Fig. 32.Fig. 32.—Homeric Cosmography.
The centre of the terrestrial disc was occupied by the continent and isles of Greece, which in the time of Homer possessed no general name. The centre of Greece passed therefore for the centre of the whole world; and in Homer's system it was reckoned to be Olympus in Thessaly, but the priests of the celebrated Temple of Apollo at Delphi (knownthen under the name of Python) gave out a tradition that that sacred place was the real centre of the habitable world.
The straits which separate Italy from Sicily were so to speak the vestibule of the fabulous world of Homer. The threefold ebb and flow, the howling of the monster Scylla, the whirlpools of Charybdis, the floating rocks—all tell us that we are quitting here the region of truth. Sicily itself, although already known under the name ofTrinacria, was filled with marvels; here the flocks of the Sun wandered in a charming solitude under the guardianship of nymphs; here the Cyclops, with one eye only, and the anthropophagous Lestrigons scared away the traveller from a land that was otherwise fertile in corn and wine. Two historical races were placed by Homer in Sicily, namely theSicani, and theSiceli, orSiculi.
To the west of Sicily we find ourselves in the midst of a region of fables. The enchanted islands of Circe and Calypso, and the floating island of Eolus can no longer be found, unless we imagine them to have originated, like Graham's Island in this century, from volcanic eruptions or elevations, and to have disappeared again by the action of the sea.
The Homeric map of the world terminated towards the west by two fabulous countries which have given rise to many traditions among the ancients, and to many discussions among moderns. Near to the entrance of the ocean, and not far from the sombre caverns where the dead are congregated,Ulysses found theCimmerians, "an unhappy people, who, constantly surrounded by thick shadows, never enjoyed the rays of the sun, neither when it mounted the skies, nor when it descended below the earth." Still farther away, and in the ocean itself, and therefore beyond the limits of the earth, beyond the region of winds and seasons, the poet paints for us a Fortunate Land, which he callsElysium, a country where tempests and winter are unknown, where a soft zephyr always blows, and where the elect of Jupiter, snatched from the common lot of mortals, enjoy a perpetual felicity.
Whether these fictions had an allegory for their basis, or were founded on the mistaken notions of voyagers—whether they arose in Greece, or, as the Hebrew etymology of the name Cimmerian might seem to indicate, in the east, or in Phenicia, it is certain that the images they present, transferred to the world of reality, and applied successively to various lands, and confused by contradictory explanations, have singularly embarrassed the progress of geography through many centuries. The Roman travellers thought they recognised the Fortunate Isles in a group to the west of Africa, now known as the Canaries. The philosophical fictions of Plato and Theopompus about Atlantes and Meropis have been long perpetuated in historical theories; though of course it is possible that in the numerous changes that have taken place in the surface of the earth, some ancient vast and populous island may have descended beneath the level ofthe sea. On the other side, the poetic imagination created theHyperboreans, beyond the regions where the northern winds were generated, and according to a singular kind of meteorology, they believed them for that reason to be protected from the cold winds. Herodotus regrets that he has not been able to discover the least trace of them; he took the trouble to ask for information about them from their neighbours, theArimaspes, a very clear-sighted race, though having but a single eye; but they could not inform him where the Hyperboreans dwelt. The Enchanted Isles, where the Hesperides used to guard the golden fruit, and which the whole of antiquity placed in the west, not far from the Fortunate Isles, are sometimes called Hyperborean by authors well versed in the ancient traditions. It is also in this sense that Sophocles speaks of the Garden of Phœbus, near the vault of heaven, and not far from thesources of the night,i.e.of the setting of the sun.
Avienus explains the mild temperature of the Hyperborean country by the temporary proximity of the sun, since, according to the Homeric ideas, it passes during the night by the northern ocean to return to its palace in the east. This ancient tradition was not entirely exploded in the time of Tacitus, who states that on the confines of Germany might be seen the veritable setting of Apollo beyond the water, and he believes that as in the east the sun gives rise to incense and balm by its great proximity to the earth, so inthe regions where it sets it makes the most precious of juices to transude from the earth and form amber. It is this idea that is embedded in the fables of amber being the tears of gold that Apollo shed when he went to the Hyperborean land to mourn the loss of his son Æsculapius, or by the sisters of Phaëton, changed into poplars; and it is denoted by the Greek name for amber,electron—a sun-stone. The Grecian sages, long before the time of Tacitus, said that this very precious material was an exhalation from the earth that was produced and hardened by the rays of the sun, which they thought came nearer to the earth in the west and in the north.
