, Burchard of Mount Sion, Felix Fabri, Bernhard von Breydenbach A pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a journey through time and space. In the fifteenth century hundreds of pilgrims set sail for Palestine where, according to the widely read ‘Descriptio terrae sanctae’ (‘Description of the Holy Land’), the memory of the biblical past was „as complete as it was on that day when things were done“.¹ To see the places with their own eyes and to walk among the relics of the biblical era was a way to immerse themselves in the time of Christ.² In the fifteenth century more and more pilgrims wrote detailed accounts of their pilgrimage to the Holy Land, not only to document their presence and to keep track of the indulgences they had earned, but as a way of retrieving the salvific energy and reproducing the experience of their journey. Such first-hand accounts could present the raw material for a guide to a ‘virtual pilgrimage’,³ such as Felix Fabri’s (1441– 1502) ‘Die Sionpilger’ (‘The Pilgrims to Sion’),⁴

 Burchardi de Monte Sion description terrae sanctae, ed. Johann Christian Mauritz Laurent, Peregrinatores medii aevi quatuor. Burchardus de Monte Sion, Ricoldus de Monte Crucis, Odoricus de Foro Julii,Wilbrandus de Oldenborg, Leipzig 1864, pp. 1– 100, here pp. 19 – 20; Burchard of Mount Sion, Description of the Holy Land (1274– 1283), in: Denys Pringle (ed.), Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 1187– 1291 (Crusade Texts in Translation 23), New York 2012, pp. 241– 321, here p. 241: „The memory of each and every one of these places is still as complete as it was on that day when things were done in their presence.“  Christian Kiening, Mediating the Passion in Time and Space, in: id/ Martina Stercken (eds.), Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Cursor Mundi 32), Turnhout 2018, pp. 115 – 147, here p. 122.  In recent years the phenomenon of so-called ‘virtual pilgrimages’ has been the subject of lively discussion within numerous disciplines: Pnina Arad, ‚As If You Were There‘: The Cultural Impact of Raoul Marc Etienne DuBois, Universität Zürich, Deutsches Seminar, Schönberggasse 2, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-012

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serving as a surrogate for the long, expensive and often dangerous journey. Eager to find ways to keep the memory alive, the pilgrims experimented with means of mediating their experience of the journey to the Holy Land that went beyond the reproduction of the Holy Land in text and image.⁵ In this article, I will look at a few especially telling examples of illustrated guidebooks for the pilgrimage to the Holy Land: a map drawn by Hans Tucher, vivid descriptions by Burchard of Mount Sion and Felix Fabri, miniatures in a German translation of Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ (‘Book of Overseas’), and the woodcut illustrations in Bernhard von Breydenbach’s ‘Peregrinatio in terram sanctam’ (‘Pilgrimage to the Holy Land’). These examples show how conscious fifteenth-century pilgrims were of the materiality and mediality of transmission. While some of these examples have been identified as vehicles for a ‘virtual pilgrimage’,⁶ their material dimension is usually not taken into consideration. As a way of introducing a narrative dimension to a seemingly ‘descriptive image’, the manipulation of

Two Pilgrim’s Map of Palestine, in: Bianca Kühnel/ Galit Noga-Banai/ Hanna Vorholt (eds.), Visual Constructs of Jerusalem (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 18), Turnhout 2014, pp. 307– 317; Kathryne Beebe, The Jerusalem of the Mind’s Eye: Imagined Pilgrimage in the Fifteenth Century, in: Kühnel/ Noga-Banai/ Vorholt (eds.) (as above), pp. 409 – 420; Kathryne Beebe, Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: the Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri’s ‘Die Sionpilger’, in: Essays in Medieval Studies 25 (2008), 39 – 70; Daniel K. Connolly, Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris, in: The Art Bulletin, 81/4 (1999), pp. 598 – 622; Gavin Fort, Make a Pilgrimage for Me: The Role of Place in Late Medieval Proxy Pilgrimage, in: Albrecht Classen (ed.), Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time (Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 22), Berlin 2019, pp. 424– 445; Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Virtual Pilgrimages?: Enclosure and the Practice of Piety at St. Katherine’s Convent, Augsburg, in: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60, 1 (2009), pp. 45 – 73; Jacob Klingner, Reisen zum Heil. Zwei Ulmer ‚Pilgerfahrten im Geiste‘ vom Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts, in: Martin Huber/ Christine Lubkoll/ Steffen Martus/ Yvonne Wübben (eds), Literarische Räume. Architekturen – Ordnungen – Medien, Berlin 2012, pp. 59 – 73; Kathryn M. Rudy,Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Disciplina Monastica 8), Turnhout 2011; ead., Virtual Pilgrimage through the Jerusalem Cityscape, in: Kühnel/ Noga-Banai/ Vorholt (eds.), (as above), pp. 381– 393; cf. also the articles in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 93/4 (2019).  Felix Fabri, Die Sionpilger, ed. Wieland Carls (Texte des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit 39), Berlin 1999; Katheryne Beebe, Pilgrim and Preacher. The Audiences and Observant Spirituality of Friar Felix Fabri (1437/8 – 1502), Oxford 2014.  Andreas Betschart, Zwischen zwei Welten. Illustrationen und Berichte westeuropäischer Jerusalemreisender des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Würzburger Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie 15), Würzburg 1996.  Kathryn Blair-Moore, Seeing through text: the visualization of Holy Land architecture in Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s ‘Libro d’oltramare’, 14th-15th centuries, in: Word and Image 25 (2009) pp. 402– 415; ead., The Disappearance of an Author and the Emergence of a Genre. Niccolò da Poggibonsi and Pilgrimage Guidebooks between Manuscript and Print Moore, in: Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2013) pp. 357– 411; ead., The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land. Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, Cambridge 2017; Elizabeth Ross, Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book. Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio from Venice to Jerusalem, University Park 2014.

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the carrier medium presents an exciting way of mediating the experience of a journey to the Holy Land.⁷

Here and there, then and now When Hans VI Tucher (1428 – 1491), a wealthy merchant and high-ranking city official, found his last earthly resting place in the family tomb in Saint Sebaldus Church in February 1491, Nuremberg mourned one of its most dazzling figures. Not only had the deceased turned the Tucher family business into one of Nuremberg’s most successful trading companies, he had also reformed the city council’s library by doubling its holdings and overseen the renovation of Saint Sebaldus Church, to which he had donated precious works of art.⁸ While he left a lasting impression on the city, the thing that would define the memoria of Hans VI Tucher in the centuries to come was his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1479 – 1480. The richly illuminated Tucher family chronicle of 1606 portrays Hans VI presenting a money bag amid the badges recalling his pilgrimages.⁹ But his reputation as Nuremberg’s most celebrated pilgrim is based less on the journey itself than on the highly popular account of the pilgrimage he wrote after his return to Nuremberg.¹⁰ Unlike his fellow pilgrim Sebald II Rieter († 1488), who, like his father before him, added his account to the family chronicle,¹¹ Hans Tucher wished to share his experience with a broader audience. His ‘Reyß ins Heylig Land’ (‘Voyage to the Holy Land’) is believed to be the first travelogue written with the intention of publication in the relatively young medium of print.¹² It was first published in 1482 by the Augsburg printer Hans Schönsperger († 1521) and enjoyed tremendous success, with a total of six editions being published in Augsburg, Nuremberg and Strasbourg by 1486.¹³ The vivid descriptions and precise measurements of the sanctuaries had a noticeable impact on the genre and were frequently copied by

 For research on the work of the thirteenth-century historiographer Matthew Paris († 1259), exploring how the manipulation of the carrier medium can turn maps into a device for ‘virtual pilgrimage’, see Daniel K. Connolly, The Maps of Matthew Paris. Medieval Journeys Through Space, Time and Liturgy, Woodbridge, Rochester/NY, 2009.  Randall Herz, Die ‘Reise ins gelobte Land’ Hans Tuchers des Älteren (1479 – 1480). Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung und kritische Edition eines spätmittelalterlichen Reiseberichts (Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter / Schriften des Sonderforschungsbereich 226 Würzburg/Eichstätt 38), Wiesbaden 2002, pp. 20 – 21.  Stadtarchiv Nürnberg E 29/III Nr. 258, fol. 74r.  Tucher, Reise, ed. Herz (note 8), pp. 327– 636.  Das Reisebuch der Familie Rieter, ed. Reinhold Röhricht/ Heinrich Meisner (Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 168), Tübingen 1884, pp. 36 – 149.  Christian Kiening, Hybride Zeiten. Temporale Dynamiken 1400 – 1600, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 140 (2018), pp. 194– 231, here p. 217.  Tucher, Reise, ed. Herz (note 8), pp. 163 – 189.

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Tucher’s contemporaries,¹⁴ while his itinerary was used in ‘Fortunatus’, the first genuine German prose romance, to depict the hero’s journey.¹⁵ In Nuremberg, however, Tucher was celebrated long before the first copies of his ‘Reyß’ entered the book market. Upon his return the city welcomed its most famous pilgrim like royalty. They [Sebald Rieter junior and Hans Tucher] were festively welcomed at home, as many rode out towards them. Some rode up to Kronburg and to its surrounding forest. Both of the city’s mayors, Ruprecht Haller and Paulus Rieter, rode towards them as well as the larger part of the city’s council. Furthermore, all mercenaries walked out to the forest on foot, and the people gathered as if it was the entry of a prince.¹⁶

Tucher’s reputation was in large part the result of a well-planned communication strategy. In numerous letters he sent to Nuremberg during his pilgrimage he shared his experiences in the Holy Land with those who had remained at home. These letters were highly sought after and were enthusiastically circulated within Nuremberg’s high society. According to his elder brother Endres II (1423 – 1507), a letter he had received

 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. Konrad Dietrich Hassler, 3 vol. (Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 2– 4), Stuttgart 1843 – 1849, vol. 1, pp. 327– 328; Pro quo notificando accipio descriptionem, quam honestus vir Johannes Tucher, civis Norimbergensis, confecit in lingua theutonica de dominico sepul- chro, qui anno 1479, uno videlicet anno ante meum primum introitum, fuit multis diebus in Jerusalem, et dominicum tumulum curiossisime inspexit, et manibus, pedibus, digitis, et extentis brachiis mensuram ejus accepit. Cujus quidem descriptionem mecum in Jerusalem habui, et per omnia, sicut scripsit de sancto sepulchro, sic inveni. Ideo eum de theutonica scripsit de sancto sepul- chro, sic inveni, et evagatorio meo inserui, uti veram et a viro maturo et veraci confectam. Felix Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings in the Holy Land, ed. Aubrey Stewart, 4 vols. London 1892– 1893, vol. 1, pp. 403 – 404: „For this description I avail myself of the account of the Lord’s sepulchre which a respectable man named Johannes Tucher, a citizen of Nuremburg-, has written in the German tongue. He spent many days at Jerusalem in the year 1479, one year, that is, before my first visit, and he examined the Lord’s sepulchre with the most minute care, and took its measurements with his hands, feet, and outstretched arms. I had his account of it with me at Jerusalem, and found all that he had written concerning the holy sepulchre to be true: wherefore I have translated it from the German tongue into Latin, and have inserted it into my Book of Wanderings, as being a really true description, and written by a respectable and truthful man.“ Zur Shalev, Christian Pilgrimage and Ritual Measurement in Jerusalem, in: Micrologus 19 (2011), pp. 131– 150.  Marjatta Wis, Zum deutschen ‘Fortunatus’. Die mittelalterlichen Pilger als Erweiterer des Weltbildes, in: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 63/1 (1962), pp. 5 – 55; ead., Nochmals zum ‘Fortunatus’Volksbuch. Quellen- und Datierungsprobleme, in: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 66/2 (1965), pp. 199 – 209.  Christiane Hippler, Die Reise nach Jerusalem. Untersuchungen zu den Quellen, zum Inhalt und zur literarischen Struktur der Pilgerberichte des Spätmittelalters (Europäische Hochschulschriften. Reihe I, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur 968), Frankfurt am Main et al. 1987, p. 77: und sie (Sebald Rieter jun. and Hans Tucher) warn herlichen hie entpfangen, das in vil hinauß entgegen riten, eins teils pis Kornburg und im Wald ummer hin auß, ritt in entgegen ped burgermaiser herr Rupreht Haller und Paulus Rieter und der merer tail im rat, auch all söldner, und luffen vil hin auß entgegen pis an den walt zu fuß und lof das volck zu, als ob ein fürst ein rit […].

