Mappa mundi

A mappa mundi (Latin [ˈmappa ˈmʊndiː]; plural = mappae mundi) is any medieval European map of the world. Such maps range in size and complexity from simple schematic maps 25 millimetres (1 inch) or less across to elaborate wall maps, the largest of which was 3.5 m (11 ft 6 in) in diameter. The term derives from the Medieval Latin words mappa (cloth or chart) and mundi (of the world).

Approximately 1,100 mappae mundi are known to have survived from the Middle Ages. Of these some 900 are found illustrating manuscripts and the remainder exist as stand-alone documents.

Extant mappae mundi come in several distinct varieties, including:

Medieval world maps which share some characteristics of traditional mappae mundi but contain elements from other sources, including Portolan charts and Ptolemy's Geography are sometimes considered a fifth type, called "transitional mappae mundi".

Zonal maps are pictures of the East Hemisphere. Their purpose was to illustrate the concept that the world is a sphere with 5 climate zones:

Of these, only the two temperate zones were believed to be inhabitable, and the known world was contained entirely within the northern temperate zone's Eastern Hemisphere. Because most surviving Zonal maps are found illustrating Macrobius' Commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio (an excerpt of Cicero's De Re Publica), this type of map is sometimes called "Macrobian". In their simplest and most common form, Zonal mappae mundi are merely circles divided into five parallel zones, but several larger Zonal maps with much more detail have survived.

T-O maps, unlike zonal maps, illustrate only the habitable portion of the world known in Roman and medieval times. The landmass was illustrated as a circle (an "O") divided into three portions by a "T". These three divisions were the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. The vast majority of T-O maps place east at the top, hence the term "orienting" a map from the Latin word oriens for "east". The assertion that T-O maps depict a "flat earth", while common, is unwarranted. The "circle of the lands" in a T-O can just as easily be fit onto the sphere of the Earth as onto a flat, disk-shaped Earth. The popularity of the Macrobian maps and the combination of T-O style continents on some of the larger Macrobian spheres illustrate that Earth's sphericity continued to be understood among scholars during the Middle Ages.

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