The Slightly Inaccurate World of Medieval Maps
Reader, meet the Hereford Mappa Mundi.
The Hereford Mappa Mundi was created by a team of artisans, scribes, scholars, and clergymen sponsored by a man named Richard de Bello in England around the year 1300. For context, that’s about 30 years after the Ninth Crusade and 50 years before the Bubonic Plague.
At 5 feet tall, this extraordinary map is the largest medieval map still known to exist. On it is drawn not only continents, countries, and cities, but images depicting biblical stories, classical mythology, mythical creatures, plants, animals, and peoples of the world. You could spend hours poring over the Hereford map and still find new things to look at.
However, you may start to notice a few—shall we call them errors? Namely,
If this is supposed to be a ‘world map,’ what the h*** is it doing looking like this?
Why didn’t they care about getting the shapes and distances right?
Why is it oriented with east on top and not north?
And why is England, the very country where the map was made, shoved all the way down in the bottom corner?
Look closer and you’ll see even more.
Here’s a pelican pictured. Above it is written “I am called a pelican. For [my] chicks I tear out [my] heart from myself.”
Here’s a lynx pictured. Above it is written “The lynx sees through walls and urinates a black stone.”
These are real animals that live not too far from England, so why would the mapmakers take something so outlandish as fact?
Finally, you might notice that the labels for Africa and Europe have been reversed. Africa should be on the right side and Europe should be on the left.
That seems like a pretty glaring error, right?
So let’s find some answers to these questions.
Why is it shaped like this?
On first glance, you’d think somebody with zero knowledge of how geography works just went at it and panicked when they ran out of space halfway through. But this kind of map would have actually been very familiar to a medieval audience.
It’s called a T-O plan. The T is made up of Europe, Asia, and Africa, divided by a few major rivers and seas, and the O is the surrounding oceans. The concentric Os around the borders of the map also act as diagrammatic shorthand for a sphere. Because these medieval scribes actually knew the earth was a globe!
What they didn’t know were two things:
Number one, they didn’t know what, if anything, was on the other side of the world. They hadn’t colonized the other continents yet. So rather than leaving half their map empty, they decided to fill it up with just the known world.
Number two, they hadn’t yet figured out linear perspective. Here are two scenes of the Annunciation, one from the 1200s and one from the 1460s.
You know how buildings in old medieval art tend to look flat and almost cubist, like the example on the left? It’s because we’re used to art made with linear perspective and all the other tricks of depth, like the example on the right. So in the absence of those artistic discoveries, the makers of the Hereford Mappa Mundi did the best they could to depict a 3D object on a 2D plane by using the T-O setup.
All this makes you think, “Oh. Maybe these guys were smarter than I thought.” So, if they were so smart…
Why didn’t they care about getting the shapes and distances right?
Now here we get to the secret of reading this map: it wasn’t made to get you from one place to another. But — isn’t that the whole point of a map?
Sometimes, yes. Scholars know of extremely accurate nautical maps dating back as early as the 1100s, and there were likely locally concentrated maps floating around in the 1300s, but those weren’t predisposed to survive hundreds of years.
The Hereford map, in contrast, was probably created as an educational work of art. The creators aimed to dazzle the local provincial population, show points of interest around the world, and draw in visitors making religious pilgrimages. They made not only a map, but an encyclopedia of animals, a collection of classical legend, and a religious text, all blended up into one beautiful piece.
And who are the people making the map? Religious clergymen. So what do they really focus the map on? Christianity. This brings us to:
Why is it oriented with east on top?
On the Hereford map, an object’s literal placement often has deeper figurative meaning. For example: above the world map, Jesus Christ is depicted sitting on a heavenly throne. By putting him there, the map creators are saying that he ranks figuratively above all else in the world, and lives in eternal realms outside of our earth.
On either side of Christ, people are guided by an angel through the gates of heaven, or dragged in chains to the mouth of hell. The righteous people are placed on Christ’s right side, saying that they’ve received the traditional place of honor on the right hand of God. And below Christ is a circular area representing Paradise, or the Garden of Eden. Its literal placement on the map says that it is figuratively the closest place to heaven on earth.
So the same goes with the map’s orientation. In Matthew 24:27, the Bible says that Jesus Christ will come from the east on the day of judgment. Therefore, the Christian world orients itself toward God, both figuratively in their hearts, and literally in their maps.
And why is England pushed off in the corner?
Because Jerusalem is front and center. In fact, it’s exactly in the center. There’s even a tiny hole where a compass was used to draw the circles around the world.
