Islamic Golden Age Cartography

Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100–1165), a geographer born in Ceuta and educated in Córdoba, spent some fifteen years at the cosmopolitan Norman court of King Roger II of Sicily in Palermo compiling the Tabula Rogeriana (1154), consisting of an engraved silver planisphere, now lost, and an accompanying geographical compendium, Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq ("The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands"). Al-Idrisi organized the world into seven climatic zones inherited from the Ptolemaic klimata system, each subdivided into ten sections, yielding seventy detailed regional maps in total, conventionally oriented with south at the top, a convention that was common in the broader Islamic cartographic tradition and stood in contrast to the east-oriented mappae mundi of contemporary Latin Christendom.