The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America - Softcover

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Toby Lester is the author of The Fourth Part of the World (2009) and a contributing editor to The Atlantic. A former Peace Corps volunteer and United Nations observer, he lives in the Boston area with his wife and three daughters. His work has also appeared on the radio program This American Life.

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The Fourth Part of the World


• British Isles and northern Europe •

CHAPTER ONE

MATTHEW’S MAPS

It is the vocation of a monk to seek not the earthly but the heavenly Jerusalem, and he will do this not by setting out on his feet but by progressing with his feelings.

—Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (circa 1150)

IN THE EARLY 1200s the Benedictine monastery of Saint Albans hummed with activity. Situated just a day’s ride north of London, the monastery was one of the largest and most important in England, home to as many as two hundred monks. In the parlance of the times they were Latins: members of the greater community of Roman Catholics in Europe who submitted to the authority of the pope. But Saint Albans wasn’t just a religious retreat. It was a busy center of economic, political, and intellectual life, and even had served as the site of an early drafting of the Magna Carta in 1213. It also ran a popular guesthouse—the first stopping point on the Roman-built Great North Road out of London—and operated stables that could accommodate some three hundred horses at a time. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Saint Albans was feeding and lodging a steady stream of visitors on their way to and from London: Oxford professors, royal councilors, powerful bishops, papal emissaries and monks from elsewhere in Europe, a traveling delegation of Armenians, and even the king of England himself. It was a worldly place.

After a day of traveling, guests would unwind in the monastery’s dormitories and refectory. Inevitably the talk would turn to where they had come from, and to what news and information they had picked up along the way. Again and again the same subjects came up: the weather, local crimes and misdemeanors, politics, the antics of the royals, the utterances of the pope, and the ill-conceived and apparently interminable series of wars being waged in the Middle East—the Crusades. One monk in particular had a special interest in stories from beyond the monastery’s walls. A down-to-earth, willfully opinionated, and generally likable crank, he was Brother Matthew Paris: the greatest and most colorful of all medieval church chroniclers.

Born in about 1200, Matthew joined the Benedictine order at Saint Albans in 1217, became its official chronicler in 1237, and died in 1259. The work for which Matthew is most famous is the Chronica majora, or Great Chronicle, a vast history of the world that, in typical medieval fashion, extends from the time of the creation right up to Matthew’s own time. The first half or so of the Chronicle amounts to little more than Matthew’s copying and fiddling with the chronicle of his predecessor, but from 1235 forward the entries are his own—and in one commonly consulted English translation they fill three five-hundred-page volumes. Yet despite its size the Chronicle is a wonderfully good read.

Matthew wrote and wrote and wrote. Keeping him properly supplied with writing materials alone was a tall order. In the thirteenth century the production of a book—that is, a manuscript scratched out with goose quill and ink, on page after page of parchment—amounted to a significant investment of a monastery’s capital. A single book might well consume the skins from a whole flock of sheep. But Matthew’s output justified this investment; it brought Saint Albans great renown, even during Matthew’s own lifetime.

Matthew was more than just a writer. He was also a gifted artist who illustrated his work with everything from tiny doodlings to lavishly executed portraits. Biblical figures, ancient emperors, popes, European kings, saints, monks, martyrs, battles, shipwrecks, eclipses, exotic animals—they all come to life on Matthew’s pages, and not just as frivolous additions to his text. They were an integral part of his chronicle. “I desire and wish,” he wrote, “that what the ear hears the eyes may see.”

That brief reference to hearing, rather than reading, serves as a useful reminder: in thirteenth-century England reading was primarily an oral act, not a silent one. Monks in monastery libraries read aloud to themselves, and the din they created would have exasperated modern library patrons. Matthew read to himself, to his fellow monks, and to special guests visiting the monastery, and what he offered his readers and listeners was a captivating mix of words and pictures. “Turning the pages of Matthew’s Chronica majora,” one modern historian has written, “is like opening the door of a great abbey cupboard, from which spills forth a rich succession of disparate images and objects, each conjuring up its own compelling story from the past, so that each event again becomes visually ‘present.’ ”

The great abbey cupboard. That’s a critical image to keep in mind when trying to make sense of the jumble of disparate ideas and images that one encounters in the works of Matthew and other medieval writers—especially in their maps.

* * *

MATTHEW HAD a passion for maps. He drew them throughout his adult life, following a number of traditional models, and those that survive provide a remarkably useful survey of the different ways in which educated medieval Europeans imagined and depicted the world.

One of the main sources from which Matthew received his geographical ideas was the hugely popular and influential Etymologies, by Saint Isidore of Seville: a vast compendium of ancient and medieval learning, written in the seventh century a.d. Throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance, Europeans considered Isidore one of their most trusted authorities. He began the geographical section of his Etymologies by situating his readers cosmically. “The earth,” he wrote, “is placed in the central region of the cosmos, standing fast in the center, equidistant from all other parts of the sky.” This age-old conception of the world—as a sphere that sat motionless at the center of the universe, with the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars all revolving around it—was one that medieval authors often diagrammed in their works, and Matthew was no exception (Figure 6).

Medieval Europeans, even the most learned of geographers among them, are to this day often described as having believed that the world was flat.



Figure 6. The medieval cosmos, by Matthew Paris (circa 1255). The earth (terra) is fixed at its center, surrounded by the spheres of water, air, fire, the moon, the sun, the planets, and the firmament.

But this simply isn’t true. Thanks in large part to the labors of Arab astronomers and mathematicians, ancient Greek proofs of the earth as spherical had survived into the Middle Ages and were circulating in Europe—and at some point early in the thirteenth century an English scholar known as John of Holywood, or Sacrobosco, laid them out in an astronomical treatise appropriately titled The Sphere. For centuries afterward the work would be taught and studied in schools and universities around Europe. “If the earth were flat from east to west,” Sacrobosco wrote, “the stars would rise as soon for Westerners as for Orientals, which is false. Also, if the earth were flat from north to south, and vice...