Geographies of Conquest: A Maghrebi Chart of the Western Mediterranean, c. 1350

Medieval Islamic geography has been well studied. The wealth of extant sources has stimulated a number of critical editions, translations, and studies. The majority of these works have focused on early Muslim geography from the Near East, and have consequently relegated the Maghreb to the margins. Rather than focus, as has traditional historiography, on early medieval Near Eastern geography, this paper shifts the spotlight to the late-medieval Maghreb through a close examination of a fourteenth-century Arabic-language nautical chart drawn in the Maghreb. I focus, in particular, on this chart’s relationship to contemporary Muslim and European geography, especially regarding how knowledge circulated among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Mediterranean region and beyond. At a basic level, this paper reveals the possibility of transmission of knowledge in a world fragmented by violence and religious divisions, but more precisely, I argue that while the chart exhibits considerable influence from Mallorcan, Genoese, and Venetian charts in both its visual representation of space and toponymy, it nevertheless conveys a distinctively Maghrebi-Muslim representation of the world in part through the provenance of its materials and in part through its inclusion of toponymy that recalls Muslim rule and conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The cartographer mapped an Islamic framework over the transmitted topography of Christian nautical charts. In addition to contributing to a little-studied aspect of Muslim geography and history, this paper offers a nuanced view of interfaith relations, the circulation of knowledge among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants of the medieval Mediterranean, and demonstrates that cartographers can inscribe maps with specific meanings and messages.