Chapter IV (2)

The first pilgrim after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 who has left a fairly complete account of the Holy Land was the Anglo-Saxon, Saewulf,[513] a traveler who visited Palestine in 1102 and 1103, combining trading enterprise with religious zeal. From the middle of the century the journeys of John of Würzburg,[514] of his follower Theoderic,[515] as well as of the Icelandic abbot, Nikulás Bergsson[516] of Thverá, deserve mention because in these records we find a personal touch that distinguishes them from the majority of similar narratives. The latter as a rule show that the pilgrims, like the medieval men of learning, suffered from that tendency, so characteristic of their age, to copy slavishly what others had said rather than to rely on their own powers of observation. This is particularly well illustrated by the majority of pilgrim records dating from after the early years of the twelfth century, when, as Beazley puts it, a decline had set in, “hastened by the compilation of standard guidebooks, which may be faintly described as legendary and inaccurate, and from which the later pilgrim narratives blindly copy, to the ever growing exclusion of anything independent or scholarly. Two of these handbooks, known as the _Old_ and the _New Compendium_, are the source of most of the tracts on the Holy Road which have been left us, under various names, from the time of the Second Crusade to the close of the Middle Ages.”[517] To this dry, guidebook type belong the narrative ascribed to Fetellus, archdeacon of Antioch,[518] and a series of anonymous accounts of pilgrimages dating from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Though several of these contain more or less original matter, the desiccating influence of the _Old Compendium_ is nearly everywhere apparent.[519]

Besides the pilgrims other travelers were on the road, and the records of their travels have in some cases come down to us. The journeys of Giraldus Cambrensis through Wales and Ireland will be discussed in the next section, on topographical works. Narratives of travel are also occasionally to be found in historical works and chronicles, poems, and letters.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

The letter was an honored form of literary expression throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. Carefully composed epistles of the ecclesiastic and educated man of the world were looked upon as more than mere media for the conveying of information. Not infrequently they were highly polished specimens of stylistic art, worthy of finding a permanent place in literature. From our point of view, they are of interest for the personal accounts of journeys which they sometimes contain.[520] Guy of Bazoches, for instance, who was precentor of the church of St. Stephen at Châlons, gave a brilliant description of his experiences and of what he saw on the Crusade of 1190 in a series of letters to his nephew and to others.[521] Conrad of Querfurt, bishop of more than one see in Germany during the last years of the twelfth century, wrote enthusiastically of his wanderings through Italy in a letter preserved for us in Arnold of Lübeck’s _Chronica Slavorum_.[522] A thorough study of the epistolography of the Crusading age would surely reveal a wealth of geographical lore.

JEWISH TRAVELERS

The Jews of the Middle Ages often journeyed farther afield than their Christian contemporaries. Their travels, for the most part in the interests of commerce, though in some instances in the nature of pilgrimages to Jerusalem, a city holy to Jew and Christian alike,[523] were facilitated by the presence of Hebrew communities in nearly all the cities of Europe and Western Asia. Strongly imbued with the racial consciousness of a vigorous and often oppressed people, the members of these communities did all in their power to receive the travelers and speed them on their way. The books composed by such Jewish wanderers as Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Ratisbon have been preserved and are invaluable as geographical records. It should be remembered, however, that they were written by men of a despised race and in a tongue unknown to the Christians of the West and that the geographical lore which may have been widespread among the more intelligent Hebrews never became an integral part of the geographical knowledge of Christendom. Hence in the pages which follow and which deal primarily with the geographical knowledge of Western Christendom but relatively little space can be devoted to Jewish geography.

A few words, nevertheless, must be said of Benjamin and of Petachia.

_Benjamin of Tudela_

Rabbi Benjamin came from the small Spanish city of Tudela on the Ebro. It was probably about the year 1159 that this observant wanderer journeyed eastward from his native town, moving leisurely through southern France, Italy, Greece, Constantinople, and thence by sea to Syria. After a thorough examination of the cities of Syria and Palestine he made his way overland to Baghdad. It is unlikely that he penetrated beyond Mesopotamia, though on his homeward journey he visited Egypt sometime before 1171 and returned to his home in Castile in 1173. He appears to have kept a record as he went along, and from a critical examination of his book it is possible in a general way to reconstruct his route. He describes in detail the cities he passed through and the distances in days’ journeys, though not the directions, from one to another. He notes particularly the names of the leading Jews of each place and gives estimates of the numbers of the Jewish population. Indeed, probably one of his main purposes was to get in touch with Jews of as many countries as possible in order to determine where they were treated well. One result of the Crusades was an outburst of persecution of Hebrews throughout Christendom, and Benjamin, besides traveling for the sake of trade, was undoubtedly seeking for places “where his expatriated brethren might find an asylum” (Adler).[524] But, as well as revealing an interest in the Jewish inhabitants of the regions he traversed, his book gives us many significant data in regard to commerce and politics, monuments and natural features. For the regions actually visited by Benjamin this information is accurate and precise, but for the farther parts of Asia it becomes confused and often legendary.[525]

