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2009
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Between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age, the depiction of the imago mundi-the universal description of lands, seas, animals, plants and, above all, people, their history, customs, costumes, and trade-was based on a vast body of knowledge derived from ancient and diverse sources. According to a tradition that dates from classical antiquity to the start of the modern age, cosmography-in the form of treatises of geography, universal chronology, encyclopedias, and mappae mundi-included elements of Christian cosmology (Earth within the context of the creation story); astronomy and Ptolemaic astrology (Earth in relation to the planets and stars); Aristotelian and Ptolemaic natural philosophy (Earth in relation to other elements of the sublunar world: water, air, and fire); and information concerning universal geography, peoples, and trade.4 Such an eclectic body of knowledge resulted from a composite set of written material, including maps, travel accounts, merchants' letters and handbooks, diplomatic correspondence, geographical and astrological treatises, medical handbooks, botanical herbaria, and chronicles, as well as evidence derived from material culture.
Other sources included Latin auctores veteres (geographers such as Pliny, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, Orosius, and the poets Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan, whose poems are an endless source of geographic knowledge) and Greek auctores veteres (such as Ptolemy and Strabo, whose works became known in the fifteenth century); the travel narratives of auctores novi, including the missionaries who traveled to Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (e.g., Franciscans William of Rubruck, Odoric of Pordenone, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine), merchant-travelers such as Marco Polo and Niccolò de' Conti; pilgrims to the Holy Land and "modern" compilers of geographic treatises such as Ristoro d'Arezzo (thirteenth century) and Pierre d'Ailly (1350-1420).
There were "those who saw things with their own eyes"-the often anonymous travelers, monks, merchants, diplomats, navigators. There were cartographers such as the Cresques from Majorca (late fourteenth century); Fra Mauro of Venice (early fifteenth century); and Martin Behaim, a merchant from Nuremburg who was active in Lisbon during the late fifteenth century. These diverse individuals collected the evidence, i.e., the descriptions, of the vast regions of northern Europe, Africa, and Asia, and starting in the late fifteenth century, the New World. For example, Navigazioni e viaggi (Navigation and Voyages, 1550-59), by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485- 1557), a humanist and secretary of the Council of Ten (the government of the Republic of Venice), offered the most systematic summary about the long process of European expansion published up to that time; it was also widely based on information acquired from Portuguese navigators passing through Venice.
Against alleged epistemological ruptures, such as "from the flat Earth to the round Earth" and against sciovinistic appropriation of the past-often mentioned in the ongoing celebrations of the multiple "discoveries" of America and the various and numerous "first voyages" of one or another navigator-that not only cannot be documented but above all are misleading oversimplifications about the past, it is important instead to stress the continuity, or longue durée, of the epistemological status of cosmography as well as its configuration more as a network of knowledge encompassing several cultural centers, mostly in Europe and in Asia, than the result of "national" acquisitions.
Between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern period, there was no direct flow from "ancient" to "modern"; thus neither progress nor decline in the history of cosmography and ancient cartography can be found. Paolino da Venezia (circa 1270-1344), a Franciscan priest active first in Venice and then with the papacy in Avignon, became the bishop of Pozzuoli in 1324 and also authored three celebrated universal chronologies: Epitoma, Chronologia Magna, also known as the Compendium, and Satyrica Historia. In his geographical treatise of the inhabited world titled De Mapa Mundi, Fra Paolino clearly defines the function and status of universal cartography in relation to cosmography. He describes cartography as the heir to a tradition with roots in classical culture that asserts the need to know about the geography of people in order to understand their history. Regarding written cosmography, the "map"-which he understood as a depiction of the inhabited world through the symbiosis of "writing" and "pictures"-assumes a pedagogical and exemplifying function. Fra Paolino writes: For [the construction of] a map both the picture and the text are necessary. In fact, I would agree that one without the other is insufficient, as the image without the text shows kingdoms and provinces in a confusing way. The text without the aid of the image does not sufficiently clearly indicate the boundaries of the provinces that extend under the different parts of the heavens in order to be able to see them in a single view [Requiritur autem mapa duplex, picture et scripture. Nec unum sine altero putes sufficere, quia pictura sine scriptura provincias seu regna confuse demonstrat. Scripture vero non enim sufficenter sine adminiculo picture provinciarum confinia per varias partes celi sic determinat, ut quasi ad oculum conspici valeant. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. 1960].