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from Jerusalem¹⁷ was so torn apart and damaged after going through so many eager hands that he had to copy it.¹⁸ After closer examination of this letter dating from August 6, 1479, its tremendous popularity comes as no surprise. In a written gleichnuß (analogy) between two visually dissimilar churches, that of the Holy Sepulchre and Saint Sebaldus Church in Nuremberg, Hans Tucher transmits the sacred topography of the Holy Land to his home town, allowing his readers to visualise the holiest sites in Christianity within the familiar cityscape.¹⁹ This remarkable gleichnuß, however, was not to be his only attempt to evoke Jerusalem’s sacred topography. His brother Endres also copied a cartographic sketch, which he presented as a register of the Stations of the Cross (Fig. 1).²⁰ The single-page document contains a diagrammatic abstraction of the path Christ walked from the house of Pilate to Calvary. A crooked line connects two schematically drawn buildings, Herod’s Palace (Deß herodes hauß) and the house of Pontius Pilate (Pilatus hauß), to a simplified image of Mount Calvary (Das ist der pergk Kalfarie).²¹ Within the medial transfer of Jerusalem’s sacred topography, Hans Tucher embeds the Way of the Cross within „a framework marked by the points of the compass“²² by assigning the four sides of the page to the cardinal directions – east on top.²³ The measured distance of 1050 steps between the first and the last Station was, according to Endres, incorporated into Nuremberg’s topography long before Hans set out on his

 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. O2 f. 13 ad 1.A; Randall Herz (ed.), Briefe Hans Tuchers d. Ä. aus dem Heiligen Land und andere Aufzeichnungen, in: Mitteilungen für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 84 (1997), pp. 61– 92; Tucher, Reise, ed. Herz (note 8), pp. 645 – 654.  Tucher, Reise, ed. Herz (note 8), p. 654, 30 – 34: Jtem noch dem der hie vorgeschriben prieff also her kum, wolt jn jederman horen von geistlicher vnd weltlicher persunnen also, das er gancz zw rÿssen vnd beschediget wardt, das ich jn doch abgeschriben vnd do her czw eÿner gedechtnuß sesczet hab („Further, after I received the letter above, everybody, members of the clergy and secular persons alike, wanted to read it, until it was entirely torn apart and damaged, so I copied it and put it in here as a memory“).  Tucher, Reise, ed. Herz (note 8), p. 650, 18 – 19: Dovon will lich ein wiennÿg schreÿben ein geleichnuß von Sant Sebolcz kirchen, wie wol der thempel nicht als langk ist, so ist er doch weÿtter etc. („Of this [the Church of the Holy Sepuchre] I want to write with a few words a comparison with Saint Sebaldus Church, although the temple is not as long, it is broader etc.“); Bernhard Jahn, Raumkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit. Zur Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit in Pilgerberichten, Amerikareisebeschreibungen und Prosaerzählungen (Mikrokosmos 34), Frankfurt am Main et al. 1993, pp. 73 – 77; Kiening (note 2), pp. 128 – 131.  Briefe Hans Tuchers, ed. Herz (note 17), p. 77, 1– 6: Item das hie jegen ist ein verczeichnuß des wegeß und der gassen zu Jerusalem von des Pilatus hauß piß auf den pergk Kalfarie, […]. Item auch ist do pei verczeichnet, wie vil der schridt umber von einer stat zu der anderen ist, und waß sich do zwischen die zeit begeben hot. („The following is a register of the path and the alley in Jerusalem from Pilate’s house to Mount Calvary […]. It also records how many steps one station is apart from the other and what happened there in-between“); Kiening (note 2), pp. 131– 134.  Hans Tucher was probably using the compass-sundial he repeatedly mentions in his travelogue, see Tucher, Reise, ed. Herz (note 8), p. 512, 13; p. 541, 11.  Kiening (note 2), p. 192.  auffgang (ascent, i. e. sunrise; east), vnterganck (descent, i. e. sunset; west), mÿttenacht (midnight; north) and mÿttertag (noon; south).

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Fig. 1: Tucher’s map showing the Way of the Cross from Pilate’s palace to Golgotha; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. O2 fol. 13 ad 1, fol. 6r.

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pilgrimage.²⁴ The positions of the individual stations and the precisely measured distances between them, however, offered a new and exciting way of visualising the itinerary of Christ’s last path, and it would not be long before the idea of a precisely measured Way of the Cross would reshape the Nuremberg cityscape. The relief panels Adam Kraft († 1509) created for Nuremberg’s new Way of the Cross at the turn of the sixteenth century contain measured distances.²⁵ While such monumental architectural projects were used to transpose Jerusalem’s sacred topography onto European cityscapes, Tucher’s sketch itself already presented an innovative means of presenting the Way of the Cross. The interplay of the topographic framework, the diagrammatic abstraction of the path and the distinct directions of the inscriptions turn Tucher’s sketch into an interactive device that enables its user to simulate the experience of walking in Christ’s footsteps by continuously re-orientating the page.²⁶ To face the first station, the reader must rotate the page until west (vnterganck) is on top. The now readable description of Pilate’s house in its present state (at the bottom of the page) allows the reader to imagine the Jerusalem a fifteenth-century pilgrim would see.²⁷ To face the imaging matching the description, the reader has to

 Briefe Hans Tuchers, ed. Herz (note 17), p. 77, 11– 14: So weit ist hie zu Nurembergk von dem newen thor piß an den goczaker pei Sant Johanns. Das hot man abgeschritten und do auff dem goczaker eigenlichen geschriben vor etlichen jaren, und ee mein pruder, der Hans Tucher senior, uber mere fure („It is as far as here in Nuremberg from the New Gate to the Saint John’s cemetery. This has been paced out and truly written at the [Saint John’s] cemetery, many years ago and even before my brother, Hans Tucher Senior, travelled over the sea.“). The structures of Nuremberg’s old Way of the Cross that Endres referred to in his introduction can be seen in the depiction of Nuremberg in Hartmann Schedel’s ‘Liber Chronicarum’. Just outside the city’s wall, in the very front of the woodcut, a pillar with a depiction of the crucifixion and a larger relief including an inscription on the roof of the small building (probably Saint Stephen’s Chapel, demolished in 1509) mark the last station of Nuremberg’s Way of the Cross; Blair-Moore, The Architecture (note 6), pp. 207– 208.  Susanne Wegmann, Der Kreuzweg von Adam Kraft in Nürnberg. Ein Abbild Jerusalems in der Heimat, in: Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Nürnbergs 84 (1997), pp. 93 – 117; Bianca Kühnel, Fiktion und Treue zum Original: Europäische Jerusalementwürfe, in: Albert Dietl/ Wolfgang Schöller/ Dirk Steuernagel (eds.), Utopie, Fiktion, Planung. Stadtentwürfe zwischen Antike und Früher Neuzeit (Forum Mittelalter Studien 9), Regensburg 2014, pp. 175 – 195. The exact source for the distances on Kraft’s panels remains unclear. Similar measurements can be found in the travel account of Sebald Rieter Junior: Reisebuch, ed. Röhricht/ Meisner (note 11), pp. 70 – 71.  Briefe Hans Tuchers, ed. Herz (note 17), p. 77, 16 – 20: Item so hie jegen auch verczeichent auff den vier ortten aufgang und untterganang der sunnen, auch mitter tag und mitte nacht. So man das puch legt in die vier ort, so sicht man eigenlichen, wie das des Pilatuß hauß jegen dem auffgang der sunnen gelegen ist, und das der Here von dannen jegen dem unttergang der sunnen zu dem perg Kalfarie gefurt worden ist 1050 schridt weit („Further, there are also marked the four directions, sunrise and sunset also midday and midnight. So when one places the book in the four directions, one actually sees that the house of Pilate is located in the [direction of] the sunrise [east] and that the Lord from there was led towards the sunset [west] to Mount Calvary“).  Ibid., p. 78, 12– 15: Das haus Pilati ist jeczundt ein heidenische kirchen. Das thor dor durch Jhesus gefurt wart, das ist jeczundt vermawrt und ein klein thurlein dor ein auff der seitten, dor durch die heiden jeczundt auß und eingen. Auch so sein ire heusser alle oben mit der dachung etc. („The house of Pilate is

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rotate the page 90 degrees anticlockwise. Once facing the previously described brikked-up gate, the reader is able to decipher the inscriptions within the building (Pilatus hauß) and Herod’s palace. The adverb hinauff (uphill) in the latter defines the reader’s point of view at the bottom of the stairs leading down to Pilate’s house thus encouraging the reader to imagine the spatial surroundings.²⁸ Keeping in mind that Herod’s palace was one of the areas Christians were not allowed to visit under Muslim rule, the seemingly trivial information introduces a new element to the sketch: the restrictions and obstacles a pilgrim was confronted with while following Christ’s footsteps through a Muslim city. Tucher’s sketch evokes both the path of Christ and the experience of a fifteenth-century pilgrim walking in Christ’s footsteps. The importance of the distinction between the two paths becomes clear as the reader moves to the second station. To do so, the reader needs to rotate the page back by 90 degrees. At this point, the reader finds himself at a crossroads.While the line depicting the path of Christ leads through the currently bricked-up and therefore impassable gate on the south side of the building, the visual and textual directions of the document’s layout lead the reader through the currently open gate on its west side. The two distinct routes leading to the second station of the Cross present a choice of whether to walk in the steps of Christ or follow the procession of the pilgrims. The distinct directions of the inscription’s two parts present the next crossroads. The current position renders only the part south of the line readable, which contains information about the distance between the house of Pilate and this point.²⁹ Here the reader can continue reading the inscriptions south of the line and learn about the distances between the stations, or remain at the second station, rotate the page by 90 degrees and learn about the events that took place at this station.³⁰ The sketch offers two options: choosing the gate depicted as open allows a visualisation of the sacred topography of the pilgrim’s Jerusalem, while the way through the bricked-up gate allows contemplation of the events of the Passion. To acquire all the information about any given station, the reader must pause and rotate the page back and forth or ‘walk’ the Way of the Cross multiple times. While the second option highlights the difference between the past and the present, the first blends the different layers of time into each other. This dynamic reading encourages the reader to imagine Jerusalem’s sacred topography while simulating the bodily experience of the pilgrim proceeding through it, occasionally dipping into biblical time.³¹

now a heathen temple. The gate through which Christ was led is now bricked up, and a small doorway on its side is now used by the heathens to walk in and out. It now has a roof like all their houses“).  Ibid., p. 78, 17– 18: Erodes hauß leit ein wienig auf einer höche und hot etlich staffeln hinauff („Herod’s house lies on a hill, and there are many stairs leading uphill“).  Ibid., p. 78, 19: Von Pilatuß hauß piß auff das puncktlein, so sein 200 schridt etc („From Pilate’s house up to the little point, it is 200 steps etc.“).  Ibid., p. 78, 19 – 20: Do stundt Maria und sach Jhesum außfuren und wardt anmechtig etc („There stood Mary and saw Jesus departing and fell unconscious etc.“).  Kiening (note 2), p. 134.

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While both the letter and the cartographic sketch reflect a desire to mediate the experience of a fifteenth-century pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Hans Tucher seems to be interested in its most important destinations only: seeing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and following the Way of the Cross. As such, his text and his map grant direct access to the centre of Christianity without the time-consuming and costly journey. Driven by the same desire, Tucher’s contemporaries tried to go even further and mediate the full experience of the journey to (and within) the Holy Land by portraying its most significant moments: the first sight of the Holy Land, Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

First glimpses Felix Fabri’s ‘Evagatorium’ (‘The Book of the Wanderings’) evokes an emotional moment as the pilgrims lay eyes on the Holy Land for the first time.When the crew of their galley, after a suspenseful moment of uncertainty, concludes that the distant shoreline is in fact the Holy Land, the pilgrims praise the Lord by singing the Te Deum. One by one, pilgrims, sailors and merchants join in while the pilgrims start playing various instruments, pray and shed tears of joy. The different tongues and sounds blend into a harmony that seems miraculous to Fabri (mirabilliter): a sound so magnificent that even the ship seems to glide more swiftly through the waves.³² This combination of emotional expressions, biblical allusions and a miraculous soundscape, which Fabri uses to highlight the sacred dimension of the first glimpse of the Holy Land, can be seen throughout the whole ‘Evagatorium’.³³ His portrayal of the first sight of Jerusalem shows identical elements. Fabri describes how, when Jerusalem miraculously appears in front of them like lightning (ut fulgur), the overwhelmed pilgrims dismount their donkeys to praise the city, with tears of joy in their eyes. The following description of the now definitely earthly city, with its towers and walls, generates another moment of uncertainty, only this time it is the reader who is unable to identify the fortified structures. While moving towards the city, the pilgrims again sing the Te Deum. This time, however, the thundering soundscape produced on the open sea is transferred to the mind of the pilgrims.³⁴

 Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14) vol. 1, pp. 183 – 184; Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, pp. 207– 210; Beebe (note 4), pp. 113 – 116; Susanna E. Fischer, Erzählte Bewegung: Narrationsstrategien und Funktionsweisen lateinischer Pilgertexte (4.–15. Jahrhundert) (Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 52), Leiden 2019, p. 226 – 229.  Another example, besides the three first sights, would be the procession on Mount Sion, see Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14) vol. 1, pp. 244– 245); Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, pp. 291– 293.  Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1 pp. 234– 235; Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, pp. 279 – 282.

