Unknown early disciples of Humboldt and Santarém

The “history of cartography” of the basins of the Black and Caspian seas by Xavier and Adèle Hommaire de Hell (1844–45). Commentary and Translation

Note: all images in this post have been taken from the digital collections of the Russian State Historical Library (Государственная публичная историческая библиотека России). I use them here with grateful thanks for the digitization of the Hommaires de Hell’s fugitive atlas. Click on any image to go to the library’s website.

Note: the works I discuss in the following are commonly attributed solely to Xavier Hommaire de Hell. It is however clear that his wife Adèle was active in the initial travels and was later instrumental in cowriting and editing the works (Hommaire de Hell and Hommaire de Hell 1843–45, 1: vi–vii; see Monicat 1994–95). She should be properly credited as such. I am certainly not going to presume that she had no hand in volume three, or the “scientific part,” of Les steppes de la Mer Caspienne, le Causcase, la Crimée et la Russie méridionale.

I’ve been drawn into the work of Ignace Xavier Morand Hommaire de Hell (1821–48) and Jeanne Louise Adélaïde “Adèle” Hommaire de Hell née Hériot (1819–83) as two of the very first proponents of the kind of “history of cartography” pioneered by Alexander von Humboldt and the viscount of Santarém. Their work in map history seems almost completely unknown to map historians. Armando Cortesão (1969) did not identify them in his biobibliographical listing of early map historians; they do not appear in any of the bibliographies of early works in map history discussed in a recent post. All that I have yet found are the brief mentions by Tony Campbell (1986, 94; 1987, 457 n. ee) to Xavier’s finding of a now untraceable chart from 1497 or 1500; his letter announcing the discovery was published by Santarém (1847).

I first discovered Xavier’s and Adèle’s work some years ago when I was using Google’s n-gram tool to find early instances of “cartography,” “history of cartography,” and “historical cartography” in various European languages. Specifically, chapter nine in the third volume (1844, pages 344–65) of their account of the steppes of southern Russia was entitled “Coup d’œil sur l’histoire de la cartographie du bassin de la mer Noire et de celui de la mer Caspienne.” I left it at that until just the last couple of days, when I stumbled across the fact that the three-volume book was accompanied by an “atlas historique” and an “atlas scientifique”; the latter included some folios of facsimiles of early maps. As is clear from recent posts on this site, I have been looking at the importance of facsimiles in the study of the history of cartography and in the development of the field of study in Paris in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With that in mind, I spent time to go through their short narrative with some care, to see their sources and influences.

In the bigger scheme of things, there’s little reason why the Hommaires de Hell should be prominent in map history: Xavier made a couple of maps, he found an early chart, and with Adèle he wrote one, short narrative in map history. They appeal to me as an example of the initial moment of popularization of the “history of cartography” just as it began to pull away and separate from the history of geography and of discoveries.

Before I can get to this early exercise in map history, however, I need to get through some biographical background and bibliographical complexity.

The Hommaires de Hell

Xavier and Adèle met in Saint Étienne, where Adèle was living with an elder sister and where Xavier studied at the École des mines. They married in 1834. In 1835, pregnant, Adèle joined Xavier in Turkey where he worked for the Ottoman Empire on internal improvements (suspension bridges, lighthouses). In 1838, they moved to Russia to work on a series of projects in southern Russia. Among other things, Xavier found coal deposits on the Dnieper river; in this respect, he prefigures the economic exploration more commonly associated with European imperialism in the later nineteenth century, as with Ferdinand von Richthofen’s work on the Shantung peninsula in China, with its extensive coal deposits (Hudson 1977; Wu 2014).

Hommaire de Hell, “Coups et Plans Planche I,” including a plan of the rapids on the Dnieper and a geological cross-section of the Carpathian Mountains.

After Xavier fell ill when building roads in Moldova, he returned with Adèle to Paris in 1842. They prepared Les steppes, which in 1844 won for Xavier the “grand prix” of the Société de géographie in Paris.

Eventually, they went back to south-west Asia on a commission from the French government to examine the agricultural and commercial systems of Turkey and Persia. Adèle returned to France relatively early, to preserve her health; Xavier would die in Isfahan in August 1848. Adèle edited an account of this second voyage from Xavier’s notes.

“Traversée des débordements du Don dans les plaines du Manitch,” engr. Férogio, printed by Lemercier. “Voyage à la Mer Caspienne par Mr et Me Hommaire de Hell, pl. 4”

Bibliographical Complexities

Three Text Volumes and One Atlas, or Should it be Two Atlases?

The atlas(es) associated with Les steppes exemplify the confusion generally surrounding folio atlases issued in fascicules, especially in comparison with the apparent stability of the neatly bound volumes of text produced in the early nineteenth century. The folios were large and expensive to produce. Issued in several fascicules, an owner might not acquire all of them. Unbound, being held together only within paper wrappers, some of their contents might be frittered away, while the folios could be arranged and rearranged in any order their owner preferred. (The set in the Russian State Library is quite disorganized.) Each set is likely to differ from all others.