Florus, in relating the expedition of Decimus Brutus along the coast of Spain, gives great effect to the Epicurean views about the sun, by declaring that Brutus only stopped his conquests after having witnessed the actual descent of the sun into the ocean, and having heard with horror the terrible noise occasioned by its extinction. The ancients also believed that the sun and the other heavenly bodies were nourished by the waters—partly the fresh water of the rivers, and partly the salt water of the sea. Cleanthes gave the reason for the sun returning towards the equator on reaching the solstices, that it could not go too far away from the source of its nourishment. Pytheas relates that in the Island of Thule, six days' journey north of Great Britain, and in all that neighbourhood, there was no land nor sea nor air, but a compound of allthree, on which the earth and the sea were suspended, and which served to unite together all the parts of the universe, though it was not possible to go into these places, neither on foot nor in ships. Perhaps the ice floating in the frozen seas and the hazy northern atmosphere had been seen by some navigator, and thus gave rise to this idea. As it stands, the history may be perhaps matched by that of the amusing monk who said he had been to the end of the world and had to stoop down, as there was not room to stand between heaven and earth at their junction.
Homer lived in the tenth century before our era. Herodotus, who lived in the fifth, developed the Homeric chart to three times its size. He remarks at the commencement of his book that for several centuries the world has been divided into three parts—Europe, Asia, and Libya; the names given to them being female. The exterior limits of these countries remained in obscurity notwithstanding that those boundaries of them that lay nearest to Greece were clearly defined.
One of the greatest writers on ancient geography was Strabo, whose ideas we will now give an account of. He seems to have been a disciple of Hipparchus in astronomy, though he criticises and contradicts him several times in his geography. He had a just idea of the sphericity of the earth; but considered it as the centre of the universe, and immovable. He takes pains to prove that there is onlyone inhabited earth—not in this refuting the notion that the moon and stars might have inhabitants, for these he considered to be insignificant meteors nourished by the exhalations of the ocean; but he fought against the fact of there being on this globe any other inhabited part than that known to the ancients.
It is remarkable to notice that the proofs then used by geographers of the sphericity of the earth are just those which we should use now. Thus Strabo says, "The indirect proof is drawn from the centripetal force in general, and the tendency that all bodies have in particular towards a centre of gravity. The direct proof results from the phenomena observed on the sea and in the sky. It is evident, for example, that it is the curvature of the earth that alone prevents the sailor from seeing at a distance the lights that are placed at the ordinary height of the eye, and which must be placed a little higher to become visible even at a greater distance; in the same way, if the eye is a little raised it will see things which previously were hidden." Homer had already made the same remark.
On this globe, representing the world, Strabo and the cosmographers of his time placed the habitable world in a surface which he describes in the following way: "Suppose a great circle, perpendicular to the equator, and passing through the poles to be described about the sphere. It is plain that the surface will be divided by this circle, and by theequator into four equal parts. The northern and southern hemispheres contain, each of them, two of these parts. Now on any one of these quarters of the sphere let us trace a quadrilateral which shall have for its southern boundary the half of the equator, for northern boundary a circle marking the commencement of polar cold, and for the other sides two equal and opposite segments of the circle that passes through the poles. It is on one such quadrilateral that the habitable world is placed." He figures it as an island, because it is surrounded on all sides by the sea. It is plain that Strabo had a good idea of the nature of gravity, because he does not distinguish in any way an upper or a lower hemisphere, and declares that the quadrilateral on which the habitable world is situated may be any one of the four formed in this way.
The form of the habitable world is that of a "chlamys," or cloak. This follows, he says, both from geometry and the great spread of the sea, which, enveloping the land, covers it both to the east and to the west and reduces it to a shortened and truncated form of such a figure that its greatest breadth preserved has only a third of its length. As to the actual length and breadth, he says, "it measures seventy thousand stadia in length, and is bounded by a sea whose immensity and solitude renders it impassable; while the breadth is less than thirty thousand stadia, and has for boundaries the double region where the excess of heat onone side and the excess of cold on the other render it uninhabitable."
