stupendous task, that of systematically describing the habitable world, beginning with the first section of the first climate at Ptolemy's prime meridian, the Canary Islands. It proceeded from west to east and from south to north through each of the 10 sections of the seven climates. Each section opened with a general description of the region, then a list of the principal cities, then a detailed account of each city, with distances between cities: From Fez to Ceuta, on the Strait of Gibraltar, heading north, seven days. From Fez to Tlemcen, nine days, following this itinerary: from Fez turn toward the great river of Sebou . . .

A modern facsimile of al-Idrisi’s world
The resulting book and associated maps which took 15 years to amass are, for this and the above reasons, unquestionably among the most interesting monuments of Arabian geography. In addition, the book is the most voluminous and detailed geographical work written during the entire 12th century in Europe.
Modern geographers have attempted to reconstruct the features of the silver planisphere by using a combination of the maps of Roger's Book, which has survived in several texts, and its tables of longitudes and latitudes. From this reconstruction it is evident that, like Ptolemy, al-Idrisi pictured the habitable world as occupying 180 of the 360 degrees of the world's longitude, from the Atlantic in the West to China in the East, and 64 degrees of its latitude, from the Arctic Ocean to the Equator. The planisphere showed the sources of the Nile—not explored by Europeans until the 19th century, but evidently known to 12th-century Muslim travelers—and the cities of central Sudan. The Baltic area and Poland were represented much more precisely than on Ptolemy's maps, showing the fruit of the geographers’ investigations. The British Isles also were treated with a surprising insight, probably due to contacts between Norman England and Norman Sicily. An element of subjectivity entered into the fact that southern Italy was represented as larger than the north, and that Sicily occupied a substantial part of the Western Mediterranean, in contrast to Sardinia and Corsica, which shrank in scale. Not surprisingly, the best part of both map and text, accurate and detailed, dealt with Sicily itself.
Distortions, omissions, and misconceptions notwithstanding, the superiority of al-Idrisi’s map over the world maps of medieval Europe is striking. Contrasted with the quaint and picturesque, but almost totally uninformative maps of the Christian scholars, the features of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East are easily recognizable in al-Idrisi's representation—Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, the Red Sea and the Nile.
The first division of the first climate commences to the west of the Western Sea, which Idrisi called the Sea of Darkness. “In this sea are two islands named Al-Khalibat [Fortunate Isles] where Ptolemy began to count longitudes and latitudes (sic) .... nobody knows of habitable land beyond that. ” In this southern most section he places a number of important towns including the problematical Oulil [Cape Timiris?] which, he tells us, “ is situated in the sea not far from the shore and is renowned for salt”. Much of the trade in this commodity with the Sudan was done with the help of ships which carried it from the town of Oulil
. . . a days journey to the mouth of the Nile [i.e., Senegal River, or Nile of the Negroes] and mounted the river as far as Silla, Tacrour, Barisa, Ghana . . . [and] to all the Sudanese towns. The greater part of the country is only habitable on the borders of the Nile for the rest of the country . . . is desert and uninhabited. There are arid wastes where one must walk two, four, five, or twelve days before finding water . . . The people of Barisa, Silla, Tacrour and Ghana make excursions into Lamlam [probably identified with the hinterland of the Ivory/Liberian coasts] bringing natives into captivity, transporting them to their own country and selling them to merchants.
In the second section of this first climate, Idrisi describes, among others, the lost city of Ghana, farther to the east,
. . . the most considerable, the most densely peopled and the largest trading center of the Negro countries. . . From the town of Ghana, the borders of Wangara are eight day’s journey. This country is renowned for the quantity and the abundance of the gold it produces. It forms an island 300 miles long by 150 miles wide: this is surrounded by the Nile on all sides and at all seasons . . . The greater part [of the gold] is bought by the people of Wargalan [i.e., Wargla] and by those of Western Maghrib [i.e., Morocco].
Following the Nile, still eastward, we find the nomadic Berbers who pasture their flock on the borders of a river flowing from the east, debouching into the Nile stream. Beyond, in the fourth section of his first climate, we come to
. . . the place where the two Niles separate, that is to say, first, the Nile of Egypt which crosses the country from the north to south, and second, the branch which flows from the east towards the western extremity of the continent. It is on this branch of the Nile that most of the large towns of the Sudan are situated.
