THE GEOGRAPHERS’ WORLD
From Arabia Felix to the Balad al-Ifranj (Land of the Franks)
WHAT NOTION DID the men and women of the Middle Ages have of the world they lived in? What were their perceptions of the boundaries—geographical, religious, cultural, and so on—that separated what we moderns call the Islamic world from Europe? Clearly, the responses are many, and the perspective changes with one’s point of view: from a Northumbrian monastery in the eighth century, from Baghdad in the tenth century, from the unstable border regions of Anatolia in the eleventh century, from a Genoese ship sailing off the coast of Egypt in the thirteenth century, from the Maghreb in the fourteenth century, or from Cape Sagres at the far southwest tip of Portugal in the fifteenth century. We are, moreover, obliged to rely on the reflections that a small literate elite, usually male, left behind regarding the geography and ethnography of the world they inhabited.
The geographical culture of these literati had a dual foundation: scriptures (the Bible and the Qur’an) and Greek geographical scholarship. Greek geography had undergone transformations, since medieval Europe received it through the filter of Latin geographical and encyclopedic works, texts dating primarily to the fifth to seventh centuries. In the Umayyad and then the Abbasid caliphates, translations of Greek works were supplemented by Persian and Hindu geographical traditions. For these geographers, there was no hard and fast distinction between physical geography, human geography, and religious explanation: mountains, for example, are sometimes presented as manifestations of divine power, and the excessively cold climate of the northern countries is cited as an explanation for why Slavs and Franks are unable to grasp the superiority of Islam.
SONS OF ISAAC, SONS OF ISHMAEL
Let us first examine the frameworks that the reading of scripture—the Bible and the Qur’an—imposes on geography and ethnography. The tendency is more pronounced in Latin scholarship than in Arabic, and for good reason: the Bible (unlike the Qur’an) provides geographical information that allows Christians to retrace the history of the chosen people from Adam to Jesus (though with a few gaps) and to situate a number of neighboring or enemy peoples within that history. Time is structured in the same way: the chroniclers divided history into six “ages,” punctuated by the lives of the protagonists of divine history: Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, Nebuchadnezzar (the only “enemy” in the series), and then Christ.1
For Isidore of Seville, a Latin encyclopedist and contemporary of Muhammad, human geography was a consequence of human history: the diversity of peoples, languages, and customs in the world is the direct result of the Fall, the Flood, and the confusion of tongues at Babel. We all descend from Adam and Noah. Our ancestors all spoke the same language, Hebrew, until God destroyed the Tower of Babel. For Isidore, the astonishing diversity of humankind could be rationally explained; at least in theory, it was possible to go back to a unified origin, a common ancestor, in the person of Noah. Although Isidore integrates many details of the classical Roman ethnographic tradition, he places them within a biblical framework, imposing order on chaos.2 He presents his vision of historical ethnography in various writings, particularly in book 9 of the Etymologies. The world has seventy-two or seventy-three peoples, each with its own language, and all can be traced back to one of the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. That schema allows Isidore and his readers to classify all peoples within an apparently rational and comprehensible framework. He designates various biblical figures as fathers of precise peoples, including a son of Abraham, “Ishmael, from whom arose the Ishmaelites, who are now called, with corruption of the name, Saracens [Saraceni], as if they descended from Sarah, and Hagarenes [Agareni], from Hagar.”3
According to Genesis, Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn; his mother was Hagar, Sarah’s servant. The angel of the Lord who announced the birth of Hagar’s son told her he would be a “wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren” (Genesis 16:12, King James Version). Then Abraham’s wife, Sarah, bore a son, Isaac. When Isaac was weaned, his parents gave a great feast, and Sarah saw Ishmael mocking his younger brother (Genesis 21:9). She then demanded of Abraham: “Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son” (Genesis 21:10). And God told Abraham to heed Sarah, consoling him by declaring that “also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation.” That is the same message He sends to the desperate Hagar in the desert (Genesis 21:13, 18). Ishmael will live long enough to have twelve sons, “twelve princes according to their nations,” who “dwelt from Haviläh unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as thou goest toward Assyria” (Genesis 25:16–18). Isaac, Abraham’s legitimate son, was his heir; Ishmael was cast out into the desert. But his descendants remained a threat to those of Isaac. From the first century C.E. on, Jewish and Christian authors identified the twelve sons of Ishmael with the twelve Arabian tribes.4 In the early fifth century, Jerome claimed that they had usurped the name “Saracens,” “falsely taking the name of Sarah in order to claim to be descendants of a free and sovereign woman.”5 These Hagarenes, the descendants of the slave Hagar, claimed to be the sons of Sarah, Abraham’s legitimate wife; they insisted on being called “Saracens.” In fact, no Arab called himself a “Saracen,” a term originating in ancient Greek geography.6 But Isidore borrows this passage from Jerome, and many Latin authors will repeat that false etymology, making the Saracens the usurpers of a legitimacy that belongs solely to Sarah’s lineage.7
The Qur’an gives a very different account of Abraham and Ishmael. Abraham proclaims: “Praise be to God who has given me Ishmael and Isaac in my old age!” (14:39).8 Ishmael is the firstborn; it is he who accompanies his father to Mecca, where father and son build the Kaaba together (2:125–27). Several times in the Qur’an, the faithful are entreated to declare that they worship the God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac; sometimes the names of the prophets are added, especially Moses and Jesus.9 Far from being an illegitimate child, Ishmael was “a man of his word, an apostle, and a prophet. He enjoined prayer and almsgiving on his people, and his Lord was pleased with him” (19:54–55). When the Qur’an describes how Abraham made ready to sacrifice his son, it does not specify whether that son was Ishmael or Isaac (37:101–7).
