XII. REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY

XII. REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY

We shall not attempt the thankless and impossible task of giving a complete conspectus of Western regional lore in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This chapter, like its predecessors, consists largely of illustrative examples.

GENERAL CHARACTER OF REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE PERIOD

GEOGRAPHY OF TRADITION AND GEOGRAPHY OF OBSERVATION

We explained in the Introduction that there were two kinds of geographical information available in the Middle Ages—information derived from earlier literature and information derived from contemporary tradition and observation. In the period we are studying, these were found among men of very different interests and activities, and hence they usually failed to blend. It is true that now and then in a work of erudition of the time we come across a report of some original observation made by the writer himself or learned by him from a contemporary; but these data were seldom really assimilated into the body of the text, seldom used as a check on the assertions of older authorities. They seem to float like drops of oil on the deep, or shallow, waters of authoritative learning. Conversely, in works recording contemporary events—histories, chronicles, letters—we often come across facts and theories that were taken from older books; but these were infrequently subjected to critical examination in the light of contemporary knowledge. On the contrary, they were usually treated with indulgence or respect merely because they were old, even when observed phenomena seemed to prove them false.

In the present as in the foregoing parts of this book the attempt is made to distinguish between these two distinct types of geographical lore. For many regions the geographical ideas are indicated that were derived from Pliny, Solinus, Isidore, Bede, and other encyclopedists and that found expression in treatises like the De imagine mundi, the Otia imperialia, and the Image du monde. In contrast to these there is set forth the kind of information that was being gathered by contemporary eyewitnesses.

GRADATIONS OF ACCURACY OF KNOWLEDGE

Maps are sometimes drawn at the present day to show the state of progress of geographical knowledge. Upon these by various tints or shadings are indicated tracts that are accurately surveyed, partially surveyed, known only through route traverses, known only through reports from natives, or totally unknown. No such map could be constructed to show the character of regional knowledge in the Middle Ages, because our sources of information are not sufficiently complete and because the knowledge both actually and potentially available varied from country to country, from community to community, even from individual to individual. The printing press and facility of communication between the peoples of the world has rendered scientific knowledge or, at any rate, the possibility of obtaining scientific knowledge the common property of all modern civilizations. An Australian student, for instance, if he is willing to take the time and trouble, can learn through research virtually all that is known to Danish or Icelandic scholars about the geography of Greenland. In the Middle Ages, on the contrary, we may feel certain that the Danes and Norwegians had at hand much detailed information on Greenland and the Arctic shores of Europe that the Italian had no means whatever of obtaining. Correspondingly, the Italian trader of Genoa or Venice unquestionably knew a great deal about remote parts of Asia and North Africa that could never reach the ears of an author of a De imagine mundi or of a Lambert of St. Omer, writing in quiet cloisters of France or Belgium.

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

Before turning to the various regions of the known world—the oikoumene, as the Greeks called it; the orbis terrarum or habitatio of the Romans—something must be said concerning theories about the oikoumene as a whole, about its center, and about Paradise and the four rivers of Paradise. It was usually supposed that the oikoumene itself occupies a relatively restricted part of the surface of the globe. The words of Seneca to the effect that there is only a short distance from Spain to India imply that the known world must stretch out over much more than a half of the circumference of the sphere.[1175] Though these words were often read in our period, scant attention was paid either to them or to the Arabic interpretation of Aristotle’s similar theory until a later date. Roger Bacon’s specific explanation that the habitatio extends around much more than half the earth’s circumference represents an opinion that was exceptional.[1176] The majority of the thinkers of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries who speculated on the subject at all were probably under the spell of the theory fostered by Macrobius, which made our habitable portion of the earth one of four similar regions separated from each other by two oceans.[1177] This undoubtedly was the view most widely accepted, but in addition the idea was perhaps already being propounded early in the twelfth century that the lands of the known world form merely a small portion of the surface of the terrestrial sphere emerging above the surface of a larger, enveloping sphere of water.[1178]

THE “OIKOUMENE” DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS

The writers of the Crusading age were unanimous in dividing the oikoumene itself into three parts, Asia, Libya (or Africa), and Europe. Bernard Sylvester said: “In two parts the ether, and likewise in two parts the air, but in three parts you are to understand that the land is divided,”[1179] almost as if a tripartite division of the lands were in accord with a law of nature. This division was inevitable in view of what was known of the arrangement of lands and seas. Orosius,[1180] however, had spoken of certain writers who would split the known world in two, making Africa a part of Europe “because of its small size” and making Asia as large as Africa and Europe together. Those who had preferred to conceive of Africa as a separate continent, he had said, did so not on account of its size but because it is cut off from Europe by an arm of the sea. These words of Orosius were quoted by Otto of Freising[1181] and by Gervase of Tilbury.[1182] The theory that Asia is equal in size to Europe and Africa put together is reproduced by the author of the De situ terrarum,[1183] and upon it was based that symmetrical division of the world’s surface which we find depicted on the so-called T-O maps of the early Middle Ages.[1184]

Isidore of Seville drew largely from Orosius in writing his chapters on geography. Theoretically he accepted the tripartite division,[1185] but in his actual treatment of the countries of the world he appended a discussion of islands to his discussion of the continents. In this he was followed by the author of the De imagine mundi and by many other writers of the time,[1186] all of whom declared that the earth’s surface is divided in three, but added chapters on the islands after their descriptions of Asia, Africa, and Europe.

THE CENTER OF THE “OIKOUMENE”

JERUSALEM AS THE CENTER

During the Middle Ages the idea that Jerusalem is at the center of the oikoumene seems gradually to have gained ground. Arculf, a bishop of an unknown see in Gaul and pilgrim to the Holy Land, so described it as early as the close of the seventh century;[1187] but the tradition does not appear to have become established in the cartography of the West until the twelfth or even the thirteenth century.[1188] To place Jerusalem at the center was to recognize the preëminence given that city in Scripture, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament.[1189] It is natural for primitive peoples to think that the most holy of all places occupies a central position:[1190] the Greeks believed that either Delphi or Olympus was the navel of the earth;[1191] the Scandinavians thought the same was true of Asgard; the Hindus, of Mount Meru; the Babylonians, of Nippur.[1192] Gervase of Tilbury argues in a confused, semi-theological manner on the position of Jerusalem:[1193] Augustus, he believed, had thought that Judea was the heart of the earth because that Emperor had begun a survey of the provinces of the empire there; in addition, from texts of the Bible Gervase attempted to demonstrate that Jerusalem is halfway between the North and the South, that by “antithesis” it must be halfway between the East and the West, and consequently must be at the center of the known world.

THE EXACT POSITION OF THE EARTH’S CENTER

There seems to have existed in the minds of writers some confusion as to the exact spot that marks the navel of the earth. A map of the year 1110 identifies it with Mount Zion.[1194] The pilgrim Saewulf, who was in the Holy Land in 1102 and 1103, says:[1195] “At the head of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the wall outside, not far from the place called Calvary, is the place called Compas, which our Lord Jesus Christ himself signified and measured with his own hand as the middle of the world, according to the words of the Psalmist, ‘For God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.’ But some say that this is the place where our Lord Jesus Christ first appeared to Mary Magdalene, while she sought him weeping and thought he had been a gardener, as is related in the Gospels” (Thomas Wright’s translation).[1196]

In certain astronomical notes of the early twelfth century an anonymous writer (possibly Adelard of Bath) asserts that Mount “Amor reorum” is the center of the earth and that he proved this to be the case by experiment.[1197] It would seem that upon this mountain (possibly Mount Moriah) he hung a log, twelve cubits long by three in diameter, suspending it vertically in the air by means of a rope, and that at the time of the summer solstice he observed that the shadow of the log was directly beneath and circular in shape. This, he asserted, showed that Mount “Amor reorum” was the center of the earth. To clinch the veracity of his observation, he added that he had not been drinking wine and that his eyes were not satiated with sleep. Although the sun is not directly overhead at the summer solstice in Palestine, the same idea reappears in the Otia imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury.[1198] Gervase seems to favor, as the center of the earth, the well where Christ spoke to the Samaritan woman.[1199] He adds that this well has the characteristic that philosophers attribute to wells on the Tropic of Cancer at Syene in Africa, that is to say, that the sun shines directly into it at the summer solstice every year.

THE TERRESTRIAL PARADISE

PARADISE IN THE EAST

Most medieval maps include in the eastern part of the world a picture of the Terrestrial Paradise,[1200] surrounded by a high wall or mountain range and containing within it figures of Adam and Eve and the serpent[1201] (see above, Fig. 2, p. 69). “The first place in the East is Paradise, a garden famous for its delights, where man can never go, for a fiery wall surrounds it and reaches to the sky. Here is the tree of life which gives immortality, here the fountain which divides into four streams that go forth and water the world.”[1202] “Around Paradise extends a savage, trackless waste, infested with wild beasts and serpents.”[1203]

This was the orthodox medieval view, to be found in Peter Abelard’s commentary on the Works of the Six Days,[1204] in the De situ terrarum,[1205] and in the Image du monde.[1206] Gervase of Tilbury copies it word for word from the De imagine mundi[1207] but gives additional details in another connection,[1208]where he tells us that Paradise was the seat of the first of the four universal monarchies, that of Adam; that it was so called because of its delights, for “delight” is the meaning of the word “Eden,” and that the Garden makes a spot of marvelous deliciousness, separated from our inhabited earth by a long tract of land and sea and elevated so high that it reaches the sphere of the moon, so high that the waters of the Deluge failed to disturb it.[1209] Peter Lombard explained why it is thought that Paradise is in the East:[1210] Scripture, he said, teaches us that God made man outside of Paradise and placed him ready-fashioned in the Garden of Delights which had been planted by the divine power at the beginning of time (a principio). In an old translation, Peter explained, instead of this phrase, a principio, the words ad Orientem were given, and consequently the earlier translator would have had us believe that Paradise was to be found in the eastern parts of the earth. Peter added that a long stretch of land and sea cut Paradise off from the regions inhabited by men and that it was situated on a height touching the circle of the moon’s orbit, whence it came about that the waters of the Deluge could not penetrate thither.

It was generally agreed that Paradise is in Asia,[1211] although this was not a universal belief. Hermann the Dalmatian in 1143 asserted that there was “no mean opinion” that Paradise lies beyond “Amphitrites,” the ocean which encircles the earth from north to south, and that indications of its presence had been found both to eastward and to westward.[1212] Gervase said that it could be forcibly argued that the Garden lies beyond the Torrid Zone and is inaccessible to man, though he did not commit himself either for or against this theory.[1213] Robert Grosseteste speaks of theologians who would place Paradise under the equator.[1214] Otto of Freising’s words[1215] also seem to imply indirectly that the Garden is not in Asia, for Otto tells us that Alexander the Great conquered the entire Orient from Scythia to the ends of the earth. The same idea may be gathered from the De situ terrarum,[1216] which places the Seres and not Paradise in the farthest East, and also from the cycle of romances of Alexander, which relate how the Macedonian hero conquered all those Oriental regions where Paradise was usually supposed to be. The mappaemundi of Henry of Mayence[1217] and of Lambert of St. Omer[1218] place Paradise on an island beyond the easternmost limits of the habitable world; but St. Brandan found the Saint’s Land of Promise (probably no other than Paradise) far out in the Western Ocean.[1219] As a matter of fact there was no uniformity of opinion regarding the geographical position of the Happy Land: St. Augustine, whose works were read during our period, had even gone so far as to state that Paradise had no real existence at all but was merely an allegorical conception.[1220] A child is not worried about the latitude and longitude of fairyland, and the average man of the Middle Ages was just as little worried about the exact whereabouts of the Garden of Eden.

Nevertheless, in one version of the Romance of Alexander a logical outcome of the conqueror’s travels in the Far East was recognized. In the Iter ad Paradisum[1221] Alexander is actually brought to the gates of Paradise. When he had subjugated India he came to a broad river which he understood to be the Ganges; embarking with five hundred men on a ship that happened to be at hand, he arrived at the end of a month before an immense city surrounded by a wall on all sides. Here, after various adventures, he learned from a Jew that this city was the place where the souls of the just were sojourning until the Last Judgment or, in other words, that it was the Terrestrial Paradise.

JOURNEYS TO PARADISE

The Iter ad Paradisum and the various versions of the legend of St. Brandan’s voyage are examples of a type of story very common in the Middle Ages, the story of actual journeys to Paradise by mortal men.[1222] Among these we should include the account of the visit there of Adam’s son, Seth, who brought back seeds from the tree of knowledge which were planted in Adam’s mouth after the latter’s death; the seeds ultimately sprouted into a great tree, the wood of which was used to make Christ’s cross.[1223] Tales were told of the sojourns of pious monks in Paradise and of how on their return to the homes of men they found that what had seemed only three days in the Garden of Delights was in reality a period of three hundred years. Godfrey of Viterbo in his Pantheon[1224] relates a tale of a hundred brothers who, like St. Brandan, made widespread explorations in the ocean before coming to Paradise, a golden mountain redolent with wonderful odors and adorned with an image of the Virgin and Child. Another story, dating from an earlier time but undoubtedly well known during our period, was that of the fabulous St. Macarius.[1225] Three brothers from a convent between the Tigris and Euphrates set out to find the place where “the earth joins the sky.” After crossing Persia they entered India—a land of wonders, of cynocephali and of pygmies, of serpents and of darkness. Here they came upon the altars set up by Alexander the Great to mark the limits of his wanderings,[1226] and beyond them reached miraculous countries filled with giants and birds that talked. At last, about twenty miles from the Terrestrial Paradise, they found Macarius, a man of hoary age, dwelling in a cave on friendly terms with two lions. Macarius told them a romantic story, in the course of which he described the wonders of Paradise but, alas, emphasized the fact that this long-sought-for garden was absolutely inaccessible to human beings.

THE RIVERS OF PARADISE

The account of the four rivers of Paradise, like other passages in Scripture, was interpreted both allegorically and literally. In the religious art of our period these streams were often depicted in stone, glass, or miniature as symbolizing the four evangelists spreading the gospel throughout the world.[1227] Neckam, after mentioning Paradise and the rivers, goes on to explain that, just as the world is watered by the four streams, so “by the gift of the Holy Ghost the garden of the Holy Church is irrigated by the four virtues, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, and Prudence.”[1228] Literal interpretation of the passage, on the other hand, would present difficulties to the modern hydrographer, but these difficulties were easily overcome in the Middle Ages by appeal to the familiar theory of subterranean watercourses.[1229]

The author of the De imagine mundi,[1230] copying from Isidore,[1231] makes the four rivers disappear into the ground, whence they spring forth in lands far distant; and some of the maps of our period represent all four rivers as rising from a central source within the Garden and vanishing into the earth at its walls or not far beyond. The Psalter map,[1232] on the other hand, shows no less than five rivers issuing from an aperture leading out of Paradise and spreading out like a fan over the interior of Asia. Abelard[1233] explains carefully that if we interpret the Bible correctly there can be but one river within Paradise, that this divides into four outside of the Garden, and that the names given to each of the four are applied to those parts only “which flow from their sources to the sea.” We may assume that he refers here to the portions of the rivers between points where they issue from their subterranean passages and their mouths. Some writers would seem to imply, Abelard continues, that we cannot take literally the words of the Bible because the sources of some of the four streams are known and those of others are not. But, he asks, may not those streams, whose sources are supposedly known, in reality arise elsewhere far away and pass through numerous countries before issuing forth to the knowledge of mankind? There is no question but that this is the case with many streams, as is shown, he adds, by the statement in Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae (a famous work of the sixth century much read throughout the Middle Ages) that “the Tigris and the Euphrates spring from one source.”

One version of the legend of Prester John informs us that the four rivers of Paradise all arise in a spring in the mountains of India and water the two Indias.[1234] Like most rivers of Prester John’s realm, they give forth quantities of gold and precious stones at regular intervals three times a year.

Discussion of the individual characteristics of each of the four rivers falls more logically with the treatment of the ideas concerning the countries through which they flow and will be reserved until later. In most of the geographical works of our period, however, the rivers receive special consideration immediately after the remarks on Paradise and before the description of the regions of Asia. Their unusual origin and character, as described in Scripture, entitled them to particular distinction: they were holy streams to Jew and Christian alike. It is, then, a peculiarly eloquent commentary on the paganism of Bernard Sylvester to find that he mentions and describes the Euphrates, Tigris, and Nile in his De mundi universitate[1235] without referring to Paradise in connection with any of these three streams. To his thinking they would seem to have occupied no higher or holier place among streams than Tiber, Rhone, or Seine.

ASIA

There are no more absorbing chapters in the history of geography than those connected with the growth of European knowledge of Asia in antiquity and during the Middle Ages [1236] and with its converse, the growth of Oriental knowledge of the Occident.[1237] Of late years the historical and archeological investigations of Albert von Le Coq, Sir Aurel Stein, Edouard Chavannes, Paul Pelliot, and Albert Herrmann have thrown a flood of light on the connections that existed in the earlier medieval period between eastern and western Asia. While these early connections may have brought some vague information regarding the Far East to the Byzantine world, they probably exerted almost no influence upon the conceptions of Asia prevalent in Western Europe before the middle of the thirteenth century.

THE OPENING OF ASIA IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Relations between the Far East and Far West, however, were profoundly modified by certain events that took place during the first half of the thirteenth century. As a result of these events, Farther Asia for the first time in history was opened to Occidental travelers. Beginning with the year 1245 no inconsiderable number of European missionaries and traders made their way overland through the hitherto unknown heart of the continent and penetrated to the mysterious region of Cathay (China) at the ultimate point of the world. For somewhat more than a century the veil of the Extreme Orient was drawn aside, but drawn aside only again to be closed when the disruption of the Mongol empires and the rise of the Ottoman Turks barred the overland routes. It remained for Portuguese and Spanish seafarers of the great age of maritime exploration to rediscover the Far East. The history of the earlier relations of eastern and western Asia and of the opening of that continent in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, falls outside our province and cannot be discussed in detail in the present volume. A few words, nevertheless, must be said on this subject in order that the traditional geographical lore of Asia in our period may be seen in its proper perspective.

THE MONGOL CONQUESTS

The events that led to the overland journeys sprang from the establishment of what was probably the most extensive military empire the world has ever known.[1238] Toward the end of the twelfth century, Temujin, chief of a small tribe dwelling near the headwaters of the Amur, consolidated his dominion over the neighboring Mongol peoples of the steppes north and northwest of China. Proclaimed “Chinkkis Khan” (Jenghiz Khan), or “Inflexible Emperor,” in 1206, he soon conquered northern China and turned his hordes to the west; Turkestan was subjugated, Persia was invaded, and in 1222–1224 a detachment overran southern Russia in the course of a great whirlwind raid that completely encircled the Caspian Sea. Jenghiz Khan died in 1227, but under his successors the wave of conquest swept still farther westward. Toward the close of the thirties the steppes of Russia were again overwhelmed, in 1240 Poland was devastated, and the Christian army of Henry of Silesia was defeated in 1241 at Liegnitz, near Breslau. Meanwhile another Mongol army was ravaging Hungary and had even driven the king of that country to seek refuge in an island off the Dalmatian coast. Relief to the stricken people of Central Europe came, however, in 1243 when news of the death of the Great Khan caused the invaders to withdraw to the plains of Russia, there to maintain their hold for many centuries to come.

These visitations of the Tatars, as the Mongols were called, took Europe unaware. “Barely a rumour” of the invasion of Russia in 1222 had “reached western Europe,” writes Rockhill,[1239] “and contemporary writers have left us but few brief references to it.” The first full description of the Tatars is given in Matthew Paris’ Chronica maiora[1240] for the date 1240, the following extracts of which, as translated by Rockhill, are worth quoting: “That the joys of mortal men be not enduring, nor worldly happiness long lasting without lamentations, in this same year (i.e. 1240) a detestable nation of Satan, to wit, the countless army of the Tartars, broke loose from its mountain-environed home, and piercing the solid rocks (of the Caucasus), poured forth like devils from the Tartarus, so that they are rightly called Tartari or Tartarians. Swarming like locusts over the face of the earth, they have brought terrible devastation to the eastern parts (of Europe), laying it waste with fire and carnage.... They are inhuman and beastly, rather monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood, tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and men, dressed in ox-hides, armed with plates of iron, short and stout, thickset, strong, invincible, indefatigable, their backs unprotected, their breasts covered with armour.... They are without human laws, know no comforts, are more ferocious than lions or bears, have boats made of ox-hides, which ten or twelve of them own in common: they are able to swim or to manage a boat, so that they can cross the largest and swiftest rivers without let or hindrance, drinking turbid or muddy water when blood fails them (as beverage).... They know no other language than their own, which no one else knows; for until now there has been no access to them, nor did they go forth (from their own country); ... They wander about with their flocks and their wives, who are taught to fight like men.... It is believed that these Tartars, of cursed memory, are of the ten tribes who, having forsaken the Mosaic law, followed after the golden calves, and whom Alexander the Macedonian endeavoured at first to shut up in the rugged mountains of the Caspians with bitumen-covered rocks.[1241] When he saw that the undertaking exceeded the power of man, he invoked the might of the God of Israel, and the tops of the mountains came together, and an inaccessible and impassable place was made.... It is written in sacred history that they shall come out toward the end of the world, and shall make a great slaughter of men. There arises, however, a doubt whether the Tartars now coming from there be really they, for they do not use the Hebrew tongue, neither do they know the laws of Moses, nor have they laws, nor are they governed by them....”

