While Constantine IV and Justinian II were ensuring the orthodox faith of the empire’s inhabitants, Ravenna was nurturing an unknown author who wrote a Cosmographia, a geographical description of the universe in five books. This anonymous scholar introduces himself in this way:
Although I was not born in India, nor travelled in Scotia or Mauritania or Scithia, or through the four quarters of the world, yet by theoretical learning I have understood the whole world and the various peoples who live in it, just as the world is recorded in the books [of those philosophers] in the times of many emperors.1
He was therefore not an explorer, or even a traveller, but a reader of books by philosophers (which is the name he gives to geographers) to which he had access in Ravenna.
The motive for his effort to explain and document the known world came from the author’s ‘most dear brother Odo’, who had asked him how to interpret what Scripture records of the creation of the world (Bk I, 1). He therefore began his study with the Book of Genesis and tried to incorporate all the information he could glean from ancient Greek, Roman and more recent writing about the universe. He found these resources in ‘the most noble’ city of Ravenna, which he placed at the very centre of this world, in the middle of the Mediterranean. While he reserves the epithet nobelissima for Ravenna and Constantinople, he accepts that Rome is even more noble, insignis nobelissima. Alexandria is most famous, famosissima ; Petavia, very old, vetustissima.2 His work appears to have been prepared to be read aloud, as auditors as well as readers are mentioned, perhaps in a school organized by the archbishop or the abbot of a monastery.
While the author was clearly based in Ravenna, he provides no evidence about the date of his composition and does not mention any events that would help to establish when he lived.3 But he cites seventh-century authorities like Isidore of Seville, whose writings would have become known in Ravenna by about 650, so he must have been active between that time and the Lombard capture of the city in 751. His Cosmographia is not concerned with the political authorities of his time: it does not record any eastern emperor or imperial official by name; there is no mention of the Lombards or Arabs.4 It draws heavily on late Roman administrative records of provinces and cities, rivers and mountains, as well as myths about foreign peoples. Only three copies survive, made in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the very lengthy period of transmission may account for some of the duplications, errors of spelling and garbled Latin. But in the early twelfth century the Cosmographia was available in Pisa, where a cleric named Guido incorporated the whole text into his Geographica, a geographical encyclopaedia. Guido’s copy was more accurate than the later ones; he identified place names better and tried to improve the original Latin.5 With his help we can study the Anonymous Cosmographer of Ravenna’s extraordinary synthesis of world geography, written around the year 700.
The first of his five books is a literary mappa mundi, an account of the entire universe from its creation by God across the four corners of the world; the second, third and fourth books detail over five thousand cities in the three regions – Asia, Africa and Europe – that Noah allotted to his sons, and the fifth includes a circumnavigation (periplous) of the Mediterranean, listing all the ports around the Magna Mare and the islands within it.6 Although the Cosmographia is based on lists of cities within the provinces of the Roman empire with their rivers and mountains, it stretches outside the imperial frontiers to the Baltic islands, the Orkneys and ultima Thule. ‘Britannia’, he declares, ‘is said to form part of Europe’, although it had not been Roman since the early fifth century. In the south, he identifies the two provinces of Arabia by their traditional names: Omeritia (land of the Homeritai), which is eudaemon (Greek for felix, prosperous) and full of cities, though neither Mecca nor Medina (previously Yathrib) are mentioned, and Arabia maior (Bk II, 6–7).
Biblical inspiration is fundamental to his work. He opens Book I with the divine order of the world created by God as recorded in Scripture, and links this to ‘the edict that went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed’ (Luke 2.1: ‘exiit edictum ex Augusto Caesare ut describeretur universus orbis’). He understands this more as a measurement of the world rather than a census. In order to describe the universe, he uses previous records of peoples, tribes, cities and rivers, recording the conflicts that made some gentes oppress others, ut barbarus mos est, ‘according to barbarous custom’, a muchused phrase. Repeatedly stressing that he can do nothing without Christ’s help, he insists that Christ made everything from nothing and put the great lights in the heavens, by which the most skilful men are able to compute movements and times according to the order of the creator.7
His description of the known world proceeds from East to West, from the Indian subcontinent to islands off the coast of Britannia, listing the places and peoples who inhabit those regions. He explains that the sun’s movements through the whole day along the line of the meridian enable us to fix both the hours of the day and the passage of time through the year, and to designate the countries of all the peoples placed within the great circuit of the unnavigable Ocean’s shore. In this way he introduces a concept of the world depicted within a circle – a plan familiar from late antique T-O (Isidoran) maps – ringed by the great ocean that surrounds the inhabited landmass. He measures the hours of the sun’s progress at the vernal equinox (21 March), adds the six winds that blow, followed by a long digression on where the sun goes at night.