Lacking the coherence of the bound atlas, the number of atlases could not necessarily even be consistently counted. Consider the “Observations” included within the set of folios digitized by the Russian State Historical Library, which describe the overall work and provide a tariff for buying it in whole or in part:

Detail of “Observations”

This statement suggests that, as a whole, Les steppes comprised three volumes in octavo and one atlas in folio issued as 22 fascicules (livraisons). Yet, the description went on to identify that the whole could be divided into two thematic parts, one historical the other scientific, and each with its own atlas. So, two atlases!

Indeed, the unbound set in the Russian State History Library includes two titlepages, both identical in the settings of type, divided by horizontal rules and by a vignette of a camel train, except for one line:

Les steppes de la Mer Caspienne, le Caucase, la Crimée et la Russie méridionale; Voyage pittoresque, historique et scientifique, par Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur et de l’ordre de S. Wladimir de Russie, Membre de plusieurs Sociétés savants.

Voyage qui a remporté le grand prix décerné en 1844 par la Société royale de géographie de France.

Atlas scientifique. [or Atlas historique.]

Paris, P. Bertrand, Éditeur, Libraire de la Société géologique de France. Rue Saint-André-des-Arcs, 65

1845

According to the “Observations,” and also to the pasted-on tariff on the outer wrapper of the set in the Russian State Historical Library, the Atlas historique should have contained one map (“carte géographique et statistique de la Russie méridionale”) and 25 plates of costumes, landscape, etc. (That set lacks only the general map and one picturesque view.)

“Prière du soir chez les Kalmouks,” engr. Férogio, printed by Lemercier. “Voyage à la Mer Caspienne par Mr et Me Hommaire de Hell, pl. 8”

The other (half of the) atlas, the Atlas scientifique, was intended to contain four elements:

• the same regional map as in the Atlas historiques, only now colored with geological strata;

• 4 folios “bearing a collection of geographical monuments from the Middle Ages to modern times” — which are of course the items that are of interest to me

• 1 folio with views and plans (see above)

• 6 folios with images of fossils, which accompanied the several chapters at the end of volume three on paleontology, written by one Alcide d’Orbigny.

“Carte géologique et statistique de la Russie méridionale, 1844” engr. L. Bouffard, printed by Lemercier, with Bertrand’s imprint.

One more point of confusion and uncertainty: if bound, which way should the folios be oriented? The set in the Russian State Historical Library is in portrait orientation: the titlepages appear like that of a normal book (see above) but all the folios are rotated. (I have unrotated them for inclusion here). However, a partial copy imaged by SPL Rare Books is in landscape orientation, including the titlepage (this set bears the titlepage of the Atlas scientifique but contains just seven of the plates from the Atlas historique). Did the Russians modify the digital images of the titlepages to make them look portrait orientation, or were the titlepages issued in two formats?

The Four Folios of Facsimiles

In addition to the complexities inherent to the manner of production—22 fascicules of conceptually two atlases that should be bound as one—there is a further point of confusion stemming from the author’s perhaps overly grandiose plans. Both the text and the “Observations” (above) indicate that there are 4 folios of facsimiles (reproduced below). Each bore the main title

Histoire de la Cartographie de la Mer Noire et de la Mer Caspienne

Each bears a unique subtitle in the upper-left corner:

Monuments géographiques du XV et du XVI Siècle.

Monuments géographiques du XI-XIII et XIV Siècle. No. I

Monuments géographiques du XVI, du XVII et du XVIII Siècle. No. III

Monuments géographiques Européens XVIII & XIX Siècles, Arabes XII & XIII. No. VI

That is, the 4 folios are not numbered 1 through 4, as one might expect, but are unnumbered, 1, 3, and 6. Did Xavier and Adèle have plans to do more? Or was the lithographer (Schwaer Jr., rue S. André des arts, 60) incompetent?

In the event, we have a simple concordance:

H de H plate “No. I” = “pl. I” as specified in the text (see H de H note 9)

H de H unnumbered plate = “pl. II” as specified in the text (see H de H note 21)

H de H plate “No. III” = “pl. III” as specified in the text (see H de H note 24)

H de H plate “No. VI” = “pl. IV” as specified in the text (see H de H note 30)

So, incompetence: the lithographer forgot to add the plate number to the second plate, and then transposed the digits to “No. IV” to make the actual “No. VI.”

The History of Cartography of the Basins of the Black and Caspian Seas

General Comments

The narrative by Xavier and Adèle Hommaire de Hell is characteristic of the early nineteenth century engagement with early maps. They were very much aware of having only limited access to the relevant geographical “monuments,” even those produced by European culture. They knew that other cultures made maps, and especially the Islamic cultures of south-western Asia, but they lacked knowledge of them. In this respect, they looked forward to the eventual release of further monuments of geography from the obscurity of dusty archives and libraries. (Remember: libraries and archives were only just being opened up even to socially elite scholars in the early 1800s.)

