Galia Halpern, Ph.D., MLIS.

g.halpern@nyu.edu

Vernacular Geography Beyond the Sea:

Mapping the Medieval World with Body and Tongue

(A preliminary version of this paper was delivered at the Univ. of Oxford for The Language of Maps:
Communicating through Cartography during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, June 23-25, 2011, under the
title “Mapping Surface and Structure Beyond the Sea.”)

1
 Vernacular Geography Beyond the Sea:
Mapping the Medieval World with Body and Tongue

In one version of The Book of John Mandeville (British Library, Ms. Cotton Titus

C.16), there is a short interpolation that describes a scene in which Mandeville visits the

pope in Rome. He presents the pope with a treatise of his travels, petitioning the pope to

verify his account.

And our holy father, of his special grace, gave my book to be examined and corrected by
advice of his wise and discreet council…by the which my book was proved for true, insomuch
that they showed me a book, which my book was examined by, that comprehended full much
more, by an hundredth part, by the which the Mappa Mundi was made. 1

That the pope consulted a scholastic encyclopedia and mappamundi comprised of

aggregate scriptural, classical, and patristic knowledge demonstrates the problematic early

reception of the critical gaze and genuine transactions with the environment in late

medieval learned circles? The conundrum posed a real challenge for Mandeville.2 After all,

in practice the Book of John Mandeville (hereafter, TBJM) participated in learned habits of

collecting expert knowledge and perspectives from many cultures across many centuries.

Ironically, whoever authored TBJM may have personally witnessed as little en route to the

well-stocked local library as some of his readers would witness from their armchairs. 3

Nevertheless, TBJM is presented to its audiences not as the outcome of bookish study but

of eyewitness experience. It substitutes the multiple speakers of textual gloss and exegetical

writing with Mandeville’s single speaking voice and organizes the internal environment of

the text on his corporeal present.

The same spatial logic did not govern the organization of the pope’s encyclopedia,

nor did it guide his council’s bookish actions. Indeed, the structural coherency of TBJM’s

world depends on the continuous flow of vernacular writing and lay, not learned, spatial
2
attitudes.4 Only in written periploi and nautical charts of the medieval period do we find

examples of concrete spatial maps that account for the traveler’s movements. 5 These lay

verbal and visual maps dealt with commonplace activity among the many linguistic

communities of the maritime and mercantile world and provided an early alternative to

learned texts as sources of geographical knowledge. Furthermore, non-specialist interest in

these documents can be traced to the closing years of the thirteenth century, when charts

were commissioned for display purposes and library collections, and the first quasi-

autobiographical travel narratives entered into circulation. The coincidence of both formats’

coeval popularization as collectable items not only indicates sweeping changes in attitudes

towards what constituted geographical authority, it also reveals somewhat of how nautical

charts were perceived as the graphic expression of lived world experience.

This is a study of historical narrative and pictorial conventions for communicating

eyewitness experience and the rise of personal observation as a legitimate force in

geographical commentary. I will examine the ways in which utilitarian maps and pilot-

manuals charted human activity in relation to the natural world, identify where these maps

intersect with the emergent genre of travel literature, and trace the chart’s incorporation of

new cartographical conventions into didactic maps.

The Sea in Early Composite Maps

Traversing the Mediterranean produced new forms of graphic representation born of

practical use. The portolan chart’s different institutional origins established one of the

earliest alternatives to the smooth expanse of space charted in scholastic and antique

Ptolemaic maps. Nautical charts are constructed on itineraries and incorporate the map
3
reader into the space of the map. David Woodward characterized the space of medieval

charts as route-enhancing, noting that ‘routes are endowed with the importance of direct

observation.’6 Mapping the sea produced the only graphic representation that systematically

accounted for motion vectors and contact sites along the littoral. Termed striation by Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the striated space of nautical charts was an early experiment in

graphically capturing the moment when ship encountered coast, acknowledging man’s

‘contact with the real.’ 7

More than mere space, water first assumed the identity of a concrete place by the

mid-twelfth century. By this time, we have evidence from secular Islamic cartography that

the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Indian Ocean assumed fixed and substantiated pictorial

identities. As evidence, we can turn to the atlas of al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī that was completed in

1154 for Roger II of Sicily, the Kitab nuzhat al-muzhāq fi’khtirāq al-āfāq (The Book of

Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands, hereafter Book of Roger). It included a map

engraved with ‘the seven climates and their lands and regions, their shorelines and

hinterlands, gulfs and seas, watercourses and places of rivers, their inhabited and

uninhabited parts…’8

The relationship between regional tables and the lost engraved silver-disk map that

originally accompanied the Book of Roger remains postulation, but both may have derived

from a carefully prepared drawing board. 9 It is known that al-Idrīsī was familiar with

executing true portolan charts and that on account of this ability the depiction of aquatic

bodies in the world map was highly sophisticated.10 The same holds true for world maps

that we find in later copies of the text [Fig. 1]. Half a dozen manuscripts from different

periods include a world map that al-Idrīsī possibly adapted from the engraved archetype,

incorporating additional material from Persian cartographers of the previous generation. 11

4
Despite dramatic discrepancies in age and execution, all the world maps exhibit a

conception of aquatic space drawn from nautical charts and common handling of the water

masses most heavily traversed by sailors.