At this point he cites Rigilinus, a philosophus, whose twenty-four lines of verse on the daily journey of the sun confirm that by night it moves through the partem arctoam (arctic region).8 Thanks to this otherwise unknown geographer/poet, the Anonymous Cosmographer can follow another tradition: that of prefacing serious intellectual endeavour by verses that enhance its authority and power.9 In the fifth century two craftsmen who created a map for Theodosius II also wrote a poem of dedication to the emperor.10 The verses by Rigilinus here support the Ravenna cosmographer’s argument that the sun does not hide behind huge mountains during the night, or sink below the waters of the Ocean, but returns to its seat in the East, whence it rises again in the morning. That the nightly movement of the sun continued to perplex early medieval philosophers is demonstrated by his conclusion that the means by which this happens ‘is known only to our God’.11 Then he records the hours of darkness going back from West to East, listing the regions of the north, from Germania and Britannia, via the Baltic islands of the Fini, to the Caucasus, Scythia, Sarmatia and the Caspian Gates to Bactrian India. He tries to fit all the peoples of the north into these twelve hours and draws attention to the importance of midnight with several scriptural references, such as the moment when Judith struck off the head of Holofernes.12
Although many of the ancient sources appear to be cited from later compendia and florilegia, there’s no doubt about the range of books available to the author in seventh-century Ravenna or his ambition. The Cosmographer begins by acknowledging his predecessors, ‘philosophers’ such as Ptolemy, Herodotus and Strabo, and Orosius, Solinus and a certain Castorius, among the Latin authors. He knows of Persian philosophers who wrote in Greek, uses Josephus for the regions of Palestine where the Hebrews live, and quotes several Greek Church Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Epiphanios of Cyprus, Athanasios of Alexandria, and Gregory the Great, the most famous of the Latin Fathers known to him. In addition to sixthand early seventh-century authorities such as Procopius, Cassiodorus and Stephanos of Byzantium, he also mentions Pentesileus as a reliable source for the Amazons and their region of Cholchia in a mixture of the fantastical and serious. He follows the typical early medieval habit of providing an extravagant etymological explanation of strange names, for example, ‘Altinum was once called Altilia because it was captured by Attila the Hun’.13
One of the chief sources he uses is attributed to Castorius, an otherwise unknown author, whom the Anonymous Cosmographer associated with a list of itineraries that linked cities across the Roman world, similar to the celebrated Tabula Peutingeriana.14 Whenever he cites Castorius as his source for specific city names, they can be traced to this document, which only survives in a twelfth-century medieval copy over seven metres long.15 Since the original Peutinger map was probably made in the Tetrarchic period, about ad 300, it’s likely that a copy was kept in Ravenna, where the Cosmographer thought it had been made by Castorius.16 And because he describes this philosopher/geographer as ‘learned in both languages’, there were probably both Greek and Latin references in this source, in contrast to the firmly Latin base of the surviving Peutinger map.17 It’s likely that he also had a circular map that showed the division of the universe into the portions distributed to Noah’s sons: Asia to Shem, Africa to Ham, Europe to Japheth.18
In frequent references to three – probably Gothic – experts, the Anonymous Cosmographer provides information about the extreme north and the outlying frontiers of Christendom. While ‘Athanarich’, ‘Ildebaldus’ and ‘Marcomirus’ could certainly be Gothic names – Athanarid, Heldebald and Marcomir – no individuals with these names are recorded elsewhere.19 The destruction of Gothic documents (especially those containing texts of Arian doctrine, which were all condemned to the flames) ensured their work did not survive. This probability is supported by the growing number of Gothic palimpsests identified, mainly Arian Christian texts, which originated in Ravenna and were re-used in Verona for the production of new records.20 It’s difficult to judge what the alleged Gothic geographers added to the Ravenna Cosmographer’s knowledge of the Goths, which is largely derived from Jordanes’ Getica and Isidore of Seville, whose works would certainly have found a place in a library in Ravenna.21 The archbishop, exarch and the abbots of the numerous monasteries in the city maintained their own libraries and would have regarded these Gothic geographers as a further source of esteem – experts who provide specifically Gothic names of settlements mostly unfamiliar to the Mediterranean world.
