How the Map Was Made: from the Mappa Mundi to the Atlas
A short history of mapmaking and its makers, from Ptolemy and the medieval world maps to Ramusio, Ortelius, Ricci and the atlas houses of Amsterdam, told through works in our collection
Maps are among the oldest forms of human communication. The historian of cartography J. B. Harley opened the great History of Cartography with the observation that mapping precedes both writing and number, that there have been very few mapless societies, and that a map is best understood as a specialised graphic language, a memory bank for spatial knowledge in societies that had no printing. He also reminded his readers of something every collector knows: maps have a high mortality. They were used, folded, pasted to walls, cut out of atlases and thrown away, and what survives is only a fraction of what was made. The pieces that have come down to us are therefore witnesses to a much larger and largely vanished conversation about the shape of the world. This article follows that conversation from the medieval world map to the atlases of the Dutch Golden Age, and points along the way to works from our own stock in which the story can be read at first hand.
Ptolemy, the touchstone
The scientific tradition begins in Alexandria in the second century, with Claudius Ptolemy's Geography: a set of instructions for drawing the world on a grid of latitude and longitude, with the coordinates of some eight thousand places. The text survived in Byzantium, was translated into Latin in Florence around 1406, and was first printed with maps at Bologna in 1477. Harley calls it the touchstone of the Renaissance in European cartography, and describes the stages by which the ancient maps were slowly pushed aside: in the fifteenth century they were still valued as authoritative maps of the world, but as printing spread they were replaced by the tabulae modernae, the new maps of the discoveries, and the Strasbourg Ptolemy of 1513 was the first to put the ancient and the modern maps in separate sections. When Mercator reissued the Ptolemaic maps alone in 1578, without any modern supplement, the ancient atlas had become a purely historical object.
The Ptolemaic tradition can be followed in our stock from the reduced woodcut maps that Lorenz Fries cut for the Strasbourg editions, such as the eighth map of Asia of 1522, through Sebastian Münster's Tabula Germaniae of about 1540, to the copperplate Ptolemies of Venice: Girolamo Ruscelli's edition of 1561, from which our Isola Cuba Nova comes, and Giovanni Antonio Magini's Geografia of 1597-1598, whose map of the ancient world shows how the Greek picture of the oikoumene was still being printed at the end of the sixteenth century, now as a piece of history.
The medieval world: mappae mundi and portolan charts
Medieval Europe drew the world in two quite different ways. The mappae mundi, of which about eleven hundred survive in manuscripts from the eighth to the fifteenth century, were not navigational instruments but encyclopaedias in graphic form. Choubey and Bansal, in their retrospect of medieval mapmaking, describe the four types: the zonal map with its five climates inherited from Greek cosmography, the tripartite or T-O map in which the Don, the Nile and the Mediterranean divide a disc of land into Asia, Europe and Africa with the east at the top, the quadripartite map that adds a fourth, unknown continent of the antipodes, and the transitional maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in which the outline of the Mediterranean begins to look like the sea charts. The Hereford map of about 1295, the largest to survive, calls itself a history, and that is what these maps are: biblical and classical history laid out in space, with Jerusalem at the centre and Paradise at the top. The tradition ends in splendour with the great circular map of Fra Mauro, made in Venice around 1450 with south at the top, because its maker did not trust Ptolemy.
The other tradition came from the sea. The portolan charts, drawn on vellum in Italy from the late thirteenth century, record the coasts of the Mediterranean with a precision that still astonishes, criss-crossed by the lines of the thirty-two directions of the mariner's compass; about fifteen hundred charts and chart atlases survive from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Between the two lay the Islamic world, where al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana of 1154, made for Roger II of Sicily, combined Ptolemy with the reports of merchants and travellers. The most famous printed world map of the fifteenth century still belongs to this older world: the map in Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, printed a few months after Columbus's return, shows a Ptolemaic world held up by the three sons of Noah, with the monstrous races of the East along its margin. Our stock also holds a leaf of the Chronicle with the Creation, the opening of the same book.
