Pantokrator

A Cartographic Homage to the Byzantine Manuscript Tradition

"Pantokrator", a Greek term that literally translates as "All-Powerful", and more practically translates as "Almighty" (Especially in the Christian usage of the term), is inspired by the rich and vivid tradition of Medieval Roman, aka "Byzantine" illuminated manuscripts, especially of the 9th-11th Century "Macedonian Renaissance". Medieval Roman society was deeply religious, and viewed its ruler, the Emperor of the Romans, as God's Viceroy on Earth. It thus seems fitting (if a bit heterodox) to use it to name a map of global scale. The single most important rule of "Pantokrator" is that it may only use colors directly extracted from the pages of Byzantine-period manuscripts. No colors derived from modern dyes, pigments, or rooted in digital color schemes, may be used.

For the sake of consistency and variety, the lavishly-illustrated Paris Psalter, a creation of mid-10th century Constantinople (and almost certainly funded by the scholar-emperor, Constantine VII), was referenced. Its 14 hand-painted miniatures are honestly staggering achievements. The scribes accomplished an awe-inspiring variety of color, precision of strokes, and so successfully executed a classicized (meant to evoke Classical Roman art) style, that 19th-century scholars first thought that this work was almost 4 centuries older than it really was! Here, King David composes the Psalms, with Melodia, the personification of musical melody, often found in this period of Medieval Roman iconography. The color of the water in the map is drawn from the stream in the bottom left, and the green for the natural areas is drawn from the foliage at the top center.

Here, King David is shown with a psalter, held upen to Psalm 71, with Wisdom "Sophia" and Prophecy "Propheteia" standing beside him. The lavender shades of David's robe were used for the road colors, and the ostentatious gold illumination on this page was used to sample several different gold colors used in the map.

The painted images themselves are not the only sources of inspiration within the Psalter. The text itself offers a surprising array of options. The text within the map is inspired by the dark brown iron gall ink used in the main text body. Important text, as one can see, is emphasized with a bright red ink, based on dyer's madder. Even the aged vellum pages themselves provide a beige/off-white background color. More than that, the carefully-formatted Greek text is an explicit inspiration for the font used in the map itself, Dr. Juan-José Marcos' "Minuscule-XI". Compare the capital letters in this image with the letters seen in map screenshots!

Use of exclusively natural pigments necessitates a very careful evaluation of which features should be emphasized. A regional view of Northern Italy and Switzerland displays nearly every selected element simultaneously, i.e., terrain shading, national and 1st-level administrative borders, forest cover, water, roads, and inhabited areas. One may see that the "red ink" is used exclusively for national borders, country names, and, to a very muted extent, internal administrative borders. Inhabited areas receive a great deal of emphasis, appearing as if they were gold illumination on the metaphorical page.

Even the busiest cities in the world have a rather muted, approachable character with this approach. Density of information is minimized, in favor of emphasizing pure geographical orientation. Man-made features, such as neighborhoods, cities, and streets, are generally privileged over natural features, with the notable exception of tree cover, a very important subject for pre-industrial economies.

If one decides to zoom very close, then buildings leap out at the viewer as gold illumination, much as cities did at a lower, regional-level resolution. Buildings are some of humanity's highest-effort impositions upon the face of the earth, and it only feels right to associate them with something as careful and meticulous as gold leaf, painted upon a carefully-prepared vellum page.

Terrain shading (using natural hues of ochre) is heavily emphasized here, both for aesthetic value, and to contextualize mountain roads, a very important subject for map-users throughout history. In times of war, knowledge of strategic mountain passes, and the few routes through them, was a matter of survival.

Pantokrator's view of western North America.

Southern California shows a strong visual hierarchy. Each city dot is slightly-asymmetrical, scanned directly from dots written on the Paris Psalter.

Ojai Valley, in Ventura County, California, showcases the wide diversity of terrain (and general lack of south-facing tree cover!) found in Southern California.

Downtown Ojai. The style may be minimalist, but users can still find the address they're looking for.

Credits:

Created via Mapbox Studio

Geographic data from OpenStreetMap

Manuscript fascimiles from Grec 139, the Paris Psalter, courtesy of the National Library of France, Department of Manuscripts. Referenced pages: Folio 1 verso, Fol. 7v, Fol. 264 recto.

Font: Minuscule-XI, by Juan-José Marcos, Ph.D.