It is clear that the part of southern Africa which is extended far to the east is a legacy from Ptolemy, but Arabian seafarers had taught Idrisi that the sea was open in the east, and in his own commentaries he writes: “The Sea of Sin [China] is an arm of the ocean which is called the Dark Sea [the Atlantic]”.
These few extracts are characteristic of Idrisi’s method and his content. From them we see, for instance, that Ptolemy’s authority no longer commanded unreserved adherence; Ptolemy placed the Nile River’s source south of the Equator, in the Mountains of the Moon, and had no sympathy with the idea of a dual Nile. We see further that there was already, by the 12th century, a regular commercial exchange between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sudan, and that reliable information concerning these southern lands was beginning to filter through to the European centers of learning. When we recall that exact hydrography of the land of the Western Nile was not discovered until the 19th century, Idrisi’s narrative assumes a profound importance. The authenticity of many of the places that he mentions is indisputable. Thus Ghana (situated near Timbuktu), Silla [possibly Ysilgam of the Valseccha portolan chart of 1434] and Tacrour [Tekrour on the Senegal] were, for a time, flourishing centers of Muslim culture. The reference to Wangara implies a knowledge of the flood region of the Niger, above Timbuktu; and the mention of the salt trade of Oulil suggests that there were, in Europe, faint glimmerings of knowledge about the Senegalese coast, even as early as the mid-12th century.
To the south al-Idrisi pictured a great river, the Nile of the Negroes, a composite of the Senegal and the Niger, that flowed from Central Africa west to the Atlantic. Via this river the salt trade was carried on with the Sudan. Al-Idrisi described the lost city of Ghana (near Timbuktu, on the Niger) as the most considerable, the most densely peopled, and the largest trading center of the Negro countries. In the fourth section of the first climate, al-Idrisi located the sources of the Nile in their approximately correct position, though he pictured the Nile of the Negroes as joining the Egyptian Nile at that point.
Al-Idrisi gave a detailed description of Spain, where he had spent his student days. He praised Toledo, with its defensible site, fine walls and well-fortified citadel. Few cities are comparable in the solidity and height of buildings, the beauty of the surrounding country, and the fertility of the lands watered by the Tagus. The gardens of Toledo are laced with canals on which are erected water wheels used in irrigating the orchards, which produce in prodigious quantity fruits of inexpressible beauty and quality. On every side are fine estates and well fortified castles.
Sicily, naturally, came in for special praise; it was a pearl of the age, and al-Idrisi told the story of the Norman conquest of the island by Roger d’Hauteville, the greatest of Frankish princes," followed by the succession of "the great king who bears the same name and who follows in his footsteps.
Idrisi was not, however, able to put the countries around the Baltic into proper shape, even though his notes show him to have been familiar with a great many places there, as in the rest of Europe. He had no doubt met travelers and merchants from Scandinavia at the court of King Roger and received important information from them, but we know that the Arabs too had connections with the Baltic peoples and also those in Russia at that time. Idrisi knows of Danu [the Danube], Arin [the Rhine] and Albe [the Elbe]. He mentions Denmark and Snislua [Schleswig], and describes Norway as if it were an island. Curiously, Idrisi notes that in the Baltic there is an Isle of Amazons.
Every area had its fascinations. In Russia, winter daylight periods were so short that there was hardly time for Muslim travelers to perform all five obligatory daily prayers. The Norwegians had to harvest their grain when it was still green and dry it at their hearths since the sun shines very rarely upon them. As for Britain, it is set in the Sea of Darkness. It is a considerable island, whose shape is that of the head of an ostrich, and where there are flourishing towns, high mountains, great rivers and plains. This country is most fertile; its inhabitants are brave, active and enterprising, but all is in the grip of perpetual winter. Al-Idrisi gave the names of many English towns, principally ports, with the distances between them. Hastings was a "considerable town, densely populated, with many buildings, markets, much industry and commerce;" Dover, to the east, was "an equally important town'' not far from the mouth of the "river of London, the broad and swiftly flowing Thames." London, however, was mentioned only as "a city of the interior."
Towns of France were also described, again with emphasis on the ports, particularly those of Britanny and Normandy; but cities of the interior were also listed: Tours, then, as now, a wine center surrounded by numerous vineyards; Chartres, an agricultural market (its famous cathedral had not yet been built); Meaux, the center of the land of France; Bayeux, Dijon, Troyes, Orleans, Le Mans and many others. Paris (Abariz) earned a condescending reference as a town of mediocre size, surrounded by vineyards and forests, situated on an island in the Seine, which surrounds it on all sides; however, it is extremely agreeable, strong, and susceptible of defense.
