Farther east Esthonia and the land of the heathen are also mentioned.

Edrisi says that there are many inhabited and uninhabited islands in the Dark Sea to the west of Africa and Europe; indeed, according to Ptolemy “this ocean contained 27,000 islands.” He mentions some of them. There is an island called “Sâra,” near the Dark Sea.

He also mentions the Isle of Illusion (“ǵazîrat khusrân” == “Villuland,” cf. vol. i. p. 377), of great extent, inhabited by men of brown colour, small stature, and with long beards reaching to their knees; they have a large (broad)[194] face and long ears [cf. the ideas of the Pygmies, dwarfs, underground people and brownies], they live on plants that the earth produces of itself. There was a further large island “al-Ġaur,” with abundance of grass and plants of all kinds, where wild asses and oxen with unusually long horns lived in the thickets. There was the Isle of Lamentation (“ǵazîrat al-mustashkîn”), which was inhabited, and had mountains, rivers, many trees, fruits and tilled fields; but where there was a terrible dragon, of which Alexander freed the inhabitants. On the island of “Kalhân” in the same sea the inhabitants have the form of men but animal heads; another island was called the Isle of the Two Heathen Brothers, who practised piracy and were changed into two rocks. He also names the Island of Sheep and “Râka,” which is the Island of Birds (cf. pp. 51, 55).

What is here said about this island is approximately the same as Edrisi elsewhere states about the island of Scotland, following the “Book of Wonders,” which is attributed to Mas’ûdî.

It will be seen that he has a very heterogeneous mixture of islands in this western ocean. Some of them, like the Island of Sheep and that of Birds, as already suggested (p. 55), probably came from Ireland, and this whole archipelago is evidently related to the numerous islands of Irish legend, and points to an ancient connection, which may have consisted in reciprocal influence; while many of these conceptions travelled from the east through the Arabs to western Europe and Ireland, the Arabs again may have received ideas from the Irish and from western Europe and carried them to the east. Thus Edrisi relates that, according to the author [Mas’ûdî] of the “Book of Wonders,” the king of France sent a ship (which never returned) to find the island of Râkâ; we may therefore conclude that the Arabs had this myth from Europe. That many of these islands are inhabited by demons and little people, who resemble the northern brownies and the Skrælings, is interesting, and shows that whether the myths came from the Irish to the Arabs or vice versa, there were in this mythical world various similar peoples who may have helped to form the epic conceptions of the Skrælings of Wineland (cf. pp. 12, 75).

Edrisi’s map of the world is to a great extent an imitation of Ptolemy’s, but shows much deviation, which may resemble the conceptions of Mela, for instance. It might seem possible that Edrisi was acquainted with some Roman map or other. In his representation of the west and north coast of Europe, for instance, there are also remarkable resemblances to the so-called Anglo-Saxon map of the world (cf. vol. i. p. 183; vol. ii. p. 192); this may point to both being derived from some older source, perhaps a Roman map (?).[195]

Abu’l-Hasan ‘Alî Ibn Sa‘îd (1214 or 1218-1274 or 1286) says (in his book: “The extent of the earth in its length and breadth”)[196] of Denmark (the name of which he corrupts to “Ḥarmûsa”) that from thence are obtained true falcons (for hunting):

He speaks of the women’s island and the men’s island which are separated by a strait ten miles across, over which the men row once a year and stay each with his woman for one month. If the child is a boy, she brings it up until it reaches maturity, and then sends it to the men’s island; the girls stay on the women’s island.

Zakarîyâ Ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwînî (ob. 1283) has in his cosmography[197] several statements about the North, some of which have already been referred to (vol. i. pp. 187, 284; vol. ii. p. 144). Of the northern winter he has very exaggerated ideas. Even of the land of “Rûm” [the Roman, especially the Eastern Roman Empire; in a wider sense the countries of Central Europe] he says that winter there has become a proverb, so that a poet says of it:

Of the cold in “Ifranǵa” [the land of the Franks, Western Europe] he says that it

Professor Seippel considers it not impossible that there may here be a corruption of the Arabic Nurmân [== Normans] to Burǵân, and to a layman this looks probable. In any case Burǵân cannot here, as elsewhere in Arab authors, be Bulgar [the Bulgarians]; on the other hand it might be the Norwegian town of Bergen. In any case the description seems to suit the Norwegians best, and the mention of Ptolemy’s latitude for Thule (the longest night of twenty hours) also points to this. That they are said to be heathens is due again to the name “Maǵûs” (cf. pp. 201, 209).

