at disturbing influence was religion, or rather
theology; not, of course, religion in the proper sense of the word,
or theology based on critical principles, but theological conceptions
deduced from a slavish adherence to texts of Scripture, very often
seriously misunderstood. To quote a single example: when it is
said in Ezekiel v. S, "This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the
midst of the nations... round about her," this was not taken by
the mediaeval monks, who were the chief geographers of the period,
as a poetical statement, but as an exact mathematical law, which
determined the form which all mediaeval maps took. Roughly speaking,
of course, there was a certain amount of truth in the statement,
since Jerusalem would be about the centre of the world as known
to the ancients--at least, measured from east to west; but, at
the same time, the mediaeval geographers adopted the old Homeric
idea of the ocean surrounding the habitable world, though at times
there was a tendency to keep more closely to the words of Scripture
about the four corners of the earth. Still, as a rule, the orthodox
conception of the world was that of a circle enclosing a sort of T
square, the east being placed at the top, Jerusalem in the centre;
the Mediterranean Sea naturally divided the lower half of the circle,
while the AEgean and Red Seas were regarded as spreading out right
and left perpendicularly, thus dividing the top part of the world,
or Asia, from the lower part, divided equally between Europe on
the left and Africa on the right. The size of the Mediterranean
Sea, it will be seen, thus determined the dimensions of the three
continents. One of the chief errors to which this led was to cut
off the whole of the south of Africa, which rendered it seemingly
a short voyage round that continent on the way to India. As we
shall see, this error had important and favourable results on
geographical discovery.

[Illustration: GEOGRAPHICAL MONSTERS]

Another result of this conception of the world as a T within an
O, was to expand Asia to an enormous extent; and as this was a
part of the world which was less known to the monkish map-makers
of the Middle Ages, they were obliged to fill out their ignorance
by their imagination. Hence they located in Asia all the legends
which they had derived either from Biblical or classical sources.
Thus there was a conception, for which very little basis is to be
found in the Bible, of two fierce nations named G