The habitable world was thus much longer from east to west than it was broad from north to south; from whence come our termslongitude, whose degrees are counted in the former direction, andlatitude, reckoned in the latter direction.
Eratosthenes, and after him Hipparchus, while he gives larger numbers than the preceding for the dimensions of the inhabited part of the earth, namely, thirty-eight thousand stadia of breadth and eighty thousand of length, declares that physical laws accord with calculations to prove that the length of the habitable earth must be taken from the rising to the setting of the sun. This length extends from the extremity of India to that of Iberia, and the breadth from the parallel of Ethiopia to that of Ierne.
That the earth is an island, Strabo considers to be proved by the testimony of our senses. For wherever men have reached to the extremities of the earth they have found the sea, and for regions where this has not been verified it is established by reasoning. Those who have retraced their steps have not done so because their passage was barred by any continent, but because their supplies have run short, and they were afraid of the solitude; the water always ran freely in front of them.
It is extraordinary that Strabo and the astronomers ofthat age, who recognised so clearly the sphericity of the earth and the real insignificance of mountains, should yet have supposed the stars to have played so humble a part, but so it was; and we find Strabo arguing in what we may call quite the contrary direction. He says, "the larger the mass of water that is spread round the earth, so much more easy is it to conceive how the vapours arising from it are sufficient to nourish the heavenly bodies."
Fig. 33.Fig. 33.—The Earth of the Later Greeks.
Among the Latin cosmographers we may here cite one who flourished in the first century after Christ, Pomponius Mela, who wrote a treatise, calledDe Situ Orbis. From whatever source, whether traditional or otherwise, he arrived at the conclusion, he divided the earth into two continents, our own and that of the Antichthones, which reached to ourantipodes. This map was in use till the time of Christopher Columbus, who modified it in the matter of the position of this second continent, which till then remained a matter of mystery.
Fig. 34.Fig. 34.—Pomponius Mela's Cosmography.
Of those who in ancient times added to the knowledge then possessed of cosmography, we should not omit to mention the name of Pytheas, of Marseilles, who flourished in the fourth century before our era. His chief observations, however, were not so closely related to geography as to the relation of the earth with the heavenly bodies. By the observation of the gnomon at mid-day on the day of the solstice he determined the obliquity of the ecliptic in his epoch. By the observation of the height of the pole, he discovered that in his time it was not marked by any star, but formed a quadrilateral with three neighbouring stars, β of the little Bear and κ and α of the Dragon.
After the writers mentioned in the last chapter a long interval elapsed without any progress being made in the knowledge of the shape or configuration of the earth. From the fall of the Roman Empire, whose colonies themselves gave a certain knowledge of geography, down to the fifteenth century, when the great impetus was given to discovery by the adventurous voyagers of Spain and Portugal, there was nothing but servile copying from ancient authors, who were even misrepresented when they were not understood. Even the peninsula of India was only known by the accounts of Orientals and the writings of the Ancients until the beginning of the fifteenth century. Vague notions, too, were held as to the limits of Africa, and even of Europe and Asia—while of course they knew nothing of America, in spite of their marking on their maps an antichthonal continent to the south.
Denys, the traveller, a Greek writer of the first century, and Priscian, his Latin commentator of the fourth, still maintained the old errors with regard to the earth. According to them the earth is not round, but leaf-shaped; its boundaries are not so arranged as to form everywhere a regular circle. Macrobius, in his system of the world, proves clearly that he had no notion that Africa was continued to the south of Ethiopia, that is of the tenth degree of N. latitude. He thought, like Cleanthus and Crates and other ancient authors, that the regions that lay nearest the tropics, and were burnt by the sun, could not be inhabited; and that the equatorial regions were occupied by the ocean. He divided the hemisphere into five zones, of which only two were habitable. "One of them," he said, "is occupied by us, and the other by men of whose nature we are ignorant."
