Medieval men and women were neither stupid nor ignorant. And I trust that I am not vain if I hope to spur your interest in the Middle Ages along the way.īetween these twin purposes, then, I hope that you find something of interest here and that you walk away knowing something more about maps than you knew beforehand. I view this as an essential task, since I cannot convey to you the complexity of medieval cartography without defining the terms involved and showing you a few medieval maps. The other myths that I will discuss in this article are less common, but still present in the minds of many readers: the notion that ancient mariners charted the coastline of Antarctica in the far distant past, and the idea that medieval maps typically marked the edge of the known world with the caption 'Here There Be Dragons (or Tygers, or Monsters).' Pointing out what medieval maps are not, therefore, is the primary point of what you are about to read.Īnother purpose of this article, however, is to talk about what medieval maps really are. No one, outside of a couple theologians (that only modern scholars have managed to pull out of history's woodworks) has seriously believed in a flat earth since at least the Sixth Century BCE. I feel confident in this assumption only because I was taught the very same thing even though there isn't a shred of truth to the statement.

I am relatively certain that at some point in your life you were told, for instance, that Columbus proved that the Earth was round. The primary purpose, as the title suggests, is to expose three modern myths about medieval maps. I want to do a couple of things in this article.

Ancient map of flat earth