Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | The two main schools of the medieval Arab cartography - the mathematical geography and the Balkhîs school - pictured Europe, though based on different ideas. For the Muslim medieval observers, the European continent had no geographical unity. It was seen as a mosaic of peoples, and Spain was bound to the Maghreb. In the 9 th century, al-Khwârizmî, in his adaptation of Ptolemy, gave Europe nearly the same form as the one given by the Alexandrian geographer. In the 10 th century, Ibn Hawqal, who traveled in the Mediterranean area, pictured more or less the European coastline but he was unaware of the interior of the continent. He showed the Mediterranean Sea as a Muslim sea. In fact, his cartography was a political geography. In the 12 th century, Al-ldrîsî renewed the map of Europe according to the mathematical geography. The coastline was always more or less Ptolemaic but the vast amount of information at the disposal of al-ldrîsî permitted him to improve the picture of the Atlantic coast and the topograp hy. Unfortunately, his work was not taken up again after him and eventually it was a simplified form of Europe that has been shown by the world maps until the 15 th century. |