Despite the impression of extreme ferocity reflected in this passage, after the warlike ardor of conquest had somewhat subsided, the Mongols showed themselves not intolerant in their attitude toward strangers and not unreceptive of foreign influence. The immediate result of their withdrawal from Hungary to Russia and the consequent removal of the direct menace to Central Europe was the dispatch of Christian ecclesiastics as ambassadors to the Mongol lords. Rumors had come to Europe that these nomads from the Far East were monotheists, and hope sprang up that they might be converted to Roman Catholic Christianity and used to offset the reviving Moslem power menacing the Christian states of the Holy Land.[1242] The origin of the rumors which gave rise to this elusive hope is to be sought in the fact that the Nestorian form of Christianity had been firmly established among some of the Mongol tribes north of the Great Wall of China and was represented even in their ruling dynasty. Furthermore, these rumors seemed to confirm and be confirmed by the reports that had been in circulation since the twelfth century of the existence of a great Christian kingdom of Prester John in the remote interior of Asia.[1243]

THIRTEENTH-CENTURY JOURNEYS

The journeys of the diplomatic missions sent out by Pope Innocent IV and by Louis IX, King of France, in 1245 and the years immediately following have often been described.[1244] The Pope’s envoy, John of Pian de Carpine,[1245] and Louis’ representative, William of Rubruck,[1246] reached the Mongol capital at Karakorum, near Lake Baikal, and on their return wrote graphic narratives of their journeys, which have been preserved and which give full account of the Tatars and their customs. Many of the observations made by John of Pian de Carpine and by Simon of St. Quentin (who took part in an expedition under Friar Ascelin, or Anselm, sent by the Pope to a Mongol ruler in Persia in 1247) are included in the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais.[1247] The geographical information acquired by Rubruck, although it was ignored by other writers of the period, found its way to Roger Bacon, who incorporated much of it in the Opus majus.[1248]

The way shown by Pian de Carpine and Rubruck was soon followed by Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, whose incentive was commercial, and by their far more famous son and nephew, Marco.[1249] Marco Polo’s amazing wanderings were succeeded by the journeys of others, among them the wonderful missionary enterprises of John of Monte Corvino, Riccold of Monte Croce, and Orderic of Pordenone. The story of these and other travels of the period,[1250] fascinatingly told in the third volume of Beazley’s Dawn of Modern Geography, falls far beyond the limits of our subject. Suffice it to remark, however, that the wanderings of the adventurous traders and friars were generally forgotten in the West during the centuries that followed and were largely ignored, even in the literature of the time itself. Marco Polo was branded as an impostor, and the traditional lore of eastern Asia that had come down from the days of the Roman Empire, together with its accretions of legend and romance, was held to be more worthy of credence than the observations of eyewitnesses. We must now turn to this traditional lore as expressed in the writings of the time of the Crusades.

THE GREAT MOUNTAIN SYSTEM OF ASIA

Asia, the author of the De imagine mundi[1251] tells us, quoting from Isidore,[1252] derived its name from a queen of that name.

The great system of mountains which runs eastward through the heart of the continent—the Caucasus, the ranges of northern Persia, the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas—was well known to the Greek geographers, and the men of our time had acquired some hazy notions about it through reading Orosius and Isidore.[1253] Gervase of Tilbury,[1254] copying Orosius,[1255] tells how the Caucasus, joined by the “Imabus” (Imaus), divides India from Scythia and extends the entire length of Asia as far east as the Seric Ocean, though bearing different names in its eastern parts. Several of the maps show a straight range of mountains running east and west across the continent and labeled with various names (Taurus, Caucasus, Ceraunius, Paropamisus).[1256] The Jerome map[1257] reveals, on the other hand, many mountains in Asia but does not make them continuous.

According to the De imagine mundi, the Caucasus divides the countries of southern from those of northern Asia. Among the former were India, Parthia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, reaching in a straight line from the Far East to the Mediterranean.[1258] Egypt, which was regarded as belonging to Asia by the Greek geographers and by Isidore, was held to adjoin Palestine on the west, and to be part of this southern tier of countries. North of the Caucasus were the lands of the Seres, Bactria, Hyrcania, and Scythia, in the east, and in western Asia, Armenia, the country of Mount Ararat, Cappadocia (“where mares conceive through the wind alone and give birth to foals that live only three years”), and finally Asia Minor, almost completely surrounded by the sea.[1259]

THE LAND OF THE “SERES”

At the eastern end of Asia, Gervase, following the Roman geographers, had placed the Seres on the shores of an ocean named after them.[1260] “Seres” was a classical designation of the people of China in so far as that country was the terminus of the overland route toward the Far East described by Pliny and Ptolemy. Beyond vast solitudes, the former had said,[1261] you come to this remote land, where the people comb silk from the trees; though they carry on an extensive trade in this commodity, they avoid all personal dealings with strangers (whose commercial morality must have been high) by leaving the silk on the banks of streams to be picked up by those who wish to procure it. Solinus [1262] copied Pliny’s account, but Isidore,[1263] followed by the author of the De imagine mundi,[1264] gives us less detail, merely stating that Seres is a city of the East, from which were named the Seric region, the people, and a kind of cloth. Pausanias first among classical writers had understood that silk comes from a worm. The silk manufacture was introduced into the Byzantine Empire in 552 A. D., and it may well be from Byzantine sources that there originated the more or less correct understanding of its production revealed in the Letter of Prester John,[1265] where we are informed that the salamander is a worm which makes a sort of capsule (pellicula) around him, “as do the other worms that make silk.”

CHINA

If the land of the Seres lay at the end of the overland route eastward, the sea route ended, according to the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, at the land of “Thin” (China), and according to Ptolemy’s Geography at the country of the “Sinae.”[1266] Here we have the first use in the West of the word “China,” knowledge of which had probably reached the Occident through Arabic channels, though not until the sixteenth century was it recognized that the land of the “Seres” (Cathay) and “China” were the same.[1267] An indication of the Ptolemaic “Sinae” is found in Plato of Tivoli’s translation of Al-Battānī’s Astronomy:[1268] here a branch of the Indian Ocean is described as reaching to the furthest point of India where lies “Thiema” (China).

Benjamin of Tudela also speaks of the country of “Zin,” or China, in the uttermost East near the reputed Sea of Nikpa, where violent and stormy winds blow—possibly the typhoons of Far Eastern waters. Ships carried into this sea by the winds stick fast there; their supplies of food give out, and the crews often die of starvation. In order to avoid this fate, some of the men, armed with knives, throw themselves into the sea and are carried to shore in the talons of an enormous bird, the griffon. By slaying the griffon with their knives they are able to escape.[1269] This story reminds us, on the one hand, of Western reports of the congealed sea[1270] and, on the other, of Arabic tales of the Rukh, which reappear in Marco Polo’s travels.[1271]

INDIA

Subdivisions

More abundant and somewhat more accurate information was to be had regarding India. This name was applied loosely to cover all of Farther Asia: the anonymous report of the visit of the Patriarch John of India to Rome in 1122 calls India the ultimate border of the world. The Pseudo-Abdias[1272] had quoted “certain historiographers” as asserting that there are three Indias, the first facing Ethiopia, the second facing the country of the Medes, and the third occupying the end of the earth, with the realm of darkness on one side and the ocean on the other. The threefold division of India was found on many of the maps.[1273] It was adopted by Ordericus Vitalis in his Historia ecclesiastica.[1274] It undoubtedly inspired the declaration in the Letter of Prester John[1275] that that potentate rules over the “three Indias,” and probably with it in mind Gervase of Tilbury[1276] spoke of “India superior,” where St. Bartholomew, “India inferior,” where St. Thomas, and “India meridiana,” where St. Matthew preached. On the other hand, there is evidence of a twofold division of India in the Elysaeus[1277] account of Prester John’s kingdom. The broad and loose medieval usage of the term “India” is especially well shown in the Image du monde, where it comprises not only what we now know as Hindustan but also Persia.[1278]

Limiting ourselves to the narrower definition of India, the tract between the Himalayas and the ocean, let us see what was believed to exist there.

Facts Known About India

A few facts were known, many half-facts, and a great many more fables. This knowledge and misinformation was based to a very large extent on classical authority, for little new had been learned about these parts of the world since the days of Pliny. First let us examine the facts and half-facts.[1279] It was known that much of India lies beyond the tropic so that the shadows fall south in summer and north in winter. It was known that a giant range of mountains encloses India on the north, and perhaps there was a hint of familiarity with the Himalayan forests in the old story of trees so lofty that they touch the skies. It was likewise known that the Ganges takes its rise in the mountains to the north and is joined by many streams. According to Isidore, who was followed by the De imagine mundi, Peter Abelard, Gervase of Tilbury, Peter Comestor, and a host of other plagiarizers,[1280] the Ganges is no other than the Pison, one of the rivers of Paradise, which springs from Mount Orcobares and flows eastward to the ocean. Peter Comestor explains[1281] that “Phison” may mean “flock,” because ten rivers join to make this stream,[1282] an interpretation in which we see perhaps a reflection of the true characteristics of the great stream of India, so strikingly different from the other three “rivers of Paradise” by reason of its multitude of tributaries. The same idea, or possibly even a suggestion of the Ganges delta with its many outlets, is found in the Letter of Prester John[1283] where the river Ydonus is mentioned as one of the streams of Paradise, flowing across a pagan province of the realm of the great Christian potentate and spreading its branches throughout the entire area. The “Ydonus” doubtless means the Pison, or Ganges. It was also known in the time we are studying that there are other mighty rivers of India, among them the Indus, sweeping into the ocean.[1284] Likewise it was appreciated that India supports an immense population and enormous riches; that many of the people are Brahmins—though little enough was understood about their religion; and that some of them practiced the custom of suttee, which prescribed that wives burn themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

Benjamin of Tudela acquired (probably in Mesopotamia) some information about Khulam, or Quilon, a great medieval seaport on the Malabar coast. He comments briefly on the honesty and dark complexions of the natives, the intense heat of the summer, the practices connected with the cultivation of pepper, the customs of embalming the dead, and the superstitions of sun worship.[1285]

Marvels of India

But India was above all else a land of marvels (Fig. 8). Here were pygmies who fight with storks and giants who combat with griffons; here were “gymnosophists” who contemplate the sun all day, standing in the hot rays first on one leg and then on the other; here were men with feet turned backward and eight toes on each foot; cynocephali, or men with dogs’ heads and claws, who bark and snarl; people whose women give birth to but one child and that one with white hair; races whose hair is white in youth but turns dark with age; one-eyed men; people who shade themselves from the sun by lying on their backs and holding up a single huge foot (skiapodes); persons who live on the smell of food alone; headless men with eyes in their stomachs; forest peoples with hairy bodies, dogs’ teeth, and terrific voices; and a variety of horrible non-human monsters combining the parts of several animals.[1286]

These marvels and more still are related by nearly all the Western writers of our period who concern themselves with India and the Orient. They originated, as we have seen, early in classical times. Collected by Ctesias,[1287] Pliny, Solinus and others, they were passed on to our age, when we find them faithfully retold by the author of the De imagine mundi, by Gervase of Tilbury, by Rudolf of Hohen-Ems,[1288] and in the Image du monde. They made their way into the Romance of Alexander as exemplified by the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Letter from Alexander to Aristotle. In short, the “marvels of India” were a stock feature of medieval geography.[1289] They figure on maps and in miniatures and even in architectural sculpture—a skiapod helps adorn the façade of Sens cathedral.

Two mythological personages and one historical character, the story of whose exploits became mythological in the Middle Ages, were supposed to have visited India. These were Bacchus (Liber Pater), Hercules, and Alexander the Great. The Altar of Liber and the Column of Hercules are shown on the Psalter map in the region between the Red Sea and Paradise.[1290] On the Jerome map of Palestine two columns mark the ultimate limits of the journeys of Alexander and of Hercules.[1291] The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle mentions the miraculous trees of the sun and moon, which spoke oracular words to the Macedonian conqueror and figured widely in the medieval geography of the Far East, appearing prominently on many of the maps.[1292]

Legend of St. Thomas in India

Though classical antiquity was the main source of medieval knowledge and fancy concerning India, it was not the only source. The mysterious Ophir, whence came the gold and jewels of Solomon, was placed in India on the Lambert map [1293] and on the Jerome map of the world.[1294] There also early came into existence a well-rooted idea that this country was the home of a large and flourishing Christian colony. The origins of the latter belief are to be found in reports which had filtered through to Europe at an early date of St. Thomas the Apostle’s preaching of the gospel in India and of the existence of Nestorian Christianity in southern Hindustan.[1295] The story of St. Thomas contains some elements of geographical interest.[1296] Christ was said to have sold Thomas to the merchant Habban in order that he might be taken to India to convert the people. Once arrived there by ship, having landed at a port of Sandaruk, or Andrapolis, he succeeded in gaining for the Christian religion the king, Gundophorus, and his brothers. The saint built for the king a palace in heaven. According to the original story, this palace was not a real structure but merely the symbol of a heavenly habitation for the monarch. As the legend was subsequently developed, St. Thomas was represented as an architect whom Gundophorus summoned to his court to build an actual dwelling, and one of the miracles by which the saint succeeded in converting the Indian potentate to Christianity was his almost instantaneous construction of the palace. The legend then proceeds to relate how St. Thomas was conducted by one Siphorius to the kingdom of a certain Mazdeus, of his martyrdom at the hands of the latter, and of the subsequent removal of his body to Edessa in Syria.

The stories of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew were often retold during our period, notably, for instance, in the Historia ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis.[1297] The Osma Beatus map[1298] shows heads representing the twelve apostles in the various countries of the world; that of St. Thomas is placed in India (see Fig. 4, p. 123, above). The unknown writer of the Letter of Prester John was undoubtedly familiar with the legend of St. Thomas, because he makes Prester John’s palace correspond exactly to the palace built by the saint.[1299] This legend was a favorite subject for representation in the sculptures of cathedrals and stained glass windows of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[1300]

Visit of Patriarch John of India to Rome

Belief in the existence of a large Christian population in Asia was reënforced by an obscure event that took place in Rome in 1122. We have an anonymous account[1301] of the visit of a certain Patriarch John of India in that year and of the stupendous sensation which it created in the Roman curia and throughout the whole of Italy. The narrator informs us that in the course of countless ages no native was ever known to have come from those distant and barbaric Oriental regions, nor had any one ever before been seen in Italy who had actually been there.[1302] The purpose of the patriarch’s visit to the West originally was to procure at Byzantium the pallium and the confirmation of his office, which he had recently assumed on the death of his predecessor. At Byzantium, however, being told that Rome was in reality the capital of the world,[1303] he proceeded thither along with some homeward-bound Roman ambassadors and while in Rome gave a lecture about his native country before the papal curia. The principal city, he said, was Hulna, on the river Pison, one of the four rivers of Paradise; the city was of huge size, surrounded by gigantic walls and inhabited by faithful Christians. Outside the walls there was a mountain encircled by a very deep lake and on the top of the mountain was situated the Church of St. Thomas. Surrounding the lake were twelve monasteries erected in honor of the twelve apostles. The Church of St. Thomas was inaccessible except once a year, when the waters of the lake disappeared, allowing pilgrims to approach. The Patriarch John then went on to explain in considerable detail the marvels and miracles connected with the church.

We should be inclined—and justifiably—to reject the story of Patriarch John’s visit as wholly fanciful, did it not seem to be confirmed by a letter[1304] to a certain Count Thomas written by Odo, abbot of St. Remi in Rheims (1118–1151), who happened to be in Rome at the time John was there. The report of Odo about this event was probably not derived from the anonymous account, from which it differs in several minor details. Among other matters, according to Odo, John speaks of a river, not a lake, surrounding the shrine of St. Thomas and of how its waters diminished as a result of drought and became passable to a boy of seven years during eight days before and eight days after the festival of the apostle. The whole clergy and (Christian) people of India were said to gather here on this occasion.

We shall see shortly that these stories contributed to the formation of the curious medieval belief in the existence of a great Christian kingdom in the heart of Asia. First, however, we must consider what notions were current regarding the seas and islands to the south of India and the vast tracts to the northward beyond the Himalayan barrier.

INDIAN OCEAN

A very brilliant feature on the maps of our period is the Red Sea, almost invariably colored red. This name was given to the entire Indian Ocean, and the red color was applied to the Persian Gulf as well as to the “Arabian Gulf,” or Red Sea proper. The name “Indian Ocean” was also occasionally used, as, for example, on the Jerome map of the East.[1305]

The Greeks had acquired some fairly correct information about the northwestern shores of the Indian Ocean and had heard vague rumors of the great peninsula and islands east and south of India: Malaya, Ceylon, Sumatra. Confused reports of the geography of Taprobane, or Ceylon, are found in classical works as far back as the time of the expedition of Alexander. Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, and others described Taprobane in some detail but exaggerated its dimensions to enormous proportions. Pomponius Mela had spoken of the islands of Chryse, lying off the eastern promontory of Asia, and Argyre, off the mouth of the Ganges. Perhaps these represented some vague knowledge of the Andamans or Nicobars or the Malay Peninsula; and certainly we recognize the last-named in the Aurea Chersonesus of Ptolemy.

Islands of the Indian Ocean

Some relics of this classical knowledge of Indian seas and isles was retained in the Middle Ages. Isidore[1306] had spoken of “Chrisa” and “Argare” as full of gold and silver and perpetually blooming flowers, with mountains of gold guarded by dragons and griffons. This account found its way into the De imagine mundi[1307] and was copied by Gervase of Tilbury;[1308] the islands themselves, together with the “Island of the Sun” of Pliny, Mela, Solinus, and others, figured on many contemporary maps.[1309] Orosius had said that in Taprobane there were ten cities.[1310] Isidore, whom Gervase of Tilbury copied, added that the dimensions of the island were 875 by 625 miles, that it has two summers and two winters each year, and that the vegetation always remains green.[1311] Solinus had described[1312] Taprobane as being divided in two by a river; one half, he said, was full of wild beasts, but the other was inhabited by men. This division of the island is perpetuated on the Henry of Mayence,[1313] Jerome,[1314] Hereford,[1315] and Ebstorf maps.[1316]

Al-Battānī on the Indian Ocean

The geographical chapter in Al-Battānī’s Astronomy, probably compiled from a redaction of Ptolemy’s Geography and translated by Plato of Tivoli in our period, gave a description of the seas of the world.[1317] The Indian Ocean, Al-Battānī said, extends from the land of the negroes to the extreme limits of India, a distance of 8000 miles. Its width was 2200 miles, of which 1900 (Plato of Tivoli mistakenly translated this 3900) reach south of the equator. What lands lay beyond are not specified. From this sea four gulfs run into the land: first the Barbaric Sea, which extends into the “land of the negroes,” or Ethiopia, and may be the Gulf of Aden or possibly even Mozambique Channel; second, the Green Sea (Mare Viride), or our Red Sea, which reaches towards Hyla (Ailah?); third, the Persian Gulf (Mare Persicum); and, fourth, a second Green Sea, running out to the east towards China (“Thinae”) and representing the Bay of Bengal or possibly the China Sea. In the Indian Ocean there are some 1370 islands, among them a very large one called “Tibiariae” (Taprobane), or Sarandib (Ceylon), opposite the eastern coast of India, 3000 miles in circumference, full of great mountains and rivers, quantities of rubies and hyacinths, and surrounded by fifty-nine lesser isles. The traditional account of the many isles of the Indian seas so persistent in Arabic literature arose unquestionably from familiarity with the vast Malay Archipelago or at least with its western portion. On the other hand, whether we may assume, as some have done, that the exaggerated classical and Arabic estimates of the size of Ceylon had their origin in rumors of the existence of Australia[1318] is an obscure problem which we cannot attempt here to solve.