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The priests and monks among us all together began to sing Te Deum laudamus, but in a low and subdued voice, that we might not offend our escort, whom perhaps our hymn of joy might have moved to anger if loudly and clearly sung. So we sang aloud only with the voice of our minds, because the joy wherewith we rejoiced was deep and great, beyond what any outward words could express.³⁵

According to Fabri, the overwhelming spiritual experience of singing through one’s heart and mind even surpasses the overwhelming bodily experience on board the ship. At the same time, this internalisation invites the reader, who to some extent shares the restrictions of the pilgrim’s bodily experience, to partake in their spiritual celebration by joining them in their praise.³⁶ The immersive elements in Fabri’s writing increase as the pilgrims enter Jerusalem. As soon as the pilgrims realise that the previously unknown church in front of them is, in fact, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they can no longer hold back their feelings. They burst out in tears while throwing themselves down to be embraced by Christ’s virtus, which, according to Fabri, emanates from these holy grounds.³⁷ O my brother! hadst thou been with me in that court at that hour, thou wouldst have seen such plenteous tears, such bitter heartfelt groans, such sweet wailings, such deep sighs, such true sorrow, such sobs from the inmost breast, such peaceful and gladsome silence, that hadst thou a heart of stone it must have melted, and thou wouldst have burst into a flood of tears together with the weeping pilgrims.³⁸

By addressing the reader directly (O frater mi) Fabri increases the immersive potential of his description and conveys the overwhelming emotion of the pilgrims to the reader. The first sight of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marks the climax of this sequence of three similar descriptions. A moment of uncertainty following the first glimpse quickly turns into an outburst of joy expressed as a highly emotional soundscape.³⁹ In addition to the syntagmatic relation generated by the travelogue, the narrative, acoustic and visual parallels establish paradigmatic relations between the three important moments, transforming the sequence of stations from a visualisation of the journey’s  Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, pp. 281– 282; Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, p. 237: Sacerdotes ergo et religiosi simul adunati inceperunt cantare: Te Deum laudamus etc., submissa tamen et humili voce, ne ductores nostros offenderemus, quibus jubilus noster altus et manifestus forte displicuisset. Altis ergo vocibus mentis cantavimus, quia ingens altum et magnum erat gaudium, quo exultavimus, nullis vocibus exterioribus explicabile.  Fischer (note 32), p. 231.  Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, pp. 235 – 238; Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, p. 283; Fischer (note 32), p. 231.  Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, p. 283; Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, p. 238: O frater mi, si in ista hora mecum in atrio illo fuisses, vidisses et audivisses tam exuberantes lachrimas, tam profunda lamenta et ex intimis singultus, tam quieta et jocunda silentia, et si cor lapideum habuisses, liquefactum fuisset, et simul cum ipsis peregrinis lachrymantibus resolutus in lachrymas uberes fuisses.  Fischer (note 32), pp. 231– 232.

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progress into a process of intensification. While each soundscape surpasses the one before, Fabri increases the reader’s emotion by gradually increasing the immersive elements in his descriptions. Fabri’s ‘Evagatorium’ is of course not the first description of these climactic moments to present the reader as a fellow pilgrim. Similar approaches to transmitting experience can already be found in the above-mentioned ‘Descriptio terrae sanctae’ by the Dominican friar Burchard of Mount Sion († after 1285). His ‘Descriptio’ has been hailed as „the most detailed account of the Holy Land to have come down to us from the thirteenth century“,⁴⁰ and as such it „influenced the perception of Palestine in both text and image, in travel accounts and maps“⁴¹ for centuries to come. In order to present the entire body of information he had gathered during the decade he spent in the Holy Land (1274– 1283), Burchard developed a highly efficient system, based on a model of cartographic abstraction,⁴² to compose a „geographical commentary on the Bible“⁴³ allowing a new and closer understanding of the Holy Scripture. However, in his description of the first sight of Jerusalem, the abstract and descriptive model turns into a vivid first-hand account as Burchard switches to the pilgrim’s point of view. As one leaves Bethany one does not at first see Jerusalem because the Mount of Olives is in the way; but first one goes up a rise in the ground and then one sees part of the beloved city and Mount Sion. O God, how many devout tears have been shed in that place by those seeing there the exultation of the whole earth, the city of the Great King! O what joy it would be to see the place of Your glory, good Jesus, when one comes to see with such jubilation the place of Your dishonour and confusion! But let us put all this aside and come to Jerusalem as quickly as possible. So one goes down the mountain and again the beloved city is hidden from sight. Moreover, on the east side of the Mount of Olives near Bethphage, a very small village that one passes in a valley a stone’s-throw to the left below the Mount of Offence, one goes up along the southern side of the Mount of Olives and circles around it.⁴⁴

 Pringle (note 1), p. 46.  Ingrid Baumgärtner, Burchard of Mount Sion and the Holy Land, in: Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 4/1 (2013), pp. 5 – 41, here p. 8.  Pringle (note 1), p. 243; Ingrid Baumgärtner,Winds and Continents: Concepts for Structuring the World and Its Parts, in: ead./ Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby/Katrin Kogman-Appel (eds.), Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 9), Berlin, Boston 2019, pp. 91– 135.  Elka Weber, Traveling Through Text: Message and Method in Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts (Studies in Medieval History and Culture), New York, London 2006, p. 49.  Pringle (note 1), p. 287 (slightly altered). Laurent (note 1), p. 62: Recedendo de Bethania nondum uidetur Ierusalem propter montem oliueti interpositum, sed ascenditur primo tumor quidam terre, et uidetur pars quedam ciuitatis dilecte cum monte Sion. Eya Deus, quot deuote lacrime sunt in illo loco fuse uidentium ibi exultationem uniuerse terre, ciuitatem regis magni! O quanta erat exuItati, uidere locum glorie Tue, bone Ihesu, cum locus ignominie Tue et coufusionis cum tanto tripudio uideatur! Sed omissis omnibus ad lerusalem quantocius ueniamus. Descenditur igitur de monte, et iterum, ciuitas dilecta occultatur. Item sub latere orientali montis oliueti iuxta Bethphage, que ad iactum lapidis dimittitur ad sinistram, sub monte offensionis, in ualle, uiculus ualde paruus, ascenditur per latus australe et giratur mons oliueti.

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Burchard enthrals the reader by increasing the pace of the narration using verbs of motion (recendere, venire, ascendere, descendere) and sight (videre) in close succession.⁴⁵ The exclamations he uses to express his feelings as he looks at Jerusalem (Eya Deus!) encourage the reader to imagine a breathtaking view, while postponing the actual description of the city. The suspenseful interplay of visibility and invisibility goes on until Burchard reaches the place where Christ mounted the donkey for his triumphal entry in Jerusalem. From here he finally gets a clear view of Jerusalem. One comes to the place where the Lord mounted the donkey and immediately the city shines forth with the temple, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the other holy places. And so one comes to the way down from the Mount of Olives, where with the crowds preceding and following Him crying, ‘Hosannah to the Son of David!’ and rejoicing at His blessed coming, He saw the city and wept bitterly over it.⁴⁶

While the city that shines upon the approaching pilgrim (resplendere), is reminiscent of the Heavenly Jerusalem rather than the earthly city, Burchard locates the source of the divine light in the earthly sanctuaries, and in the description of the descent from the Mount of Olives he blends the pilgrim’s motion into Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Time seems to be suspended as Burchard blends the temporal layers in the climactic moment of arriving in Jerusalem. At this point, the text changes fundamentally. Let us therefore proceed and cross the Kidron brook between the place of His prayer in agony and the place of His arrest in Gethsemane, and let us follow – if by whatever means we are permitted to come to Golgotha – where His feet stood fixed on the Cross while flowing with blood. Let us die there with Christ, that with Him we may likewise rise again.⁴⁷

By switching the narrative voice to the first-person plural (veniamus, procedamus, transeamus), Burchard addresses the reader as a fellow pilgrim walking by his side. Like Fabri, Burchard uses biblical allusions to highlight the sacred dimension of this moment, as his description blends into Psalm 132.⁴⁸ Both authors choose similar

 Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Jerusalem sehen. Reiseberichte des 12. bis 15. Jahrhunderts als empirische Anleitung zur geistigen Pilgerfahrt (Berliner Kulturwissenschaften 9), Freiburg/Breisgau et al. 2010, p. 210.  Pringle (note 1), p. 287; Laurent (note 1), pp. 62– 63: Uenitur ad locum, ubi Dominus asinum ascendit, et continuo resplendet ciuitas cum templo et ecclesia Sancti Sepulcri et sanctis locis ceteris. Uenitur ergo ad descensum montis oliueti, ubi turbis precedentibus et sequentibus et clamantibus: „Osanna filio David!“ et letantibus benedicto eius aduentu, Ipse uidens ciuitatem fleuit amarissime super illam.  Pringle (note 1), p. 287; Laurent (note 1), p. 63: Procedamus ergo, et inter locum orationis eius in agonia et locum captiuitatis eius in Gethsemani transeamus torrentem Cedron et sequamur, si quomodocunque concedatur nobis uenire in Golgatha, ubi steterunt fixi in cruce fluentes sanguine pedes eius; moriamur ibi cimi Christo, ut cum Eo pariter resurgamus!  Lehmann-Brauns (note 45), p. 211.

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narrative strategies to mediate the experience of the pilgrim’s journey to Jerusalem, and both choose similar moments to include the reader in their descriptions of the Holy Land. The images in illustrated accounts of pilgrimage can support this process of mediating the journey to Jerusalem – not only by depicting certain moments but also by using their material dimension to turn the described motion into a sensory experience.

A fifteenth-century page-turner The London manuscript Egerton 1900, possibly written in Passau around 1467, contains an extraordinary travel account in the German vernacular, fully illustrated with 146 colourful pen drawings.⁴⁹ A short note on the last page identifies the manuscript as the account of Gabriel Muffel, († 1498), third son of Niklas III Muffel († 1468).⁵⁰ As a member of one of Nuremberg’s oldest and most powerful dynasties, Gabriel was destined to become a high-ranking city official like his father before him.⁵¹ Nuremberg’s local politics, however, are not the only domain the Muffel name is associated with – the men of this family were also esteemed travellers and writers. Gabriel’s father travelled to Rome in 1452 to deliver the Imperial Regalia to the coronation of emperor Frederick III (1415 – 1493). On his return he wrote a German translation of the ‘Indulgentiae ecclesiarum Urbis Romae’.⁵² Gabriel’s older brother Niklas IV († 1496) accompanied William III, Landgrave of Thuringia (1425 – 1483), on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1461.⁵³ Soon after, Gabriel was to set out on a pilgrimage of his own. Following an invitation of Gabriel Tezel († 1479), a fellow Nuremberg patrician, he joined the expedition of Leo of Rožmitál († 1486). This Bohemian nobleman set out on a grand tour visiting the courts and kingdoms of Europe, followed by a pilgrimage to  London, British Library, Egerton 1900; Clive D. M. Cossar, The German Translation of Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s Libro d’oltramare (Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 452), Göppingen, 1985.  Cossar (note 49), p. 2: Anno 1467 die octavo decembris iuit ad terram sanctam Gabriel Muffel filius tertius Nicolai Muffell („In the year 1467, on December 8, Gabriel Muffel, the third son of Niklas Muffel went to the Holy Land“). The handwriting points to an author of the fifteenth century.  Gerhard Hirschmann, Die Familie Muffel im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Nürnberger Patriziats, seiner Entstehung und seines Besitzes, in: Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 41 (1950), pp. 257– 392; Gerhard Fouquet, Die Affäre Niklas Muffel. Die Hinrichtung eines Nürnberger Patriziers im Jahre 1469, in: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 83 (1996), pp. 459 – 500.  Nikolaus Muffel, Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, ed. Wilhelm Vogt (Bibliothek des Literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 128), Tübingen 1876; Gerhard Wiedmann: Der Nürnberger Kaufmann Nikolaus Muffel in Rom (1452), in: Rainer Babel/ Werner Paravicini (eds.), Grand Tour. Adeliges Reisen und europäische Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Akten der internationalen Kolloquien in der Villa Vigoni 1999 und im Deutschen Historischen Institut Paris 2000 (Beihefte der Francia 60), Ostfildern 2004, pp. 105 – 114, here p. 108.  Pilgerfahrt des Landgrafen Wilhelm des Tapferen von Thüringen zum heiligen Lande im Jahre 1461, ed. Johann Georg Kohl, Bremen 1868, p. 73.