Woodward already suggested that the new sense of mass and treatment of the

littoral in world maps like al-Idrīsī’s was a profound departure from early medieval

representations of the mundane orbis. Nevertheless, the Book of Roger was presented to the

Norman king of Sicily for the purpose of study and in the spirit of political approbation,

thus it cannot be classified as either strictly functional or traditionally schematic. Nor is it

indicative of a transitional phase in mapping that would imply a linear evolution from the

schematic and dogmatic to the pragmatic and proto-scientific.12 Hindsight reveals that the

spatial concept of nautical charts neither extended from nor contributed to Antiquity and

Renaissance projection methods.

Documentary references to hybrid maps attest to similar cartographic developments

elsewhere in Italy. Nearly concurrent to the fixing of seas in al-Idrīsī’s world map,

presentation sailing guidebooks were executed like the Liber de Existencia Riveriarum et

Forma Maris Nostri Mediterranei (hereafter Book of Our Mediterranean), commissioned

by the canon of Pisa. Although not technically a shipboard instruction manual, it contains

written descriptions of the Mediterranean region reported in the sequential order typically

found in sailing instructions.

Patrick Gautier Dalché recently dated this manuscript to the second half of the

twelfth century. 13 Moreover, he proposed that the text was supplemented by a portolan

chart.14 Support for his hypothesis comes from the terminology that the anonymous author

used to describe not a ‘mappa mundi,’ or map of the world, but a ‘cartula mappe mundi,’

that is a charted map of the world. 15 Like al-Idrīsī’s composite world map, the Book of Our
5
Mediterranean was intended for learned readers, and it mobilized the depiction of passage

along the Mediterranean littoral towards more expansive geographical commentary.

This is likely why the Book of Our Mediterranean survives to this day. There are no

remaining functional shipboard nautical charts from the early thirteenth century. Like al-

Idrīsī’s map, the chart in the Book of Our Mediterranean was not destined for daily use but

for study in a controlled environment. In this capacity, it reveals a new privileged status

afforded to eyewitness experience and the eyewitness perspective’s indebtedness to the

description of the sea. The author explicitly states that he writes from the direct experience

of seeing and traveling – ‘uidi et peragraui.’16 He further explains how he supplemented his

knowledge with that acquired directly from sailors and their guidebooks. 17

Rigidly designating maps like al-Idrīsī’s or the Book of Our Mediterranean’s as

Islamic or as Latin Christian, based on authors and intended readers, overlooks how each

incorporated marine mapping activity little concerned with religious orientation.18 We find

representations of the sea everywhere, inserted not only into al-Idrīsī maps, but also world-

pictures like those of Paolino Minorita’s and Petrus Vesconte’s (c. 1321), despite these

latter works appearing in crusading handbooks and ecclesiastic encyclopedias [Fig. 2]. The

sea renders Arabic and Genoese charts as strikingly similar [Fig. 3], and its ready

appropriation into traditional cosmologies suggests that it initially defied East, West,

Catholic, Byzantine, or Islamic classification, participating instead in a pragmatic,

polylinguistic sphere of activity. It is clear that the portolan was concerned with one

objective: the present knowing of a specific place and how to move about it.

The Present Time of Sailing Manuals

6
 No longer insubstantial, seas in al-Idrīsī’s world map and in the Book of Our

Mediterranean have become specific places. What characterizes place, as I use the word

here, is Edward Casey’s observation that place is distinguished from mere space because it

is indexical of a concrete human presence. According to Casey, ‘Wherever place is at stake

in human experience there body will be found as well.’ 19 Written periploi and graphic

portolan charts configure geography on the human body, and late medieval collecting

activities indicate that charts participated in the accumulation of travel knowledge based on

eyewitness experience and new forms of empiricism.

Written periploi, like the Italian early thirteenth-century Lo Compasso de Navigare,

carry the reader in a linear, clockwise circuit around the Mediterranean along a continuous

succession of movements in a fixed direction. The Compasso begins, ‘First, from Cape St.