Their lack of knowledge is manifested in many confusions. When they refer to Claudius Ptolemy’s “astronomy,” do they mean his Almagest or the Geography? They cite J. B. B. d’Anville approvingly, but do not seem to know of his Essai d’une nouvelle carte de la Mer Caspienne (1754), which displays a distinctly modern outline, of which they would have approved. They cite one of works of Vincenzio Antonio Formaleoni, but not his mapping of the Black Sea based on medieval marine charts (Formaleoni 1788–89). So, because they worked from little knowledge, and most of what they knew they took from Santarém or from printed maps, their narrative cannot be said to be a thorough history.

There is some slippage in their usage of “cartography” or “cartographic.” This should not be surprising: the word was still new, and people were still trying to figure it out. At times, Xavier and Adèle used it to mean “(the field of) the study of maps,” as in the obvious parallel between carte-graphy (the description of maps) and geography as the study/description of the earth. The “history of cartography” was the narrative (“history” per se) not of the field of study, of course, but of the endeavor of map making. The proper pursuit of this history was through the chronological arrangement of early maps (a cartographie chronologique). In doing so, they could see both progression and regression in the amount and quality of knowledge.

In making their facsimiles—for which they used the same printers as Santarém and Ramón de la Sagra—they focused specifically on the depiction of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. They changed or added key toponyms to their modern equivalents, reoriented the maps so that north was at the top, and in some cases seem to have added meridians and parallels. Compare, for example, their detail of the British Library’s Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, the so-called “Anglo-Saxon Map,” with the same area from a digital image of the original:

“Plate 1, figure 1”

Detail of the original (rotated for ease of comparison)

They discuss how, in the past, mapping entailed different kinds of work that would be united in the modern era. Having said that, they still treated all geographical information as equivalent, regardless of the kind of mapping involved; the significance of recognizing different kinds of mapping lay in accounting for the spread of geographical information.

They also reveal a common understanding of the importance of printing in distributing information and knowledge. Their understanding of medieval culture is also very much of their time and reads today as a parody. In particular, they subscribe to notions of medieval culture as being poorly informed and so characterized by “systematic” thought, which I take to mean theoretical systems by which the world is organized, shaped, and structured.

Overall, their narrative is a presentist paeon, a march onwards to better knowledge and truth. That truth is defined by the map as perfected in the modern age.

I am most taken by their indication of resources. They were motivated by the examples set by Humboldt and by Santarém, with his first facsimile atlas—see a recent post for more information—to map a region over time; they also owed much to Edme François Jomard in the Bibliothèque royale, although work on his own facsimile collection was barely begun. But, because they were interested in the knowledge of one region, and not really with the overall history of cartography (as Jomard would be in his facsimile collection, and Santarém in his second), they brought their narrative all the way up to the nineteenth century and Humboldt’s map of central Asia. At the same time, they suggest an understanding of the study of early maps that bears all the hallmarks of what Santarém would publish a couple of years later (in Santarém 1847), so Santarém was proselytizing for his new disciplinary vision.

The following transcription is a preliminary translation; fortunately, the language of the original is relatively unadorned, so that a literal translation is mostly sufficient. It is not a critical edition and should be read as such; I have not corrected their errors and have updated only a few names to their modern Anglophone equivalents. Note numbers have been made sequential, the notes being situated as indented quotations after the relevant paragraphs. Page numbers are indicated in bold. Images of the facsimiles are inserted just before each is first referenced. I have not translated the remainder of the chapter, which explains Xavier’s construction of his own map of the Black Sea.

Translation

Hommaire de Hell, Xavier, and Adèle Hommaire de Hell. 1843–45. Les steppes de la Mer Caspienne, le Caucase, la Crimée et la Russie méridionale: Voyage pittoresque, historique et scientifique. 3 vols. + atlas. Paris: P. Bertrand.

344

CHAPTER IX. A look at the history of the cartography of the Black Sea basin and that of the Caspian Sea.

Having studied, from a historical and physical point of view, the geography of the great seas which nature has placed between Europe and Asia, as well as that of the various rivers which bring them the tribute of their waters, it is essential now to complete these notions, to link together the various parts considered in isolation, by taking a general look at all of human knowledge as it is recorded in the cartographic monuments that the past centuries have bequeathed to us and whose testimony we have already so often invoked during the course of our discussions. We cannot, of course, pretend that by undertaking a still incomplete work we will arrive at a rigorous appreciation of the successive modifications and progress which took place in geographic science over the course of the Middle Ages and modern times. Such a task would go completely beyond the framework that we have outlined for ourselves. The cartographic works 345 known about the countries which concern us, are besides still too limited in their number, for it is possible to treat such a subject with the developments which it involves. We therefore ask for the reader’s benevolent indulgence in reading this chapter.

An entirely new science, cartographic studies date back barely fifty years. Buried in the obscurity of libraries and public archives, the parchments of old cosmographers were for a long time if not despised then at least seen as quite useless. G. Delisle, d’Anville himself, as well as the most eminent scientists of their time, remained totally foreign to all these precious summaries, which successively framed the results of the great maritime and terrestrial discoveries of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. In the latter century, it is true, geography was far from attaining the high degree of development which it has reached today; scholarship was preoccupied almost exclusively with classical studies; the ardor for historical research which characterizes our time did not yet exist and the writers of the Middle Ages, the great part in manuscript, very rarely had the honor of a commentary.