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Santiago de Compostela and the Holy Land.⁵⁴ However, the fact that neither Gabriel Tezel nor Václav Šašek, Leo’s squire and arms bearer, mention this pilgrimage to the Holy Land in their travelogues arouses the suspicion that, despite the note in Egerton 1900, Gabriel Muffel never set sail for Palestine. Furthermore, Cossar’s editorial work revealed that Egerton 1900 is not the account of a 1467 pilgrimage to the Holy Land but merely a translation of the ‘Libro d’Oltramare’, written by the Franciscan Niccolò da Poggibonsi around 1350.⁵⁵ While it remains unclear whether or not Gabriel Muffel ever set foot on Palestinian ground, the manuscript’s unique features may have enabled him to experience the Holy Land virtually. Shortly after his return from an adventurous, four-year journey to the east (1346 – 1350), Niccolò da Poggibonsi, a Franciscan friar from Tuscany, began to work on an extraordinary account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ is, among other things, believed to be both the first pilgrimage guidebook to be written in the vernacular and the first one to be fully illustrated.⁵⁶ While the text and images enjoyed tremendous success in the following centuries, its author was soon forgotten.⁵⁷ Neither the printed editions nor the German translation mention his name.What remains is a first-person account of an unnamed pilgrim visiting the sanctuaries of the Holy Land, taking notes on a pair of tables he was carrying by his side. And what I saw with my eyes and touched with my hands and asked of others, and when I was well certified of the things, that I wrote on two small tables, which I carried by me. Later, when I was in Jerusalem, I procured a measure of one braccio, with one of one foot, and going my rounds, I measured everything in order, as herein you will hear: the area, the length, and the breadth, and I at once wrote them down. And the reason why I troubled myself about this is: firstly, many who have a great desire to visit the holy places, poverty impedes; and others abandon it, for the too great fatigue; and others again for want of permission, which must be had from the Pope.⁵⁸

Like the ‘Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostri Ihesu Cristi’ (‘Travel to the Tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ’) written by his contemporary Francesco Petrarcha (1304 –

 Des böhmischen Herrn Leo’s von Rožmital Ritter-, Hof- und Pilger-Reise durch die Abendlande: 1465 – 1467, ed. Johann Andreas Schmeller (Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 7), Stuttgart 1844, p. 145.  Cossar (note 49), pp. 14– 29. The German translation seems to be related to a fifteenth-century manuscript copy of the ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ kept in New York Public Library, MS Spencer 62. See BlairMoore, Seeing through text (note 6), p. 403; ead., The Disappearance (note 6), p. 372.  Blair-Moore, Seeing (note 6); ead., The Disappearance (note 6); ead., The Architecture (note 6), pp. 132– 162.  The anonymous ‘Viazo da Venesia al Sancto Iherusalem’, printed in Bologna in 1500, had seen over 75 editions by the time it was last published in 1800; Betschart (note 5), p. 46; Blair-Moore, Disappearance (note 6), p. 357.  Niccolò da Poggibonsi, A Voyage beyond the Seas, ed. Theophilus Bellorini/ Eugene Hoade, Jerusalem 1848, p. 11.

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1374),⁵⁹ Niccolò’s ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ presents a surrogate. While Petrarch introduces the ‘Itinerarium’ as a substitute for its author, who is unable to partake in the journey on account of his thalassophobia, ⁶⁰ Niccolò’s ‘Libro’ expresses a desire to bring the Holy Land to those who are not able to travel. Regarding its primary motive, the ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ bears an uncanny resemblance to Burchard’s ‘Descriptio terrae sanctae’.⁶¹ Niccolò too wants to replicate the Holy Land, and within their detailed descriptions of Jerusalem, both authors use cardinal directions and measured distances between the sanctuaries to create a vivid image of the city’s sacred topography. There are, however, some significant differences between the two. While Burchard’s cartographic abstraction of the Holy Land points to the Dominican tradition of mnemonic devices,⁶² Niccolò’s description of a bodily experience recalls the Franciscan tradition of virtual pilgrimages.⁶³ In this, the ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ introduces a radical reconfiguration to its European audience, one that would change their perception of the Holy Land forever: the Franciscan topography of indulgences.⁶⁴ Niccolò’s account is the first to mention the indulgences that followed the permanent installation of the Franciscans on Mount Sion in 1333. The term ordnung (order) in the German translation, Egerton 1900,⁶⁵ highlights the similarity between the ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ and the ‘Peregrinationes totius terrae sanctae’, the small booklets produced by the Franciscans to guide pilgrims through the reconfigured topography.⁶⁶ Both the ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ and its German translation, however, differ from the list-like peregrinationes in presenting a first-hand account of the pilgrim’s experience. The translator of Egerton 1900 uses the first-person simple past tense to describe his journey from Venice to Palestine.⁶⁷ However, once the narrator has set foot in the Holy Land, the first-hand account of a past journey turns into a guidebook

 Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ, ed. Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Notre Dame 2002.  Ibid. p. 86: Cum multe igitur me teneant cause, nulla potentior quam pelagi metus; p. 87: „Although numerous causes hold me back, none is more powerful than the fear of the sea.“  Pringle (note 1), p. 242: „Seeing, however, that some people are affected by a desire to picture for themselves in some degree at least those things that they are unable to look upon face to face and wanting to satisfy their wish as far as I can, I have inspected diligently recorded and studiously described in so far as I have been able that land through which I have frequently passed on foot.“  Lehmann-Brauns (note 45), pp. 204– 208.  Blair-Moore, Disappearance (note 6), p. 394.  Michele Campopiano, Écrire/décrire la Terre sainte: les Franciscains et la représentation des lieux sacrés (début du XIVe – début du XVIe siècle), in: Nathalie Bouloux/ Anca Dan/ Georges Tolias (eds.), Orbis disciplinae. Hommages en l’honneur de Patrick Gautier Dalché, Tournhout 2017, pp. 67– 182; Ross (note 6), pp. 157– 164; Blair-Moore (note 6), pp. 134– 137.  Cossar (note 49), p. 45, 19; A similar use of the term can be found in the account of Sebald Rieter Junior: Reisebuch, ed. Röhricht/ Meisner (note 11), p. 56.  Josephine Brefeld, A Guidebook for the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages: A Case for Computer-Aided Textual Criticism (Middeleeuwse Studies en Bronnen 40),Verloren 1994; Campopiano (note 64).  Cossar (note 49), pp. 37– 41, 15.

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for the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In the description of the march from Ramla to Jerusalem, the text suddenly addresses the reader while switching to the present tense (Als du gest). When you leave Ramla in the direction of Jerusalem, you walk on even ground until [you see] a hospice that goes by the name of Kane, and when you go inside you go up on the right-hand side and there you find a small hill, on top of which stand broken houses and there used to be a stronghold.⁶⁸

Within the subsequent description of Jerusalem he switches constantly between different pronouns and tenses.⁶⁹ By referring to the narrator as both writer and pilgrim and by addressing the reader as both pilgrim and reader, Egerton 1900 blends the past of the pilgrim-writer into the present of the reader-pilgrim. The illustrations in Egerton 1900 reinforce this interweaving of different spaces and times and play a crucial role in mediating the pilgrim’s experience. Almost every entry in the manuscript is composed in the same manner and consists of three distinct parts: a title, a description and a full-page or half-page coloured pen drawing. In most cases the drawings can be classified as ‘descriptive images’, depicting the places, plants and animals of the preceding description. However, unlike the ‘descriptive images’ in most fifteenth-century travelogues and in contrast to the detailed descriptions, the drawings in Egerton 1900 bear little resemblance to the sanctuaries in the Holy Land. Blair-Moore has argued that the illuminations in some Italian manuscripts of the ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ are „constructed not in reference to the three-dimensional building itself, but instead in reference to a textual model“⁷⁰ and should therefore be understood as visualisations of the mental images rooted in widely diffused descriptions of the Holy Land.While there is no direct evidence that this manuscript was used as a guideline for virtual pilgrimage, there are strong indications that, as Blair-Moore suggests,⁷¹ the drawings in Egerton 1900 did not serve exclusively ornamental purposes. Direct references within the descriptions,  Ibid., p. 41, 15 – 19: Als du gest von ramma gen Jerusaalem wertz do geste ben pis zu einer herberg die heist kane vnd so du hinein gest So gestu auffwertz auff die rechten hant vnd do vindestu einen cleinen pühel do stent zu prochne heüser auff vnd do ist gewest ein castell.  Ibid., p. 47, 4 Als man get zu der kirchen („as one approaches the church“); p. 47, 15: Als du von dem obgenannten stein schaidest vnd kerst dich vmb gen ponent wartz („as you move on from the abovementioned stone and turn westwards“); p. 48, 21– 22: durch die selb viereckat capellen mustu gen ee du kumps an die stat („through this square chapel you must go before you come to the place“); p. 48, 23: Jch han euch gesagt („I have told you“); p. 49, 1: Ein yeder der da hinein geht („everybody who enters here“); p. 49, 2: Do vindestu einen stein („there you find a stone“); p. 49, 12: EJn yeder mensch der do gewesen ist („every person who has been there“); p. 50, 1: Wann du hinein gest („as you enter“); p. 50, 20: Als ich dar von schide („as I moved on from this“); p. 50, 21: Als ich mich schid („as I moved on“); 51, 12: Ir sullent wissen („you shall know“); p. 52, 6: die ich oben genant hab („that I mentioned above“); p. 53, 20: Wol pin ich gewesen („surely I was“).  Blair-Moore, Seeing (note 6), p. 411.  Ibid., p. 410.

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for example, present the drawings as an indispensable part of the guidebook.⁷² While most descriptions do not refer to the drawings, a few establish a close connection between text and image by using explicit references.⁷³ Some of these descriptions reflect the specific mediality of the manuscript page by referring to a drawing on its reverse side,⁷⁴ and some go even further by directly instructing the reader to turn the page and look at the image.⁷⁵ On the bottom of folio 9r, the reader finds the words Ker vmb so vindestu die stat Ierusalem (Turn around, and you will find the city of Jerusalem), written in red ink (Fig. 2). By not mentioning the medium (manuscript page), the translator of Egerton 1900 creates a moment of ambiguity, as the descriptions frequently use the expression ker vmb (turn around) to guide the pilgrim to the next sanctuary. The ker vmb on folio 9r addresses both the pilgrim moving through the sacred topography and the reader turning the page. This superposing of the pilgrim’s movement through the Holy Land and the reader’s movement through the manuscript allows the latter to experience the journey to Jerusalem as a physical act. In this sharing of a bodily experience, the reader, in the process of turning the page, becomes the pilgrim who turns around and lays eyes on Jerusalem for the first time. Similar ambiguities can be found in the descriptions of two other significant moments: the description of Saint Helen finding the one true Cross and that of Christ praying on the Mount of Olives.⁷⁶ In these examples the manipulation of the carrier medium introduces a narrative dimension to the seemingly ‘descriptive images’ of Egerton 1900. The miniatures in Egerton 1900 also introduce a spatial dimension to the manuscript, as they not only visualise the sanctuaries a pilgrim would see in the Holy Land, but help the reader to experience the movement between them. For example, when the textual choreography places the reader behind a previously described altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he finds himself on the reverse of the painted altar, which remains visible, shimmering through the paper, after the page has been turned. The miniatures transform the manuscript into a traversable sphere, where the manipulation of their carrier medium offers a way of simulating locomotion. As Connolly has pointed out for the maps of Matthew Paris, the manuscript is presented

 Cossar (note 49), p. 30.  Ibid., p. 83, 7– 8: wie sie gezeichnet ist („as it is drawn“); p. 126, 22: als irs do sechent gemalt („as you can see drawn here“); p. 130, 8: Nun kumpt sein gestalt hernach („now follows its appearance“); p. 158, 10 – 11: als du sichst hie („as you see here“).  Ibid., p. 123, 15: auf dem anderen palde ist gemalt die gleichnus der stat von Alexandria („on the other page is painted the image of the city of Alexandria“); p. 82, 6: Auff der anderen seyten sichstu die temple alle peide („on the other side you see both of the temples“).  Ibid., p. 41, 21: Nun ker vmb daz plat So vindestu die zwo stet Ramma vnd Modone („now turn the page and you will find the two cities Ramla and Modon“); p. 77, 18 – 19: nun such den gartten an dem anderen platte („now look for the garden on the other page“).  Ibid., p. 54, 2: ker vmb da vindestu St. Helena („turn around and you will find Saint Helen[’s chapel]“); p. 74, 7– 8: Nun ker vmb So vindestu die stat do vnnser herr daz pater noster macht („now turn around and you will find the place where our Lord prays the Pater Noster“).

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Fig. 2: Ker vmb so vindestu die stat Ierusalem (Turn around, and you will find the city of Jerusalem) London, British Library, Egerton 1900, fol. 9r/v.

