A stranger to someone - a view of Norway from Salamanca

 

los raudos torbellinos de Noruega 

- Luís de Gongora, Soledades 

In the library of the University of Salamanca there are four globes, donated in the eighteenth century. They are known as the "round books", and the story goes that they were called that because the library would only accept donations in the form of books. They are displayed in the main room, available to visitors, and last year I was able to see them again when I was visiting Salamanca for a conference. 

Whenever I see early modern globes or maps of the world, I am naturally drawn towards Norway. Over the years, I have seen a lot of different premodern and early modern depictions of my native country, and I am always fascinated how these depictions deal with the rather complicated outline of the Norwegian coastline. The degree to which the map fits the terrain is an interesting starting-point for understanding what kind of cartographical information existed about Norway at the time, and very often it will become evident that to a lot of continental cartographers Norway was not very well known, at least compared to what one might expect given the relative proximity between the big map-making centres and Scandinavia. 

These maps are sources to Norwegian history, at least as long as we ask the right questions. On a non-academic level, the maps also serve as good reminders that one will always be a stranger to someone, that our known world will seem alien to someone else. In our own age, when information - if not necessarily knowledge - is easy to come by, it can also be easy to forget that our ideas about other parts of the world rarely fit with reality. And to see oneself from the outside, to see Norway from Salamanca through eighteenth-century eyes and map-making hands, is a useful reminder of the gap between perception and reality. And this is a good thing to keep in mind, both for academics and for non-academics alike. 

Saint Thomas and apostolic succession in the Antipodes

 

When researching the history of utopian thought, one of my main points of interest is when I can map the continuity of an idea or a topos across the medieval/early modern periodisation. My interest stems from the artificial nature of periods, and how these chronological divides continue to impede our understanding of the past. The other day, I encountered one such example of continuity that both pleased me and surprised me. 

The example in question comes from the 1616 novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes (‘History of the great and marvellous kingdom of Antangil, unknown to historians and cosmographers until the present day’). On the title page of the 1616, the work is attributed to a certain I. D. M. G. T, whose identity is, as far as I know, still a mystery to us. The work was part of a growing vogue that followed in the wake of Thomas More’s Utopia, published one hundred years before Antangil, where authors described ideal societies found in faraway locations, which could also be used to satirise or criticise the real-world societies of the author’s own time. While the main form of this vogue – a novel about an invented ideal society – had Thomas More’s work as its starting point, both More and later authors belonged to long strands within the history of ideas, and therefore ensured a great deal of continuity in thought and form from both the medieval and the pre-medieval cultural frameworks.   

 

At the point of writing this blogpost, I have not read Antangil in its entirety, and I hesitate to say much about its content, as most of my knowledge about the work comes from secondary sources – especially David Fausett’s excellent 1993 monograph Writing the New World. What I can say, however, is that this marvellous kingdom is located south of the tropic of capricorn, and south of Great Java, the latter being a common point of orientation in late-medieval travelogues. The reader is not only provided with coordinates, but also a woodcut map made with incredible detail, where the main villages and rivers are numbered, and these 129 numbers correspond to a list of three columns where the names are provided. The capital of the kingdom, Sangil, is located at the bottom of a long, narrow inlet akin to a fjord.  

The great kingdom of Antangil

Courtesy of Gallica BnF

Table of the main cities and rivers of Antangil

The capital of Sangil

I hope to delve more deeply into the world of Antangil in the future, but at this point I am most interested in the fifth book, which describes how Christianity was brought to Antangil, and how the kingdom got its first martyr. The events are summarised in the header of chapter 1, which states that the holy gospel was proclaimed the capital of Sangil by Byrachil, who is described as a very sage ‘Braquemane’ who was the disciple of Saint Thomas the Apostle. As I have yet to read how Byrachil met his martyrdom in chapter 16, I can only focus on what the information from chapter 1 tells us, and how this connects to utopian thinking from the Middle Ages. 

Header for chapter 1, book 5

If we start with the description of Byrachil as a ‘Braquemane’, this points us to the tradition of medieval travelogues exemplified in particular by Marco Polo and John Mandeville, two figures whose works remained impactful and widely read well into the seventeenth century. (I say this with full awareness that it was Rustichello of Pisa who gave Marco Polo’s account the shape by which we know it today, and also that John Mandeville might never have existed.) In these accounts, we read about non-Christian sages who are given variations of the name ‘Bragmanni’, which in turn comes from ‘Brahmin’. The descriptions of these sages drew heavily on the so-called Alexander tradition, a long line of fantastical accounts of the exploits of Alexander the Great that comprise the legacy of the Alexander romance by Pseudo-Callisthenes rather than any contemporary accounts from Alexander’s own time. What interests me here, however, is that the figure of the Brahmin was well-established as a marker for the positive ‘other’, and also as a representative of the far east. That the author of Antangil has decided to use such a figure as the apostle of their fictional utopia shows that they were familiar with the traditions of the Middle Ages, and that they expected the medieval traditions to be known to their audience. In short, we see that the idea of the Brahmin was still a figure of contemporary resonance in the early seventeenth century, and that markers of the ideal society established in medieval writing still served that function centuries later.  

