Watercolor on vellum, depicting a part of Al-Idrisi's world map, the names of the places, the rivers and the mountains in yellow, black and red ink. Note that south is at the top of the map. 67 by 50.5 cm. CATALOGUE NOTE In the 12th century, scholar Al-Idrisi produced a map showing most of Europe, Asia, and North Africa for the first time. Al-Idrisi ranged widely, drawing on older knowledge and interviewing thousands of travelers to make his map the most accurate of its day. Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Idrisi (circa 1100–66) was a 12th century geographer from al-Maghrib (North Africa).As a young man al-Idrisi attended the famous university in Cordoba, and over the course of his life he travelled widely around a Mediterranean divided between several competing Christian and Muslim powers, arriving in around 1138 at the Sicilian court of the Norman king Roger II. The Normans had conquered the Arab Emirate of Sicily in the final decades of the 11th century, and Roger ruled over a linguistically and culturally diverse population: Arab artesans were commissioned to produce art and architecture for the court at Palermo, and many Arab bureaucratic structures remained in place.