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as a „sensate vehicle for imagined pilgrimage“,⁷⁷ transforming the reading of a travelogue into a bodily experience. In the light of Gabriel’s situation (in 1467 he had just returned from Venice after a failed attempt to set sail for Palestine), the extraordinary features point to the possibility that Egerton 1900 could have served as a surrogate for the planned pilgrimage to the Holy Land.⁷⁸

Travelling in body and mind While Egerton 1900 had the potential to be read as a private guide for a ‘virtual pilgrimage’, closely connected to the circumstances facing Gabriel Muffel at the time, Bernhard von Breydenbach’s ‘Peregrinatio in terram sanctam’ aims for a broader audience. Niccolò’s ‘Libro d’Oltramare’ was the first fully illustrated guidebook for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but Bernhard von Breydenbach’s ‘Peregrinatio’ was the first one to be printed. Among the woodcuts created by the Dutch painter and printer Erhard Reuwich († 1505), the synthesised map of the Holy Land presents the most spectacular features and can be understood as a mass-produced multi-layered device for a ‘virtual pilgrimage’. Inspired by Hans Tucher’s highly successful printed travelogue, Bernhard von Breydenbach, a dean at the cathedral of Mainz, who visited the Holy Land alongside Felix Fabri in 1483 – 1484, composed his book of two parts, revolving around the journey to the Holy Land and the journey to Mount Sinai. By incorporating other travelogues, he turns the ‘Peregrinatio’ into a „scholarly compendium“⁷⁹ of the Middle East, appealing to different audiences. The Latin editio princeps left Reuwich’s printing shop in February 1486, and the German version followed only five months later. With eleven editions in seven languages, Bernhard’s book enjoyed tremendous success, ultimately driving Tucher’s bestselling ‘Reyß ins Heylig Land’ out of the book market.⁸⁰ One of the main reasons for its success was the cycle of 26 woodcuts, which turned the ‘Peregrinatio’ into a visual spectacle. To also serve other Christian believers with this work, I have summarised the two journeys in a small book with benevolent intention. Much of this form has never been seen before, and perhaps written word and picture have never been printed together. But not only the mental eye, that is reason, should be pleased, but also the bodily eye should be pleased and amused by images, so

 Connolly, Maps (note 7), p. 55.  It is worth noting that Václav Šašek’s account, which only survived in Stanislaus Pavlovský’s Latin translation, also includes a register of all pilgrimages and indulgences of the Holy Land, see Schmeller (note 54), pp. 136 – 142.  Michael Herkenhoff, Die Darstellung außereuropäischer Welten in Drucken deutscher Offizien des 15. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 1996, p. 185: „gelehrtes Kompendium“.  Ibid., p. 168.

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that the desire of other people to set out on the same kind of journey is promoted all the more strongly.⁸¹

Despite denying the existence of truly new things,⁸² Bernhard presents his idea of a printed and fully illustrated guidebook as an innovation. He introduces the images as a vital part of the ‘Peregrinatio’ and as a way of attracting more people to the idea of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and, of course, encouraging them to buy his book. As he states in the introduction, word and image fulfil different functions within the ‘Peregrinatio’. While the word addresses the reader’s intellect, the images introduce a sensory experience that pleases his bodily (lyplich gesicht) rather than his spiritual eye (seelich aug). The illustrations themselves are by no means less innovative then Bernhard’s concept of an illustrated and enriched guidebook for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Reuwich’s woodcuts have long been hailed as the first authentic depictions of late medieval travel.⁸³ The enthusiasm for Reuwich’s work is not limited to the scholars of the past century: his contemporaries also praised the realism of his woodcuts. Felix Fabri, who admired the Dutch painter,⁸⁴ describes his works as so realistic that the viewer, when looking at the woodcuts, feels as if he is standing in the Holy Land himself.

 Bernhard von Breydenbach, Peregrinatio in terram sanctam. Eine Pilgerreise ins Heilige Land. Frühneuhochdeutscher Text und Übersetzung. ed. Isolde Mozer, Berlin 2010, pp. 6 – 8: Do mit aber daz ich ioch in sollichem kleynem wreck andern cristgleubigen menschen mochte dyenen vnd zů willen syn hab ich in gůtem gemůt vnd vff sehen die selben beyd in eyn bůchlyn gebracht jn form vnd maß vorhyn villicht nit me gesehen vnd lassen drůckern in geschrifft mit sampt gemelt da mit eß nit alleyn were das seelich aug (daz ist) die verstantnuß mit der geschrifft sunder auch das lyplich gesicht mit figuren erlustigen vnd ergetzen da mit es dester krefftiglicher wůrd ziehen vnd reitzen ander menschen begirde zů sollicher reysen.  Ibid., p. 4: ob joch etwas dieser zyt moͤ cht nuwe genant werden solichs meyn ich daz alleyn vßwendig eyn ander kleydung enpfahet oder mit eyner anderen farbe vberstrichen wurdt dan eß vorhyn hette doch die substantz von ynnen vnveranderet verblyben („Although there is nothing in our time that could be called ‘new’. (I mean this in the sense that, externally, something can be covered in a different dress or painted over with a different colour than before but inside, the substance remains unchanged, whatever may be changed in the outside“).  Frederike Timm, Der Palästina-Pilgerbericht des Bernhard von Breidenbach und die Holzschnitte Erhard Reuwichs. Die ‚Peregrinatio in terram sanctam‘ (1486) als Propagandainstrument im Mantel der gelehrten Pilgerschrift, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 121– 122; Louis van Empelen, The Realism of Erhard Reuwich Cityscape of Jerusalem (1486), in: Eastern Christian Art 8 (2011), pp. 15 – 28.  Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, p. 353: Conduxit etiam pretio eruditum virum, Erhardum Rewich, subtilissimum pictorem, qui portus maris et civitates et terraé loca, et praecipue terram sanctam, et habitum gentium dictarum proproe figuravit et figuras ad descriptions aptavit Transl.: Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, p. 439: „He [Bernhard von Breydenbach] also hired a man of art, named Erhard Rewich, a most cunning painter, who has drawn the seaports, cities, places on land, especially in the Holy Land, and the dresses of the aforesaid nations to the life, and has fitted his pictures to the words of the text.“

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If anyone wishes to see (videre) the form (formam) of this church, let him look at the ‘Pilgrimage’ written by that eminent lord and clever man, Lord Bernhard of Braitenbach, Dean of the Metropolitan Church of Mainz, where he will be able to see its image drawn clearly as if he were standing in the courtyard and beholding it with his eyes (ac si in atrio ecclesia staret et videret).⁸⁵

Seven of the 26 woodcuts depict the ports and cities the pilgrims would visit on their journey from Venice to Palestine.⁸⁶ While the introduction of the ‘Peregrinatio’ introduces them as ‘descriptive images’ showing places mentioned in the text for entertainment purposes, the seven large-scale gatefolds become a visual travelogue in themselves. By using seven stations, Reuwich applies the structure of the Way of the Cross to his illustrations of the pilgrim’s journey from Venice to Jerusalem. He connects the images through formal parallels (size, gatefolds) as well as through certain elements within the images, most importantly a pilgrim vessel. The representation of the pilgrims’ galley replaces that of Christ’s path as a way of introducing locomotion and thus a narrative dimension to the sequence of seven seemingly descriptive images. The first (Venice) and the last (Jerusalem) of this sequence’s woodcuts are significantly wider than the other five, with Venice being the widest (162 cm).⁸⁷ Although shorter than the panoramic view of Venice, the 127 cm long map of the Holy Land remains Reuwich’s most renowned work (Fig. 3). It presents a synthesis of multiple pictorial traditions within one image.⁸⁸ While the coastline and the basic layout point to the tradition of Marino Sanudo’s (1260 – 1338) grid maps,⁸⁹ its centrepiece is an oversized and highly detailed panoramic view of the city of Jerusalem seen from the Mount of Olives. The result of this combination is the characteristic multiperspectivity within Reuwich’s depiction of the Holy Land: While the map is oriented with east on top, the view from the Mount of Olives looks west.⁹⁰ Reuwich’s perspective on Jerusalem is highly significant. It is the very same point of view Burchard used in his description of the (almost celestial) city’s shining sanctuaries. It is also the view seen by the pilgrims when they visit the restricted areas of Jerusalem through their prayers, as described in Felix Fabri’s ‘Evagatorium’: The Saracens will not allow us to come near this gate, and we could by no means obtain leave to go thither, because without it is the Saracen burying-ground, over which they will not suffer

 Beebe, The Jerusalem (note 3), p. 411; Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, p. 344: Si quis autem cupit videre formam hujus templi, videat peregrinale magnifici domini et ingenui, viri, Domini Bernhardi de Braitenbach, ecclesiae metropolitanae moguntinensis decani, et ibi depictam ejus effigiem adeo clare intuebitur, ac si in atrio ecclesia staret et videret.  Civitas Veneciarum (Venice), Parens (Parenzo), Corfun (Corfu), Modon (Methoni), Candia (Herakleion), Rodis (Rhodes), Civitas Iherusalem (The Holy Land/ Jerusalem).  Elizabeth Ross, Mainz at the Crossroads of Utrecht and Venice: Erhard Reuwich and the Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (1486), in: Alexander-Skipnes (ed.), Cultural Exchange between the Low Countries and Italy (1400 – 1600), Turnhout 2007, pp. 123 – 145.  Timm (note 83), pp. 242– 265; Ross (note 6), pp. 101– 141.  Timm (note 83), p. 259; Ross (note 6), pp. 112– 119.  Timm (note 83), p. 249; Ross (note 6), p. 51.

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Fig. 3: Reuwich’s depiction of the Holy Land. Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, RARA 2.65. Christians to walk. However, we knelt looking towards it from afar off, and after worshipping God received plenary indulgences. These indulgences are given to everyone who stands opposite this gate afar off, and worships it, as many times as he does it.⁹¹

The prominent position of such restricted areas as the Dome of the Rock (templum salomonis) and the Golden Gate (porta aurea) at the very centre of the image indicates that the composition of the image is strongly influenced by the „Franciscan indulgenced view“.⁹² It is not hard to imagine how Reuwich’s detailed panorama with all its sanctuaries and indulgences could have functioned as a guide to a virtual pilgrimage. With regard to its form, however, Reuwich’s portrayal of Jerusalem differs from the numerous late medieval images that followed the same purpose, as it lacks any narrative elements.⁹³ Or almost any – by using the pilgrim’s point of view in the very moment of a virtual pilgrimage Reuwich adds a narrative dimension to the seemingly descriptive image. Furthermore, he introduces an element of imitatio Christi to the woodcut without showing scenes from the Passion – the Via Dolorosa is visibly empty. Despite the fact that the point of view does not match the exact location where Christ

 Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, p. 459; Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, p. 368; Sarraceni non sinunt mos ad hanc portam accedere, et nequaquam permissi fuimus ibi ire, quia ante eam sunt Sarracenorum sepulturae, super quas Christianos non sinunt ambulare. Genua tamen contra eam fleximus, et adorato Domino indulgentias plenariae remis- sionis accepimus. Data est enim hujusmodi indulgentia omnibus contra hanc portam e regione respicientibus et adorantibus, totiens quotiens id fecerint; Beebe, The Jerusalem (note 3), pp. 412– 413; Ross (note 6), pp. 143, 159.  Ross (note 6), pp. 157– 164.  Some examples are the Epitaph for Adelheid Tucher (Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Inv. no. Gm 1486), Sebald Rieter’s sketch of Jerusalem (München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Iconogr. 172) or the ‘destruction of Jerusalem’ in Hartmann Schedel’s (1440 – 1517) Liber Chronicarum.

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stood as he looked down on the city and wept,⁹⁴ Reuwich’s panorama might have looked more authentic to the reader of Felix Fabri’s ‘Evagatorium’ than the actual view. We stood for a long while in this place of Christ’s tears, and gazed upon the holy city, for from this place one can get a very clear prospect of Jerusalem, the Temple, and Mount Sion, the sight whereof is powerful to move the souls of the pious to tears, and it is marked as the place where we read that the Lord wept. Jerusalem, even in its wretched state at the present day, presents a sweet and delightful spectacle from this spot.⁹⁵

As seen in the miniatures of Egerton 1900, the fifteenth-century depictions of the Holy Land, including Reuwich’s seemingly descriptive woodcuts, are composed in reference to a textual model, and their authenticity derives „not from visual resemblance to the original but from correlation to the textual description and the corresponding mental imagery“.⁹⁶ Like Burchard, Fabri and Reuwich use the view from the Mount of Olives to blend different temporal layers.⁹⁷ By referring to the wretched state of the now Muslim city,⁹⁸ Fabri projects the view of Christ into the present. Far from negating the presence of Islam in the Holy Land, Reuwich depicts or even generates new Islamic structures (e. g. the roof of the Dome of the Rock). Like Breydenbach in the ‘Peregrinatio’, he highlights the wretched state of the Holy Land in terms of the opportunities it offers for imitatio Christi.

