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Mappa mundi

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My parents have just visited Hereford Cathedral to view the Magna carta and Mappa mundi. Apparently the Mappa mundi has a number of cathedrals in Engl...

Encyclopedia

Mappa mundi is a general term used to describe medieval European

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

maps of the world

World map

A world map is a map of the surface of the Earth, which may be made using any of a number of different map projections. A map projection is any method of representing the surface of a sphere or other three-dimensional body on a plane....

. These maps range in size and complexity from simple schematic maps an inch or less across to elaborate wall maps, the largest of which was 11 ft. (3.5 m.) in diameter. The term derives from the Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

words mappa (cloth or chart) and mundi (of the world).

Approximately 1,100 mappae mundi are known to have survived from the Middle Ages. Of these some 900 are found illustrating manuscripts and the remainder exist as stand-alone documents.

Types of mappae mundi

Extant mappae mundi come in several distinct varieties, including:

Zonal or Macrobian maps
Tripartite or "T-O" maps
Quadripartite maps (including the Beatus maps)
complex maps

Medieval world maps which share some characteristics of traditional mappae mundi but contain elements from other sources, including Portolan charts and Ptolemy

Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy , was a Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the...

's Geography are sometimes considered a fifth type, called "transitional mappae mundi".

Zonal maps

Zonal maps are pictures of the East Hemisphere. Their purpose was to illustrate the concept that the world is a sphere with 5 climate zones:

The northern frigid zone
the northern temperate zone
the equatorial tropical zone
the southern temperate zone
the southern frigid zone

Of these, only the two temperate zones were believed to be inhabitable, and the known world was contained entirely within the northern temperate zone's Eastern Hemisphere. Because most surviving Zonal maps are found illustrating Macrobius' Commentary on Cicero's

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...

Dream of Scipio
Dream of Scipio
The Dream of Scipio , written by Cicero, is the sixth book of De re publica, and describes a fictional dream vision of the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, set two years before he commanded at the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE.Upon his arrival in Africa, Scipio Aemilianus is visited by his...

(an excerpt of Cicero's De Re Publica
De re publica
De re publica is a dialogue on Roman politics by Cicero, written in six books between 54 and 51 BC. It is written in the format of a Socratic dialogue in which Scipio Africanus Minor takes the role of a wise old man — an obligatory part for the genre...

), this type of map is sometimes called "Macrobian". In their simplest and most common form, Zonal mappae mundi are merely circles divided into five parallel zones, but several larger Zonal maps with much more detail have survived.

Tripartite or T-O maps

T-O maps
T and O map
A T and O map or O-T or T-O map , is a type of medieval world map, sometimes also called a Beatine map or a Beatus map because one of the earliest known representations of this sort is attributed to Beatus of Liébana, an 8th-century Spanish monk...

, unlike zonal maps, illustrate only the habitable portion of the world known in Roman and medieval times. The landmass was illustrated as a circle (an "O") divided into three portions by a "T". These three divisions were the continents of Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

, Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

and Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

. The vast majority of T-O maps place east at the top, hence the term "orienting" a map from the Latin word oriens for "east". The assertion that T-O maps depict a "flat earth

Flat Earth

The Flat Earth model is a belief that the Earth's shape is a plane or disk. Most ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period ...

", while common, is unwarranted. The "circle of the lands" in a T-O can just as easily be fit onto the sphere of the Earth as onto a flat, disk-shaped Earth . The popularity of the Macrobian maps and the combination of T-O style continents on some of the larger Macrobian spheres illustrate that Earth's sphericity continued to be understood among scholars during the Middle Ages.

Quadripartite or Beatus maps

Quadripartite maps represent a sort of amalgam of the Zonal and T-O maps by illustrating the three known continents separated by an equatorial ocean from a fourth unknown land, often called Antipodes
Antipodes
In geography, the antipodes of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface which is diametrically opposite to it. Two points that are antipodal to one another are connected by a straight line running through the centre of the Earth....

. Fourteen large quadripartite maps are found illustrating different manuscripts of Beatus of Liébana's

Beatus of Liébana

Saint Beatus of Liébana was a monk, theologian and geographer from the Kingdom of Asturias, in modern northern Spain, who worked and lived in the Picos de Europa mountains of the region of Liébana, in what is now Cantabria and his feast day is February 19.-Biography:He created an important...

popular Commentary on the Apocalypse
Apocalypse
An Apocalypse is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted. The Apocalypse of John is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament...

of St John

John the Evangelist

Saint John the Evangelist is the conventional name for the author of the Gospel of John...

. These "Beatus map

Beatus map

The Beatus Map or Beatine Map is one of the most relevant cartographic works of the European High Middle Ages: It was originally drawn by the Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana, based on the accounts given by Saint Isidore of Seville, Ptolemy and the Holy Bible...

s" are believed to derive from a single (now lost) original which was used to illustrate the missions of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ.

Complex maps

The "complex" or "great" world maps are the most famous mappae mundi. Although most employ a modified T-O scheme, they are considerably more detailed than their smaller T-O cousins. These maps show coastal details, mountains, rivers, cities, towns and provinces. Some include figures and stories from history, the Bible and classical mythology. Also shown on some maps are exotic plants, beasts and races known to Medieval scholars only through Roman and Greek texts. Prior to its destruction in World War II, the Ebstorf map

Ebstorf Map

The Ebstorf Map is an example of a mappa mundi similar to the Hereford Map, made by Gervase of Ebstorf, who was possibly the same man as Gervase of Tilbury, some time in the thirteenth century....

at 3.5 metres (11.5 ft) across was the largest surviving mappa mundi. Today that honor is held by the Hereford map

Hereford Mappa Mundi

The Hereford Mappa Mundi is a mappa mundi, of a form deriving from the T and O pattern, dating to ca. 1300. It is currently on display in Hereford Cathedral in Hereford, England...

which is 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) across. Other important maps in this group are the Cotton or Anglo-Saxon map, the Psalter map and the Henry of Mainz map. The somewhat later mappae mundi that accompany the popular Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden should probably be viewed as degenerate form of the earlier complex maps.

