Mappa mundi

A mappa mundi (Latin [ˈmappa ˈmʊndiː]; plural = mappae mundi; French: mappemonde; Middle English: mappemond) is any medieval European map of the world. Such maps range in size and complexity from simple schematic maps 25 millimetres (1 inch) or less across to elaborate wall maps, the largest of which to survive to modern times, the Ebstorf map, was around 3.5 m (11 ft 6 in) in diameter. The term derives from the Medieval Latin words mappa (cloth or chart) and mundus (world).

Around 1,100 mappae mundi are known to have survived from the Middle Ages. Of these, some 900 are found illustrating manuscript books and the remainder exist as stand-alone documents.

Extant mappae mundi come in several distinct varieties, including:

Medieval world maps which share some characteristics of traditional mappae mundi but contain elements from other sources, including Portolan charts and maps associated with Ptolemy's Geography are sometimes considered a fifth type, called "transitional mappae mundi".

Zonal maps are pictures of the Eastern Hemisphere. Their purpose was to illustrate the concept that the world is a sphere with latitudinal climate zones, most often the five Aristotelian climes:

Of these, only the two temperate zones at middle latitudes were believed to be habitable, and the known world was contained entirely within the northern temperate zone's Eastern Hemisphere. As most surviving zonal maps are found illustrating Macrobius' Commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio (an excerpt of Cicero's De Re Publica), this type of map is sometimes called "Macrobian". In their simplest and most common form, Zonal mappae mundi are merely circles divided into five parallel zones, but several larger zonal maps with much more detail have survived.

T-O maps, unlike zonal maps, illustrate only the habitable portion of the world known to medieval Europeans, limiting their perspective to a relatively small portion of the Earth's Northern Hemisphere. The landmass was illustrated as a circle (an "O") divided into three portions by a "T". These three divisions were the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. The popularity of the Macrobian maps and the combination of T-O style continents on some of the larger Macrobian spheres illustrate that Earth's sphericity continued to be understood among scholars during the Middle Ages.

The V-in-square map depicts the Earth divided between the sons of Noah.