 Ross (note 6), p. 143.  Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, p. 480; Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, p. 334– 335: Stabamus autem diutius in hoc loco lacrymarum Christi, et civitatem sanctam contemplabamur, siquidem ex hoc loco valde clare videtur Jerusalem cum templo et cum monte Syon, cujus aspectus mentes pias efficax est ad movendum in fletum, et signatur, ubi Dominus legitur flevisse. Habet enim Jerasalem ex hoc loco dulcem et delectabilem speciem, etiam hodie sub hac miseria.  Blair-Moore, Seeing (note 6), p. 410.  Ross (note 6), p. 141.  Ibid., pp. 164– 175.

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There are more narrative moments within Reuwich’s woodcut, as it shows numerous pilgrims on their way from Jaffa to Jerusalem. An earlier version of a similar motif can be found in a copy of Jean Miélot’s († 1472) illuminated translations of Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’,⁹⁹ and might have found its way into Reuwich’s woodcut through a printed version of the ‘Rudimentum Novitorum’.¹⁰⁰ Reuwich’s adaption, however, includes several new details such as the harassment and imprisonment of the disembarking pilgrims (Fig. 4). While the ‘Peregrinatio’ mentions no such events, Fabri’s ‘Evagatorium’ portrays these fearful moments of sorrow as a most valuable experience of imitatio Christi,¹⁰¹ one of the leading concepts within Reuwich’s depiction of a pilgrim’s journey to the Holy Land. As the pilgrims are beaten, humiliated and imprisoned, the events of the Passion are projected into the present in an inverted order. Reuwich uses the motif of the pilgrim’s journey to the Holy Land, with all the obstacles and dangers faced by the fifteenth-century pilgrim in a Muslim country, to present different forms of imitatio Christi. While the illustration of the journey to Jerusalem presents a physical experience, it allows the reader to approach the city mentally, thus offering a safer spiritual experience.¹⁰²

Fig. 4: The beating and imprisonment of the pilgrims. Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, RARA 2.65.

 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms fr. 9087, fol. 85v; Ross (note 6), p. 168.  Herkenhoff (note 79), p. 154.  Fabri, Evagatorium, ed. Hassler (note 14), vol. 1, pp. 195 – 203; Fabri, Book, ed. Stewart (note 14), vol. 1, pp. 221– 234.  Felix Fabri presents a similar approach in his guidebook for a virtual pilgrimage: Fabri, Sionpilger, ed. Carls (note 4), pp. 78 – 85.

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The most exciting visualisations of the pilgrim’s journeys to and within the Holy Land are, however, not to be found within the image. Rather they result from manipulating its carrier medium. Reuwich uses different aspects of the gatefold’s materiality to portray the two most significant journeys within the ‘Peregrinatio’. For the journey to Mount Sinai he relies on a technique similar to Hans Tucher’s sketch of Jerusalem’s Way of the Cross.

Turning to the right path While most of the inscriptions within Reuwich’s woodcut identify the places depicted, some use the different direction of their writing to visualise the journey of the pilgrims (and other travellers).¹⁰³ Most of these descriptions can be found in the Sinai Desert and are connected to a complex network (Fig. 5). Gaza (Gazera vel gaza) on the right-hand side of Jerusalem presents a crossroads to the viewer-reader, as two inscriptions lead away from the city. One inscription follows a straight line of schematically drawn villages in close succession, while the other bends slightly upwards and leads through the desert. The straight description identifies the chain of buildings as the route from Gaza to Cairo, which leads through numerous small towns.¹⁰⁴ At the end of this path another inscription directs the reader up the page. Beginning with the word Saraceni, this inscription contains information on the Hajj.¹⁰⁵ The inscription leads the reader around Mount Sinai to Mecca (Mecha), located on the edge of the woodcut. The city seems to sit on an island in the Red Sea behind the inscription of the port of El Tur (portus thor)¹⁰⁶ indicating that even the faraway lands of India are, in some way, closer to the Holy Land than the sacred city of the Saraceni. By identifying Mecca as the burial ground of Mohammed (vbi sepultus est Machomet), Reuwich presents it as a „malevolent inverse of Jerusalem“ and „false pilgrimage destination“.¹⁰⁷ Following the shorter route to the right, the more comfortable alternative for the reader, who does not have to turn his head, as well as for the

 Ross (note 6), pp. 128 – 132.  Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, RARA 2.65: Per hanc viam itur ex Gazera versus Chayrum per loca supra posita· que sunt oppida parva et est tota via ista arenosa. Transl.: Ross (note 6), p. 131: „By this route one goes from Gaza to Cairo by the places above, which are small towns, and the entire route is full of sand.“  Zurich, RARA 2.65 (note 104): Saraceni de longinquis partibus· peregrinatum ituri ad Mecham· primum veniunt ciuitatem famosissimam Chayrum et Indeper viam istam longam et arenosam xxxviii dierum spacio perueniunt In Mecham ad suum pseudoprophetam. Transl.: Ross (note 6), p. 131: „Saracens from distant parts about to go on pilgrimage to Mecca come first to the most celebrated city of Cairo and from there arrive in Mecca at their pseudoprophet by that long and sandy route in the space of thirty-eight days.“  Zurich, RARA 2.65 (note 104): Portus thor vbi applicant naues ex India. Transl.: Ross (note 6), p. 124: „Port of El Tur, where ships land from India.“  Ross (note 6), p. 124.

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Fig. 5: The written roads in Reuwich’s woodcut. Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, RARA 2.65.

pilgrim, who can travel through villages, ultimately leads to the word Saraceni. Driven by curiositas, the reader is likely to follow the inscription, and suddenly find himself as a Muslim pilgrim on his way to Mecca. There he finds the next crossroads between the road to the kingdom of Presbyter John to the right¹⁰⁸ or the path of the Israelites leading back by crossing the Red Sea to the left.¹⁰⁹ Of course, there is also the option of returning to Gaza and following the alternative route through the desert. Following the less comfortable, slightly bent inscription leading from Gaza, the reader finds himself on the pilgrim’s road through the desert and to Mount Sinai (Mons Synay),¹¹⁰ where the next crossroads awaits. To decipher the inscription going straight

 Zurich, RARA 2.65 (note 104): Via qua peregrinatur in terras presbiteri Johannis spatio trium mensium per loca arenosa. Transl.: Ross (note 6), p. 124: „route by which one travels to the lands of Prester John in the space of three months through desert.“  Zurich, RARA 2.65 (note 104): Via per quam filÿ Israhel sicco pede transierunt mare rubrum. Transl. Ross (note 6), p. 124– 125: „path by which the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea with dry feet.“  Zurich, RARA 2.65 (note 104): De ista civitate itur ad sanctam katherinam· per desertum magnum et vastam solitudinem en venitur ut communiter illac spacio dierum x· cum labore magno. Transl. Ross

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down, the reader needs to rotate the page anticlockwise by 90 degrees, or by 180 degrees to read the other inscription. The first is once again the pilgrim’s road to Cairo,¹¹¹ also leading to the word Saraceni. The second, however, leads the reader on a journey through space and time, as he finds himself on the Israelites’ path from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land.¹¹² As at the crossroads at the Red Sea, the different directions lead to different times. However, this time the journey turns into a bodily experience for the reader. While the inscription of the pilgrim’s road to Mount Sinai can be deciphered by leaning over the map and twisting one’s neck, the only way to follow the path of the Israelites is to turn the map back and forth, or better still, to walk around the map and back. The different directions of the inscriptions depict a journey through space and time. Following the medieval understanding of the progress of history,¹¹³ Reuwich illustrates the progress of the pilgrim in the Holy Land by orienting the description of the pilgrim’s road from east to west, and uses the opposite direction to travel back in time on the paths of the Israelites. By writing the inscription of the Hajj upside down, Reuwich presents the route as a false pilgrimage. And the playful use of the reader’s movement through the desert also offers advice for the journey to the Holy Land. There is a real danger of getting lost here – not in the desert, but in the artist’s shortcuts and curiositas.

Unfolding the Holy Land To visualise the first part of the journey, Reuwich chooses an entirely different, but no less exciting way of using the carrier medium: the process of unfolding. The stages of this process introduce a dynamic dimension to the static woodcut, as each stage presents a different version of the image. This dynamic transformation of the woodcut must not be thought of as an arbitrary series of images, but rather as a strategically planned dramaturgy. On the copy of Breydenbach’s ‘Peregrinatio in terram sanctam’ used for this paper, which is kept in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich (RARA 2.65), the folding marks indicate that the readers of the past experimented with multiple variants of folding Reuwich’s

(note 6), p. 131: „From that city [Gaza] one goes to Saint Catherine through a great desert and a vast wilderness, and generally one comes to that place with great effort in the space of ten days.“  Zurich, RARA 2.65 (note 104): Via per quam peregrini Christiani redeundo de monte Synai· xii dierum interuallo· veniuntur in ciuitatem Chayrum. Transl. Ross (note 6), p. 131: „Route by which Christian pilgrims, returning from Mount Sinai, come into the city of Cairo after a period of twelve days.“  Zurich, RARA 2.65 (note 104): Via· per quam filÿ Israhel venerunt de monte synaÿ in terram promissionis. Transl. Ross (note 6), p. 131: „The route by which the children of Israel came from Mount Sion to the promised land.“  Kiening (note 2), p. 133.

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Fig. 6: Unfolding Reuwich’s woodcut as a wrapped accordion fold. Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, RARA 2.65.

monumental woodcut. The woodcut within this copy shows two distinct folding techniques: the double parallel fold and the wrapped accordion fold. Each of these folding techniques presents a distinct dramaturgy and proposes a different reading of the map. While the former allows the woodcut to be unfolded sequentially from one side to the other, the latter leads to a centripetal unfolding, with the woodcut’s outer flaps being visible first and its centre last. Unfolding Reuwich’s woodcut as a double parallel fold reveals, from Alexandria to Damascus, one part of the eastern world after the other. As no parallels are drawn between this sequence and the text of the ‘Peregrinatio’, the woodcut appears as a descriptive image, a compendium of topographical knowledge. The sequence of images generated by unfolding the wrapped accordion fold, however, parallels the pilgrim’s journey to Jerusalem (Fig. 6). In the first stage of unfolding, the woodcut reveals what looks like the distant coastline of an unknown land. When it is unfolded once, the pilgrim’s vessel enters at the bottom of the woodcut while Jerusalem appears

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in its centre. The round edges of the not yet visible lengthy panorama form a circular structure echoing the depictions of the heavenly Jerusalem. When the edge of the woodcut is pulled out, Jerusale„m unfolds in front of the reader and reveals the wellknown panorama. At the same time, the vessel at the bottom of the woodcut reaches the port of Jaffa, and the pilgrims disembark into the Holy Land. The complex dramaturgy of unfolding Reuwich’s woodcut as a wrapped accordion fold evokes multiple forms of locomotion connected to the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and introduces several narrative elements to the seemingly descriptive image. The most obvious is, of course, the pilgrims’ journey to Jerusalem, depicted in the ship entering first the woodcut and then the port of Jaffa. The viewer can experience how the pilgrims’ vessel, which he has followed through the seven gatefolds, finally reaches its destination. For the now disembarking pilgrims, however, the journey is not yet over. Their journey towards Jerusalem is visualised as a sequence of the three first sights from the pilgrims’ point of view. At first, the viewer sees the distant shoreline of the Holy Land, then Jerusalem, as the heavenly city, exactly how Burchard and others described it, and finally he sees the earthly city with its sanctuaries and, of course, its indulgences. This dynamic transformation of the heavenly Jerusalem’s circular structure into the panorama of the earthly city witnessed from a mountaintop recalls the descent of the New Jerusalem, while the ascent to the top of the Mount of Olives incorporates the idea of the ascension to God. In a sense, the two methods of manipulating the carrier medium (turning and unfolding) mirror the two-part structure of the book. Unfolding the woodcut becomes a simulation of the journey to Jerusalem. The reader experiences the overwhelming joy of reaching the destination by following the well-known sequence of the three first sights. Following the descriptions in the desert of Sinai simulates the journeys within the Holy Land. The reader experiences what it means to be a pilgrim in a Muslim country and learns about the real dangers of such a journey. All in all, the playful use of material aspects bears witness to an awareness of the mediality of the illustrated pilgrim’s account.

