Charles Freeman - The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment

The epithets barbarous and civilized occur so frequently in conversation and in books, that whoever employs his thoughts in contemplation of the manners and history of mankind will have occasion to consider, with some attention, both what ideas these words are commonly meant to convey, and in what sense they ought to be employed by the historian and moral philosopher.

James Dunbar, Essay on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780)

The monastic foundation of the Chora in Istanbul, formerly the great Christian city of Constantinople, is a rare survival of a church with its original medieval decorations in what has been an Islamic city since 1453. Founded in the fourth century as a monastery of the Holy Saviour in the Fields, outside the walls built by Emperor Constantine (chora designates the open space around a city), it then became enclosed within the later, fifth-century, set of walls but never lost its name. It is famous today for its wonderful fourteenth-century mosaics and, in a fresco in a side chapel, a stunning portrayal of the resurrected Christ entering Limbo to release the souls there.

It was in 1295, just before the mosaics were created, that one Maximus Planudes, an erudite Byzantine Greek monk who was fascinated by the ancient world, tracked down in the library the one manuscript he was looking for, a copy of Claudius Ptolemys Geographike Hyphegesis (Guide to Drawing the Earth). The rediscovery of the Geographike in the late thirteenth century, 1,000 years after it had been written down and presumed lost, was a seminal moment in the reopening of the western mind.

Planudes was not the only copy of the Geographike to survive; another was known to the Arabs and had been translated into Arabic in the ninth century. It was used by the nobly born cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who had been invited to join the cultured court of the Norman king of Sicily, Roger II, in about the year 1138. Al-Idrisi adopted Ptolemys concepts of longitude and latitude to create seventy regional maps in which all the sections were drawn to the same scale, the first time this had been done. The maps were recognizably accurate in delineating the known world of Ptolemy even though, according to Arabic convention, north and south were reversed. (Most illustrations of al-Idrisis maps follow the western convention of the north at the top.) They reflected the faith of its maker, so they showed the Arabian peninsula and Mecca at the centre and the text was in Arabic, but al-Idrisi used Greek, Latin and Arabic sources without discrimination. The open-minded Roger II took such an interest in the project that the volume containing the maps and accompanying text became known as the Tabula Rogeriana (The Book of Roger). Following the death of Roger who had proved such an enthusiastic patron to al-Idrisi in 1154, the climate of the times was hardly conducive to the dissemination of the work of the Tabulas creator. With the crusades dominating the Christian imagination, an Islamic map of this date, even one produced at a European court, was hardly likely to be welcomed. Al-Idrisis pioneering work therefore remained little known in Europe. Yet it serves to highlight one of the major themes of this book: the Arabs were well ahead of the Europeans in intellectual life at least until the thirteenth century and they were to make a formidable contribution to the revival of western learning.

The copy of Ptolemy found by Planudes proved more influential in Europe. The monk took his find to the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, who was equally excited by the discovery. He soon had his finest copyists working on the manuscript and his best mathematicians plotting out the maps. Planudes added his own explanatory texts, translating the Greek numerals into the Arabic ones that we use today. Three copies of their atlases survive, in large folios with all the twenty-six maps Ptolemy had given co-ordinates for. Manuel Chrysoloras, a scholar from Constantinople, brought one copy to Florence when he initiated the teaching of Greek there in 1396. By 1410 the first Latin translation of the original Greek text had been made by one of Chrysolorass students, the Tuscan Jacobus Angelus, who dedicated it to Pope Alexander V. For the humanists the Geographike became honoured as another window into the minds of the ancients and as a text that was clearly superior to its competitors. It gradually supplanted medieval conceptions of the geography of Europe, the Christian mappae mundi and the portolan charts that used compass bearings to plot the ports of the Mediterranean. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Geographike was still dominating the world of the cartographers. As knowledge of the Earths land masses expanded, Ptolemys findings could be adapted to fit these new discoveries. So while Ptolemy knew nothing of Scandinavia the northernmost point in the Geographike was the semi-mythical island of Thule at 63 degrees his system could be used to incorporate the region in newly drawn maps.