Al-Idrisi's Map of the World

Muhammad al-Idrisi (c. 1100-1165), a geographer of noble Andalusi and Moroccan descent who had studied at Cordoba and travelled widely, spent years at the court of Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily at Palermo, where for fifteen years he gathered the reports of travellers and merchants and the works of the earlier Muslim and Greek geographers and welded them into the most accurate description of the world that had yet been made. The result, completed in 1154, was a book usually called the Book of Roger (Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq, the Recreation for one who longs to traverse the horizons), a systematic geography of the inhabited earth divided into climes and sections, with the lands and seas, the cities and rivers and mountains, and the routes and distances between places set down in detail; and with it a series of sectional maps and a great circular world map, drawn in the manner of the Muslim geographers with the south at the top, which was also engraved upon a massive disc of silver. The work drew on the long tradition of Islamic geography and remained one of the foremost geographies of the world for centuries. Its making at Palermo is itself a witness to the meeting of civilisations in twelfth-century Sicily, an island lately Muslim and now ruled by Norman kings who retained much of its Arabic culture, where Arab, Greek and Latin learning and craftsmanship mingled at a brilliant court. This scene depicts al-Idrisi's world map and the work of its compilation at Palermo, with the silver planisphere and the Book of Roger. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.