The impressive assemblage of facts from travelers' accounts and geographical writings was interrupted now and then by fables, some taken directly from Ptolemy, some from popular folklore. The Strait of Gibraltar, according to Roger's Book, did not exist when Alexander the Great—as medieval legend had it—invaded Spain. Because the inhabitants of Africa and Europe waged continual warfare, Alexander decided to separate them by a canal, which he cut between Tangier and al-Andalus (southern Spain). The Atlantic rushed in, inundating the land and raising the level of the Mediterranean.
Al-Idrisi's Rome had an oriental magnificence; ships with their freight sailed up the Tiber to be drawn thus loaded right up to the very shops of the merchants. There were 1,200 churches; the streets were paved with blue and white marble; in a magnificent church encrusted with emeralds stood an altar supported by 12 statues of pure gold, with ruby eyes. And the city's "prince," he wrote, is called the Pope.
After telling us that the Canaries had been visited by Alexander the Great and that the tomb of a pre-Islamic South Arabian king, made of marble and colored glass, can be seen on one of them, al-Idrisi gives the names of two of the islands. The island with a “circular mountain” in the center is called Masfahan. This is probably Tenerife, and the round mountain would be the 3,600-meter-high (12,000-foot) volcano called Pico de Teide. The other island is called Laghus and is probably Gran Canaria. Neither name is Arabic, nor do they appear to be transcriptions of Greek, Latin or Romance - but the fact that these two islands had names at all means mariners must have visited them, and the names are either native designations or hark back to some lost, perhaps oral, source.
Even more interesting is al-Idrisi’s account of an actual voyage of exploration into the western Atlantic, undertaken by 80 brave men from Lisbon whom he calls the mugharrirun, best rendered as “intrepid explorers.” The expedition must have taken place before 1147 - the date Lisbon fell to the Christians - but it is impossible to be more precise. The mugharrirun were so famous for their exploit that a street in Lisbon was named after them. The story is worth giving in full, for its mixture of fact and legend is characteristic of early accounts of Atlantic voyaging:
It was from the city of Lisbon that the mugharrirun set out to sail the Sea of Darkness in order to discover what was in it and where it ended, as we have mentioned before. A street in Lisbon, near the hot springs, is still known as "The Street of the Intrepid Explorers"; it is named after them. Eighty men, all ordinary people, got together and built a large ship and stocked it with enough food and water for several months. Then they set sail with the first gentle easterly and sailed for about eleven day's, until they came to a sea with heavy waves, evil-smelling, ridden with reefs and with very little light. They were sure they were about to perish, so they changed course. There were 1,200 churches; the streets were paved with blue and white marble; in a magnificent church encrusted with emeralds stood an altar supported by 12 statues of pure gold, with ruby eyes. And the city's "prince," he wrote, Handlingsuperheroine s Cams c Movie l
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After telling us that the Canaries had been visited by Alexander the Great and that the tomb of a pre-Islamic South Arabian king, made of marble and colored glass, can be seen on one of them, al-Idrisi gives the names of two of the islands. The island with a “circular mountain” in the center is called Masfahan. This is probably Tenerife, and the round mountain would be the 3,600-meter-high (12,000-foot) volcano called Pico de Teide. The other island is called Laghus and is probably Gran Canaria. Neither name is Arabic, nor do they appear to be transcriptions of Greek, Latin or Romance - but the fact that these two islands had names at all means mariners must have visited them, and the names are either native designations or hark back to some lost, perhaps oral, source.
