The mysterious Middle Ages are unusual in everything. For a modern person, a map is, first of all, a source of information about the location of countries, cities, rivers, lakes, and it is intended for orientation on the ground. But medieval maps are definitely not suitable for such purposes. What and why did medieval people draw on maps?
Types of medieval maps
The most common type of medieval card is the so-called "T-O" card. The world was divided into three parts - Europe, Asia, Africa. "O" stands for the world's oceans, and "T" stands for rivers and bodies of water that separate parts of the world from each other. Jerusalem and the Holy Land were in the center of the world on almost all maps. Which probably needs some explanation: the medieval man is extremely religious. The division into three parts is also explained by Christian motives. This corresponds to the Old Testament tradition of the division of the world between the three sons of Noah - Shem, Ham and Japheth.
Map of the type T-O.
"T-O" maps - the most popular type in medieval cartography, and it was he who formed the basis of the vast majority of the maps that have come down to us.
For example, the famous Hereford map.
Hereford map, the turn of the XIII-XIV centuries, view O-T.
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How to read medieval maps
The main feature of the maps of the Middle Ages is their topology. They do not represent exact distances, distances, proportions. They only show what was located relative to what. For example, India is east of Persia, but the exact distance between them cannot be found on the map.
The reason for this is not that medieval people did not know the ideas about the sphericity of the earth or did not know how to scale. Not. Simply, drawing the map, they pursued completely different goals.
If you look closely, you can see the names of both modern cities and places where the most important events in world history took place on the maps of that time (Ancient Greece, Rome, Persia). Biblical places are also present near real or existing places - the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel.
XIV century world map, British Museum (by Ranulf Higden, British Library).
And if Europe is described on maps in detail, then in Asia and Africa medieval cartographers placed unseen creatures on their masterpieces. The fact is that little was known about these regions, and therefore, on the one hand, they posed a danger, and on the other hand, the fantasy of the people of the Middle Ages allowed them to inhabit them with fairy-tale characters.
In short, medieval maps reflected the ideas of people of that time about the structure of the world, were a chronicle of human history, moving from the Creation to the Apocalypse.
If maps in the Middle Ages were not intended for orientation on the terrain, then how merchants traveled then
For orientation during travel, medieval people used textual geographical and cartographic descriptions of routes. Such descriptions can often be found on the maps themselves. After traveling in Asia, Marco Polo in the 13th century gained popularity for his "Book on the diversity of the world", in which he also outlines his route and the places he visited. There is an assumption that even Christopher Columbus in the 15th century, preparing to sail to India, used Marco Polo's notes to draw up a travel itinerary.
Part of the Catalan World Atlas, 1375, Portolan (by Abraham Cresquez, Bibliothèque Nationale de Fance).
And nautical navigational charts with the outlines of coasts, continents, islands, the names of cities that could already be used when traveling, began to appear much later, in the late Middle Ages (such cards were called portolans), from the end of the XIII century. But that's another story.