This idea remained current well beyond the late Middle Ages and influenced the cosmography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nautical cartography of Mediterranean origin and Ptolemaic cartography were revised and expanded in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively, in light of the "literary discoveries" of works by Pomponius Mela, Ptolemy, and Strabo, among others, as well as knowledge that had emerged from travels beyond the inhabited world of antiquity. Ancient treatises of Roman geography, such as the De chorographia by Pomponius Mela (first century C.E., recovered by Petrarch and Boccaccio circa 1330-35) and narratives of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and voyages of Franciscan missionaries and traveling merchants led to the first redefinition of the imago mundi by cartographers such as Fra Mauro (Venice, mid fifteenth century), Henricus Martellus Germanus (Florence, late fifteenth century), Bernardo Silvano of Eboli (Padua and Venice, early sixteenth century), Martin Waldseemüller (Saint-Dié des Vosges, circa 1475-1522), Jorge and Pedro Reinel, Diogo Ribeiro and Bartolomeo Velho (Lisbon, Seville and Paris, first half of the sixteenth century), Sebastian Münster (Basel, 1488-1552), Jacopo Gastaldi (Venice, early sixteenth century-after 1565), Gerard Mercator (Louvain and Duisburg, 1512-1594), and Abraham Ortelius (Antwerp, 1527-1598).
During the Age of Discovery, Portuguese and Spanish cartographers were the only ones with direct access to the maps drawn by navigators during their expeditions and to their official synthesis, known as the padron real. It is important to emphasize that they also included written texts in the design of their universal maps; for parts of the globe they did not know directly, they relied on maps they knew to be speculative. Examples include the depictions of eastern Asia or the interior of the New World in the Cantino Planisphere and the Miller Atlas.
Bibliography:
Cicle de conferències sobre història de la cartografia, organitzat per l'Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya i el Departament de Geografia de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 10 voll., Barcelona, Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya, 1990-2000. DESTOMBES, Marcel, Mappemondes A.D. 1200-1500. Catalogue préparé par la Commission des Cartes Anciennes de l'Union Géographique Internationale, Amsterdam, N. Israel, 1964. EDNEY, Matthew, Recent Trends in the History of Cartography. A Selective, Annotated Bibliography to the English-Language Literature, http://purl.oclc.org/coordinates/b6.htm. version 2.1 2007. The History of Cartography, I, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. by J.B. Harley and D. Woodward, Chicago, Chicago University Press 1987. The History of Cartography, II.1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. by J.B. Harley and D. Woodward, Chicago, Chicago University Press 1994. The History of Cartography, III, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. D. Woodward, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2007. Monumenta cartographica neerlandica, 10 voll., ed. by G. Schilder, Alphen aan den Rijn, 1986-2007. SHIRLEY, Rodney W., The Mapping of the World. Early Printed Maps, 1472-1700, London, The British Library, 1983.
Author: Angelo Cattaneo
Other sources included Latin auctores veteres (geographers such as Pliny, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, Orosius, and the poets Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan, whose poems are an endless source of geographic knowledge) and Greek auctores veteres (such as Ptolemy and Strabo, whose works became known in the fifteenth century); the travel narratives of auctores novi, including the missionaries who traveled to Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (e.g., Franciscans William of Rubruck, Odoric of Pordenone, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine), merchant-travelers such as Marco Polo and Niccolò de' Conti; pilgrims to the Holy Land and "modern" compilers of geographic treatises such as Ristoro d'Arezzo (thirteenth century) and Pierre d'Ailly (1350-1420).
There were "those who saw things with their own eyes"-the often anonymous travelers, monks, merchants, diplomats, navigators. There were cartographers such as the Cresques from Majorca (late fourteenth century); Fra Mauro of Venice (early fifteenth century); and Martin Behaim, a merchant from Nuremburg who was active in Lisbon during the late fifteenth century. These diverse individuals collected the evidence, i.e., the descriptions, of the vast regions of northern Europe, Africa, and Asia, and starting in the late fifteenth century, the New World. For example, Navigazioni e viaggi (Navigation and Voyages, 1550-59), by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485- 1557), a humanist and secretary of the Council of Ten (the government of the Republic of Venice), offered the most systematic summary about the long process of European expansion published up to that time; it was also widely based on information acquired from Portuguese navigators passing through Venice.
Against alleged epistemological ruptures, such as "from the flat Earth to the round Earth" and against sciovinistic appropriation of the past-often mentioned in the ongoing celebrations of the multiple "discoveries" of America and the various and numerous "first voyages" of one or another navigator-that not only cannot be documented but above all are misleading oversimplifications about the past, it is important instead to stress the continuity, or longue durée, of the epistemological status of cosmography as well as its configuration more as a network of knowledge encompassing several cultural centers, mostly in Europe and in Asia, than the result of "national" acquisitions.
