His Representation Of Europe, Northern Africa, Syria,
Asia Minor, Arabia And Its Two Gulfs, Is A Fair Approximation To General
Facts; his collected knowledge has enabled him to locate, with more or
less of general truth, Georgia, the Iron Gates,
Cathay, the Plain of
Moghan, Euphrates and Tigris, Persia, Bagdad, Kais, Aden (though on the
wrong side of the Red Sea), Abyssinia (Habesh), Zangibar (Zinz), Jidda
(Zede), etc. But after all the traditional forms are too strong for him.
Jerusalem is still the centre of the disk of the habitable earth, so that
the distance is as great from Syria to Gades in the extreme West, as from
Syria to the India Interior of Prester John which terminates the extreme
East. And Africa beyond the Arabian Gulf is carried, according to the
Arabian modification of Ptolemy's misconception, far to the eastward until
it almost meets the prominent shores of India.
[Sidenote: The Catalan Map of 1375, the most complete mediaeval embodiment
of Polo's Geography.]
84. The first genuine mediaeval attempt at a geographical construction
that I know of, absolutely free from the traditional idola, is the Map
of the known World from the Portulano Mediceo (in the Laurentian Library),
of which an extract is engraved in the atlas of Baldelli-Boni's Polo. I
need not describe it, however, because I cannot satisfy myself that it
makes much use of Polo's contributions, and its facts have been embodied
in a more ambitious work of the next generation, the celebrated Catalan
Map of 1375 in the great Library of Paris.
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