Arab geographers adopted these Qur’anic traditions. For Mas‘
d
in the tenth century, there is a clear hierarchy between the three sons of Noah:
at the top, Shem and his descendants (including the Arabs and Hebrews); then Japheth
(the ancestor of the Chinese, the Indians, the Franks, the Slavs, and the Turks, among
others); and last of all, Ham (from whom the blacks were descended).10 This is sometimes difficult to fathom: Mas‘d also distinguishes between the Y
n
niyyn (Greeks), descendants of Japheth, and the Rm (Byzantines), stemming from Shem.11 But for Latin and Arab authors, both Christians and Muslims, the scriptural genealogies
provide geographical and ethnographical information of the utmost importance.
THE ENDS OF THE EARTH: THE LAND OF THE FRANKS AS SEEN FROM MEDIEVAL BAGHDAD
André Miquel has described in detail the development of geography in the intellectual
centers of the Muslim world, especially in Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, but also,
as of 972, in Cairo, the new capital of the Fatimid caliphate. The geographers of
the early centuries of Islam translated, adapted, and commented on Greek, Persian,
and Hindu geographical works, and added to them new knowledge gleaned from travel
narratives, dispatches, and government records. In the ninth and tenth centuries,
that new science, called “jghr
fa” after the Greek, benefited from masterful encyclopedic works such as those of Mas‘d, Ibn Hawqal, and al-Muqaddas. Geographical knowledge became part of adab, the learned culture that every educated man had to possess.
The Muslim world claimed for itself the choicest part of that geography. Baghdad, a political and cultural capital, was in some sense the center of the world, though at times it shared that position with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Muslim authors attempted to establish and communicate knowledge of a world under the power of the caliphs by sketching mountainous reliefs, rivers, and trade routes by land and sea. Geographers described the populations of the different regions, their languages, habits, and economy. They drew a portrait of the cities, tallying up the mosques, hammams, and markets for the reader.
The world beyond the dr al-islm fascinated these geographers as well, especially the vast, populated, rich regions
of India and China. China in particular inspired open admiration in the Arab geographers.
Its administration, justice system, and economy all functioned impeccably, according
to many of these authors, and everything seemed devoid of corruption. Beyond China
and India, especially in the islands of the sea, geographers situated a fabulous world.
Some islands abounded in gold or precious stones, while on others fruit trees grew
on their own, sparing men the trouble of working the soil. Other islands were inhabited
by cannibals, still others by women whose sexual appetites killed the poor sailors
who dropped anchor there. In indulging in such fantasies of wondrous creatures and
bizarre societies, Muslim geographers perpetuated the traditions of their ancient
Greek predecessors. They populated the edges of the world with monstrous beings: headless
men with faces on their chests, others with human bodies and dog’s heads. There was
the country of the Waq-Waq, where one tree bore a strange fruit in the shape of a
naked woman. When ripe, the fruit opened its mouth, said “Waq Waq!” and fell; upon
bursting on the ground, it gave off a nauseating odor.12
Unlike China or India, Europe occupied only a very small place within that vision
of the world. The Greek word Europa, which in Arabic became Arfa, certainly existed among these geographers: it is found in the tenth century, for
example, in Hamdni and Ibn Khurddhbih, for whom the term designates the northwest quadrant of the habitable world.13 But, as André Miquel points out, “except for these old recollections, the concept
of Europe is nonexistent.”14 Arab scholars instead divided the world into climates (iql
m): horizontal bands, normally seven of them but sometimes three or five, generally
distributed between the equator and the arctic.15 Each climate had its own characteristics (humidity, heat, and so forth) that determined
the nature and behavior of its flora, fauna, and human inhabitants. Like the Greeks
before them, the Arab geographers claimed that the climates most propitious for human
habitation were those where they themselves lived. In these “central” climates, man
could practice agriculture, build cities, and benefit from a physical and mental balance
that allowed for intellectual reflection, erudition, and adherence to the true religion.
