little better than a panorama of legends and monsters.
Christ at the top; the dragons crushed beneath him at the
bottom; Jerusalem, the navel of the earth, in the middle
as a sort of bull's-eye to a target, all show a "religious"
geography. The line of queer figures, on the right side,
figuring the S. coast of Africa, suggests a parallel with the
still more fanciful Mappe-Monde of Hereford. (For copy
see Bevan and Phillott's edition of the Hereford map).


THE S.W., OR AFRICAN SECTION OF THE HEREFORD
MAP _c._ 1275-1300 106

(B. Mus., King's Lib., XXIII). The S. coast of Africa,
as in the Psalter map, is fringed with monstrous tribes;
monstrous animals fill up a good deal of the interior; half
of the wheel representing Jerusalem in the middle of the
world appears in the N.E. corner; and the designer's idea
of the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands is specially noteworthy.
The Hereford map is a specimen of the thoroughly
traditional and unpractical school of mediæval geographers
who based their work on books, or fashionable collections
of travellers' tales--such as Pliny, Solinus, or Martianus
Capella--and who are to be distinguished from the scientific
school of the same period, whose best works were the
Portolani, or coast-charts of the early 14th century.


THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MARINO SANUTO. _c._ A.D. 1306 114