Yet if, for these reasons, we cannot show on a map the gradations in the character and accuracy of Western geographical knowledge in the age of the Crusades, such gradations nevertheless existed. From the point of view of Western Europe as a whole they might be grouped in a broad way as follows. First there were the well-known regions about which knowledge was derived and kept fresh through active commercial, diplomatic, ecclesiastical, military, and scholarly enterprise. These regions may be said to have included most of Europe west of the Elbe and Hungary. They also included the overland routes to Constantinople, the shores of the Mediterranean, and the Holy Land. From the point of view of the Scandinavian peoples, who were great travelers, they took in not only the foregoing regions but also the Baltic coasts, southern Norway and Sweden, and Iceland. Beyond the bounds of the well-known areas lay a second group of areas about which a fair amount of reasonably trustworthy information was at hand, derived from one of three sources: (1) reports of occasional travelers; (2) more or less reliable hearsay; (3) classical descriptions drawn from literary sources. Much of Western Asia and North Africa fell within this category and, for the Scandinavians, Greenland. Beyond lay the third group of regions known only through the vaguest of rumors—the domains of fabulous monsters and legendary men. To some writers India was such a land, to others Russia and northern Scandinavia, to still others the legendary isles that lay concealed in the Western Ocean. Finally, beyond them came those regions lying without the known world, about which the men of the Middle Ages themselves would have acknowledged that they knew nothing: the austral continent, the countries of the antipodeans, _antoikoi_, _antichthones_, which have been discussed in an earlier chapter. No boundaries could be drawn setting off these various tracts from one another; the well-known shaded off imperceptibly into the less well-known, and the vaguely known merged into fairyland; within each well-known tract were islands of doubt and mystery, and fabulous stories were told of even the most commonplace features of the landscape. _THE “OIKOUMENE” AS A WHOLE_