According to these geographers, things were very different for the unfortunate souls who lived in too hot or too cold a climate. Their agriculture was more rudimentary, their constructions were flimsily made of wood or straw, and the fragility of their health could be clearly discerned by the color of their skin—too dark for those who lived in excessively hot climates, too light for those who lived in the cold countries. The damaging effects of the climate also prevented them from reasoning clearly, depriving them of the benefits of philosophy, science, and the true religion. It was not at all astonishing that so few of them were Muslims!
Of course, the damaging effects of a frigid climate affected peoples other than those
of Europe: the Turks especially, whose military feats the geographers admired but
whom they portrayed as half-savages. The cold impelled them toward nomadism and war,
but it reduced their sexual appetites. The same effects were also found among the
Slavs and Franks (Ifranj), peoples who inhabited the extreme northwest of the inhabited world. That portrait
of barbarians from the north corresponded to that of antiquity, whether Herodotus’s
Scythians or Tacitus’s Germans. Hamdni (d. 945) based that view on Ptolemy’s astronomy. He enumerated the regions of the
northwest quadrant of the world: Britain, Galatia, Germania, Italy, Gaul, Puglia,
Sicily, the land of the Celts, Hispania, and the land of the Slavs, among others.
The inhabitants of these regions are “little inclined to submission, love freedom,
weapons, and fatigue, are hostile to peoples of law and order, and given to grand
designs.”16 These traits are the effect of the distance from the sun but also of the greater
influence of the planets Jupiter and Mars.
Other geographers went even further. Consider, for example, what the great encyclopedist
Mas‘d (d. 956–957) says in his Book of Notification and of Verification:
The inhabitants of the northern quadrant are those for whom the sun is far from the zenith—increasingly far the farther north they go—such as the Slavs, the Franks, and other nearby nations. Since, because of its distance, the sun has only a weak power over these regions, cold and humidity prevail, and snow and ice rarely disappear from them. The humors have little ardor there; the men are tall in stature, fierce, with crude manners, dull intelligence, halting speech; their complexion is so white that it turns from white to bluish; their skin is thin, their flesh thick; their eyes are also blue, matching the tone of their complexion; their hair is flowing and rust-colored, because of the water vapor. Their religious beliefs are without solidity, because of the nature of the cold and for lack of heat. Those who live farthest to the north are the coarsest, the stupidest, and the most brutish. These characteristics grow more prominent as they move farther away, in a northerly direction, as can be seen among the Turkish tribes that move deep into the northernmost regions. Being very far from the trajectory described by the sun as it rises and sets, they have abundant snow; cold and humidity invade their homes. Their bodies become soft and thick; the vertebrae of their backs and the bones in their necks are so flexible that they can fire their arrows while twisting their torsos backward as they flee. They are so fleshy that dimples form at the joints; their eyes are small in round faces; the heat rises to their faces when the cold takes hold of their bodies. The cold humors, in fact, produce a great deal of blood and color the complexion, because the cold gathers up the heat and makes it appear on the outside. The men who live sixty some miles above that latitude are the tribes of Gog and Magog. They belong to the sixth climate and are counted among the beasts.17
Wherein lay the interest of that description for the Baghdad scholar and his reading
public? No doubt it confirmed his sense of religious and cultural superiority: heavenly
bodies themselves, especially the sun, procure significant benefits for those who
have the good fortune to live in the central climates of the “ecumene,” the inhabited
world. Lack of heat is the cause of Northerners’ peculiar characteristics: blue eyes,
red hair, stupidity, and coarseness, and even of the Turks’ ability to shoot arrows
while turning backward in their saddles. Such is the sad fate that the Arabs escaped
by being born in the center of the world. To be sure, it is not possible to speak
of a vision of “Europe” here, only of the vision of a vague and vast north, with the
borders between Franks, Slavs, and Turks remaining unclear. For Mas‘d, these peoples were the neighbors of Gog and Magog, savage nations who, according
to the Bible and the Qur’an, would devastate the civilized world at the end of time.
