186 emilie savage-smith
A roughly triangular form of the Mediterranean Sea occupies the center of an
anonymous Latin map made in 776 in southern France.^2 The sea is packed with 15
large globular islands and a triangular Sicily. This so-called ‘Isidore World Map’
formed part of a medieval computus document devoted to the calculation of time and
the representation of space.
In contrast to the smooth and simple lines of the eighth-century maps, an Anglo-
Saxon map produced at Christ Church Canterbury between 1025 and 1050 displays
a Mediterranean with a very wiggly shoreline and rather amorphous form, filled with
more than 60 unnamed islands of varying sizes, also with wiggly coastlines (British
Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B. V., fol. 56v; Barber, 2005: 46–47; Scafi, 2006: 139,
fig. 6.7a, b). The western end is open to the surrounding ocean, with additional
islands near its mouth. The Adriatic is elongated and turns decidedly westward, while
the Aegean narrows into a long northern extension leading to the Black Sea. Possibly
reflecting a much older Roman form of mapping, this English map was designed to
show the travels of the Hebrews and the localities of major peoples as well as legend-
ary monsters and marvels.
The Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea are reduced to narrow green ribbons on
the Peutinger map, drawn about 1200 on a parchment roll nearly seven meters long.
Based on what was likely a Carolingian prototype, the map illustrates Roman itinerary
lists and was surely intended for a boastful display of imperial ambition rather than a
road map (Albu, 2005; Salway, 2005; Albu, 2008; Elliott, 2008).
With a map made about 1200, usually called the Sawley World Map, we have the
forerunner of the Mediterranean layout found on later medieval mappaemundi exem-
plified by the famous Hereford map. The sea has roughly the shape of a hatchet
having its blade facing left, north (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 66, p. 2;
Barber, 2005: 50–51; Scafi, 2006: 142–143, fig. 6.10a,b). The “handle” narrows as
it approaches the Straits of Gibraltar, and its back side, along with the back edge of
the “blade,” forms the undulating North African shoreline. The coast of Spain and
the western side of Italy form the front side of the “handle,” while the join of the
“handle” to the “blade” occurs at the toe of Italy, where the coastline takes an abrupt,
90 ° turn northward. The top of the “blade” is formed by the coast of Syria and the
Levant, and the sea broadens out as it approaches Asia Minor and the Hellespont.
Roughly 20 islands of various sizes and shapes fill the sea. The map, predominantly
historical and biblical in nature, served as a prologue to a popular medieval history,
the Imago Mundi by Honorius Augustodunensis.
None of these Latin or Greek maps were of any use to a sailor or even as an
aide-mémoire to ports of call. They were theological and historical statements. In
Muslim maps of roughly the same time period, the Mediterranean Sea merits its own
map (distinct from world maps) and is depicted in a manner that is neither theological
nor historical, with no one city dominating, not even Damascus or Jerusalem or
Constantinople.
In the tenth century, Islamic maps were made primarily by four Arabic scholars
whom we group together today under the rubric “the Balkhı̄ school”—after Abū
Zayd Aḥmad ibn Sahl al-Balkhı, who died in 934, having spent most of his working ̄
life in Iraq (Tibbetts, 1992; Kahlaoui, 2008a: 60–124). His treatise on geography,
titled Illustration of the Climes (Ṣuwar al-aqālim), contained one world map and 21
regional maps. No copies of his treatise are preserved today, but we have many copies