Vincent to the mouth of the river of Seville, 150 miles (bearing) between east and south

east. From the said mouth as far as the city of Seville is 60 miles by river…,’ and so on.20

The Compasso relates to the present time of its user, so one could consult the text by

selecting a port of entry and taking up the circuit from there.

Movement was unidirectional and restricted to the coastal rim, but the Compasso’s

method for describing landscape was based on physical movement through it. In this sense,

it accounts for the passage of its reader through the internal environment of the book while

flipping through the pages. This was markedly different from the criteria for arranging

geographical content in learned schemas. Time is pliable in these pilot-books, according to

Jacques Le Goff, 21 and is used to measure units of distance not progressive change.22 Space

has a heavy horizontal component, with features of physical distance and spatial regression

(depth) established relative to the current position of the map’s reader. Horizontal space

7
contends with the strict spatial relationship of synchronous geographic and hydrographic

features. 23

Furthermore, this type of written map grouped its chorographic descriptions to

locatable sites. The Compasso consistently organizes relevant details with respect to the

ports in which they are to be found. So, for example, Genoa harbor had, ‘a cape to the west

called Cape Faro on which is a high white tower on which they put a great light at night.’24

This is the same structure that we find embellished upon in sections of Marco Polo and

Rustichello of Pisa’s Devisament dou Monde when the narrator informs his audience ‘you

have quitted the city of which I have been speaking, you ride some 12 days between north-

east and east…There is plenty of water along the road, and abundance of game; there are

lions too.’ 25

Unlike the topically schematized arrangement of content in early missionary

accounts of the East, like Giovanni di Plano Carpini’s Historia Mongalorum, the pleasure

of the route in the present time of the reader first became an element of geographical

representation circa 1298 in the Venetian-French original of the Devisament authored by

two men who were not educated in Latin letters.26 Polo was an Italian merchant-

administrator and Rustichello was a vernacular French romance writer. 27 It is only in the

Devisament that for the first time two authors take their readers along a designated path

through the East, engaging them with theatrical strategies of vernacular court performance

and addressing them directly from within the text.28

John Larner observed that the speaking voice in the Devisament, with its direct

address of the audience, has its basis in oral vernacular delivery. 29 In apposition to the

multiple speaking voices of learned textual gloss, the emulation of traveling along a

designated route through the text entails mapping time and space dependent on the
8
continuous flow of narrative engendered by speaking and writing in the vernacular mode.

According to Ramon Pujades, ‘the chronology of the advent and dissemination of nautical

charts is totally inseparable from the rise of vernacular Romance languages to the category

of vehicles of written expression.’ 30 It should come as no surprise then, that the

earliest extant nautical charts, likely those that were reserved for study rather than

shipboard use, date to the last quarter of the thirteenth century, when Polo and

Rustichello also authored the Devisament.

Corporeal Space in Sea Charts

A graphic nautical chart, like the late thirteenth century Carte Pisane, differs from

written sailing instructions by presenting a geography that is visually accessible all at once.

However, that sites on the chart can be visually accessed simultaneously does not preclude

the chart from alluding to personal movement in the present time like its written

counterpart. It is the figuration of ship-by-ship private transactions with Mediterranean

topography, collectively amassed and independently utilized. The chart’s distinct

configuration was generated by its continuous use at sea. 31

Using the map to track routes is reflected in its rhumb line network and in the lack

of fixed orientation that portolan charts exhibit. They were devised for the individual

localization of a ship on water in relation to the desired coordinates on land. The

perpendicular inscription of city toponyms to the coastlines reveals that ‘the map’s reader’s

own position is not taken into account as a stable vantage point from which to view the

map.’32 For most of the early charts, there is no clear designated viewing orientation. 33 This

9
spinning effect emphasized orientation as embodied direction and loxodromal movement.

Orientation was no longer linked to cosmic direction or place. In portolan charts, east is no

longer the East and it need not be placed at the top of the image; it is simply a place and an

orientation that can now be reached by heading west.

The changing location of the viewer’s body is incorporated into the very chart. That

is why despite their surprisingly accurate rendition of the sea, portolan charts curiously lack

proper projection from a bird’s eye view.34 Projection requires the absence of the viewer

within the mapped space–the distantiated eye. Conversely, the chart accommodates the

traveler’s presence within its space, indexing the ever-changing location of the reader’s eye

from within the representation of the sea itself.

Like in written pilot-books, the movement of the body is thus the building block of

sea charts. This is most evident in map copies, which rarely exhibit a one-to-one

correspondence in coastal depiction or the laying down of rhumb networks [Figs. 4-5]. A

good example of the chart’s emphasis on bodily movement can be seen in a 1339 map by

Angelino Dulcert (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Res. Ge. B. 696) and a near

contemporary copy of it (London, British Library, MS add. 25691). The anonymous

mapmaker of the Dulcert copy has pushed the primary center of his rhumb network

northwest of Dulcert’s, jumping the Pyrenees. The result is that the secondary centers move

out further into the Atlantic.

