The Fourth Part of the World: the Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name

Book by Lester Toby

The Fourth Part of the World


· British Isles and northern Europe ·
CHAPTER ONE

MATTHEW’S MAPS

It is the vocation of a monk to seek not the earthly but the heavenly Jerusalem, and he will do this not by setting out on his feet but by progressing with his feelings.

—Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (circa 1150)

IN THE EARLY 1200s the Benedictine monastery of Saint Albans hummed with activity. Situated just a day’s ride north of London, the monastery was one of the largest and most important in England, home to as many as two hundred monks. In the parlance of the times they were Latins: members of the greater community of Roman Catholics in Europe who submitted to the authority of the pope. But Saint Albans wasn’t just a religious retreat. It was a busy center of economic, political, and intellectual life, and even had served as the site of an early drafting of the Magna Carta in 1213. It also ran a popular guesthouse—the first stopping point on the Roman-built Great North Road out of London—and operated stables that could accommodate some three hundred horses at a time. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Saint Albans was feeding and lodging a steady stream of visitors on their way to and from London: Oxford professors, royal councilors, powerful bishops, papal emissaries and monks from elsewhere in Europe, a traveling delegation of Armenians, and even the king of England himself. It was a worldly place.

After a day of traveling, guests would unwind in the monastery’s dormitories and refectory. Inevitably the talk would turn to where they had come from, and to what news and information they had picked up along the way. Again and again the same subjects came up: the weather, local crimes and misdemeanors, politics, the antics of the royals, the utterances of the pope, and the ill-conceived and apparently interminable series of wars being waged in the Middle East—the Crusades. One monk in particular had a special interest in stories from beyond the monastery’s walls. A down-to-earth, willfully opinionated, and generally likable crank, he was Brother Matthew Paris: the greatest and most colorful of all medieval church chroniclers.

Born in about 1200, Matthew joined the Benedictine order at Saint Albans in 1217, became its official chronicler in 1237, and died in 1259. The work for which Matthew is most famous is the Chronica majora, or Great Chronicle, a vast history of the world that, in typical medieval fashion, extends from the time of the creation right up to Matthew’s own time. The first half or so of the Chronicle amounts to little more than Matthew’s copying and fiddling with the chronicle of his predecessor, but from 1235 forward the entries are his own—and in one commonly consulted English translation they fill three five-hundred-page volumes. Yet despite its size the Chronicle is a wonderfully good read.

Matthew wrote and wrote and wrote. Keeping him properly supplied with writing materials alone was a tall order. In the thirteenth century the production of a book—that is, a manuscript scratched out with goose quill and ink, on page after page of parchment—amounted to a significant investment of a monastery’s capital. A single book might well consume the skins from a whole flock of sheep. But Matthew’s output justified this investment; it brought Saint Albans great renown, even during Matthew’s own lifetime.

Matthew was more than just a writer. He was also a gifted artist who illustrated his work with everything from tiny doodlings to lavishly executed portraits. Biblical figures, ancient emperors, popes, European kings, saints, monks, martyrs, battles, shipwrecks, eclipses, exotic animals—they all come to life on Matthew’s pages, and not just as frivolous additions to his text. They were an integral part of his chronicle. “I desire and wish,” he wrote, “that what the ear hears the eyes may see.”

That brief reference to hearing, rather than reading, serves as a useful reminder: in thirteenth-century England reading was primarily an oral act, not a silent one. Monks in monastery libraries read aloud to themselves, and the din they created would have exasperated modern library patrons. Matthew read to himself, to his fellow monks, and to special guests visiting the monastery, and what he offered his readers and listeners was a captivating mix of words and pictures. “Turning the pages of Matthew’s Chronica majora,” one modern historian has written, “is like opening the door of a great abbey cupboard, from which spills forth a rich succession of disparate images and objects, each conjuring up its own compelling story from the past, so that each event again becomes visually ‘present.’ ”

The great abbey cupboard. That’s a critical image to keep in mind when trying to make sense of the jumble of disparate ideas and images that one encounters in the works of Matthew and other medieval writers—especially in their maps.

