In this field Arabian play an important role; they raise a remarkable interest in Astronomy, Cartography,Geography, Maths but above all they maintained and continued what Greek did previously.
During a time of decline, they had the great merit to have kept alive classical studies, preventing the loss of important scientific discoveries. The importance of Arabic cartography in the development of Geography is not restricted only to this essential rescue.
Arabian were also the vehicle by which part of the classical knowledge will go back westward, setting up the rebirth of Geography during the High Middle Ages.
During the Middle Ages, while in the Western World the classical heritage is reconsidered from a religious point of view, Islamic civilization is spreading in the European area.
Taking inspiration from the neighbouring cultures,the scientific thought and the religious one develop and sustain Islam’s economic and political growth.
Among the classical works translated in Arabic between the VII and the X century there is Claudius Ptolemy’s (Claudio Tolomeo) work, essential author in the field of cartography, but above all for his contribution to Astronomy, crucial science for a nation who, according to the Islamic belief, had to be able to locate, at any moment, the direction of Mecca, the holy city in Islam.
Cartography gains fresh impetus when, around the XI century, Arabian are forced to open up towards new markets in Northern Europe.
Main character of this renaissance is Al-Idrisi, well known as Edrisi.
He was born in Ceuta ( Morocco) in 1099 and after having studied in Cordova, he spent much of his early life in North Africa an in Asia Minor before settling in Palermo. Here by the Norman king and patron Roger II he was committed to collect in a compendium all the useful information in order to create a geographical compilation about the then known world.
The cartographer produces, between 1154 and 1192, two of the masterpieces which present a considerable and valuable collection of documents, some of them very elaborated and others lowered in dimensions and number of toponyms. All of them present the distinction in climatic areas, already employed by Ptolemy and the principle for which South, placed at the top of the map sets the orientation.
Al-idrisi is to be considered one of the main talented man in medieval cartography, but it must be underlined that, despite he owned a huge amount of fresh information and original details, he still feels the effect of Ptolemy’s charismatic culture. When Al-idrisi tries to force the new material in a classic pattern, he produces images often distorted and not easily legible. His documents, in the whole, appear very distorted, perhaps because all the new and fresh elements, that can be inferred from the arabic maps are reduced to the ancient classic pattern, and the reading is made it hard due to the use of arabian writing, that skips vowels.
For this last reason it is not always possible to localize all the cities indicated in the drawing, even though the text is valuable because it gives precise information on the roads and distances among the single places.
Both writings and panels are full of mistakes because Al-Idrisi, except for Sicily, Apulia and Calabria, visited by himself, for all the other regions he took information by third persons or from travel journals or even from scholars’ notes that not always were correct.
However the importance of his masterpiece was very relevant in order to affect for a long time the following cartographic production.
All the documents he left represent the highest peak in geographical knowledge that Arabian reached until that moment.
His illustration of Italy, where the southern part is excessive, is for sure the one that, more than others, make our country similar to the classic oak leaf, even it is difficult to say if it derives from the old materials employed in the drawing up or from the details he directly gathered for his huge work.
The Adriatic Sea has a semi-lunar shape, Istrian peninsula is missing and its more important sites are stretching on a coast totally deprived of bays and prominences.
A hint to small peninsulae is visible only near Albona or Durres, that is the peninsula bounded in the North from Gulf of Drin and in the South from Vlora bay.
On the other side there is the cape of Otranto which rightly seems to close The Adriatic Sea in the South.
Italian coast appears more detailed, actually Gargano promontory is noticeable but an unrealistic bay ends in Ancona (no hint about Conero).
Northern Kvarner islands have Zadar’s same latitude.
Generally speaking all the medieval maps, much more than this one of Edrisi, give us pictures completely altered ed unrecognizable, so as to provide a meaningful demonstration of the bad conditions in which Geography as a science was, in those centuries.

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