the mediterranean and the indian ocean 461
fourth-century ce original, offers a map stretching from Britain to India and assigns
greater significance to land, rather than sea, routes. The Mediterranean runs as a thin
strip through the center of this long map (6.75 m long x .34 m width), which Richard
Talbert has suggested was intended not as an accurate travel-map but as an ideological
statement of fourth-century Roman peace that could have been be displayed in a
procession, temple, or imperial palace (Talbert, 2010: 144–145). Talbert has tantaliz-
ingly imagined that this map, with its emphasis on land routes, may well have been a
set of three maps, the other two a celestial map and a map of open water routes
(Talbert, 2010: 146). Regardless, with its much-touted Templum Augusti at Muziris,
the Peutinger Table demonstrates a Roman cosmology that literally enshrined
Mediterranean beliefs (imperial cult) on the southwest coast of India.
Maps developed between 1000 and 1500 ce document Mediterranean-dwellers’
increased interest in the Indian Ocean and its markets for goods and potential con-
verts. The Tabula Rogeriana, prepared for King Roger II of Sicily by al-Sharif al-Idrisi
(1154 ce), drew on the experiences of Arab merchants and others who had travelled
along the Indian Ocean routes to produce a map that marks many of the ports and
topographical features of interest to travelers and traders, although it misrepresents
the relative size of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (the Mediterranean is
slightly larger) and shows only a small portion of Africa (Ahmad, 1987). The Catalan
Atlas (1375), thought to have been drawn by the Jewish Majorcan cartographer
Abraham Cresques, is well-known for its image of Mali king Mansa Musa, trans-
Saharan gold routes, and its depiction of the relatively-recent exploits of Marco Polo
(Edson, 2007: 74–86); yet it also drew on the experiences of Jewish and Muslim
merchants in the Arabian Sea to mark out several important ports along the west coast
of India and beyond. The Mappa Mundi created by Venetian monk Fra Mauro (1459)
in consultation with Venetian merchants and other expert sailors demonstrates rela-
tively good knowledge of the Indian Ocean (its size compared with the Mediterranean,
an even more detailed knowledge of west African and Indian ports, informative draw-
ings and notes on such details as the kinds of ships that sailed these waters, and
descriptions of marvelous goods, customs, and peoples (Edson, 2007: 141–164). The
Peutinger Table, the Tabula Rogeriana, the Catalan Atlas, and the Fra Mauro Map are
just four of the many maps from antiquity to the mid-second millennium ce that
documented an ongoing cartographic concern, both ideological and practical, in
some cases imagined and in others well-documented, for Mediterranean connectivity
with the Indian Ocean.
Linking the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean:
interrelated levels of exchange over timeIndian Ocean connectivity with the Mediterranean took place on many inter-related
levels, including political–military interactions, commodities exchanges, the move-
ment of peoples, and the exchange of ideas (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1997: 52–55).
Other scholars have referred to similar levels of exchange as boiling down to
“MCC,” namely migration, commerce and conquest (Pearson, 2003: 7). Whatever
formal schema one adopts for analyzing the exchanges, the connections between
the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean over time transpire at all these levels to