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MATTHEW HAD a passion for maps. He drew them throughout his adult life, following a number of traditional models, and those that survive provide a remarkably useful survey of the different ways in which educated medieval Europeans imagined and depicted the world.

One of the main sources from which Matthew received his geographical ideas was the hugely popular and influential Etymologies, by Saint Isidore of Seville: a vast compendium of ancient and medieval learning, written in the seventh century a.d. Throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance, Europeans considered Isidore one of their most trusted authorities. He began the geographical section of his Etymologies by situating his readers cosmically. “The earth,” he wrote, “is placed in the central region of the cosmos, standing fast in the center, equidistant from all other parts of the sky.” This age-old conception of the world—as a sphere that sat motionless at the center of the universe, with the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars all revolving around it—was one that medieval authors often diagrammed in their works, and Matthew was no exception (Figure 6).

Medieval Europeans, even the most learned of geographers among them, are to this day often described as having believed that the world was flat.



Figure 6. The medieval cosmos, by Matthew Paris (circa 1255). The earth (terra) is fixed at its center, surrounded by the spheres of water, air, fire, the moon, the sun, the planets, and the firmament.

But this simply isn’t true. Thanks in large part to the labors of Arab astronomers and mathematicians, ancient Greek proofs of the earth as spherical had survived into the Middle Ages and were circulating in Europe—and at some point early in the thirteenth century an English scholar known as John of Holywood, or Sacrobosco, laid them out in an astronomical treatise appropriately titled The Sphere. For centuries afterward the work would be taught and studied in schools and universities around Europe. “If the earth were flat from east to west,” Sacrobosco wrote, “the stars would rise as soon for Westerners as for Orientals, which is false. Also, if the earth were flat from north to south, and vice versa, the stars that were always visible to anyone would continue to be so wherever he went, which is false. But it seems flat to human sight because it is so extensive.” Sailors certainly knew the world was round: a lookout at the top of a ship’s mast, Sacrobosco pointed out, always catches sight of land before a lookout standing at the foot of the mast—“and there is no other explanation of this thing,” Sacrobosco wrote, “than the bulge of the water.” Copies of The Sphere almost invariably included a small drawing illustrating this concept (Figure 7).

Another source that would have helped determine Matthew’s geographical outlook, and one that he had access to in the library at Saint Albans, was the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, by the fifth-century Roman writer Macrobius. The work—which for a full millennium after it was written would be used widely as a textbook in Europe—parsed The Dream of Scipio, a phantasmagoric musing on the world and its place in the cosmos, written some five centuries earlier by the Roman political philosopher Cicero. From a vantage point high up in the heavens, a character in Cicero’s work had described the earth just as Isidore would later do, fixed at the center of the universe, but had also drifted in for a closer look. “You will observe,” he declared, imagining the world as it would look from space,



Figure 7. Proof that the Earth is round: a sailor atop the mast of a ship catches sight of land before a sailor on deck. From a fifteenth-century edition of Sacrobosco’s The Sphere (early 1200s).

that the surface of the earth is girdled and encompassed by a number of different zones; and that the two which are most widely separated from each other and lie beneath opposite poles of the heavens are rigid with icy cold, while the central, broadest zone is burnt up with the heat of the sun. Two others, situated between the hot zones and the cold, are habitable. The zone which lies toward the south has no connection with yours at all.... As to its northern counterpart, where you yourselves live ... the territory is nothing more than a small island, narrow from north to south, somewhat less narrow from east to west, and surrounded by the sea that is known on earth as the Atlantic, or the Great Sea, or the Ocean.

Macrobius elaborated at considerable length on this division of the world in his Commentary, which contained a simple diagram. Today known as a zonal map, it showed the world as a circle, divided up into the five zones described by Cicero: two frigid zones, in the north and south; two temperate (or habitable) zones, closer to the center; and a torrid zone that wrapped around the earth’s equatorial regions. Zonal maps were drawn and studied often during the Middle Ages, and Matthew, of course, produced his own version (Figure 8).

