Professor Karen Pinto has spent three decades at the forefront of the study of Islamic cartographic history. Her first book, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration, came out in 2016, and she is currently working on a second, focusing on Islamic maps of the Mediterranean. Today, she is an Associate Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm  صورة بحر الروم , which translates to the “Image of the Sea of the Romans” (i.e. the Byzantines) comes from a twelfth-century Norman-Sicilian copy of the Book of Routes and Realms, attributed to the early tenth-century geographer al-Iṣṭakhrī. 

I abbreviate this type of book to KMMS based on its Arabic title: Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik. It represents a snapshot back in time to the caliphal age of the eighth-through-tenth centuries. 

This map is special. It comes from the earliest extant KMMS manuscript housed at one of the best and most generous medieval manuscript libraries in the world. In addition, unusual colophonic reader signatures and a trademark Siculo-Norman ‘alāma (or formal signature) suggest this copy was owned by a young Frederick II before he became the famous conquering Holy Roman emperor.

Image details: Gouache and ink on paper. 34 × 26 cm. Courtesy: Leiden University Libraries. Cod. Or. 3101, fol. 33.

Out of a bed of grey, blue, and white encased on three sides by aged cream colored paper from the 12th century, the most popular medieval Islamic form of the Mediterranean emerges. Painted with ornamental wave-like designs, the form of the sea is depicted schematically in an unusual bulbous shape that is round and wide along its eastern Levantine edge tapering off into a narrow neck of water that runs past North Africa and Spain into the Atlantic.

Pictured: A modern satellite map of the Mediterranean with the locations from this map. To explore this more closely, check out the other images in this exhibit.

What takes us aback about this Islamicate image of the Mediterranean is its emphasis on smooth geometric spaces. Mimesis in the KMMS atlas series exists only in geometric contours.

Especially striking is the fact that both sides of the Mediterranean are mirror images of each other. 

 

Because of the history of tension between the Christian and Muslim flanks of the Mediterranean, this geometric harmony comes as a surprise.

Does this mirror-image portrayal assert an idyllic message of unity? Or does it depict a Muslim Mare Nostrum in deliberate contradistinction to the sea of the Romans?

Or, does this form come from ignorance? Were the Muslim cartographers simply reflecting their knowledge of the undulating North African coast onto the other side of the sea?

That's unlikely. Muslim geographical accounts that accompany the manuscripts that contain these maps indicate that Muslim sailors understood the physical shape of the sea.

Should we read this form as a vase, a fish, an inverted church, a key-hole, a fountain, a belly, a uterus, or simply as a bottle?  

One possibility is to read this unusual form of the Mediterranean as a representation of the na’l, or sandal print motif of the Prophet Muhammad, shown below. 

 

An 18th-century representation of the na'l. Screenshot from Karen Pinto, “'Surat Bahr al-Rum': The Mediterranean in the Medieval Muslim Cartographical Imagination,” in Eastern Mediterranean Cartographies, eds. George Tolias, Dimitris Loupis (Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research N.H.R.F., 2004), 235. https://www.academia.edu/1153023/Surat_Bahr_al_Rum_Picture_of_the_Sea_of_Byzantium_Possible_Meanings_Underlying_the_Forms. 

This makes sense in parallel with the image of the Baḥr Fāris, or Persian Gulf-Indian Ocean, shown below, which, as a firmly Muslim sea, traditionally enjoyed the senior status of resembling the Prophet's tooth.

Image created by Karen Pinto, based on an Ottoman world map from the Suleymaniye Library. See more images like this in Karen Pinto's collection of Islamic maps on Pixeum.

West-East Axis Across the Central Heart of the Mediterranean

Crowned by the mythical Jabal al-Qilāl, which may be the Pillars of Hercules, the islands of Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus carve a West-East axis in distinctive red and gold. The line stretches from the mouth of the Mediterranean to the thughur al-shāmiyya--the border with Byzantium--in northern Syria and southeast Anatolia.

Are these islands stepping stones which connect the southern Muslim and northern Christian halves of the sea? Or should we read them as a line of division, splitting the Mediterranean into Muslim and Christian worlds?

South-North Axis: Nile Delta to Bosphorus

Reinforcing the West-East island axis is another South-North line from the Nile Delta to the Bosphorus. Placed together, they reveal an underlying source of Muslim anxiety with this foreign, Roman sea: a Christian cross. 

Amid three rivers, the Jayḥān, Sayḥān, and Baradān, slashed into the eastern coast, we find the eye of the Muslim cartographer, looking out on the Mediterranean from the contested frontier between the Roman Byzantine and Muslim worlds: the thughūr al-shāmiyya. 