Even more interesting is al-Idrisi’s account of an actual voyage of exploration into the western Atlantic, undertaken by 80 brave men from Lisbon whom he calls the mugharrirun, best rendered as “intrepid explorers.” The expedition must have taken place before 1147 - the date Lisbon fell to the Christians - but it is impossible to be more precise. The mugharrirun were so famous for their exploit that a street in Lisbon was named after them. The story is worth giving in full, for its mixture of fact and legend is characteristic of early accounts of Atlantic voyaging:
It was from the city of Lisbon that the mugharrirun set out to sail the Sea of Darkness in order to discover what was in it and where it ended, as we have mentioned before. A street in Lisbon, near the hot springs, is still known as "The Street of the Intrepid Explorers"; it is named after them. Eighty men, all ordinary people, got together and built a large ship and stocked it with enough food and water for several months. Then they set sail with the first gentle easterly and sailed for about eleven day's, until they came to a sea with heavy waves, evil-smelling, ridden with reefs and with very little light. They were sure they were about to perish, so they changed course to the south and sailed for twelve days, until they came to Sheep Island, There were so many sheep it was impossible to count them, and they ranged freely, with no one to watch them. They landed and found a spring of flowing water and a wild fig tree beside it. They caught some of the sheep and slaughtered them, but the flesh was so bitter they could not eat it. They took some sheepskins and sailed on to the south for another twelve days until they sighted an island. They could see it was inhabited and under cultivation. They headed toward it in order to explore and when they were not far offshore, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by boats, which forced their ship to land beside a city on the shore. They saw the men who lived there; they were light-complexioned, with very little facial hair. The hair on their heads was lank. They were tall, and their womenfolk were very beautiful. They were confined to a house for three days. On the fourth day a man who spoke Arabic entered and asked them who they were and where they were going and what was the name of their country. They told him everything and he said not to worry, and that he was the king's interpreter. The next day they were taken into the king's presence and he asked the same questions they had been asked by the interpreter. They told him what they had told the interpreter the day before, of how they had embarked upon the ocean in order to find out about it and see the wonders it contained, and how they had come to this place. When the king heard this, he laughed and told the interpreter to tell them the following: "My father ordered some of his slaves to sail this sea and they sailed across it for a month until there was no more light; they came back having found nothing of any use at all." Then the king ordered the interpreter to treat them well so they would have a good impression of the kingdom, and he did so. They were then taken back to their place of confinement until the west wind began to blow. A boat was prepared for them, their eyes were bound, and they were at sea for some time. They said: "We were at sea about three days and nights. Then we came to the mainland and they put us ashore. They tied us up and left us there. When dawn broke and the sun rose, we found we were in great pain because we had been so tightly bound. Then we heard noises and the sound of people and we all cried out. Some people approached and, seeing our difficulty, released us. They asked us what had happened and we told them the whole story. They were Berbers. One of them asked us: ‘Do you know how far you are from your country?’ ‘No,’ we answered. 'Two months journey!' he replied. Our leader said, ‘Wa asafi!’ (Woe is me!) and to this day the place is known as Asfi."
Asfi, a port on the southern coast of Morocco, is now called Safi. It is hard to escape the impression that we owe the preservation of this account largely to the folk etymology in the last line. But it is also obvious that this is a report of an actual Atlantic voyage. The “sea with heavy waves, evil-smelling, ridden with reefs and with very little light” can probably be ignored, for the passage is influenced by the "land of darkness" thought to exist in the farthest West, and the reefs may echo a passage in Plato's Timeus which speaks of the shallows in the Atlantic marking the site where Atlantis sank. But Sheep Island [Jazirat al-Ghanam] has the ring of truth. In another passage al-Idrisi gives more details of this island - incidentally showing that a longer account of the voyage of the mugharrirun must have existed. He says Sheep Island is large, shrouded in shadows, and filled with small sheep whose flesh is bitter and inedible. Nearby is another island, called Raqa, which is the home of a red bird the size of an eagle, which catches fish in its claws and never flies far from the island. A fruit like a large fig grows there; if eaten, it is the antidote to any known poison. A king of the Franks heard of this, al-Idrisi adds, and sent a ship to the island to bring him that fruit and some of the birds, but the ship was lost and never returned.
Sheep Island and Raqa are most probably two of the islands in the Azores. The Azores are named after a kind of goshawk - in Portuguese, açor - prevalent there at the time of discovery. The sheep are a problem, for the Azores were uninhabited when settled in the 15th century, and even if we slightly stretch the meaning of the word ghanam, which can also mean “goats,” we are still left with the problem of the origin of the creatures. No large mammals are indigenous to the Azores, and sheep or goats could only have been brought to the island by previous mariners. The Azores lie almost 1,300 kilometers (about 800 miles) west of the coast of Portugal - one-third of the way to America. In the 19th century, Carthaginian coins were found on the most westerly of the islands, Corvo - 31° west longitude - and although the find has been questioned, the origin of the coins has never been satisfactorily explained. Corvo is marked on the Canterino map of 1351, where the name occurs as Corvini - considerably before its official discovery.
