From Scythia to Tartary. Travel as a source of knowledge in Medieval Europe

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In this sense, in the basins of the Volga and Don rivers is where the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius locates Tartary, as we can see in the world map Typus orbis terrarum [1] , from 1608, where we also see that Tartary is differentiated from the own Mongolia or Turkestan. But it can also, in a more generalized way, be used for a larger territorial group, as we can see in maps such as that of Guillaume de L'Isle: L'Asie [2] , published in the year 1700, where it is reflected a Great Tartary for the vast territory of Central and Northeast Asia, while establishing minor Tartaries based on political control: the Muscovite, the Chinese and the independent.

This represents how fickle this concept has been in Europe throughout history , until the establishment of Russian rule in the area is completed during the modern era. The beginning of the diffusion of the term can be located in the Middle Ages, which is undoubtedly related to the contemporary expansion of the peoples identified as Tatars, the BTC Users Number Data great nomadic Turko-Mongol societies [3] . We can attest to this terminological novelty if we go back to the world maps of the time. We see a clear example from the 15th century with Bartolomeo Pareto's map [4] . If we compare them with immediately previous examples, we notice that it is then that medieval cartography replaces the term Scythia with that of Tartary, progressively and sometimes making them coincide. We ca difference between Tartary and European Tartary , the border of both being the Don, thus locating the border of Europe in this river. But in the space of the Ixartes river (the current Syr Daria) he clearly writes that the populations there can be referred to as Scythians or Tatars, which gives us the link between the two ethnonyms [7] .



It is worth remembering that the idea that the medieval West has of this entire area and the people that inhabit it has its origin in classical authors, as it could not be otherwise. Herodotus himself dedicates a good part of his book IV of his History to the Scythians. He places them on the plains north of the Black Sea, as well as at an undetermined location further east, in Central Asia [8] . The author makes clear on several occasions the unknown nature of the northern and northwest space of the Asian continent [9] , clearly pointing out the unknown nature of those places and the difficulty of obtaining reliable information, which will always be heard [10] . He establishes the limit of reliable information in the Argipeans, a people of difficult location who would coexist with the Scythian peoples [11] , recognizing the lack of knowledge of geography in the furthest limits of Europe [12] .