In addition to such Gothic texts, the Anonymous Cosmographer was clearly aware of the history of Ravenna, and that it had been ruled by the famous King Theoderic, whose palace, churches and mausoleum remained a constant feature of the cityscape. In particular, the equestrian statue that stood in front of his palace with its impressive basilica, rededicated to St Martin in the 560s, demonstrated his power and patronage. Even if the Gothic language had not survived the extinction of Arian theology, it left an influence in the spoken language and certain technical terms. The Cosmographer was heir to this integration of Germanic and Roman cultures, which is so evidently reflected in his text, and he therefore cited his Gothic informants, whether they were very useful or not.22 The Gothic names gave later readers problems as they were not familiar with the alphabet.
In Book V, a periplous of the Mediterranean, the Cosmographer makes Ravenna the starting and end point of his coastal journey and travels anticlockwise. In contrast, earlier descriptions of sailing around the Mediterranean began at the Pillars of Hercules in the extreme West and moved clockwise around the littoral. The text takes his audience south down the Adriatic coast of Italy and then up the western coast to Salerno, Rome and Genoa to Ventimiglia – and on via Nice, Marseille, Nîmes and Narbonne to the Pyrenees and Spain. Crossing over into North Africa and on to Alexandria, he travels north to Palestine, Syria, round Asia Minor into the Sea of Marmara past Chalcedon, up the Bosporus into the Black Sea, anticlockwise round the sea, and back to Constantinople. Then on to Thessalonike, south down the coast of Greece and up the Eastern Adriatic past Salona, Pola, Parentium, Tergeste, Aquileia and back to Ravenna. Pride in the most noble city of his birth, and an individual approach to maritime routes, which note some littleknown harbours, confirm the author’s focus on his own locality.
In a note attached to the list of coastal cities south of Ravenna, the author advises his reader that there may be a discrepancy between the names of cities already given and those which follow.
They are the same but men use different letters (diversis vocabulis) according to their custom and the diversity of their languages (linguarum diversitas). Just as men vary in their appearance (facie) so speech (loquela) divides men and cities. Don’t worry if despite a similar appearance you find the word (loquelam) used by men for cities varies. (Bk V, 1)
And indeed, when comparing the lists of cities in earlier books with those in the periplous there are some slight and other more notable differences, such as Pensarum/Pensaurum; Floxo/Flosor; Pinna/Tinna; Pausas/Pausulas. In contrast to other geographical lists of cities, the spelling of names is quite idiosyncratic, and there are duplications and undocumented sites. The Cosmographer’s attention to the spoken Latin of the time and the different spellings of city names reveals the difficulty of finding an established form.