For no less than seven centuries, Muslims battled for control of this crucial entrance, marked by two of the rivers of Paradise, into Anatolia from northern Syria, first with Byzantine forces and then with Crusaders and Armenians. 

The Muslim cartographic vision of the Mediterranean stands atop a violent battleground.

Only 3 Christian Lands are Boxed In by Borders!!!

In the entire map only three places are depicted with borders. These borders are on the European landmass and indicate the territory of three Christian groups: the Franks (Ifranj) placed at the center of a pale dusty-rose colored circle; the Galicians (Galgaskas) placed in a rectangular box above the Franks; and the Basques (Baskunis) in a rectangular box below the Galicians. These three boxes are outlined with thick black lines. In containing only three Christian lands the Muslim cartographer is sending a strong message about the need to constrain the Christian kingdoms on the European flank visually to as small a circumscribed space of territory as possible. Furthermore, the illuminator appears to be indicating that outside of these three boxed-in Christian lands the remaining landmasses surrounding the Mediterranean are free and available for Muslim colonization! In doing so, the illuminator indicates that frontiers on this contested space of the Mediterranean are only used to box in Christian groups not Muslim ones. These maps do not indicate any frontiers for Muslim kingdoms even though we know from the chronicles that Islamic al-Andalus of Spain was divided into a multitude of Muslim principalities. 

This approach to frontiers as demarcating only non-Muslim lands as part of the dreaded “thughur” (literally “fangs of the dog”) is verified in geographical and historical writing from the Muslim world as pertaining primarily to the frontiers with the Christian world. 

Ralph Brauer, the foremost scholar of the construction of borders and frontiers in the Islamic context put it, “External frontiers occurred at the periphery of the empire wherever a
Muslim polity adjoined an 'Unbeliever' one. They were recognized from early on as frontiers facing dar al-harb, the land of war of the Quranically mandated permanent state of Holy War. In the period here under consideration this had come to be interpreted as implying that they were inevitably and permanently frontiers of war even when at a given moment armies were not marching upon one another.”

Ever since the success of my MA essay at Columbia University on the Mediterranean in the Islamic cartographic imagination, I have been chasing Islamic maps in manuscript libraries around the world, and I have assembled a massive archive of images (about 3,000 strong), many of which have not been published before. I simply love working on them and have devoted my life to understanding them and explaining them to the world.

If you'd like to explore more about medieval Islamic understandings of the Mediterranean, see my articles below in the DOT text:

• "Surat Bahr al-Rum [Picture of the Sea of Byzantium]: Possible Meanings Underlying the Forms." In Eastern
  Mediterranean Cartographies: The Cartography of the Mediterranean World, edited by George Tolias & Dimitris Loupis. Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research, 2004, pp. 234-241. https://www.academia.edu/1153023/Surat_Bahr_al_Rum_Picture_of_the_Sea_of_Byzantium_Possible_Meanings_Underlying_the_Forms.
• “In God’s Eyes: The Sacrality of the Seas in the Islamic Cartographic Vision.” Espacio, Tiempo, y Forma, Serie VII, Historia del Arte, vol. 5, no. 1, 2017, pp. 55-79.  http://
  revistas.uned.es/index.php/ETFVII/issue/view/961.
• “Interpretation, Intention, & Impact: Andalusi Arab and Norman Sicilian Examples of Islamo-Christian
  Cartographic Translation." In Knowledge in Translation: Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000–1800 CE,
  edited by Patrick Manning and Abigail E. Owen. The University of Pittsburgh Press, September 2018,
  41-57. https://www.academia.edu/37439184/
  Interpretation_Intention_and_Impact_Andalusi_Arab_and_Norman_Sicilian_Examples_of_Islamo-
  Christian_Cartographic_Translation.
• "Güneydoğu Anadolu'nun en Tartişmali Ortaçağ siniri: sugûru’l şâmiyye’nin islami kartografik
  vizyonunun incelenmesi,” (“Southeastern Anatolia‘s Most Contested Medieval Border: Examining the
  Islamic Cartographic Vision of the Thughûr al-Shâmiyya”), in Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda Coğrafya ve
  Kartografya/Geography and Cartography in the Ottoman Empire, eds. Mahmut Ak and Ahmet Üstüner,
  (forthcoming İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2024).

Created by Karen Pinto in close collaboration with Andrew Gu, Summer 2024 intern for Pixeum. 