Qazwînî also[199] tells us that

As mentioned above (p. 199), elsewhere in Arab writers the Varangians’ Sea undoubtedly meant the Baltic; but here, as is also suggested by Professor Seippel, one might be tempted to think that it is Varanger or the Varanger-fjord in Finmark that is intended.[200] It may also be recalled that Edrisi already knew the name of Finmark. But as Qazwînî has such exaggerated ideas of the cold in Rûm and in Ifranǵa, he may also be credited with such a description of the regions on the Baltic.[201] No importance can be attached to the statement that the bay proceeds from the northern ocean in a southerly direction, as ideas of that kind were general.

Mahmûd ibn Mas ûd ‘ash-Shîrâzî (ob. 1310) has the following about the northern regions:[202]

Shams ad-dîn Abû ‘Abdallâh Muḥammad ad-Dimashqî (1256-1327) in his cosmography has little of interest about the North, and his ideas on the subject are obscure.

He has besides various strange fables about the northern regions and the fabulous creatures there. Of the sea to the north of Britain he says that its coasts

Afterwards the coasts extend farther still to the north and west, and lose themselves in the climate of Darkness, and no one knows what is there.

Of the whales he says that in the Black Sea a kind of whale is often seen which the ignorant assert to have been carried by angels alive into Hell, to be used for various punishments, while others think it keeps at the bottom of the sea and lives on fish;

There is preserved an “abstract of wonders” (oldest MS. of 1484),[206] by an unknown Arab author, which gives a picture of the Arabs’ mythical ideas in the tenth century. It also tells of islands in the west, which are of interest to us on account of their resemblance to many of the mediæval mythical conceptions of Western Europe.

Through an apparently small thing the Arabs possibly exercised more than in anything else a transforming influence upon the navigation, geography and cartography of Europe; for it was probably they who first brought to Europe the knowledge of the magnetic needle as a guide. We know that the Chinese were acquainted with it, at any rate in the second century A.D., and used it for a kind of compass for overland journeys. Whether they also used it at sea we do not know, but it may readily be supposed that they did. That the Arabs through their direct commercial intercourse with the Chinese became acquainted with this discovery at an early date seems probable; but curiously enough we hear nothing of it in Arabic literature before the thirteenth century. As the Arabs and Turks after that date used the Italian word “bossolo” for compass (bussol), it has been thought that they may have derived their knowledge of it, not from China, but from Italy; but it seems more reasonable to suppose that, while they had their first knowledge of the magnetic needle from China, they obtained an improved form of the compass from Italy, and with it the Italian word.

COMPASS-CHARTS

We do not know how early the magnetic needle’s property of pointing to the north became known in Europe and used for finding the way at sea. The first mention of it is found at the close of the twelfth century in the works of the Englishman Alexander Neckam, professor in Paris about 1180-1190, and of the troubadour Guyot de Provins from Languedoc. The latter, in a satirical poem of about 1190, wishes the Pope would imitate the immutable trustworthiness of the polar star by showing the steadiness of the heavenly guide; for sailors come and go by this star, which they are always able to find, even in fog and darkness, by a needle rubbed with the ugly brown lodestone; stuck in a straw and laid upon water, the needle points unfailingly to the north star. As late as in 1258 Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, saw as a curiosity in the possession of Roger Bacon at Oxford a large and ugly lodestone, which was able to confer on an iron needle the mysterious power of pointing to the star; but he thinks that it cannot be of any use, for ship-masters would not steer by it, nor would sailors venture to sea with an instrument which was so like an invention of the devil. As always when the progress of humanity is at stake, orthodoxy and religious prejudice raises its head. It is certain that the use of the compass-needle must have been known in the Mediterranean at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and probably even in the twelfth. It has been alleged that the compass was known long before that time, even in the eleventh and tenth centuries; but no proof of this has been found, and it does not appear very probable.[209] How early the compass, or lodestone, was known in the North is uncertain. We only know that when the Hauksbók was written, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it was at any rate known in Iceland (cf. vol. i. p. 248); but it may of course have been known before that time, and it does not appear that any long time elapsed between the instrument’s being known in the Mediterranean and its reaching the Scandinavians.