Heeren, who rightly counts among the great intellectual lights of Germany, was one of the first to understand the usefulness of cartographic studies. He analyzed the world map of the Museo Borgiano, and despite the 346 inevitable imperfections, [1] the work he published in 1804 had the undeniable merit of having popularized within the learned world knowledge of one of the most curious geographical monuments of past centuries, and thus of having awakened attention to a kind of research that had until then been entirely neglected. Around the same time, Cardinal Zurla published a long dissertation on Fra Mauro’s world map of 1460. Since then, with the vigorous impetus which historical studies soon received, other writers, among whom the illustrious Alexander von Humboldt [2] and the abbé 347 Andreas, [3] also dealt with cartography; they adduced documents and arguments as positive as they were interesting, and along with their essays they prepared facsimiles and reductions of several extremely remarkable old maps.

1. The monuments of medieval geography were then so little known that Heeren could not make any comparison between the Borgia world map and similar works. It must be said, however, that before him, Formaleoni and Jean Potocky had also already appreciated, to a certain extent, the scientific value of the ancient cosmographers. The first published, in his Treatise on the Navigation of the Venetians, a reduced copy of Andrea Bianco’s world map of 1436, and the second borrowed from Freduce d’Ancone the map of the Black Sea, drawn in 1497. But all these works had very little impact in their time and it is not surprising that they escaped Heeren’s knowledge (see Memoirs of the Academy of Göttingen: Explicatio plani glohi orbis terrarum, faciem exhibentis, ante medium seculum XV summa arte confecti).

2. Humboldt, in his Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du nouveau continent (1839), published several fragments of the world map by Juan de la Cosa, pilot of Christopher Columbus; this most remarkable monument, which belongs to Baron Walckenaer, dates back to 1500.

3. Father Andreas published in 1822 a dissertation on Bartholemé del Pareto’s map, drawn up in 1455.

All these early efforts, however, produced only partial publications that each related exclusively to this or that subject, and no one yet thought of bringing together the many monuments disseminated throughout the libraries of Europe and of systematically publishing them in chronological order to form a complete collection within the reach of everyone. In 1842 a big question, although already of a very old date, again preoccupied the scientific world, that of the priority of the Portuguese discoveries on the western coasts of Africa. Thanks to the pretensions formerly raised by the Genoese, the French, and the Spaniards, pretensions resuscitated by some writers, spirits were greatly impassioned and from the struggle naturally sprang new insights and new notions that considerably enlarged the once thoroughly restricted domain of medieval geography. As a Portuguese and as a first-rate geographer, the 348 viscount of Santarém took the most active part in the discussion; he surrounded himself with cartographic documents from all countries and soon, carried away by the interest of their study and seduced by the value of the testimony that they gave him, he extended the circle of his research, and was not long in designing the idea of ​​one of the most interesting publications of our time. It was thus, following a particular debate, that science was enriched with a magnificent atlas, which will allow us before long to study and compare the principal geographical monuments transmitted to us by the different nations which took part in the great political and intellectual movements of the Middle Ages, whether arranged in chronological order or topically. [4]

4. The viscount of Santarém has already published 32 world maps, all prior to the discoveries of Columbus and da Gama, and summarizing as a whole the history and general state of geographical and cartographic knowledge during the ten centuries of the Middle Ages. The second series currently consists of 22 equally remarkable monuments [i.e., marine charts], the most recent of which was made by Jean Guerard, cosmographer of Dieppe, from 1631. The viscount of Santarém today continues work on his beautiful publication with as much activity as devotion. We are happy to join in with all those who have already paid him the tribute of their praise, and to express to him in particular all our thanks for this benevolence, so dignified and so kind, with which he has made all his documents available to us, even his completely new materials.

349 We will not seek to respond to those who have tried to belittle the value of geographical monuments. This task has already been victoriously accomplished in the works of Humboldt and the viscount of Santarém, [5] as well as in our own works, if we are permitted to mention them. [6] Only by resorting to cartography have we been successful in shedding new light on various aspects of early geography and in finding meaningful data about the configurations, internal distances, and reported positions previously adopted for the countries in which we have ourselves traveled. Finally, it is only in the chronological arrangement of maps (cartographie chronologique) that we have revealed a series of documents that precisely indicate the phases of progress and decadence through which the physical and geographical sciences have alternately passed relative to the basins of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

5. See Central Asia and the Critical Examination by M. de Humboldt, and the Researches on the Discovery of the Countries Located on the West Coast of Africa, by M. le Vicomte de Santarem.

6. See our Journey of the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azof, as well as our Historical Geography of the Caspian Sea (same volume).