We have the impression that these ferocious men of the north are in some sense midway
between “normal” men, those who inhabit the central climates, and the monstrous beings—Gog,
Magog, cannibals, Waq-Waq—that haunt the periphery of the world. Nevertheless, the
remote peoples elicit amazement: Ibn Rusteh, in his Book of Precious Things (903), describes whaling activity among the Irish and evokes islands inhabited by
geese who feed solely on the flesh of shipwrecked sailors.18
The sources for these ideas about the peoples who inhabit the fringes of the earth
were often Greek and Persian geographical works, but more recent information can also
be found. An embassy left Baghdad in June 921, arriving almost a year later at the
king of the Bulgarians on the banks of the Volga. The secretary of the group, Ibn
Fadln, described the journey, the talks, and the customs of the peoples they met: Khwrezmians, Turks, Oghuz, Bashkirs, Pechenegs, Bulgarians, Russians. He describes with
astonishment the harsh climate of the Great North, where his beard froze when he left
the hammam, and notes the stupor and terror inspired by his first experience of the
aurora borealis. Ibn Fadln has the eye of an ethnographer: for each people he meets, he describes their eating
habits, clothing, cleanliness (or most often, lack of cleanliness), marriage customs
and sexuality, funeral rites, and, of course, religion. He encounters Turks who worship
phallus idols and who explain their belief as follows: “I came out of something similar
to this, and I do not know any creator of myself other than it.”19 The Russians have idols sculpted from wooden stakes stuck into the ground, and they offer these idols presents to obtain their
favor for trade or war. As for the king of the Bulgarians, he had converted to Islam:
Ibn Fadln lectured his muezzin about the proper way to make the call to prayer and tried in
vain to compel Bulgarian women to veil themselves.
Ibn Fadln’s report could only confirm the climatic scheme that relegated the peoples of the
north to an inferior status. In that border world, Gog and Magog were not far off.
The Bulgarians supposedly told him of their encounter with a giant who belonged to
that people: at the mere sight of it, children died and pregnant women miscarried.
That giant caught men and strangled them; in the end, the king of the Bulgarians had
him hanged, and he showed the grave to Ibn Fadln. Of the peoples Ibn Fadlan met, he called the Russians “asses who have gone astray,”
partly because of their idolatry but also because they were “the dirtiest creatures
of God.”20 They bathed rarely or not at all; they had sex with their slaves in view of everyone.
But his ethnographer’s gaze is apparent especially in the detailed description he
gives of the funeral of a Russian chief. The people placed the deceased in a temporary
grave while all the preparations were being made for his cremation. They erected tents
around the grave and selected one of the young slave girls to share her master’s death.
For ten days, that victim celebrated with the deceased’s loved ones, drinking with
them and giving herself to all the men. On the tenth day, they built a pyre, on which
was placed a boat containing a funeral chamber. They removed the deceased from his
grave, dressed him sumptuously, offered him food and drink; they killed animals for
him. Finally, they placed his slave next to him; four men held her, and an old woman,
known as “the angel of death,” stabbed her with a dagger. Then they lit the funeral
pyre, and in the space of an hour everything was reduced to ashes. These reports would
provide new material for geographical encyclopedias but would change none of the assumptions
regarding the barbarians of the north.
In general, however, these peoples of the north occupy little place in the geographers’
accounts. The encyclopedists, though they wanted to give an exhaustive description
of the inhabited world, had few things to say about northern Europe. Are we to conclude,
with Bernard Lewis, that medieval Arabs were lacking in curiosity about the world
beyond the dr al-islm?21 Not at all: we have already mentioned the important place occupied by China and India,
and Byzantium too merits long descriptions.