Orosus, writing in the same century (fourth), and whose work exercised so great an influence on the cosmographers of the middle ages and on those who made the maps of the world during that long period, was ignorant of the form or boundaries of Africa, and of the contours of the peninsulas of Southern Asia. He made the heavens rest upon the earth.
S. Basil, also of the fourth century, placed the firmament on the earth, and on this heaven a second, whose upper surface was flat, notwithstanding that the inner surfacewhich is turned towards us is in the form of a vault; and he explains in this way how the waters can be held there. S. Cyril shows how useful this reservoir of water is to the life of men and of plants.
Diodorus, Bishop of Tarsus, in the same century, also divided the world into two stages, and compared it to a tent. Severianus, Bishop of Gabala, about the same time, compared the world to a house of which the earth is the ground floor, the lower heavens the ceiling, and the upper, or heaven of heavens, the roof. This double heaven was also admitted by Eusebius of Cæsaræa.
In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries science made no progress whatever. It was still taught that there were limits to the ocean. Thus Lactantius asserted that there could not be inhabitants beyond the line of the tropics. This Father of the Church considered it a monstrous opinion that the earth is round, that the heavens turn about it, and that all parts of the earth are inhabited. "There are some people," he says, "so extravagant as to persuade themselves that there are men who have their heads downwards and their feet upwards; that all that lies down here is hung up there; that the trees and herbs grow downwards; and that the snow and hail fall upwards.... Those people who maintain such opinions do so for no other purpose than to amuse themselves by disputation, and to show their spirit; otherwise it would be easy to prove by invincibleargument that it is impossible for the heavens to be underneath the earth." (Divine Institution). Saint Augustin also, in hisCity of God, says: "There is no reason to believe in that fabulous hypothesis of the antipodes, that is to say, of men who inhabit the other side of the earth—where the sun rises when it sets with us, and who have their feet opposed to ours." ... "But even if it were demonstrated by any argument that the earth and world have a spherical form, it would be too absurd to pretend that any hardy voyagers, after having traversed the immensity of the ocean, had been able to reach that part of the world and there implant a detached branch of the primæval human family."
In the same strain wrote S. Basil, S. Ambrose, S. Justin Martyr, S. Chrysostom, Procopius of Gaza, Severianus, Diodorus Bishop of Tarsus, and the greater number of the thinkers of that epoch.
Eusebius of Cæsaræa was bold enough on one occasion to write in his Commentaries on the Psalms, that, "according to the opinion of some the earth is round;" but he draws back in another work from so rash an assertion. Even in the fifteenth century the monks of Salamanca and Alcala opposed the old arguments against the antipodes to all the theories of Columbus.
In the middle of the sixteenth century Gregory of Tours adopted also the opinion that the intertropical zone was
Fig. 35.Fig. 35.—The Earth's Shadow.
uninhabitable, and, like other historians, he taught that the Nile came from the unknown land in the east, descended to the south, crossed the ocean which separated the antichthone from Africa, and then alone became: visible. The geographical and cosmographical ideas that were then prevalent may also be judged of by what S. Avitus, a Latin poet of the sixth century and nephew of the Emperor Flavius Avitus, says in his poem on the Creation, where he describes the terrestrial Paradise. "Beyond India," he writes, "where the world commences, where the confines of heaven and earth are joined, is an exalted asylum, inaccessible to mortals, and closed by eternal barriers, since the first sin was committed."
In a treatise on astronomy, published a little after this in 1581, by Apian and Gemma Frison, they very distinctly state their belief in a round earth, though they do not go into details of its surface. The argument is the old one from eclipses, but the figures they give in illustration are very amusing, with three or four men of the size of the moon disporting themselves on the earth's surface. As, however, they all have their feet to the globe representing the earth, and consequently have their feet in opposite directions at the antipodes, the idea is very clearly shown.
Fig. 36.Fig. 36.
"If," they say, "the earth were square, its shadow on the moon would be square also.
"If the earth were triangular, its shadow, during an eclipse of the moon, would also be triangular.
Fig. 37.Fig. 37.
"If the earth had six sides, its shadow would have the same figure.
Fig. 38.Fig. 38.
"Since, then, the shadow of the earth is round, it is a proof that the earth is round also."