The monuments which we are going to examine belong to two distinct categories; some are systematic, others result from more 350 or less positive, or more or less erroneous, observations. Prior to those remarkable centuries which saw the growth of the commercial predominance of the republics of Italy and of the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain, cartography was a truly minor science that was naturally the preserve of scholars who, lacking contemporary information, drew their ideas almost exclusively from the writers of antiquity. Their various representations of the globe were all necessarily systematic; cartographers reproduced, according to the manuscripts they possessed or their own imagination, the opinions of Strabo, Pliny, Denis, and Solinus. [7] And with these opinions appeared jumbled up quotes from the Bible, traditions from the earliest times, and the most fabulous legends that have ever been accredited. Such are most of the world maps [8] that date back to the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. We can 351 readily analyze those world maps that seem to be most characteristic.

7. We have often had occasion to recall that the propagation in the scientific world of Ptolemy’s astronomical tables dates only from the end of the fifteenth century, and rather still from the beginning of the sixteenth.

8. The oldest map of the world that has come to our knowledge is that belonging to a manuscript by Cosmas Indicopleustes, and which appears in the atlas of the viscount of Santarém. This completely amorphous monument can only interest us in its manifestation of the belief in the Hyrcanian gulf.

Plate I of facsimiles.

In the mappamundi of the Cotton Collection of the British Museum, [9] dating back to the eleventh century, the Black Sea, a vast basin curved as an arc of a circle, merged with the Sea of ​​Azov and dotted with a large number of islands, is at an equal distance from the North Sea and the Caspian Sea; the Tanaïs comes out of the Rypheus mountains, imagined by Aristotle and reproduced by his successors; Herodotus’ Gryphons inhabit the ends of the earth, and Gog and Magog find themselves relegated to the western shores of the Caspian Sea, depicted as a gulf that receives its waters from the great ocean which surrounds the ecumene. In the south, the mountains of Armenia appear to be surmounted by Noah’s ark, and the Taurus mountain range extends, in accordance with the opinion of the ancients, into the vicinity of the Eastern Sea. Towards the west, Constantinople is seated at the northern end of a vast canal, the length of which is at least equal to that of the Black Sea; in its center we can see a vague indication of the Sea of Marmara, into which our cartographer boldly makes the Danube debouch.

9. This world map is part of Santarém’s atlas (see our Cartography, pl. I, fig. 1).

352 The mappamundi of Hereford cathedral [10] is even more curious. It undoubtedly constitutes one of the most remarkable monuments that have been bequeathed to us from the thirteenth century, as much for the grandeur of its execution as for the infinite number of legends and drawings with which it is enriched. Its configuration, however, is still almost as fabulous as that of the eleventh-century mappamundi. It shows the Pontus Euxinus [Black Sea] as a long canal that the author has divided into three seas, the Propontis, the Cimerienne and the Euxine, in the middle of which he has ingeniously transported several islands of the Archipelago. [11] The course of the rivers is 353 however traced there with more accuracy than on the Cotton map. The Danube no longer flows into the Sea of ​​Marmara: it discharges its waters through several mouths north of Constantinople. The indication of the Dnieper [12] and that of the old Halys in the south are precise, and with a little good will it is even possible to find the Dniester, the Don, and the Phase. As for the Palus Maeotis [swamp/sea of Azov], they are shown as a long channel, the northern extension of which is a river [Fluv. Meotides] that can only be the Tanaïs [Don]. To the east, the Caspian Sea still forms a gulf of the northern ocean; but two great rivers flow into it: one bears the name of Oxus, and the other, although without designation, can only be the Cyrus or the Araxis, which we see emerging from above the mountains of Armenia, as ever crowned by Noah’s ark. In the northern part of the Hyrcanian Gulf, to the west, 354 there is a third stream; it is, according to legend, the infernal river which escapes from obscure mountains, where one finds, it is said, the entrance to hell.

10. It is because of the indefatigable perseverance of Jomard that the Bibliothèque royale in Paris has since 1842 possessed a facsimile of this precious monument. May Jomard also allow us to express to him here all our gratitude for the constant and eager benevolence with which he facilitated our laborious research in the magnificent map collection of which he can rightly be proud to be the founder. We sincerely regret, however, that his multiple commitments still prevent this learned curator of the Bibliothèque royale from enriching the scientific world with the numerous cartographic documents which constitute his particular responsibility, whose importance we have been able to appreciate even from our rapid examination. The original of the Hereford map is drawn on vellum and colored. Its dimensions are 1.65m by 1.55 (see our Cartographic Monuments, pl. I, fig. 2).

11. One notices, among others, the islands of Thassos and Pathmos in the vicinity of the island of Achilles.

12. The Dnieper is already identified as the Danaper. This denomination and some other names belonging to the tributaries of the Danube are, in the countries which concern us, almost the only ones which are foreign to classical tradition. We have already said [in a previous chapter] that Danaper (Danapros) appears for the first time in the De administrando imperio of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. Is the English cartographer’s geography the result of the knowledge of Byzantine writers, or that of an obscure traveler’s account? We will not seek to determine the answer; Jomard’s work will probably clear up all doubts in this regard.

