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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
POLO'S INFLUENCE ON GEOGRAPHY
131
Paradise was represented as occupying the extreme East, because
it was found in Genesis that the Lord planted a garden east
ward in Eden.* Gog and Magog were set in the far north of
north-east, because it was said again in Ezekiel : " Ecce Ego
super to Gog Ptinciiem cap./is Mosoch et Thubal . . . et ascendere
to facianz de lateribus Aquilonis," whilst probably the topography
of those mysterious nationalities was completed by a girdle of
mountains out of the Alexandrian Fables. The loose and
scanty nomenclature was mainly borrowed from Pliny or Mela
through such Fathers as we have named ; whilst vacant spaces
were occupied by Amazons, Arimaspians, and the realm of
Prester John. A favourite representation of the inhabited earth
was this
a great O enclosing a T, which thus divides the
circle in three parts ; the greater or half-circle being Asia, the
two quarter circles Europe and Africa.- These Maps were
known to St. Augustine4
81. Even Ptolemy seems to have been almost unknown ;
and indeed had his Geography been studied it might, with all
its errors, have tended to some greater endeavours
Roger
after accuracy. Roger Bacon, whilst lamenting the Bacon as a
exceeding deficiency of geographical knowledge in the geographer.
Latin world, and purposing to essay an exacter distribution of
countries, says he will not attempt to do so by latitude and
longitude, for that is a system of which the Latins have learned
colco dell' Emme, " the couch of the M," is puzzling. The best solution that occurs to me is this : In looking at the world map of Marino Sanudo, noticed on p. 133, as engraved by Bongars in the Gesta Dei per Francos, you find geometrical lines laid down, connecting the N.E., N.W., S.E., and S.W. points, and thus forming a square inscribed in the circular disk of the Earth, with its diagonals passing through the Central Zion. The eye easily discerns in these a great M inscribed in the circle, with its middle angular point at Jerusalem. Gervasius of Tilbury (with some confusion in his mind between tropic and equinoxial, like that which Pliny makes in speaking of the Indian Mons Malleus) says that " some are of opinion that the Centre is in the place where the Lord spoke to the woman of Samaria at the well, for there, at the summer solstice, the noonday sun descends perpendicularly into the water of the well, casting no shadow ; a thing which the philosophers say occurs at Syene " ! (Otia Iníj5erialia, by Liebrecht, p. i.)
* This circumstance does not, however, show in the Vulgate.
t " Veggiamo in prima in general la terra Come risiede e come il mar la serra.
Un T dentro ad un O mostra il disegno Come in tre parti fu diviso il Mondo, E la superiore è il maggior regno Che quasi piglia la metà del tondo.
} De Civ. Dei, xvi. 17, quoted by Peschel, 92.
ASIA chiamata : il gambo ritto è segno Che parte il terzo nome dal secondo AFFRICA dico da EUROPA : il mare Mediterran tra esse in mezzo appare."
—La Sfera, di F. Leonardo di Stagio
Dati, Lib. iii. st. II.
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