Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

The glories of Arab geography and cartography continued well into the late Middle Ages and in 1154, at the height to the Latin Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Palestine was mentioned on the world map of the Arabic magnum opus, Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi’khtirāq al-Afaq (translated as The Pleasure of Him who Longs to Cross the Horizons), produced by Andalusian Arab geographer and cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100–1165), the foremost geographer of his age. Becoming famous in Latin as the Tabula Rogeriana (Arabic: Kitab Rujar, The Book of Roger) and Opus Geographicum, al-Idrisi’s masterpiece of geographical information and a description of the known world included a world map, showing Filastin in Arabic.

Bearing in mind that al-Idrisi was working decades after the Crusaders’ victory in Jerusalem (he was born a year after), interest in Palestine was at an all-time high, and maps and literature including the country were sought after.

Al-Idrisi had settled in Palermo, then the capital of a rising Mediterranean power and a centre of Christian and Arab Muslim cultural convivencia, and had worked on the commentaries and illustrations of the map for fifteen years at the court of the Norman King Roger II, the founder of the Kingdom of Sicily in the first half of the 12th century, with a mixed cultural heritage, who commissioned the work around 1138 (Houben 2002:

102‒104; Maqbul 1992). Al-Idrisi travelled extensively in Europe, North Africa and West Asia and gathered information from Muslim travellers, sailors and merchants. Inspired by Ptolemy’s Map of the World (discussed above), al-Idrisi’s Map of the World was far more advanced and for the next three centuries geographers treated his map as the most accurate and copied it without alteration (Scott 1904: 461‒462; Maqbul 1992; Edson 2007: 42‒43).

An abridged Arabic version of Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi-Ikhtiraq al-Afaq was published in Rome in 1592 with title: De Geographia Universali (Maqbul 1992; al-Idrisi 1592). Printed by Rome’s academic Medic Press, this was one of the first Arabic books to be printed. (Hopkins and Levtzion 2000:

104–131). The most complete Arabic manuscript, which includes the world map and all seventy sectional maps, is kept in Istanbul (Pinto 2006: 140).

A century and a half after Idrisi’s world map was produced, Palestine was found on another world map, this time by Marino Sanudo (c. 1270– 1343) a Venetian merchant who travelled to Palestine a number of times and drew maps based on his travels. Sanudo was also a public figure and geographer who became widely known for his lifelong attempts to revive the Latin Crusades following the fall of Acre, the last capital of the Latin Kingdom, in 1291. For the Venetians, money-making, maritime trade and crusading for the Holy Land went hand in hand. Suddenly, with the loss of the considerable wealth of Acre (and much of the Galilean and Lebanese coasts), the Venetians, and their European allies, had lost lucrative trade, local harbours, considerable material assets, residential quarters, churches, monasteries and the famous religio-military Orders such as the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights in Acre. By 1307 Sanudo had written a book, Conditiones Terrae Sanctae, effectively a strategic manual for crusading schemes and for European reconquest of Palestine. A map of Acre was included in Sanudo’s book (Edson 2004: 133). Also, a world map appeared in most of Sanudo’s manuscripts of the early 14th century.

Historian Evelyn Edson writes:

The map of the Eastern Mediterranean … which shows the main theatre of operations for Sanudo’s proposed campaign, is a combination of a marine chart and a map of the interior … Lined up along the southern coast of Asia Minor, and the shores of Palestine and Egypt and the island of Cyprus, is a series of names of ports.

On the coast of Palestine these are accompanied by indications of distances in miles. In the interior, much more vaguely indicated, are larger features such as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the countries of Mesopotamia, Persia and Chaldea. (Edson 2004: 139)

For nearly three centuries al-Idrisi’s world map was treated by Arab and European geographers, cartographers and historians as the most accurate and they copied it without alteration (Scott 1904: 461‒462; Maqbul 1992:

156‒174). In the mid-15th century the mappa mundi of Fra Mauro (died 1464), an Italian cartographer and monk who lived in the Republic of Venice but also worked for the Portuguese kings, came to replace al-Idrisi’s map from the 12th century. In his youth, Mauro had travelled extensively as a merchant and a soldier and became familiar with the Near East regions.

