Why are Medieval Maps so Weird?
Final Video
In the Middle ages many Europeans thought this was the shape of the world. This is the Hereford map, one of over a thousand Mappae Mundi that exists, and it’s quite possibly the best window we have into how people used to imagine the world.
Long after explorers knew better, at a time when nautical charts were first being made, the average Christian still imagined that the world looked something like this. So…why? What happened that made people believe this was the shape of the world?
Understanding the Hereford Map
If we turn this, the Hereford map, so North is up and overlay it with modern country labels, you get a sense of how off this map is. Italy’s a little bulge, and Israel is most of the Middle East. Turkey’s pretty good. Russia and China? Completely off. There are so many areas that just feel stuffed in.
But rather than trying to imagine this by today’s standards, let me instead show you how they might of seen it back then. How they got to this point.
The History of Mappae Mundi
It comes from a long line of Mappae Mundi, which were medieval maps of the world. The first ones were pretty boring. The TO Map has east on the top and divides the world into: Europe, Africa, and Asia. And that’s about it. This was put in The major encyclopedia of the day and others built on it. Some emphasized Chistianity, highlighting Jerusalem at the center of the world. Some were more illustrative, some more descriptive. Landmarks like the Red Sea got copied from one to the next. And while many followed the TO pattern, others didn’t. Over time, maps in Christian Europe started adding in more cities, rivers, animals, various legends, going far beyond this basic diagram. By the time of the Hereford Map, Mappae Mundi had gotten complex.
But even though it was more complex than older Mappae Mundi, it still wasn’t incorporating most of what the Greeks had learned 1300 years before. Part of that is they hadn’t yet rediscovered some of those findings, but the other part is that Mappa Mundi, in general, had a different goal. The Greeks were trying to get the distances right. But the goal of these Medieval maps was not to be accurate. It was to tell stories.
The Stories of the Hereford Map
The main story was that the bible is right, and here’s how it matches up with everything else. East is on top, as that’s where Jesus will come from, they said, on the day of Judgment, and Jerusalem is at the center. Here’s where Jesus was crucified, the Tower of Babel, the Garden of Eden. Here’s the path of the Israelites, them crossing the Red Sea, where they got lost in the desert. Etc. Etc. Etc. And it lays all of that over the major known cities and rivers of the day. And then, it goes a step further, also showing where stories from the Classical world took place: the Golden Fleece, Mount Olympus, The City of Pharos, Rome, Alexander’s quest. It shows where different animals had been found. [lynx, pelican, rhino]. And where the monsters and savages lived: Unicorns, Blemmyes, Griffons, Fauni. My favorite is the Bonnacon whose fart kills hunters, but there are many, many others.
In the corner, there’s a guy who says: ‘Go Beyond’ and you can see that this map stretches beyond the Earth itself. At the top is a line heading towards Heaven and another towards the gates of Hell.
How fiction and reality melded together in the Medieval Ages
The stories from explorers, the bible, from ancient civilizations, and from other myths all rested in a soupy fog of muddled together truths. This map connected these ideas and brought tourists to the Hereford Cathedral. Something to look at after they got bored of the Tomb of St Thomas and the Chained Library.
It was something between a map as we know it today and an illustration, between antiquity and modernity. Between the mystic and the real.
Are Mappa Mundis good maps?
As a map of the world, it’s easy to laugh at. But even today, we still have maps that look like this. Not our world map, but for places that we haven’t completely charted, like our Solar System. In this diagram, the distances are off. The details simplified. It shows what matters, what we can understand. Obviously, more accurate maps exist, but they’re not the ones most of us are looking at. They’re certainly not the ones we remember.
At a time when traveling between cities could be a life altering affair, what purpose was there to know all of the world? So if they could take a story away with them, that was powerful. The map allowed them to latch knowledge together. Sometimes correctly. Sometimes incredibly ham fisted. But for people whose entire world view beyond this was strictly the Bible, it took them a long, long way into understanding what else was out there. And just how big the world could be.