The numerous inscriptions [13] which appear in the Hereford map are no less interesting than its purely cartographic layout. They are all the more valuable in that they positively indicate 355 the main source for the geographical notions that had been used in the composition of this precious monument. In fact, we find textual accounts in the midst of historical commentaries, all of Solinus’s fabulous legends: the people of Scythia, with bloodthirsty and bizarre customs; the Gristé (Gelons), turning the skin of their enemies into clothing for themselves and their horses; the Satarchs, despising the use of gold and silver; the Arimaspes, questing for precious stones; and Jason, in search of his fleece. There are depicted the Gryphons, guardians of emeralds; the Lynx, with the piercing gaze; the Mantichora, with the human form; and all the fantastic parade of animals with which the imagination of the ancients had enriched natural history.

13. We thought it necessary [for the facsimile] to translate into French all the Latin legends that illustrate the Hereford map. We have been greatly helped in this difficult task by Jomard and Paris, of the Institute, as well as by d’Avezac. Solinus’s text was also of great help to us; for, as is easy to see, most of the quotes from the English cartographer are a literal reproduction of that author’s passages. This comparison which we made between the legends of the world map and the passages of Solinus enabled us to judge all the variants and all the interpolations which must mark the majority of old manuscript maps. Thus, in the Hereford map, in the midst of textual citations, Solinus’s Gelons appear under the name of Gristé, the Arimaspes as the Carinialpis. Several traditions have even been attributed to the Latin writer that we could not find anywhere in his works, such as that relating to the accursed children of Ham, who must appear with the Antichrist to bring destruction to the entire surface of the earth, etc. This is indisputable proof that the manuscript of Solinus used by the English cartographer was different from all those which have come to our knowledge. There are also many inscriptions on the Hereford map in Anglo-Norman, with which we did not concern ourselves.

During the fourteenth century, English cartographers kept the systematic ideas of earlier ages almost intact. [14] The world maps we have from this period reproduce at least all the main features of the cosmography of the mappaemundi of the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. 356 They nevertheless prefigured the revolution in geographical concepts and scholarship. The Caspian Sea, it is true, retained, as in the past, its communication with the northern ocean; Gog and Magog are still prisoners on its shores; certain islands of the Archipelago are still visible in the middle of the Pontus Euxinus; and the Tanaïs, as in the past, has its source in the Rypheus mountains. But Solinus’s fabulous animals have disappeared and in place of the populations of Scythia, so strangely characterized by Solinus, there are regions whose names already belong to the Middle Ages.

14. Cartographers of other nations appear, prior to the fourteenth century, to have been just as backward as those of Great Britain, judging by some world maps in Santarém’s atlas. We found these later works to be so crude in their depiction of the countries around the Black Sea that we thought it unnecessary to mention them further. [Yet see figs. 4–5 on plate I]

While the scholars of Western Europe, in their dearth of contemporary documents, dragged themselves into the rut of the classical authors, whose cosmography they blindly adopted, Italian navigators roamed all the coasts of the Mediterranean, entered the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azof, everywhere multiplying their trading houses and their commercial relations. From these actions there resulted the most positive benefits for the craft of navigation and for the geography of the Eastern countries. From the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, the Venetians and the Genoese were enriched by portolans, whose accuracy and beauty of execution still cannot be sufficiently admired today. [15] The Spaniards and 357 the Portuguese in their turn appropriated the knowledge of the Italians, and in this way gradually spread new conceptions among the Mediterranean nations, which were not long in bringing about a complete revolution in European cartography. The great systematic errors of past centuries and the classical toponyms then quickly disappeared, to make room for historical and geographical truths, proclaimed for the first time by clerical ambassadors, [an echo of Conrad Malte-Brun 1810] then confirmed and completed by Italian explorers. During the course of the fourteenth century the mathematical configuration of the portolans was already incorporated into most mappaemundi. The planisphere of Marino Sanuto, the map of the library of Florence, and that known as the Catalan Atlas from 1375 [16] successively reproduced the Pontus Euxinus and the Palus Maeotis with all the precision of the layout of the Italian navigators and all the richness of their nomenclature. However, apart from the maritime explorations of the Genoese and the Venetians, mainly in the regions located to the east of the Black Sea, the depiction of geographical features was still far from being rigorous and the few travelers by land were not 358 sufficient to correct all of the errors that so many centuries had accumulated. Thus, although they separated the Caspian Sea from the northern ocean and properly traced the courses of the Tanaïs, the Volga, and even the Kama, the fourteenth-century cartographers still followed the example of ancient writers. Like them, they had no notion of the Aral Sea and they made the famous river Oxus flow, albeit under another name, into the​Hyrcanian sea. [17] In the monument of Marino Sanuto, the Rypheus mountains still served as a starting point for the Tanaïs and the Volga. The author of the Florentine map even represented some of the fabulous riverine connections invented by the poets of ancient Greece. Equally large errors are also inevitably to be found in the maps’ geographical configurations and in ratios of distances [between the map and reality]. We have already pointed out the numerous variations through which the course of the Caspian Sea successively passed; now the neighboring countries underwent the same vicissitudes. To the east of the Hyrcanian Sea, Marino Sanuto placed a second basin, bearing, like the imaginary mountains which surround it, the name Caspian. [18] Then for him, as with the author of the Catalan map, the Caucasus Mountains extend 359 to the most northerly ends of the Caspian Sea, [19] and the distance separating this latter basin from that of the Black Sea is so restricted that it almost equals the width of the Danube Delta, as indicated by both cosmographers.

