e; in the ninth century Archbishop
Rabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh
century Hugh of St. Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural
demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging
the Franks to the crusade, declared, "Jerusalem is the middle point of
the earth"; in the thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in
vogue, the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, declared, "As the heart in
the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our
inhabited earth,"--"so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre
of the earth." Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty,
wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels ascribed
to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages, it is
declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and that a spear
standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox.

Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early
map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of
Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this view
in men's minds, and doubtless discouraged during many generations any
scientific statements tending to unbalance this geographical centre
revealed in Scripture.(30)

(30) For beliefs of various nations of antiquity that the earth's center
was in their most sacred place, see citations from Maspero, Charton,
Sayce, and others in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap.
iv. As to the Greeks, we have typical statements in the Eumenides of
Aeschylus, where the stone in the altar at Delphi is repeatedly called
"the earth's navel"--which is precisely the expression used regarding
Jerusalem in the Septuagint translation of Ezekiel (see below). The
proof texts on which the mediaeval geographers mainly relied as to the
form of the earth were Ezekiel v, 5, and xxxviii, 12. The progress
of geographical knowledge evidently caused them to be softened down
somewhat in our King James's version; but the first of them reads, in
the Vulgate, "Ista est Hierusalem, in medio gentium posui eam et in
circuitu ejus terrae"; and the second reads, in the Vulgate, "in medio
terrae," and in the Septuagint, [Greek]. That the literal centre of the
earth was understood, see proof in St. Jerome, Commentat. in Ezekiel,
lib. ii; and for general proof, see Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori
popolari degli antichi, pp. 207, 2