The Trefoil of the World

My next chapter, titled "The Trefoil of the World", elaborates on the conventional geographical construct of the three continents forming the habitable world. This image, linked to the scholastic ideas of ancient Greeks and to the Christian philosophy, had further developments throughout the Middle Ages, culminating in detailed "world maps".

Image: Noah’s sons observing their estates from Jean Mansel's illustration to "La Fleur des Histoires" https://www.pinterest.com/dekockmarijke/noah/?lp=true 

"Mappamundi, that is to say, image of the world and of the regions which are on the earth and of the various kinds of peoples which inhabit it."-The Catalan Atlas (2)

The cosmographers who contemplated the mysteries of the Earth would employ two distinct approaches. On the one hand, they mulled over dry land as an orphan island, whose patchy outlines almost merged with the turbulent waves of the boundless Ocean.  On the other hand, they zoomed in on the trefoil of continents divorced from each other by overwhelming water bodies.

These conventional diagrams,  dubbed T-O maps [Latin: orbis terrarium or “the circle of lands”], reflected the basic medieval outlook on the inhabited world. The phrase borrowed from Isaiah applies to the Lord King sitting “enthroned above the circle of the earth”. (3)

T-O graphs, featuring the “T” inscribed within the “O”, displayed the circle of lands girdled by a narrow ocean belt. The Mediterranean Sea served the upright pole of the capital “T”, while the Don River in Russia and the Nile shared the crossbar. The former “Roman Lake” separated Europe from Africa. The Don cut the former away from Asia, while the Nile disconnected it from the Dark Continent. The geographical imagination blew up those water passages to marine proportions.

          Not everybody shared this view. The “father of history” found the tripartite division artificial, ridiculing the superficial titles attached to the inhabited areas. He argued that the given names were designated to honor some down-to-earth women, hopefully of noble origin, rather than glorify heroic men. The Greek historian denounced the continental construct with its arbitrary boundaries: “I cannot conceive why three names, and women’s names especially, should ever have been given to a tract which is in reality one.” (4)

Nevertheless, the image of the three parts held currency among European scholars.  Already for Orosius, an outstanding Christian historian who lived at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, this outlook was time-honored and respectable: “Our ancestors fixed a threefold division of the whole world surrounded by a periphery of the Ocean”. (5) A devout author pays tribute to both classical authors and the fathers of the Church as his recognized elders.