SCYTHIA AND CENTRAL ASIA

North of the mountain barrier enclosing India lay lands about which Western medieval knowledge was equally vague. “Upper Scythia, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Seric Ocean and southward to the Caucasus, includes much habitable land but also much that is sterile: gold and gems abound there, but men avoid them on account of the griffons. Lower Scythia adjoins Hyrcania, so called from the Hyrcanian Forest, where a marvelous bird is found whose plumage glows in the dark. Iranea, or Iran, is next to Scythia on the west: a region of nomads who wander widely because of the sterility of the soil and who are horrible and ferocious (portentuosi ac truces), eaters of human flesh and drinkers of human blood.” In about these terms the author of the De imagine mundi and Gervase of Tilbury, borrowing from Isidore,[1319] summed up very nearly all that was known of Central Asia before the great overland journeys of the thirteenth century to which brief reference has already been made.[1320] Several of the maps show large rivers—Araxes, Oxus, Oscorus, and even Acheron, the stream of Tartarus—rising in the Caucasus and flowing northward into the Caspian.[1321] The latter, in accordance with the usual classical tradition, is represented as a gulf of the encircling Ocean Stream.

BENJAMIN OF TUDELA ON CENTRAL ASIA

Benjamin of Tudela, who himself journeyed at least as far east as Baghdad, had opportunities for gaining information about Central and Northern Asia more favorable than those of his less traveled contemporaries. Samarkand he mentions briefly as a “great city on the confines of Persia” inhabited by 50,000 Jews. “Thence,” he adds, “it is four days’ journey to Tibet, the country in whose forests the musk is found” (Adler’s translation).[1322] He quotes the reports of Persian Jews that four of the lost ten tribes of Israel dwell in the mountains of Naisabur (in eastern Persia). These people were said to be independent and to dwell in a broad tract of land twenty days’ journey in extent, with cities and large villages among the mountains.[1323] Others associated the lost tribes with the abhorrent hordes of Gog and Magog.[1324] Benjamin goes on to tell us that these Jews were in league with the “Kufar-al-Turak, who worship the wind and live in the wilderness and who do not eat bread nor drink wine but live on raw, uncooked meat. They have no noses, and in lieu thereof they have two small holes through which they breathe” (Adler’s translation).[1325] He relates the confused story of wars between these undeniably Turanian tribes of the steppes of Turkestan and the “King of Persia” (the Seljuk Sultan, Sanjar), events which perhaps gave rise to a legend that became widespread in twelfth-century Europe and to which we must now turn.

PRESTER JOHN

The legend was the romantic story that in these far regions there lay a vast and powerful Christian kingdom ruled by a mighty potentate, Prester John. This tradition was the most important contribution of our period to regional geography, for, false as it was, it long persisted, became an integral part of late medieval geographical theory, and exerted in subsequent centuries a powerful influence on the course of exploration. The thirteenth-century Oriental travelers were constantly on the lookout for Prester John’s kingdom and, when it finally became obvious that there was no such kingdom in Asia, Prester John was transferred to Africa, where he was sought for by the Portuguese navigators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. How did this strange legend come into existence, and what did it contribute to Western notions of Asia?

Origins of the Legend

Various elements seem to have given rise to it. Perhaps rumors of the existence of a Christian nation in Abyssinia may at a very early period have fostered belief in the existence of a great Christian potentate in Asia. India in Asia and Ethiopia in Africa were often confused both in antiquity and during the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the story of the visit of the Indian archbishop or patriarch, already referred to, encouraged belief in a numerous Asiatic Christian population. Some of the elements of the patriarch’s report became an integral part of one of the twelfth-century versions of the story of Prester John.

Then again, we have echoes of actual events in the East in Benjamin of Tudela’s Itinerary, as we have just seen, and in Otto of Freising’s Chronicon. Otto relates[1326] that in 1145 the bishop of Gabala in Syria had come to Viterbo to report to Pope Eugenius III, among other things, the fall of Edessa. Here Otto met the bishop, and what he learned is recorded in the Chronicon. This was to the effect that, not very long before, a certain John, king and priest, who dwelt in the Far East beyond Persia and Armenia and who, together with his tribe (gens), was a Christian, waged war with the Samiards (Saniards), two brothers who were kings of the Medes and Persians. John captured Ecbatana, the capital of the Samiards’ realm, defeated the brothers in battle, and put them to flight. He then proceeded to advance to the aid of the church at Jerusalem but was hindered from going very far by the river Tigris. Turning northwards in hope that the river would freeze over and thereby enable him to cross, he was finally constrained, after several years had elapsed, to give up the enterprise because continued warm weather prevented ice from forming. This John, Otto added, was said to have come of very ancient lineage, in fact, to have been one of the progeny of the Magi. The tribes under his command were perhaps the same as the “Kufar-al-Turak” of Benjamin of Tudela.[1327]

Though the attempt has been made to identify the Christian potentate of the legend with a chieftain of the Caucasus,[1328] the weight of evidence would seem to favor belief that the story in its more specific thirteenth-century form grew out of rumors of some Christian Mongol lord of Central Asia.[1329] It is certain that the Nestorian form of Christianity was strongly represented in Central Asia during this period and that two powerful tribes of these distant regions, the Keraïts and the Onguts, formed outposts of this faith. But, as Pelliot writes, “whatever may have been the origin of the famous legend of Prester John, ... it was to a prince of the Keraïts that the tradition was applied during the first half of the thirteenth century. All the Keraïts spoken of in the history of the Mongol dynasty seem to have been Christians; in any case this is true of the majority of them. In fact it was through marriage with Keraït princesses that Christianity penetrated even into the family of Jenghiz Khan.”[1330] Many of these Asiatic Christians bore Christian names preserved in Chinese forms, such as Yao-su-mu for Joseph or K’wo-li-ki-ssö for George.[1331] We learn from Marco Polo and other thirteenth-century travelers that Mongol princes often submitted to baptism, though this was probably done out of indifference to religion rather than as the expression of any deep-seated convictions.

On such slender foundations as the report in Otto’s Chronicon or the anonymous account of the visit of the Patriarch John to Rome or on other rumors of events in the heart of Asia of which no record has been preserved, there was erected an elaborate, detailed, and wholly fanciful series of descriptions of Prester John and his realm, embellished by borrowings from the Romance of Alexander, from the legend of St. Thomas, and from that world of fable which constituted the medieval European conception of the Orient.

Prester John’s Kingdom As Described in His “Letter”

The most important description of Prester John’s kingdom is contained in the famous Letter, addressed in some manuscripts to Manuel, the Byzantine Emperor, in others to Frederick, the Roman Emperor; in still others, to the Pope. In this letter,[1332] the earliest version of which dates from before 1177, John tells that he is superior in wealth and power to all the kings of the world. His realm includes the three Indias and St. Thomas’ shrine. It extends across the desert of Babylon to the tower of Babel and contains seventy-two provinces, each ruled over by a king. Prester John is lord of the Amazons and Brahmins. In one direction his territory reaches out four months’ journey. In the other, no one can tell how far. “Only if you could count the stars of the heaven and the sands of the sea would you be able to form an estimate of our dominion and our power.” Many are the extraordinary features of this realm which abounds in milk and honey: here is one of the rivers of Paradise; here are streams that give forth gold and jewels; here pepper is gathered; here is the fountain of youth; and here a mysterious sea of sand fed by a river of rocks, beyond which dwell the ten tribes of the Jews, who, although they have their own kings, are nevertheless subject to the mighty Christian ruler. In one of the provinces near the torrid zone the salamander thrives, a “worm” which cannot live without fire and which makes a chrysalis about himself as do the silkworms (an interesting and unexpected bit of natural history embedded in the midst of fable). Prester John takes particular delight in expatiating on the enormous wealth of his country, on the virtues of its inhabitants—for among them there are neither liars nor adulterers nor indeed vice or crime of any description—and on their clemency and Christian piety. Every year the king makes a pilgrimage with his army across the serpent-infested Babylonian desert to the shrine of the prophet Daniel. A large part of the Letter is taken up with a minute description of the royal palace—exactly like that which St. Thomas built for the King Gundophorus, of the king’s household, the grandees who wait upon him, the officials of the kingdom, etc., etc. In an early Latin version of the Letter, written probably in England, we are informed that there are people from all countries of the world at Prester John’s court;[1333] among the personal servants of the king there are Englishmen who wait upon him at table. No less than eleven thousand Englishmen are in his bodyguard, and every Englishman who comes to the court, whether clerk or knight, is invested with the order of knighthood. The French and Italian versions of the Letter, which were probably translated from this Latin text, substitute “François” and “Franceschi” for “Anglici.”

Alliance With Prester John Desired

During the thirteenth century it was the vain hope of the Popes and of the Christian kings of Europe to gain the alliance of some great power in the East—either the Mongols or Prester John—as an offset to Turkish encroachments on the Crusaders’ frontiers.[1334] Perhaps we may detect the beginnings of this policy in a letter of Pope Alexander III (1177) to John, “Magnificus rex Indorum sacerdotum sanctissimus.”[1335] The Pope informs the great king that he has heard of his piety through a certain Master Philip, papal physician, who had held conversation with distinguished and honorable persons of his realm. Consequently Alexander was sending this Philip to expound to him the tenets of Western Christianity and to convert him to the true Catholic faith. It seems probable that Alexander was acquainted with the supposed letter of Prester John to the Byzantine Emperor, though there is also strong probability that he had confused the stories of the Asiatic Prester John with reports regarding the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia—a source of much confusion at a later period than ours.

GOG AND MAGOG

The northern part of Asia was the reputed seat of the terrible tribes of Gog and Magog, whose eruption at the Last Day was destined to bring about the destruction of the human race. We have seen that Biblical prophecies were combined with the story of Alexander the Great’s enclosing of these tribes behind great walls. The legend appears in our period under various forms. Most of the maps show Gog and Magog, usually surrounded by a wall; some add disparaging epithets, such as “gens immunda.” Matthew Paris on his map of Palestine indicates in the north the walls whereby King Alexander the Great shut in Gog and Magog and states in the explanatory legend that from this same direction came the Tatars.[1336] In the De imagine mundi[1337] we find a simple statement that between the Caspian Mountains and the sea of that name dwelt those tribes who had been walled in by Alexander the Great, Gog and Magog, the fiercest of all peoples, eaters of the raw flesh of wild beasts and of human beings. The Moslems had placed Gog and Magog in the farthest corner of northeastern Asia: and in John of Seville’s translation of Al-Farghānī’s Astronomy we find the land of Gog at the easternmost extremity of the sixth and seventh “climates” (those farthest north).[1338] Lambert li Tors speaks in the Romance of Alexander of “Gos et Magos” among the vassals of Porus: though they came forth with four hundred thousand men, Alexander, after he had defeated Porus, chased them back into the defiles of the mountains, where he shut them in with a great wall.[1339] In a later part of the Romance, the subdivision of Alexander’s kingdom at his death is explained: to Antigonus was given Syria and Persia as far as Mount Tus, together with the duty of standing guard over Gog and Magog.[1340] Otto of Freising also mentions these tribes.[1341] He derived his information from Frutolf’s Chronica,[1342] whence, in turn, it had come from the version of the Romance of Alexander known as the Historia de praeliis. In the days of Heraclius, Otto says, the “Agareni” (Saracens) devastated the lands of the empire and destroyed part of the army of Heraclius. In revenge the latter opened the Caspian Gates and let out those most savage tribes, which Alexander the Great had enclosed along the Caspian Sea on account of their heinousness, and inaugurated a war against the Saracens. By night, as a punishment sent by the Deity for this sacrilegious act, fifty-two thousand of Heraclius’ army were struck down by lightning, and, as a result of this terrible visitation, Heraclius himself died in the twenty-seventh year of his reign.

There were many variations of the legend of Gog and Magog. Elsewhere in Otto of Freising’s Chronicon[1343] we find an account, taken from Orosius, of the way in which Artaxerxes forced many of the Jews to dwell in Hyrcania near the Caspian Sea. It was believed that these people had multiplied greatly,[1344] and they were expected to burst forth on the world in the days of Antichrist. Though not here expressly called Gog and Magog, the connection is plain; and Godfrey of Viterbo relates how Alexander enclosed Gog and Magog, the “eleven [sic] tribes of the Jews.”[1345] We have already quoted[1346] Matthew Paris’ description of the Tatars who, he said, might be the same as the tribes whom Alexander enclosed—the ten tribes of Israel.

WESTERN ASIA

When we turn from the remote parts of the Orient to Western Asia we find ourselves in regions much better known to the Western world, though the traditional geography of these regions, founded on classical and Biblical authority, persisted in encyclopedic writings hardly influenced at all by the contacts that in reality had been established. The De imagine mundi, Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, and other similar works add little to what Isidore and Orosius had written. Between the Indus and Tigris lie many countries, Arachosia, Parthia, Assyria, Persia, Media, all forming a harsh and mountainous tract called in Scripture “India” but more generally known as Parthia. Fire had been discovered in Persia.[1347] The Tigris, so called because it is as swift as a tiger, rises from a common source with the Euphrates in the mountains of Armenia.[1348] Thence the two rivers separate, leaving a long space between them known as Mesopotamia; the Tigris encircles Assyria and empties into the Dead Sea! Peter Comestor and the author of the De imagine mundi accepted the views of Isidore regarding the source of the Tigris in the highlands of Armenia,[1349] but the latter adds to the already prevailing confusion by stating that both rivers of Mesopotamia debouch into the Mediterranean Sea. Gervase, on the other hand, corrects the error of the author of the De imagine mundi by making them flow into the Red Sea (or Indian Ocean),[1350] as was depicted on most maps.

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia was said to be famous as the site of Nineveh and of Chaldea, where astronomy was discovered;[1351] and Gervase of Tilbury dilates on the immense size of the walls of Babylon.[1352] Regarding Babylon, it is refreshing to find in Otto of Freising’s Chronicon some really up-to-date information which he had derived from Frutolf.[1353] In the first place, he makes a careful distinction between Babylon and Cairo, to which the name of Babylon was commonly given. “Old Babylon,” he added, “as we learn from reliable men from across the seas, is partly inhabited at the present day and now called Baldach [Baghdad]. Part, however, as you would expect from the words of prophecy, is a desert waste extending for ten miles as far as the tower of Babel. The part which is inhabited and called Baldach is very large and populous.” He explains that here is the seat of the greatest priest of the Persians, whom they call “Caliph,” and who holds in some respects a position among these pagans parallel to that which the Pope at Rome holds among Christians.

With Baghdad we have at last come to a city that was actually visited and described during our period by Western Europeans whose descriptions have come down to us. The Jewish travelers, Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Ratisbon, appear to have sojourned in the Mesopotamian city in the seventh and ninth decades of the twelfth century respectively.

Benjamin of Tudela on Baghdad

Benjamin’s personal familiarity with Baghdad saved him from making Frutolf’s and Otto’s mistake of confusing the Abbasid capital with old Babylon. We gather from Benjamin’s Itinerary that the latter is three days’ journey distant and that “the ruins of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar are still to be seen there, but people are afraid to enter them on account of serpents and scorpions” (Adler’s translation).[1354]

Baghdad, Benjamin writes (our quotations are from Adler’s translation), “is on the River Tigris,” which “divides the metropolis in two parts.” The city “is twenty miles in circumference, situated in a land of palms, gardens, and plantations, the like of which is not to be found in the whole land of Shinar. People come thither with merchandise from all lands. Wise men live there, philosophers who know all manner of wisdom, and magicians expert in all manner of witchcraft.”[1355] Benjamin was particularly interested in the Caliph, of whose palace, park, family, and widespread authority he writes in no little detail and in highly commendatory terms,[1356] for it seems that the Caliphs were more tolerant toward the Jews than were most Christian monarchs of the age. Besides treating of the Caliph, Benjamin tells about the “Head of the Captivity,” another powerful ruler whose headquarters were Baghdad and in whom the Caliph had vested authority over all the Jewish communities throughout the eastern Moslem world. A descendant of David, King of Israel, he was a man of great dignity and rank, held high in the esteem of the Mohammedans. His power extended “over all the communities of Shinar, Persia, Khurasan, and Sheba, which is El-Yemen, and Diyar Kalach (Bekr) and the land of Aram Naharaim (Mesopotamia) and over the dwellers in the mountains of Ararat and the land of the Alans, which is a land surrounded by mountains and has no outlet except by the iron gates which Alexander made but which were afterwards broken. Here are the people called Alani. His authority extends also over the land of Siberia [Sikbia?] and the communities in the land of Togarmim[1357] unto the mountains of Asveh and the land of Gurgan, the inhabitants of which are called Gurganim who dwell by the river Gihon (Oxus?); and these are the Girgashites who follow the Christian religion. Further it extends to the gates of Samarkand, the land of Tibet, and the land of India. In respect of all these countries the Head of the Captivity gives the communities power to appoint Rabbis and Ministers who come unto him to be consecrated and to receive his authority. They bring him offerings and gifts from the ends of the earth.”[1358]

Whether or not Benjamin was personally presented to the Head of the Captivity we are not informed. In any case he undoubtedly came into contact at Baghdad with Jews from all over Central and Western Asia and from them was able to gather those details regarding the Jewish communities which form such an important and interesting part of his Itinerary. Most striking in this connection are the data which he furnishes us about the Jews of Arabia.

Benjamin of Tudela on Arabia

The interior of that great peninsula until recently has remained very vaguely known to Western Christians, and in the Middle Ages there reigned almost complete ignorance regarding it. Gervase of Tilbury tells us (from Orosius) that Arabia lies between two seas and is the country of Mount Sinai, of the Queen of Sheba, and of frankincense.[1359] Beyond this and a few details about the Bedouins picked up by the Crusaders, nothing was known. Hence the information which Benjamin gives on the Jewish communities is of exceptional importance. If we may trust his figures, it would seem that there was at this time a large Jewish population both in Yemen and farther north. Benjamin’s conception of the geography of the peninsula, however, is remarkably confused. He tells us that at a distance of twenty-one days’ journey through the deserts from Hillah in Mesopotamia one comes to the land of Saba, or El-Yemen. Here he places the great Jewish cities of Tanai, Tilmas, Teima, and Kheibar. Neither Tilmas nor Tanai have been definitely identified. To the former Benjamin assigned a population of 100,000 Jews; to the latter, with the district surrounding, a population of no less than 300,000 Jews. They may represent Jewish settlements in Yemen, though Benjamin’s statement that Tilmas is only three days from Kheibar would seem to preclude this possibility. Tanai, on the other hand, has been thought to be Sanaa. Kheibar (to which Benjamin assigns 50,000 Jews) and Teima have long been well-known towns of northern Arabia not far from Medina. Now inhabited by half-breed negroes, these places were the centers of a Jewish population from before the times of Mohammed until as late as the sixteenth century.[1360]

Ina totally different connection Benjamin refers to Jews of the “land of Aden,” which he believed to be part of India, taking India to include southern Arabia and Ethiopia. Their country he describes as mountainous. The Jewish element in the population, he adds, “are not under the yoke of the Gentiles but possess castles on the summits of the mountains from which they make descents into the plain country called Libya, which is a Christian empire” (Adler’s translation).[1361] This is indeed confusing. If by Libya Abyssinia is meant—which is likely, for Abyssinia was a Christian kingdom from very early times—it seems peculiar that Benjamin makes no mention of the Red Sea intervening between the land of Aden in Arabia Felix and the African coasts which would have to be crossed by Jews of the Aden highlands in making war on the Abyssinians. Possibly Benjamin, like Marco Polo a century later, conceived of Aden as lying in Africa.[1362]

Syria and Palestine

Unlike all the rest of Asia, Syria and Palestine were well known at first hand to many European Christians. Yet, in writing about them, the makers of compilations like the De imagine mundi and the Otia imperialia were content to do little more than copy Isidore’s dry catalogue of the names of places rendered famous through Scriptural associations.[1363] The Dead Sea with its sinister neighborhood was the only natural feature of this part of the world which seems to have made a strong enough appeal to the imagination of these writers to impel them to add anything to what Isidore had said long before.[1364]

Geographical Knowledge Enlarged by the Crusades

On the other hand, the Levantine countries were familiar through the journeys of Western travelers, though their observations were not incorporated into the works of the scholarly compilers. Many were the motives that induced men of the West to visit the Nearer East. Religious enthusiasm and the desire for commercial gain, however, were paramount. The Crusades contributed more than any great series of events between the time of Claudius Ptolemy and the middle of the thirteenth century to the broadening of man’s geographical horizon, and, with it, the broadening of the whole range of human activity. We cannot attempt to discuss these wider aspects of the Crusading movement in any detail, but a few words must be said about the dissemination of regional knowledge that resulted from it. Feudal nobility, soldiers, pilgrims, and adventurers of all sorts and from all parts of the West were joined by Italian merchants in the great enterprise, the object of which was not only to redeem the holy places from the infidel but also to profit from the Levantine trade. Men of all ranks and callings, coming from every part of Christendom, made their way by land and sea to the Holy Land. Peasant, serf, and petty townsman, as well as powerful noble and church dignitary, were torn from old and familiar environments to wander through countries about which they had hitherto known next to nothing. In some cases the stories of their travels and adventures were preserved in chronicles and poems, but in most no permanent record was left. Nevertheless, the geographical knowledge of the average man was widened to an extent which we can scarcely appreciate at the present day. Before the Crusades communities throughout the greater part of Europe had lived very much to themselves, in limited contact with the outside world; but by the year 1200 it is safe to infer that practically every town and village of France, England, Germany, and Italy held someone who had visited the East and was not unready to tell about what he had seen there and on his way out and back. Just as the War of 1914–1918 has taught the world much European geography, so the Crusades taught all classes of Europe about the Holy Land and the routes thither. But the Crusades did more than give the people a wider knowledge of places: they brought them into contact with new customs, new religions, new ideals and modes of life, as well as with new types of landscape and terrain. All this tended to displace men from habitual and local modes of thought; Europe became more cosmopolitan, and the way was prepared for that profound change in man’s entire attitude towards life which we now call the Renaissance.