When the compass came into general use on Italian ships in the thirteenth century, it naturally led to the development of an entirely new type of map, the Italian sea-charts or compass-charts, which were to be of fundamental importance to all future cartography. The mediæval maps of the world already mentioned were learned representations which were of no practical use to the navigator. The Greeks had drawn land-maps which were also of no great use at sea, and we do not know that they had sea-charts. On the other hand sailing-books (“peripli”), which gave directions for coasting voyages, were in use far back in antiquity. In the Middle Ages sailing-books, called “portolani,” which gave information about harbours, distances, etc., were an important aid to the navigator, especially in the Mediterranean. It was the Italians before all others who at that period developed navigation. When coasting was to some extent replaced by sailing in open sea, after the compass came into use, sea-charts became a necessary adjunct to the written sailing-books or portolani. How early they began to be developed is unknown; we only know that charts were in use on Italian ships in the latter half of the thirteenth century;[210] and we must suppose that they were employed long before that time. Whether, as some have maintained, there was a connection between these charts and the maps of the Greeks is doubtful, though there may indeed have been an indirect connection through the Arabs, among whom Edrisi, for instance, seems perhaps to have exercised some influence. But in any case it is certain that the Italians of the Middle Ages were not acquainted with Greek cartography, and this may in a way be regarded as an advantage; for they were thus obliged to invent their own mode of representation. For Greek thought the chief thing was to find the best expression for the system of the world and the “œcumene,” to solve problems such as the reduction of a spherical to a plane surface by projection, etc.; while the sense of accurate detail was less prominent. The Italian sailor and cartographer went straight to nature, unhindered by theory, and to him it appeared a matter of course to set down on the map coasts and islands as accurately as possible according to the course sailed and the distance, without reflecting that sea and land form a spherical surface.

The Italian sea-charts seem especially to have been developed in the republics of northern Italy, Genoa and Pisa, and to some extent Venice. Later the Catalans of the Balearic Isles and of Spain (Barcelona and Valencia) also learned the art, probably from Genoa. The charts have been justly admired for their correct and detailed representation of the coasts known to the Italians and the seamen of the Mediterranean; the world had never before produced any parallel to such a representation. It shows that the sailors of that time were masters in the use of their compass,[211] and in making up their reckoning. The remarkable thing is that the first known compass-charts, of the beginning of the fourteenth century, were already of so perfect a form that there was little to add to or improve in them in later times. It looks as though this type of chart suddenly sprang forth in full perfection, like Athene from the brain of Zeus, without our knowing of any forerunner; it held the field with its representation of the coasts of the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe almost unaltered through three centuries. There is something puzzling in that. We must suppose in any case that these charts were developed through many smaller special charts throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, but even that seems a short period for the development of a representation so complete as this, which thenceforward became almost stereotyped. It is principally the coasts that are represented, with many names, while inland there are comparatively few, which of course is natural in sea-charts.

As Italian trade did not extend farther north than Flanders and England (from whence came wool), it is also characteristic of the compass-charts that their detailed representation of the coast extends to the south of England and to Sluis in Flanders, and to the mouth of the Scheldt. Farther than this the Italian ships did not sail; beyond this boundary began the commercial domain of the Hanseatic League. The delineation on the compass-charts of the greater part of Ireland, northern England, Scotland, the north coast of Germany, Denmark, the Baltic and Scandinavia has an entirely different character from that of the more southern coasts. The coast-lines are there evidently drawn in a formal way, and more or less hypothetically; the names (chiefly those of a few ports, bishops’ sees and islands) are also strikingly few. It is clearly seen that these coasts cannot have been drawn from actual compass courses and reckonings; they are sketches based on second- or third-hand information. For this reason too the shape of the northern countries may be subject to considerable variation in the different types of compass-charts.