Note on Contributors Ingrid Baumgärtner has been Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kassel since 1994. She previously taught at the University of Augsburg (1983 – 1992) and was a Heisenberg Fellow of the DFG and Visiting Scholar in Princeton, Stanford, and at the Villa I Tatti in Florence. She served as vice-president of the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, as faculty dean at Kassel University, and as a member of the presiding committee and scientific board of the Mediävistenverband. Her publications explore medieval canon law and Roman law, the city of Rome, gender and women’s history as well as social space, cartography, and travel reports. Geographically, her focus is on Germany, Italy, and the Mediterranean world. Her latest books discuss the sixteenthcentury cartographer Battista Agnese (WBG 2017, Stuttgart 2020). Nathalie Bouloux is Maître de Conférences at the University of Tours, associated with the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance. Her research focuses on representations of space, specifically cultural geography of the ninth through the fifteenth centuries, space, territory and humanist geography. She has published several articles and is the author of ‘Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle’ (Turnhout, 2002). Her ‘L’espace habité’ appears in ‘La Terre: connaissance, représentations, mesure’ (Turnhout, 2013), edited by Patrick Gautier Dalché. Along with Georges Tolias and Anca Dan, Bouloux edited ‘Orbis disciplinae: hommages en l’honneur de Patrick Gautier Dalché’ (Turnhout, 2017). Raoul Marc Etienne DuBois studied interdisciplinary medieval studies and German literature at the University of Zurich. Since 2018 he has worked as a PhD student in the SNF-funded research project “Hybrid Times – Temporal Dynamics. 1400 – 1600” under the supervision of Professor Dr. Christian Kiening at the University of Zurich. Jean-Charles Ducène (PhD) is Directeur d’études at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris) where his research and his teaching focuses on Islamic medieval geography, cartography and natural sciences. He studies the development of the various genres of these litteratures. Among his works is a commented translation of the travel of Abû Hâmid al-Gharnatî (twelfth century). He also edited the second geographical treaty of al-Idrîsî and he has recently published a study on Europe as seen by the Arabic geographers. Eva Ferro obtained her PhD from the University of Freiburg (Germany) for her dissertation ‘Ein Fest für den Heiligen. Die früh- und hochmittelalterliche Verehrung des heiligen Zeno und ihre liturgischen Quellen in Verona’. 2016 – 2018 she held the position of assistant lecturer to the chair for Medieval Latin in Freiburg. Twice was she awarded Mercator Followships (as Pre-doc and as Post-Doc) at the University of Heidelberg, Department of Medieval Latin, financed by the Collaborative Research https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-013

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Center 933 ‘Materiale Textkulturen’. From October 2017 to May 2020 she was part of the team in the project ‘Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terrae Sanctae: The Text, Its Development and Its Circulation and Reception’, founded by the Israel Research Foundation. Since October 2020 she works at the Handschriftenzentrum of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart cataloguing the latin manuscripts from the benedictine cloister St. Georgen/Villingen. Kurt Franz is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Tübingen. Having studied Arabic and Islam, Sociology, Political Science and History at Göttingen, he earned his PhD from Hamburg university and then conducted research in Halle and Beirut. A historian of society, politics, and scholarship in the Islamic Middle East, he asks how human experience transforms into texts and thence into intertextual knowledge transmission. Monographs of his focus on ‘Compilation in Arabic Chronicles’ and ‘Bedouin Groups in the Islamic Middle Period’, vol. I (both in German). He also looks into the spatial dynamism of Islamic history to understand the ways in which geospatial realities, human agency and geographically related literature act upon each other. David A. King is a British-born, American-trained orientalist and historian of science, most of whose research over 50 years has been on Arabic scientific manuscripts and instruments in libraries and museums around the world. He has documented for the first time the way in which astronomy was used for religious purposes in medieval Muslim society. From 1985 until his retirement in 2006 he was Professor of History of Science at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Christoph Mauntel is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History at the University of Tübingen. In 2013 he finished his PhD on practices of violence in late medieval France at the University of Heidelberg. The following two years, he worked in the Heidelberg-based Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” on medieval ideas of ‘Empire’ as well as on premodern cartography. In 2015, he became a member of the Research Training Group “Religious Knowledge in Premodern Europe (800 – 1800)” at the University of Tübingen. Since then his work focussed on medieval ideas of world order. He is about to complete a book on the concept of continents in the Middle Ages. Karen C. Pinto was educated at Dartmouth and Columbia and specializes in the history of Islamic cartography and its intersections between Ottoman, European, and other world cartographic traditions. She published a major book on ‘Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration’ (Chicago, 2016), which won a Choice’s 2017 Outstanding Academic Title award. For her work, she has received a number of distinguished fellowships including an NEH Fellowship, a Harley Fellowship, and a Social Science Research Council Ibn Khaldun prize for her study on medieval Islamic maps of the

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Mediterranean. At the moment, she is completing a smaller book on the question ‘What is “Islamic” about Islamic Maps?’ Felicitas Schmieder, born 1961, professor of pre-modern history at FernUniversität in Hagen since 2004. Dissertation 1991 Europe and the Foreigners. The Mongols judged by the Latin West from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century; Habilitation 2000 on Frankfurt in the Middle Ages; Recurrent visiting professor Dpt. for Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest; executive board of CARMEN. The worldwide medieval network since 2011. Main research areas: pre-modern cartography (world, regional); medieval cross-cultural contacts and perceptions; prophecy as political language; history of medieval ‘Europe’; medieval German urban history; European cultural memory. Stefan Schröder is historian at the University of Helsinki (Department of Church History), specialized in late medieval cultural and religious history. After his studies of history and politics, he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Universities of Kassel, Erlangen-Nuremberg and Helsinki. He is particularly interested in cultural encounters, worldviews, transmission of knowledge and cultural memory. Based on his dissertation, he has published a book on ‘Otherness’ in late medieval pilgrimage reports to the Holy Land and written several related articles e. g. on medieval travelling and on images of Islam and Judaism. His first interdisciplinary postdoc project focused on cultural transfer between the Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian world by analysing medieval cartographical representations. In his current work, he examines the uses of the crusading past in late medieval times historiographical texts. Emmanuelle Vagnon is a researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris-Paris1 University), specializing in medieval and early Renaissance cartography. Her PhD thesis was published as ‘Cartographie et représentations de l’Orient méditerranéen en Occident, du milieu du XIIIe à la fin du XVe siècle’ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). She co-edited the Catalogue of the map exhibition ‘L’âge d’or des cartes marines’, Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris: BnF-Seuil, 2012), and co-edited with Eric Vallet ‘La fabrique de l’océan Indien. Cartes d’Orient et d’Occident’, a book about the representation of the Indian Ocean in Islamic, Asian and Western maps from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017).

Index This index lists premodern toponyms, locations, persons, and dynasties. Some important artefacts (such as the Hereford map) have also been included. The location of institutions (as for example ‘London’ for the British Library), however, have not been listed. Page numbers in italics refer to footnotes. I am grateful to Kurt Franz (Tübingen) for is help with the transliteration.

Abbasids 22, 28, 44, 134, 136, 207 Abelard, Peter 33 Abū Dulaf 142 Abū Jaʿfar, Muḥammad b. Mūsā 151 Abū al-Maʿālī 142 Acre 189 – 190, 193, 208, 210 – 212, 216, 224, 227, 251, 256, 266, 269 – 270 Adam 24, 100 – 101, 105 – 107, 156, 165 Adso of Montier-en-Der 105 Africa 16, 18, 23, 25, 40 – 42, 45, 48 – 50, 55, 57, 59, 63, 66 – 67, 72, 76 – 77, 79, 81, 88, 94, 97, 103, 125, 141, 164, 166 – 167, 173, 175, 199, 204 – 205, 237, 245 Albano, Justus de 234 Alberti, Leonardo Battista 236 Aleppo 111 – 112, 182 Alexander the Great 55 – 56, 172 – Walls/Gates of Alexander 24 – 25, 105, 172 Alexandria 4, 206, 208, 230, 245, 289, 300 Alfonso VII, King of León and Castile 153 Ambrose of Milan 3 – 4 ʿAmr b. al- ʿĀṣ 47 Anatolia 150 Andalusia/al-Andalus 125, 127 – 128, 153, 180 Antioch 206, 224, 266 Arabia, Arabian Peninsula 12, 25, 42, 44 – 45, 48 – 49, 128, 200 – 202, 206 – 208 Ararat 14 Aristotle 33, 102 Asia 13, 16, 25, 40 – 42, 45, 49 – 50, 55, 57, 59, 63, 66 – 68, 72, 76 – 77, 97, 81, 88, 94, 97, 103, 142, 158, 164, 166 – 167, 169 – 170, 172 – 173, 175, 177 – 178, 180, 185, 200 – 201, 226, 230, 231, 237, 245 – 246, 248, 251 Atlantic Ocean 30, 44, 120, 145, 167 – 169, 172, 248 ʿAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn 51 Augustine of Hippo 3 – 4, 63, 66, 81, 99, 106 Avicenna → Ibn Sīnā Avignon 190, 196, 205, 224 Ayyubids 109 – 110, 136 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-014

Babel 164, 207 Baghdad 21, 22, 111, 118, 184, 186 – 187, 192, 207 Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ 40, 44, 55 – 56 Baibars I, Sultan of Egypt 207 al-Bajalī 133 al-Bakrī 116, 126 – 128 al-Balkhī 23, 49, 200 Balthasar → Magi Baltic Sea 195 Bamberg 170 Barthelemy of Parma 107 Bartolomé de las Casas 169 Basil of Caesarea 3 Basra 137 al-Bawāzīj 133 – 134, 136 Beatus of Liébana 7, 13 – 14 Bede the Venerable 90, 97, 101 – 102, 105 Behaim, Martin 163 – 164, 167 – 171, 173 – 178 Berlinghieri, Francesco 223, 226, 230, 232, 237 – 246 Bethlehem 153, 164, 175, 213, 240, 244, 253, 255 Beyazid II, Ottoman Sultan 241 Bianco, Andrea 19, 177 Bible 3 – 4, 7, 9, 11, 16, 17, 33, 63, 65, 67, 165, 174, 177, 193, 207, 213, 217, 229, 237, 246, 258, 283 – Acts 240 – Dan 2:37 – 41 207 – Ezk 9:4 71 – Ezk 38:2 148 – Ezk 39:6 148 – Ex 12:7 71 – Ex 19 – 20 207 – Gen 9 – 10 76 – Gen 11 :1 – 9 207 – Jg 4:1 213 – Jg 4:11 213 – Jg 20:1 226 – Jm (apokr) 177 – Jn 240

308

Index

– Jn 4:1 – 45 153 – Jn 11:1 – 44 152 – Jn 9:6 – 7 152 – Lk 19:28 – 40 152 – Lk 2:1 104 – Lk 2:8 – 14 153 – Mk 11:1 – 10 152 – Mt 2 175 – Mt 21:1 – 9 152 – Mt 27:3 – 8 152 al-Bīrūnī 21, 23, 118 – 120, 184 Bisticci, Vespasiano da 229 Black Sea 18, 164, 167, 189, 191, 194, 204 Boethius 259 – 260 Borso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara 232 Brandis, Lucas 266 Brazil/Brasil 168 – 171, 175, 178 Brendan 171 – 172 Breydenbach, Bernhard of 18, 232, 268, 274, 291 – 293, 295, 299 Buondelmonti, Christoforo 214, 238, 242 Buoninsegni, Domenico 229 Burchard of Monte Sion 17, 34, 209, 211 – 216, 223, 226 – 229, 239 – 241, 247, 250 – 257, 259 – 267, 269 – 270, 272, 274, 283 – 284, 287, 293, 295 – 296, 301 Cairo 182, 188, 206 – 207, 209, 297, 299 Caspar → Magi Caspian Mountains 172 – 173 Caspian Sea 90, 194, 198 – 199, 203, 219 Catalan Atlas 10, 202 Caverio, Nicolo 245 Charles IV, King of France 190 Chartres 102 China 27, 48, 50, 120, 158 – 159, 167 Clement V, Pope 193 Columbus, Christoph 167, 169 – 170, 248 Constantinople 43, 148, 201, 225 Córdoba 28 – 29, 152 – 153 Cosmas Indicopleustes 4 Cresques, Abraham and Jehude 10 Damascus 24, 111 – 112, 182, 213, 226, 300 Damietta 137 Dante Alighieri 238, 241 Dati, Gregorio and Leonardo 82, 238 Dead Sea 207, 214, 226, 240 Delphi 1 de la Cosa, Juan 167, 248 – 249

al-Dimyāṭī 27, 182 Don 59, 94, 98 – 99, 164 Doxapatrès, Neilos 144 Ebstorf map 14, 73, 189, 192 – 193, 200, 208, 217 Egypt 18, 23 – 24, 26 – 27, 31, 47, 49, 71, 111, 136, 154, 175 – 176, 182, 189, 193 – 195, 199, 202, 204, 206 – 207, 216, 224 – 225, 230, 239 – 240 Elijah (prophet) 105, 107 England 16, 102 Enoch (prophet) 105, 107 Ethiopia 178, 194, 199, 206 Euphrates 133, 171, 207 Europe/Europa 1, 10 – 12, 16, 25, 33, 40 – 42, 44 – 45, 49 – 50, 55, 57, 59, 63, 66 – 67, 72, 76 – 77, 79, 81, 85, 88, 93 – 95, 97, 99, 102 – 104, 107, 109, 142 – 144, 158, 163 – 164, 166 – 167, 172, 179, 190, 192, 195, 200, 231 – 232, 237, 250 – 251, 273, 279, 285, 287 Eusebius of Caesarea 228, 259 – 260 Eve 105 – 106, 165 Fabri, Felix 255, 273 – 274, 276, 281 – 284, 291 – 296 Fatimids 22, 110, 154, 159, 207 Fazio degli Uberti 238 Fidentius de Padova 190, 206 Finland 170 Flanders 16, 86, 92, 102, 104, 167 Florence 223, 229 – 230, 232, 237 – 238, 242, 264 France 232, 236, 241, 245 Frederick III, Roman Emperor 285 Fugger, Ulrich 192 Fulk, King of Jerusalem 216 Galilee 207, 213, 234, 240, 243 Ganges 171 – 172, 174 – 175 Gaza 209, 226, 297 – 299 Genghis Khan 203 Gennadius of Marseilles 106 Germanus, Nicolas 214, 223, 232, 234, 237 Germany 223, 233 – 234, 237, 245 al-Ghazālī 52 Gibraltar 79

