'If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.'
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Anna Komnene is one of our only sources on the First Crusade from the Byzantine perspective. She was a Byzantine princess, historian, and intellectual. Read more about her life here! #history #crusades #womenshistory #AnnaKomnene #historian #writer
“For even the greatest of deeds, if not haply preserved in written words and handed down to remembrance, become extinguished in the obscurity of silence”
-Preface, The Alexiad
Anna Komnene is one of the first female historians and one of the most valuable primary sources of the Middle Ages. Her written account of her father’s reign, The Alexiad, is our only source of the First Crusade from a…
Let's check out some Dutch winter paintings from the 1600s. These capture the happier side of the "Little Ice Age," a period of colder temperatures in Europe during the early modern period.
Dutch winter paintings generally portray the cold weather as a pretty fun time — townspeople are outside frolicking on the ice and snow rather than huddling miserably by the fire. Hendrick Avercamp made a number of these:
Click on the link below for more art -- including "kolf," a hybrid of golf and hockey that was pretty popular:
One of the primary forms of fortune-telling in the Islamic world was bibliomancy, in which people would flip open a book to a random page, plunk down their finger, and then interpret their future based on the image or text they had selected. Sometimes this was done with the Quran, but Persian people in the 1500s and 1600s produced books full of lavishly decorated paintings for the practice.
This image would have been a positive omen — it shows the story of the “Seven Sleepers,” who kept themselves safe by sleeping in a cave for centuries:
More bibliomancy and other ways to tell the future here:
Four millennia of divination
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I get that this is intended to be funny, but just so people are aware the Bunting map (on the left) is not intended to be cartographically useful. It is intended to show a theological conception of the world, where Jerusalem is the center, and to make a visual reference to the three leafed clover on the arms of Hanover, Bunting's home. It's art, not a serious map.
A serious cartographic map from the era looked more like this:
Don't get me started on late medieval/Renaissance nautical maps. DO FUCKING NOT. You're all lucky that my external HDD on which I had a collection of about 500 of those decided to die as a Christmas present and now I have to search for images online instead of uploading them directly, so this will be a quick and short post. Sorry if it's not very ordered.
So, @socialmaya (because if I don't tag people, no one will read this).
Yes, in the early to high middle ages, Christian European maps were very schematic. There were the so-called T-O maps, with the internal seas (Black and Mediterranean) in a T shape, dividing Europe, Africa and Asia, and surrounded by the O-shaped world ocean:
Then, a bit more detailed, Beatus maps, depicting the known world still as a more or less monolithic island in the world ocean:
Until eventually, in ca. 1000-1100 AD they became highly complex, if very inaccurate maps of the old world, like the Ebstorf map:
Those maps were simplified, since as per Christian canon the mortal world was sinful and not worth depicting in detail, from earlier maps like the 700 AD Ravenna cosmography:
which was itself based on maps from Antiquity such as the one by Anaximander:
The map by Muhammad Al-Idrisi, also known as Tabula Rogeriana (made for King Roger II of Sicily) did lay the foundation for later mapmaking and it itself is the result of Islamic cartography having evolved directly from Ancient Greek cartographers like Anaximander and Ptolemy because the Islamic golden age was a time when classical works were preserved, examined and built upon in the Muslim world, unlike in the Christian one.
And then came the 1200s and European sailors started demanding more accurate maps for navigating the seas for trade and war. At that point, mostly the Mediterranean and Black seas, to trade with the Levant and the Golden Horde. Thus came to be the portolan maps, made specifically for seafaring.
The earliest known map of this type is the so called Carte Pisane, or the map from Pisa:
As you can see, it encompasses the Mediterranean and Black seas, which would be true for most such maps for centuries to come. It is also covered in numerous, intersecting lines - the so-called "rhumblines" radiating from several central points on the map which were used for navigation before map projection was a thing.
Portolans drew on Arabic cartography and there was some back-and-forth exchange of cartographic knowledge around the Mediterranean. First, there was the Genoese cartographic school, product of which were the Carta Pisana and the earliest example of an illuminated portolan map, such as the Lucca chart, again from ca. 1300-1320:
Early Genoese cartographers this codified the portolan map as the principal map type of the age, which was to yield important navigational and political information (well not really, flags were often obsolete by hundreds of years, I've seen Byzantine eagles over Constantinople on maps made 100+ years after the city fell, etc.)
Those flags, btw, are why I became so fascinated with portolan maps in the first place and why they're still my passion.
Maps encompassing the whole then-known world, also known as *mappae mundi* (literally "maps of the world"), evolved independently from portolans, although often by the same cartographers: from the T-O and Beatus maps, through Arabic world maps, to accompany portolan maps and atlases. A shining example are the maps (ca. 1320) by Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte:
And then the ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE of Fra Maro, a Franciscan monk, from ca. 1450:
(image limit hit so link)
The practice then went to the kingdom of Aragon where (mostly Jewish) cartographers would spread from Genoa to Mallorca and Barcelona, founding the Catalan map school:
1375, Abraham Cresques (the so-called Catalan atlas):
Venetians, Portuguese, French and others soon followed, founding their own portolan making traditions.
Diogo Homem (Portugal), 1563:
Muslim (Arab and later Ottoman) cartographers also would make portolans sometimes:
1461, Ibrahim Al-Mursi from Tunis (sorry, lost my good copy):
Then, in the 1480s, a copy of the Cosmpgraphia, an atlas by the Ancient Greco-Roman cartographer Claudius Ptolemaus was discovered, leading to the rediscovery of polar projection:
(13th century Byzantine Greek copy)
Thus cartographers like Sebastian Münster (early 1500s) and Gerhard Mercator (late 1500s) were able to build on those foundations.
Sebastian Münster, Cosmpgraphia, 1550:
Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, 1572:
So yeah, the "BLERGH STOOPID YUROPIAN MAPP" is bullshit. That one is a very symbolic map no one at the time believed was true. There are other allegorical maps, such as Münster's "Europe as Queen":
You can’t just give up on someone because the situation’s not ideal. Great relationships aren’t great because they have no problems. They’re great because both people care enough about the other person to find a way to make it work.
"You know, love doesn't mean "l never want you to change." But I don't think it means "I don't care if you change" either. So I suppose it might mean, "I believe that you'll always be the person I adore." A declaration of faith, perhaps."
– Sayaka Saeki, やがて君になる (Bloom into You), Via "freckled-lili" on Tumblr
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