al-Idrīsī

Arab geographer and cartographer

• Born: 1100
• Birthplace: Sebta, Morocco (now Ceuta, Spain)
• Died: Between 1164 and 1166
• Place of death: Near Sebta, Morocco (now Ceuta, Spain)

A world traveler, al-Idrīsī eventually collaborated with the Norman king of Sicily, Roger II, to produce a major geography and several significant maps of the medieval world. For more than five hundred years, these works served as models for productions in the field.

Early Life

Al-Idrīsī (al ih-DREE-sih) was born in 1100 in Sebta, now the Spanish enclave Ceuta, in Morocco. He was a Shīՙite Muslim, descended from the Prophet Muḥammad, of the noble house of Alavi Idrīsīs, claimants to the caliphate. His family had migrated from Málaga and Algeciras in Spain to Sabtah and Tangier in the eleventh century, and al-Idrīsī studied in Córdoba, the capital of Islamic Spain.

Al-Idrīsī was a student of medicine, a poet, a world traveler, and a merchant-adventurer. His wanderings, which began at age sixteen, eventually took him on the routes of many of the historic Muslim conquests. He traveled far and wide across much of the known world west to Madeira and the Canary Islands, north to France and England, and east to Asia Minor and Central Asia and meticulously gathered information along the way about what he saw and what lay beyond.

A natural curiosity about the world, along with the wealth and freedom to satisfy it, was probably the principal motivation behind these journeys. Al-Idrīsī's identity as a great noble and a descendant of Muḥammad periodically put his life in danger from assassins hired by rival Islamic noble houses or religious factions. This ever-present danger probably kept him on the move. Whatever the cause of his wanderings, they gradually gained for him the reputation of a worldly wise and learned man. Under the pretext of offering him protection from his enemies, but probably because of his growing fame as a scholar and traveler, in 1140 the Norman Christian king of Sicily, Roger II , invited al-Idrīsī to join his court. Al-Idrīsī's acceptance of the offer led to a twenty-year stay at the Sicilian court and initiated a fifteen-year geographic and cartographic collaboration with Roger.

Life's Work

Sicily had been granted to Roger II and the Normans under the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1139, and he promptly made Palermo his capital. Before the coming of the Normans, Palermo also had been the capital of Islamic Sicily. During the Middle Ages, under both the Muslims and the Normans, Palermo was a major crossroads of the Mediterranean world. It was a traditional meeting place for sailors, merchants, pilgrims, Crusaders, scholars, adventurers, and other travelers.

During Roger's reign, Palermo also became an intellectual center of medieval Europe. He was interested in fostering learning of any kind, and he was generous with his patronage. Perhaps for pragmatic reasons of expansionism and trade, Roger was devoted to geography. Undoubtedly, he believed that al-Idrīsī's princely status might help him further his own political aims. In any case, he seems to have been dissatisfied with the existing Arabic and Greek works on geography and cartography one of the major reasons for the summons to al-Idrīsī.

At Roger's court, al-Idrīsī was honored as a noble, scholar, and traveler, and it was there that his real fame as a geographer and cartographer came. During the fifteen years of their collaboration, al-Idrīsī produced a celestial globe, a disk-shaped 1.5-by-3.5-meter (5-by-11.5-foot) tablet map of the known world, and many other maps. The globe and the world map were made of solid silver, weighing 450 Roman pounds. The globe and map in turn were based on al-Idrīsī's encyclopedic geography, Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (1154; the pleasure excursion of one who is eager to traverse the regions of the world; also known as Kitāb ar-Rujārī, literally “book of Roger”), which was completed under Roger's patronage. The world map and presumably also the globe fell into the hands of a mob in 1160 and were smashed, but many of the seventy manuscript maps made by al-Idrīsī from the world map shortly before Roger's death in 1154 luckily survived. Sadly, no complete version of Kitāb ar-Rujārī survives in any language. It first appeared in the West in Rome in an abridged version in 1592 and was translated into Latin in Paris in 1619, but no full translation into English ever has been made.

