The Albi mappa mundi: the oldest surviving medieval map of the world. Preserved in a ms produced in the 8th c. in Southern France or Spain it is an extraordinary witness of how the world was seen at the turn between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages 1/ #medievaltwitter

Here is a sketch of the map from Konrad Miller's Mappae Mundi (1895) which allows us to read a bit better all the labels. Look at tiny Britain in the lower left and at Jerusalem, which although big, is not at the very centre. 2/

The manuscript itself (Albi Inv. Ms 29 (115)) is a carefully curated collection of texts ranging from Biblical commentaries to geographical extracts. It is a little knowledge capsule, a vademecum to the early medieval world. You can see it all here: 3/

…https://cecilia.mediatheques.grand-albigeois.fr/collection/item/97-redirection

Actually let me muse a little more about the Albi Map. One might take it as simplistic, right? It draws rivers in straight lines and divides the world into rectangles. Sicily is a freaking rhombus. That’s not exactly cartographic precision, is it? 4/

But to discount it on those grounds is to miss the point of those maps entirely. First of all: they are texts to be read, in a way just like the other ones in the manuscript. They are her to order the world and to make it discoverable. 5/

We use maps to find places and to go places. To travel on the map and with it. But we also use maps to find ourselves in relation to what is important. Literally to find our place in the world. And the Albi map, I would argue, did that job fairly well. 6/

Moreover if we look at it in context of its manuscript it did another great thing: it allowed the reader to find themselves in relation to their past. The map stands in a long tradition of geography. Geography that was also textual. And it tells you where and *when* you are. 7/

So you could have gone to a lot of places with this map. Just think about various types of maps that we have. We don’t discount them as simple, we say they are for different purposes. The Albi map also has a lot of functions. Not so simple after all, huh? 8/