The Enchanting Encounter with the East: Breaking the Ice Between the Latin West and the Far East

By Michael Baizerman

“The Enchanting Encounter with the East” belongs to cross-cultural studies and focuses on the attempts of European literati to get acquainted with the bizarre realm of the Far East during the Late Middle Ages.

It turns out that western intellectuals lured by the marvels and myths of the Far East did a lot of spadework before taking a route that led to unfamiliar oriental realms. On this thorny path, many Eurocentric medieval fantasies had been debunked. The book shows how global connections had surfaced centuries before industrialization.

The book falls into the genre of non-fiction history and centers on the recognition of lands and cultures of India, China, and the Mongols by the Latin medieval society.

The storyline is based on the original online research and presents authentic arguments based on the author’s engagement with the sources. The readers might enjoy as well as profit from this comprehensive reference that does not require deep background knowledge. The content is provided in clear language and is supplemented with a bibliography and illustrations that will enrich the entire work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665596718

Book preview

© 2022 Michael Baizerman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   07/15/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9670-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9671-8 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To Naomi and Gleb,

my beloved children,

for their confidence and support

that made it possible to fulfill my dream

Contents

UNIT I: The Miraculous Revival Or The Painful Recovery

1.     What If the Earth Is the Sphere?

2.     How to Measure the Earth’s Circumference?

3.     How Long Spans the Inhabited World?

Bottom Line

UNIT II: The Saga of All My Sons

4.     The Trefoil of the World

5.     Where is the Heart of the World: The Location of Jerusalem on European Mind Maps

6.     In Black and White: Racial Prejudices in the European Middle Ages

7.     The Enigma of the Antipodes

Bottom Line

UNIT III: Unveiling the Alien

8.     The Squall from the East

9.     The Suspension Bridge across the Abyss

10.   The Swan Song of the Mongol Thrust

Bottom Line

UNIT IV: Mapping Marvels and Monsters: In the Shadow of the Iron Gate

11.   Meet your Enemy

12.   Alexander at the Caspian Gates

13.   Beware of Barbarians

14.   A Kernel of Truth

15.   Alexander versus Gog-Magog

16.   The Lost and Found Tribes

17.   The Ten Tribes and Other Monsters

18.   The Turks in Jacob’s Tents

Bottom Line

UNIT V: Dreams Amid Debris: In the Shoes of Prester John

Prologue

19.   The Early Encounters: Under the Historic Radar

20.   The Shadow Crusader: Otto of Freising

21.   The Black Prince: Yelu Dashi

22.   The Mysterious Letter

23.   Waiting for the Train That Would Never Come: The Fifth Crusade

24.   The Scourge of God

25.   The Underdog and the Power Strife on the Steppes

Bottom Line

UNIT VI: The Witness in the Den

26.   Barefooted Envoys

27.   John of Plano Carpini

28.   William of Rubruck

29.   John of Montecorvino

Bottom Line

A List of Illustrations

Image 1:   The Blue Marble snapshot by the Galileo spacecraft

Image 2:   The geocentric model of the universe, with its spheres and planets rotating around the immovable core.

Image 3:   The shooter rains his satirical arrows on the corrupted sinners

Image 4:   Jesus Christ blesses the earth

Image 5:   Intrepid travelers walk around the globe

Image 6:   The Nuremberg Globe of Martin Behaim, 1492

Image 7:   The Pear-Shaped Earth of Columbus

Image 8:   The Reconstructed World Map of Eratosthenes

Image 9:   The Reconstructed World Map of Posidonius

Image 10:   The World Map of Henricus Martellus

Image 11:   The T-O chart assigns the continents to Noah’s offspring

Image 12:   The world view of Ptolemy flanked with Noah’s sons

Image 13:   Noah’s sons observing their estates

Image 14:   Heinrich Bunting: The world modeled as a cloverleaf

Image 15:   Pietro Vesconte’s Mappa Mundi

Image 16:   Jerusalem on the sixth century Madaba map mosaic

Image 17:   Healing of Gadarene Demoniacs

Image 18:   Rouen cathedral, reproduction of the tympanum from the facade portal of St. John the Baptist