After the death of Roger, al-Idrīsī continued to work for his son and successor, King William I (William the Bad), and wrote another geographic treatise. No complete version of this second book survives either, but a shortened version, a seventy-three-map atlas, remains. In about 1160, al-Idrīsī left Sicily for his native Morocco to live out his life, where sometime between 1164 and 1166 he died, probably near Sabtah.

Al-Idrīsī's great world map was a monument to medieval Islamic geography and cartography, but today it exists only in several reconstructions created by scholars from the surviving fragments of his works. It was divided into seven horizontal climatic zones (probably derived from the classical Greco-Roman worldview and the works of Ptolemy), each divided vertically into eleven sections to create a primitive grid, a system of longitude and latitude for more accurate place location. The map also contained a wealth of information, an abundance of detail, and a degree of clarity rarely achieved previously. It was most accurate for the Mediterranean region; perhaps understandably, Sicily is shown as an exceptionally large island. Its accuracy and detail also extended elsewhere. For example, al-Idrīsī showed the source of the Nile River as an unnamed lake in Central Africa. Yet, while his maps were drawn very correctly for the time, they were not drawn mathematically.

On al-Idrīsī's world map, the Islamic and Norman worlds were joined. In preparation for the creation of al-Idrīsī's maps and geographies, Roger had sent out reliable agents and draftsmen to collect data from many lands. Al-Idrīsī relied heavily on classic Muslim sources, such as the works of al-Khwarizmi and al-Masՙūdī, and classic Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic sources, such as the works of Ptolemy, the father of modern geography and cartography. Al-Idrīsī's grid system (but not his projections) probably was based on those of Ptolemy and a copy of Ptolemy's altered version of the world map of Marinus of Tyre. As his great world map demonstrates, however, al-Idrīsī was often much more than a mere modifier of Ptolemy. Al-Idrīsī also utilized Indian astronomical studies. Yet, perhaps most important, he relied heavily on his recollections of his own journeys and those of other travelers for reliable information.

Significance

Al-Idrīsī's work was far more influential than Ptolemy's in the East, but less so in Europe. Still, his maps opened European eyes to some of what the Muslims knew about Africa and Asia in the Middle Ages. Perhaps because he spent much of his adult life in the service of the Christian kings of Sicily, for centuries even into the twentieth century al-Idrīsī and his achievements were ignored by Muslim scholars. In so doing, they deprived their Western counterparts of a fuller understanding of him as well. Only recently has al-Idrīsī's full impact begun to be realized, especially within the context of the study of the history of science and the history of cartography.

In short, al-Idrīsī represents by far the best example of Islamic-Christian scientific collaboration in the Middle Ages in geography. Kitāb ar-Rujārī was the most important geographic work of the period, and in its various forms it served as a major European and Muslim textbook for several centuries. Maps clearly based on those of al-Idrīsī were produced well into the seventeenth century. He applied scientific methodology and precision to the heretofore largely imaginative arts of geography and cartography. Al-Idrīsī truly deserved the epithet “Strabo of the Arabs,” which was applied to him in his own lifetime.

Bibliography

Badeau, John S., et al., eds. The Genius of Arab Civilization: Source of Renaissance. New York: New York University Press, 1975. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. Contains a relatively brief but significant factual account of al-Idrīsī and his work by Florence Amzallag Tatistcheff, putting them into perspective with the broader medieval Arab achievement. Plate of one map.

Bagrow, Leo, and R. A. Skelton. History of Cartography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. 2d ed. Chicago: Precedent, 1985. Contains a brief section on al-Idrīsī and his work which only begins to put him into perspective in the history of cartography. Plates of four maps.

Curtis, Edmund. Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy, 1016-1154. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912. A very good biography of the much-neglected King Roger II, containing a significant section on his collaboration with al-Idrīsī. Includes extensive excerpts from al-Idrīsī’s works.

Lock, C. B. Muriel. Geography and Cartography: A Reference Handbook. Hamden, Conn.: Linnet Books, 1976. Contains an entry on al-Idrīsī. Especially helpful with regard to some of the various abridgments and other editions of his now-classic works.