15. See in our Cartography, pl. I, figs. 3 and 8: the maritime chart of the Black Sea, from the thirteenth century, of the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; and that from the portolan atlas by Pierre Visconti (1318). The first is now part of the royal library [I don’t see how: not in Campbell’s (1986) census; Jomard did not reproduce it in his facsimile atlas, although he might have taken a tracing from the original]; thanks to the Vicomte de Santarem, we have a facsimile of the second, the original of which is in Vienna.

16. See pl. I, figs. 6, 7, and 9.

17. See pl. I, fig. 9, for the Catalan map of 1375.

18. Can we see in this indication some vague knowledge of the Aral Sea? This is what it is really not possible to appreciate.

19. It is seen here that the fourteenth-century cartographers were entirely faithful to the opinions that we attributed to the ancient writers (see our Historical Geography of the Caspian Sea, in this volume, p. 165).

Plate II of the facsimiles.

In the fifteenth century, maps generally remained faithful to the navigators’ good delineation of the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azov. [20] Yet, as in the previous century, cosmographers varied the configuration of the Caspian basin according to their imagination, or according to their interpretations of travelers’ itineraries. Only occasionally, undoubtedly among certain proponents of classical authors, do we see the re-emergence of the traditions that had marked the Anglo-Saxon mappaemundi and generally all European maps prior to the thirteenth century. Thus, the author of the mappamundi in the Museo Borgiano, [21] while roughly accepting the outline of contemporary cosmographers as well as a host of positive geographical conceptions, while no longer imagining the Caspian to be a gulf of the Hyrcanian sea, reconfigured the history of Gog and Magog 360 and brought the famous Amazons back to life at the foot of the Hyperborean mountains. We do not believe, however, that the scholars who constructed such maps put full and complete trust in all of these wonderful traditions; they undoubtedly recorded them in their works, not as positive and contemporary notions, but as remarkable quotations belonging to a literature of which they were fervent admirers. It would be difficult to explain otherwise the presence of passages, with origins dating back to Herodotus, in the midst of numerous commentaries on the political state of these eastern regions during the course of the fifteenth century.

20. See, pl. II, Andrea Bianco, 1436; Fra Mauro, 1460.

21. Plate II, fig. 2.

Towards the end of this same century [i.e., 15th], a second revolution took place in European cartography following the adoption of Ptolemy’s astronomical tables, which, until then unknown, were quickly accredited and popularized in the scientific world by the art of printing. The works of previous cosmographers and the portolans themselves existed only as manuscripts and so gradually escaped the knowledge of geographers; [22] and soon, towards the middle 361 of the sixteenth century, the very precise observations of the Genoese and Venetian navigators were condemned to oblivion and replaced by those, naturally much less rigorous, of the astronomer of Alexandria. The configuration of the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azov was then considerably distorted on the maps of the world, [23] and underwent incessant variation. The fabulous mountains of antiquity momentarily regained possession of the plains of Russia. The Caspian Sea, whose true position had been vaguely sensed by Fra Mauro and the author of the Florentine map, lengthened definitively towards the east and its basin was confused with that of the Aral Sea, being fed by the Oxus and the Iaxartes.

22. Many portolans were nevertheless composed during the sixteenth century. But the printing press did not reproduce them, they were used exclusively by navigators, and so remained either ignored or disdained by scholars (see the Cosmographie universelle of Guillaume le Testu, pl. II, fig. 10 (Dépôt de la guerre), 1555; the portolan by Jean Freire, belonging to Santarém, fig. 8; the unnamed Portuguese map, fig. 6, etc.; and also among the portolans possessed by the Bibliothèque royale, those by Rosny, Don Domingo Deuillaroil, 1589, Diego Homen, 1574, etc.).

23. Plate II, world maps by Francesco Berlinghieri after Ptolemy, 1481, and Sebastien Cabot, 1544; the periplus of Arrian, 1577, etc.

Plate III of the facsimiles.

The travelers who explored Russia towards the end of the sixteenth century nevertheless quickly made disappear from maps Ptolemy’s assumptions about the topographical constitution of the interior of this country. [24] But the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azov, closed to 362 European navigators since the [Ottoman] capture of Constantinople, went through the most bizarre configurations from the moment that the observations of the astronomer of Alexandria were found to be faulty, and that true nautical charts were attempted to be constructed from contemporary reports. The Dutch portolans are distinguished among other things by the strangeness of their layout. [25] They excluded the Sea of ​​Azov and the Crimea in the most extraordinary way; gave the Pontus Euxinus a length four times its width; indicated sandbanks to the east of Snake Island [Insula Șerpilor]; and finally, undoubtedly according to Pliny’s statements, they imagined under the name of Samsoun a vast gulf to the south-east of Sinop. Thanks to the Russian conquests and many commercial explorations, the Caspian Sea basin was proportionately much better known. We have already discussed all the modifications its geography underwent at the hands of Jenkinson, Oléarius, Jean Struys, [26] and the hydrographic expeditions ordered by Peter the Great, [27] so this matter need not concern us further.