Image 19:   The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain

Image 20:   St. Morris in the Magdeburg Cathedral

Image 21:   Burgo de Osma Mappamundi

Image 22:   The Mongol invasion of Hungary

Image 23:   The scramble for the bridge

Image 24:   The sacking of a Russian city

Image 25:   The moonlit gorge depicted by Ivan Aivazovsky

Image 26:   While in transit…

Image 27:   A gate erected by Alexander the Great to seal off the hordes of Gog and Magog (A fifteenth-century illustration to Jean Wauquelin’s Book of Alexander)

Image 28:   Ebstorf Mappa Mundi: Gog-Magog Entering the Role

Image 29:   The henchmen of Antichrist besieging the city of saints

Image 30:   A Typical Notice

Image 31:   A false prophet (Nathan of Gaza leading the Ten Tribes to the Land of Israel (Germany, 1666)

Image 32:   Dieric Bouts the Elder. Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek

Image 33:   The tomb of Thomas the Apostle in San Thome Basilica.

Image 34:   Hunting with eagles: Khitans.

Image 35:   Manuel I Komnenos

Image 36:   The Fair Death of Prester John in a Mounting Battle Against Chinggis Khan

Image 37:   The Lord Pope Dispatches Delegations of the Dominicans and Franciscans to the Great Khan

Image 38:   The Great Khan Güyük at the feast. An illustration from Ata-Malik Juvayni’s Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror

Image 39:   Audience with the Great Khan Möngke. (An illustration from Ata-Malik Juvayni’s Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror)

Image 40:   A Mongolian empress sporting a tall headdress

Image 41:   Mongol male and female costumes

Image 42:   A Mongolian tent

Image 43:   A one-masted dhow with an unfurled sail in the Indian Ocean

Image 44:   Black pepper vine with immature peppercorns

UNIT I

The Miraculous Revival Or

The Painful Recovery

"Who is ignorant of the places in the world,

lacks knowledge not only of his destination but

of the course to pursue." (Roger Bacon) (¹)

1

What If the Earth Is the Sphere?

"Thus when the God, whatever God was he,

Had formed the whole and made the parts agree,

That no unequal portions might be found,

He molded earth into a spacious round."

-Ovid, Metamorphoses (²)

Of what importance is it to know whether the earth is a sphere, a cylinder, a disk, or a concave surface? -Basil of Caesarea (³)

Image%201.jpg

The Blue Marble snapshot by the Galileo spacecraft

The tag geography fell into disuse among medieval European scholars. Ruled out of liberal arts, it never gained access to the university curriculum. Academics would treat this subject as a handmaid of cosmography at best or a concubine of theology at worst.

Geographic ideas adopted by medieval intellectuals originated in Ancient Greece. By adhering to these old-fashioned and partly erroneous tenets, western academics followed the path of universal wisdom, pouring the stagnated wine into new wineskins.

From a historical perspective, the advent of geography entailed a political stance to justify the Roman expansion. An inscription on Hereford Mappa Mundi, created in the late thirteenth century, gives the credit for the earliest description of the earth to the ill-fated Roman hegemon: The world began to be measured by Julius Caesar. However, his adopted son, Caesar Augustus, commissioned surveyors to evaluate our planet. (⁴)

In compliance with their classical mentors, Latin disciples adopted the image of the spherical earth. They perceived our planet as a tiny eyeball anchored inside an enormous socket of the Heavens. This fixed globe embraced by water and shrouded by the veil of air acted as a pivot for the rotating universe whose seven planets were spinning around the immovable center. These celestial bodies followed their discreet circular orbits and revolved at their own pace across the clock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model#/

media/File:Bartolomeu_Velho_1568.jpg

The geocentric model of the universe, with its spheres

and planets rotating around the immovable core.

In a renowned illustration of a Latin poem, Vox Clamantis (The voice of the one crying out), its author, John Gower, shoots arrows at the sinful world. The poet blasts humankind for its wickedness at the backdrop of the earth fashioned as a sphere with compartments for air, fire, and water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Gower_

world_Vox_Clamantis_detail.jpg#/media/

File:John_Gower_world_Vox_Clamantis.jpg

The shooter rains his satirical arrows on the corrupted sinners

This image of the spherical earth would not surprise an extraterrestrial onlooker, for whom the convexity of our planet was an undeniable fact. However, all human observers were insiders and based their assumptions on circumstantial evidence, such as…

Table 1: The evidence for the spherical earth

• The circle is a perfect geometric shape that any object is apt to take; this is true for the universe and its terrestrial center.

