The geographical lore of the time of the Crusades : $b A study in the history of medieval science and tradition in Western EuropeWright, John Kirtland
History
The geographical lore of the time of the Crusades : $b A study in the history of medieval science and tradition in Western Europe
Wright, John Kirtland
Geography -- History; Geography, Medieval
To complete the discussion of _mappaemundi_, mention must be made of a
very small but very neat little map in a late thirteenth-century Psalter
in the British Museum. If this was not actually drawn during our period,
it undoubtedly had predecessors much like it, and it shows marked
resemblances to the map of Henry of Mayence as well as to the Hereford
and Ebstorf maps.[547]
REGIONAL MAPS
Several of the regional maps, or maps of limited areas, dating from our
period may be merely fragments or copies of small portions of maps of
the world. This is certainly true of the map of Europe in the Ghent
manuscript of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_, which depicts that continent
crammed into slightly more than a quarter of a circle with no attempt to
show the articulations of the coast. The Guido map of Italy, as we have
already seen, probably represents a portion of a larger map, and the
same can possibly be said of the maps of the East and of Palestine which
follow a treatise by Jerome, entitled _De situ et nominibus locorum
Hebraicorum_, or _De Palestinae locis_, in a manuscript now in the
British Museum. Though these two maps were actually drawn in the twelfth
century, they represent the cartography of a very much earlier age and
perhaps may be attributed to Jerome himself.[548] They were drawn to
illustrate the Biblical geography of Palestine and the Orient, and they
show a great wealth of Scriptural legends. Other legends were taken from
profane sources, such as the writings of Isidore, Orosius, Julius
Honorius, Dionysius, and the Romance of Alexander; and affinities to the
Peutinger Table show that the draftsman was under the influence of the
cartography of the Roman imperial epoch.
Among the regional maps that had no connection with _mappaemundi_ are
plans of Jerusalem (“Situs Ierusalem”) accompanying twelfth- and
thirteenth-century manuscripts of an anonymous work written about 1109
and entitled _Gesta Francorum Ierusalem expugnantium_ (Fig. 7, p. 250,
below). Though these plans reveal many names from the early Crusading
age, their outlines as a whole—the fact, for instance, that Jerusalem is
shown to be circular instead of rectangular—make it seem probable that
they represent a schematic diagram of the Holy City going back to as
early as the sixth century and brought up to date by the anonymous
compiler of the Crusading epoch.[549]
_Matthew Paris’ Maps of Britain_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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