Between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern period, there was no direct flow from "ancient" to "modern"; thus neither progress nor decline in the history of cosmography and ancient cartography can be found. Paolino da Venezia (circa 1270-1344), a Franciscan priest active first in Venice and then with the papacy in Avignon, became the bishop of Pozzuoli in 1324 and also authored three celebrated universal chronologies: Epitoma, Chronologia Magna, also known as the Compendium, and Satyrica Historia. In his geographical treatise of the inhabited world titled De Mapa Mundi, Fra Paolino clearly defines the function and status of universal cartography in relation to cosmography. He describes cartography as the heir to a tradition with roots in classical culture that asserts the need to know about the geography of people in order to understand their history. Regarding written cosmography, the "map"-which he understood as a depiction of the inhabited world through the symbiosis of "writing" and "pictures"-assumes a pedagogical and exemplifying function. Fra Paolino writes: For [the construction of] a map both the picture and the text are necessary. In fact, I would agree that one without the other is insufficient, as the image without the text shows kingdoms and provinces in a confusing way. The text without the aid of the image does not sufficiently clearly indicate the boundaries of the provinces that extend under the different parts of the heavens in order to be able to see them in a single view [Requiritur autem mapa duplex, picture et scripture. Nec unum sine altero putes sufficere, quia pictura sine scriptura provincias seu regna confuse demonstrat. Scripture vero non enim sufficenter sine adminiculo picture provinciarum confinia per varias partes celi sic determinat, ut quasi ad oculum conspici valeant. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. 1960].
This idea remained current well beyond the late Middle Ages and influenced the cosmography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nautical cartography of Mediterranean origin and Ptolemaic cartography were revised and expanded in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively, in light of the "literary discoveries" of works by Pomponius Mela, Ptolemy, and Strabo, among others, as well as knowledge that had emerged from travels beyond the inhabited world of antiquity. Ancient treatises of Roman geography, such as the De chorographia by Pomponius Mela (first century C.E., recovered by Petrarch and Boccaccio circa 1330-35) and narratives of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and voyages of Franciscan missionaries and traveling merchants led to the first redefinition of the imago mundi by cartographers such as Fra Mauro (Venice, mid fifteenth century), Henricus Martellus Germanus (Florence, late fifteenth century), Bernardo Silvano of Eboli (Padua and Venice, early sixteenth century), Martin Waldseemüller (Saint-Dié des Vosges, circa 1475-1522), Jorge and Pedro Reinel, Diogo Ribeiro and Bartolomeo Velho (Lisbon, Seville and Paris, first half of the sixteenth century), Sebastian Münster (Basel, 1488-1552), Jacopo Gastaldi (Venice, early sixteenth century-after 1565), Gerard Mercator (Louvain and Duisburg, 1512-1594), and Abraham Ortelius (Antwerp, 1527-1598).
During the Age of Discovery, Portuguese and Spanish cartographers were the only ones with direct access to the maps drawn by navigators during their expeditions and to their official synthesis, known as the padron real. It is important to emphasize that they also included written texts in the design of their universal maps; for parts of the globe they did not know directly, they relied on maps they knew to be speculative. Examples include the depictions of eastern Asia or the interior of the New World in the Cantino Planisphere and the Miller Atlas.
Bibliography:
Cicle de conferències sobre història de la cartografia, organitzat per l'Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya i el Departament de Geografia de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 10 voll., Barcelona, Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya, 1990-2000. DESTOMBES, Marcel, Mappemondes A.D. 1200-1500. Catalogue préparé par la Commission des Cartes Anciennes de l'Union Géographique Internationale, Amsterdam, N. Israel, 1964. EDNEY, Matthew, Recent Trends in the History of Cartography. A Selective, Annotated Bibliography to the English-Language Literature, http://purl.oclc.org/coordinates/b6.htm. version 2.1 2007. The History of Cartography, I, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. by J.B. Harley and D. Woodward, Chicago, Chicago University Press 1987. The History of Cartography, II.1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. by J.B. Harley and D. Woodward, Chicago, Chicago University Press 1994. The History of Cartography, III, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. D. Woodward, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2007. Monumenta cartographica neerlandica, 10 voll., ed. by G. Schilder, Alphen aan den Rijn, 1986-2007. SHIRLEY, Rodney W., The Mapping of the World. Early Printed Maps, 1472-1700, London, The British Library, 1983.
Author: Angelo Cattaneo