• The heaviest element of the universe, the earth, tends to accumulate at the center by the gravitational forces and takes shape as a circle.

• The unequal elevation of the Sun and the Polar Star at different latitudes: the higher point for the north-bound traveler and the lower location as one approaches the equator. (⁵)

• During the lunar eclipse, the Earth casts a round shadow on the moon’s surface.

• Asynchronous sighting of land from the sea depending on the height of a spectator’s position. (⁶)

• Due to the earth’s bulge, even the highest mountains disappear at a certain distance. (⁷)

• The horizon recedes at the pace of our advancement.

Medieval scholars not only supported the ancient teaching of the spherical earth; they excluded any other reasonable explanations of the above-mentioned exhibits. John of Hollywood penned The Sphere, a famous thirteenth-century treatise and mandatory reading in European universities. His book hammers final nails into the coffin of an ancient doctrine of a flat planet: If the Earth were flat from east to west, the stars would rise as soon for Westerners as for Orientals. If the world were flat from north to south, the stars would always be visible to anyone would continue to be so wherever he went. (⁸)

The contemporaries of the fourteenth-century pandemics, dubbed the Black Death, incorporated it into their global vision. A witness from Padua, Italy, lets out a sigh of despair: this plague encircled the whole globe. (⁹)

In his attractive poetic vision from the Metamorphoses, Ovid promotes the anonymous creator of the world as a diligent potter who has embedded his masterpiece in a vast orb. This alluring pagan symbol took fancy among Christian scholars who viewed the spherical earth as taking various shapes: an apple, a ball, or the yolk of an egg.

The globe makes the days unequal in length, explains Venerable Bede, who flourished in the eighth century. A sphere set in the middle of the whole universe is not merely circular like a shield but resembled more a ball, equally round in all directions. (¹⁰) The sphere’s shape should comply with its position at the heart of the cosmos.

The tiny Psalter Mappa Mundi, created around 1265, exposes the correlation between the two perceptions of our planet--as a circle and as a sphere. Wearing royal garb, Jesus Christ serves a Mass with the aid of two angels swinging the censers. He blesses the earth modeled as a wheel, wielding its miniature copy—a kingly orb, which displays him as the ultimate ruler of the world.

Image%204.jpg

Jesus Christ blesses the earth

This image has an antique analog: the colossal bronze statue of Emperor Constantine stood twelve meters high, featuring a sphere placed on the emperor’s palm. (¹¹)

Another popular image was an apple. Gautier de Metz, the thirteenth-century French poet, compares an explorer to a fly engaged in constant motion across the sphere: a man can go around the world as a fly makes the tour of an apple. (¹²) The author might borrow his image from Isaiah, who claims that movement is inherent to human beings. The Lord sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. [Isaiah 40: 22]

Here the shape of our planet implies and even demands a challenging trip across the globe. This imaginary journey features a couple of travelers who set off from the same spot, moving in opposite directions and inevitably meeting at the antipodal point on the other side of the sphere. If a curious explorer knows how to navigate his route, he will never go astray. An author maintains that one day his prophecy may come true.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Terre_est_

ronde,_Image_du_Monde,_Gossuin_de_Metz.png

Intrepid travelers walk around the globe

A century later, an armchair traveler, Sir John Mandeville, will elaborate on this idea, coming up with the prospect of circumnavigation. He asserts that mariners might go by ship all about the world and above and beneath. (¹³)

Martin Behaim, who created the earliest known terrestrial globe the same year as Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the New World, called his masterpiece Erdaphel [German: the earth apple.]

Image%206.jpg

The Nuremberg Globe of Martin Behaim, 1492

Jacob Perez of Valencia, a fifteenth-century Augustinian friar and theologian, slams the entrenched conceptions of the earth in favor of a more progressive worldview. He claims that dry land occupies far greater space than the sea, while his opponents profess that the earth is like a light ball or an apple in a basin full of water which only the top appears above the water. (¹⁴) According to These die-hards visualized our planet floating on the ocean’s surface like the tip of an iceberg.

Another prevailing metaphor was an egg. A fifteenth-century medical treatise entertains its readers with the following comparison: Earth is a tiny round ball in the middle of the heathen circle, right as the yolk is in the middle of the egg. (¹⁵)

Only toward the end of the Middle Ages did explorers harbor reservations about the earth’s shape. According to their testimonies, the discoveries proved that the east-west extent of our planet was more prominent than academics had previously thought. They were not ready yet to acknowledge that the Blue Marble was squashed at the poles and swollen at the equator, but it was a step in the right direction.

The admiral of the Ocean Sea argued that the Earth was pear-shaped with the Paradise bulging at the tip, like a female nipple. In a letter sent from his third voyage, he claims that our planet has the shape of a pear which is everywhere very round except where the stalk is. (¹⁶)

https://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/boe/boe26.htm

(From W.F. Warren’s Paradise Found, 1885.)

The Pear-Shaped Earth of Columbus

The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder expressed a similar view far back in the first century CE, asserting that the earth is of the shape of an irregular globe, resembling a pinecone. (¹⁷)

The controversy developed approaching the thorny issue of the earth’s rotation, i.e., whether our planet is at rest or in motion. The adepts of the immobile orb based their hypothesis on the completion of the Creation. The Lord laid the Earth on its foundations. [Psalm 104: 5] It could not budge an inch. The globe cannot get off the ground and vanish into space.

On the other hand, the universe was considered movable. Isidore of Seville, who authored the popular seventh-century Christian encyclopedia, expresses the consensus of European literati that it undergoes constant change: it is always in motion, with no rest given to its elements. (¹⁸)

Medieval scholars never refused to build their arguments on a solid foundation and didn’t stop looking for new evidence to confirm the universal truths. They came up with the concept of the immovable earth based on the following demonstration. When an archer shoots his arrow directly upward, the projectile will inevitably return very close to the place of projection (in case we ignore an impact of wind): Shoot up an arrow perpendicular from the earth, [it] will return to your foot again. (¹⁹) If the globe did rotate around its axis, they argued, it would deviate the missile from its original position in the direction of the rotation. The conditions of the experiment predetermined the outcome.

2

How to Measure the

Earth’s Circumference?

As we have seen, there was a consensus among eminent medieval academics concerning the earth’s shape. Yet, the scientific circles got involved in a heated argument about calculating the globe’s circumference.

Back in time, the two giants of ancient Greek science endeavored to carry out this tremendous task back in time. Both estimated the elevation angle of heavenly bodies above the horizon at distant points presumably located on the same meridian to calculate the measure of a degree. Both assessed the distance between these spots by converting travel days on land (²⁰) or sea (²¹) to a reasonable length standard.

The fact that they carried out these estimations twice shows that the scholars confronted with sound criticism were unhappy with their initial scores and had to improve their performance. The margin of uncertainty only grows if we make allowances for the inherent inconsistency between antique and modern units of measurement.

Modern science ranks the earth’s equatorial circumference (²²) at 40,075 kilometers, where each degree stands for 111.319 kilometers.

In the Greek-speaking world, a conventional unit of length to estimate distances on land and at sea was a stadium, whose value varied from region to region. The problem with this standard lies in its ambiguity; there were no fewer than five different versions, and any talk about the precision of ancient estimations sets up a straw man argument.

Table 2: Stadia to Meters Conversion (²³)

The maximum gap between the opposite values can reach 25 percent (157:209=0.75). The mean or consensus equivalent (184.6), which cuts by half the span of error in this ocean of uncertainty, approaches the Attic stadium. The same standard also allows the easy conversion from the Roman mile to the stadium (1,480 meters:8=185 meters), as reported by Strabo: reckon, as the generality of persons, a mile at eight stadia. (²⁴)

By coincidence, the modern metric value of a nautical mile—1850 meters--equals ten stadia. We will apply our consensus magnitude for further calculations to appreciate the nuts and bolts of mathematical geography.

The first of the scientific prodigies was Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Libya, who flourished in the third century BCE and coined the term geography, i.e., the description of the world. In his initial estimation, he reckoned that the earth’s circumference amounted to 250,000 stadia (46,250 kilometers), a 15 percent overestimation of modern value.

