Al-Mas’udi went on to describe the Turkic tribes of Central Asia and wrote in some detail on India, its rulers, trade and beliefs. He described China, though in less detail, dwelling at one point on a revolt towards the end of the Tang period, led by a certain Huang Chao, which he describes as leading to a weakening of the dynasty.
Al-Mas’udi was a prolific writer, but the best known of his works is Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma’adin al-jawahir (‘Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems’), a history that begins with Adam and Eve and takes the reader through the ages to the time of the late Abbasid Caliphate. The same book mentions the story of Khashkhash Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad, a navigator of al-Andalus (in southern Spain) who sailed across the Atlantic in 889 CE and eventually returned loaded with booty. This story is said to be well known among the people of al-Andalus – a tantalising tradition for succeeding generations of Iberians staring towards that vast western horizon.
He was an expert mineralogist and geologist, proposing a theory of evolution based on his observation of fossils; thus – from minerals to plants to animals to man – his work preceded Darwin by 900 years.
* The map, the cathedral and the town are all well worth a visit. Hereford is also the birthplace of 17th-century actress and Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwynn. I enjoyed a very happy couple of days there, lubricated by good cider.
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I try to spend as much time as I can these days in my little place in Normandy, in the middle of the Cotentin Peninsula – a great place to rest and recuperate. It is an ancient small farm, and the building is long and thin, 25 feet wide and 105 feet long. It is about half a mile from a small village, and Axel, an old and very knowledgeable local worthy, visits from time to time – just to test my wine stock, you understand, and offer advice on anything he might notice. Like most Normans, he is very generous in that way, and I soon come to realise that the shelf I have just put up in the kitchen is in the wrong place. The Normans are an unusual group of people, an amalgam of long-settled farming folk with layers of Franks and later Vikings, the latter in particular. My neighbours, Axel included, lay specific claim to being of Viking descent – an important element of their family inheritance. In Axel’s case, with a face of sun-bleached leather, white bristly hair and bright, clear blue eyes, he might just be right.
Not far from the farm lie the ancestral lands of the Hauteville dynasty. This particular Norman family arrived in southern Italy in 999 CE as mercenaries on behalf of Byzantine and Lombard overlords, and it did not take long for them to see the opportunities the area presented. On hearing the good news, more Normans, well armed and upwardly mobile, were soon on the way, eager to carve out estates for themselves. Unlike the conquest of England, which took less than a decade to consolidate, in Italy and Sicily the process took over 100 years. Eventually the Normans became local lords, and then ‘the power’ in the land.
King Roger II inherited his Italian and Sicilian domains from his father Roger Guiscard, Roger I, Count of Sicily, and in 1130, he established the Kingdom of Sicily. For 24 years he ruled over an unusually diverse state, made up of native Sicilians and south Italians, Arabs, Lombards, Byzantines and Normans, and fought a complicated struggle to control his lands, but in doing so he developed an amazingly inclusive and tolerant society.
Among the citizens of this realm was a certain Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Abdallah Idris al-Sharif al-Idrisi, a name that rolls off the tongue, but let’s call him al-Idrisi for short. Al-Idrisi spent much of his time in the Christian kingdom of Sicily, and consequently the geographic traditions of Islam and Christianity came together in his work. He was born in the North African city of Ceuta, spent part of his early life in al-Andalus and travelled through France and into England, stopping in London and York. I was in York not so long ago, and with an afternoon to spare I walked around the area of the minster and pondered the fact that one of my cartographic heroes had, at least according to some, visited the city. With this thought on my mind I wandered into a fine little place with good beer called The Hole in the Wall, and chose the special of the day, a hearty plateful. It seemed an ancient place located on a medieval plot. What, I wondered, had al-Idrisi chosen from the menu 885 years earlier? What was the special of the day in 1130? He would have seen Normans strutting through the lanes, as they had conquered the place 60 or so years before. His later journeys took him east to Anatolia and North Africa, where he gained first-hand knowledge of those regions. Al-Idrisi chose to settle in Sicily in around 1136 and his skills eventually came to the attention of the royal household. Roger II’s administration was run by a royal chancery, and among its talented staff were Greek, Arabic and Latin scribes who were capable of producing documents to suit the needs of his state and its population, in whatever appropriate language might be needed.
Around 1144, Roger commissioned al-Idrisi to produce what we might now call an atlas. King Roger II had a keen interest in the extent of his domains, which are shown at their maximum reach, in around 1150, drawn in the dark tint on our rendition of al-Idrisi’s world map. In Arabic the work was called Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq or ‘Entertainment for He Who Longs to Travel the World’. Al-Idrisi had produced a collection of 70 detailed maps covering the known world, their orientation with south at the top. (If you look at al-Idrisi’s work on the internet, his maps are frequently upside down, with north at the top, to help the modern viewer.) The atlas became known as The Book of Roger, indicating the king’s important role in sponsoring the work. It was created following the Greek tradition, dividing the world into seven climes and moving from west to east, describing each clime in detail. Al-Idrisi referred extensively to previous Arabic geographers in his final compilation. He also relied on his own observations as well as collating the reports of contemporary travellers, many of whom, as you might expect, passed through the ports and towns of Roger’s kingdom, located as it was in the central Mediterranean. The work’s geographical accuracy, an improvement on Ptolemy’s gigantic contribution, corrected the interpretation of the Indian Ocean as enclosed by land and the form of the Caspian Sea, and determined the direction of major European rivers. Further details were added concerning China and Tibet far in the east. In Africa, the lakes near the Mountains of the Moon are shown as the source of the Nile, whose course is tracked to the Mediterranean. The Niger River is also shown, locating the trading city of Timbuktu on the edge of the known world.
The map’s style and draughtsmanship and the choice of colour are a joy to behold. They have a kind of rhythmic quality; to my eye there is a modern feel – perhaps David Hockney’s pool paintings are suggested. I could stare at them for hours. Among all the triumphs of cartographic design, a calculating mind was at work on this map, as al-Idrisi estimated the circumference of the earth to be some 22,900 miles, which was just 8 per cent off from a modern calculation.
Map 17. Muhammad al-Idrisi was a geographer and cartographer. For much of his life he lived in Palermo, Sicily, at the court of King Roger II.
Al-Idrisi’s work remained a standard for accuracy for almost 300 years after it was written. Geographers and travellers from Islamic traditions, such as Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun and Piri Reis, were influenced by it in creating their own views of the world, while European explorers such as Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus also read his work in detail, thus shaping Christian tradition also.
Sometime just before October 1451, Cristoffa Combo was born in the Republic of Genoa, now part of modern Italy. In Italian, he was known as Cristoforo Colombo, the son of Domenico Colombo and Susanna Fontanarossa, weavers and people of the middling sort. They also had a cheese stand where young Cristoffa helped out. In 1473, Cristoffa was placed as an apprentice business agent for trading families in the port of Genoa. From there he made various voyages around Genoese holdings on the Mediterranean, which may have included a journey to Chios, a major Aegean island and trade centre, then under the control