The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
has agreed to grant me passage in his convoy to Lübeck, and from there into
the undiscovered regions which some call Livonia, some Karelia, some
Lettgallia, and some Astlanda. I have heard that among Astlanda’s towns
there is also Qlwri. This is a small town like a large castle; if it is God’s will, I
shall arrive there before the first snow falls.”
Astlanda was al-Idrisi’s translation of Estonia, and Qlwri one of the many
names of the city we today call Tallinn. Meinhard and his company sailed no
farther than the Christian outpost of Riga; al-Idrisi continued his cartographic
travels along the Baltic coast until a storm brought his ship aground
on the island of Hiiumaa. He wrote that during that winter “we were shamed
to see all manner of misery and unhappiness. Men ate horseflesh, tree bark,
dogs, dead grasses and mosses, and, on occasion, each other. Fathers and
mothers set their children in boats, hoping that they would reach a safer land
elsewhere; we found scores of these babies frozen stiff upon the island shore.
It falls beyond my power to convey the depravity which hunger and cold can
bring.” What is most extraordinary about this note is not its tone—Adam of
Bremen and the Novgorod Chronicles report similarly miserable events—but
its existence: it reached Roger’s court in April 1155. How did al-Idrisi, who
had never ventured farther north than Sicily, survive a winter that, according
to the Chronicles, killed one in three Novgorodians?
The following spring, Canute V, king of the Danes, received a letter from
Bishop Meinhard. The cleric mentioned that, traveling from King Sweyn’s
court to Riga, he had, “for the purposes of increasing the Holy Church’s
stock of souls and for the greater glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, passed
some time in conversation with a dark Sorcerer also traveling to the cold and
untamed regions, a pleasant-spoken heathen with all manner of knowledge
meet and unmeet of the natural world and things unseen. He carries constantly
about his person a satchel, inside of which he boasts is that which can
save a man forever, or dash one all to pieces.”
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