 

Another point of importance is that Byrachil was the disciple of Saint Thomas, the apostle of Christ whom the post-biblical apocryphal literature claimed to have evangelised in India. Thomas’ missionary activities were accepted as historically true in the Middle Ages, and there are to this day those who believe that this account is based on historical reality. As Saint Thomas was the apostle of India, it only makes sense to use his activity as a historical reference point for the introduction of Christianity in the antipodean kingdom of Antangil. A similar idea can be found in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624/27), where the society in question is converted to Christianity through a letter from Saint Bartholomew (who was also credited with evangelising in India). In terms of continuity of ideas, however, the use of Saint Thomas as a marker of an ideal society located on the far side of the world – albeit vicariously through his disciple – is also seen in medieval literature. In the mid-twelfth century, members of the court of Frederick Barbarossa forged a letter claiming to be from Prester John, a Christian king in the east, who ruled over an ideal kingdom, which became a fixture in Latin medieval thought well into the sixteenth century and beyond. In the letter, the king states that the tomb is Saint Thomas the Apostle is located in his realm, and that he undertakes pilgrimages to this holy site. Moreover, the king’s own palace is modelled on the palace that Saint Thomas built for King Gundoforus of India, which means that the connection to the apostle is both one of architectural emulation and continuous contact by way of his relics. In other words, Saint Thomas, as apostle, saint, and biblical figure, a marker that proves the ideal condition – the utopian quality – of Prester John’s realm. This same function is fulfilled by him – by way of his disciple – in the novel Antangil.         

 

The Christianisation of the kingdom of Antangil by Byrachil also rhymes with the medieval thoughtworld in another way, namely that apostles of new members in the Christian oikumene had a connection to a biblical figure. Such a connection provides a link to biblical history, and when the figure in question is an apostle, the Christianisation of the new location takes the form of apostolic succession. Such a succession was not always the case in the Christian histories of Latin medieval kingdoms – Latin is here used about the liturgical language, not about the vernacular – and there are plenty of medieval polities where the apostolic mission is not traced all the way back to the Bible. The native France of Antangil’s author, however, had several traditions concerning such biblical connections. In the ninth-century Vita Dionysi by Hilduin, Saint Dionysius – or Saint Denis of Paris – was conflated with two other individuals by the same name, one of whom was Dionysius the Areopagite, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, which recounts his meeting with the apostle Paul. Through this conflation, the apostle of the Paris region was linked to the apostolic activities of Paul. Similarly, around the year 1000, Ademar of Chabannes, a historian at the abbey of Saint-Martial in Limoges, rewrote his chronicles to claim that Martial was also a first-century figure. It is tempting to see the apostolic succession from Saint Thomas in India to Byrachil in Antangil as a variant of the theme represented by Dionysius and Martial.          

 

The novel Antangil is very much a work of the seventeenth century, in that it belongs to a contemporary vogue in utopian writing. However, it is also steeped in ideas and traditions that run through the Middle Ages, and which showcase how ideal societies have been imagined or represented in medieval writings. The connection with the Brahmins is a utopian strand where an ideal society is located in the far east. The connection with Saint Thomas is a utopian strand which also places the ideal society in the far east, but which also includes biblical history, and, by extension, the figure of Prester John, the ideal Christian king. The connection with the idea of apostolic succession might be seen as stemming from similar ideas in French medieval hagiography. These medieval strands have remained forceful and important by 1616, and they continued to be so for centuries afterwards. The novel Antangil, therefore, is a good reminder that ideas have a long and often curious life, and that there is more that connects the so-called modern world with the Middle Ages than what separates it.

The edge of knowledge – sixteenth-century cartography and the North

 

The sixteenth century is one of the most dynamic periods in the history of European cartography. Not only did the voyages of the era provide new knowledge that was transmitted through maps, but experimentation with projections and ways of transmitting knowledge about the world led to a wide variety of maps. However, in some cases the cartographers got things wrong. In some cases – as I hope to blog about at a later point – it was because the sources were faulty, and this is the explanation for why we find a lot of non-existent islands of some of the most cutting edge maps of the period. In other cases, knowledge got warped in transmission. It is one such case I want to write about here.      

