The Edges of the Medieval World

Edges of the World - Edges of Time

EDGES OF THE WORLD – EDGES OF TIME Felicitas Schmieder The first ideas that come to mind when thinking about medieval “edges of the world” presumably are conceptions of the earth being a restricted mass of land beyond which the world somehow ends – we have heard a great deal about such edges during the workshop on which this publication is based. In these conceptions, the edges of the world, represented as the margins of medieval maps of the inhabited earth, from antiquity onwards are mostly inhabited by wild, monstrous races (among the best-known are the twelfth-century so-called Psalter world map or the Ebstorfer Weltkarte from the thirteenth century; figs.1 and 21; see also fig. 8). But fines saeculi, edges of the world, are not found only in medieval concepts of space, but of time as well: the medieval idea of time included its beginning when God created the world as well as its ending when He will come to earth a second time. Both concepts of edges of the world are represented in close connection to each other in these world maps, which are – it is well-known – representations of both space and time and can thus create a bridge between the imagination of both in medieval world view. They have rightly been described as a kind of painted world chronicle.2 We can find Noah’s Ark, the Queen of Sheba or the Three 1 On the Ebstorf world map see Birgit Hahn-Woernle (ed.), Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte (Ebstorf: Kloster Ebstorf , no date [1989]) (hereafter: Hahn-Woernle, Ebstorfer Weltkarte); Hartmut Kugler (ed.), Ein Weltbild vor Columbus. Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte. Interdisziplinäres Kolloquium 1988, (Weinheim: VCH, Acta humaniora, 1991); Jürgen Wilke, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, 2 vols. (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2001.) 2 Anna Dorothee von den Brincken, “Das Weltbild der lateinischen Universalhistoriker und -kartographen ,” in Popoli e Paesi nella cultura altomedievale (Spoleto: ...., 1983), vol. 1, 377-408; eadem, “‘Ut describeretur universus orbis.’ Zur Universalkartographie des Mittelalters,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 7 (1970), 249-78; eadem, “Mappa Mundi und Chronographia. Studien zur imago mundi des abendländischen Mittelalters,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 24 (1968), 118-186. – The history of medieval cartography is booming lately. Several more collected papers of colloquies are forthcoming, and collections of maps are published as well as facsimiles of single maps, medieval and early modern – all this can already be seen from the volumes quoted in notes 1, 3, 5 and 8; see also Ute Schneider, Die Macht der Karten. Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis heute (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004) as well as the complete series Terrarum Orbis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001 ff.) ed. by Patrick Gautier Dalché. EDGES OF THE WORLD – EDGES OF TIME 5 Magi as well as other past figures and events in their geographical places (see, for instance , figs. 3, 4, 5, 6, 73); also, far in the East, Paradise, very often with Adam and Eve inside or being driven out, and mostly with the four rivers that spring there clearly marked (figs. 84, 9, 10, 11, 14). Considering the medieval framework of a world chronicle , it is not astonishing that we also find figures with a destiny for the future, and more specifically, for the end of time and thus world history. Probably the most famous of them appear on nearly every medieval world map among the races on the rims: The enclosed nations of Alexander the Great, generally identified (since Pseudo-Methodius drew the connection in the seventh century) with the endtime peoples of Gog and Magog and since the twelfth century and Peter Comestor also with the ten lost Jewish tribes from the biblical first book of Chronicles (see figs. 10, 11, 125, 13, 14).6 And when Alexander had transited Scythia and had pushed along further east, he encountered a people that was unclean, abhorrent in view and contaminated with many kinds of magic. It devoured all sorts of horrid things, such as the meat of wild animals … and all sorts of beast, also birds and worms – but not alone this, but also aborts and malformed foetuses, which had been received by the uterus, but not completed. They do not burry their dead, but prefer to eat them. When Alexander saw them doing all these terrible things, he got afraid that they could spread all over the world and contaminate the world. And he let them round up together with their women and children and all of their belong3 More on the...