TheChristian Topography (Ancient Greek:Χριστιανικὴ Τοπογραφία,Latin:Topographia Christiana) is a 6th-century work, one of the earliest essays in scientific geography written by a Christian author. It originally consisted of five books written byCosmas Indicopleustes and expanded to ten and eventually to twelve books at around 550 AD.[1]
TheChristian Topography spans twelve books. The entire work began as five books, but later, Cosmas added the sixth to tenth books in one stage, and then the eleventh and twelfth books in a second stage.[2] The titles of each of the books are:
Cosmas Indicopleustes, the author of theChristian Topography, put forward the idea that theworld is flat. Originally written in Greek with illustrations and maps, his view of the flatness of the world may have been influenced by some Jewish and Eastern contemporaries.[3] While most of the Christians of the same period maintained that the Earth was a sphere,[1] the work advances the idea that theworld is flat, and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid, and especially attacks the idea that the heavens were spherical and in motion, now known as thegeocentric model of the universe. The author cites passages from the Christians'scriptures which he interprets originally in order to support his thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of aspherical Earth by stigmatizing it as "pagan". An early surviving reference to the work is byPatriarch Photios I of Constantinople in the 9th century AD. Photius condemns the style and syntax of the text as well as the honesty of the author. More recent authors tend to agree with Photius on the stylistic points, but to find the work generally reliable for geographical and historical references.Edward Gibbon, for example, said "the nonsense of the Monk was, nevertheless, mingled with the practical knowledge of the traveller" and used it in writingThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.[4][5]
TheTopography is oftenerroneously cited as evidence thatChristianity introduced the idea of the flat-Earth into the world, and brought in theage of ignorance. The latter pages of his work are devoted to rebutting thecriticism of his fellow monks. He repeatedly denounces "those reprobate Christians who, ..., prefer, through their perverse folly or downright wickedness, to adopt the miserable Pagan belief that earth and heaven are spherical, and that there are Antipodes on whom the rain must fallup."Raymond Beazley, in the first volume ofThe Dawn of Modern Geography (1897), said[4][5]
The place of Cosmas in history has been sometimes misconceived. His work is not, as it has been called (in the earlier years of this century), the chief authority of the Middle Ages in geography. For, on the whole, its influence is only slightly, and occasionally, traceable. Its author stated his position as an article of Christian faith, but even in those times there was anything but a general agreement with his positive conclusions. . . The subtleties of Cosmas were left to the Greeks, for the most part; the western geographers who pursued his line of thought were usually content to stop short at the merely negative dogmas of the Latin Fathers; and no great support was given to the constructive tabernacle system of the Indian merchant. ... Yet, after all, the Christian Topography. must always be remarkable. It is one of the earliest important essays in scientific or strictly theoretic geography, within the Christian aera [sic], written by a Christian thinker.
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Besides the cosmological elements of the book,Christian Topography provides insight into the geographical knowledge of Byzantium, it is also the only Greek work with both text andillustrations surviving from the 6th century.[6] "Indicopleustes" means "The one who has sailed to India".[7] While it is known fromclassical literature that there had been trade between theRoman Empire andIndia, Cosmas was one of the individuals who had actually made the journey.[8] Indeed, we learn from his book that he had travelled over much of theRed Sea coast, and as far as modernSri Lanka. He described and sketched some of what he saw in hisTopography. Some of these have been copied into the existing manuscripts.
When not expounding hiscosmology, Cosmas proves to be an interesting and reliable guide, providing a window into a world that has since disappeared. He happened to be inEthiopia when the King ofAxum was preparing a 522 or 525 AD military expedition to attackJewish Arabs inYemen. He recorded now-vanished inscriptions such as theMonumentum Adulitanum (which he mistakenly attributed toPtolemy III Euergetes).
Three nearly complete manuscripts are known to exist. The earliest and best is from the 9th century, and is in theVatican Library. This text has only ten books. Two closely related manuscripts of the 11th century, one from theSaint Catherine's Monastery and the other probably originally from theIviron monastery ofMount Athos, contain twelve books and comment on the prophets in the same order thatTheodore of Mopsuestia preferred rather than inSeptuagint order as in the copy from the Vatican Library.[6] The eleventh and twelfth books may originally have been parts of other works by the same author. Portions of book five appear more frequently as a marginal commentary upon thepsalms, and it is the name given to the author in these commentaries that is now used.[5]
The influence of Cosmas was marginal, especially due to his background as aNestorian who lived beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire.[9]
David C. Lindberg asserts: "Cosmas was not particularly influential in Byzantium, but he is important for us because he has been commonly used to buttress the claim that all (or most) medieval people believed they lived on a flat earth. This claim...is totally false. Cosmas is, in fact, the only medieval European known to have defended a flat earth cosmology, whereas it is safe to assume that all educated Western Europeans (and almost one hundred percent of educated Byzantines), as well as sailors and travellers, believed in the earth's sphericity."[10] One of the contemporaries of Cosmas,John Philoponus, wrote a refutation of his work in hisDe opificio mundi (On the Creation of the World).[11]
This article uses text taken from the Preface to theOnline English translation of the Christian Topography, which is in the public domain.
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