Medieval maps portrayed the three known continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, in a diagram that resembled a capital T within an O.
In a T-O map, following the medieval convention of placing east at the top of maps, the top half represented Asia. Below Asia, Europe filled the bottom left quadrant, and Africa filled the bottom right. The T of the map represented the bodies of water that divided the continents. Africa and Europe, for example, were separated by the
Mediterranean. The O, at the outer rim of the map, represented ocean.
The makers of T-O maps apparently did not intend them as depictions of the physical world, and travelers and merchants did not use them as guides. Their significance was religious and symbolic. Such maps usually placed Jerusalem, because of its religious significance to medieval Christians, at the center. They often showed the Garden of Eden, or earthly paradise, at the top of the map, in Asia. Because Europeans believed that all peoples had descended from the three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the three continents were often marked with their names.
About 100 examples of T-O maps have survived in various manuscripts. The maps were most common between the ninth and the 13th centuries but survived into the early modern period. The earliest known printed map, a woodcut from 1472, is a T-O map.
Further reading: Valerie I. J. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); William D. Phillips, Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); R. V Tooley, Maps and Map-Makers (London: B. T. Batsford, 1987).
—Martha K. Robinson
World History
