Monsters at the End of Time: Gog and Magog and Ethnic Difference in the Catalan Atlas (1375)
Although they are only mentioned briefly in Revelation, the destructive Gog and Magog formed an important component of apocalyptic thought for medieval European Christians, who associated Gog and Magog with a number of non-Christian peoples. Modern scholarship has focused primarily on medieval representations of Gog and Magog as Jews, largely dismissing other sources as obscure derivatives of these anti-Semitic depictions. However, the Catalan Atlas (1375), which depicts Gog and Magog as Tartars, problematizes this characterization. Created by Abraham Cresques, a Jewish cartographer, for Pedro IV of Aragon, I argue that the Atlas modifies traditional Christian apocalyptic narratives—and particularly those involving Gog and Magog—to critique Christian thought about the past, present, and apocalyptic future. This conclusion stresses the importance of analyzing depictions of Gog and Magog within their immediate historical contexts and challenges the primacy that has been given to anti-Semitic representations of Gog and Magog.
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