The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History by Colin McEvedy (1968).pdf

Note all the corer maps

knov.n to Crcsqucs by hearsay, and the map's

medicval touches - kings and other creaturcs

in the littlc·known hinterland are at irst sight

its most stri.ing feature. Butlhe \\eb of compass

bearings, the constant scale. thc correct

oriental ion of the string of coastal towns and

e\cn the fact that the towns arc represented by

standard symbols rathcr than individual

pictures. spcllthe dierence between a map and

an illustration. between medicval and modern

attitudes. In 1427 Crcsques' son went to

Portugal where a project for reaching India by

circumnavigating Africa was being acti\ely

discussed; the mariners of the Age of Discovery

were to usc charts drawn up on the Catalan

system.

Thc primary requirement of the tra\cller is a

list of the places he will be passing through or

by; in the medieval period when tra\e! \�as

mostly by sea the nced was met b) lists of

coastal towns. These lists were readily converted

into diagrams of the type on the back emcr,

which shows, along the bottom, the sequence

of scvcn coastal towns from Haifa in Palestine

to Damictta at thc eastern corner of the

Egyptian dclta. From Jaffa in the centre a road

leads inland to Jerusalem, which is allowed an

cxpandcd scale and considerable detail: from

Jerusalem another road is shown going off to

Damascus at roughly the correct angle and in

roughly the right relationship to the River

Jordan and the Dead Sea. However, the

presentation of a right·angled piece of coast line

as straight brings the Nile into line with the

spine of the book, and Cairo up against

Jerusalem (lop right-hand corner) so that the

map cannot be said to be a real succcss.

Matthew Paris who drew this Illap was a

monk: the map on the front cmcr is by a

professional. Abraham Crcsques, ollcial map

and compass maker to Peter III of Aragon.

Increasingly confident use of the compass in the

\Jlh century led 10 a demand for usable charts

and supplied the information necessary for

their constHlctioll; by the end of the century an

astonishingly accurate olltlinc of the Mediter

ranean was available, super-imposed on an

oblique grid of compass-bearings, This grid was

extended as a framework for the elaborate Atlas

of the World which Cresques produced in 1375

as a gift for the King of FranCe. Thc section

shown on the front cmer, the Kingdom of Delhi

in the north·western quarter of India, \\as only

Also by Colin A1cEI'('tiy

THE PENGUIN ATLAS OF

ANCIENT HISTORY

THE PENGUIN ATLAS 0

MODERN HISTORY

Penguin BookJ'

also (with Sarah McEI'etJJ')

THE ATLAS OF WORLD HISTORY

I. From the Beginning to Alexander the Great

2. The Classical 'orld

3. The Dark Ages

Rupert Hart-Dm'is ald

CrO<'eJl·Collier (U.S.)

Colin McEvedy The Penguin

Atlas of

Medieval History

Maps devised by the author

and drawn by John Woodcock

Penguin Books

Contents

Introduction

The area covered 2

2. The shadings used 4

Limitations 6

4. Background Notes 7

A Note on Mountains and Terrain 12

Atlas 14-90

Index 91

INTRODUCTION

the section. All the maps cover exactly the same

area: Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East;

the reasons for the choice of this area are funda�

mental to the whole atlas and require explanation

at some length.

In the medieval period, the nations of Europe

and the Near East formed acommunity, the mem

bers of which constantly reacted on each other but

were almost completely cut of from the rest of the

world by physical barriers. We can think of

the Europe-Near-East area as a cul-de-sac,

the rough outline of the sack being formed by

the Arctic circle, Atlantic Ocean, and Sahara

Desert (Figure I). The southern limit can be carried

around to the Arabian Sea and the lips of the sack

drawn close together by bringing the upper down

along the line of the Ural Mountains and the

lower up the Suleiman Range. The mouth is thus

reduced to the region of the Oxus and Jaxartes

rivers (Russian Turkestan), and it can be said that

all signiicant contacts between the Europe-Near�

East area and the rest of the world took place via

Turkestan, The apparent exceptions to this rule,

the Norse, the Portuguese, and the Arab traders

of the Saharan and spice routes, however stirring

their individual sagas, never succeed in enlarging

the European-Near-Eastern horizon during the

period under consideration (360-1478).

A resume of their achievements clearly demon

strates this. In the Atlantic the Norse discovered

and colonized Greenland during the ninth century

and they later reconnoitered a debatable amount

of the coast of North America, which they termed

Vinland, but these events were reported barely if

at all in Europe, and the harsh conditions that

eventually extinguished the Greenland colony did

not encourage interest. The resources required for

the sustained efort needed to breach the Atlantic

barrier permanently were not in fact available un

til the ifteenth century, and the successful expedi-

tions of the 14905 lie outside our period. The

discoveries made by the Portuguese before 1478

were relatively speaking unimportant - the Azores

and the Atlantic coast of Africa as far as the Gulf

of Guinea. The southern barrier, the Sahara, was

not as formidable to the desert-bred Arab as it had

been to the Romans, and shortly after the Islamic

conquest of North Africa routes were opened

up between Morocco-Algeria and the weste.rn

Sudan, whose slaves, ivory, and gold provided the

basis for a lourishing trans-Saharan trade, The

contact between the two communities broadened

briely when the Murabits of Morocco turned

south, shattered the Negro Empire of Ghana

which had held much of the Niger and Senegal

basins since the fourth century, and began the

conversion of the population to Islam. After that,

the link between the two communities became

purely economic again and the native Islamic em

pire of Malli which replaced Ghana in 1240 pur

sued its history in efective isolation, To the east

the spice route connecting India with Persia,

The Area Covered

My idea in compiling this atlas has been to show

the unfolding of medieval history in Europe and

the Near East as a ' continuous story, an aim in

contrast to that of most historical atlases, which

illustrate discrete fragments of history and are in

tended primarily as works of reference. That the

nations within this area have much history in

common is an obvious fact which the purely na

tional approach often ignores and the modern

tendency for microscopic analysis tends to kep

permanently out offocus. It is continually empha

sized by the method of presentation here adopted

and, if the result is at irst sight a mere pictorial

catalogue, a perspective emerges from the whole

which establishes the relative proportions of dir�

ferent historical events.