This of course is one of the proofs that would be employed in the present day for the same purpose.
The most remarkable of all the fantastical systems, however, thechef d'œuvreof the cosmography of that age, was the famous system of the square earth, with solidwalls for supporting the heavens. Its author wasCosmas, surnamedIndicopleustesafter his voyage to India and Ethiopia. He was at first a merchant, and afterwards a monk. He died in 550. His manuscript was entitled "Christian Topography," and was written in 535. It was with the object of refuting the opinions of those who gave a spherical form to the earth that Cosmas composed his work after the systems of the Church Fathers, and in opposition to the cosmography of the Gentiles. He reduced to a systematic form the opinions of the Fathers, and undertook to explain all the phenomena of the heavens in accordance with the Scriptures. In his first book he refutes the opinion of the sphericity of the earth, which he regarded as a heresy. In the second he expounds his own system, and the fifth to the ninth he devotes to the courses of the stars. This mongrel composition is a singular mixture of the doctrines of the Indians, Chaldeans, Greeks, and Christian Fathers.
With respect to his opponents he says, "There are on all sides vigorous attacks against the Church," and accuses them of misunderstanding Scripture, being misled by the eclipses of the sun and moon. He makes great fun of the idea of rain falling upwards, and yet accuses his opponents of making the earth at the same time the centre and the base of the universe. The zeal with which thesepretended refutations are used proves, no doubt, that in the sixth century there were some men, more sensible and better instructed than others, who preserved the deposit of progress accomplished by the Grecian genius in the Alexandrian school, and defended the labours of Hipparchus and Ptolemy; while it is manifest that the greater number of their contemporaries kept the old Indian and Homeric traditions, which were easier to understand, and more accessible to the false witness of the senses, and not improved by combination with texts of Scripture misinterpreted. In fact, cosmographical science in the general opinion retrograded instead of advancing.
According to Cosmas and his map of the world, the habitable earth is a plane surface. But instead of being supposed, as in the time of Thales, to be a disc, he represented it in the form of a parallelogram, whose long sides are twice the shorter ones, so that man is on the earth like a bird in a cage. This parallelogram is surrounded by the ocean, which breaks in in four great gulfs, namely, the Mediterranean and Caspian seas, and the Persian and Arabian gulfs.
Beyond the ocean in every direction there exists another continent which cannot be reached by man, but of which one part was once inhabited by him before the Deluge. To the east, just as in other maps of the world, and in later systems, he placed theTerrestrial Paradise, and the fourrivers that watered Eden, which come by subterranean channels to water the post-diluvian earth.
After the Fall, Adam was driven from Paradise; but he and his descendants remained on its coasts until the Deluge carried the ark of Noah to our present earth.
On the four outsides of the earth rise four perpendicular walls, which surround it, and join together at the top in a vault, the heavens forming the cupola of this singular edifice.
The world, according to Cosmas, was therefore a large oblong box, and it was divided into two parts; the first, the abode of men, reaches from the earth to the firmament, above which the stars accomplish their revolutions; there dwell the angels, who cannot go any higher. The second reaches upwards from the firmament to the upper vault, which crowns and terminates the world. On this firmament rest the waters of the heavens.
Cosmas justifies this system by declaring that, according to the doctrine of the Fathers and the Commentators on the Bible, the earth has the form of the Tabernacle that Moses erected in the desert; which was like an oblong box, twice as long as broad. But we may find other similarities,—for this land beyond the ocean recalls the Atlantic of the ancients, and the Mahomedans, and Orientals in general, say that the earth is surrounded by a high mountain, which is a similar idea to the walls of Cosmas.
Fig. 39.Fig. 39.—The Cosmography of Cosmas.
"God," he says, "in creating the earth, rested it on nothing. The earth is therefore sustained by the power of God, the Creator of all things, supporting all things by the word of His power. If below the earth, or outside of it, anything existed, it would fall of its own accord. So God made the earth the base of the universe, and ordained that it should sustain itself by its own proper gravity."
After having made a great square box of the universe, it remained for him to explain the celestial phenomena, such as the succession of days and nights and the vicissitudes of the seasons.
Fig. 40.Fig. 40.—The Square Earth.