The medieval West, for all its knights and castles, was actually the weaker sibling compared to the cosmopolitan East. And what was the hottest commodity in the East? Jerusalem. Remember, everyone had just spent 200 years Crusading to get their hands on the Holy Land! Considering how important this city was to the medieval population, both in Christian tradition and current events, it’s no surprise that they would place it literally in the center of the world.
There’s also a scriptural precedent for using Jerusalem as the center of the world: Ezekiel 5:5 says, “Thus saith the Lord God; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her.” Now people may have taken that a bit literally, but the meaning we can draw from placing it in the map’s center is that God should be the center of a Christian’s life, and that they should seek after holy places.
And even though the British Isles are pushed off to the lower corner, they’re still quite large and detailed in comparison to some other nations. The town of Lincoln is even drawn with a cathedral on top of a hill above a river, leading scholars to believe that the Hereford map has a likely connection with the town.
Why are the animal facts all wrong?
Well, it’s partially because of a thousands-of-years-long game of scholarly Telephone. Let’s dive into bestiaries!
The most popular kind of book in medieval times, second only to the Bible, was a sort of encyclopedia. Aptly named a bestiary (bes-CHEE-ery), or book of beasts, it depicted animals and plants along with written descriptions of their behaviors or properties.
In a time without printing presses, scribes had to copy old books by hand to make new ones. Most bestiaries can actually trace their origin all the way back to a single Greek text called the Physiologus. As the years passed, copies were made from copies, entries were added, ideas were embellished, and eventually things got garbled. It was pretty common in medieval times to defer to previous scholarly authorities, so if a claim was made in one edition, it would probably end up in the next.
Now, that’s not to say that the Physiologus was full of stone cold facts. Another common idea in medieval times was that God had created every living thing with a special meaning, or moral lesson, to be decoded by humans. An animal’s actions were clues to that lesson. So they were less interested in “the pelican is four feet tall and has an orange bill,” and more interested in “what virtues and vices does a pelican have, and what can it teach me about God?”
So take centuries of writing being embellished and add in Christian interpretations, and you get crazy stuff like this.
Person A might think, “Wow, that pelican is really attentive to its young.” Person B hears that and thinks, “The pelican is such a good parent that I bet if there was no food around, it would sacrifice itself to feed its chicks!” Person C hears, “Pelicans stab themselves to feed their babies with blood!” And Person D interprets “The pelican’s tendency to pierce its own side is a symbol of the passion of Jesus Christ, who sacrificed himself for the benefit of humankind.”
Person A thinks, “Wow, that lynx just spotted a mouse that was 200 feet away.” Person B thinks, “Huh, that lynx kitten just buried its scat.” Person C hears, “Lynxes have x-ray eyes and they bury their poop because it turns into a valuable gemstone!” And Person D interprets “Lynxes symbolize the uncovering of hidden truths.”
And then just as a bonus, sometimes you get something REALLY crazy like this.
“With rapid voiding of its bowels, [the bonnacon] sprays excrement the length of three acres, whose heat scalds whatever it touches.”
Bestiary writers often included animals like the bonnacon that we now consider to be imaginary—maybe because they truly believed in them, maybe just in case the creatures turned out to be real, or maybe because even imaginary stories can teach valuable lessons.
Now, for the last mystery.
Why are the labels for Africa and Europe reversed?
It’s evident that the makers of the Hereford map knew the right names, since they correctly labeled “terminus africe” and “terminus europe” near the map borders. So did somebody in the group project drop the ball?
In past years, people assumed that this switch was just a quirk of working long hours in the candlelight. Imagine being the poor scribe who made that mistake. But according to experts at the Hereford Cathedral, it was completely intentional.
Just as the other placement choices on the map, like Paradise and Jerusalem, communicate a deeper meaning, this mirrored labeling seems to be saying that our reality—our view of the world—is just a reflection of the ‘truer’ reality its creator sees. Even with all their learning, these scholars made a point of acknowledging that they couldn’t know everything about the world.
All in all, the Hereford Mappa Mundi may seem more than a bit inaccurate to an audience raised on Google Maps. But it was just a world with different priorities. We think of medieval knowledge as wild and wacky, but these scribes and scholars were a lot smarter than what we give them credit for. It’s just a matter of learning to speak their language.
Interested in learning more about the Hereford Mappa Mundi? Visit the official site at www.themappamundi.co.uk, or take a detailed virtual tour at https://sims2.digitalmappa.org/36.