Byzantium—Rm in Arabic (literally, “Rome”)—was a rival that inspired fear and envy in many Arab
authors of the ninth and tenth centuries, at a time when the empire of Constantinople
was regaining force and making conquests at the expense of its Muslim neighbors. These
authors took an interest in the empire’s military might and infrastructure: its networks
of fortresses, the organization of its army into themata, and its fleet.22 The capital of Constantinople, which the Arab troops had tried to take in the early
decades of the conquest, remained invincible, proud behind its powerful walls. Hrn Ibn Yahya, a prisoner of war who lived there (probably in about the late ninth century), offers
a tableau rich in information, insisting particularly on the sumptuous decorations
of the palaces and churches and on the pomp of the processions and rites during feast
days, providing as an example a detailed description of the organ played during a
banquet. The geographers would repeat that account. Byzantium was an object of anxiety
and fascination. They wondered where its financial resources came from: they knew
that the land tax was the basis for this wealth but sometimes suspected that the emperor
possessed inexhaustible funds resulting from his knowledge of alchemy. In fact, whispered
Ibn al-Faqh in his Kitb al-buldn (Book of Lands; ninth century), the emperor had in his treasury sacks of white powder that he turned
into gold.23
Although Constantinople was the capital of Rm, these geographers were well aware that there was another Rome, the first, in the
West. Mas‘d points out the importance of that Mediterranean city and traces its history from
Julius Caesar to Constantine, listing the emperors. He also describes how Christianity
had replaced the cult of idols there. The city became the see of the patriarch, called
bb, or “pope.”24 For many authors, the description of the city was tinged with the supernatural: Ibn
Khurddhbih (in his Kitb al-maslik wa l-mamlik, Book of Roads and Kingdoms, written in about 885) provides a description that would be largely adopted (and
sometimes expanded) by his successors. He claims that Rome had 12,000 streets, each
with 1,223 palaces; there were 95 markets and 40,000 baths (600,000 according to Ibn
al-Faqh in 903). But it is the ascendancy of the church that especially captured Ibn Khurddhbih’s imagination: 1,220 stylite monks were said to live perched on as many columns;
there were supposedly 1,200 churches (24,000 according to Ibn al-Faqh), more than 100,000 bells, 21,000 gold crosses, and so on. The largest of these
churches was said to measure 3 kilometers long and was illuminated solely by the carbuncles
inserted in the eyes of statues. In the Basilicas of the Apostles Peter and Paul,
lamps burned with oil collected in a remarkable manner: the wind blew into a copper
weathercock in the shape of a bird, which began to whistle. In response, every thrush
in the area gathered a twig from an olive tree and came to deposit it in front of
the church.25
Europe would occupy a much more important place for Ab ‘Abdallh Muhammad Idrs, who in the 1150s composed his Book of Roger for Roger II, Norman king of Sicily.26 Idrs’s avowed aim was to present an overarching and accurate view of the world. He drew
a map of the world, for which the Book of Roger was in some sense a detailed commentary (figure 1). He used the texts of previous geographers, his own knowledge of the places he had
seen (in Sicily, Spain, and the Maghreb), and also the eyewitness accounts of the
travelers and merchants who frequented the Palermitan court, accounts he seems to
have collected systematically. Idrs was no longer writing from the viewpoint of literary adab; he condensed the historical excursus and the descriptions of wonders that he found
in his sources. He did not eliminate them completely, however: in his description
of Rome, for example, there are again twelve hundred churches, a large canal made
of copper and, in one church, twelve statues of pure gold whose eyes are made of rubies.
In describing the churches of Rome, he relied more on Ibn Khurddhbih than on the prelates in Roger’s entourage.
Figure 1. Idrs’s world map, from a manuscript copied by ‘Al ibn Hasan al-Hf al-Qsim in Cairo in 1456, now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, UK (MS Pococke 375
fol. 3v–4r). In this illustration, South is at the top and North is at the bottom.
Idrs retains the classic structure of the seven climates; he cuts each climate into ten
cross-sections, west to east. Within each section, his description follows the traveler
on his itinerary, sailing along the coast from port to port, or traveling on the rivers
or overland routes. Sometimes he describes the countryside, the farmland, stock breeding,
or fishing. He names the cities, some of which (Cordova and Tunis, for example) merit
a relatively detailed description, while others are merely qualified as “remarkable”
(Clermont) or “pleasant, famous, and very prosperous” (Thessalonica). The information
on Europe contained in the Book of Roger surpasses by far that of its predecessors. It is possible, for example, to construct
an itinerary from Mainz to Utrecht, or from Cologne to Ratisbon (Regensburg), since
Idrs provides the name of each stopover city along the way. He gives abundant, well-understood
information on Sicily and southern Italy. For the rest of Europe, his information
is uneven; along with Henri Bresc and Annliese Nef, we may be surprised, for example,
at the paucity of information on northern Italy.27 No doubt some of his informants were Norman merchants, who provided him with knowledge
of the coasts of Brittany (along with a poor opinion of the Bretons). Normandy occupies
a place of choice in the description. Hence Bayeux is an “agreeable city, splendid
and prosperous,” whereas Paris is supposedly a city “of mediocre size.”28
The Book of Roger remains unique in geography: written in Arabic at the court of a Norman king, it blends the Arab geographical tradition with information collected from interviews with European travelers and merchants. It is testimony to the cosmopolitan character of the court of the kings of Sicily—the patrons of Latin, Greek, and Arab scholars—that this work could be published. But that cosmopolitanism had its limits: the book was not translated in the Middle Ages and therefore exerted no influence on Europeans’ knowledge of geography.