In 1450 Mauro completed a world map, which became the most detailed and accurate map of the world up to that time. Among Mauro’s sources we find classical authors and Ptolemy’s Geography as well as Arab cartographers and the 12th century maps of al-Idrisi.

Mauro’s world map mentions Palaestina for religio-political and practical purposes. If al-Idrisi’s map in the 12th century was commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily and in the service of a trading Mediterranean Christian kingdom with religious connections to Palestine, Mauro’s map was commissioned by King Alfonso V of Portugal in the service of the rising global Portuguese Empire. But the ‘land of Jesus’ was central to the Italian monk and to Christian pilgrims to Terra Sancta. However, the size of Palestine/ Terra Sancta is considerably reduced by having to accommodate all the other places on the map and Mauro feels he had to apologise for this:

‘Those who are knowledgeable would put here in Idumea, Palestine and Galilee things which I have not shown, such as the river Jordan, the sea of Tiberias, the Dead Sea and other places, because there was not enough room’ (Edson 2007: 151).

The printing revolution in Renaissance Europe and the spread of the press from the late 15th century onwards introduced an era of mass circulation of ideas with considerable impact on the mass representation of the Holy Land/Palestine. In the European and Italian Renaissance era cartographic representations of Palestine/the Holy Land also increased sharply. The map of ‘Palestina Moderna et Terra Sancta’ was published in Florence around 1480 and was included in Francesco Berlinghieri’s expanded edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Geography). Berlinghieri, an Italian Renaissance scholar and diplomat, was the first modern European to interpret, expand upon and republish the works of the 2nd century Greek geographer. Apparently the ‘Palestina Moderna et Terra Sancta’ map was based on the Sanudo‒ Vesconte map of Palestine, a map produced by Pietro Vesconte (who was active between 1310 and 1330) and Marino Sanudo, first published in Venice around 1320.1 Vesconte was a Genoese cartographer, geographer and navigational chart-maker who worked in Venice. He also provided a world map, nautical atlas, a map of Palestine and plan of Acre and Jerusalem for inclusion in Marino Sanuto’s Liber secretorum fidelium cruces super terrae sanctae recuperatione et Conservatione, a work which discusses trade routes and was aimed at encouraging a new Latin crusading campaign, providing a manual for the military reconquest of the Holy Land (Edson 2004: 139; Bagrow 2010: 69‒70). Although gradually ideas of new military crusades began to subside, the Sanudo‒Vesconte map and the maps of ‘Palestina Moderna et Terra Sancta’ were destined to project European power and provide modern representational images of Palestine for the Europeans until the 18th century.

The European printing revolution made it possible for dozens of detailed maps of ‘Palestina/Palaestina’ to be published and circulated in Europe throughout the 18th century. In 1714 Palaestina ex monumentis Veteris illustrata by Dutch cartographer, philologist and biblical Orientalist Hadrianus Relandus illustrated the geography of Palestine with maps. In the Ottoman Empire, the printing of books and maps started only in 1729

and in 1803 the Ottoman Cedid Atlas Tercümesi (A Translation of a New Atlas), published in Istanbul, was partly based on European geographical knowledge as well as European map-making methods of the day. Published within the framework of the ‘new system’ of the Ottoman administrative and military reforms of the time, the New Atlas included a map of Filastin and bar‑Sham (hinterland of al‑Sham) with the Arabic term Ard Filastin (‘Land of Palestine’; written in a peculiar way: ارض فلاستان ) shown in large Arabic script on the bottom left of the map. As we shall see below, the publication of this new Ottoman atlas preceded the publication of ‘Jacotin Atlas’, which had a map using the Arabic script for ‘Palestine’ and the ‘land of al-Quds’ ( فلسطين أو أرض قدس ) by twenty-three years.

In the 19th century European romantic Crusader revivalism in art, religious fervour and politics and British actual penetration of Palestine were repackaged in the form of a ‘peace crusade’ and biblical Orientalism.

This gradual penetration of late Ottoman Palestine culminated in the pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration of November 1917 and the actual British military occupation of Palestine in 1917.