_Petachia of Ratisbon_

The second of the great Hebrew travelers of the twelfth century was Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon in Bavaria. In the ninth decade of the century Petachia traveled eastward from Prague through Poland, Russia, Transcaucasia, and Kurdestan to Baghdad, whence he returned homeward by way of Palestine. The outward journey was a most unusual exploit for this time, traversing the steppes of Russia then infested with wild Tatar tribes. Unfortunately, much that was most important and significant in Petachia’s book appears to have been removed by Rabbi Yahudi the Pious, “who acted as Petachia’s literary mouthpiece” (Beazley).[526]

_TOPOGRAPHICAL WORKS_

We must now examine a few works on the geography and topography of local regions.

GODFREY OF VITERBO

In a manuscript of the mid-twelfth-century writings of Godfrey of Viterbo, and in all probability to be ascribed to Godfrey, there is a poem entitled _Denumeratio regnorum imperio subjectorum_.[527] The writer explains his purpose in the following terms: “Not the wars of kingdoms are here set forth, but their fortune (pride?), their rivers, the extent and kind of regions which constitute them, the types of customs, the manner of harvesting and of trade.”[528] In the course of the poem he treats of Rome, of Apulia and other Italian districts subject to Rome, of the kingdom of the Lombards, of Venetia, of “true France”—by which he means the lands of the Franks along the lower Rhine—of Basel, of Alsace, of Strasburg, of Worms; but, though much of the detail constitutes a poetic geography of peoples and cities, little attention is paid to physical features.

GERVASE OF CANTERBURY

Among the lesser writings of the English chronicler, Gervase of Canterbury, we find a _mappamundi_ dating from about the year 1200.[529] This is a brief account of England, its dimensions[530] and languages, followed by a table in three columns showing, for each county. (1) the most important ecclesiastical officers, archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priors; (2) the names of the churches; and (3) the religious orders and mother churches to which the various ecclesiastics appertained. After this there follows a list of hospitals, castles, islands, fresh- and salt-water springs, and other curiosities.

GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS

By all means the most important topographical works of our period, however, came from the pen of Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Barry (_c._ 1146-_c._ 1222).[531] This active and intelligent Norman-Welsh ecclesiastic, who at the time had already made one visit to Ireland, was appointed chaplain to Henry II in 1184 and in the following year was sent as counselor to the young Prince John on the latter’s expedition to Ireland. During the expedition he collected materials for two treatises, the first of which, the _Topographia Hiberniae_, was completed in 1188. Though Giraldus’ knowledge of Ireland in reality was limited, barely extending beyond the areas occupied by the English, though his impression of the Irish people was prejudiced and hostile, and though he overburdens us with the recitation of marvels, his books show, none the less, that their author possessed a keen interest in natural history and geography and that his powers of observation were far from mediocre. The second treatise, the _Expugnatio Hiberniae_, or history of the English conquest of the island, contains much less geographical material than the _Topographia_.

In 1188, when Henry II was about to start out on the Crusade, he sent Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury into Wales to preach there and urge the people to take the cross. Giraldus accompanied the archbishop on this tour and subsequently wrote an account of it in his _Itinerarium Kambriae_. Together with the _Descriptio Kambriae_ that followed a few years later, this contains many accurate and important remarks and notes on the physical and human geography of Giraldus’ native land.

These treatises on Ireland and Wales hold a unique position in the literature not only of our period but of the entire Middle Ages. Brewer, in his introduction to the collected works of Giraldus, says that the _Topographia Hiberniae_ is a “monument of a bold and original genius” and that Giraldus “must take rank with the first who descried the value and, in some respects, the proper limits of descriptive geography.”[532] Though this may be a little too strong, we readily agree with Dimock’s estimate of the treatises on Wales: “His account of the land and the people of Wales will bear very honourable comparison with any topographical attempt that had appeared up to his time and with any that appeared for many ages afterwards.”[533] Giraldus was in a very real sense the forerunner of the modern writer of the better sort of book of travel. His works reveal to us a mind keenly interested in the results of its own observation and not merely in collecting what others had said. Giraldus was certainly enthusiastic, and we are almost tempted to say that he was endowed with an “outdoor” and even “Rooseveltian” interest in the world about him.

