History of Cartography

Map-making Among the Romans.

We learn from Cicero, Vitruvius, Seneca, Suetonius, Pliny and others, that the Romans had both general and topographical maps. Thus, Varro (De rustici) mentions a map of Italy engraved on marble, in the temple of Tellus, Pliny, a map of the seat of war in Armenia, of the time of the emperor Nero, and the more famous map of the Roman empire which was ordered to be prepared for Julius Caesar (44 B.c.), but only completed in the reign of Augustus, who placed a copy of it, engraved in marble, in the Porticus of his sister Octavia (7 B.c.). M. Vipsanius Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augus tus (d. 12 B.c.), who superintended the completion of this famous map, also wrote a commentary illustrating it. It must have been a work of superior excellence. A copy of it may possibly have been utilized by Marinus and Ptolemy in their compilations. The Romans have been reproached for having neglected the scientific methods of map-making advocated by Hipparchus. Their maps seem to have met the practical requirements of political adminis tration and of military undertakings.

Only two specimens of Roman cartography have come down to us, viz., parts of a plan of Rome, of the time of the emperor Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), now in the Museo Capitolino, and an itinerarium scriptur, or road map of the world, com pressed within a strip 745mm. in length and 34mm. broad. Of its character the reduced copy of one of its 12 sections (fig. 3) con veys an idea. The map, apparently of the 3rd century, was copied by a monk at Colmar, in 1265, who fortunately contented himself with adding a few scriptural names, and having been acquired by the learned Conrad Peutinger of Augsburg it became known as Tabula peutingeriana. The original is now in the State library of Vienna.

Map-making in the Middle Ages.

In scientific matters the early middle ages were marked by stagnation and retrogression. The fathers of the Church did not encourage scientific pursuits. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was held by the more learned, but the heads of the Church held it to be unscriptural. Even after Gerbert of Aurillac, who is better known as Pope Sylvester II. (999-1063), Adam of Bremen (1075), Albertus Magnus (d. 1286), Roger Bacon (d. and indeed all men of leading had accepted as a fact and not a mere hypothesis the geocentric system of the universe and sphericity of the globe, the authors of maps of the world, nearly all of whom were monks, still looked in the main to the Holy Scriptures for guidance in out lining the inhabited world. We have to deal thus with three types of these early maps, viz., an oblong rectangular, a circular and an oval type, the latter being either a compromise between the two former, or an artistic development of the circular type. In every instance the inhabited world is surrounded by the ocean. The authors of rectangular maps look upon the Tabernacle as an image of the world at large. On the other hand there was the expression "circuit of the earth" (Isa. xl. 22), and the statement (Ezek. v. 5) that "God had set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations and countries." In nearly every case the East occupies the top of the map. Neither parallels nor meridians are indicated, nor is there a scale. Paradise is placed in the Far East.

The oldest rectangular map of the world is contained in a most valuable work written by Cosmas, an Alexandrian monk, sur named Indicopleustes, after returning from a voyage to India (A.D. 535), and entitled Christian Topography. According to Cosmas the inhabited earth has the shape of an oblong rectangle surrounded by an ocean in four great gulfs. A small map of the

world of the 8th century is found in a codex in the library of Albi, an archiepiscopal seat in the department of Tarn. Its scanty nomenclature is almost wholly derived from the "Historiae ad versum paganos" of Paulus Orosius (418). Far greater interest attaches to the so-called Anglo-Saxon map of the world in the British museum (Cotton mss.), where it is bound up in a codex which also contains a copy of the Periegesis of Priscianus. Map and Periegesis are copies by the same hand, but no other connec tion exists between them. More than half the nomenclature of the map is derived from Orosius, an annotated Anglo-Saxon version of which had been produced by King Alfred (848-900. The Anglo-Saxons of the time were of course well acquainted with Island (first thus named in 870), Slesvic and Norweci (Nor way), and there is no need to have recourse to Adam of Bremen (1076) to account for their presence upon this map. The broad features of the map were derived no doubt from an older docu ment which may likewise have served as the basis for the map of the world engraved on silver for Charlemagne, and which was also consulted by the compilers of the Hereford and Ebstorf maps.

The map or diagram of which Leonardo Dati in his poem on the Sphere (Della Spera) wrote in 1422 "un T dentre a uno 0 mostra it disegno" (a T within an 0 shows the design) is one of the most persistent types among the circular or wheel maps of the world. It perpetuates the tripartite division of the world by the ancient Greeks and survives in the Royal Orb. (See figs. 9 and io.) The map in Hereford cathedral (fig. 5) is the work of Richard of Haldingham, and has a diameter of 134cm. (53 inches). The "survey" ordered by Julius Caesar is referred to in the legend, evidently derived from the Cosmography of Aethicus a work widely read at the time, but this does not prove that the author was able to avail himself of a map based upon that survey. A map essentially identical with that of Hereford, but larger—its di ameter is 156cm. (6oin.), and consequently fuller of information— was discovered in 1830 in the old monastery of Ebstorf in Han over. Its date is Pomponius Mela tells us that beyond the Ethiopian ocean which sweeps round Africa in the south and the uninhabitable torrid zone, there lies an alter orbis, or fourth part of the world inhabited by Antichthones. On a diagram illustrating the Origines of Isidore of Seville (d. 636) this country is shown, but is de scribed as a terra inhabitabilis. It is shown likewise upon a num ber of maps which illustrate the Commentaries on the Apocalypse, by Beatus, a Benedictine monk of the abbey of Valcavado at the foot of the hills of Liebana in Austria (776). There are similar maps illustrating the Commentaries existing at St. Sever (1050), Paris (1203) and Tunis; others are rectangular, the oldest being in Lord Ashburnham's library (97o). Beatus, too, describes the southern land as inhabitabilis. The habitable world is divided among the twelve apostles, whose portraits are given. On the maps illustrating the encyclopaedic Liber floridus by Lambert, a canon of St. Omer (II20), this south land "unknown to the sons of Adam," is stated to be inhabited "according to the philos ophers" by Antipodes. Lambert, indeed, seems to have believed in the sphericity of the earth. Diagrams illustrating the division of the world into climata are to be found in the opus majus of Roger Bacon (d. 1294) and in Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's De imagine Mundi (1410).