MEDIAEVAL CARTOGRAPHY 



round. In spite of the fact that most authors, among them 

 Isidore himself, expressly declare that the earth had the form 

 of a globe, this does not seem to have been anything more than 

 a purely theoretical doctrine, for in cartographical representa- 

 tions, through the whole of the Middle Ages to about the close 

 of the fifteenth century, there is never any hint of projection, 

 or of any difficulty in transferring the spherical surface of the 

 earth to a plane, which had been so clearly present to the minds 

 of the Greeks. 



The wheel-maps were, as we have said, from the first 

 purely formal ; 

 but by degrees 

 an attempt was 

 made to bring 

 into the scheme 

 real geographi- 

 cal informa- 

 tion, although 

 the endeavor 

 to approach 

 reality in the 

 representation 

 is scarcely to 

 be traced. To 



this type of map belongs the so-called " Beatus map," which 

 the Spanish monk Beatus (ob. 798) added to his commentary 

 on the Apocalypse, and which was reproduced in very vary- 

 ing forms, ten of which have been preserved. The original 

 map, which is not known, was probably round, but in the 

 reproductions the circle of the earth is sometimes more or 

 less round (as in the illustration, p. 184), sometimes oblong 

 (cf. Vol. I, p. 199), and sometimes four-sided with rounded 

 corners [cf. K. Miller, ii., 1895]. Jerusalem was frequently 

 placed in the center of the wheel-maps. Paradise (often with 

 Adam and Eve at the time of the Fall, or with the four rivers 

 of Paradise) in the extreme east of Asia, which is at the top of 



185 



Northern Europe on Heinrich of Mainz's map, 

 at Cambridge (mo) 