This is the remarkable explanation he gives. He says that the earth, that is, the oblong table circumscribed on all sides by high walls, is divided into three parts; first the habitable earth, which occupies the middle; secondly, the ocean which surrounds this on all sides; and thirdly, another dry land which surrounds the ocean, terminated itself by these high walls on which the firmament rests. According to him the habitable earth is always higher as we go north, so that southern countries are always much lower than northern. For this reason, he says, the Tigris and Euphrates, which run towards the south, are much more rapid thanthe Nile, which runs northwards. At the extreme north there is a large conical mountain, behind which the sun, moon, planets, and comets all set. These stars never pass below the earth, they only pass behind this great mountain, which hides them for a longer or shorter time from our observation. According as the sun departs from or approaches the north, and consequently is lower or higher in the heavens, he disappears at a point nearer to or further from the base of the mountain, and so is behind it a longer or shorter time, whence the inequality of the days and nights, the vicissitudes of the seasons, eclipses, and other phenomena. This idea is not peculiar to Cosmas, for according to the Indians, the mountain of Someirat is in the centre of the earth, and when the sun appears to set, he is really only hiding behind this mountain.
His idea, too, of the manner in which the motions are performed is strange, but may be matched elsewhere. "All the stars are created," he says, "to regulate the days and nights, the months and the years, and they move, not at all by the motion of the heaven itself, but by the action of certain divine Beings, orlampadophores. God made the angels for His service, and He has charged some of them with the motion of the air, others with that of the sun, or the moon, or the other stars, and others again with the collecting of clouds and preparing the rain."
Fig. 41.Fig. 41.—Explanation of Sunrise.
Similar to this were the ideas of other doctors of the Church, such as S. Hilary and Theodorus, some of whom supposed that the angels carried the stars on their shoulders like theomophoresof the Manichees; others that they rolled them in front of them or drew them behind; while the Jesuit Riccioli, who made astronomical observations, remarks that each angel that pushes a star takes great care to observe what the others are doing, so that the relative distances between the stars may always remain what they ought to be. The Abbot Trithemus gives the exactsuccession of the seven angels or spirits of the planets, who take it in turns during a cycle of three hundred and fifty-four years to govern the celestial motions from the creation to the year 1522. The system thus introduced seems to have been spread abroad, and to have lingered even into the nineteenth century among the Arabs. A guide of that nationality hired at Cairo in 1830, remarked to two travellers how the earth had been made square and covered with stones, but the stones had been thrown into the four corners, now called France, Italy, England, and Russia, while the centre, forming a circle round Mount Sinai, had been given to the Arabians.
Alongside of this system of the square was another equally curious—that of the egg. Its author was the famous Venerable Bede, one of the most enlightened men of his time, who was educated at the University of Armagh, which produced Alfred and Alcuin. He says: "The earth is an element placed in the middle of the world, as the yolk is in the middle of an egg; around it is the water, like the white surrounding the yolk; outside that is the air, like the membrane of the egg; and round all is the fire which closes it in as the shell does. The earth being thus in the centre receives every weight upon itself, and though by its nature it is cold and dry in its different parts, it acquires accidentally different qualities; for the portion which is exposed to the torrid action of the air is burnt by the sun, and isuninhabitable; its two extremities are too cold to be inhabited, but the portion that lies in the temperate region of the atmosphere is habitable. The ocean, which surrounds it by its waves as far as the horizon, divides it into two parts, the upper of which is inhabited by us, while the lower is inhabited by our antipodes; although not one of them can come to us, nor one of us to them."
Fig. 42.Fig. 42.—The Earth as an Egg.
This last sentence shows that however far he may have been from the truth, he did not, like so many of his contemporaries, stumble over the idea of up and down in the universe, and so consider the notion of antipodes absurd.
Fig. 43.Fig. 43.—The Earth as a Floating Egg.