We know little of the sources from which they may have obtained their delineation of the North; probably they were many and of different kinds. A glance at the maps reproduced (pp. 226, 232) will convince one that their image of the North differed greatly from that which we find on the wheel-maps, and from that which was probably shown on the maps of antiquity. It is a decisive step in the direction of reality, although the representation is still imperfect. In a whole series of these charts the image of the North shows certain typical features. The coast of Germany and Jutland goes due north from Flanders, thus coming much too near Britain, and the North Sea becomes nothing but a narrow strait. Even on the earliest charts (Dalorto’s chart, p. 226) the shape of Jutland is quite good. Norway, the coasts of which are indicated by chains of mountains, is placed fairly correctly in relation to Jutland, but is put too far to the west and too near to England. It is also made too broad. The Skagerak appears more or less correctly, but the Danish islands, including Sealand, usually as a round island, are placed in the Cattegat to the north-east of Jutland. This greatly distorts the picture. Sweden is much too small, and is given too little extension to the south; the Baltic has a curious form: it extends far to the east and has a remarkable narrowing in the middle, through the German coast making a great bend to the north towards Sweden. Gotland lies in the great widening of its inner portion. The Gulf of Bothnia seems to be unknown. The islands to the north of Scotland: Shetland (usually called “scetiland,” “sialanda” or “stillanda”), the Orkneys, and often Caithness as an island, come to the west of Norway, frequently placed in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, and in the wrong order. “Tille” (Thule), the round island off the north-east coast of Scotland, is a characteristic feature on many compass-charts. Its origin is uncertain, but possibly it may be connected with the Romans having thought they had seen Thule to the north of the Orkneys (?) (cf. vol. i. p. 107). The names in the North are in the main the same on most of the compass-charts,[212] and one cartographer has copied another; by this means also many palæographic errors have been introduced, which are afterwards repeated. As an example: the Baltic is originally called “mar allemania,” this is read by Catalan draughtsmen as “mar de lamanya,” also written “de lamãya,” and thus we get “mar de la maya” (cf. pp. 231, 233). Another example: Bergen is originally called “bergis” (cf. p. 221), a draughtsman corrupts this to “bregis,” and that becomes the name of the town in later charts (cf. p. 232). Whence these names first came we do not know; partly, no doubt, from sailors, and partly from literary sources. The latter must be true of names in the interior. There are also various legends or inscriptions on these charts, e.g., in Norway, in Sweden, in the Baltic, on the islands in the Northern Ocean, and in Iceland. Many of these legends can be certainly proved to have a literary origin. Some of them (e.g., that attached to Norway) may be derived in part from the Geographia Universalis. Others are connected with such authors as Giraldus Cambrensis, Higden, and others. Certain resemblances to Arabic writers, especially Edrisi, might also be pointed out; but it is uncertain whether these are not due in part to their being derived from a common source.

The first known compass-chart, the so-called “Carte Pisane,” of about 1300,[213] goes no farther north than to the coast of Flanders and southern England. But the compass-chart[214] drawn by the Genoese priest Giovanni da Carignano (ob. 1344), evidently a little after 1300, already gives a delineation of Great Britain, Ireland, the Orkneys and Scandinavia, with the Baltic. That these regions are only represented hypothetically, and do not belong to the compass-chart proper, is also indicated by their partly lying outside the network of compass-lines. It is in the main a land map, with many names in the interior of the continents, but the delineation of the known coasts (to the south of Flanders) is evidently taken from the sea-charts. The representation of the British Isles and of the North reminds one a good deal of the Cottoniana map (cf. vol. i. p. 183), and of Edrisi’s representation (cf. p. 203);[215] as an example: it is difficult to suppose that the western inclination of Scotland should have come about independently on each of the three maps. There is also considerable resemblance to Edrisi in the names on other parts of the chart; but Carignano has no hint of Edrisi’s “Island,” nor of the Cottoniana’s island of Tylen (Thule). Whether his Scandinavia is a peninsula, as usually asserted, and not rather a long island, as on the two maps in question, is uncertain, since the delineation has suffered a good deal and is indistinct in the inner part of the Baltic. To judge from a photograph of the chart [Ongania, Pl. III.] it appears to me most probable that it was an island, which then has considerable resemblance to the island of Norwâġa [Norway] in Edrisi. Names that are legible on this island or peninsula are: “noruegia,” “finonia” [Finmark or Finland], “suetia”; also “bergis” [Bergen], “tromberg” [Tönsberg], “uamerlant” [Vermeland], “scarsa” [Skara on Lake Vener], “kundgelf” [Kungelf], “scania” [Skåne], “lendes” [Lund], “stocol” [Stockholm], etc. On the two islands in the Baltic there are “scamor” [i.e., “scanior” ? Skanör] and “gothlanda” [Gotland]. Many of these names appear here for the first time in any known authority. Carignano may have taken them from older unknown maps, but he may also in some way or other have received information from the North; possibly, for instance, he may have had the names of ports, etc., from sailors. His representation of the western part of Scandinavia, with three long peninsulas (cf. Saxo), is curious; of these the eastern, with “scania,” might be south Sweden with Skåne; the central one with “tromberg” [Tönsberg] might be Vestfold and Grenmar, and the western with Bergen might be western Norway. The smaller peninsula to the north might be Tröndelagen [the district of Trondhjem] (cf. also Historia Norwegiæ, below, p. 235).

