As we shall see, this error had important and favourable results on geographical discovery.
[Illustration: GEOGRAPHICAL MONSTERS] Another result of this conception of the world as a T within an O, was to expand Asia to an enormous extent; and as this was a part of the world which was less known to the monkish map-makers of the Middle Ages, they were obliged to fill out their ignorance by their imagination.

Hence they located in Asia all the legends which they had derived either from Biblical or classical sources.
Thus there was a conception, for which very little basis is to be found in the Bible, of two fierce nations named Gog and Magog, who would one day bring about the destruction of the civilised world.

These were located in what would have been Siberia, and it was thought that Alexander the Great had penned them in behind the Iron Mountains.

When the great Tartar invasion came in the thirteenth century, it was natural to suppose that these were no less than the Gog and Magog of legend.

So, too, the position of Paradise was fixed in the extreme east, or, in other words, at the top of mediaeval maps.