A great number of the maps of the world of the period followed this idea, and drew the world in the shape of an egg at rest. It was broached, however, in another form by Edrisi, an Arabian geographer of the eleventh century, who, with many others, considered the earth to be like an egg with one half plunged into the water. The regularity of the surface is only interrupted by valleys and mountains. He adopted the system of the ancients, who supposed that the torrid zone was uninhabited. According to him the known world only forms a single half of the egg, the greater part of the water belonging to the surrounding ocean, in the midst ofwhich earth floats like an egg in a basin. Several artists and map-makers adopted this theory in the geographical representations, and so, whether in this way or the last, the egg has had the privilege of representing the form of the earth for nearly a thousand years.
The celebrated Raban Maur, of Mayence, composed in the ninth century a treatise, entitledDe Universo, divided into twenty-two books. It is a kind of encyclopædia, in which he gives an abridged view of all the sciences. According to his cosmographic system the earth is in the form of a wheel, and is placed in the middle of the universe, being surrounded by the ocean; on the north it is bounded by the Caucasus, which he supposes to be mountains of gold, which no one can reach because of dragons, and griffins, and men of monstrous shape that dwell there. He also places Jerusalem in the centre of the earth.
The treatise of Honorus, entitledImago Mundi, and many other authors of the same kind, represent, 1st, the terrestrial paradise in the most easterly portion of the world, in a locality inaccessible to man; 2nd, the four rivers which had their sources in Paradise; 3rd, the torrid zone, uninhabited; 4th, fantastic islands, transformed from the Atlantis intoAntillia.
Fig 44.Fig 44.—Eighth Century Map of the World.
In a manuscript commentary on the Apocalypse, which is in the library of Turin, is a very curious chart, referred to the tenth, but belonging possibly to the eighth century. It represents the earth as a circular planisphere. The four sides of the earth are each accompanied by a figure of a wind, as a horse on a bellows, from which air is poured out, as well as from a shell in his mouth. Above, or to the east, are Adam, and Eve with the serpent. To their right is Asia with two very elevated mountains—Cappadocia andCaucasus. From thence comes the riverEusis, and the sea into which it falls forms an arm of the ocean which surrounds the earth. This arm joins the Mediterranean, and separates Europe from Asia. Towards the middle is Jerusalem, with two curious arms of the sea running past it; while to the south there is a long and straight sea in an east and west direction. The various islands of the Mediterranean are put in a square patch, and Rome, France, and Germany are indicated, while Thula, Britannia, and Scotia are marked as islands in the north-west of the ocean that surrounds the whole world.
Fig. 45.Fig. 45.—Tenth Century Maps.
We figure below two very curious maps of the world of the tenth century—one of which is round, the other square. The first is divided into three triangles; that of the east, or Asia, is marked with the name ofShem; that of the north,or Europe, with that ofJaphet; that of the south, or Africa, with that ofCham. The second is also divided between the three sons of Noah; the ocean surrounds it, the Mediterranean forms the upright portion of a cross of water which divides the Adamic world.
Omons, the author of a geographical poem entitledThe Image of the World, composed in 1265, who was called the Lucretius of the thirteenth century, was not more advanced than the cosmographers of the former centuries of which we have hitherto spoken. The cosmographical part of his poem is borrowed from the system of Pythagoras and the Venerable Bede. He maintains that the earth is enveloped in the heavens, as the yoke in the white of an egg, and that it is in the middle as the centre is within the circle, and he speaks like Pythagoras of the harmony of the celestial spheres.
Omons supposed also that in his time the terrestrial paradise was still existing in the east, with its tree of life, its four rivers, and its angel with a flaming sword. He appears to have confounded Hecla with the purgatory of St. Patrick, and he places the latter in Iceland, saying that it never ceases to burn. The volcanoes were only, according to him, the breathing places or mouths of the infernal regions. The latter he placed with other cosmographers in the centre of the earth.
Another author, Nicephorus Blemmyde, a monk wholived during the same century, composed three cosmographical works, among them the following:On the Heavens and the Earth, On the Sun and Moon, the Stars, and Times and Days. According to his system the earth is flat, and he adopts the Homeric theory of the ocean surrounding the world, and that of the seven climates.