As Matthew’s zonal map clearly shows, the northern temperate zone—which, following the practice of Arab geographers, Matthew placed at the bottom of his map—contains the whole of the world as the ancients had described it and as medieval Europeans still knew it. Isidore of Seville succinctly described its makeup in his Etymologies. “It is divided into three parts,” he wrote, “one of which is called Asia, the second Europe, the third Africa.” To accompany this description, Isidore, or one of his early copyists, drew a rudimentary diagram, and for centuries after his death permutations of this diagram, known today as a T-O map, would adorn European encyclopedias, chronicles, religious texts, and travelogues (Figure 9). Matthew knew T-O maps well and drew a number of them in his work (Figure 10).



Figure 8. Zonal map, showing the earth’s frigid, habitable, and torrid zones. South is at the top. Matthew Paris (circa 1255).

The standard T-O map places the world within a circular frame (hence the O). That frame represents the ocean as Cicero had described it: an all-encompassing body of water that washed every shore of the known world. Asia, the biggest continent, occupies the top half of the circle; Europe and Africa share the bottom. Dividing the three continents are two lines that meet at a right angle in the middle of the map (hence the T). These represent three bodies of water: the Mediterranean, separating Europe from Africa; the River Nile, believed to separate Africa from Asia; and the River Don, in Russia, separating Europe from Asia.



Figures 9 and 10. Left: A classic T-O map. Right: A T-O map drawn by Matthew Paris (circa 1255).

As a whole, the T-O scheme concisely and effectively represents the world as medieval Europeans knew it. But at a certain level the scheme is disconcerting to the modern eye, because it puts east at the top of the map. Today north would be the natural choice, but that’s an arbitrary convention, and in Matthew’s time it had yet to come into being. East, in fact, had primacy of place in medieval Europe—which is why so many modern European languages still use a form of the word orient to describe getting one’s bearings.

As the direction from which the sun rose, East represented the origin of things. (Oriens, the Latin root of orient, means “rising.”) The Old Testament is built on this foundation. God planted the Earthly Paradise and its four great rivers “eastward in Eden,” the Book of Genesis explains, and those waters nourished the world by flowing from East to West. “The glory of the God of Israel,” reads the Book of Ezekiel, “came from the way of the east.” The New Testament develops this theme: a star in the east announces the birth of Christ, who later dies on the Cross facing west. (Occidens, the Latin root of occident, means “falling” or “dying,” and can refer to the setting sun.) The symbolic meanings of east and west in early Christian theology were set out clearly by the fourth-century church father Lactantius. God, he wrote,

established two parts of the earth itself, opposite to one another and of a different character—namely, the east and the west; and of these the east is assigned to God, because He Himself is the fountain of light, and the enlightener of all things, and because He Himself makes us rise to eternal life. But the west is ascribed to that disturbed and depraved mind, because it conceals the light, because it always brings on darkness, and because it makes men die and perish in their sins.

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THE EARLIEST SURVIVING T-O maps, which appear in eighth-century copies of Isidore’s Etymologies, aren’t invested with any such Christian symbolism. They’re simple diagrams that seem based on a model that dates back at least to imperial Roman times (although no examples survive). They were a way of signifying the extent of not just the known world but also the world that the Romans aspired to rule: a world that the first Roman emperor, Augustus, described as “a global empire to which all peoples, monarchs, nations ... consent.”

After Christianity became the official religion of Rome, in the fourth century, the idea of Christendom came into being: a global Christian empire with Rome as its capital. In the centuries that followed, Christian mapmakers in Europe invested their simple T-O maps with increasingly complex layers of symbolism. Europe’s Christian rulers, for example, began to be depicted sitting on thrones and holding T-O globes in their hands: an imperial pose that would fast become a Christian archetype, used for centuries to represent not only political rulers but also Christ himself. Matthew drew many different rulers, both ancient and modern, in this pose (Figure 11).



Figure 11. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II holding a T-O globe. Matthew Paris (circa 1255).

The very shape of the T-O map lent itself naturally to a specifically Christian kind of symbolism: the O called to mind a Biblical description of God sitting “enthroned above the circle of the earth,” and the T called to mind the tau, a ...