Maps for different jobs
The word “map” covers several quite different things in the Middle Ages. Large world pictures meant to teach religious and historical ideas are one type, and they are the mappa mundi tradition. This article is about the other side: how maps were physically made, who made them, and the practical kinds that helped people travel, trade and manage land.
Materials and tools
Almost every surviving map was made by hand on parchment or vellum, prepared animal skin that was durable and could be scraped and reused. A few were painted on walls or woven into textiles, but skins and later paper were the standard supports. A mapmaker’s kit was close to that of any scribe or illuminator:
- pens cut from quills, and inks made from natural materials
- compasses and rulers for laying out circles and straight lines
- pigments for coastlines, rivers, mountains and decoration
- gold leaf, in expensive manuscripts, for marking important places
Because skin was costly, the size and detail of a map often depended on what the patron could pay. The parchment and pigments were the same ones used for books.
Who made them
Most mapmakers are anonymous. Many maps were produced inside monasteries and cathedral communities, where scribes and artists already worked, and a map might be one part of a larger manuscript, such as a chronicle or geography. Some monks added sketch maps of routes or the Holy Land to their histories. Later, secular workshops in towns, especially in Mediterranean ports, produced charts for sale to sailors and merchants. A map might be drawn by one person and colored by another, and copies were made from earlier copies, so errors and styles passed along.
Names do survive in some cases. A thirteenth-century English chronicler and artist drew itinerary maps showing the stages of a journey to Jerusalem, and a workshop in Majorca is associated with the large Catalan Atlas of the later fourteenth century. For most of the period, however, the maker is unknown.
Sea charts as a specialist trade
The best known practical maps are portolan charts, sea charts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, with the earliest surviving examples usually dated to around the end of the thirteenth century. For the craft story, the point is that they were a specialist trade. Workshops in Italian and Majorcan ports turned out charts on vellum for merchants and sailors, with ports named in ink along the shore and the interior often left blank or decorated. Many surviving charts are so lavish that they were probably prestige objects as much as tools.
Practical maps on land
Land maps were rarer, but they existed. Some were local plans. Disputes over land, water, drainage or rights of way sometimes produced sketch maps, which served as evidence in court or in an estate’s records. Monasteries drew plans of their buildings and water systems. A famous early plan of an ideal monastery survives from the early ninth century, though it appears to be a design rather than a record of an existing site.
Route maps and itineraries listed stages of a journey with distances rather than showing the countryside to scale. Pilgrims, merchants and church officials found them useful, and they connect to the realities of road travel. Maps of a whole kingdom were unusual, with a fourteenth-century map of Britain, often called the Gough Map, as one of the better-known exceptions.
Mapmakers and the reports of travelers
A mapmaker rarely went anywhere. Instead, he gathered information from others: pilots, merchants, pilgrims, and the accounts of long journeys such as those of Marco Polo. These second-hand reports were combined with older authorities, such as ancient writers, with varying results. Places in the Mediterranean, where many people had direct experience, tended to be drawn more reliably than distant lands, where mapmakers relied on rumor or inherited tradition. The Catalan Atlas, for example, appears to blend sailing knowledge with information about Asia and Africa from several sources.
Scale and accuracy
Medieval maps usually did not use a consistent scale, and they did not share modern conventions such as north at the top. Their purpose shaped the design: a pilgrim’s itinerary needed order and distance, a legal sketch needed relationships between plots, a sea chart needed bearings. It is therefore misleading to judge them only by whether they match a modern map. They were tools that solved particular problems, and the best of them solved those problems well.