Occidental Population of the Levant

We can merely hint at these general results of the extension of geographical contact with the Levantine world and turn to the more specific problem of the limits to which Western penetration was actually pushed. The Occidental population of the states established after the First Crusade along the eastern border of the Mediterranean was composed primarily of the Frankish nobility and soldiery and of Italian traders.[1365] The former had established themselves in castles and garrisons, from which they ruled over widespread manorial estates tilled by native Syrians. The traders occupied large foreign quarters in such commercial centers as Acre, Jaffa, Ascalon, Tyre, and Tripoli on the coasts, and in the interior at Jerusalem. Trading privileges and the right to build up commercial colonies in the towns were granted to Genoese, Pisans, Venetians, and others in return for services rendered the Crusading armies by the Italian navies in the conquest of the coast towns and in the transportation of military forces. Through the reports brought back to Europe by returning soldiers, adventurers, and merchants, Syria and Palestine became more widely and accurately known in the West than most parts of Europe itself.

European Occupation of Syria

First-hand acquaintance with the Levant, however, did not, either in the twelfth or in the thirteenth century, necessarily lead to first-hand acquaintance with the neighboring countries that still lay under the domination of the Turk. At the time of its greatest extent the Kingdom of Jerusalem reached eastward to the edge of the desert plateau beyond the Jordan and Dead Sea and southward to Ailah on the Gulf of Akaba. Northeastward the upper Tigris marked the frontier of the County of Edessa. Beyond these restricted borders lay Saracen territory into which traders from the West did not dare to venture. Southern Mesopotamia was virtually terra incognita; and the men who held the small garrison posts along the eastern border of the states of the Crusaders were not prone to undertake rash enterprises in the enemy’s country.

The danger of such enterprises is illustrated by the fate of a Christian naval expedition sent down the Red Sea from Akaba in 1182–1183.[1366] A small fleet, fitted out by Reynauld of Châtillon, lord of the castle of Kerak beyond the Jordan, succeeded in getting almost as far as Yembo, the port of Medina. We are not told of its true purpose by the Arabic historians, who alone seem to have recorded this adventure, though the Arabs certainly believed that the Crusaders were bent upon plundering the tomb of the prophet at Medina. Perhaps its leaders harbored a fanatic hope of attacking the holy cities of Islam. At all events, the navy of Saladin, hastily summoned from Egypt, soon overtook and defeated the little squadron at Haura, and those of the Crusaders who escaped ashore were either killed by the Bedouins or sold into slavery.

But though, with a few exceptions, Europeans themselves did not go beyond these bounds of the Crusaders’ states, commercial relations were established with the more eastern regions.[1367] Antioch and Laodicea were the termini of two trade routes from Aleppo, whence came merchants from Rakka on the Euphrates and ultimately from Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia. Asiatic goods were also sold at a great open fair in the Hauran country, at one time in the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and undoubtedly frequented by Westerners. And the harbors of the kingdom were the entrepôts of an extensive traffic from Arabia Felix and India by the Red Sea and across the Isthmus of Suez. At all of these points the Italians established connections with the Oriental merchants and learned from them much about Oriental lands and their products.

Asia Minor

During the early thirteenth century Asia Minor also became familiar ground to the men of the West.[1368] The establishment of the Latin Empire at Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade was mainly responsible for this; but even before the close of the twelfth century the Venetians had become preponderant from a commercial point of view in the districts that had hitherto formed parts of the Byzantine Empire, and after 1204 they were in a position to conclude advantageous treaties with their Anatolian neighbors, Greek, Seljuk, and Armenian. Venetian merchants were to be seen in the important towns and along the highways of the peninsula. Italians, with Provençaux in their train, exploited the trade of the small Christian kingdom of Little Armenia (the ancient Cilicia) and penetrated from the Mediterranean into and across the Seljuk sultanate of Iconium, whose rulers were disposed to look with fairly friendly eyes on the Frankish trader. Even the Empire of Nicaea, a small remnant of the Greek dominions which had managed to preserve its independence after the Fourth Crusade, was constrained in 1219 to grant extensive trading privileges to the Venetians.

Western Asia As Described by the Crusaders

The knowledge of Western Asia acquired in these various ways was naturally enough reflected in the works of the historians, chroniclers, and poets of the Crusades, many of whom had themselves visited the places they describe. Their fresh and realistic accounts contrast strikingly with the sort of geographical writings we have so far been discussing in this chapter. From Dreesbach’s study of the Orient as described in the early French Crusading literature we may gain a concise idea of the sort of thing that impressed itself on the mind of the Occidental.[1369] His impressions of climate and landscape need not detain us here, as they have already been explained in early chapters.[1370] Of the natural resources, the wealth of the fruits of Syria, grapes, figs, pomegranates, almonds, olives, and locusts, were often the subject of wonder and admiration, and William of Tyre speaks enthusiastically of the great sugar plantations at Sur.[1371] Of the animals,[1372] the Arab horse and the camel attracted most attention; and the usefulness of the latter was known both as a beast of burden and as a swift traveler through the desert. A lively sketch of a man leading a camel laden with a large cask figures prominently on one variant of the Matthew Paris map of Palestine, and a legend reads: “Here abound camels, buffaloes (bubali), mules, and asses, which are used by the merchants trading between the peoples of the Orient and of the Occident.”[1373] Bears and lions, serpents and tarantulas, and carrier pigeons also invited notice; and the mosquito is mentioned by Ambroise, who says that though very small it has a terribly poisonous bite, bad enough to make every one, old and young alike, appear to be leprous:

“Que chescons, vielz ou damoisels, Sembloit a estre tut mesels.”[1374]

Concerning the people[1375] of the Levant we find that the distinction between the nomadic desert-dwelling Bedouins and the bearded turban-wearing Saracens (townsfolk) was well understood. The Bedouins—contrary to their present reputation—were looked down upon as cowards in battle, and William of Tyre relates with some disgust that it was their custom to hang about on the outskirts of a fight until they saw which side was going to win and then to join the victors.[1376]

In commenting on the religion[1377] of the Saracens the medieval Christians made the fundamental error of supposing that Islam is an idolatrous cult and that Mohammed was worshipped as a god. Nevertheless they were far from inaccurate in their remarks on the various customs, habits, and minor beliefs of the Moslems, on such matters, for example, as the pilgrimage to Mecca, the prohibited eating of pork and drinking of wine, the importance of ablutions, polygamy, and the customs of divorce. William of Tyre describes[1378] the division of the Mohammedans into two great groups, Shiah and Sunni, and explains how the former held that Ali (“Haly”) was the only true prophet and the latter that Mohammed was the one messenger of God. Baghdad was referred to as the seat of the great “apostle” of the Saracens, or caliph, whom William of Tyre spoke of as a sovereign prince and chieftain whom all must obey; Cairo in Egypt was recognized as the capital of the caliphs of the rival Shiah persuasion.

Benjamin of Tudela also acquired some fairly clear ideas of Islam during his visits to Baghdad and to Egypt. He states that the Abbasid Caliph at Baghdad “is head of the Mohammedan religion, and all the kings of Islam obey him” and likens his position to that of the Christian Pope.[1379] In writing about Cairo he tells us that the subjects of the Emir were followers of Ali (hence Shiites), that they rose against the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, and that a lasting feud was kept up between the two factions.[1380]

Particular terror was inspired in the hearts of the Crusaders by that strange sect of Assassins,[1381] whose principal seat was at Alamut in Persia, the stronghold of the notorious Old Man of the Mountain, though most of the Crusaders mistakenly thought that the outlying fortress of Massiat in Syria was the abode of the Old Man. William of Tyre dilates[1382] on the treachery and murderous nature of this people; and in Ambroise’s Estoire we find[1383] a vivid account of how the children of the Assassins were brought up to do the bidding of the Old Man in every detail and in particular to bring about the murder of his enemies.[1384]

AFRICA

EGYPT AS PART OF ASIA

Both the author of the De imagine mundi and Gervase of Tilbury include an account of Egypt with their descriptions of the countries of Asia. They then take up the remainder of Asia and Europe before finally returning to Africa toward the close of the geographical parts of their books. This order of treatment, which accorded with classical traditions, usually included Egypt with Asia or at least, as in the De imagine mundi, made the Nile rather than the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa.[1385] Certainly from an historical and cultural point of view Egypt has been more closely related to the Asiatic than to the African continent, even though geographically it forms a portion of the latter.[1386]

The description of Egypt in the Otia imperialia[1387] was copied in large part from the De imagine mundi,[1388] and this in turn had closely followed the words of Isidore.[1389] It ran somewhat as follows. Surrounded by the course of the Nile, which forms a letter delta,[1390] Lower Egypt comprises five thousand country estates; these are not watered by rainfall but by the floods of the river alone, for the skies of Egypt are never obscured by clouds. The capital of Egypt is Babylon (Cairo), built by Cambyses. Close to Thebes—a city founded by Cadmus, Agenor’s son and founder of Boeotian Thebes as well—are vast solitudes where there used to dwell a great company of hermits. The De imagine mundi speaks of the island of Meroë and of Syene on the tropic in Upper Egypt, the latter famous for the well built there by the philosophers, into which the sun shines directly in the month of June.[1391] The Jerome map of Palestine also shows Egypt in considerable detail, one of the most important features being the lighthouse at Alexandria.[1392]

DESCRIPTIONS OF EGYPT

Egypt, like the Holy Land, was frequently visited by Western merchants throughout our entire period. Benjamin of Tudela testifies to the enormous trade carried on there with the West. Alexandria was the principal port whence the spices and luxuries of the Far East were transshipped to Europe. Benjamin spoke with high appreciation of the wide straight streets of the city and of the architectural beauty of its buildings. He was much impressed by the swarm of merchants from all over the world who congregated in its streets and markets.[1393] William of Tyre enlarged on the commercial importance of the great port and explained that the peppers, spices, ointments, drugs, lectuaries, precious stones, and silks of the Orient were brought first to Aden on the Red Sea and thence transported direct to Alexandria. He pointed out that Alexandria was also important as the meeting place of the river and maritime trades, and he gave a description of the local topography of the city.[1394] Merchants from various Occidental nations and city states of Italy had fondachi, or trading stations, in this cosmopolitan metropolis, which was, as Schaube says, more subjected to European influences than any other city of Islam.[1395] The Church endeavored to place severe restrictions on commerce with the infidel, in particular by the prohibition of the importation into Egypt of wood and iron, two materials of vital importance to the Saracens and much in demand. The restrictions, however, were disregarded, and trade flourished between Southern Europe and Egypt throughout nearly the entire twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, except for a short interruption at the time of the Third Crusade. In 1215–1216 there were said to be no fewer than three thousand Frankish merchants in Alexandria.[1396] Egypt was the objective of the Crusaders of the Fifth Crusade, who seized and held the city of Damietta from 1219 to 1221, and again under Louis IX of France, who held it from 1248 to 1249; but in the interval between these two Crusades the Emperor Frederick II was on friendly and even intimate terms with the sultans.[1397]

William of Tyre, who knew Egypt at first hand, gives a vivid picture of the fertile strip of country, hemmed in on either side by two deserts “in which the land is so burned and sterile that it supports no herb and no manner of tree, except where the river Nile waters the ground when it is in flood; in these parts alone a great abundance of wheat can grow.”[1398] He speaks of the flood of the Nile, between the months of June and September, and how it leaves a rich deposit of silt; of the palm gardens like a forest along the banks of the stream; and of the extensive orchards of fruit trees in the neighborhood of Alexandria.[1399] He also fully describes the caliph’s palace at Cairo and the Mamelukes, or sultan’s bodyguard, recruited from the children of captured enemies.[1400]

Benjamin of Tudela also marveled at the agricultural wealth of the flood plain of the Nile. The river alone, he said, irrigates and fertilizes the land, for “no rain falls, neither is ice or snow ever seen” (Adler’s translation). Among other curiosities he described the Nilometer, which measured the height of the flood waters, and he gave details regarding the agricultural crops and fruits. Benjamin quoted the correct explanation of the flood: “The Egyptians say that up the river, in the land of Al-Habash (Abyssinia), which is the land of Havilah, much rain descends at the time of the rising of the river, and this abundance of rain causes the river to rise and to cover the surface of the land” (Adler’s translation).[1401]

AFRICA WEST OF EGYPT

To the west of Egypt, according to the De imagine mundi, lies Africa, stretching from the Nile to the ocean. Here in order are the provinces of Libya, named from a queen of that name; Cyrenaica, called from the city of Cyrene; Pentapolis, from the five cities of Berenice, Arsinoë, Ptolemaïs, Apollonia, and Cyrene; Tripolis, from the three cities of Occasa, Berete, and Leptis Magna; Heusis, containing the site of Carthage; Getulia; Numidia, with Hippo, the home of St. Augustine; and Mauretania.[1402] The two Syrtes (Major and Minor), or shallow bays of the north coast of Africa, are shown on the Henry of Mayence map immediately to the west of Egypt.[1403] In the extreme west of Africa the De imagine mundi, with characteristic confusion, places Gades (Cadiz), from which the adjacent sea is called the Sea of Gades; and, on the borders of the ocean, Mount Atlas, a mountain of immense height, named after Atlas, once a king of Africa.[1404] These mountains also appear prominently on the St. Sever Beatus map as a long range running parallel to the Atlantic[1405] (see Fig. 2, p. 69, above). Other maps of the same group[1406] show two great peaks on the western coast of Africa, which seem to represent a confusion of the Atlas Mountains with the famous Pillars of Hercules. A legend on the St. Sever Beatus map in the neighborhood of Tangier (Tingi) draws attention to the fact that “this region produces monkeys and ostriches,”[1407] true certainly at the present day in regard to the former.

In the fourth and fifth decades of the twelfth century the Norman king of Sicily, Roger II, the patron of Edrisi, conquered many of the seaport towns along what is now the coast of Tunis; and, though the Latins were expelled from this region by the powerful Moroccan dynasty of the Almohads,[1408] who during the following decade came to supersede the Almoravids in the domination over North Africa and Spain, close commercial relations were maintained between the northern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea throughout the century and a half with which we are concerned.[1409] The Genoese held the foremost place in the North African trade; but Pisan, Venetian, Massiliot, and Catalan merchants also frequented the markets of the seaboard towns. Under the Almohads, Ceuta and Bugia were important entrepôts of Genoese trade; and when the Almohad dominions split up in the early years of the thirteenth century (1212–1238), these two towns fell into the hands of Genoa.[1410] Genoese fleets also ventured through the Strait of Gibraltar and not only tapped the commerce of the western coasts of the Iberian Peninsula but penetrated as far as Saleh on the Moroccan shore. Christians also found their way in various capacities into the interior of Maghreb, as the Moslems termed these western territories of Islam. During the Crusading epoch many Christians were taken captive in the wars in Spain and by pirates on the high seas; most of these were sold into slavery in the markets of the sea ports of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunis and sent to drag out lives of suffering in the towns of the interior. Towards the close of the twelfth century a Christian religious order was formed for the purpose of ameliorating the sufferings of the captives and of bringing about their redemption by exchange with Moslem captives held in Christendom.[1411] We have evidence that these “Redemptorists,” and the Franciscan and Dominican friars who were soon to follow them in the same work and who also served as ministers of the Christian religion to the European merchants engaged in business in Moslem countries, were not at all inhospitably received.[1412] Their work was facilitated by almost uniformly friendly relations between the papacy and the rulers of Morocco, and the number of Christians in this part of the world became so great by the fourth decade of the thirteenth century that an episcopal see was established in Fez (1233), subsequently to be removed to Morocco City.[1413] Another tie between Morocco and the Latin West was created by the maintenance at the court of the Almohads and their successors of a mercenary force composed for the most part of Spanish Christians from Catalonia and Aragon.[1414]

On certain of the Beatus maps a “sandy desert” is shown between Egypt, western Africa, and Ethiopia;[1415] and on the Psalter map it appears as a well-defined strip of territory labeled “sandy and sterile land.”[1416] This of course is no other than the Sahara,[1417] of which little or nothing was known, except that the Henry of Mayence map shows,[1418] far back in the desert, the Temple of Jupiter (Ammon), in the oasis of that name, known since antiquity, and the St. Sever Beatus map represents certain immense salinae, or salt pits (the two squares west of the Nile on Fig. 2, p. 69, above), said to wax and wane with the moon.[1419]

ETHIOPIA

South of Egypt and the Sahara lies Ethiopia. In the minds of medieval writers this name was not restricted to the region beyond Upper Egypt but was applied to the entire southern part of the known world, just as “India” sometimes was applied to the entire Far East. Indeed, from early classical times Ethiopia had itself been confused with India, and some of the writers whose works we are studying believed that the two regions were coterminous.

Nearly all the maps of the period carried the extremities of Ethiopia far to the east and minimized the size of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in such a way as to bring Central Africa within no great distance of India. On the Jerome map of Palestine two tracts called “India Egyptii” and “India Ethiopie” were placed along the shores of the Red Sea opposite the mouths of the Indus.[1420] Gervase of Tilbury speaks of three peoples inhabiting Ethiopia: the Hesperi in the west, the Garamantes in the center, and the “Indians” in the east,[1421] and adds that there are one hundred and twenty provinces “from India into Ethiopia.”[1422] The De imagine mundi places Saba, the city of the Queen of Sheba, in the easterly part of Ethiopia.[1423] It was conceded that Ethiopia is terribly hot on account of the proximity of the sun and that the soil there for the most part is dry and desert. Gervase speaks of the mighty Mount Climax of Ptolemy, Orosius, and other ancient writers in the midst of Ethiopia, a home of bearded women and similar marvels.

Some of the Beatus maps designate Ethiopia as a country “where there are races horrible on account of their strange faces and monstrous appearance. It extends as far as the borders of Egypt. It also abounds in wild beasts and serpents; and precious stones, cinnamon, and balsam are found there.”[1424] In fact, all remote parts of the world were made the habitats of marvels in the Middle Ages, and few parts of the known world were more remote than Ethiopia. In addition, the intimate connection between India and Ethiopia, which had persisted in the minds of men throughout so many ages, seems to have brought about a transference thither of many of those marvels and monsters that originally had been placed in the Far East. A most entertaining example of the peopling of Ethiopia by monstrous creatures is provided by the Psalter map and by the Ebstorf map of a period later than ours.[1425] On these the entire shore of the equatorial ocean along the southern border of the known world is lined with men that are tongueless, earless, noseless, or men that have four eyes or mouths and eyes on their breasts, and with cannibals, cynocephali, snake-eating troglodytes, and the like.

SOURCES OF THE NILE

The main interest in Ethiopia, however, lay in the fact that from this country comes that great river the problem of whose sources has puzzled mankind from the earliest ages down nearly to our own day. In classical times three theories had prevailed concerning the headwaters of the Nile.[1426] The correct theory, that of Eratosthenes and of Ptolemy, that the river rises in Ethiopia itself but far to the south, met with no recognition in our period. The second theory placed the sources in India and was closely allied with the very old belief that tended to confuse Ethiopia itself with India and can be traced back to Homeric or even pre-Homeric times.[1427] The third theory, which probably originated in vague rumors that reached the Carthaginians and later the Romans and still later the Moslems, of the eastward-flowing course of a great river south of the Sahara (a river which we now know to be the Niger), placed the headwaters of the Nile either in a great lake or else in the Atlas Mountains in western Africa close to the ocean.

Traces of each of the last two theories are to be found in the writings of our period. According to the accepted interpretation of Scripture, the Nile was the same as the Gihon, one of the four rivers of Paradise, and its ultimate source must therefore have been in the east, where Paradise was nearly always thought to be. It is also possible that early Christian monks in Abyssinia may have learned of the course of certain of the eastern tributaries of the Atbara which rise close to the Red Sea, and this information, in the devious course of its transmission to Western Europe, may have been confused in such a way as to foster belief that one of these minor streams was the headwaters of the main river itself.[1428] In any case, Orosius,[1429] whose words were copied by Gervase of Tilbury,[1430] made the Nile spring from the ground near Mossylon Emporium on the shores of the Red Sea and, after flowing westward for some distance, turn north to enter Egypt. But he also said that other authorities state that the river rises far in the west and that, after an underground course through the sands and thence through a great lake, it runs eastward across the Ethiopian desert even as far as the ocean and then turns to the left into Egypt. In any case, he adds, it is true that there is a large river which has exactly such a source and produces all the monsters that the Nile does. The barbarians who dwell near its source call this latter river the Dara, but other natives name it the Nuchul. The Dara is mentioned by Pliny and the Nuchul by Mela; perhaps they represent a reminiscence of the generally eastward-flowing Niger. Orosius suggested that this river, coming from the west, may well contribute by an underground channel to the westward-flowing stream that springs from the earth near the Red Sea. Isidore seems to have derived from Orosius the idea of a West African origin of the Nile, its disappearance under ground, and subsequent emergence on the shores of the Red Sea and thence of its encircling of Ethiopia before flowing down into Egypt,[1431] and in this idea he was followed by the author of the De imagine mundi.[1432]

Orosius’ and Isidore’s theories are graphically represented on the maps. Several of the Beatus maps simply show the river springing from mountains in the western part of the continent and swinging east and north into the Mediterranean.[1433] The symbols and legends on the St. Sever Beatus[1434] indicate (see Fig. 2, p. 69, above) that the river originates in the neighborhood of the Atlas Mountains; thence, passing beneath the sands, it expands into a vast lake, whence it flows toward the east through an immense swamp, like the Maeotic Swamp, but surrounded by mountains. After this it turns to the left, envelops the Isle of Meroë, and flows down into Egypt. Other maps, like the Cotton, Henry of Mayence (inset on Fig. 6, p. 245, above), and Jerome map of Palestine are even more faithful to the Orosian description. The sources of the Nile proper are shown near the Red Sea in the eastern part of Ethiopia, but another large river is also depicted, coming from the far west near the Atlas range and emptying into a large lake not far from the sources of the Nile, with which the lake may communicate. The Cotton map[1435] splits this river into two sections and calls the upper section “Dara” and the lower “Fluvius Nilus.” On the Jerome map of Palestine[1436] it is called “Nuchul” and made to flow into a lake of the same name. Henry of Mayence[1437] names it “fl. Gion.”

TRADITIONAL VIEW OF CENTRAL AFRICA

As a matter of fact, no new information about Central Africa was brought to light during our entire period or had been during many centuries before, and no new theories were propounded. Old and hackneyed notions were handed down from one writer to another. Simar, in a recent admirable study of the geographical ideas regarding Central Africa in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trenchantly sums up the whole matter with the following words, which might equally well be applied to ideas regarding many other parts of the world: “These meager notions soon became stereotyped and were repeated by the scholars of the Middle Ages, who vied with each other in their unalterable ardor. From Martianus Capella in the fourth century to Honorius of Autun [here the author of the De imagine mundi is meant] in the twelfth, passing by Macrobius, Priscian, Saint Avitus, Gregory of Tours, Jornandes, the Venerable Bede, Raban Maur, Dicuil, Alfred the Great, Alfric, Adelbold, Richer, Asaph, Hermann Contractus, Robert of St. Martin of Auxerre, Otto of Freising, Hugh of St. Victor, and even, later, the historian Joinville, men copied Solinus, Orosius, and Isidore and adopted like them a round oikoumene separated from the terra incognita by an impassable equatorial ocean, the uninhabitability of the torrid zone, the limit of Africa this side of the equator, the sources of the Nile in Mauretania, its course through Ethiopia from west to east, its ultimate origin in the Terrestrial Paradise situated to the east of India, and its submarine course as far as its emergence in the western part of Libya.”[1438]

THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

THE NAME “MEDITERRANEAN”

To the great chain of inland seas that lies between Africa, Asia, and Europe the Romans had applied the name of mare internum or mare nostrum. Solinus was probably the first to describe these as mediterranean seas, and Isidore the first to convert the term “mediterranean” into a proper name.[1439] The authority of Isidore was sufficient to make this designation familiar to future ages; and it was used by the author of the De imagine mundi and by Gervase of Tilbury with the same connotation that it enjoys at the present day.[1440] The term, however, was not firmly established in popular use in our period and is conspicuously absent from most of the maps, which as a rule either give no name at all for the sea as a whole or else employ some vague designation like mare nostrum or mare magnum.[1441]

Gervase of Tilbury says[1442] that the Mediterranean is shaped like a letter Y with two branches, a longer one extending from the entrance (Strait of Gibraltar) to the Hellespont, and a shorter one forming the Sea of Alexandria or of Syria. This comparison suggests that Gervase must have had before him a typical medieval map of the world with east at the top. More detailed is the account of the Mediterranean in Plato of Tivoli’s translation of Al-Battānī’s Astronomy.[1443] Here the “Roman Sea” is described as extending a distance of 5000 miles [!] from the Isle of Gadir (Cadiz) to Tyre and Sidon; it has various branches, one running off towards the Narbonnese, one called Adriatic, another called Pontus; and it contains a total of one hundred and sixty-two inhabited islands, of which five are especially noteworthy on account of their size.

THE MEDITERRANEAN DURING THE CRUSADES

During the Crusades the Mediterranean served as one of the main highways from the West to the Holy Land, and hence the men of Europe were enabled to learn much of its waters and coasts. Though the principal armies of the First Crusade had proceeded overland, in the years that followed the establishment of the states of the Crusaders there was constant coming and going by sea between the Levant and the ports of Italy, France, and England. The sea route was the way taken by the armies of Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur-de-Lion in 1190; by the cosmopolitan army that captured Constantinople in 1204; by Frederick II and the ill-starred expedition of St. Louis to Egypt; as well as by innumerable pilgrims, soldiers, merchants, and other individuals unconnected with any definite Crusading enterprise.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR NAVIGATION IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

Perhaps the most attractive account of the Mediterranean derived from the literature of the Crusaders is to be found in the chronicles and histories recording the expedition of Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The Gesta regis Ricardi, mistakenly attributed to Benedict of Peterborough, and the Chronica of Roger of Hoveden contain descriptions of routes and coasts, parts of which were undoubtedly drawn from manuals of navigation. Here we find much the same sort of data that at the present time is incorporated in our Coast Pilot books, a combination of practical advice to sailors with useful and interesting information about the waters, islands, and shores. Great care is taken to inform the navigator of the best and most practicable routes for him to follow. For example, two ways are mentioned of going from Marseilles to Acre, one through the open sea and the other near the coast.[1444] If the wind is favorable you can proceed by the first, leaving Sardinia and Sicily out of sight to the left, though you must constantly be on your guard against running too far to the right and falling afoul of the barbarian shores.[1445] With a good breeze this journey can be made in fifteen days,[1446] and vessels are safer on it from the menace of pirates than when they follow the coastwise route. On the other hand, the navigation is more difficult, and under no circumstances should this route be attempted by galleys, which might easily be sunk if a storm should come up. In the account of the coastwise route various menaces and dangers to ships are carefully pointed out. For instance, off the coast of Greece, about twenty miles from land and fifty from Modon, there is a low round rock called Triffar; and in order to avoid it ships are warned not to stand too far out to sea. West-bound vessels, however, are advised, instead of passing through the channels between “Chefeline” (Cephalonia), “Fale de Campar” (Ithaca), and the neighboring islands to keep out to sea, placing these islands on the right. Navigators are cautioned to beware of a sand bar in Corfu harbor with only four and a half ulnae of water upon it. The dangers of the narrow and crooked channel between Corfu and the mainland make it advisable for vessels en route to Italy to avoid taking this passage and, by steering out to sea, to leave Corfu on the right. The harbor of Karentet (Santa Quaranta) is said to be a fine one, except for submerged reefs at the entrance and extending under about half of its area; the best approach for ships is not far from the Corfu side.

We find also many full and practical details regarding the distances between various points along the coasts, the width of straits, the length of islands; the names of seaport towns and now and then their products and other distinguishing features are mentioned, for example, the fact that Marseilles has an excellent harbor surrounded on all sides by hills, or that Almeria in Spain is far-famed for its manufacture of silk. Prominent landmarks are carefully pointed out: great mountains making promontories on the coast of Spain, sand banks, the mouths of rivers (like the Ebro, or the Salef in Asia Minor, “in which Frederick Barbarossa was drowned and from the neighborhood of the sources of which the three wise men were said to have come”), the high peaks in the interior of Crete, or the volcanoes of Sicily and the Lipari Isles. Marine life, such as the flying fish of the waters near Corsica and Sardinia as well as less credible monstrosities of the Gulf of Satalia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, also seems to have aroused the curiosity of the navigator and chronicler.[1447]

ISLANDS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

Most medieval maps show the islands of the Mediterranean scattered about with scant respect for their actual locations and relative sizes. The Guido map of the world, for instance, indicates but one island by name in the entire Mediterranean, and that is “Baleares.”[1448] The most important islands are fairly well represented on the St. Sever Beatus[1449] (Fig. 2, p. 69, above), but the draftsman of the Osma Beatus did not have room enough for Tenedos and Rhodes in the Mediterranean (Fig. 4, p. 123, above), and hence placed then in the circumambient ocean to the east of Taprobane![1450] In the De imagine mundi and in the Otia imperialia the islands are described in a dull and catalogue-like manner from the data given by Orosius and other classical authorities.[1451] The accounts of the Mediterranean in the chronicles which we have just been discussing also add little beside scattering details on Corfu and Cyprus and a significant observation that, owing to the danger from pirates, a large number of the islands of the Greek archipelago had been deserted by their inhabitants.[1452]

Guy of Bazoches, who journeyed overseas with the Crusaders to Syria in 1190, told in a letter to his nephews[1453] that on the third morning out from Marseilles they were in sight of Corsica and the many and varied inlets and promontories of its broken coast. The following day Sardinia was visible, likewise on the left. Sardinia, Guy wrote, might almost have been called free from poisonous serpents, were it not for one variety, the solifuga, which took the place of all the others, since the poisonous virulence of all serpents was concentrated in this one. Besides this there was a violently poisonous plant in Sardinia. On the other hand, these pests were compensated for by the presence of hot springs in several parts of the island which prevailed against the solifuga and were good for broken bones and for the eyes. We have already spoken[1454] of Guy’s description of Sicily, which was reached soon after Sardinia was left behind. From Sicily Guy came to Crete, “a famous island and once powerful with a hundred cities.” Crete was blessed with an absence of all kinds of serpents, though the place of serpents was taken by a small animal called a spalangius, the bite of which was deadly. In the sea where Crete lay were the Cyclades, forming a circle around Delos, and Cyprus, more pleasing to the eye because of the richness of its fields, the delights of its vineyards, and its far-famed fertility.

Sicily

The critical position of Sicily on the routes between East and West and North and South, its peculiar volcanic phenomena, as well as the establishment of a Norman kingdom there, brought that island to the attention of the outside world.[1455] Sicily came inevitably to figure in the poetry and legend of the period both in France and in the isle itself. The song of Roland and the Breton cycle of legends of King Arthur were sung and related on Sicilian soil, and echoes of these popular romances found their way into the Latin literature of our age. One story had it that the peers of Charlemagne had passed through Sicily on their return from Jerusalem and had named mountains after Roland and Oliver. Godfrey of Viterbo wrote: “There stands a great mountain which was called Roland and another similarly called Oliver, and these names were applied by the bold dukes as memorials.”[1456] Gervase of Tilbury was inclined to treat skeptically the report of how, in his own day, King Arthur, said to have been enclosed within Mongibel (Etna), had appeared miraculously on the outside of the mountain.[1457] King Arthur also was associated in a French poem, Florian et Florete, with a distinctively Sicilian fairy, Morgain—who gave her name to the fata morgana, or mirage, over the Strait of Messina, and with Mongibel, an abode of supernatural beings. French poets writing of Sicily from far away often revealed an amazing ignorance of the geography of the isle, as is well shown by the Dolopathos of Jean of Haute Seille, in which not only is the city of Mantua placed in Sicily but the insular character of the latter is entirely overlooked.[1458]

The travelers Conrad of Querfurt and Guy of Bazoches both discuss the phenomena of Etna[1459] and Scylla and Charybdis and refer to the stories of Arethusa and of the rape of Proserpina.[1460] Conrad identifies Taormina with the home of the minotaur.[1461] These twelfth-century travelers were well read in the classical mythology of the places they chose to visit.

With this mythical lore of the Mediterranean island should be contrasted a few excellent and graphic accounts given by eyewitnesses. The troubadour Ambroise, who sings of the expedition of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, tells us something of the contemporary population of Messina, consisting of Lombards, “Griffons” (or Greeks), and “persons of Saracen extraction.”[1462] The latter, he complained, treated the French pilgrims abominably, insulting them with evil gestures, calling them dogs, and acting in an especially objectionable manner when the Frenchmen tried to take liberties with the Saracens’ wives, a naïve admission not to the credit of the Frenchmen. We have already alluded to the graphic descriptions of Etna in the letters of Guy of Bazoches and in the second redaction of the Image du monde.[1463]

EUROPE

NORTHEASTERN EUROPE

Eastern and northeastern Europe were quite as shadowy and unfamiliar to the men of the West during our period as Central Asia or the heart of Africa. Classical tradition had placed in the northern part of Europe a range of mountains not far from the Ocean Stream, the Rhipaeans—perhaps an echo of some very early acquaintance with the Urals.[1464] Between these and the Ocean, so Gervase of Tilbury[1465] affirmed, there was a land in the vicinity of the “septentrional” circle (called thus from the “seven stars” and known to the Greeks as the “Arctic circle”) so cold as to be constantly frozen and uninhabitable. Another tradition dating back to remote antiquity placed the Hyperboreans far north in a region of temperate climate. Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon tried to prove that such a climate might be produced by the character of the mountains at very high latitudes.[1466] The rivers of Scythia, among them the Lentulus and the Tanaïs (Don), were said to have their sources in the Rhipaean Mountains, and of these the Tanaïs, which was the largest, after flowing past the altar of Augustus, constantly poured an immense volume of water into the Euxine (Black Sea) near Theodosia.[1467]

RUSSIA

More recent information about Russia had been acquired by men of the West, though it had not been widely disseminated. In regard to northern Russia the Northmen were in possession of much valuable knowledge. We have already mentioned their adventurous voyagings in the Baltic and around the North Cape into the White Sea to a region which they had called Biarma.[1468] There is evidence that their trade with Biarmaland was maintained throughout our period, although only three actual voyages after the tenth century are recorded: one in 1090, one in 1217, and one in 1222.[1469] A member of the expedition of 1217, however, crossed Russia to the Black Sea and penetrated ultimately to the Holy Land before returning to Norway.

Of southern Russia and the northern coasts of the Black Sea some slight knowledge had undoubtedly filtered into the West through the medium of the Italian merchants. Though Genoese, Pisans, and Venetians penetrated these regions in the twelfth century,[1470] the great expansion of Occidental commerce into the steppes and thence into the heart of Asia came only after the establishment of the Latin Empire in Constantinople in 1204 and after the conquest of the Ukraine and Crimea by the Mongols, whose relatively tolerant rule was favorable to the presence of European colonies and mercantile enterprise. Otto of Freising mentions the tribes dwelling to the north and east of Hungary on the plains of Russia, Petchenegs and Komans, devourers of raw and foul meats, such as those of horses and cats—tribes who inhabited a land which, though rich in game, had never felt the plow or rake.[1471] The Komans were also spoken of by Robert de Clari (died 1216) in his Prise de Constantinople as a tent-dwelling folk, living on cattle, cheese, and milk and possessed of large herds of horses.[1472] We have already quoted from Matthew Paris’ graphic description of the Mongols,[1473] who swept into Russia in 1222–1224 and later, in 1240–1243, menaced Central Europe itself.

POLAND

Northwest of these tribes lay Poland, of which Ragewin gave a brief description in his continuation of Otto’s Gesta Friderici.[1474] Dwelling in a country bounded by the Oder on the west, the Vistula on the east, the Ruthenians and the Scythian Ocean on the north, and the Bohemian Forest on the south, the Poles, he tells us, are well protected by the character of the land on which they live. They are almost a barbaric people and are very quick to fight, partly because of their own inherent ferocity but partly too because of contact with more ferocious neighbors on the shores of the sea that washes their coasts.[1475]

SLAVIC EUROPE AS DESCRIBED BY BENJAMIN OF TUDELA AND PETACHIA OF RATISBON

The Hebrew travelers Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Ratisbon also wrote of Slavic Europe, the former from hearsay, the latter from personal observation. Benjamin stated that Russia was “a great empire stretching from the gate of Prague to the gates of Kieff, the large city which is at the extremity of that Empire. It is a land of mountains and forests, where there are to be found animals called vair [a species of marten], ermine, and sable”[1476] (Adler’s translation). It seems that Benjamin would include in Russia much of Bohemia, Galicia, and Poland, together with the Carpathian Mountains. Petachia, who traversed Russia, Caucasia, and Armenia on his way from Prague to Baghdad, was one of the few Occidental travelers of the Middle Ages who ventured into the land of the steppes before the overland journeys of John of Pian de Carpine, William of Rubruck,[1477] and others to the Mongol court during the middle and closing years of the thirteenth century. Petachia commented on the absence of mountains in Russia. He described accurately the tent-dwellers of Kedar, or the Ukraine (Petchenegs and Komans), noting especially the horsehide rafts on which they cross the great rivers; their diet of rice and millet boiled in milk and of raw flesh which they warm under the saddles of their horses; their custom of drinking from vessels of copper cast in the shape of a human face; their government in the hands of princes and nobles rather than of kings. He gave some details about that portion of the Sea of Azov now known as the Putrid Sea, telling us that when the wind blows from its foul surface in the direction of the Black Sea it causes the death of many people![1478]

HUNGARY

With Pannonia, or Hungary, Western Europe was in much more intimate contact than with Russia and Poland. Gervase of Tilbury, to be sure, adds little to what Orosius had told about this country,[1479] but in Otto of Freising’s Gesta Friderici there is a description of both land and people.[1480] Otto writes that Pannonia is enclosed by woods and mountains, particularly by the range of the Apennines (sic); it forms a wide and well-watered plain, fed by springs and rivers; there are a great many woods stocked with game of every variety, and the land abounds in fields so rich and fertile that they can be likened either to the Paradise of God or else to Egypt. The aspect of the country is beautiful but rendered so rather by nature itself than by the work of man, for, owing to the barbaric state of civilization in which the people remain, walls and buildings are very rare. Boundaries are marked by the courses of great rivers and not by woods and hills. The names which Otto assigns to the borders of Pannonia have a distinctly modern sound, contrasting with the classical geographic nomenclature used by Gervase for all this part of the world. “Eastward, where the famous river Sawa (Save) is received by the Danube, Pannonia borders on Bulgaria; westward on Moravia and the eastern marches of the Teutons; southward on Croatia, Dalmatia, Hystria (Istria), or Carinthia; and northward on Boemia (Bohemia), Polimia (Poland), Ruthenia, etc.; to the northeast are the Pecenati (Petchenegs) and Falones (Komans), and to the southeast is Rama.” Otto also describes rather fully the tent-dwellers of the Hungarian plain. The country, he says, has suffered much through the invasions of barbarians, and hence no wonder it remains a land where the people are of rough speech and little culture. First the Huns overran this region, then the Avars, eaters of raw and unclean meat, and finally the Hungarians from Scythia. The latter have deep-set eyes, are ugly and small, wild and barbaric in speech and customs; and one is constrained to wonder at the injustice of fate, or, even more, at the patience of God, for giving such a beautiful country to such a monstrous folk. Otto then adds further details about the customs of the people: their deliberation in council, their unlimited obedience to the tyrannical and arbitrary authority of their kings, the rigid requirements of their military system. Their dwellings in the villages and towns are primitive to an extreme, the houses nearly always built of reeds, rarely of wood, and almost never of stone. As a matter of fact, the majority of the people lived both winter and summer in tents.

Relations between France and Hungary were fairly close in the twelfth century.[1481] Intermarriages between members of the reigning houses had induced many of the Hungarian nobles to imitate French manners and customs. French teaching monks and military orders (Templars and Hospitalers) had established themselves in the Danubian plain before the close of the century, and during the Crusades many Frenchmen found occasion to visit the eastern kingdom in one capacity or another.[1482] In the thirteenth century the Gallic colonies in Hungary became even more numerous than previously, and French merchants and architects were well known among the Magyars.[1483] Conversely, this French infiltration led to the dissemination of some knowledge of Hungary in France and to frequent mention of that country in the chansons de geste, though the phrase “to go to Hungary” was held to be synonymous with visiting any extremely distant and unknown region.[1484] It was not in the nature of the chansons de geste to supply detailed geographical information, least of all about a remote country; and consequently the presence of any testimony at all of a geographical nature in them justifies our belief that the troubadours knew more of Hungary than their songs at first glance would seem to indicate. We are told that among the products of the Magyar kingdom were horses, mules, and donkeys, which were exported to France; that the gold of Hungary was well known in the West; and that there were many cities in this realm, though only one of these, Striguus, is mentioned by name.

BALKAN PENINSULA

Quite characteristically, in dealing with Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula, such writers as the author of the De imagine mundi[1485] and Gervase of Tilbury [1486] merely copied from Isidore and Orosius, who in turn had derived their knowledge from much earlier sources. The accounts of this part of Europe in these standard authorities of our period, though fairly full, were nearly a thousand years out of date. Even so, it comes as something of a shock to find that on the Jerome map of the East, drawn as late as 1150, a legend near the Ister (Danube) informs us that in this locality “the pygmies fight with the cranes.”[1487]

More recent information seems to have been gathered by Arnold of Lübeck. In the Chronica Slavorum[1488] he speaks of a city of Ravenelle,[1489] where the river Ravana flows into the Morava. This city, he says, lies in the midst of a wood, and its inhabitants are called Servi. They are sons of the devil, heathens, ravenous for meat, and worthy of their name, for they are the slaves of all low and foul passions and live like beasts but are even wilder than beasts. In such uncomplimentary terms Arnold describes the ancestors of the modern Serbians and adds that they were subjects of the kings of the Greeks, i. e. the Byzantine emperors.

In regard to the Balkan Peninsula as well as to Hungary, however, much knowledge had undoubtedly been gained through the Crusaders. The main route from the West to Constantinople by way of the Morava and Maritsa valleys was taken in the First Crusade by Godfrey of Bouillon; in the Second by Louis VII and Conrad III (1147); and, in the Third, Frederick Barbarossa followed it as far as Adrianople, whence he made his way into Asia Minor through Gallipoli and across the Dardanelles. Other leaders of the First Crusade had traveled overland from the Adriatic at Durazzo and Avlona to Thessalonica and thence eastward along the shore to the Bosporus. During the Fourth Crusade the Latin fleet coasted Dalmatia, Greece, and the Archipelago; and the founding of the Latin Empire, with its petty Frankish principalities in Greece and among the isles, inevitably established a connection between those parts of the world and Europe beyond the Alps.

Knowledge of Balkan countries was also derived from trade as well as from the enterprise of the Crusaders. In the twelfth century, Occidental colonies were to be found in practically all the important cities of the Byzantine Empire. Heyd in his Histoire du commerce du Levant[1490] gives a summary of the evidence on this subject, which shows that before the Fourth Crusade (1203–1204) there were in existence colonies, mostly of Italians from Genoa, Venice, and Pisa. Thessalonica harbored in its foreign quarter not only Italians, but Spaniards, Portuguese, and French. As commerce went mainly by sea, an important traffic had sprung up among the islands of the Archipelago and especially between Euboea, Crete, Rhodes, Lemnos, and the West, though prior to the Fourth Crusade Western merchants avoided penetrating the interior of Greece.

Constantinople

Constantinople was a great meeting place of merchants from all quarters of the known world and consequently a very important center for the dispersal of geographical knowledge. During the twelfth century Pisan, Venetian, and Genoese colonies flourished together there unharmoniously and vied with each other for trade privileges, but after 1204 the Venetians had matters very much in their own hands. Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, says[1491] that in 1180 there were no fewer than 60,000 Latins in Constantinople and that the majority of these were Italians. Benjamin of Tudela[1492] and other writers also tell of merchants here from Babylon, Mesopotamia, Media, Persia, Armenia, Iberia (in the Caucasus), Egypt, Palestine, Russia, Hungary, the country of the Petchenegs, Bulgaria, Spain, France, and Germany, though the Latins were by all odds the most numerous among this multitude. After the establishment of the Latin Empire in 1204 we hear of the presence of Provençaux, Spaniards, citizens of Ancona, and even Danes and English,[1493] though the latter were probably mercenaries rather than traders. With this motley population Constantinople was preëminently the great cosmopolitan city of the world and as such served as a vast clearing house for geographical information brought thither from all four corners of the earth.

Benjamin of Tudela described the Constantinople of his day in graphic terms,[1494] alluding especially to the busy activity of its merchants, the costly magnificence of its buildings (notably the Church of Santa Sophia and the Palace of Blachernae), as well as to the wealth of its Greek inhabitants, who “go clothed in garments of silk with gold embroidery and ride horses and look like princes” (Adler’s translation). He was impressed by the great shows given annually on Christmas Day at the Hippodrome, the like of which were to be seen in no other land; here, in accord with the old Roman custom, lions, leopards, bears, and wild asses were made to engage in combat. The Jews of Constantinople were segregated in the quarter of Pera, where their condition was very miserable, and they were subjected to many indignities. “Yet,” Benjamin adds, “the Jews are rich and good, kindly and charitable, and bear their lot with cheerfulness.”

ITALY

Otto of Freising’s Gesta Friderici[1495] probably contains one of the best general descriptions of Italy dating from the time of the Crusades.[1496] Otto says that the Italian peninsula as a whole is divided into three parts. The districts that once constituted the Roman colonia form ulterior Italia, which consists of Venetia, Emilia, and Liguria, with Aquileia, Ravenna, and Milan respectively as capitals. The part “within” the Apennines, where Rome and Tuscany are situated, is known as interior Italia. Beyond these mountains (to the south) are the fields from which Campania derives its name. This part of the peninsula extends as far as the Faro, or strait cutting off Sicily from the mainland—Sicily itself being counted with Sardinia and other neighboring isles as a part of Italy—and is known as citerior Italia, or Magna Graecia. In Otto’s day this third portion was more commonly called Apulia or Calabria. In conclusion Otto adds that some authorities preferred to divide Italy into two parts only, ulterior and citerior, the latter consisting of the above-mentioned middle and southern districts together.[1497]

Otto waxes particularly enthusiastic about Northern Italy, a region which he conceived of as bordered or hedged in by the high and craggy ranges of the Apennines and “Pyrenean” (sic) Alps, stretching out in either direction, enclosing the region in their midst. Like a “garden of delights” (the term frequently used to describe Paradise), this district is bounded by the Pyrenean Alps on the north, the Apennines (vulgarly called Mount Bardo) on the south, the Tyrrhenian Sea on the west, and the Adriatic on the east. Watered by the course of the great river Po, or Eridanus (which topographers considered one of the three most famous streams of Europe, says Otto), and by other rivers, blessed with a rich soil and a temperate climate, this land is most fertile in grain, in the vine and olive, and produces such a variety of fruit trees—especially chestnuts, figs, and olives—that it resembles an immense grove.[1498]

To the world beyond the Alps, Lombardy was the best-known part of Italy. Godfrey of Viterbo[1499] dilates on its immense potential strength, with thirty cities, the equal of any one of which could scarcely be found elsewhere in the world. The population of Lombardy is thicker than the hair on a woman’s head, and rare are the times when a ship cannot be seen on the Po. Otto of Freising[1500] gives an account of the Lombard invasion of Northern Italy, of the founding of Milan and its neighboring cities, and of the free government and liberal democratic institutions of the Italian city states.

Gunther of Pairis amplified and made more picturesque Otto of Freising’s description of Italy, but it is doubtful whether he added any observations resulting from first-hand acquaintance with the peninsula. Whatever the sources from which he derived his descriptions of Lombardy and Apulia—his own imagination, personal experience, the inspiration of classical poetry, or the Gesta Friderici—if we compare them, we find that the differences between the inhabitants of the northern and southern parts of the peninsula were fully appreciated in the twelfth century. The Lombards, Gunther says,[1501] are a keen, skillful, and active people, foresighted in counsel, expert in justice, strong in body and spirit, full of life and handsome to look upon, with light, supple bodies that give them great powers of endurance, economical and always moderate in eating and drinking, masters of their hands and mouths, honorable in every business transaction, mighty in the arts and always eagerly striving for the new. Lovers of freedom and ready to face death for freedom’s sake, these people have never been willing to submit to kings.

Apulia in the south, Gunther goes on to say, is also a fair country, rich in all the blessings of this earth:[1502] fruit trees, vineyards, pasture lands, towns and cities, all of which make a gloriously beautiful prospect. But what a contrast its people present to the Lombards, dirty, lazy, weak, good-for-nothing idlers that they are!

Rome

Rome must have been in a sad state of decay and dilapidation, if we can place any trust in the picturesque accounts of the city given by Otto and Gunther.[1503] From our period there also dates a little booklet on the topography and monuments of Rome, which exerted wide influence and enjoyed great popularity during the thirteenth and later centuries. This work, the Mirabilia urbis Romae, contains a discourse on the antiquities and architecture of the Eternal City. It is in three parts. Part One treats of “the foundation of Rome and of her chief monuments, with chapters on the town walls, gates, arches, hills, baths, palaces, theaters, bridges, cemeteries, places where the saints suffered martyrdom,” and so on; Part Two contains “divers histories touching certain famous places and images in Rome,” that is legends of both classical and Christian origin; and Part Three is a “perambulation of the city,” like Baedeker in its fullness of topographical and architectural detail. Though this book is a dry catalogue, its very existence and popularity are significant of the fact that antiquities aroused interest in the twelfth century and that the archeological tourist was not altogether a product of the days of the Renaissance. Gregorovius, the historian of medieval Rome, says of the Mirabilia: “In this curious composition ... Roman archeology, which has now attained such appalling proportions, puts forth its earliest shoots in a naïve and barbarous form and in a Latin as ruinous as its subject.”[1504]

Another contemporary writer on Roman monuments, an unknown Master Gregory, includes a description of six out of the seven wonders of the world in his short tract on the marvels of the Eternal City![1505]

Antiquities

In a letter of the traveler Conrad of Querfurt describing a journey through Italy[1506] we also find a strongly antiquarian interest in evidence. Conrad’s primary concern was for the mythological and historical associations of the places he visited, and he took a genuine tourist’s pride in being able to say that he had seen with his own eyes spots made famous by the poets. His route carried him over the Alps to Mantua, thence down the length of the peninsula to the Strait of Messina and into Sicily. He tells us that he would have been amazed at the smallness of the famous Rubicon and that such a paltry stream could have presented any kind of obstacle to Caesar, had not a native informed him that in rainy weather the river was much wider. In the vicinity of Naples he noted, besides the baths of Virgil at Baiae, certain natural features: Mount “Veseus” (Vesuvius), which every ten years sends out flames and stinking ashes, and the subterranean passages under Monte Barbaro. Calabria, he says, is a rough and trackless country through which it is necessary to pass in order to reach Sicily.

SPAIN

Gervase of Tilbury[1507] adds little besides a list of the archiepiscopal sees and their suffragans to the dry details which Orosius[1508] and the De imagine mundi[1509] had furnished concerning Spain. In the Chronica[1510] of Roger of Hoveden the story of the passage of Richard Coeur-de-Lion’s fleet around the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula was the occasion for a discussion of the geography of that part of the world, together with a list of the towns of the coast. Roger[1511] enumerates the bishoprics of Spain and, in his description of Castile, mentions Toledo as the seat of the primate, under whom there were twenty-one bishops. He says that there were two hundred castles in Castile and, furthermore, that Castile contained a mountain from which were taken daily many thousand camel-loads of earth. No matter how big an excavation was made, if rain fell it was always filled up again on the following day. This earth was sold in the surrounding countries for washing the heads and garments of Christians and pagans alike. Roger also is careful to bring out the distinction between Christian Spain, consisting of Navarre, Castile, Portugal, Aragon, and the “lands of the kings of St. James” (Leon), on the one hand, and Saracenic Spain, comprising the kingdoms of Cordova, “Gahang” (Jaén), Murcia, and Valencia, on the other.

THE ALPS

Otto of Freising asserted that the Alps and Apennines join near Tortona,[1512] though he was not inclined to dispute a prevalent belief that these two mountain systems form in effect one continuous range.[1513] In order to demonstrate this, he says people assert that, as viewed from the deck of a vessel lying off Genoa, the two systems appear to be continuous and to constitute the same mountain range and that, according to Isidore, Pannonia was enclosed by the Apennines, from which it took its name. He argues that the portion of the Apennines which encloses Pannonia certainly cannot be the same as that part which is to be found in peninsular Italy and is there called Mount Bardo, but must be a continuation of the “Pyrenean Alps.”

The Alps themselves not only are a great, wall-like barrier—broken, to be sure, by relatively low breaches—between Italy and the North, but themselves constitute a broad band of territory which until comparatively recent times has been difficult of access and during the Middle Ages was for the most part virtually terra incognita to the outside world. The existence of thickly populated centers of civilized life on either side had, however, long before our age led to familiarity with the main routes through the mountains. There were four or five motives which induced men to cross the Alps in the Middle Ages. Ecclesiastics traversed them when bound to and from Rome on official missions. German emperors en route to Italy to be crowned and to attempt to regulate Italian affairs led their armies over their defiles. Pilgrims and Crusaders toiled painfully through their passes towards Rome and the East; and merchants brought their wares across the snows back and forth from the busy cities of Northern Italy. Taking it all in all, there must have been a large number of men scattered throughout Germany, France, England, and the Scandinavian countries who were acquainted with the appearance of Alpine scenery and the difficulties of Alpine travel. Between 1100 and 1250 seven emperors made no less than thirty-nine journeys over Alpine passes.[1514] The size of their armies varied greatly. The numbers given for the immense concourse (30,000) which Henry V is said to have mustered in 1110 at Roncaglia after conducting them through the mountains were undoubtedly exaggerated.[1515] At all events, the army was so great that Henry had to divide it and send part over the Brenner Pass and part over the Great St. Bernard. The numbers of Frederick Barbarossa’s armies probably ranged from 10,000 to 15,000. The time of year chosen for undertaking the journey by those among the medieval travelers who were free to make their own plans—notably the pilgrims—was usually the month of August. Albert of Stade near Hamburg, writing in his chronicle early in the thirteenth century, says that the journey should be undertaken “about the middle of August, since the air is then temperate, the roads dry, there is no excess of water, the days are sufficiently long for traveling and the nights for rest, and you will find at this time the storehouses full of fresh fruits.”[1516] Political exigencies, however, forced the emperors to conduct their hosts across at all seasons and under all conditions of weather.[1517]

Of the many Transalpine routes, the Mont Cenis, Great St. Bernard, Septimer, and Brenner were the most frequented during our period. These were the passes over which trade flowed back and forth between Italy and the North.[1518] English and North German pilgrims made frequent use of the Mont Cenis route because it offered an easy way, a long and simple ascent to and descent from the crest of the ridge, and no subsidiary passes to surmount.[1519] Pilgrims from Iceland, though they also used the Mont Cenis, seem to have preferred the Great St. Bernard;[1520] but when bound for the Holy Land they would sometimes traverse the Carnic Alps and embark from Venice.[1521] The Brenner Pass was, of course, most used by the Germans and formed the grand highway of the imperial expeditions. Out of the thirty-nine imperial crossings between 1100 and 1250 nearly half were made by the Brenner, four by the Great St. Bernard, six by the Septimer, three by the Mont Cenis, two by the Lukmanier, and six by other passes.[1522]

USE OF TERMS “TRANSALPINE” AND “CISALPINE”

In classical times the terms trans Alpes and transalpinus always referred to Gaul, Germany, and regions north of the mountains, for these countries were beyond the Alps as viewed from Italy. This usage was continued in the Middle Ages by writers who themselves dwelt north of the Alps, and we find in our period that Otto of Freising speaks of Germany as trans Alpes and of Italy as cis Alpes.[1523] Ragewin, Otto’s continuator, wrote more avowedly from the Germanic point of view and on several occasions refers to Italy as trans Alpes.[1524]

“ALEMANNIA”

The name “Alemannia” as applied to the whole of Germany was also in use in our period, although in the opinion of Otto it ought not to have been so used. Otto says that the city of Turegum (Zurich) is situated on a lake from which the river Lemannus flows and that from this river the province of Swabia is sometimes called Alemannia. “From this circumstance, some have come to think that the whole Teutonic land is called ‘Alemannia,’ whereas this province only [i.e. Swabia] should be called Alemannia, and its inhabitants only should be spoken of as ‘Alemanni.’”[1525] The question of the true etymology of the word Alemanni is one that lies beyond our field.

GERMANY

Though the author of the De imagine mundi[1526] follows Isidore and classical tradition in dividing Germany into two parts, “Germania superior” and “Germania inferior,” in the description of this part of the world he departs from his usual slavish habit of copying the words of Isidore and actually gives us a little information derived from a later source or, perhaps, even representing the result of personal and original observation. “Germania superior,” he says, extends between the Danube and the Alps and westward to the Rhine. Called also Rhaetia, it is the land in which the Danube takes its rise (a river which, enlarged by the junction of sixty great streams, discharges its waters into the Pontic Sea through seven mouths, as does the Nile). Suevia (Swabia), Alemannia (so called from Lake Leman), and Noricum (or Bavaria), in which is the city of Ratisbon, are all parts of “Germania superior.” It would almost seem as if the author of the De imagine mundi goes out of his way to mention Ratisbon, a fact that has been cited[1527] as evidence (very slender evidence, it is true) that he may have been a native of this city or was at least personally acquainted with Germany. He carefully refrained from placing Isidore’s marvelous bird with luminous plumage in the Hercynian Forest, but removed it to Hyrcania in Central Asia, which seems to show that he was skeptical about the possibility of such a bird being found in Germany.[1528] Yet, though less lacking in originality than other parts of the work, the chapters on Germany in the De imagine mundi can hardly stand comparison with the information to be found in Otto of Freising’s Gesta Friderici and in Gunther of Pairis’ Ligurinus, both of which bespeak undeniable personal familiarity with the country. We have already noticed Otto’s description of the local topography in the vicinity of Freising.[1529] Elsewhere he mentions such matters as the good hunting and fishing in the neighborhood of Worms, enjoyed by the Italian princes who came over the Alps to take part in a diet held there.[1530] This territory, he said, was divided by the Rhine, with Gaul on one bank and the confines of Germany on the other. On the Gallic side stood the Vosges and Ardennes; on the German, forests of considerable extent, which to Otto’s day retained their barbaric place names (“barbara adhuc nomina retinentes”). Godfrey of Viterbo[1531] also enlarges on the beauties of the region about Worms, the wealth and numbers of its population, the fields and the fish-filled streams which water them, flowing down from wooded places.

Gunther’s description of the Main, Rhine, and Moselle country show that he probably was better acquainted with this district than with any of the other territories described in his poem.[1532] He cites, among specific details concerning Mayence, the fact that the city is situated on the Rhine a few leagues below the junction of the Main with that stream and not at the junction, as had usually been stated previously.[1533]

Hildegard of Bingen includes in her Subtilitates[1534] remarks about the rivers of her native country, with cautions regarding their use. Her introductory statement in this connection, that the sea sends forth rivers by which the land is irrigated as is the human body by the blood in the veins, should be interpreted in the sense we have already explained in Chapter VIII.[1535] She writes of the Seh (possibly the Selz, a stream that flows into the Rhine near Bingen), Rhine, Main, Danube, Moselle, Glan, Nahe, and other rivers, repeating in each case the assertion that the river arises from the sea. The bed of the Seh and its sands, she says, are polluted like a swamp because the stream rises and falls with the storms. Its waters should not be taken raw, nor even cooked in food, for, since they come from the foam of the sea, they are bad for the digestion and generally unsanitary. The Rhine is clear and flows through sandy country; but its water, when drunk unboiled, causes noxious blue fluids in the body. The sands of the Danube are clean and beautiful, its waters clear and harsh but not very good for drinking; the waters of the Main are insipid (pinguis); those of the Moselle light and transparent; and so on.