Such an inconsistency between copies might lead one to believe that the lines are

merely aesthetic, solely intended to represent an empirical space of mechanical

reproduction. However, the network still takes for its starting point a baseline and cardinal

orientation with a standard degree of deviation between radii. The baseline is the horizontal

access upon which the center rose is placed. Different mapmakers lay down the line at
10
different latitudes. However, once a latitude was selected, where line intersected littoral at

specific coordinates remained consistent along the length of the Mediterranean. 35 The

network is flexible and can accommodate change. While it is clear that the anonymous

copier selected a baseline several degrees north of Dulcert’s original, if we slide the center

rose south-by-southeast along the green rhumb, to where it intersects with two red rhumb-

lines off the east coast of France (absent in the copy is the thick, black, squiggly line

portraying the Pyrenees), we can establish a new rose which corresponds with only a

marginal degree of error to the original.

The mapping of coastlines extends discursively from the idea of movement. In

nautical charts the littoral is not an isomorphic representation of actual coastlines but rather

a series of connected coordinates in which important sites for sailors were marked out and

the marginal spaces in between were simply stylized space filler.36 The designated

coordinates are sites where ships encounter land. The verbal equivalent in the Compasso is

given as the general distances between sites of interest. Philip Steinberg pointed out that

within this context, islands are treated quite differently than the mainland coast and are

consistently colored in with solid colors. This is because they interrupt vectors and are

obstacles to bodily movement, not points of arrival. 37

Topography, quite literally, unfolds with the concerns of the human body, and

individual movement can map space convincingly. An example of this spatial logic is

evident in a geographical experiment in the British Library’s Cornaro Atlas (London,

British Library, MS Egerton 73, 15A). There, two mapmakers have charted the shores from

the Venetian lagoon to Corfu as mirror images of each other, yet under a single rhumb

network [Fig. 6]. To confuse matters further, the two Venices are horizontally mapped,

rather than utilizing the binding of the atlas as a clue to the existence of a mirror, and one
11
reflection has been rotated 180 degrees. If you follow the logic of the loxodrome, you reach

Venice twice, without even realizing that topographic contours have been manipulated.

This is the same logic that structures TBJM. Even when landscape is imaginative, it is

rendered coherent through a trick of the running eye, tracing the path of the body’s

continuous route.

Nevertheless, if the expensive and imaginative Venetian atlas exemplifies the

conceptualization of space in utilitarian charts, it also belies the chart’s utility.38 What I call

the ‘Map of Two Venices’ is not practical but whimsical, and it shows how the nautical

chart migrated from port to court and study as a wide range of consumers began

commissioning maps and atlases for institutional and private collections.

On the heel of the portolan chart’s emergence the reproduction of the littoral

became the responsibility of artisan workshops that no longer perpetually modified its

likeness to reflect updated measurements and observations. 39 Toponymic revitalization

slowed in the fifteenth century and, despite a magnetic declination of ten degrees between

1300 and 1600, map rotation remained fixed and coastal handling was static.40 The notable

quantity of extant charts from the fourteenth century in contrast to the sole, yet fully

articulated, thirteenth century Carte Pisane, indicates that during the later century charts

were display artifacts, worthy of preservation. Hence, although the stagnant internal

development of the chart is linked to its reception as a collector’s item, that same stagnation

suggests the chart’s capacity to signify to various consumers legitimate forms of

geographical representation based on new criteria originating in new institutions of

knowledge.

Vernacular Geography
12
 In the fourteenth century, the sophisticated space consciousness in nautical charts

was no longer singularly appealing to marine pilots. The quality of the vellum support, the

outdated or politically aspirational toponymic and heraldic material, and the elaborate

miniatures found on many charts by mid-century lead some historians of geography to

conclude that perhaps no extant chart ever saw shipboard use to fulfill its original function.

