A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter twelve
Maps illustrating the Mediterranean Sea that have been preserved today from antiquity
and the medieval period were not intended to be used as a modern map might be. For
the most part, they were theological maps, or historical narratives, or entertainments,
or plans for dreams of ambitious rulers. In other words, these early maps provided
visuality to larger schemes of power and position. It was not until the rise of portolans
that maps reflected maritime travel narratives, and, even then, most extant portolans
are vivid and highly decorative statements of power and dominion and not guides for
sailors. As such, they, like all maps from the earliest examples to Google Earth, have a
great deal to tell us about the way the world—or in this case the Mediterranean—was
conceived in political as well as practical terms.
Although the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy (d. c. 168 ce) composed a detailed
and technical book on world maps, with instructions for various methods of projec-
tion, the only actual maps associated with his treatise are in fact late Byzantine or
Renaissance reconstructions. For that reason, we are unable to say what a second-
century Ptolemaic map would have looked like.^1
For many Latin map makers, the Mediterranean was simply a line demarcating
Europe from the other two continents. This is evident, for example, in the so-called
T–O maps, where the known world is shown surrounded by a circular sea (the ‘O’ of
the maps) and divided into three continents by the T, whose ‘leg’ is the Mediterranean
Sea separating Africa and Europe. The horizontal bar of the T represents two rivers:
the River Nile and the River Don (see Figure 12.1).
These abstract maps reflect a cartographic tradition probably going back to ancient
Rome, preserved today as illustrations in ninth-century and later copies of the histo-
ries of Sallust (86–34 bce) and a poem on the civil war between Pompey and Caesar
composed by Lucan (39–65 ce) (Edson and Savage-Smith, 2004: 49–51 and fig. 25;
Edson, 1997: 14–23).
Similar representations of the Mediterranean as a thick, straight line occur on many
of the world maps illustrating a Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John composed
by the Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana in 776. On a copy made at the Monastery of
Cartography
emilie SaVage-SmitH