CLASSICAL AND EARLY MEDIEVAL HERITAGE 21 



of the text, which admittedly lacks unity, he believes that it 

 was put together from Ptolemy's writings by a Byzantine scribe 

 in the tenth or eleventh century, and from the tribal names in 

 European Sarmathia (western Russia), he concludes that the 

 maps were not drawn until the thirteenth century. He has 

 further found a record that a Byzantine, Maximos Planudes 

 {c. 1260-1310) who possessed a manuscript of the text, drew 

 a set of maps for it, from which Bagrow believes the later MS. 

 maps stem. Though it is clear that the maps as they have 

 survived are not the unaltered work of Ptolemy, it does not 

 necessarily follow that he did not draw maps (the case of 

 Agathodaimon and the world map suggest that quite early his 

 data were being used for maps). What is of more importance, 

 through the Ptolemy manuscripts, whatever is the truth about 

 their history, there was transmitted to Renaissance scholars, 

 a vast amount of topographical detail, which profoundly in- 

 fluenced their conception of the world. 



The manuscript maps fall into two classes, one consisting of 

 the world map and twenty-six regional maps. It was this set 

 which accompanied the Latin translations of the fifteenth 

 century and were used for the earliest printed editions. The 

 second class contained sixty-seven maps of smaller areas. The 

 world map is drawn on the more elementary of the two pro- 

 jections described by Ptolemy — a simple conic with one 

 standard parallel. The special maps are on a rectangular pro- 

 jection with straight parallels and meridians intersecting at 

 right angles; they indicate the boundaries of provinces, and the 

 relative positions of important nations, as well as cities, rivers, 

 and mountains. 



It is necessary to dwell on his maps in a little detail on 

 account of their influence upon the renaissance of cartography. 

 From the second until the early fifteenth century, they were 

 almost entirely without influence on Western cartography: 

 they were, however, known to the Arab geographers, who 

 possessed translations of his works, and through them seem 

 to have had some influence on fourteenth-century carto- 

 graphers such as Marino Sanudo. With the translation of the 

 text into Latin in the early fifteenth century, Ptolemy dominated 

 European cartography for a century, and, through his insistence 