Scripted and presented by Karen Pinto.

Edited by the brilliant Andrew Gu.

Thanks to Samer Issa for suggestions and to Leiden University Library for generously making high-res images of Or. 3101 available for research use. 

Line-drawing translation of KMMS Mediterranean map prepared by Karen Pinto to make it easier to understand the layout of places around the classical Medieval Islamic Map of the Mediterranean. It has taken a number of years but I managed to identify most of the places on the KMMS Mediterranean map. In some particularly puzzling cases, I found going to ground made all the difference in the identification process of historical sites that were not possible to identify by aerial maps and scholarly texts alone.

 

Much of this identification process was facilitated by a 5 year teaching stint at the American University of Beirut that made it possible for me to make field trips to previously unidentified sites in the area of the Levant. 

One of the previously unidentifiable places that I was able able to find with the help of insightful Lebanese students was the formidable fortress of Akkar located in the mountains behind Beirut close to Syria. It served the area called the Awasim that lay behind the main frontier between Byzantium and Syria. It was known as the Thughur al-Shamiyya and was considered the Muslim world’s most formidable frontier. It was intensely fought over between Muslims and Christians for the better part of six centuries. It is in this area from the seventh century onwards that the original writing and rhetoric of Jihad developed. 

Accidental evacuation during the 2006 war to southeastern Turkey facilitated further identification and understanding of key sites in the Cilician plains of Anatolia. During this unusual hiatus, I was able to identify a pesky marker that had been misidentified for the better part of a couple of centuries, perhaps because no scholar before me went to ground to identify the site. Turns out the mysterious marker of Hajar Musa is for one of the engineering wonders of the ancient world, namely the site of Titus’ Tunnel that is located close to present day Turkish Çevlik and cuts through the mountains known as Jabal Musa.

Following the massive earthquake of February 2023 that wreaked much havoc on this area of Hatay it is reported that no stone moved in this 2000 year old 870 meter long engineering marvel!

All in keeping with the greater wonder of discovery even during times of war that holds so many of us map aficionados in its grasp :)

One of the few places that remains unidentified is a place marked on the KMMS Mediterranean map written as Ulas in Arabic. It could be a reference to present day Ayas in southeastern Anatolia but is more likely to be an abbreviation of the famed Metropolis of Roman yore. This is likely to be a mystery that will never be fully resolved. It is, however, fascinating to see what an interest the mapmakers took in South-eastern Anatolia—especially in one of the most famous battle fields of ancient and medieval history. Namely, the Cilician plains, which was the most actively contested frontier between Muslims and Christian for no less than 6 centuries!

Laying out the places on a modern map reveals the surprising result that the distribution of the places around the Mediterranean are not evenly spaced as we might have expected. Quite the contrary! The places are clustered instead around the two major frontiers that dominated this sea in the Islamic imagination which the Muslims attributed in their anxiety as “The Sea of the Romans”—“Bahr al-Rum”. 

 The 10th century Muslim geographer, al-Muqadasi expressed the anxiety of the situation as perceived from the Muslim side of the sea. 

“"In our times the Rums get to attack the coast lines of Syria and Egypt, they get around everywhere having a free hand hand on the ships with no one to give the Muslims a helping hand!”

The layout of the KMMS maps of the Mediterranean, being “Images/Surat” as the title naturally reflects, play out this deep-seated anxiety felt by the Muslims over the mega frontier zone of the Mediterranean as they looked out west over the sea from their stronghold in the east.  

The major frontiers between the Muslim and Christian worlds lay along the extremities of east and west across the face of the sea. It is for this reason that the islands of Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily receive so much emphasis in the Islamic vision of this sea the central dividing backbone of this sea. They represented the crucial dividing line that lay at the heart of this sea. 

Called thughur—a word in Arabic that derives from the bared teeth of dogs—the thughur al-Shamiyya (the frontier of Syria and Byzantium) …

 

and the thughur of al-Andalus (the frontier of Muslim Spain) define the Muslim depiction of the Mediterranean and, nothing makes this clearer, than laying the places from the medieval map onto a modern one. For this terrific work of depiction I am grateful to Pixeum’s amazing intern from this past summer, Andrew Gu.

From a manuscript at Topkapı Saray Museum in Istanbul that is definitively dated via it’s colophon to 684 AH /1285 CE is a rendition of the Mediterranean map made in Mamluk Egypt. We know this because of the signature of its copyist with the last name (nisba) of al-Miṣrī (the Egyptian) which tells ‘us that TKS A3348 was copied in Egypt during the rule of the Baḥrī Mamluks, specifically the Mamluk Sultan known as Sayf al-Dīn (r. 1270-1290).