THE WORLD SEEN FROM LATIN EUROPE IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY: GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY ACCORDING TO HUGH OF SAINT VICTOR
The Greek geographers had made Delphi the navel (omphalos) of the world; the Arab geographers placed the center of the world sometimes in Baghdad, sometimes in the holy cities of Arabia. The European geographers of the Middle Ages, by contrast, never claimed to inhabit the center of the world. Beholden to the ancient traditions, they were aware that they lived on the northwest fringe of the earth. The center was Jerusalem, as can be seen on many medieval world maps. These geographers divided the world into three continents surrounded by the Ocean Sea: Asia, to the east, occupied half the habitable surface of the earth; Africa occupied the southwest quadrant; and Europe, the northwest.
Let us look at the world as seen from Paris in about 1130. Hugh of Saint Victor probably wrote his Descriptio mappe mundi shortly after 1130,29 with the aim of teaching the art of reading a world map. A native of Flanders, Hugh entered the monastery of the Canons Regular of Saint Victor, just outside Paris, in about 1110 and stayed there until his death in 1141. Not content to produce a mere catalogue of the knowledge of geography he had learned from books, he tried to present clearly and systematically the different toponyms. His text is both traditional and innovative. It is traditional in that his vision of the world differs very little from that of Isidore and Bede, the great authors of the seventh and eighth centuries who had described the world with knowledge drawn from their readings of the ancient geographers, the Bible, and the church fathers. But Hugh displays an interest in pedagogy that these authors did not have: his Descriptio is in some sense a scholarly manual, showing us how, in the Paris of 1130, a map of the world could be used to teach geography. Neither of the two twelfth-century manuscripts that contain the Descriptio preserves the map that Hugh was annotating. Another map has been identified, however, also produced in northern France in the twelfth century, similar to the one used by Hugh (reproduced in figure 2, with a schematic rendering in figure 3).30
Figure 2. World map from a twelfth-century manuscript of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. In this illustration, East is at the top and West is at the bottom. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (MS CLM 10058 fol. 154v). Reprinted by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Figure 3. Schematic drawing based on world map in figure 2 from plate II of P. Gautier Dalché, La ‘Descriptio mappe mundi’ de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1988). Reprinted by permission of the Institut d’Études Augustiniennes.
The organization of this text probably also reflects the order in which Hugh presented his geography lessons. He explains that he will begin with the description of the ocean, the twelve winds, and the islands found in the ocean. The map of the world located in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich makes it clear that Hugh began from the outside. The ocean, in the tradition of ancient geography, surrounds the habitable world, and the names of the twelve winds are marked around it. And in fact, having explained the position of the ocean and the names of the winds, Hugh goes on to list the islands found in the ocean and in the different seas, offering a brief description of some of the islands and their inhabitants. He then explains the division of the earth: “The world is customarily divided into three parts, namely, Asia, Africa, and Europe, though there is a great inequality of size among the three. But anyone wishing to know the regions of these three parts [of the world] or their provinces and divisions should first know the different mountains, rivers, and streams that separate the regions and provinces. In Asia, which contains almost half the earth [in size], the rivers and streams are the following….”31 An enumeration of the rivers of the different regions of Asia follows: it is easy to imagine the gesture of the teacher, tracing with his hand the course of rivers on the map. Next, he does the same for the mountains of Asia. The map of the world tries to impose order, to make the world knowable, comprehensible; Hugh’s reading of the map does likewise. The world is divided into three “parts.” (Hugh does not use the word “continent.”) Each of the three parts is divided into regions by mountains and rivers, natural boundaries created by God. The pedagogical approach is clear: it is first necessary to know these natural divisions before attempting to learn the names of the cities or kingdoms, which are human creations that follow the logic of natural geography delimited by the rivers and mountains. And so Hugh goes on to list the names of the “provinces and cities of Asia.” Then he enumerates the different seas between the continents, before turning to “the part of the world called Africa” and finally, to Europe, “the third part of the earth.”
