Al-Idrisi at the Court of the Christian Sovereign

Abstract

The paper examines the history of cooperation between two outstanding personalities of the 12th century — the Arab geographer al-Idrisi and the king of Norman Sicily Roger II, by whose order and with whose assistance al-Idrisi created the geographical work “The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands”, which included, in addition to describing the ecumene, detailed maps. An analysis of the history of the creation of this work from the point of view of such a discipline as the geography of knowledge leads to an understanding of the features of both the form and the content of al-Idrisi’s work. Despite the fact that al-Idrisi borrowed the general principle of land description according to latitudinal zones-climates from the Islamic geographical tradition, his approach to the depiction of the countries and peoples of the world reveals significant differences from the practice of Islamic scientists. In his work, al-Idrisi creates a space devoid of hierarchy, homogeneous in terms of value, permeated with paths that connected cities and countries.