Certainly the most elaborate productions were valued as works of art from the onset. 41

Gautier Dalché uncovered documents that describe the different uses of charts, and

he noted that many lack compass holes and divider scratches that indicate their direct use in

performing calculations.42 Instead, he argued that these charts shifted into new registers of

meaning when, for instance, they were consulted and displayed by notaries or when sailors

stuck at sea began spinning them while invoking the names of holy saints in the order of

successive sanctuaries located along the Mediterranean’s rim. 43

The refashioning of maps as sacred objects in folk religion and their presence in

aristocratic libraries reflects the perpetuation of an elusive substrata of medieval mapping

activity in more prominent social spheres for which there is greater documentation.44 We

should not take for granted the empirical eye of sailing manuals and vernacular geography

books or the horizontal space in charts of this period, as there are no antecedents for them

in earlier authorial texts and images. While it is true that varieties of written periploi

enjoyed continuous use throughout the Middle Ages among a highly trained set of

practitioners, the status of eyewitness conventions and the temporal present as valid

figuration of the mundus elicited skepticism from intellectual and elite circles until quite

late in the era. Marco Polo’s initial reception in learned circles was at best lukewarm until

the Dominican friar Frencesco Pipino produced a Latin translation of the Devisament that
13
adhered to a greater extent with learned language and structure. 45 Due to his lack of learned

citations and scriptural proofs, Carpini had to plead in the prologue of the Historia

Mongalorum that, ‘[I]f anything we write into the account of the embassy is unknown in

your parts you must not for that reason call us liars.’46

The portolan chart’s validity as graphic figuration of the real also elicited

skepticism. As Peter Barber has shown in his work on the Aslake world map fragment

(London, British Library. MS add. 63841), the map’s creator copied a Catalan display chart

abandoning those aspects of it that related to measured space while maintaining the chart’s

more traditional iconography. Although Aslake is a near contemporary of the Catalan

Atlas, its producer perceived the exemplar as a truthful world image because of the lore

contained at the world’s outer rim and not its spatial empiricism. 47 Charts were not

necessarily commonplace or easily legible to the population at large. In the earliest

documented reference to a sea chart, William of Nangis reported that when Louis IX’s ship

stalled at sea en route with his troops to attack Tunis in 1270, sailors ‘aporter la

mapemonde devant le roy,’ but that Louis’s son Philip thought ‘li marinier qui estoient

sigloient en doutance.’48

To consult nautical charts is to defer to experiences of the contemporary traveling

Everyman and his modes of empirical observation and verbal description. What was being

described was not as much at stake as who had claims to knowing and explaining it and

what formats for presenting this knowledge extended from those claims. Representation

here is a question of defining authorial body and its accompanying effects on traditional

content. In true mappaemundi, the body that can be found is the omnipresent body of

Christ, not that of the contemporary traveler. 49

14
 The rise of the eyewitness traveler in text and image is indicative of more than a

simple contradistinction between the sacred and profane typically ascribed to the expanding

secularism of the later Middle Ages. At this time the laity was still very religious. A

traveler, even a contrived one like Mandeville, was fully engaged with Universalist

discourse. The traveler as a convention, however, depended on continuous narrative and

embodied spatial experience born of social and linguistic systems outside of learned

information habits. During the period when the Carte Pisane was drafted, widespread

institutional language reforms began occurring throughout Europe, facilitating the

advancement of new forms of knowledge.

Articulations of space emanating from the professional classes entered into the

intellectual mainstream with expanding rates of vernacular literacy and the dismantling of a

bilingual diglossic society that privileged Latin. The fourteenth century witnessed major

language reforms that codified the writing of French, Italian dialects, and other vernacular

languages, enhancing their use in elite forms of writing. At this time copies of merchant

common place books, like the Venetian Zibaldone da Canal, began to circulate as

collectables and serve as childhood educational tools for the non-Latinate mercantile

class.50

It should be noted here that in the prologue of TBJM, Mandeville exonerates himself

from writing in French rather than Latin ‘pour ce que pluseurs entendent mieulx rommant

que latin, ie lay miss en rommant.’ 51 Circa 1300, forms of vernacular geography authored

outside of the erudite Latin community were absorbed into the worldview, even up to the

highest institutions of power and learning. This revealed the assimilation of pragmatic

spatial attitudes that once defied religious, political, or linguistic classification into didactic

world maps.
15
 Perhaps no single composite world map/portolan chart so effectively communicates

the new status of the eyewitness geographer and the maritime culture from which he

emerged than the 1375 Catalan Atlas (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Esp. 30).

The Atlas was executed by the (future) Joan I of Aragon’s mapmaker, Abraham Cresques,

for presentation to Charles V of France. Charles was interested in updated descriptions of

the Far East and in 1371 he also received the earliest known copy of TBJM (Paris,

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS nouv. acq. fr. 4515 & 4516). Responsible for

adopting French as the official governing language of the Valois domain, the king’s move

officially marked the eradication of a society founded on bilingualism.52

Of vital importance here is that both the Catalan Atlas and Charles’s copy of TBJM

were penned in vernacular dialects and partook in charting with a contemporary authorial

voice and body that which what would otherwise be considered a traditional global schema.

