Abstract
This article explores the relevance of oceans and seas for Christian-Latin and Arabic-Islamic cosmographic concepts. It offers a comparative view on Latin and Arabic sources which discuss maritime spaces, including encyclopaedias, historiographic sources, and world as well as regional maps from the tenth to the fourteenth century. It describes the maritime knowledge of medieval Arabic and Latin writers and cartographers such as Isidore of Seville, Pietro Vesconte, Fra Mauro, Ibn Ḥauqal, al-Masʿūdī and others. The main questions which this paper addresses are: to what extent did oceans and seas structure the world in a specific way? What was their significance for Christian and Muslim concepts and perceptions of the world? How did authors and cartographers describe the relationship of oceans and seas to the mainland on the one hand and the interconnectivity of seas on the other hand? Although both geographic traditions had its roots in the knowledge of Antiquity, their modes of describing and depicting the world reveal some considerable differences.