Before leaving the topographical works, mention should be made of a little anonymous guide to the monuments and antiquities of Rome, the _Mirabilia urbis Romae_,[534] dating from the late twelfth century and widely read during the years that followed.

_MAPS_

From the age of the Crusades date several of the most characteristic medieval maps. These highly important sources, which serve so admirably to illustrate the geographical conceptions of the time, have been made the object of such thorough and careful research by Konrad Miller,[535] the results of whose investigations are well summarized in Beazley’s _Dawn of Modern Geography_,[536] that it hardly seems necessary here to devote a great deal of space to them. Let us merely indicate what the more important maps were, and show in a general way their relation to the literature of the age, leaving for Chapter XI a brief discussion of them as typifying medieval geographical thought.

We saw in Chapter II that the maps of the world drawn before 1100 and now extant could nearly all be classified in four groups.

ZONE MAPS

1. Of the first, zone maps, or diagrams illustrating the division of the earth’s surface into zones, examples occur in twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts of Macrobius, of the _De imagine mundi_, of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_ (Fig. 3), of William of Conches’ _De philosophia mundi_, of Herrad of Landsperg’s _Hortus deliciarum_, and of John of Holywood’s _De sphaera_.[537] The Paris manuscript of Peter Alphonsi’s _Dialogus_ also contains two related diagrams, one showing the eccentricity of the sun’s orbit and the other the division of the northern hemisphere into climates. Arabic influence upon Peter Alphonsi is revealed by the fact that south is at the top of his diagrams, instead of east, according to the almost universal custom of medieval Christian cartography.[538]

T-O MAPS AND SALLUST MAPS

2. The diagrammatic T-O group are also represented. By all means the most interesting of these is a map preserved in a manuscript in St. John’s College, Oxford, and dating from 1110. Somewhat more elaborate than others of the same type, this one assigns Greek names to the cardinal points of the compass, a circumstance which has given rise to a plausible conjecture that it may have been a copy of an original found in the Levant at the time of the First Crusade.[539]

FIG. 3—Zone map in an early twelfth-century manuscript of Lambert of
St. Omer’s _Liber floridus_, viz. Ghent Codex 2, fol. 24 vo. East is
at the top. (From Miller, _Mappaemundi_, vol. iii, 1895, fig. 59.)
]

3. There also date from our period several examples of the ornamented T-O maps drawn to illustrate Sallust’s works.[540]

BEATUS MAPS

4. We saw that the existing specimens of that series of maps of the world drawn to elucidate a passage in Beatus’ commentary on the Apocalypse appear to have come from two sources: (_a_) maps which were modeled closely on the original map of Beatus or a contemporary copy and (_b_) those which were merely generalized outlines of it.[541]

_a._ A map dating from 1203 and preserved at Osma in Old Castile comes nearest to the original in design and form, if not in the richness of detail (Fig. 4). Alone of all the Beatus type this shows the heads of the twelve apostles scattered over the earth’s surface. Another map, probably derived from the same source, is to be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; though it is rich in detail, little attempt was made to show localities in their proper relative positions, and consequently the geography represented is chaotic to an extreme.

FIG. 4—Osma Beatus map dating from 1203 showing the division of the
world among the twelve apostles. East is at the top. (From Miller,
_Mappaemundi_, vol. i, 1895, p. 35.)
]

_b._ There are also three or four maps dating from our period from the second source. Their main interest lies in the remarkable naïveté of workmanship.

MAPS OF LAMBERT, GUIDO, HENRY OF MAYENCE, AND OTHERS

In addition to the above, for which we have prototypes from the period before 1100, there are a number of maps of the world of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the prototypes of which either have been lost or never existed. Among the most notable of these is one found in certain manuscripts of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_.[542] It was compiled from the usual medieval authorities, Isidore, Orosius, Julius Honorius, Martianus Capella, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_, and the Bible, though there also appear upon it a few names that could have been taken only from contemporary sources. The influence of Macrobius is most strikingly revealed, for, unlike most other medieval maps which indicate the known world (Asia, Europe, and Africa) as occupying the entire area or by far the greater part of the world disk (as in the Beatus group), Lambert’s map divides the disk along its diameter by a zone representing the course of the sun and places in the southern hemisphere an austral continent of magnitude equal to that of the _oikoumene_.[543]

