Medieval Portolan Charts As Documents of Shared Cultural Spaces

SONJA BRENTJES Medieval Portolan Charts as Documents of Shared Cultural Spaces The appearance of knowledge in one culture that was created in another culture is often understood conceptually as »transfer« or »transmission« of knowledge between those two cultures. In the field of history of science in Islamic societies, research prac- tice has focused almost exclusively on the study of texts or instruments and their trans- lations. Very few other aspects of a successful integration of knowledge have been studied as parts of transfer or transmission, among them processes such as patronage and local cooperation1. Moreover, the concept of transfer or transmission itself has primarily been understood as generating complete texts or instruments that were more or less faithfully expressed in the new host language in the same way as in the origi- nal2. The manifold reasons (beyond philological issues) for transforming knowledge of a foreign culture into something different have not usually been considered, although such an approach would enrich the conceptualization of the cross-cultural mobility of knowledge. In this paper, I will examine the cross-cultural presence of knowledge in a different manner, studying works of a specific group of people who created, copied, and modified culturally mixed objects of knowledge. My focus will be on Italian and Catalan charts and atlases of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, partly because the earliest of them are the oldest extant specimens of the genre and partly because they seem to be the richest, most diverse charts of all those extant from the Mediterranean region3. In addition, I have relied on the twelfth- century »Liber de existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostris Mediterranei«, a Latin 1 Charles BURNETT, Literal Translation and Intelligent Adaptation amongst the Arabic–Latin Translators of the First Half of the Twelfth Century, in: Biancamaria SCARCIA AMORETTI (ed.), La diffusione delle scienze islamiche nel Medio Evo Europeo, Rome 1987, p. 9–28; Charles BURNETT (ed.), Marie-Thérèse D’ALVERNY, La transmission des textes philosophiques et scientifiques au Moyen Âge, Farnham 1994. 2 Paul KUNITZSCH, Der Almagest. Die Syntaxis Mathematica des Claudius Ptolemäus in ara- bisch-lateinischer Überlieferung, Wiesbaden 1974. 3 The corpus includes works by Pietro and Perrino Vesconte (Genoa/Venice, 1311–1236); Ange- linus Dalorto (Genoa, 1330); Angelino Dulcert (Ciutat de Mallorca, 1339–1345); Francisco and Domenico (?) Pizigano (Venice, 1367); Abraham and Jafuda Cresques, as well as other mem- bers of their workshop (Ciutat de Mallorca, Barcelona etc., ca. 1360–1430); Giovanni da Carignano (Genoa, before 1329); anonymous charts of the late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, such as the Pisan chart (late thirteenth century) and the Cortona chart (late thirteenth/early fourteenth century); charts from the Cresques workshop; charts from the atelier of Francisco Cesanis (early fifteenth century); and charts made by Mecia da Viladestes, Andreas Bianco, Gratioso Benincasa, Hotomanno Freducci, and other chart-makers of the fifteenth century. See Youssouf KAMAL, Monumenta cartographica Africae et Aegypti, ed. Fuat SEZGIN, 6 vols., Frankfurt 1987, vol. 5; Ramon J. PUJADES I BATALLER, Les cartes portolanes. La repre- sentació medieval d’una mar colcada, Barcelona 2007. 136 Sonja Brentjes register of localities in the Mediterranean and their distances, a (lost) map of the Medi- terranean, and an introductory text describing the purpose, addressee, and mode of compilation of the work4. MULTI-LAYERED TOPONYMS: NAMING THE COAST OF NORTHERN AFRICA AND ITS HINTERLAND Medieval writers and chart-makers encountered several problems when creating a description of a foreign stretch of land or sea. As a rule, they had no direct access to the foreign places or their names, and knew next to nothing about their physical environment. They had to find sources from their own environment and make foreign sources accessible. To do this, they had to contact and collaborate with a number of people from different social groups and educational levels. Then, they had to choose between differing information found in texts, maps, and images, as well as that received from human informants, and to evaluate its trustworthiness. Last but not least, they had to take into account the capability of the users of their work to understand the data, including its visual and symbolical components. Thus, writers and chart-makers had to navigate between different ways of knowing foreign lands, of reporting about them in writing, speaking, or drawing, and of using the final products of their work. All of these aspects can be detected not only by analysing which names chart- makers attributed to localities on the North African coast and the region of its hinterland from the Sinai to the Atlantic, but also by paying attention to the position of these names on the