On his second attempt, the Hellenistic scholar rolled up his figures to 252,000 stadia (46,620 kilometers), probably for arithmetic convenience since his new meaning hits 700 stadia (129.5 kilometers) per latitudinal degree at the equator. Who does not adore round numbers? The second estimate had surpassed the current standard by 16 percent.

Another genius, Posidonius of Apamea, Syria, a celebrated astronomer, who lived in the first century BCE and was known for calculating the distance between the earth and the sun, disagreed with this outcome. According to his initial estimation, he set the terrestrial circumference at 240,000 stadia (44,400 kilometers). His mean figure errs only by 11 percent and considerably improves the values of Eratosthenes.

Unfortunately, Posidonius did not follow his sound logic and revised his original score, cutting it down to 180,000 stadia (33,300 kilometers) to reach a spectacular round figure of 500 stadia (92.5 kilometers) per degree. The new value is well beyond the present-day standard, underestimating it by 17 percent.

If we compare the figures obtained by the outstanding Greek savants, the score of Posidonius in his first estimation is closer to modern computation. However, he made a fatal error in his further attempt, causing the Blue Marble to shrink even greater than Eratosthenes had blown it up.

Taking into consideration the passion of the Greek academics to round numbers, it’s a pity that none of them tried a version of 600 stadia (111 kilometers) per degree, which would enable the champions of the exact science to come up with the trustworthy figure of 39,960 kilometers—an immediate hit to the modern value.

Table 3: Estimation of the Earth’s

Circumference by Greek Scholars (²⁵)

In the early fifteenth century, Pierre D’Ailly, a French theologian and natural philosopher, put forward another learned opinion based on the estimate of Ahmad Al-Farghani. The Persian astronomer thrived in the ninth century CE and belonged to the giant Earth supporters. The latter assumed that the length of one degree at the equator equaled 56.67 miles.

A famous astronomer must have used an Arab mile worth between 1,925 and 1,995 meters (with the consensus value staying at 1,960 meters). Let’s take the last estimate for granted. We can convert al-Farghani’s degree into 111.1 kilometers which makes his circumference equal to 39,986 kilometers—a close match to the modern calculation (with a discrepancy of fewer than 90 kilometers).

However, D’Ailly made his revision in Roman miles, plummeting the degree’s value to 83.872 kilometers and coming up with the dwarf Earth model of 30,194 kilometers. (²⁶) His estimation opened a 25 percent gap against modern calculations.

Christopher Columbus, an involuntary discoverer of America and a self-proclaimed master of oceanic expanses, adopted this latest estimate, which drastically curtailed the circumference. He benefited from the contraction of the earth’s dimensions, arguing that the Ocean Sea was much narrower than the mainstream scholar opinion had maintained, and contemporary sea-going vessels were fit to cross it. He obtained the royal endorsement by hook or crook, allowing him to launch his crucial venture.

Columbus confronted his figures with what he considered to be a profane concept of the giant Earth. Following the apocryphal composition of Esdras, (²⁷) he also claimed that the dry land occupied the lion’s share of our planet: six parts out of seven. He was confident that his calculations matched both the truth of the Scriptures and the opinion of expert mariners. Even facing the dubious results of his glorious discovery, this die-hard had never had second thoughts.

In the letter to the Catholic monarchs sent in 1503, during his last voyage, the pioneering seafarer claimed that out of seven divisions, only one was the sea out of seven divisions, and the rest constituted dry land. He figured out that one degree at the equator equaled close to fifty-seven miles: the fact that one can touch with one’s fingers. (²⁸)

In another letter to the same recipient, the stubborn adventurer admits that the spiritual foundations of his mission had far eclipsed any scientific arguments: "the execution of the enterprise of the Indies was not a question of scholarship, or mathematics, or Mappa Mundi; (²⁹) it was the fulfillment of what Esdras has said." (³⁰)

His opponents, the advocates of the giant Earth conception, could cite an alternative opinion, backed by Eratosthenes’s figures: the circuit of the entire world is 252,000 stadia. (³¹)

3

How Long Spans the

Inhabited World?