We find in the German chronicles of the time of the Crusades and of the century immediately preceding, some detailed notices about the northern parts of Germany and the shores of the Baltic not to be found in earlier works. In the middle of the eleventh century Adam of Bremen had described Saxony as a generally flat, low region of roughly triangular shape, lying between the lower Elbe and Rhine.[1536] The rivers Elbe and Oder, he said, rise near each other in the forested mountains of Moravia but flow off in opposite directions, the former to the northern sea, the latter to the Scythian swamp, or Baltic.[1537] Saxo Grammaticus in the geographical introduction to his Gesta Danorum gives some fairly full remarks on the configuration of the German Baltic coast and on the peninsulas and islands of Denmark. The latter country, he says, is so intersected and broken by arms and channels of the sea that it contains few continuous tracts of land of any great size.[1538] Frisia Minor, adjacent to Denmark, is so low that it is often swept by violent storms and inundations which ruin the fields and destroy the houses.[1539]

BALTIC REGIONS

Adam of Bremen’s foremost interest was not Germany, however, but the Scandinavian North and the wilder and little-known lands beyond the Elbe, into which the frontier of Teutonic civilization was at this time gradually being pushed eastward. Adam mentions Jumna,[1540] at the mouth of the Oder, a great commercial city and gathering place of heathens and Greeks, and adds that according to some authorities Jumna was the largest city in Europe.[1541] Farther east lay various nations of Slavonia—Pomeranians and Prussians—and beyond them other “islands,” Samland, Kurland, and “Ehstland” (Esthonia), peopled by heathens. Traveling still more remotely in this direction one came to Russia and the fabulous regions of the North. Adam speaks well of the Prussians,[1542] for though heathen, he said, they were good men, ready to come to the aid of ships beset by pirates or in danger from the sea. Blue-eyed, with red skins and thick hair, eaters of horseflesh and drinkers of mare’s blood, they dwell in the midst of almost impenetrable swamps. Helmold, a chronicler of the twelfth century, copies extensively from Adam but adds many details regarding the religion and customs of the Slavs and, in particular, describes their worship of a great idol of the God Svantevith.[1543]

Saxo Grammaticus was better informed than Adam on the countries bordering upon the southern and southeastern coasts of the Baltic, and about them he supplies more or less extensive details.[1544] Though the Greeks and Romans alike had believed that on the north of Germany lies the ocean, in the midst of which are various islands—including Scandia and Scandinavia, about which little was known—they certainly had no adequate conception of the peninsular nature of Norway and Sweden. In the ninth century Einhard had described the Baltic as a bay, and Adam of Bremen quoted Einhard to this effect[1545] and it is also possible that Adam may have learned something of the Gulf of Bothnia.[1546] Adam, however, had no clear knowledge of the geography of this part of the world for “he speaks of the countries of the North as islands, and he seems to draw no sharp distinction between island and peninsula.”[1547] Saxo, on the other hand, writing over a century later, harbored no doubts whatever of the peninsular character of Scandinavia. He maintained that the sea swings around the north side of Norway and with constantly increasing breadth ends finally in a curved shore. This sea was here called by the ancients Gandvic (the White Sea). A narrow isthmus separates Gandvic from the sea to the south (the Baltic), and if the isthmus did not exist, Saxo said, Norway and Sweden would be an island.[1548]

SCANDINAVIA

Adam of Bremen enjoyed peculiar opportunities for gathering information about the lands immediately to the north of Denmark through his association with archbishop Adalbert of Bremen.[1549] Beyond Denmark, he wrote, a new world was opened up. Norway, he believed, extended northward to the limits of the known world, to the Rhipaean Mountains.[1550] Through a second of his patrons, King Svend Estridsson of Denmark, who had spent no less than twelve years in these parts, Adam was enabled to learn something of the remote land of Sweden: a rich country, the principal towns of which were Birka and Upsala, the latter possessing a heathen temple, the scene of human sacrifices. Northward of Sweden were regions inhabited by tribes of Finns of marvelous swiftness of foot. These so-called “Finns”—probably in reality Lapps—are frequently mentioned in medieval literature on Scandinavia and the North.[1551] They are sometimes called “Scritefinns,” “Skritofinns,” or “Skridfinns.” Saxo Grammaticus spoke of them as great hunters who can climb over the rocky crags of the mountains to the very summits.[1552] In the Historia Norwegiae we are told that they “fasten smoothed pieces of wood [literally, balks, stakes] under their feet, which appliances they call ‘ondrer,’ and, while the deer [i.e. reindeer] gallop along carrying their wives and children over the deep snow and precipitous mountains, they dash on more swiftly than the birds” (Nansen’s translation).[1553] Here we have one of the earliest accounts of the use of skis.

Beyond the Finns Adam of Bremen placed the realm of fable that encircled the medieval world,[1554] where were to be found a race of dwarfs and bearded women inhabiting the Rhipaean Mountains; where were also Amazons, Cyclopes, and monsters like those which other writers of our age placed in the heart of Asia or of Africa.

Adam of Bremen, Saxo Grammaticus, and the author of the Historia Norwegiae, though they included much that is fanciful in their geographical chapters, also provided reliable data regarding the peoples of the North. Ragewin, on the other hand, in the continuation of the Gesta Friderici, and Gunther of Pairis give an account which undoubtedly represented a more usual idea of these people in the minds of Western Europeans. These northern folk aroused Ragewin’s disgust, for, he said, they devour each other in time of famine. Owing to perpetual frosts, agriculture is impossible in their country, and their lives consequently are given over to hunting and killing. Well versed in the arts of piracy, these treacherous tribes infest the shores and isles of the ocean, Hibernia, Britain, Denmark, and other coasts.[1555] Gunther in the Ligurinus[1556] enlarges and amplifies this uncomplimentary description by drawing on his own imagination. He says that the inhabitants of the isles of the “Scythian Sea” are strong in the arm but weak in the head. They neither plow a soil made sterile by the perpetual cold nor harrow their uncultivated fields. Neither do they couple the vine to the elm, nor gather in the fruits of the trees, autumn’s gifts, but seek their food by the chase and by frequent forays and grow old in piracy on the tireless waves of the sea. And when long privation aggravates a famine—horrible to relate and scarce to be believed, though report would have it so!—these miserable creatures bite and lacerate their own limbs. Father does not know enough to spare his son, nor brother his brother, and the daughter finds refreshment by devouring the boiled body of her mother!

We certainly must not take this effusion as a literally exact account of the customs of the Scandinavians at a time when they were far from being sunk in the abject state of savagery which Gunther pictures; but it shows the terror which the Vikings had instilled into the consciousness of Europe and also the very vague and hazy kind of reports which an intelligent German of the twelfth century received in regard to regions not very distant from his home. Furthermore, it is not at all improbable that the story of cannibalism among these people may have arisen from an actually existing practice of human sacrifice coupled with cannibalistic rites at an earlier date.[1557]

FRANCE

Otto of Freising regarded the Rhine as the boundary between Germany and Gaul. Though he had studied at Paris, he used Orosius as the main source for the description of Gaul in his Chronicon[1558] and discussed the various parts of this country and the proper manner in which it ought to be subdivided in a way that reminds us of Caesar. Authorities, he said, declare that there are two main subdivisions; Gallia Cisalpina and Gallia Transalpina. The former lies in Italy between the Po and the Alps; the latter—our France—in turn may be divided into three parts (the three parts made famous by Caesar), Belgian, Lugdunensian, and Aquitanian. Otto then proceeds to a dry and technical discussion of how these parts should be properly grouped in relation to an ill-defined Celtic Gaul.

Paris

More full of color than the pedantic discussion of Otto is a picturesque description of the Paris of the last half of the twelfth century in one of the letters of Guy of Bazoches.[1559] “The city,” Guy writes, “lies in the lap of a delightful valley crowned on both sides by hills which Ceres and Bacchus make beautiful, striving with one another in their eagerness. The Seine, by no means a humble stream among a host of rivers, takes its rise in the east and in mid-course divides its proud current into two branches, thus making an island out of the center of the city. Two suburbs stretch forth on either side, and even the lesser of these arouses the envy of many an envious town which it surpasses. Connecting each suburb with the island is a bridge of stone, the name of which is derived from the amount of traffic that falls to its lot. The bridge facing the north, the sea, and England is styled the ‘great bridge’ and the one which faces the Loire on the opposite side is called the ‘little bridge.’” The so-called great bridge—

“Densely crowded with a wealthy, bargaining throng,

· · · · ·

Swarms with boats, groans under riches, overflows With merchandise: for lo! there is nowhere its equal!”

The little bridge, on the other hand, is given over to walkers, strollers, and disputers of logic. On the narrow strip of land that forms the island the royal palace towers up to lofty heights and audaciously overlooks with its shoulders the roofs of the whole city. Reverence for it is commanded not so much by the marvelous structure of the building as by the noble authority of its rule.

“This is that house, the glory of the Franks, whose Praises the eternal centuries will sing. This is that house which holds in its power Gaul mighty in war, Flanders magnificent in wealth. This is that house whose scepter the Burgundian, Whose mandate the Norman, and whose arms the Briton fears.”

The description of Paris closes with a tribute to the island, from ancient times the home of philosophy and of the seven sisters—the liberal arts.

Alsace

Godfrey of Viterbo seems to have known something of Alsace, whose attractions and beauties he highly praised.[1560] The Rhine, he said, is enlivened with shipping. Flowing into Alsace from Basel it laves with its waters wide fields through varied stretches of landscape and traverses a rich countryside. To cross this region takes a traveler three beautiful days’ journey, and such vineyards as flourish there the poet sees nowhere else in the world, and the grainfields are marvelous in their fertility. It is a land that can be aptly compared with “Liguria” (Lombardy), for in like manner it is naturally defended by rivers and mountains. The Lord, in his special love for Alsace, had made its plain stand preëminent in beauty among the plains of the world. The population is extremely numerous, and so great are the riches of the people that England and Denmark look thither for markets. Dominating the whole country is the city of Argentina (Strasburg), through which flows the river Ill, rushing to pour forth its water into the Rhine.

Southern France

We find various passages in the Otia imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury revealing his familiarity with the south of France. On two different occasions Gervase speaks of the three mouths of the Rhone, which enclose the Sucades (or Sicades) Islands, “commonly called the Camargae.”[1561] The earth here is rich in salt of a high quality, and the region as a whole is incomparable for its sea and pond fishing, for the hunting of game and birds, and for its pastures.[1562] Orosius[1563] and Isidore[1564] had mentioned the Sicades, undoubtedly having in mind the Stoechades of the ancient geographers, or what are now either the Iles d’Hyères or else, possibly, the small islets just outside the harbor of Marseilles. Gervase, on the other hand, identifies them undeniably with the flat alluvial islands of the Rhone delta, the largest of which is now called Camargue, as in Gervase’s day. He also mentions the famous church of Saints Martha and Mary Magdalene on this isle, then, as at present, a much frequented shrine of pilgrimage.[1565]

Gervase knew something of the Narbonnese.[1566] On the authority of the De imagine mundi[1567] he states that this province was called togata because of the length of the togas worn there, but adds that the description was no longer apt, because in his time the natives wore shorter garments.

Concerning Provence, Gervase made observations intended to impress on the Emperor Otto some idea of the strategic importance of this territory to his empire.[1568] We have here an example of medieval political and strategic geography, based in this case not on classical authority but on what the writer actually had observed and thought. The argument, curiously enough, arose out of the discussion we have already mentioned[1569] of the effects of the mistral on the character of the people of the lower Rhone valley. Gervase concluded that not only does the atmosphere exert an influence on everything upon which it bears down but also that every weight, whether material or spiritual, affects in some manner the objects upon which it rests. This led him to warn Otto that it would be advisable to moderate his imperium over Provence in order to propitiate the people. This should be done because the strategic position of that country—the old Kingdom of Arles—is of such nature that it might prove either a great menace or else a great benefit to the unity of the empire. Though admirably situated to threaten France, Gervase explained that Provence is subject to easy invasion by land from Spain, by sea from Africa, or across the Alpine passes from Italy. The character of the people, furthermore, makes it particularly important that they should be handled with circumspection. The Provençaux are shrewd in council and effective in whatever enterprise they undertake but false to their promises and without military strength; owing to their poverty largely dependent on charity (pro sua paupertate in cibando larga); insidious in crime (nocenda); but calm in the face of trouble. If they have a stable ruler whom they honor, no race is more quickly turned by good impulses, but no other race is more prone to evil when not blessed by such a ruler. In addition, their land is worth holding for its own sake, fruitful as it is above all countries in its seas, fish, meats, and all kinds of hunting, precious stones, swamps, lakes, mountains, rivers, springs and groves, and delicious in its woods and pastures.[1570]

ISLANDS OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

The Romans had discovered the Canary and Madeira groups and, owing to the mild climate and favorable conditions, had associated them with the “Islands of the Blest” of Greek mythology and hence had come to call them the “Fortunate Isles.” In the Middle Ages these isles passed again into the realm of the unknown, though their memory lingered on to adorn the Western Ocean on the Beatus maps, together with more fabulous isles and to serve as the datum point for the western prime meridian. The Cape Verde group and the Azores were utterly unknown.

On most of the maps of the world of our period the islands are arbitrarily squeezed within narrow confines of the encircling ocean, and no attempt is made to represent them in their relative positions or to indicate their distinctive shapes. On the St. Sever Beatus map[1571] all islands are shaped like sausages (see Fig. 2, p. 69, above), whether in the Mediterranean or in the ocean. Ireland lies off the coast of Spain and is designated as “Insula Hibernia ab Scotorum gentibus colitur;” Britain, separated from the coasts of Frisia, Gaul, Aquitania, and Gascony by an “Oceanus Britannicus,” is said to be 800 miles long by 200 broad—figures taken from Orosius,[1572] who got them from Pliny.[1573] Five cities are equally spaced from north to south, London, Lincoln, Wroxeter, Seaton, and “Condeaco” (?). Indeed, among the maps of the world the only one which represents the British Isles in recognizable outline is the Cotton,[1574] and this probably dates from long before our period. Here we may note, in pleasing contrast to the absurdities we find elsewhere, such features as the westward extension of Cornwall and Devon and of Scotland; Ireland in its correct position and approximately its correct size; the Orkneys to the north of Scotland, and even Man and the Scilly Isles.

BRITISH ISLES

The medieval reader of the De imagine mundi could certainly have gained no very accurate impression from the chapter devoted to the British Isles. This is worth translation in order to demonstrate the utter futility and antiquated character of this much-quoted and at one time, perhaps, unduly popular work:[1575]

“Over against Spain toward the setting sun are the following islands in the ocean: Britain, England, Hibernia, Thanet—the earth of which, wherever it may be carried, will destroy serpents—the thirty-three Orkneys on the Arctic Circle where the solstice occurs, Scotia and Chile (Thule)....” This is all the De imagine mundi tells us of the British Isles!

For more ample data we must look to such native authorities as Giraldus Cambrensis, Alexander Neckam, Gervase of Tilbury, Matthew Paris, and the various British historians and chroniclers.

Gervase of Tilbury adds some details from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the brief notices which he took from Orosius on the dimensions of Britannia Major.[1576] His account, though not thoroughly up-to-date in any sense of the term, is fuller and less misleading than that of the De imagine mundi; and we certainly do not gain from it any impression like the one we derive from the latter work, that Britain, England, and Scotland are three distinct islands. Geoffrey of Monmouth had told how Great Britain—as distinguished from Britannia Minor, or Armorica (Brittany) on the Gallic side of the Britannic sea—was divided in ancient times into four parts: Cornwall (Cornubia) to the west; Cambria, called vulgarly Wallia, to the north of this; Albania, called also Scotia, in the far north; and Loegria, or Loegrino, called also Anglia, in the middle and south; and that the rivers dividing these provinces were the Waja (Wye), Sabrinus (Severn), Boecura (?), and Deia (Dee).

Cities of Britain

Alexander Neckam, in the De laudibus divinae sapientiae, also regales us with a rambling poetical description of the marvels of Britain and of its principal cities.[1577] Fame, he says, rejoices in placing Exeter before all other cities: but as for himself he would give New Troy (London) the first place, on account of its glory, wealth, customs, charm, and situation. The walls of London, he adds, would be worthy to hold a Helen. Among other famous cities he mentions Winchester, known in early times for its wealth, and also Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Durham (famous for its associations with the Venerable Bede), Gloucester, Verolamia (St. Albans), where took place the martyrdom of St. Alban, and Colchester. In the same poem Neckam discourses on the streams of England and Ireland when discussing the principal rivers of the world.[1578] In connection with the Thames, he retells the mythological story of the founding of London. The Severn, he says, delights in the cities of Worcester and Gloucester on its banks, and its waters are augmented by those of the Usk. He points out that Britain contains several streams named Avon besides the one upon which Bath stands; that the Trent sends its fish to London; and that the Humber, unsafe for shipping on account of its tides, disdains to see a city but flows through the open fields.

Giraldus Cambrensis on Ireland and Wales

Gervase of Tilbury and Alexander Neckam give us more or less hackneyed and stereotyped descriptions of the British Isles. Far greater originality is revealed in the works of Giraldus Cambrensis. In many other connections we have spoken of the Topographia Hiberniae and Descriptio Kambriae, which are the most complete and satisfactory geographical descriptions of limited regions dating from our period. The introduction of a long series of fables into the treatise on Ireland tends to blind us to the merits of those parts of the work that have real scientific or historical value. In the beginning of the second “Distinctio” of the Topographia Hiberniae, Giraldus says that, as the prodigies of the East have long since been made familiar by the writings of diligent authors, he proposes to throw some light on the prodigies of the West. This he proceeds to do in a highly competent manner, wholly in keeping with the style of Solinus, that master among the “diligent authors” to whom he refers. The Englishman of the time who sat down with Giraldus’ work on Ireland before him gathered from it quite as much fabulous and fantastic lore as he could have gathered from the pages of Solinus, but in this case it was lore of countries near at hand. It would almost seem that Giraldus, like a novelist, deliberately set out to throw a glamour of romance over familiar scenes and places. But, however this may be, Giraldus, unlike his model, Solinus, was more than a mere spinner of yarns. His works show that in many respects he was a close and accurate, if not always critical, observer; and certainly he had a vivid and lively interest in nature and mankind.

Ireland

Ireland, he writes, after Britain is the largest of islands. It lies one rather short day’s journey to the west of Wales. Between Ulster and Galloway in Scotland the intervening arm of the sea narrows to about half its average width, and the promontories on either side can be seen across the straits in clear weather. South of Ireland, at three days’ sailing, is Spain; and northward at an equal distance, Iceland, the greatest of the northern isles.[1579] Cut off by the sea, Ireland is almost like another world and contains many phenomena not found elsewhere.[1580]

After discussing in detail various earlier theories about the dimensions of Ireland—what Solinus, Orosius, Isidore, and Bede had said[1581]—Giraldus proceeds to give some observations of his own on the healthful qualities of the climate, the character of the terrain,[1582] and the fertility[1583] and products of the soil. Ireland is a land full of pastures and of rich meadows flowing with milk and honey; wine is drunk there, but, as there are no vineyards, it has to be imported from Poitou in exchange for ox-hides and the skins of other cattle and of wild beasts. Owing to the presence of a certain poisonous wild yew tree and also to the violence of the rainy winds, not nearly so many bees are kept in Ireland as one would expect.[1584] Giraldus also remarks that there are more lakes in Ireland than in any other country,[1585] a statement which, though perhaps not true literally, shows that he was aware of one of the differences, if not of the reasons for the difference, between glaciated and nonglaciated countries. These lakes and the rivers abound in fish, many of which are peculiar to the island.[1586]

Giraldus gives a legendary account of the clearing of the Irish forests in the days of Partholan,[1587] who was supposed to have come there only three hundred years after the Deluge. At that time the whole landscape—with the exception of a few mountains—was covered by an immense forest; and even in his own time, Giraldus adds, the area under cultivation was very restricted in comparison with the woodlands.

His attitude toward the Irish people is neither sympathetic nor complimentary.[1588] A rude and inhospitable race, he says, they live like beasts and have scarcely advanced beyond a primitive pastoral stage of civilization. Their fields are used only to a limited extent for pastures, even less for raising of flowers, and less still for the sowing and cultivation of crops. What cultivated fields there are, are very poor; but this condition is the fault of the farmers rather than the result of defects in the soil, which is extremely fertile. There are few fruit trees, the metallic veins of the country are not worked, and there are neither manufacturing, trade, nor mechanical arts. But the people are great musicians![1589]

We ought not to place too much faith in the accuracy of this account of the Irish people. As Dimock points out in his introduction to the “Rolls Series” edition of the Topographia, Giraldus’ acquaintance with them was in all probability limited to a few clergy and to those elements of the population who could still submit “to exist in degradation under the grinding rule of the English invaders.”[1590] Giraldus was also prejudiced by the feeling of contempt for a supposedly “inferior race” which nearly always results from the conquest of one people by another.

Though his travels in Ireland were not extensive, the Welshman had acquired a superficial and inexact acquaintance with the topographical features of the island and, in particular, with its river systems.[1591] The existence of nine principal rivers, he says, dates back to the earliest times, although more recently other streams of no less size had sprung into being. The Shannon is by far the most important. Rising in a large and beautiful lake which divides Munster from Connaught, it separates into two branches that run off in opposite directions. One turns south and, forming the border between the two parts of Munster, flows into “St. Brandan’s Sea.” The other divides Meath and Connaught from Ulster and after a winding course debouches into the Northern Ocean. The western quarter of the island is thus separated from the other parts by this “mediterranean river” (mediterraneum flumen) from sea to sea. Giraldus was accused in the seventeenth century by a violent Irishman[1592] of either “raving or dreaming” when he made the Shannon divide Ulster from Connaught. It has nevertheless been shown that, though the Welshman’s hydrographic theories were false, there was some justification for his mistaken statements. Certainly, from very near the headwaters of the Shannon other rivers flow away to the north, and a hasty observer might easily have believed them to arise from the same source.[1593]

Wales

Giraldus was far better acquainted with his native country, Wales, about which his two treatises give us much accurate information regarding the mountain ranges and river systems, the types of terrain, and the character and customs of the people. He brings out the contrast between North and South Wales.[1594] South Wales, he says, is pleasanter by reason of its flat plains, but North Wales is stronger in its defenses, more productive of powerful men, and also more fertile. Merioneth, however, and the land of Canani are the roughest and most inaccessible of all parts of Wales.[1595] The Welsh people dwell for the most part in sequestered isolation and not in cities, villages, or castles.[1596] Their houses are of the simplest construction. They possess neither gardens nor orchards, and the land is little used for aught else than pasturage. The inequalities and natural defensive strength of the ground make Wales a very difficult region to conquer.