In both, biblical and eschatological episodes abound and outlying regions of the world are

still the place of fabulous legend. Yet, verbal and graphic worlds alike mined contemporary

reports in addition to scholastic accounts for their information. Among other sources,

Cresques consulted Polo’s report for the Catalan Atlas, and in TBJM we find material from

many travelers including William of Boldensele, Odoric of Pordenone, and Hetoum of

Armenia.

The map was an elaborate show piece–a gift between kings residing in the highest

strata of power. Labeled a ‘mappamundi’ by its commissioner, the Catalan Atlas stresses

the concerns of earlier erudite geography that focused on the oikoumene as stage for the

enactment of human drama. 53 The shape of the Far East still mimes the rounded edge of the

terrestrial disk. However, to erroneously delineate between the atlas’s eastern half and the

16
portolan chart accuracy of the east’s western counterpart is to overlook how that accuracy

has been harnessed to elaborate the didactic world image.

A pivotal panel in this spatial narrative is the westernmost panel in which the

compass rose resides [Figs. 7-8]. Almost entirely water, this panel seems superfluous to the

terrestrial composition. Be that as it may, the compass rose supplies the graphic weight

necessary to realign the composition so that the Holy Land appears very close to the center

of the image, near the division of the fourth and fifth panels. Between Ireland, the compass,

and the west coast of Africa an arc is formed that mirrors the easternmost eighth panel of

the map. Thus the Catalan Atlas not only adds to the traditional Dulcert Mediterranean

chart outline the three easternmost panels depicting East Asia, it also adds this western

most panel depicting the Atlantic, reinstating the symmetry of the erudite world. Water has

become a component of total mapped space.

The four tangential rhumb circles, the placement of non-hydrographic features

perpendicular to the littoral, the solid color of islands, and the material weight of the far

East’s coastal rim indicate that the Atlas was an early attempt to actively chart the

legendary and scriptural East using the attributes of the portolan.54 Indeed, it is so early an

attempt to translate the mapping activity of one community into a pictorial idiom of the

highest social order that several discrepancies occur. One of these errors concerns the

compass rose, which is the earliest example to appear in an elaborate presentation chart.

The rose’s erratic positioning indicates that rather than arising organically from the

map’s structure, it was inserted into the map partway through the process of laying down

the rhumb lines. 55 It is a noticeable mess, properly aligned with only the four primary

cardinal directions. Off kilter, it is an awkward emulation, perhaps even several copies

removed, of a now-lost utilitarian exempla, inserted on the map to allude to the travelled
17
space of the sailor. The dual functions that the compass fulfills of reinstating erudite

symmetry and symbolizing contemporary travel effectively bring the authority of present

travelers into the space of a mappamundi, graphically reflecting much the same attitude

towards eyewitness experience that Joan I articulated out loud. In a documented command,

the prince ordered that if Cresques could not be located to explain the ‘mapamundi’s’

contents to the French envoy, that a few ‘good sailors’ be fetched to do the job properly.56

While it is true that Mandeville was not cast in the role of sailor, his person mimes

the striated space of nautical charts. The knight wanders over the surface of the world

rendering it palpable via his periplus-like movements, enumerating the distance and

direction he traveled between sites, at the same time also offering descriptions linked to

place. What make’s TBJM’s world so emblematic of late medieval geography is the

presence at the world’s edge of Mandeville, not the existence there of anthropophagi. In

any event, if no one cited his source for the description of the islands around Ceylon when

the Mandeville-author ‘plagiarized’ a French translation of Friar Odoric’s Latin account,

and Odoric in his turn lifted it from Marco Polo’s Venetian account, then lay eyewitness

experience, its empirical gaze, its continuous narrating voice, and graphic articulations of

space had penetrated the chain of learned geographical citation. 57 No one in the chain of

knock-offs is citing anything other than the authenticity of personal experience and vision,

regardless of the legitimacy of sources. To do so would only hinder future travelers from

reporting their findings, detracting from ‘someone else who took the trouble and labored

