MAPS AND MAP-MAKING BEFORE MERC AT OR. 487 



Italy, which, after Honorius (a. d. 404) made Ravenna the capital of 

 the Western Empire, became very active, but the cartographical labors 

 of this school appear to have been limited to the production of descrip- 

 tive itineraries or painted route-maps. The authority of Ptolemy, 

 during this period, declined. The Alexandrine geographers, no doubt, 

 were better acquainted than he was with Asia, and knew the gross 

 errors he had made in the configuration of countries and the position 

 of places. But there was another and more potent cause that led to 

 the discrediting of Ptolemy, as well as of all the ancient geographers. 

 This was the disposition of the clergy, who for some centuries after- 



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Fig. 7. — Arab Map of the World, a. d. 1009. 



ward were the only learned class, to test all geographical knowledge 

 by the standard of the Bible ; and, as the Bible afforded no authority 

 for the opinion of the ancient geographers that the earth is a globe, 

 their ideas and their works were generally rejected as contrary to Holy 

 Writ. In the middle of the sixth century Cosmos, who had been a 

 merchant, an extensive traveler, and who afterward became a monk, 

 was the writer of several geographical works, one of which has sur- 

 vived, in which he maintained that the idea of the earth being a globe 

 was contrary alike to the Scriptures and to common sense ; sustaining 

 his views by ingenious arguments, which, in that age, were very con- 

 vincing. Cosmos was not an ignorant man ; on the contrary, his ac- 

 count of the countries with which he was acquainted was accurate and 

 valuable, and it was his topographical knowledge which made him so 

 formidable an antagonist in disputing the rotundity of the earth. 

 " There are," he says, " false Christians, contemners of the authority 

 of Scripture, who dare to maintain that the earth is a sphere. I com- 

 bat this error, derived from the Greeks, by citations from Holy Writ." 

 He then ridicules the idea that the earth revolves in space without 

 axis, or anything to support it, and characterizes the belief of antip- 

 odes, or people living on the other side of a round globe, as old wo- 