A student who had attentively followed that geography lesson would have been able
to say, for example, that the city of Echbathanis is located in India, on the banks
of the Ganges, that the Cretan Sea is situated between the island of Crete and Alexandria,
that Europe is divided in two by the Alps, and that Noah’s ark came to rest on Mount
Ararat in Armenia. But what is the aim of Hugh’s pedagogy? What is its place in the
curriculum of the school of Saint Victor? In the prologue to the Descriptio, Hugh declares, “we propose in this work not to draw the map of the world but to
describe it, that is, to show not the things and images of things but rather their
meanings.”32 Geographical knowledge is useful for understanding the names of places encountered
in reading the Bible and the ancient authors. Note the difference from Arab geography.
The geography of Hugh (and of other Latin authors) was produced in and for a monastic
environment; it was based on the ancient authors and the Bible and served as a tool
for the monk or canon, whose principal concern was to understand his biblical and
patristic readings. Arab geography, by contrast, was produced in the court of the
caliphs and other Muslim sovereigns; it was an integral part of the adab, the education of the worldly man, the man of culture. It relied on the same Greek
tradition and incorporated information from the biblical and Qur’anic tradition, but
it also incorporated information gleaned from administrative dispatches, travel narratives,
and the reports of merchants. The aim was to accumulate the knowledge necessary for
a man of the court. The case of Idrs (a contemporary of Hugh) was slightly different. Idrs, like Hugh, used a map as his starting point; both of their texts were in some sense
presented as a commentary on a world map. But the result was quite different: Idrs wished to grasp the world in itself, whereas, in Hugh’s view, geography was a science in the service of exegesis and
theology.
For Hugh, before one can understand the spiritual meaning of Noah’s ark (to which he devotes a treatise), one is well advised to know how to situate Noah and his ark in time (through the study of history) and space (through geography). Geography and history are very useful auxiliary sciences, which constitute a modest but important part of education. To understand a map of the world is to comprehend a portion of the logical organization that God gave to the universe. Hugh and the other Latin geographers have little or nothing to say about the Muslim inhabitants of Asia and Africa, partly because their knowledge was based primarily on the works of ancient geographers, written before the rise of Islam. There were travel narratives, written by pilgrims, merchants, and others who traveled to Islamic countries, but the information they provided was not incorporated into the maps of the world or into the geographical texts.
Hugh drew information from the works of previous Christian authors, who themselves had taken them from ancient authors, the Bible, and the writings of the church fathers. The names of the cities and regions (when they are not distorted) are identical to those found in fourth-century authors, as if the intervening eight centuries had changed nothing. From time to time Hugh does provide a new detail: he places Egypt in Africa and not Asia, trusting his map of the world rather than the textual authorities. He cites a few names of cities that are not found in the ancient authors: Maroch (Marrakech) in Africa, Bogdada (Baghdad) and Toflit (Tiflis) in Asia. The king of Georgia, an ally of the Crusaders, had conquered the city of Tiflis in 1122, and the map of the world therefore included some relatively recent information. Hugh seems to have made an effort to update his knowledge, as is evident for Europe: he names several European cities whose criterion for inclusion seems to have been their importance in the twelfth century. But Europe, including Gaul, which he describes in detail, is full of errors: the Garonne flows into the Loire, Toulouse is placed in Brittany, and so on. Hugh’s view of the world does not correspond to reality.
This is even clearer in his descriptions of the Far East, where he combines outdated information, distorted names, and fantastic details. The divisions (ethnic and other) are obsolete, dating back to the time of the ancient authors, indirect sources for the world map. Hugh’s attitude toward knowledge is very different from our own: for him, the ancient authors are trustworthy a priori, and ethnic groups are relatively stable over the course of time. Toponyms are sometimes distorted and places difficult to identify. Finally, everything is colored by the fantastic: like his Arab colleagues, faithful to the ancient and medieval tradition, Hugh populates the eastern and southern edges of the world with bizarre creatures. In reference to India, for example, he declares:
In these regions are many marvelous monsters, if what is said is true. There are Pygmies, men a cubit tall, who live solely on [the sight of?] different colors. There are enormous bulls. There are Centaurs, half-man, half-horse. There are also Icthyophages [fish eaters], who eat eels thirty feet long. There are elephants and unicorns. There are midgets. Between the Coaspim River and the Red Sea, there are Himantipodes, who walk with their feet upside down, and Manticores, ferocious quadrupeds who have the heads and faces of women. There are Cenophales, who have men’s bodies and dog’s heads. There are Blemii, who have [men’s] bodies with no heads and eyes on their thoraxes, and Monopods, who have only one eye and only one foot apiece.33
This passage tells us a great deal about the medieval culture drawn from books, even though Hugh expresses reservations, beginning his description with “if what is said is true.” Yet he populates Africa with dragons and other monsters without the slightest hesitation. In the face of the rich menagerie haunting the ancient poems, which were still read in the Middle Ages, his reflex is not to call into doubt the existence of centaurs or sphinxes but rather to push them back to the remote edges of the habitable world. Ancient “scientific” authorities (such as Pliny the Elder) had already populated the Orient with these monsters; they would live on in the imaginations of sixteenth-century explorers, who baptized the new places they discovered with names borrowed from imaginary geography: Brazil, Thule, Amazonia. Jacques Le Goff writes that, for medieval Europe, “the Indian Ocean was a mental horizon, … the place where its dreams freed themselves from repression.”34 The Orient was the site of the bizarre and the unusual. It was therefore altogether normal that the worst of heresies surfaced in the Orient and that the decadent Orientals, not inclined toward rationality, embraced Islam.