The classical bulbous iconographic form discussed in detail in the dot story on the twelfth century Siculo-Norman map at the outset of this presentation is maintained along with the role that the three islands of Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus play in dividing up the Mediterranean. 

This time around the sea appears to be a plumper and rounder in the middle and much shorter at the neck between North Africa and Spain.

The mythical island of Jabal al-Qilal veers away from it’s earlier central location at the mouth of Mediterranean. Now it’s closer to and pointing towards the North African flank, instead. 

The rule bounded space allocated to the three Christian groups of the Franks, Galicians, and the Basques/Saxons has been significantly reduced in this map broadcasting greater Muslim control of the Iberian peninsula which is in point of fact not true given the active and successful Christian Reconquista that was on-going in the 13th century when this map was made.

What this tells us is that the spreading of false info through popular media is not a recent phenomenon!

The illumination of this Mamluk version is noticeably different and visually much more dramatic than the Siculo-Norman rendition. In particular, the sea is decorated with a detailed dramatic design of scalloped waves … 

In addition, the site markers have morphed from docile dots into the turrets of citadels dotting the perimeter of the sea. In this way, the Mamluks, known in particular, for their military prowess and success in battle even against the indomitable Mongols, have turned their rendition of the KMMS map of the Mediterranean into a map of fortifications along the Islamo-Christian frontline that the sea of the Mediterranean is shown to represent. 

 

To our great serendipitous surprise and historical delight, the illuminator of this map even decided to include on their version of the Mediterranean the famous chain that the Byzantines used to guard the mouth of the Mediterranean. Today this chain is a historical relic proudly displayed at the naval musuem in Istanbul! 

To the best of our knowledge, this is the only extant visual depiction of the chain guarding the mouth of the Mediterranean in Islamic illumination records that caused many an Islamic conqueror to fall back until the brilliant Ottoman emperor and famed conqueror Mehmet II came up with a solution to slide the boats he used to attack the city across that Asian side (known as Galata) of the Bosphorus on a series of greased logs! Thus, in 1453, barely 21-year old Mehmet II was able to complete the 800 year long Muslim desideratum to conquer Constantinople and take what had been dubbed colloquially by the Turks as the Kızıl Elma—i.e. Red Apple.

This late 14th/ early 15th Century Timurid Mediterranean Map labeled in Persian presents a refreshing take on the classical KMMS depiction of the Mediterranean. 

The sea is still iconographically bulbous round and easily recognizable as the classical KMMS form attributed to the Mediterranean but the rivers separating the Islamic and Byzantine lands are significantly elongated and command the attention of the viewer at the expense of the sea. 

In a nod to the time period when this copy was made in the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century, deer with roses in their mouths frolic in Anatolia indicating that the great thughur frontier of Byzantine-Islamic yore is no longer depicted as one of anxiety. This is in keeping with the historical period when this version was made. From the 13th century onwards nomad Turkic groups from Central Asia had penetrated into Anatolia and were slowly taking control of the hinterland away from the Byzantines as their final defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453 drew close. 

On the European front, the boxes representing the cordoned off Christian territories have grown in size as the Iberian peninsula has shrunk indicative of the successful Christian Reconquista of Andalus from Muslim rulers. 

The mythical Jabal al-Qilal mountain that traditionally guards the mouth of the Mediterranean is now adorned with a peacock instead of scary symbols. This suggests a peaceful rapprochment of sorts across the Greater Mediterranean, especially at the entrance to it.

In this 1470 Ottoman KMMS rendition produced as part of a push to build and fill newly constructed post-conquest Constantinople’s mosque libraries, the Mediterranean has a unusual elongated shape that is distinctive of the Ottoman cluster. The island markers of Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus, that in the earlier KMMS examples were huge and dominated the sea. Now they are shrunken, small and almost insignificant. No longer do they create a wall dividing the sea.  
Even the triangular mountain of Jabal al-Qilāl that used dominate the landscape of the Mediterranean and blocked the entrance into and out of the Atlantic is in this late 15th century Ottoman version is nothing but a small brown triangular blob. It signals the end of the relevance of this particular Islamic vision of the Mediterranean that will from hereon be relegated to a relic of a classical Islamic cartographic tradition from the past.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak remotely using a funky new platform called Pixeum to display and discuss maps. I hope you will try Pixeum too. Check it out at Pixeum.org