The character of the topographic detail which Giraldus gives reveals his extensive personal acquaintance with the country. We have already had occasion to mention[1597] his graphic description of the mountains around the Lake of Brecknock, of the valley of Ewyas, of the quicksands and submerged forests along the southern coast, and of the pasturage on Snowdon. His knowledge of the Welsh rivers (Severn, Wye, Usk, Dee), the mountains in which they take their source, and their courses seaward was far more accurate than his knowledge of the streams of Ireland. Certainly among the works of our period there is none that vies with the Descriptio Kambriae either in richness and correctness of detail or in vividness of presentation.

We must say a few words about a chapter which Giraldus introduces on the dialects spoken in Wales,[1598] the only discussion of linguistic geography that the writer has found in the literature of the time.[1599] The Welshman points out that the British tongue spoken in North Wales is more delicate, beautiful, and generally more praiseworthy than that spoken elsewhere, because this region had been subjected to the intermixture of foreign peoples. The speech of Cardiganshire, however, though this province lies in the heart of South Wales, was also said to be very distinguished and praiseworthy. The natives of Cornwall and Brittany made use of tongues much alike and nearly always comprehensible to the Welsh, because originally the language of all these people was the same. Cornish and Breton, however, in so far as they were more lacking in delicacy and form than Welsh, approached more closely to the ancient British idiom. Similarly the English spoken in southern England, and especially in Devonshire, seemed to Giraldus to be far less correct and more archaic than the tongue of the northern parts of the island, which had been modified by the incursions of the Danes and Northmen. We thus see that Giraldus was broad-minded enough to grant that a language could be materially enriched by contact with alien speech and by the infusion of foreign expressions.

William Fitzstephen on London

Any discussion of the medieval geographical lore of the British Isles would be inadequate without some mention of a famous account of London that forms part of the preface of William Fitzstephen’s life of Thomas à Becket.[1600] The highly colored picture that William draws surpasses in superlatives Guy of Bazoches’ contemporary description of Paris.[1601] Even in the twelfth century local pride might lead to the innocent exaggeration of merit. William tells us that “among the noble cities of the world celebrated by Fame, the city of London in the kingdom of the English is the one seat that pours out its fame more widely, sends to farther lands its wealth and trade, lifts its head higher than the rest.” He goes on to specify how fortunate is London in its mild climate, piety, fortifications, site, manners and customs, and the character of its citizens. London’s piety is shown by the presence not only of an episcopal church but of no less than thirteen “larger conventual churches besides one hundred and twenty-six lesser parish churches.” “Above all other citizens,” he says, “the citizens of London are regarded as conspicuous and noteworthy for handsomeness of manners and of dress, at table and in the way of speaking. The city matrons are true Sabine women.” The city is very well organized so that the different businesses are distributed in different quarters. In the suburbs are “spacious and beautiful gardens” “planted with trees.” To the north lie pastures and meadowland with streams flowing through them, “where the turning wheels of mills are put in motion with a cheerful sound.” “The tilled lands of the city are not barren gravel but fat plains of Asia that make crops luxuriant and fill their tillers’ barns with Ceres’ sheaves.” Nevertheless “very near lies a great forest with woodland pasture, coverts of wild animals, stags, fallow deer, boars, and wild bulls” (Morley’s translation).[1602] In the long account of the sports of the London youth with which William Fitzstephen closes we see that even at this early period the English were devoted to outdoor athletics and games. Besides shows and cockfights we are told in detail of ball games, gymnastics, wrestling, dancing, and more strenuous horseback exercises, sham battles, tourneys, and combats in the water with lances. In winter, when the “great fen or moor which waters the walls of the city on the north side” was frozen, boys and girls engaged in sports upon the ice. Nor were young people alone interested in athletics, for in the twelfth, as in the twentieth century, “the ancient and wealthy men of the town came forth to see the sport of the young men and to take part of the pleasure in beholding their agility” (Stow’s translation).[1603]

Matthew Paris’ Maps of Britain

If Giraldus Cambrensis’ treatises are the best descriptions of regional geography in the literature of our period, the best regional maps were also the work of a native of the British Isles. In their relative accuracy and fullness of detail, as well as in their freedom from servile dependence on acknowledged authorities, Matthew Paris’ three maps of Britain occupy a place by themselves in medieval cartography. By far the best way to gain an idea of what they are like is to examine them in reproduction[1604] (one herewith in Fig. 9). It will not be amiss, however, to point out a few significant details.

On one map a legend in the middle informs us that “Britain, which includes Scotia, Galloway, and Wales, is now called England.”[1605] Another legend on a different map gives the dimensions (800 miles in length from St. Michael in Cornwall to Caithness, and 300 miles from St. David’s to Dover)[1606] and says that there are two archiepiscopal and thirty-two episcopal sees. The outlines of the coasts are in general admirably shown, especially the west coast, with the westward-reaching promontories of Galloway, Wales, and Cornwall. The east coast is less satisfactory, for neither the indentation of the Wash nor the broad eastward projection of Norfolk appear, and by some confusion a point on the coast of Suffolk is taken as the southeastern corner of Britain, with the result that the Thames is shown as debouching into the English Channel. In the far north, the sketchy outlines of Scotland show that relatively little was known of this remote part of the island. Indeed, on two of the maps the Firths of Clyde and Forth join in such a way as to cut off “Scocia Ultramarina” from the remainder of Britain, with which it is connected by a bridge (see Fig. 9). The courses of the main rivers, Severn, Humber, Avon, Thames, on the whole are well delineated. A large tract in the east is labeled mariscus to designate the Fen country, and the mountains Snowdon, Plynlimon, and Cheviot appear in their correct positions.[1607] The northern Scottish Highlands are described by long legends as mountainous and woody regions which generate an uncultivated and pastoral people, inasmuch as a great part of this area is boggy and full of reeds.[1608] Argyll is a “trackless and watery district well adapted to cattle and pasturage,”[1609] and South Wales is spoken of in much the same terms.[1610] Among the islands off the coast we notice Sheppey, Thanet, Wight, possibly some of the Channel Islands, Portland Head, Scilly, Lundy, Anglesey, Man, Tiree, Iona, and, to the east of Scotland, the Orkneys.[1611] The Hebrides are conspicuously absent, and in their place a legend reads “immense and trackless sea.” A large number of cities are placed more or less in their proper positions, together with the names of counties and other territorial divisions; and finally the Roman walls from Forth to Clyde and from Carlisle to Newcastle make the most prominent feature among the works of man.

Orkneys and Shetlands

Returning to Giraldus, we find that among the islands in the neighborhood of Britain he mentions Man, Mona (or Anglesey), the Orkneys, and the Shetlands. Man, he remarks, should be considered as belonging to Britain and not to Ireland. His criterion for so assigning it was the fact that its earth does not resemble the earth of Ireland in the property of killing venomous reptiles.[1612] The Orkneys and Shetlands,[1613] in the northern ocean beyond Ulster and Galloway, were subject to the Norwegian king, through whose piracy and prowess at sea they were held in submission even though geographically they lay nearer the coasts of other countries. Giraldus quotes Orosius and Isidore to the effect that, of the thirty-three Orkneys, thirteen were inhabited and twenty deserted, and he added that in his day, also, the greater part of these isles were uninhabited.

ICELAND AND THULE

Giraldus writes of Iceland, three days’ sail to the north of Ireland, and gives a few details regarding its people.[1614] The speech of the Icelanders was brief and truthful and they rarely made oath; their king was the equivalent of a priest; and government was in the hands of a bishop. Though thunder and lightning were rare in this distant isle, there was another curse far more terrible: volcanic eruptions and lava flows.

Apparently Giraldus did not associate Iceland with the Thule of the ancients, an isle which he was at a loss to identify.[1615] In regard to the latter, he remarked that it was strange that this island, the nature of which was so well known to the Orientals, should remain unknown to the people of the West. After quoting what Solinus and Isidore had written about it, he added that no island familiar to the men of the Occident partook of the qualities which these writers attributed to Thule and that consequently it must either be fabulous—as well as famous, he naively remarks—or else hidden away in the far corners of the Boreal Ocean under the Arctic Pole.

The Emperor Frederick II in his treatise on falconry says that the gerfalcons come from a certain island between Norway and Gallandia (Greenland) called in Teutonic “Islandia,” which may be translated as “frozen” or “region of ice.”[1616]

Iceland in Icelandic Literature

Long prior to the beginning of our period Iceland had become the home of an enterprising and cultivated Scandinavian people. From its shores pilgrims found their way to Italy and the Holy Land, and navigators sailed westward into the more mysterious recesses of the ocean. The Sagas give us data regarding these voyages and incidentally throw light on the geographical concepts in the minds of the Northern peoples concerning the seas and islands of the North. The Ílendingabók of Ari Frodhi, dating from shortly after 1134, tells of the first Norse visit to Iceland in 870 by Ingolf. Ari mentions it as significant that “at that time Iceland was clothed with forest from the mountains to the strand,” and that “there were Christian men here, whom the Norsemen called Papar” (Nansen’s translation).[1617] It was supposed that these men came from the British Isles because here were found Irish books, bells, and crooks. In the Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium of the monk Theodricus we are told that certain merchants in the time of Harold Fairhair had sailed to the Faroes but were driven out to sea by storms and came “to a far distant land, which some think to have been the island of Thule; but I cannot either confirm or deny this, as I do not know the true state of the matter. They landed and wandered far and wide; but although they climbed mountains, they nowhere found trace of human habitation” (Nansen’s translation).[1618] In the Historia Norwegiae, dating probably from the thirteenth century, we are told that “next, to the west, comes the great island which by the Italians is called Ultima Tile; but now it is inhabited by a considerable multitude, while formerly it was waste land, and unknown to men, until the time of Harold Fairhair” (Nansen’s translation).[1619] In the Landnámabók, of about 1200, we have a vivid account of the first Norwegian discoverers’ ascent of a high mountain in this remote land. They “looked around them, whether they could see smoke or any sign that the land was inhabited, and they saw nothing.... As they sailed from the land much snow fell upon the mountains, and therefore they called the land Snowland” (Nansen’s translation).[1620]

GREENLAND

Greenland had been discovered about the year 900. In our period the southwestern coast had become the seat of two small settlements, the ruins of which may be seen at the present time.[1621] The population was not great (less than two thousand), and yet this far outpost of European civilization was large enough to be constituted an independent bishopric about the year 1110. From its settlements, certainly during and after the thirteenth century and probably in the course of our period as well, regular summer seal-hunting expeditions were made to the north along the coast, perhaps as far as Baffin’s Bay. The icebound east coast of Greenland, on the other hand, was avoided by the Scandinavian seafarers, although we read of frequent shipwrecks there. There is also a report of a seal-hunting trip to this coast made in 1129. From the mid-thirteenth century dates the work called the King’s Mirror, which gives us a vivid account of the ice floes and icebergs that beset the inhospitable eastern shore.

“Now in that same sea [i.e. the Greenland Sea] there are yet many more marvels, even though they cannot be accounted for by witchcraft [skrimslum]. So soon as the greater part of the sea has been traversed, there is found such a mass of ice as I know not the like of anywhere else in the world. This ice [i.e. the ice-floes] is some of it as flat as if it had frozen on the sea itself, four or five cubits thick, and lies so far from land [i.e. from the east coast of Greenland] that men may have four or five days’ journey across the ice [to land]. But this ice lies off the land rather to the northeast (landnorr) or north than to the south, southwest, or west; and therefore anyone wishing to make the land should sail round it [i.e. round Cape Farewell] in a southwesterly and westerly direction, until he is past the danger of [encountering] all this ice, and then sail thence to land. But it has constantly happened that men have tried to make the land too soon, and so have been involved in these ice-floes; and some have perished in them; but others again have got out, and we have seen some of these and heard their tales and reports.... These ice-floes are strange in their nature; sometimes they lie as still as might be expected, separated by creeks or large fjords; but sometimes they move with as great rapidity as a ship with a fair wind, and when once they are under way they travel against the wind as often as with it. There are, indeed, some masses of ice in that sea of another shape, which the Greenlanders call ‘fall-jökla.’ Their appearance is that of a high mountain rising out of the sea, and they do not unite themselves to other masses of ice, but keep apart” (Nansen’s translation).[1622]

POLAR SEAS

In the boreal parts of the Atlantic the Northern writers of our period placed great whirlpools and fabulous countries peopled by monsters. Adam of Bremen tells of the explorations of certain noblemen of Friesland during the time of the predecessor of archbishop Adalbert of Bremen. Sailing beyond Iceland “towards the extreme axis of the north ... they suddenly glided into the misty darkness of the stiffened ocean, which can scarcely be penetrated by the eye” (Nansen’s translation).[1623] Here they were caught by a terrible current and were almost sucked into the vortex of the deep, only to be thrown forth away from danger by a reverse tidal current. Thence they came to an island, fortified like a town, where they found a race of giants whom they called Cyclopes and from whom they barely were able to make their escape. Saxo Grammaticus, writing about 1200, tells of the voyage of a legendary King Gorm of Denmark and an Icelander Thorkill to an even more mysterious region called “Farther Biarmaland,” north of Norway.[1624] Here too were loathsome monsters, a river dividing the land of men from the land of spirits, and many other wonders. In the Historia Norwegiae we are also told of a fabulous coast in the North Atlantic upon which sailors had landed when on the way from Iceland to Norway. This country lay “between the Greenlanders and the Bjarmas,” and the sailors “asserted that they had found people of extraordinary size and the land of virgins [‘virginum terram’] who are said to conceive when they taste water. But Greenland is separated from these by ice-clad skerries [‘scopulis’]” (Nansen’s translation).[1625] Yet more full of color is another description in the same work. Beyond Norway “there is the very deep and northerly gulf which has in it Charybdis, Scylla, and unavoidable whirlpools; there are also ice-covered promontories which plunge into the sea immense masses of ice that have been increased by heaving floods and are frozen together by the winter cold; with these traders often collide against their will, when making for Greenland, and thus they suffer shipwreck and run into danger” (Nansen’s translation).[1626]

Possibly these accounts in the Historia Norwegiae refer to Svalbard, “the country of the cold coasts,” mentioned in the Landnámabók.[1627] The discovery of Svalbard was placed by the Icelandic Annals in 1194,[1628] and it may well be that sailors in that year were driven out of their course and landed on the inhospitable shores of Spitsbergen.[1629]

WINELAND THE GOOD

The voyages of Leif Ericsson and others to the coasts of America, though they had taken place over a century earlier, were doubtless remembered by the Icelanders of the period we are studying. Ari Frodhi in the Íslendingabók, written about 1134, refers to Wineland and to the Skraelings as if they were entirely familiar to his contemporaries.[1630] There is also a record in the Icelandic Annals, under the date 1121, that the Bishop Eric of Greenland actually sought Wineland, though we are not told whether his search was successful or whether he made any important discoveries in prosecuting it.[1631] The detailed stories of the Wineland voyages which were current in oral tradition during the eleventh century were undeniably put into written form long before 1250, although the versions in which we now have them, the Saga of Eric the Red and the Flatey Book, are of later date.[1632]

The true position of Wineland has for many years been a matter of acrimonious dispute among historians and geographers, but it is beyond our province to enter upon this controversy. On the other hand, it is of interest to point out that the Icelanders themselves or some of them, at least, must have believed that Wineland lay in relatively southern latitudes, for an Icelandic geographical description of the world,[1633] dating perhaps from our period, contains the following remark: Not far from Markland is “Wineland the Good, which some affirm extends from Africa; and, if this is so, an arm of the sea separates Wineland and Markland.”[1634] In Europe outside of the Scandinavian countries practically nothing was known of Wineland. The earliest mention of it is in the pages of Adam of Bremen’s description of the North, where we read the following brief passages: “Moreover he [King Svend Estridsson] spoke of an island in that ocean discovered by many, which is called Wineland, for the reason that vines grow wild there, which yield the best of wine. Moreover, that grain unsown grows there abundantly is not a fabulous fancy, but from the accounts of the Danes we know to be a fact” (Reeves’s translation).[1635] Ordericus Vitalis in his Historia ecclesiastica includes Wineland in a list of countries made subject to the king of the Norsemen but gives no details.[1636]

Adam of Bremen or a later interpolator[1637] adds to the passage just quoted a description of the Northern Ocean, which he erroneously places beyond Wineland. He says: “Beyond this island, it is said that there is no habitable land in that ocean, but all those regions which are beyond are filled with unsupportable ice and boundless gloom, to which Marcian thus refers: ‘One day’s sail beyond Thile the sea is frozen.’ This was essayed not long since by that very enterprising Northmen’s prince, Harold, who explored the extent of the Northern Ocean with his ship but was scarcely able by retreating to escape in safety from the gulf’s enormous abyss, where before his eyes the vanishing bounds of earth were hidden in gloom” (Reeves’s translation).[1638]

FABULOUS ISLES

Until modern times the Atlantic has been an ocean filled by the imaginations of the coast-dwelling peoples of the Old World with fabulous and fantastic isles. In the De imagine mundi we read of the Isle of the Gorgons and of the Hesperides,[1639] “among which was that great land described by Plato as having been submerged beneath that part of the sea now coagulated—an isle greater in extent even than Africa and Europe.” In this story we recognize the old legend of Atlantis which had been the subject of speculation and discussion ever since the time of Plato. The De imagine mundi then goes on to speak of “Perdita,” or the Lost Island, which far exceeded all the surrounding countries in the delightfulness and fertility of all things to be found therein. Though as a general rule unknown to man, this isle was sometimes to be found by hazard, though never found when looked for. Hence it was called “Perdita,” or “Lost.” To it St. Brandan was said to have gone in the course of his wanderings.

St. Brandan’s Isles

For a full account of the islands visited by St. Brandan we must look to the famous narration of his voyages. Ernest Renan poetically characterizes this legend as follows: “In the midst of these dreams there appears with surprising truth a feeling for the picturesque in polar navigations: the transparence of the sea, the aspects of the ice floes and icebergs melting in the sun, the volcanic phenomena of Iceland, the playing of the cetaceans, the characteristic appearance of the fiords of Norway, the sudden fogs, the milklike sea, green islands covered with grass which overhangs into the waves....”[1640] In the most widely known Latin version, which was translated into English and French during our period,[1641] we are told[1642] that Brandan, the abbot of a large monastery in Munster, received information from a certain Barinthus of marvelous isles that the latter had visited in the western seas and in particular of the “Terra repromissionis sanctorum,” or Saints’ Land of Promise. Taking seven companions, the saint set out in a ship built especially for the voyage and wandered for seven years from one marvelous isle to another. After forty days’ sailing in a northerly direction they came to an islet, where they entered into a narrow harbor between high and precipitous rocks. This harbor mouth, just wide enough to admit a ship, was typical of the ragged western coasts of Ireland and Scotland and was doubtless suggested to the poet by some bleak cove among the rocks of St. Kilda or the Outer Hebrides. After leaving the islet the wanderers reached an isle covered with sheep—perhaps a reminiscence of the Faroes, the sheep of which had long before been described by Dicuil.[1643] Beyond this they came to a smooth islet lacking verdure and with no sand upon it; this turned out to be a sea monster, which dived beneath the waves when the saint and his companions tried to light a fire upon its back. Their fortunate escape from the monster was followed by wanderings that brought them to an isle full of birds in such numbers and of such brilliant plumage that the voyagers could scarce see the branches of the trees. Some of the birds could talk; and one spoke words of prophecy foretelling the future course of Brandan’s journeys. Thence they came to yet another isle, where they entered a port with a narrow entrance and found a monastery; then to an isle with a fresh-water spring which put each brother to sleep for a period corresponding to the number of cups he drank. After that they made their way still farther north, where the sea was coagulated, and then returned to many of the isles already visited in the course of their earlier sailings and also to fresh marvels—seas of miraculous clearness, terrible volcanoes, Judas’s rock, the islet of Paul the hermit.[1644] Finally, after seven whole years, they attained a broad and spacious country full of trees bearing apples as if it were the autumn of the year, a land where no night was ever known. Here a youth greeted Brandan and said that this was the country for which he had been seeking. Then Brandan sailed back to Ireland, where he lived out the remainder of his earthly life, and, after his death, returned forthwith to this “land of promise of the saints,” or Paradise, which for so long had been his goal.

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