Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

The world according to the Hereford Mappa Mundi

Title card reading 'Mappa Mundi' in black and red on pale parchment, beside Konrad Miller's facsimile of the Hereford map dotted with coloured markers, and a small modern map of Europe, Africa and Asia with the same places. Text: 1,025 names, Jerusalem at the centre, east at the top.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi, painted around 1300, is the largest medieval map of the world that survives. I took the 1,025 names that two Victorian clergymen indexed on it, matched them to real places, and set the map beside a modern one.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

In Hereford Cathedral hangs a sheet of calfskin about 158 cm tall and 133 cm wide. It is a map of the whole world as an educated Englishman imagined it around 1300, and you could not travel by it. Jerusalem sits at the exact centre. East is at the top, where the Garden of Eden floats in a ring of fire. The Mediterranean runs up the middle like the stem of a T, splitting Europe on the left from Africa on the right. The far edge of the world is crowded with dog-headed men, one-footed Sciapods and people with their faces in their chests. And yet it is also full of real places: Paris, Rome, Babylon, Samarkand, and dozens of English cathedral towns.

In 1873 two Herefordshire clergymen, W. L. Bevan and H. W. Phillott, published a book that went over the map name by name, region by region, and ended with an index of 1,025 names. I used that index as the map’s inventory. I located 164 of the clearest inscriptions by eye on Konrad Miller’s 1896 facsimile, which is far easier to read than the worn original, and placed the 143 the book identifies with a real place on a modern map.

Left, Konrad Miller's facsimile of the Hereford map with east at the top, dotted with coloured markers: green ones crowd the British Isles in the bottom left corner, dark red ones cluster round Jerusalem at the centre, blue ones spread over Europe, Africa and Asia. Right, a modern map of Europe, North Africa and Asia with the same places, labelled London, Paris, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Babylon, Cairo, Samarkand, Patna and Sri Lanka
The located inscriptions on the Hereford map (left, east at the top) and the same places today (right).

Bible, classics, Middle Ages and marvels

Bevan and Phillott sorted the map’s contents into four kinds of material: Biblical, classical, legendary and what they called contemporaneous, the knowledge of the mapmaker’s own day. Sorting every name the same way, 72% are classical, Greek and Roman places and peoples copied mostly from late Roman compilers and a Roman road book. 9% are Biblical, 12% medieval, and 6% pure legend: Paradise, Gog and Magog, the Golden Fleece, the Minotaur’s labyrinth and the monstrous races. Every Biblical name is in Asia. Only in Britain and Ireland is the map up to date: 92% of the names there are medieval.

Horizontal stacked bars of names by part of the map: Asia 360, with a large dark red Biblical section, a large blue classical section and a gold legendary end; Europe 321, mostly blue with a green medieval section; Africa 114, almost all blue; the seas and islands 105, almost all blue; the British Isles 83, almost all green
Names on the map, by part of the world and where they come from.

Roughly the right way

Turn the map so that east is at the top and directions from Jerusalem hold up surprisingly well. For the 140 real places I located, the median error is 19 degrees, and 81% point within 45 degrees of the right way. London is on a bearing of 318 degrees from Jerusalem; the map puts it at 306. The big exception is Africa. Because the Mediterranean is drawn as a straight channel from Gibraltar up to the Holy Land, North Africa swings round to the south, a median 69 degrees off.

Scatter chart of the true bearing of each located place from Jerusalem against its bearing on the map. Most points lie close to the diagonal, especially the British Isles, France and Italy in the north west and India and Persia in the east; North African points fall well below it, and Holy Land points scatter widely
Which way from Jerusalem: map against reality.

Wildly out of scale

Distance is another matter. Places close to Jerusalem, a median 128 km away, sit 20% of the way out to the rim. Places 3,000 km or more away sit at 93%. They are 29.3 times as far in reality but only 4.8 times as far on the map. Everything distant is pressed against the encircling ocean, while the Holy Land swells: it is drawn 4.5 times bigger than the map’s average, Egypt 1.9 times, the British Isles 1.5. India and Central Asia shrink to 0.71.

Scatter chart of true distance from Jerusalem on a log scale against distance on the map as a share of the way to the rim. Holy Land points near Jerusalem sit between 5% and 50%; places thousands of kilometres away, in Britain, Spain and India, crowd just below 100%
Distance from Jerusalem: map against reality.
Bar chart of how big each region is drawn relative to the map as a whole: the Holy Land about four and a half times, Egypt and Sinai nearly twice, Mesopotamia, Syria and the British Isles about one and a half times, Italy, Greece, France and North Africa a little above average, Spain a little below and India and Central Asia about 0.7
How big each region is drawn.

If you lay the whole map on the globe with the best possible rotation and scaling, the median place lands 516 km from where it really is. The arrows below show where each one would fall.

Modern map of Europe, North Africa and Asia with a coloured arrow from each located place to where the Hereford map would put it on an ordinary map. Arrows in Britain are short; arrows in North Africa point south into the Sahara; arrows from India and Sri Lanka point far to the west
If the Hereford map were an ordinary map: from each place to where the map puts it.

Home

Britain and Ireland are 0.4% of the land of Africa, Asia and Europe, but they have 83 names, 8.1% of the index, about 21 times their share. Here the mapmaker knew the ground: cathedral cities and abbeys, Lincoln on its hill, Ely on its island in the fens, the rivers of the Humber drawn, Bevan and Phillott thought, with “a degree of accuracy which implies personal acquaintance”. He still made mistakes. Caen, in Normandy, ended up in Devon, “by a strange blunder”.

Left, the British Isles section of Miller's facsimile with east at the top, dotted with green markers labelled Edinburgh, York, Lincoln, London, Hereford, Exeter, Dublin and Caen. Right, a modern map of Britain and Ireland with the same places
Britain and Ireland on the map and today.

How I did this

The inventory is the index of Bevan and Phillott’s Mediaeval Geography (1873), read from the Internet Archive’s scan. I sorted every name into the book’s four kinds of material with a fixed rule, set out in the paper. The 164 positions on the map are my own, located by eye on Miller’s facsimile, so they favour the legible and well-known places. Identifications are the 1873 book’s for the located places, and name matches in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places for 194 more, each checked by hand. Directions and distances are measured from the centre of Jerusalem on the map and on the globe. For a complete modern edition of every inscription, see Scott Westrem’s The Hereford Map and the Virtual Mappa project.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

Tristan Hotham

,
, , , , , , ,