Print, the discoveries and the new instruments
Within a generation the picture changed. The Strasbourg edition of Gregor Reisch's Margarita Philosophica of 1512 carried a rare folding world map, here in contemporary colour; Peter Apian's Cosmographia, in the edition of 1533 revised by Gemma Frisius, added the first printed description of triangulation, the surveying method on which every later map of a country depends, and taught the reader with paper volvelles that turn; and Sebastian Münster's edition of Solinus and Mela of 1543 contains the Asia map that Burden calls the earliest printed depiction of the north-west coast of America. In Venice, Benedetto Bordone's Isolario of 1534 presented the whole world as a sequence of islands, with an oval world map, the earliest printed map devoted to North America and, drawn from Marco Polo's account long before any European had reached it, the first printed map of Japan.
Venice: Ramusio and Gastaldi
The sixteenth century's great gathering of geographical knowledge was made in Venice by a civil servant. Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557), secretary to the Council of Ten, collected, translated and edited the accounts of the travellers of every age, from Marco Polo and Leo Africanus to Cartier and the conquistadors, and published them as Delle navigationi et viaggi in three volumes from 1550. Jerome Barnes, whose doctoral study of the work is the fullest recent treatment of its cartography, shows that Ramusio worked hand in hand with the Piedmontese cosmographer Giacomo Gastaldi, whom Ramusio himself credits in the preface to the third volume with reducing the New World to a general map and then dividing it into four regional maps. Gastaldi's maps were drawn from Ramusio's own sources, so that a reader could follow the voyages on the map by their place names: the maps of Africa and the Indian Ocean accompany Ramusio's history of the spice trade, and the famous map of New France follows Cartier up the St Lawrence. A fire in the Giunti printing house in 1557 destroyed the material prepared for the second volume, which is why that volume appeared in 1559 without maps and why the later editions carry recut blocks, some of them with the traces of woodworm that Barnes describes. Ramusio's circle in Venice, and the academy that carried on after his death, included Gastaldi, Ruscelli and Sanuto, the men who made Venice the map capital of the mid-century. We hold three sets of the Navigationi: an early set of 1563, 1583 and 1565 in contemporary limp vellum, and two later sets, one and another, of 1613, 1583 and 1606. From Ruscelli's Venetian Ptolemy of 1561, engraved after Gastaldi, come our maps of Cuba, South America, Brazil and Hispaniola.
Antwerp: the atlas is born
In 1569 Gerard Mercator published the world map on the projection that bears his name, in which a straight line on the chart is a line of constant bearing at sea, the first solution to the problem of putting a round earth on a flat sheet in a form that a navigator could use. A year later, in Antwerp, his friend Abraham Ortelius published the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas: a book of uniform maps, each engraved for the purpose, each with a text on its back, and each credited to its source. That last point matters more than it seems. Harley notes that the catalogue of authors that Ortelius printed in the Theatrum had grown by the edition of 1603 to 183 cartographers, some of whom had been at work in the fifteenth century, and that Ortelius's own collecting of maps was driven as much by his interest in them as historical documents as by their use in compiling new ones. The history of cartography begins, in other words, inside the first atlas. Mercator's own Atlas followed in 1595, the first book to use the word.
The Theatrum ran through some thirty editions in seven languages until 1612, and then had a final flowering: in 1641 the Plantin press printed a last edition, in Spanish, of which our Theatro d'el Orbe de la Tierra is a complete copy in its contemporary binding. Beside it stand the first French edition of the Epitome, the pocket atlas of 1588; the map of the Ottoman Empire from the Latin edition of 1571, in the opening years of the atlas, and its second plate of 1588; the British Isles of 1575; and the Prince-Bishopric of Liège from a French edition. Mercator's atlas passed after his death to Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam, and the Mercator-Hondius map of the Greater Antilles of 1606 shows the two names joined on one sheet.