Complex mappae mundi include:

Name	Date	MS locations	Dimensions
The Albi or Merovingian map	c. 730		29 by 23 cm (11.4 by 9.1 in)
The so-called Vatican map of Isidore of Seville Isidore of Seville Saint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "le dernier savant du monde ancien"...	776	B.A. V. Lat. 6018, fol. 64 v.–65 r.
The Anglo-Saxon or Cotton map	c. 1025–1050	British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.v, fol. 56v	21 by 17 cm (8.3 by 6.7 in)
The map of Theodulf of Orleans Theodulf of Orléans Theodulf of Orléans , was the Bishop of Orléans during the reign of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious...	11th century	B.A.V., Reg. Lat. 123, fol. 143 v.–144 r.
The Henry of Mainz or Sawley map	c. 1110		29.5 by 20.5 cm (11.6 by 8.1 in)
The Vercelli Map	c. 1219		84 by 72 cm (2.8 by 2.4 ft)
The Ebstorf map Ebstorf Map The Ebstorf Map is an example of a mappa mundi similar to the Hereford Map, made by Gervase of Ebstorf, who was possibly the same man as Gervase of Tilbury, some time in the thirteenth century....	c. 1235		3.56 by 3.58 m (11.7 by 11.7 ft)
The Psalter map	13th century		14.2 by 9.5 cm (5.6 by 3.7 in)
The Hereford map Hereford Mappa Mundi The Hereford Mappa Mundi is a mappa mundi, of a form deriving from the T and O pattern, dating to ca. 1300. It is currently on display in Hereford Cathedral in Hereford, England...	c. 1300		1.5 m (4.9 ft)
The Fra Mauro map Fra Mauro map The Fra Mauro map, "considered the greatest memorial of medieval cartography" according to Roberto Almagià, is a map made around 1450 by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro...	1459–60

Purpose of mappae mundi

To modern eyes, mappae mundi can look superficially primitive and inaccurate. However, mappae mundi were never meant to be used as navigational charts and they make no pretense of showing the relative areas of land and water. Rather, mappae mundi were schematic and were meant to illustrate different principles. The simplest mappae mundi were diagrams meant to preserve and illustrate classical learning easily. The zonal maps should be viewed as a kind of teaching aid—easily reproduced and designed to reinforce the idea of the Earth's sphericity and climate zones. T-O maps were designed to schematically illustrate the three land masses of the world as it was known to the Romans and their medieval European heirs.

The larger mappae mundi have the space and detail to illustrate further concepts, such as the cardinal directions, distant lands, Bible stories, history, mythology, flora, fauna and exotic races. In their fullest form, such as the Ebstorf and Hereford maps, they become minor encyclopedias of medieval knowledge.

In her study, Brigitte Englisch shows that the medieval world maps (the mappae mundi) both from their concept and in their concrete practice are founded on a systematically geometric projection of the known world. The basis of this projection, however, is not geographical surveying but the harmonious order of God’s creation. Using regular geometric forms like circles and triangles which are also regarded as religiously perfect, they created a coherent planispheric system. This quite basically presents the known world in its real geographic appearance which is visible in the so called Vatican Map of Isidor (776), the world maps of Beatus of Liebana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse of St John (8th century), the Anglo-Saxon Map (ca. 1000), the Sawley map, the Psalter map, or the large mappae mundi of the 13th century (Hereford/Ebstorf).

End of the tradition

In the central Middle Ages a new type of map developed as an aid to navigating the Mediterranean Sea. Known as "Portolan charts", these maps are characterized by extremely accurate coastlines with criss-crossing rhumb line

Rhumb line

In navigation, a rhumb line is a line crossing all meridians of longitude at the same angle, i.e. a path derived from a defined initial bearing...

s. A particularly famous example is the Catalan Atlas

Catalan Atlas

The Catalan Atlas is the most important Catalan map of the medieval period. It was produced by the Majorcan cartographic school and is attributed to Cresques Abraham , a Jewish book illuminator who was self-described as being a master of the maps of the world as well as compasses...

of Abraham Cresques

Abraham Cresques

Abraham Cresques , whose real name was probably Cresques Abraham, was a 14th-century Jewish cartographer from Palma, Majorca...

. During the late Middle Ages and with the coming of the Renaissance, western Europeans became reacquainted with the work of many ancient Greek scholars. In the field of geography and map-making, the coordinate system which Claudius Ptolemy outlined in the Geographia
Geographia (Ptolemy)
The Geography is Ptolemy's main work besides the Almagest...

became extremely influential. Over time maps influenced by these new ideas displaced the older traditions of mappae mundi. The last examples of the tradition, including the massive map of Fra Mauro

Fra Mauro

Fra Mauro, O.S.B. Cam., was a 15th-century Camaldolese monk who lived in the Republic of Venice. He was a monk of the Monastery of St. Michael, located on the island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon. It was there that he maintained a cartography workshop.In his youth, Mauro had traveled...

, may be seen as hybrids, incorporating Portolan-style coastlines into the frame of a traditional mappamundi.