There is no geographical detail on the maps -for

example, the only English town shown is London

- nor any dissection of political units - the King

dom of France is simply the Kingdom of France

and is never subdivided into Duchies, Counties,

and so on. There is, however, much more chrono

logical detail than is usual, each state bei n g shown

at many diferent points in time, and this, together

with the constant scale, allows diferent epochs to

be directly compared.

The thirty-eight maps that make up the atlas are

arranged in ive sections. The bulk of each section

is made up ofive or six maps showing the political

state of the area at intervals that average forty

years. Two more maps (indicated by the letters R

and E after the date at the beginning of the text),

corresponding in date to the last political one and

showing respectively the extent of Christendom

and the development of the economy, complete

1 The European-Near-Eastern community

in medieval times, with the Indian and Central

Asiatic (Nomadic) communities abutting it.

FIG.

Arabia, and Egypt carried a far greater traic than

the Saharan route, but it also was responsible for

the mediation of a politico-religious change on

only one ccasion. In 711, the Arabs sailed to

Sind, the westernmost province of India and seized

it for the Caliphate. Again the attempt to defy

geography was only momentarily successful, and

Sind, though efcctively Islamized, was neither

conscious of the temporal authority of the Caliph

nor even remembered in Baghdad.

Granted that these incidents do not invalidate

the essential circumscription of the Euroe-Near

East area, there remains the mouth of the sack,

Turkestan,where thesettled agricultural communi

ties of the Near East petered out and the Asiatic

steppe, the domain of the nomad, began. The

Indian cul-de-sac also opencd on to western Tur

kestan (via the Khyber pass) and in antiquity,

when the nearer parts of Turkestan were more

deinitely settled and could be counted within the

Near-Eastern area, it was possible for the Persian

and Macedonian empires to include an Indian

province. During the medieval period, when the

nomads' hold on Turkestan was unbroken, the

land route to India was never attempted by a

westcrn army. The third settled civilization, the

Chinese, lay on the other side of the screen of

nomads, far beyond the efective political reach of

the times. Overland trade between the civilized

three was considerable, especially when the no

mads erected their larger empires and the caravans

could journey in safety, but, as with the Saharan

and spice routes, communications were really too

tenuous to bear anything weightier than luxuries

and gospels; the nomads efectively tied the mouth

of the sack.

If the nomads had een content with a static

role, there could be no objction to the treatment

of the Europe-Near-East area as an isolated

entity; unfortunately their part was far from pas

sive, and their aggressions brought a common

factor into the history ofChina,lndia, Europe,and

the Near East. Huns, Turks, and Mongols are

pan of the story of each. The Near East and

Jndia, sharing adjacent openings on to Asia, often

shared the same storm from the Steppe; the power

of the Kushans, White Huns, and Timurids for

example, originally centered on the Oxus basin,

extended simultaneously into the Near East, Asia

proper, and India; and thoughChina was further

away, the exceptional empire - the Turkish in the

sixth century and the Mongol in the thirteenth -

could bear on both China and the Europe-Near

East area at the same time. But if there is an in

trusive element in the history of all three, India,

China, and the Europe-Near-Eastern powers

could only afect each other indirectly by some

efort against the interposed nomads (for example,

Chinese attacks weakened the Turkish Khanate in

the seventh century and thus eased the Arab con·

quest of Transoxiana), and as long as notie is

taken of the doings of the nomads in Turkestan

and of their Chinese and Indian interests the

Europe-Near-East area can

think be fairly con

sidered in vacuo.

The area within the sack as deined in Figure)

contains a lot of dead space; the area taken as the

base map for this book (it is superimposed on the

irst in Figure 3) eliminates most of this. On the

northern and western borders the sacriice of

northern Scandinavia, Iceland, the C)naries, and

the Atlantic coast or Africa allows a great reduc

tion in area without more than insigniicantly

afectin5 the historical comprehensiveness of th(!

map. A more drastic economy has ben made in

the south - the exclusion of the Eastern Sudan,

Abyssinia, and the southern third of the Arabian

peninsula. Nubia and Abyssinia are natural back

waters and, in the medieval period, they were fur

ther isolated by theirChristian faith, which made

them alien to their Moslem neighbours. The petty

Nubian principalities were inally destroyed by the

Mamluks in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen

turies; Abyssinia lost her coastline to the Arabs in

the tenthcentury but was otherwise left alone. The

Arabs colonized the coast as far south as Zanzibar

during the tenth and twelfth centuries but never

reached or knew of Madagascar. (Below Zanzibar,

the southward current was considered too fast to

allow a return journey.) To leave out such areas is

reasonable enough. The Kingdoms of South

Arabia, staging posts on the limb of the spice

route that went to Egypt and East Africa, are also

little loss, for the desert efectively cut them of

from the other Middle-Eastern countries. But

from the desert itself came one of the most vital of

medieval forces, Islam. The exclusion of part of

its birthplace is justiied by the attitude of Islam

Movements into and out of the European

Near-Eastern area

A: Norse (ninth-tenth centuries)

B: Portuguese (ifteenth century)

c: Murabits (thirteenth century)

0: Arabs (eighth century)

E: Nomads (throughout the period).

FIG.2

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