After they had dispelled the notion of a limited oikoumene and had proved that the world outside the former oikoumene contained inhabitable and navigable places, the Renaissance geographers and explorers still had little idea about the actual shape and distribution of the lands across the earth's surface. Exploration demolished the old notions about the structure of the world, but theory preceded exploration in creating a new image of the world. In particular, European Humanist geographers and travellers believed that that the universe was organised on principles of inherent balance, symmetry and opposition, and that the structure of the world followed these universal principles. This chapter will examine how such ideas allowed Humanist geographers, proto-ethnographers, and travellers to assimilate the discoveries and organise them into a comprehensible format. It argues that ideas of balance and symmetry were used to explain everything from the relationship that human and animals had with their environments to the physical arrangement of the lands across the surface of the globe. They were particularly evident in the way in which geographers discussed the proportions and arrangement of the continents. As with the destruction of the idea of uninhabitable climatic zones and unnavigable Ocean, at the core of the ideas about the nature and proportion of the world, was a sense that this was a world made by God for human domination.

The sixteenth-century writers were elaborating upon an intellectual tradition that had existed for two millennia that the whole universe was governed by laws of balance and opposition. As early as the sixth century BC, Greek philosophers and geographers had argued that there was an inherent balance to the world, and virtually every classical writer thereafter had used ideas of balance, symmetry or opposition to explain the nature of the world (and indeed the cosmos). Aristotle, in the Metaphysica, a work that would have been well known to most educated sixteenth-century writers, argued that all his predecessors saw the world in terms of opposition.1 Although one could link all preceding philosophy to ideas of opposition, opposition could function in contrasting ways, of balance and reciprocity, both of which were reflected in different aspects of classical geography. No two philosophers entirely agreed, but in the earliest stages of Greek thought, the ideas of opposition could broadly speaking be fitted into two schools.