24. Map of Jenkinson, 1562, pl. III, fig. 1; Vichelus, 1540, Ortelius, 1570, pl. II, fig. 7 and 11. [By “Chrétian Vichelus” is meant, I think, Christian Wechel, who printed Oronce Fine’s double cordiform world map in Paris 1531 (Shirley 1983, no. 66), which was republished in Basle in 1540, in an edition of Pomponius Mela.]

25. Black Sea from Constantinople to Azof, by Jean Van Keulen, 1689, pl. III, fig. 3. Doncker’s map, 1699, and La Mottraye’s map, 1727, are just as flawed.

26. Nautical chart of the Caspian Sea, by Jean Struys, 1668; map by Van Verden, 1710 to 1721; pl. III, figs. 2 and 5.

27. Plate III, fig. 4.

Plate IV of the facsimiles.

The configuration of the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azov 363 thus varied for a long time according to the interpretation and the nature of the more or less exact, more or less false, data that the geographers managed to obtain. In 1700, Guillaume Delisle gave the Black Sea an almost quadrangular shape; [28] in 1723, correcting his work no doubt according to the new documents provided by Peter the Great, Delisle came considerably closer to its true form. [29] Around 1777 there appeared, under the name of Bellin, [30] the first nautical chart published in France, although it was far from meeting the needs of navigation. Despite its many shortcomings, it was nevertheless, for a long time, the one and only resource for sailors. Later, in 1788, Delamarche [31] also published a map of the Pontus Euxinus and Palus Maeotis, including within its framework the neighboring regions. But following Bellin’s example, Delamarche kept the Gulf of Samsoun, followed exactly the same route for the Black Sea’s coasts, and in compensation for a weak rectification in the Sea of ​​Azov, he imagined between the Crimea and Cape Kérempeh (in the middle of the Pontus Euxinus) two groups of reefs which for a long time terrified navigators.

28. Plate III, fig. 4.

29. Plate III, fig. 6.

30. Plate IV, fig. 1.

31. Plate IV, fig. 2.

With the occupation by Russia of the 364 northern coast of the Black Sea, and with it the inevitable consequences of the development of the imperial navy and the lifting of the ban on travel through the Bosporus at Constantinople, the publication of accurate nautical charts became an urgent necessity. The Russian government naturally took the initiative. However, the hydrographic studies which were carried out in 1806 by Lieutenant Boudistchef, and which served for the drafting of new maps abroad, were still very incomplete and far from being able to meet the requirements of so difficult a navigation as the Black Sea. The total lack of exact works, together with the new commercial activities established between the Mediterranean and the southern provinces of Russia after the Bourbon restoration, led the French government to charge its own officers with the mission of recharting the coasts of the Black Sea. This important work, entrusted to the care of Captain Gautier, was carried out with as much zeal as intelligence and in 1820 France had the honor of providing European navigators with a truly scientific nautical chart.

Since then, the Navy has made yet other noteworthy works. M. Taitbout de Marigny published in 1830 a chart enriched with the most valuable information, thereby forming an indispensable complement to Gautier’s map. Finally, after Taitbout the Russian captain Manganari published 365 in different sheets a work as remarkable as it was conscientious of all the northern coasts of the Pontus Euxinus between the mouth of the Dnieper and the limits of the Russian possessions in Asia. [32]

32. This same officer also published in 1833 the best nautical chart that we have of the Sea of Azov.

While traversing the many vicissitudes which mark the cartography of the basin of the Black Sea and of that which we call the Aralo-Caspian basin, we remained absolutely silent concerning eastern writers. We would certainly have greatly desired to be able to venture into the domain of the Arabs, Persians, and Turks. Unfortunately, we are so poor in geographical monuments belonging to these nations—and those we do have are so imperfect, so few, and most of them so out of harmony with the real knowledge of their supposed authors—that we felt it necessary, for the moment, to forbid ourselves any kind of discussion with regard to them. We therefore refer the reader to the two Arabic maps which appear in our Plate IV. [33] He will thus be able at a glance to judge for himself the singular ideas which presided over the drafting of cartographic drawings among eastern peoples.

33. Plate IV, fig. A, map of al-Idīsī from the Bibliothèque royale in Paris; fig. B, map from a manuscript of Ibn al-Wardī, no. 589 [i.e., in the Bibliothèque royale].

< finis >

Notes

n1. Such circumstances are, of course, why historians generally use footnotes rather than author-date citations! But online, footnotes are meaningless, and it keeps the typesetting easier and costs down to do citations in my current books in author-date format. But this situation calls for an exception, I think.

References

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