Medieval Worldviews

In 1154, the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi completed the Tabula Rogeriana for King Roger II of Sicily — the product of roughly fifteen years compiling accounts from merchants, travellers and earlier geographic texts. Following Islamic cartographic convention, the map was oriented with south at the top. For its era, it was remarkably accurate, reflecting the genuinely cosmopolitan intellectual environment of Norman Sicily, where Christian, Muslim and Jewish scholars worked within the same royal court.

European medieval world maps, or mappae mundi, were rarely intended as navigational tools at all — they were theological diagrams as much as geographic ones, typically centred on Jerusalem and densely illustrated with biblical events, mythological creatures and moral instruction alongside actual place names. The Hereford Mappa Mundi (c. 1300), the largest surviving example, packs an enormous scene of salvation history, classical mythology and contemporary geography into a single sheet of vellum — a map built to teach a worldview, not to guide a ship.

Carved into stone in 1137, the Chinese Yu Ji Tu ("Map of the Tracks of Yu") used a systematic grid, with each square representing a fixed real-world distance, to preserve scale and proportion across the entire map — producing a genuinely accurate depiction of coastlines and river systems for its era, developed with essentially no contact with either Islamic or European cartographic tradition.