bodily to go into those far places and find out about the country…’ 58

18
1
The Book of Sir John Maundeville, A.D. 1322-1356, ed. Thomas Wright, in Early Travels in Palestine
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1848; repr. 2003), 282.
2
Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: the “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 254-257 at 256, ‘He offers his eyewitness testimony to the existence of a
written authority that testifies to the existence of what he as an eyewitness has written about in his book –
and this looping Roman dance is itself authenticated by an appeal to a partly written authority that readers
might have been able to see for themselves: the Mappamundi…’
3
Michael Seymour, “More Thoughts on Mandeville,” in Jean de Mandeville in Europa: Neue
Perspektiven in der Reiseliteraturforschung, eds. Ernst Bremer and Susanne Röhl (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 2007), 19-30. Christiane Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville: Une ‘Géographie’ au XIVe
Siècle (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d’Études Médiévales de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988),
273-275.
4
Ramon J. Pujades I Bataller, Les Cartes Portolanes: La Representació Medieval d’una Mar Solcada
(Barcelona: Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya; Institut d'Estudis Catalans; Institut Europeu de la
Mediterrània; Lunwerg, 2007), 415-420. “The chronology of the advent and dissemination of nautical
charts is totally inseparable from that of the rise of vernacular Romance languages to the category of
vehicles of written expression (420).”
5
David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in
Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, eds. J.B. Harley and David
Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 291. Woodward points out, “The geographical
content of the first portolan charts in the late thirteenth century bears no apparent relationship to that of
the mappaemundi of the time.”
6
Woodward, “Roger Bacon,” 119.
7
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12, 474-480.
8
S. Maqbul Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in
the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, eds. J.B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 159.
9
Ibid., 158-160.
10
J. Vernet-Ginés, “The Maghreb Chart in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana,” Imago Mundi 16 (1962): 1.
11
Ahmad, “al-Idrīsī,” 160-162.
12
Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 296-299.
13
Patrick Gautier Dalché, Carte Marine et Portulan au XIIᵉ Siècle: Le Liber De Existencia Riveriarum et
Forma Maris Nostri Mediterranei (Pise, circa 1200) (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1995), 9. Evelyn
Edson, The World Map, 1300-1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press 2007), 43-44.
14
Gautier Dalché, Nostri Mediterranei, 9-10.
15
Ibid., 28, 116, line 187.
16
ibid., 116, line 193.
17
ibid., “nautis et gradientibus illorum.”
18
Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in The History of
Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, eds.
J.B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 371-463, at 374.
Campbell describes a Portuguese chart of 1482 which contains Arabic inscriptions. Vernet-Ginés, “The
Maghreb Chart,” 1, 4. Ibn Sa’īd al Magribī used textual portolan to describe the coast of Morocco. The
earliest dated ‘Maghreb Chart’ is from ca. 1330. Svat Soucek, “Islamic Charting in the Mediterranean,”
in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, eds.
J.B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 263-292, at 263-264. In
the Maghreb chart, about 150 toponyms on the northern Mediterranean coast are of Italian, Catalan, and
Castilian derivation. R.A. Skelton, “A Contract for World Maps at Barcelona, 1399-1400,” Imago Mundi
22 (1968): 107-113, at 107. Maestro Giame Riba was designated a “cristiano novella,” a converted Jew,
as part of his designation. Riba was the assumed name of Jafudà Cresques, son and assistant of Abraham
Cresques, executer of the Catalan Atlas. Juan Ceva has translated the articles of Gabriel Llompart and
Jaume Riera I Sans, “The Will of the Cartographer Cresques Abraham and Other Family Documents,”
IEB 64/65 (1999/2000): 99-115. “Jafudà Cresques and Samuel Corcós: More Documents About the