respective maps. The names and places show that there was a broad cultural reservoir from which all chart-makers were able to choose. They also indicate that those choices differed more than once. Polyglossia was the norm of the day, but every chart-maker or workshop spoke it differently, even if the deviation was some- times only minor. The polyglot coastal names of Africa can be roughly divided into three groups: transliterations of local names (i.e. Arabic names or Arabic forms of names used in previous cultures); names given by visitors from the Catholic world or, occasionally, adaptations of local forms into the linguistic spectrum of the chart-makers and their sources; and borrowings from ancient sources, either directly or possibly through an Arabic intermediary. As my description of the content of each group indicates, the boundaries between them appear to have been fluid, and examples can be found on the boundaries between each pair of groups. A systematic linguistic analysis, combined with a register of the variants of such boundary cases in different languages and sources, is a desirable undertaking for future research. The first group is by far the largest. The forms of transliteration suggest that in most cases these names were brought to the attention of the chart-makers – directly or indi- 4 Patrick GAUTIER DALCHE, Carte marine et portulan au XIIe siècle. Le »Liber de Existencia Riveriarum et Forma Maris Nostri Mediterranei«, Rome 1995 (Collection de l’École française de Rome, 203). Medieval Portolan Charts 137 rectly – by people who had learned them in a spoken environment. In some cases, chart-makers may have contacted sailors, merchants, or other visitors to Africa directly. Several of them knew some Arabic, at least as elements of the lingua franca that is said to have emerged from the twelfth century5. Portolan chart-makers, in contrast, often did not know Arabic, with the exception of at least one of the Jewish chart-makers in Majorca and one Jewish emigrant to Alexandria who moved on to Safad. A good example of the occasional presence of Arabic on portolan charts is the pairing »malbe saline« on the earliest extant specimen (Pisa chart, late thirteenth century). »Saline« translates »malbe«, which is the result of a small spelling mistake of an Arabic word for saline, namely »malḥāʾ«6. In most cases, however, the portolan chart-makers would have learned the names from written sources, such as lists compiled by sailors, like those mentioned in the »Liber de existencia riveriarum«. Other possible written sources for Arabic place names are portolani: texts which enumerate sequences of ports and land- marks along various parts of the Mediterranean coast and give other useful information for sailing, or books such as the »Liber de existencia riveriarum« itself. Many of the transliterated Arabic place names given in this work written in Latin for an anonymous canon in Pisa – and thus for a member of the clerical written culture – can be found again, a century and more later, on the oldest extant portolan charts7. A fascinating, but so far unresolved problem concerns the relationship of these transliterations to Arabic written and cartographic sources. One of the place names on fourteenth-century and later portolan charts, namely »Bizerte/a« or »bi/eserti«, cannot have been acquired orally8. The Arabic form of a Latin version of an ancient name is »Banzart/d«, written »B-N-Z-R-T/D«9. While the first vowel would have been unem- phasized, it is very unlikely that the consonant »n« would have been suppressed in the local pronunciation10. Mistaking »n« for »i«, however, is very easy to do when con- fronted with a written form of the Arabic name, because of the similarity of the letters. Diacritical points are often either lacking, misplaced, or already confounded by an Arabic copyist. The existence of »benzart« on two portolan charts by Mecia de 5 Jocelyne DAKHLIA, Lingua franca. Histoire d’une langue métisse en Méditerranée, Arles 2009. 6 Hans WEHR, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Ithaca 41994, p. 1080. 7 PUJADES I BATALLER, Les cartes portolanes (as in n. 3), DVD, Paris, BnF, Rés. Ge. 1118 (Pisa Chart). 8 Examples are the Pisa Chart, the Cortona Chart, an anonymous Genoese chart (according to Pujades i Bataller, from the first quarter of the fourteenth century), and many others. PUJADES I BATALLER, Les cartes portolanes (as in n. 3), DVD, Paris, BnF, Rés. Ge. 1118 (Pisa Chart); Cortona, AE, port 105 (Cortona Chart); Florence, BR, MS 3827 (anonymous Genoese chart). 9 Bizerta is not located in exactly the same place as the ancient city. See al-Idrīsī, Opus geo- graphicum, ed. Alessio BOMBACI, Umberto RIZZITANO, Roberto RUBINACCI, Laura VECCIA VAGLIERI, 9 vols., Naples, Rome 1970–1976, p. 300; Géographie d’Aboulféda, ed. Joseph REINAUD, William MacGuckin DE SLANE, Paris 1840, p. 132. This includes a case of switched diacritical points, since Abū ʾl-Fidā wrote: »N-B-Z-R-T wa qīla B-N-Z-R-T«.

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