Index

Gog and Magog 24 – 25, 94, 106, 145, 147 – 148, 159, 164, 172 – 173, 199 – 201, 203 – 204 Greenland 166, 169 – 170 Guido of Pisa 28 Gyon → Nile Hadith 55, 119, 122, 124, 128, 133 – 134, 137 – 138 Hārūn al-Raschīd 5 Hayton of Corycus 203 – 204 Heidelberg 192 Hereford map 14, 189, 192 – 193, 200, 208, 217 Hieronymus, Eusebius Sophronius → Jerome of Stridon Holl, Lienhart 233 Holy Land 6, 8, 12, 16 – 18, 20, 31, 34, 79, 136, 144, 151 – 152, 154, 159, 189 – 190, 192 – 193, 195, 199, 204, 206 – 219, 223 – 232, 234 – 247, 250 – 253, 255 – 256, 258 – 260, 262 – 277, 281, 283, 285 – 289, 291 – 297, 299, 301 Iberian Peninsula 29, 33, 61, 168 Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam 23, 47 – 49, 55 Ibn Bakhtīshūʿ 46 Ibn Ḥawqal 22 – 23, 49, 150, 155 Ibn Ḥazm 141 Ibn Khurradādhbih 27, 148, 150 – 151, 157 Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) 52 – 53 Ibn al-Wardī 24 al-Idrīsī 8 – 9, 12, 26 – 27, 30, 34, 141, 143 – 152, 154 – 160, 197 – 201, 204, 217 India 21, 48, 94, 110, 120, 141, 155 – 156, 167, 172 – 179, 194, 202 – 203, 297 Indian Ocean 20, 90, 166, 199, 206 Iraq, al-Irāq 5, 47, 111, 113, 134, 136 Iran 22, 24, 49 – 51, 110 – 111, 136, 142, 154, 185 – 187 Ireneaus of Lyon 3 Isfahan 185, 186 – 187 Isidore of Seville 8, 29, 57, 58, 61 – 62, 66 – 67, 71, 73, 76 – 77, 79 – 81, 202, 244 al-Iskandarī 131 Israel 12, 18, 30 – 31, 71, 213 – 214, 233, 244, 253, 298 – 299 al-Iṣṭakhrī 22 – 23, 45 – 46, 52 Istanbul 241

309

Jabal al-Qāf 51 – 56 Jabal al-Qamar 198 – 199, 205 Jābir b. Ḥayyān 54 Jacopo d’Angelo 19, 229 – 231 Jacques de Molay 190 Jacques de Vitry 209 Jaffa 228, 240, 244, 296, 301 Japan 167, 171 Jean Germain 234 – 235 Jerome of Stridon 17, 66 – 67, 174, 226, 228, 232, 259 – 260, 263 Jerusalem 6, 14, 16, 18 – 19, 27, 30 – 31, 44, 64, 71, 94, 103, 105, 137, 141, 145, 151 – 152, 154, 164, 182, 189, 192 – 194, 201 – 202, 206 – 218, 224, 227 – 230, 235, 237, 240 – 241, 244, 251, 255 – 256, 261, 264 – 266, 268 – 269, 276 – 277, 279 – 290, 293 – 297, 300 – 301 Jesus Christ 17, 64, 104 – 105, 115, 152, 164, 174, 213, 240 – 241, 254, 264, 280, 283, 286 John (apostle) 213, 279 John XXII, Pope 190 – 191, 196, 208, 217, 223 – 224 John, Prester 175 – 176, 178, 202 – 203, 215, 298 John of Hildesheim 177 – 178 Jordan (river) 31, 136, 213, 226, 234, 238, 240 Joshua (prophet) 213, 266 Kaaba → Mecca, Kaaba al-Kalbī 131 – 132 Kabul 154 al-Kāshgharī 24 – 25 Kerbala 154 Khārijites 112 al-Khwārizmī 118, 145, 148 al-Kindī 55, 123 Kraft, Adam 279 Lambert of Saint-Omer 7 – 8, 34, 85 – 108 Lapacino, Francesco di 229 Lebanon 18, 79, 226 Leo of Rožmitál 285 Levant → Holy Land London 18 Lorraine 234, 236 – 237 Louis IX, King of France 190, 215

310

Index

Louis XI, King of France Lucan 63 – 64

237

Macrobius 21, 62, 67, 90, 97, 99, 105 – 107 Madaba 6 Madagascar 157 Maghreb 30, 48, 128, 179 Magi, Three 164, 173, 175 – 178 Majorca 10, 33 Mamluks 110, 175, 193 – 194, 204, 211, 224, 251 al-Maʾmūn 23 Massaio, Piero del 229, 238 Martellus (Germanus), Henricus 214, 223, 226, 230, 237, 242 – 245 Martianus Capella 97, 100 Māshā’allāh ibn Atharī 28 al-Masʿūdī 22, 122 – 123 Matfre Ermengaud 65 Matthew (apostle) 173, 175 Matthew Paris 18, 268, 275, 289 Mauro, Fra 19, 44, 174 Mecca 5, 9, 24 – 25, 27, 34, 44, 47 – 48, 55, 115, 120, 122, 134, 137, 141, 145 – 146, 150, 153, 179 – 181, 184 – 186, 200 – 202, 207, 209, 219, 297 – 298 – Kaaba 5, 27, 34, 55, 120 – 121, 134, 179 – 184, 200 Medina 24, 44, 47 – 48, 134, 136, 141, 201 – 202 Mediterranean Sea 18, 20, 24, 30, 59, 90, 98 – 99, 164, 189, 191, 194 – 195, 204 – 207, 209, 217, 219, 225 – 226, 230, 234, 256, 265 Mehmed II, Ottoman Sultan 43, 241 Melchior → Magi Mercator, Gerhard 246 Mesopotamia 134, 136, 206 Miélot, Jean 296 Modena world map 19, 44 Mongols 194, 200, 203 – 204, 207, 219 Mosul 111 – 112, 133, Mountains of the Moon → Jabal al-Qamar Muhammad (prophet) 55, 114, 116, 119, 122, 134, 136, 142, 150, 202, 209 Muffel, Gabriel 255, 268, 285 – 286, 291 Muffel, Niklas III 285 Muffel, Niklas IV 285 al-Muqaddasī 22 – 23, 26, 159

al-Nadīm 142 Nāṣir-i Khusraw 5 al-Nawbakhtī 141 Nazareth 207, 209, 213 Niccolò da Poggibonsi 255, 274, 286 – 287, 291 Niccolò de Lorenzo (Tedesco) 238 Nicholas I, Duke of Lorraine 236 Nicholas of Lyra 33 Nile 59, 98, 164, 171, 173, 175, 194 – 195, 199, 204, 207, 209 Noah 8, 14, 16, 20, 30, 62 – 64, 76 – 77, 80 – 81, 164, 173, 210, 219 Normandy 102 Norway 170 Nuremberg 20, 167, 170, 232, 242, 251, 255, 268, 275 – 277, 279, 285 Orosius, Paulus 28 – 29, 66, 81, 88, 92, 97 Ottomans 22, 43 – 44, 109, 235, 241 – 242, 245 – 246 Pacific Ocean 44 Palermo 153, 159 Palestine → Holy Land Paradise 8 – 9, 13 – 14, 16, 19, 24, 51, 56, 67 – 69, 81, 94, 103, 105, 107, 118, 164 – 165, 171 – 172, 174, 178, 202, 219, 247 – 248 Paris 33 Paul II, Pope 232 Paulinus Minorita 13, 196, 214, 217 – 219, 224 – 225 Paolino Veneto → Paulinus Minorita Peregrinus, Johannes 223, 236 – 237, 246 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 234 Phison → Ganges Pisa 28, 33 Pliny 21, 66, Polo, Marco 19, 28, 167, 199, 203 Polybius 66 Pomponius Mela 66 Psalter map 14 – 16, 73 Pseudo-Aethicus 88, 92, 97, 103 Ptolemy, Claudius 17, 19, 20 – 21, 23, 34, 116, 118, 145, 148, 166 – 167, 170, 212, 214, 223, 225 – 226, 229 – 234, 236 – 238, 241 – 246 al-Qazwīnī

200

Index

Quran 3, 5, 9, 11, 47, 55, 114 – 115, 118 – 119, 124, 128, 137 – 138, 180, 201 – 2:132 134 – 2:144 5, 27, 180 – 2:208 122 – 3:83 134 – 3:97 5 – 5:3 135 – 5:18 122 – 5:110 152 – 9:29 134 – 9:33 134 – 9:36 134 – 11:7 55 – 12:40 134 – 16:15 118 – 18:1 – 27 150 – 18:92 – 99 148 – 23:18 118 – 23:72 122 – 24:2 134 – 40:64 118 – 48:28 134 – 49:9 122 – 59:6 – 7 122 – 61:9 134 – 65:12 118 – 71:19 118 – 78:6 – 7 118 – 95:6 134 – 98:5 134 – 105 55 – 110:2 134 Rashi (rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki) 30 – 32 Red Sea 90, 131, 164, 206, 265 – 266, 297 – 299 Reger Johannes 223, 232, 233 – 234 Rene II, Duke of Lorraine 236 Reuwich, Erhard 18, 268 – 269, 291 – 301 Richard of St Victor 31 Rieter, Sebald II 251, 275 – 276, 279, 287, 294 Ringmann, Matthias 236 Robert VII, Count of Boulogne and Auvergne 209 Roger II, King of Sicily 26, 30, 144, 198 Rome 1, 6, 145, 150, 201, 205, 285 Rosselli, Francesco 178, 238, 245 Safavids

185 – 187

311

Sahara 155 Saint Riquier 72 Sallust 63 – 64 al-Samʿānī 136 Samarqand 185 Sanudo Torsello, Marino 7 – 8, 17, 34, 189 – 219, 223 – 230, 232 – 233, 237 – 241, 245 – 246, 293 Santiago de Compostela 154, 175, 286 Schedel, Hartmann 20, 279 Schnitzer of Arnsheim, Johannes 234 Schöner, Johannes 163 – 164, 169 – 178 Schönsperger, Hans 251, 275 al-Shahrastānī 142 al-Sharafī 182 – 184 Sicily 10, 26, 30, 33, 150 Sinai (Mount) 207 – 209, 291, 297 – 299, 301 Spain 10, 24, 144, 231 – 232, 236, 247 Sri Lanka 24, 143, 156 Suhrāb 23 Syria 47, 49, 111, 122, 230, 239 Talmud 30 Tamīm b. Baḥr 158 Tanais → Don Tertullian 63 Tezel, Gabriel 285 – 286 Thomas (apostle) 175 Tibet 27 Tigris 171, 207 Tikrit 133 Toledo 153 Torah 11, 31 – Book of Numbers (‫) ְבִּמ ְדַּבר‬, Mas’ei (‫ )ַמְסֵעי‬31 Tordesillas 247 Toscanelli, Paolo del Pozzo 169 Tucher, Adelheid 294 Tucher, Endres II 267, 276 – 277, 279 Tucher, Hans VI 251, 267, 274 – 281, 291, 297 Tunis 187, 215 Turkey 14, 79 Ulm 223, 233 – 234, 236 – 237, 242, 255 Umayyads 136 Venice 28, 33, 189, 190 – 192, 196, 205, 224, 287, 291, 293

312

Index

Vesconte, Pietro 7, 12, 17, 19, 28, 34, 189, 191 – 193, 196, 198 – 201, 203 – 207, 208, 210 – 214, 216 – 219, 224 – 225, 227 Vincent of Beauvais 203 Waldseemüller, Martin 170, 236, 245 Walsperger, Andreas 19 al-Waq Waq 47 Wey, William 212 – 213, 228 William III, Landgrave of Thuringia 285

William of Conches 27 William of Tyre 209 al-Yaʿqūbī 22 Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī 22, 34, 109 – 139 Yemen 47 – 49, 121, 154, 180 al-Zafayān 132 al-Zamakhsharī 133 – 134 Zanj 142, 199 Zubayda bt. Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr

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