19
Jewish Painters of Nautical Charts (Majorca, XIV c.),” BSAL 40 (1984): 341-350. “Jafudà Cresques, Jew
of Majorca,” Randa 5 (1977): 51-66. Accessed August 4, 2012,
http://www.cresquesproject.net/translations.
19
Edward Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), xvi-xvii.
20
E. G. R. Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook
(New York: Abelard-Schuman Limited, 1957), 105-106.
21
Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 29-42.
22
Tuan, Topophilia, 129-133, 137-138, 149. Tuan notes that horizontal space is characterized by time as
units of distance, but I differ from him slightly in proposing that nautical charts contain the horizontal
spatial-temporal logic without operating on the premise of “privileged views, on the extension of lines of
sight to the distant horizon by means of straight paths” that mark Renaissance perspective.
23
Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 12.
24
Taylor, Haven-Finding, 107.
25
Yule, Ser Marco Polo, 1:142.
26
Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), 15-33 at 27-28. Campbell points out that while pilgrim itineraries are
linear and episodic, the sense of the past overwhelms the present time of the pilgrim-viewer. The sights
are “simultaneous and perpetual,” and “bear no relation to the traveler and only the spatial relation of
distance to each other.” 27. The conception of space in early itineraries is “a hieratic, undemocratic view
of geography.” 28.
27
Larner, Marco Polo, 47-49. Larner emphasizes Rustichello’s background in romance. Previously, he
authored the Méliadus, a collection of French prose tales concerning Arthurian heroes.
28
Ibid., 49-52. Henry Yule, ed. and trans., Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and
Marvels of the East, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), 1:1. The Book begins with a passage
imploring the reader to “take this Book and cause it to be read to you…”
29
Larner, Marco Polo, 69.
30
Pujades I. Bataller, Les Cartes Portolanes, 420.”
31
Cambell, “Portolan Charts,” 387-388.
32
Casey, Representing Place, 178.
33
Campbell, “Charts,” 378.
34
Ibid., 385.
35
Pujades I Bataller, Cartes Portolanes, 474-475, uses the terms “diaphragm” and “true horizontal axis”
of the chart.
36
Dana B. Durand, The Vienna-Klosterneuburg Map Corpus of the Fifteenth Century: a Study in the
Transition from Medieval to Modern Science (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1952), 218-221. Durand identified the
copying of an Italian portolan in a Schyfkarten, postulating that the accurate outline of the sea may have
been reproduced solely by transposing individual coordinate measurements.
37
Philip E. Steinberg, “Insularity, Sovereignty and Statehood: The Representation of Islands on Portolan
Charts and the Construction of the Territorial State,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography
87 (2005): 253-265, at 255-259.
38
Skelton, “Contract for Maps,” 107. The charts in the Cornaro Atlas are copies of older charts right
down to the imitated signatures.
39
Skelton, “Contract,” 107, points out that the chart maker was not necessarily the chart illustrator and
that map decorators might be designated as “dipintore” of charts while cartographers were designated
“maestro” of charts. Llompart and Riera I Sans, “Jafudà Cresques and Samuel Corcós,” 5-9, argue that
by this period, most of the Majorcan mapmakers were illuminators of maps, not cartographers.
40
Joaquim Alves Gaspar, “Dead Reckoning and Magnetic Declination: Unveiling the Mystery of
Portolan Charts,” e-Perimetron 3 (2008): 191-203, at 199-202.
41
Campbell, “Charts,” 436.
42
Patrick Gautier Dalché, “L’usage des cartes marines aux XIVe et XVe siecles,” in Spazi, tempi, misure
e percorsi nell Europa del bassomedioevo 9 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo,
1996): 97-128, at 97-98.
43
Ibid., 109, 123.

20
44
Pujades I Battaler, Portolanes, 465.
45
Larner, Marco Polo, 53, 74. The translation was completed before 1314. It was the most widely read
version of the Polo’s report if judged by extant manuscripts. See, Peter Jackson, “Marco Polo and his
‘Travels’” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 61 (1998): 82-
101, at 84.
46
Carpini, Mongols, 35.
47
Peter Barber and Michelle Brown, “The Aslake World Map,” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 24-44, at 33-37.
48
William of Nagis, “Vita Sancti Ludovici Regis Franciae, Vie de Saint Louis,” in Recueil des historiens
des Gaules et de la France, ed. Martin Bouquet et. al. (Paris: V. Palmé, 1840), 309-465, at 445. My
italics.
49
Peter Barber, “Medieval Maps of the World,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and
Their Context, ed., P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 1-43, at 25. Barber, notes that the
Ebstorf map emphasizes salvation and that the “world is shown as the body of Christ… the rivers of the
world corresponding to his arteries.”
50
John E. Dotson, Merchant Culture in Fourteenth Century Venice: The Zibaldone da Canal
(Binghamton:
Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1994), 11-12, 23-25.
51
Malcolm Letts, ed. and trans., Mandeville’s Travels: Texts and Translations, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt
Society, 1953), 2:231. Volume 2 is the scholarly edition of the earliest known manuscript, Paris,
Bibiothèque Nationale de France, Ms. nouv. aqc. fr. 4515.
52
Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Century
France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 5-11.
53
Relaño, Shaping of Africa, 101.
54
Ibid., 99.
55
Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 395.
56
Pujades, Portolanes, 441.
57
Michael C. Seymour, The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels (Oxford: Early English Text
Society, 2002), 154-155, note 77.
58
Iain Macleod Higgins, ed. and trans., The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), 184-185.

21
 IMAGES:

Fig. 1: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Arabe 2221,

fol. 3v-4r, ca. 1300.

Fig. 2: Vesconte Map, Marino Sanudo’s Liber secretorum fidelium crusis…, Vatican City,
Bibliloteca Apostolica Vatincana, MS Vat. Lat. 2972, fols. 112v-113r, ca. 1321.

1
 Fig. 3: Maghreb Chart,
Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, S.P. II 259, ca. 1330.

2
Fig. 4: Dulcert Chart, Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Res. Ge. B 696, ca. 1339.

Fig. 5: Portolan Chart, London,

British Library, MS add. 25691,
ca. before 1350.

3
Fig. 6: The ‘Map of Two Venices,’ London, British Library,
MS Egerton 73, Map 15A, ca. 1489.

4
Fig 7: Catalan Atlas, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Esp. 30, panels 1-2, ca. 1375.

Fig. 8: Detail, left hand side.