Northern portion of Carignano’s chart (a few years later than 1300)

Between the years 1318 and 1321 the Venetian Marino Sanudo wrote a work, “Liber secretorum fidelium crucis” (the Book of Secrets for Believers in the Cross), to rouse enthusiasm for a new crusade, and himself presented a copy of it with a dedication to the Pope at Avignon, which is probably one of the two now preserved at the Vatican. The work is accompanied by several charts which must have been drawn by the well-known cartographer Pietro Vesconte in 1320, since an atlas bearing his name has been found in the Vatican with charts that completely correspond.[216] Among them is a circular map of the world of the wheel type, but on which the forms of the coasts from the compass-charts are introduced. Scandinavia is there represented as a peninsula with a mountain chain (Kjölen ?) along the middle (see map, p. 223), and the names “Gotilandia,” “Dacia,” “Suetia,” “Noruega” may be read. On the continent is written “Guenden [Kvænland, or else == “Suenden” == Sweden ?] vel Gotia”; and on the coast to the north of the peninsula is “Liuonia” and to the south of it “Frixia” [Friesland]. As Kretschmer has shown, Scandinavia was originally drawn (in both atlases) as an island, but was afterwards connected with the continent by a narrow isthmus. This representation of Scandinavia as a peninsula resembles that on many of the wheel-maps mentioned above (see pp. 185, ff.). It also bears a strong resemblance to the view of Saxo (beginning of the thirteenth century), who says:[217]

Northern Europe in Vesconte’s mappamundi (1320)
in the Vatican (Kretschmer, 1891)

It seems not improbable that the delineation on Vesconte’s map may have a connection with this description; it has also very nearly the same forms of names. The regions far in the north and east on his map are pure fancy, and the “rifei montes” are still found there.

Eight other MSS. (in various libraries) of Sanudo’s work are known, accompanied by maps, and six of them have the circular mappamundi; but the reproductions differ considerably one from another, especially in the representation of the northern coast of Europe.[218] The mappamundi in the MS. in Queen Christina’s collection in the Vatican (Codex Reginensis, 548), and the exactly similar map in the MS. at Oxford, have a remarkably good delineation of the Scandinavian Peninsula (see map, p. 224), with the names “Suetia” [Svealand], “Gotia” [Götaland], and “Scania” on the east, “Noruegia” on the west, “Finlandia” and “Alandia” [Åland, or perhaps Hallandia ?] in the extreme north-east. On the continent is written “Kareli infideles,” “Estonia,” “Liuonia,” etc. In the Baltic are two islands, “Gotlandia” in the middle, and “Ossilia” [Ösel] farthest in. The shape of Jutland [with the names “Dacia” and “Jutia”], the direction of the coast of northern Europe and the Baltic, with Scandinavia parallel to it, remind one a good deal of Edrisi’s map, of the Cottoniana and also of Carignano’s map. Evidently there is here new information which Vesconte did not possess when he drew the map previously mentioned; the correct placing of the names in Sweden and Norway is especially striking. These names, as also “Jutia,” occur in Saxo in approximately the same forms (cf. also Historia Norwegiæ). Marino Sanudo, according to his own statement, had himself sailed from Venice to Flanders, and had also travelled in Holstein and Slavonia. He was thus able to collect geographical information, and, as suggested by Björnbo [1909, pp. 211, f.], may have received communications from North German priests whose picture of the North had been formed by the study of Adam of Bremen and Saxo; but there does not appear to me to be any necessity for such a hypothesis, he may just as well have received direct information from people who knew the localities, while doubtless the names are to a great extent literary. If we suppose that it was Pietro Vesconte who drew all the maps, he may have derived his information about the North through Sanudo himself; but in that case it would be strange that he did not use it for his first map. We must therefore suppose that it was after this that their real collaboration began.

Northern Europe in the mappamundi in the MS. of
Sanudo’s work at Oxford (Björnbo, 1910, p. 123)

But here we come upon another difficulty, and this is the third entirely different form of the delineation of the North that is found in the corresponding mappamundi in the MS. of Sanudo at Paris. There the Scandinavian Peninsula is divided in an unaccountable way into several islands, the largest of which bears the name “scania de regno dacie” or “scãdinaua.” To the north of it is a long island, “gotlandia,” which has been read by some “yrlandia” or “yslandia,” and made into Iceland [as in Thoroddsen, i., 1897, p. 84]. “Noruegia” is written outside the border of the map to the north of Jutland [called “dacia”], and the name “prouincia noruicie” is placed on the west coast of Jutland, which has been given a fantastic extension towards the north with many bays. An island in the ocean to the north of Russia [“rutenia”] is marked “kareli infideles.” The whole of this representation is in complete disagreement with the other Sanudo maps, and it is difficult to understand that Vesconte can have also drawn this one, although in other respects it may bear much resemblance to the rest from his hand. One might be inclined to think that some other man had tinkered at this part of the map, introducing ideas which he entirely misunderstood.

Northern Europe in the mappamundi in the Paris MS.
of Sanudo’s work (Björnbo, 1910, p. 123)