Guido’s compilation of geographical works, made in 1119, contains in two manuscripts not only a T-O map but also a map of the world accompanying a selection from the book of the anonymous Ravenna geographer and a detailed map of Italy and the surrounding lands. The map of the world is peculiar because of the enormous area which the Mediterranean occupies. Miller believes it to be a reduced sketch of a large map of the world and holds that the detailed map of Italy is a copy of a small portion of this same original.[544]

A compilation of the _De imagine mundi_, put together by one Henry, canon of the Church of St. Mary in Mayence, in 1100 and preserved in a late twelfth-century copy in Cambridge, England, contains a world map (see below, p. 245, Fig. 6, inset). Though indirectly made from the sources that the writers of the _De imagine mundi_ and other medieval cosmographies utilized, it was probably not compiled directly from the _De imagine mundi_ but rather from a large wall map. Its affinities to the immense late thirteenth-century world disk in Hereford Cathedral make it seem possible that both had a common source. In addition to the older nomenclature, about a dozen more modern place names are to be found upon it.[545]

A map of the world which somewhat resembles that of Henry of Mayence is also to be found in two manuscripts of the _Chronica maiora_ (or _Historia maiora_) of Matthew Paris. Though there are many names that have come down to modern times, the geography is meager and poor, in striking contrast to the detail of Matthew’s map of Britain,[546] to which reference is made below.

To complete the discussion of _mappaemundi_, mention must be made of a very small but very neat little map in a late thirteenth-century Psalter in the British Museum. If this was not actually drawn during our period, it undoubtedly had predecessors much like it, and it shows marked resemblances to the map of Henry of Mayence as well as to the Hereford and Ebstorf maps.[547]

REGIONAL MAPS

Several of the regional maps, or maps of limited areas, dating from our period may be merely fragments or copies of small portions of maps of the world. This is certainly true of the map of Europe in the Ghent manuscript of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_, which depicts that continent crammed into slightly more than a quarter of a circle with no attempt to show the articulations of the coast. The Guido map of Italy, as we have already seen, probably represents a portion of a larger map, and the same can possibly be said of the maps of the East and of Palestine which follow a treatise by Jerome, entitled _De situ et nominibus locorum Hebraicorum_, or _De Palestinae locis_, in a manuscript now in the British Museum. Though these two maps were actually drawn in the twelfth century, they represent the cartography of a very much earlier age and perhaps may be attributed to Jerome himself.[548] They were drawn to illustrate the Biblical geography of Palestine and the Orient, and they show a great wealth of Scriptural legends. Other legends were taken from profane sources, such as the writings of Isidore, Orosius, Julius Honorius, Dionysius, and the Romance of Alexander; and affinities to the Peutinger Table show that the draftsman was under the influence of the cartography of the Roman imperial epoch.

Among the regional maps that had no connection with _mappaemundi_ are plans of Jerusalem (“Situs Ierusalem”) accompanying twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts of an anonymous work written about 1109 and entitled _Gesta Francorum Ierusalem expugnantium_ (Fig. 7, p. 250, below). Though these plans reveal many names from the early Crusading age, their outlines as a whole—the fact, for instance, that Jerusalem is shown to be circular instead of rectangular—make it seem probable that they represent a schematic diagram of the Holy City going back to as early as the sixth century and brought up to date by the anonymous compiler of the Crusading epoch.[549]

_Matthew Paris’ Maps of Britain_

In addition to the map of the world of which we have spoken already, the works of Matthew Paris contain no less than five regional maps.[550] Two of these, the “Situs Britanniae” and the “Schema Britanniae,” are simple diagrams of Britain and are of no particular importance. The other three are far more significant. The first, a pictorial itinerary of the route from London to southern Italy, with legends in Old French and Latin, delineates vividly towns and principal topographic features. The second is a map of Palestine which superficially resembles that of Jerome; the names, however, are in French, and the legends refer to places familiar to the contemporary pilgrim and Crusader. Finally come the three manuscript variants of Matthew’s map of Britain, which, as Beazley observes, “among all designs of purely medieval origin ... show the best evidence of critical study, the most systematic attempt at the exact delineation of a particular country”[551] (for one variant, see below, p. 343, Fig. 9). There is a profusion of detail and accuracy in the representation of the relative position of places refreshing when we contemplate the confusion and credulity manifested in the earlier works. This map is also the first example of late medieval cartography in which north instead of east is shown at the top of the sheet.