Al-Idrisi mentions a number of other islands in the west Atlantic:
Sawa is “near the Sea of Darkness.” Alexander the Great spent the night there just before entering the western darkness. The inhabitants threw stones at the travelers and hurt several of Alexander's companions.
The inhabitants of the island of al-Su’ali are shaped like women and their canine teeth protrude. Their eyes flash like lightning and their thighs are like logs. They fight against the monsters of the sea. Men and women are not sexually differentiated, and the men have no beards. They dress in the leaves of trees.
The island of Hasran is crowned by a large, high mountain. A small fresh-water river runs down from the foot of the mountain, where the inhabitants live. They are short, brown people with broad faces and big ears. The men's beards reach their ankles. They eat grass and other plants.
Al-Ghawr is long and broad. Many herbs and plants grow on the island. There are many rivers and pools, and thickets where donkeys and long-horned cattle take refuge.
Al-Mustashkin is said to be inhabited. It has mountains, rivers, fruit trees, cultivated fields and a town, with high walls. There used to be a dragon in the area, and the people were forced to feed it with bulls, donkeys or even humans, according to the legend; when Alexander arrived, the people complained to him of the dragon's depredations. Alexander fed the creature a volatile mixture and blew it to pieces.
The island of Qalhan is inhabited by animal-headed people who swim in the sea to catch their food.
Then there is the Island of the Two Brothers, Shirham and Shiram. God changed them to stone for practicing piracy, the legend has it. This island is near Asfi [Safi], and on a clear day smoke can be seen rising from it. It was this smoke that led to the abortive expedition by Yusuf ibn Tashafin’s admiral.
Some of the names of these islands make sense in Arabic, others do not. Sawa has no meaning. Al-S’ali is a word that refers to a kind of female demon or vampire; judging by al-Idrisi's description of the female inhabitants of the island, it is apt. Hasran means "regretful" - Island of Regret? - but if the variant Khusran is chosen, it means "loss" - perhaps Island of Loss, or Lost Island. But if the word is Arabic, one would expect it to be preceded by the definite article al.
Al-Ghawr makes sense; it means a depression surrounded by higher land, and occurs elsewhere in the Arab world as a place name. Al-Mustashkin is probably a corruption of al-mushtakin, meaning “the complainers” - appropriate enough for a population in thrall to a dragon. This story of Alexander and the dragon echoes the Eleventh Labor of Hercules, the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, guarded by the dragon Ladon. In the Arabic - speaking world, popular legend transfer red a number of the heroic deeds of Hercules to Alexander - including the building of a land bridge across the Pillars of Hercules. Some Greek mythographers thought the Islands of the Hesperides lay off the coast of North Africa, and we have already seen how al-Idrisi associates Alexander with two of the Atlantic islands.
Qalhan's "animal-headed people" might well be seals. The Two Brothers could be the two small islands off Lanzarote in the Canaries, Alegranza and Graciosa, or indeed, any two prominent rocks off their coasts.
A last island in the western Atlantic is Laqa. Al-Idrisi says aloe trees grow there, but their wood has no scent. As soon as they are taken away, however, the scent becomes perceptible. The wood is deep black, and merchants come to the island to harvest it and then sell it to the kings of the farthest West. The island is said to have been inhabited in the past, but it fell to ruin and serpents infested the land. For this reason, no one can land there. Could Laqa be Madeira? Madeira was heavily wooded when first settled in the 15th century - hence its name. The settlers quickly burned down all the forests, so it is now hard to know for certain, but some sort of scented wood may have once grown there.
Al-Idrisi gives the names of 13 islands in the western Atlantic; a 14th, visited by the mugharrirun, is nameless. This unnamed island, together with Masfahan, Laghus, The Two Brothers and possibly Sawa, are almost certainly islands in the Canary group. Laqa might be Madeira, and Sheep Island and Raqa part of the Azores group. Where al-Su'ali, Hasran, al-Ghawr, Qalhan and al-Mustashkin lay is anybody's guess. Al-Su’ali and al-Mustashkin both sound completely legendary, but there is nothing legendary about Hasran and Qalhan, which sound as if they might belong together. Since the only inhabited islands in the western Atlantic just before the coming of the Europeans were the Canaries, Hasran
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