the middle of the 15th century cosmographers, as a rule, made scarcely
any attempt to reform their maps by any elaborate search for new
matter, or by lights that might be collected from recent travellers.
Their world was in its outline that handed down by the traditions
of their craft, as sanctioned by some Father of the Church, such as
Orosius or Isidore, as sprinkled with a combination of classical and
mediæval legend; Solinus being the great authority for the former.
Almost universally the earth’s surface is represented as filling the
greater part of a circular disk, rounded by the ocean; a fashion
that already existed in the time of Aristotle and was ridiculed by
him.[1] No dogma of false geography was more persistent or more
pernicious than this. Jerusalem occupies the central point, because
it was found written in the Prophet Ezekiel: “_Haec dicit Dominus
Deus: Ista est Jerusalem_, in medio gentium _posui eam, et in circuitu
ejus terras_;”[2] a declaration supposed to be corroborated by the
Psalmist’s expression, regarded as prophetic of the death of Our Lord:
“_Deus autem, Rex noster, ante secula operatus est salutem_ in medio
Terrae” (Ps. lxxiii. 12).[3] The Terrestrial Paradise was represented
as occupying the extreme East, because it was found in Genesis that
the Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden.[4] _Gog and Magog_ were
set in the far north or north-east, because it was said again in
Ezekiel: “_Ecce Ego super te Gog Principem capitis Mosoch et Thubal
... et ascendere te faciam de lateribus Aquilonis_,” whilst probably
the topography of those mysterious nationalities was completed by
a girdle of mountains out of the Alexandrian Fables. The loose and
scanty nomenclature was mainly borrowed from Pliny or Mela through
such Fathers as we have named; whilst vacant spaces were occupied
by Amazons, Arimaspians, and the realm of Prester John. A favourite
representation of the inhabited earth was this [circled T]; a great O
enclosing a T, which thus divides the circle in three parts; the
greater or half-circle being Asia, the two quarter circles Europe and
Africa.[5] These Maps were known to St. Augustine.[6]
[Sidenote: Roger Bacon as a geographer.]