 

Knowledge could be warped in a multitude of ways along the chain of transmission. In some cases, the knowledge could be faulty from the start, whereas in other cases something might get lost in translation, seeing as knowledge often passed through several different languages on its way from observation to the map itself. In the present case, the main reason appears to be a mixture of unfamiliarity with the territory in question, combined with unfamiliarity with the language(s) of that region.  

Septentrionalium partium nova tabula (1561)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

In 1561, Girolamo Ruscelli, a cartographer based in Venice, printed two maps of the North Atlantic theatre – one detailed, one rather stylised. The detailed map is known as Septentrionalium partium nova tabula, a new map of the northern parts. This map contains a lot of placenames, including settlements, rivers and islands. These names are often imprecise, suggesting how difficult it could be for those from – for example – the Netherlands or Italy to accurately render the Icelandic, Danish or Norwegian pronunciations. In the case of Iceland, this difficulty is in part suggested by the choice of using Latinised names of the island’s two dioceses, Skálholt and Hólar, rendered as Scalodin and Olensis. While the accuracy of these names can be discussed, the names themselves are correct insofar as the identification of the diocesan sees is concerned.     

 

What is more puzzling, however, is to consider the correct identification of the detailed map with some elements of the more stylised map, the so-called Schonladia Nuova, new Schonladia, issued in the same year. There are several interesting differences in the presentation of Iceland and Greenland in these two maps. The detailed map contains both names, respectively Islanda and Engronelant, the latter suggesting that information was transmitted through Dutch interlocutors. The stylised map, however, does not provide a name for Greenland – and indeed seems to suggest that Greenland is linked with the Kola peninsula – whereas Iceland is identified as Thyle, an alternative spelling of Thule. That Iceland is given the name Thule is not surprising, as these two names were used interchangeably about the island throughout the Middle Ages. Another interesting difference, however, is that the stylised map includes a stretch of frozen sea, the ‘mare congelatum’, which forms a belt of ice along the coast of Greenland.

Schonladia Nuova (1561)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

The most surprising difference between the two maps, however, is that the stylised map contains a strange duplication of names – a duplication of sorts. In this map, there are two place names on Iceland, namely the two dioceses. However, the names are not the same as those found in Septentrionalium partium nova tabula. Instead, the dioceses are called Skalholten and Holen. These are Danified names, and suggest that the information has been transmitted through Danish informants in Venice. A direct Danish contact would not be all that surprising, considering that several Scandinavian ecclesiastics were in exile following the Protestant reformations in Denmark-Norway and Sweden. Given the accuracy of these names, it is therefore curious to see that the Latinised and less accurate names found on the detailed map are still included in Schonladia Nuova, but not where we would expect them to be. Rather, the two Latinised names have been moved to Greenland, where they are rendered as Scalholdin and Holenses, the placements of which do not correspond to any placename in Greenland in Septentrionalium partium nova tabula. We seem to be dealing with some kind of overcorrection, where an attempt to include the vernacular names of Iceland’s two dioceses in the new map has replicated the error elsewhere. This is, of course, presuming that Schonladia Nuova was produced after the other map, which seems likely given the confusion in question.    

 

The case of the duplicated Icelandic names is a good example of how certain parts of the sixteenth-century world were, in effect, the edge of knowledge. Along this edge, some certainties existed – such as the fact that Greenland and Iceland were real places – and so did many uncertainties, such as how to accurately and correctly render the names of these places. The confusion in Schonladia Nuova is not only due to the fact that Venice is a long way away from Iceland and Greenland. It is also indicative of how Greenland was falling off the European edge of knowledge in this period. Throughout the fifteenth century the contact between the Norse settlements in Greenland and the rest of Europe dwindled and eventually stopped. Bishops continued to be appointed to Greenland’s diocesan see, Garðar, but these were bishops in name only and never set foot on the island itself. Greenland was still known, if mainly as a memory or as a landmass occasionally seen by voyagers who traversed the Greenland Sea. Consequently, instead of knowledge there was a lot of information about Greenland, and most of it appears to have been incorrect, as seen in the confusion regarding Scalholdin and Holensis. In this way, knowledge warped into information, and information was tainted by hearsay, legend, and fiction, but became common misconceptions through the medium of maps.

Schonladia Nuova (1561) (detail)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

Schonladia Nuova (1598) (detail)

The sea monster is a decorative embellishment in the 1598 edition of the map

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection