391 CE, the library finally met its end when a Christian mob broke in, burned the almost irreplaceable contents and turned the building into a church, a triumph of faith over reason.
Meanwhile, a few years earlier at the opposite end of the empire along Hadrian’s Wall in Britannia, Magnus Maximus, who was commander of Britain, withdrew troops from northern and western Britain in pursuit of his own ambitions for imperial rule, usurping power from Emperor Gratian. His attempts ultimately failed, being defeated by Emperor Theodosius, and Maximus was finally executed in 388. With his death, Britannia came back under the direct rule of Theodosius, that is until 392 when another usurper, Flavius Eugenius, made another bid for imperial power. Again, after just two years his short-lived rule over the West failed when Theodosius marched from Constantinople at the head of his army and defeated Eugenius at the Battle of Frigidus in September 394. Eugenius was captured and executed as a criminal. The following year, 395, the victorious Theodosius died, leaving his 10-year-old son Honorus as Emperor in the West. However, the real power in the West was in the hands of Flavius Stilicho, a highly experienced general who had risen through the ranks. In 402 it was his decision to finally strip Hadrian’s Wall of its remaining garrison, and possibly other troops in Britain, to face wars with the Ostrogoths and Visigoths on the Continent.
Meanwhile, the Romano-Britons now dispensed with imperial authority. In 407, they selected Flavius Claudius Constantinus, or Constantine III, as their leader, who now declared himself the Western Roman Emperor, gathered the last Roman troops in Britain and headed for Gaul. Sixty-six years later, in the West, Rome was gone, replaced by a collection of ‘Barbarian’ kingdoms. The new kingdoms lived among the remains of a once great empire. The skills needed to repair and maintain roads, bridges, aqueducts and great buildings were lost. The Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin, written by an unknown author, looks upon the moss-covered buildings with a sense of wonder:
Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,
walls gape, torn up, destroyed,
consumed by age, Earth-grip holds
the proud builders, departed, long lost,
and the hard grasp of the grave, until a hundred generations
of people have passed. Often this wall outlasted,
hoary with lichen, red-stained, withstanding the storm,
one region after another; the high arch has now fallen.
The wall-stone still stands, hacked by weapons,
by grim-ground files.
Along with Roman infrastructure, the written word, the scrolls of study, were largely lost, at least in the West. As the natural science of the Greeks and Romans faded and almost disappeared, some ‘stories’ written in the 3rd century survived and became part of the early medieval world view. One such work was the product of Caius Julius Solinus, whose speciality was the study of grammar. His book A Collection of Memorable Facts comprises 1,100 descriptions that range from direct biblical descriptions to tall tales of Africa where the shadows of hyenas robbed dogs of their ability to bark. It was a great collection of myths – exaggerated travellers’ tales borrowed from many previous authors, with just enough geographical reality to give this masterpiece of disinformation a kind of believable life of its own. In the 6th century it was revised and republished under the title Polyhistor, meaning ‘many stories’.
The Christian faith spread around the Mediterranean from its place of origin in Palestine. It was a religion that, in a changing world occupied by usurpers, barbarian invaders, plagues and famine, offered at least the promise of a better life in the next world – the afterlife. The prevailing Greco-Roman religion did not offer any of that – it demanded sacrifice. The cults offered no guidance for the living of a good life; the underworld was not a place of peaceful eternity.
The Christian world still had a place for the Devil and leagues of demons. By the Edict of Thessalonica, 380 CE, Christianity was confirmed as the religion of the Roman Empire. Now, with official sanction, the new faith began its work: the suppression of pagan beliefs. Unfortunately, most of Greco-Roman scientific research was included in the works that were destroyed or suppressed. The Academy School of Philosophy, which had roots going back to 387 BCE, finally closed its doors in 528 CE, after 916 years of considered thought (though with interruptions), its teachers chased away, hunted down as pagans. The new religion destroyed far more than it saved, but in all this chaos, a new world view evolved that was based on faith. This would change the mapmakers’ approach to representing the world – at least for a few hundred years.
Sebastian Munster (1448–1552) was a theologian and Hebrew scholar who taught at the University of Heidelberg. Like many learned people of his age, he also had an interest in geography and mapmaking. He produced two major works: the first, in 1540, was Ptolemy’s Geography with 48 woodcut maps. He carved the names of places, cities and states on removable blocks, which enabled the map to be changed and updated without recarving the entire map. His next cartographic work was Cosmography, published in 1544, in which he mapped each continent separately and listed the sources upon which his maps were compiled. Moreover, the blank spaces were ‘decorated’ with strange fictional races and creatures that featured on the maps of Solinus. These went on to be copied onto maps produced up until the 18th century.
The disinformation spread by the works of Solinus had already been compounded by ‘Christian geography’; one such work was written in the 500s by Cosmas Indicopleustes, who believed that all things – the nature of the universe, all living things and the form of the earth – could be found in the Holy Scriptures.
In his earlier life, Cosmas had been a successful merchant trading over much of the known world, around the cities of the Mediterranean and as far east as Ceylon (Sri Lanka). He converted to Christianity and eventually settled into the cloistered life of a monk, retiring to a monastery in the Sinai desert. He produced a work called Christian Topography, in which he looked only to the scriptures, describing the world as a flat parallelogram, with Jerusalem at its centre. It was written in Ezekiel 5.5: ‘I have set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her.’ Cosmas argued that in the far north of the inhabited world there was a great mountain around which the sun and moon revolved, creating night and day. Beyond the centre lay a great ocean, and beyond that were other lands where, before the biblical flood, people lived but that were now uninhabited and inaccessible. Beyond these empty lands arose the four walls of the sky meeting in the dome of heaven, the ceiling of the tabernacle. In his Christian Topography, Cosmas berates arrogant and sceptical scholars who:
attribute to the heavens a spherical figure and a circular motion, and by geometrical method and calculations applied to the heavenly bodies, as well as by the abuse of words and by worldly craft, endeavour to grasp the position and figure of the world by means of the solar and lunar eclipses, leading others into error, while they are in error themselves, in maintaining that such phenomena could not represent themselves if the figure was other than spherical.
Map 10. The original of this map was created in around 1040 and contains the earliest-known vaguely realistic depiction of the British Isles.
Cosmas determinedly went on to discourage any consideration of Greek thought regarding the possibility of people inhabiting the Antipodean side of the spherical earth, for they ‘could not be of the race of Adam’. Did not the scriptures refer to the four corners of the earth? The Apostles were commanded to go out into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature; they could not reach the Antipodes and therefore such a place could not exist.
Now let’s take a look at the early medieval world as portrayed in Christian maps. I use the word ‘Christian’ very loosely, to describe a region and time,