The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Marco Polo and da Pisa Rusticiano

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.]