The original text of the Cosmographia may well have been illustrated with a map of the world (mappa mundi), but no images accompany the surviving manuscripts, and the map created by Guido of Pisa in 1119 does not record any debt to the Anonymous Cosmographer. Such maps were highly appreciated, as we know from Pope Zacharias (741–52), a Greek, probably from southern Italy, who had one in Rome, and another noted in the 822/3 library catalogue of the monastery of Reichenau on Lake Constance. At Aachen, the great Frankish king Charles had a very heavy silver table ‘which shows the entire universe in three concentric circles’, as well as a copy of the Tabula Peutingeriana.23 When he was planning his military campaigns in Italy in 773 and 776, Charles acquired important topographical information from Martin, the envoy and deacon of Archbishop Leo of Ravenna (770–77), who ‘showed to the Franks the route into Italy’.24 The lists of cities in the Cosmographia, probably based on itineraries, may have generated practical value as well as an intellectual interest.25
Quite apart from any military usefulness, the Cosmographia of the anonymous scholar of Ravenna excels in its range of evidence and combination of geographical sources. This wealth of information played a critical part in the transmission of geography and cartography from Roman times via Guido of Pisa in the early twelfth century and on to a more sophisticated art of mapping, which encouraged new systems of recording sea voyages in the earliest portolan maps.26 An even more intriguing influence of the Anonymous Cosmographer is found in a copy of the Tabula Peutingeriana, discovered in the fifteenth century.27 The Renaissance scholar Pellegrino Prisciani, librarian of the d’Este collection, saw this manuscript on display in the bishop’s palace in Padua and copied a section of it, noting the Greek glosses for certain names, which he had difficulty reading. These Greek additions appear to have been made in Ravenna and may well have derived from the Anonymous Cosmographer.28 Since the copy of the Peutingeriana attested at Charles’s court appears to have had only Latin names, the removal of any Greek names that may have gone back to the anonymous Ravenna scholar could be the result of Carolingian scholars’ demand for ‘exclusive Latinity’.29
Despite the paucity of evidence for schools and teachers of Greek and secular learning in Ravenna, the presence of Johannicis, Rigilinus and the Anonymous Cosmographer implies a high standard of education and an interest in Greek and verse as well as maps and computation, which is not at all common in the early Middle Ages. And although some later emperors were not interested in supporting this bilingual atmosphere, Ravenna’s close ties to Constantinople constantly invigorated and refreshed it. Translation skills were at a premium and texts originally in Greek were made available in Latin as and when required. The same skills were evident in Rome at this time but were directed specifically to the translation of religious documents. While some influence from the East may have encouraged the Anonymous Cosmographer, much of the information required for his research into ancient geography appears to have been local. And since it had practical application, as King Charles later found, it was probably patronized by the exarchs, in whose palace Johannicis found employment.
As the head of imperial administration in the West, the exarch obviously had responsibility for maintaining written records of all that happened, based on a bureaucratic tradition developed in Constantinople – where records were kept in triplicate. The exarch’s palace must have had secure places for storing such papyrus documents, as well as a library for texts that might be useful.30 Similarly, within the city the archbishops were responsible for keeping all the documentation of land ownership, the church’s contracts, leases, rents and taxes paid in kind, safely stored in locked chests. And at precisely this date, around 700, a scribe in Ravenna copied a collection of sermons in Latin and stories of the Desert Fathers that had been translated from Greek into Latin by Pelagius, later pope (556–61). The manuscript is now sadly fragmented, but it reflects the widespread interest in such tales ‘good for the soul’, known in Greek as Apophthegmata Patrum (Plate 56). The unknown scribe may have been attached to a monastery where records were also carefully kept.31 The city had more than one library where records and important documents could be consulted and cited.
Was the Anonymous Cosmographer one of the officials appointed to look after such collections? He was almost certainly a cleric, like his ‘brother Odo’, given the restriction of more advanced learning to those dedicated to ecclesiastical careers by the mid-seventh century. But the verses composed by Rigilinus serve as a reminder that early medieval clerics often sustained a serious interest in pre-Christian culture. They studied and copied texts and emulated earlier styles in their own writing. They may have cited ancient authors such as Ptolemy and Strabo without actually reading the originals, but from one perspective this was another reflection of the high esteem in which classical learning was held. The Ravenna cosmographer displays an exaggerated dedication to the transmission and elaboration of Greek and Latin culture. In his work we can see the germs of an early medieval culture that emerges in western Europe personified by Charlemagne, with its combined Latin, Christian and Germanic tributaries, transalpine energies welded to those of Rome. For the Anonymous Cosmographer, however, ‘Rome’ still designated a single world empire, now centred on Constantinople, drawing on translations of Greek works. In this text we can see how these different forces influenced his world. Ravenna not only nurtured expertise in Greek, but also preserved a curiosity about the physical world, mountains and rivers, as well as imperial geography. It was a fulcrum for the combination of Gothic, Latin, Greek and Christian elements, made possible only by the wealth, culture and direct role of Constantinople itself, presented in the surprising range and confidence of a scholar who ‘explored the whole world’ from his vantage point in nobilissima Ravenna.