Whoever wants to gain a vivid picture of the places and their relationship to each other--distance and location, longitude and latitude, height and depth; who wants to understand their variation in heat and aridity, cold and damp, color, taste, and smell, beauty, ugliness, charm, fertility, and barrenness, cannot understand all this without clear pictures of the size and shape of the habitable earth and its divisions or climatic zones. (Roger Bacon) (³²)

The principal argument that flared up in the ancient community of scholars referred to the extent of the inhabited world. Strabo of Amaseia, the Greek explorer and historian, who lived in the transition between BCE and CE, imposed upon a geographer the primary task of understanding the actual size, shape, and character of the human planet relative to the entire earth. (³³)

To achieve this goal, a researcher had to focus on the human planet, omitting the fringes and unfamiliar regions: the geographer undertakes to describe the known parts of the inhabited world, but he leaves out of consideration the unknown parts, as he does what is outside of it. (³⁴) Confined within unsettled territories of deserts and steppes on the map, these blank spots seemed unreachable and less advanced. They emitted warning signs not only in a spatial but also in an existential sense.

Ancient artists and philosophers rendered our world a far-flung island encompassed by the treacherous waters of the Ocean Sea. What lay beyond the shoreline was anyone’s guess that should not bother a qualified specialist since his expertise relied on travel accounts supported by scientific evidence. Military campaigns served as a further source of data: The spread of the empires of the Romans and the Parthians has presented to geographers of today a considerable addition to our empirical knowledge. (³⁵)

A mapmaker could draw this spacious enclave by connecting its farthest tips: joining with a straight line the extreme points reached on the coasting voyages made on both sides of the inhabited world. (³⁶) A practitioner would focus on the dry land, depicting its notable rivers and prominent mountain ranges; he took no interest in the sea except for spotting populated islands.

Geography owes its name to Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who baptized a new discipline. An outstanding Greek scholar and curator of the Library of Alexandria, he adjusted his virtual model of the earth along the prime parallel and meridian, which intersected on the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea.

His known world occupied the Northern Hemisphere, whose northern edge lay on the parallel of Thule (66 degrees North), a legendary island in the extreme north. The southern margin extended as far as the Cinnamon country (12 degrees North) in South Sudan, close to the mouth of the Red Sea, and a mysterious island of Taprobane (Sri Lanka), off the coast of India. (³⁷)

The geographer’s primary meridian ran through Meroe, Alexandria, and Rhodes. His principal parallel of 36 degrees north connected its western and eastern confines from the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) to the anonymous eastern capes of India through the whole length of the Mediterranean Sea and via the Caspian Gates and the lofty mountain ranges of the Taurus and Imaus (Himalaya). This imaginary partition line passed through an unknown bulge protruding from the littoral of the Eastern Ocean, close to the fictitious delta of the Ganges River (³⁸) It crossed the whole human planet, cutting it into two equal parts and marking the inhabited world’s length.

Ancient geographers often confused place names and used bombastic statements to report dubious evidence. They considered the most remarkable feature of Asia to be the unbroken mountain wall: from the Cilician Taurus, a continuous range of mountains extends through Asia as far as the Eastern Sea. [the South China Sea (³⁹)

Eratosthenes fixed the maximum north-to-south breadth of the habitable Earth (north-south extent) at 38,000 stadia (slightly above 7,000 kilometers) and its extreme length (west-to-east stretch) at 78,000 stadia (about 14.5 kilometers). (⁴⁰)

Image%208.jpg

The Reconstructed World Map of Eratosthenes

The known world of Posidonius the Stoic looked like a slingshot: broad in the middle from south to north but narrowing to east and west. (⁴¹) He also chose the Rhodes parallel as his fundamental latitude and calculated the length of the inhabited area from the bulge of Europe (Cape St. Vincent, Portugal) to a fancy headland on the eastern coast of India. (⁴²) This span measured 70,000 stadia (nearly 13,000 kilometers), making up half of the entire circumference: he suspects that the length of the inhabited world, being about seventy thousand stadia, is half of the entire circle. (⁴³)

In defining the breadth of the ecumene, he was less generous than his predecessor, excluding both Thule and Taprobane. The only significant islands that counted were Britain and Ireland. The northern rim passed through the shores of the Arctic Sea. The southern fringe connected the Atlas Mountains ridges, the Nile rapids, the Horn of Africa with the mouth of the Red Sea, and the coastline of the Southern Ocean.

Image%209.jpg