Ecce! A Ninth-Century Isidorean T-O Map Labeled in Arabic

Did medieval European maps influence the Islamicate ones or vice versa? Or, were they mutually exclusive? Scholars fall on both sides of the divide and the question of Islamo-Christian cartographic connections remains elusive due to the lack of extant examples. This article focuses on the author of the Arabic notations on a rare ninth-century copy of Isidore’s geographical treatise of Etymologiae, and, in particular, on its T-O map with the aim of revealing that the notations were made by a distinguished Arab geographer of princely stock from caliphal Andalus and not just an unknown anonymous Mozarab - Iberian Christians including Christianized Iberian Jews who lived under Muslim rule in the southern sections of the Iberian peninsula from the early eighth century until the mid-fifteenth century including those who escaped to the Christian kingdoms of Aragon, Asturias, and Castile. I aim to prove that the majority of the Arabic annotations on a late eighth/ early ninth-century Visigothic Latin Isidorean manuscript of Isidore’s Etymologiae, Ms. Vitr. 014/003, housed at Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacionale de Espana (BNE) were made by Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbdallāh al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094), an Andalusi geographer of princely background, whose mid-eleventh century Islamicate geography Kitāb almasālik waalmamālik (Book of Routes and Realms) influenced many a later medieval Islamicate geographical scholars. The most famous was Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 626/1229), an inveterate medieval Islamicate-world traveling scholar of Byzantine stock who relied heavily on al-Bakrī’s geography for his seven volume magnum opus, a geographical dictionary on countries and places called Muʿjam alBuldān (Dictionary/Collection of Countries, completed 1224-1228) that is considered one of the most comprehensive medieval Arabic geographical dictionaries ever written because it provides mini-encyclopedic entries on thousands of sites in the Islamicate realm of the Middle Ages. If al-Bakrī used Isidore’s Etymologiae for his conclusion, then it could be asserted that Yāqūt and other medieval Islamicate geographers who relied on al-Bakrī’s may have been influenced a little by Isidore. This article aims to provide proof of significant scholarly connections between medieval European and Islamicate carto-geographical traditions centuries earlier than previously presumed. In doing so it adds to the story of transcultural connectivity across the greater Mediterranean that can be examined under the central question informing this latest volume by Albrecht Classen as to whether globalism existed in the pre-modern world.