The Descriptio is also filled with biblical names: Gog and Magog are relegated to an island in the ocean at the far northern end of the world. For Hugh, as for several other authors, the earthly paradise of Eden was located at the eastern extremity of the habitable world.35 And he indicates the place where Noah’s ark set down. His description of western Asia contains many biblical toponyms.
It would be all too easy to make fun of the paltry geographical knowledge of that Parisian canon—or, on the contrary, to excuse him by recalling that he had only inaccurate sources at his disposal. But what matters here is not the accuracy of his view of the world but the fact that he had one. For Hugh, the world was knowable, orderly, logical. Its natural divisions (continents, then regions delimited by mountains and rivers) were rational. They reflected supreme Reason, God as creator of the universe. The world’s human divisions (peoples, cities) closely followed that natural logic, because human logic can understand (at least imperfectly) the divine logic that gives order to the world. Although in this text Hugh does not make explicit the moral and theological difference between East and West, he does so in his Noah’s Ark.
Hugh of Saint Victor’s geography is imbued with history: the places mentioned are often those that played an important historical role. Conversely, his conception of history is very geographical. He imagines a slow progression of the key historical events from the East (where God created Adam and Eve in earthly paradise) to the Holy Land, the location of the life and death of Christ, then to the West, where the final drama must unfold:
Divine Providence seems to have arranged everything so that what came to pass at the origin of time should occur in the East, as at the beginning of the world, and that then, as the course of time approached its end, all events should descend toward the West. We therefore recognize the approach of the end of days inasmuch as the course of things has already reached the ends of the world. The first man, created in the Garden of Eden, was thus placed in the East…. Similarly, after the Flood, the origin of empires and head of the world was located in the East, among the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, and the Medes. It then came to the Greeks. Finally, toward the end of time, supreme power passed to the West, to the Romans, living at the extremities of the world. The sequence of events thus follows a straight line descending from East to West.36
God is the supreme historian, the sublime geographer: he organizes space and time. For Hugh, history is not merely a disorderly and arbitrary succession of events. It is a drama orchestrated by its divine Author/Director, acted out on the stage he has created (the world), a drama full of meaning for any informed reader.
For the Christian and for the Muslim, history has a beginning (the creation), a middle, and an end (the Apocalypse and Last Judgment). God is the author of history; everything that takes place therefore reflects divine will. The Christian (or Muslim) author tries to understand and explain the unfolding of history, placing particular emphasis on the development of the “true” religion (Islam or Christianity) and its expansion in the world. He must also account for the success (temporary and illusory, he claims) of those who embrace religious “errors” (heretics, pagans, Jews, “Trinitarians,” “Saracens”). Here Hugh attempts to do so by referring to a progression both temporal and spatial. History begins in the Far East (with the Creation) and “descends” to the West. For Hugh, the end of time had nearly arrived by the twelfth century, since the West was now at the center of history. That was a way of marginalizing the East, now Muslim. Of course, in biblical times Palestine was the center of the world, but now its true dramatic (if not geographical) center was located in Europe.
Hugh provides a particularly clear example of the translatio from East to West, but he is not alone: many medieval authors speak of the translatio imperii, the transfer of empire to the West’s benefit, and also of the translatio studii, the transfer of knowledge. The European West, though at the margins of the world, was said to be the heir, the new “decentered center,” of legitimate power, spirituality, and learning.
The geographical culture of the Islamic countries and of the Latin world drew from
the same sources but took very different forms. Authors such as Mas‘d in the tenth century and Hugh of Saint Victor in twelfth-century Paris knew how to
manipulate their geographical knowledge to assert the centrality of their culture
and religion and to marginalize those of the Other. At the same time, their Arab and
European contemporaries forged ideologies to justify the conquests being made at that
other’s expense.