Nicolas of Oresmus, a celebrated cosmographer of the fourteenth century, although his celebrity as a mathematician attracted the attention of King John of France, who made him tutor to his son Charles V., was not wiser than those we have enumerated above. He composed among other works aTreatise on the Sphere. He rejected the theory of an antichthonal continent as contrary to the faith. A map of the world, prepared by him about the year 1377, represents the earth as round, with one hemisphere only inhabited, the other, or lower one, being plunged in the water. He seems to have been led by various borrowed ideas, as, for instance, theological ones, such as the statement in the Psalms that God had founded the earth upon the waters, and Grecian ones borrowed from the school of Thales, and the theories of the Arabian geographers. In fact we have seen that Edrisi thought that half of the earth was in the water, and Aboulfeda thought the same. The earth was placed by Nicolas in the centre of the universe, which he represented by painting the sky blue, and dotting it over with stars in gold.
Leonardo Dati, who composed a geographical poem entitledDella Spera, during this century, advanced no further. A coloured planisphere showed the earth in the centre of the universe surrounded by the ocean, then the air, then the circles of the planets after the Ptolemaic system, and in another representation of the same kind he figures the infernal regions in the centre of the earth, and gives its diameter as seven thousand miles. He proves himself not to have known one half of the globe by his statement of the shape of the earth—that it is like a T inside an O. This is a comparison given in many maps of the world in the middle ages, the mean parallel being about the 36th degree of north latitude, that is to say at the Straits of Gibraltar; the Mediterranean is thus placed so as to divide the earth into two equal parts.
John Beauvau, Bishop of Angiers under Louis XL, expresses his ideas as follows:—
"The earth is situated and rests in the middle of the firmament, as the centre or point is in the middle of a circle. Of the whole earth mentioned above only one quarter is inhabited. The earth is divided into four parts, as an apple is divided through the centre by cutting it lengthways and across. If one part of such an apple is taken and peeled, and the peel is spread out over anything flat, such as the palm of the hand, then it resembles thehabitable earth, one side of which is called the east, and the other the west."
The Arabians adopted not only the ideas of the ancients, but also the fundamental notions of the cosmographical system of the Greeks. Some of them, asBakouy, regarded the earth as a flat surface, like a table, others as a ball, of which one half is cut off, others as a complete revolving ball, and others that it was hollow within. Others again went as far as to say that there were several suns and moons for the several parts of the earth.
In a map, preserved in the library at Cambridge, by Henry, Canon of St. Marie of Mayence, the form of the world is given after Herodotus. The four cardinal points are indicated, and the orientation is that of nearly all the cartographic monuments of the middle ages, namely, the east at the top of the map. The four cardinal points are four angels, one foot placed on the disc of the earth; the colours of their vestments are symbolical. The angel placed at the Boreal extremity of the earth, or to the north of the Scythians, points with his finger to people enclosed in the ramparts of Gog and Magog,gens immundaas the legend says. In his left hand he holds a die to indicate, no doubt, that there are shut up the Jews who cast lots for the clothes of Christ. His vestments are green, his mantle and his wings are red. The angel placed to the left of Paradise has a green mantle and wings, and red vestments. In his lefthand he holds a kind of palm, and by the right he seems to mark the way to Paradise. The position of the other angels placed at the west of the world is different. They seem occupied in stopping the passage beyond theColumns(that is, the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean). All of them have golden aureolas. The surrounding ocean is painted of a clear green.
Another remarkable map of the world is that of Andrea Bianco. In it we see Eden at the top, which represents the east, and the four rivers are running out of it. Much of Europe is indicated, including Spain, Paris, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, which are named, England, Iceland, Spitzbergen, &c., which are not named. The portion round the North Pole to the left is indicated as "cold beneath the Pole star." In these maps the systematic theories of the ancient geographers seem mixed with the doctrines of the Fathers of the Church. They place generally in the Red Sea some mark denoting the passage of the Hebrews, the terrestrial paradise at the extreme east, and Jerusalem in the centre. The towns are figured often by edifices, as in the list of Theodosius, but without any regard to their respective positions. Each town is ordinarily represented by two towers, but the principal ones are distinguished by a little wall that appears between these two towers, on which are painted several windows, or else they may be known by the size of the edifices. St. James of Compostella in Gallicia and Rome are representedby edifices of considerable size, as are Nazareth, Troy, Antioch, Damascus, Babylon, and Nineveh.