The map goes to China
The European map travelled faster than the Europeans. In 1584 the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, newly settled at Zhaoqing in Guangdong, hung a European world map on the wall of the mission house and, at the request of the local governor, made it speak Chinese; the revised version of 1602, the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu or Complete Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World, printed from woodblocks on six panels of paper, is the oldest surviving map in Chinese to show the Americas. Ricci wrote in the text on the map that, because the earth is a sphere and the map is flat, he had followed the practice of his own country and added two hemispheres, one for each pole, so that the reader might grasp the real shape of the earth. The standard account derives the map from a world map of the Ortelius type that Ricci had brought from Europe; a recent study of its construction argues that its projection matches the oval world maps of the mid-sixteenth century and that the Amsterdam maps of Petrus Plancius were probably among Ricci's later sources. Ricci in turn placed China near the centre of the sheet, a courtesy to his hosts that changed the map's whole balance. The exchange went both ways. Fifty years later the Jesuit Martino Martini brought Chinese provincial maps back to Amsterdam, and Blaeu engraved them in his Novus Atlas Sinensis of 1655, the source of our Iaponia Regnum; Nieuhof's Ambassade of 1665 gave Europe its first eyewitness pictures of the interior of China; and Chatelain's Atlas historique of 1719 gathered the Jesuit reports of China and Japan into a single illustrated survey for the general reader, with a map of Japan drawn, as its title says, from the maps of the Japanese.
Amsterdam: the golden age of the atlas
After the fall of Antwerp in 1585 the map trade moved north. The pocket atlas of Barent Langenes, the Caert-Thresoor of Middelburg 1598, gave the world its first separately printed map of the Persian Gulf; in the same year Jan Huygen van Linschoten's Itinerario, in its first English edition, carried the Portuguese sailing secrets of the Indian Ocean to London. The De Bry family in Frankfurt made the illustrated voyage the most influential picture book of the age, and our complete De Bry of 1590 to 1634 is the whole of it. In Amsterdam Willem Blaeu, who had studied with Tycho Brahe, and his rival Johannes Janssonius competed to produce the largest atlases ever made; Blaeu's Virginia and Florida and Janssonius's map of ancient Spain, from the atlas of the ancient world that formed the sixth volume of his Novus Atlas, show the two houses at work, the one mapping the new lands, the other, in Harley's phrase, treating the past as part of the cartographic record. The trade continued into the eighteenth century with Frederik de Wit, whose two-sheet map of Lombardy was made for the war of the Spanish Succession, with Nicolaes Visscher's Spain and Portugal, and with the made-to-order composite atlases of Reinier and Josua Ottens, of which our Ottens atlas of about 1730, 119 maps in full contemporary colour, is a complete example; Covens and Mortier's sheet of twenty-two American harbour plans shows the same house reworking English material for the Dutch market.
Paris answered with science. Guillaume Delisle's map of South America of 1700, in its first state, redrew the continent on the strength of the astronomical observations of the Académie des Sciences and corrected its breadth; Johann Baptist Homann in Nuremberg, whose map of the Americas of about 1710 still shows California as an island, marks the moment before that correction reached Germany.
Collecting the past
The study of old maps for their own sake grew out of the atlas itself. Ortelius collected them; Mabillon listed mapmakers among the authors a good library should hold; in Venice Vincenzo Coronelli compiled a chronology of ninety-six geographers from Homer to his own day. In the nineteenth century the Viscount of Santarém and Edme-François Jomard published the first facsimile atlases of early maps, Santarém's growing, Harley records, out of a dispute over sovereignty between Portugal and France, and by the twentieth century the history of cartography had become a discipline with its own journal, Imago Mundi, and its own controversies. A report in that journal on a study week held in Naples in 1985 records the Italian state archives of Venice and Naples cataloguing and microfilming their map holdings, and the scholars present insisting that cataloguing is not an end in itself but the beginning of understanding. Frederik Muller, who founded his firm in Amsterdam in 1843, belonged to that first generation of scholar-dealers who treated the old map as a historical document; the collection we keep today under his name is in that tradition, and every work linked in this article can be seen in Amsterdam.
Sources
J. B. Harley, 'The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography', in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, volume 1, Chicago 1987, pp. 1-42.
Awadh Narayan Choubey and Taruna Bansal, 'Maps and Mapmaking in Medieval Times: A Retrospect', Indian Cartographer 37 (2017), pp. 41-47.
Jerome Randall Barnes, Giovanni Battista Ramusio and the History of Discoveries: An Analysis of Ramusio's Commentary, Cartography, and Imagery in Delle Navigationi et Viaggi, doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Arlington, 2007.
Michael J. Ferrar, 'ChMR/1: Matteo Ricci, Jesuit Priest, Mathematician and Cartographer. His 1602 World Map, Kunyu Wanguo Quantu', Cartography Unchained.
Vladimiro Valerio, 'Means and Aims in Historico-Cartographic Studies in Italy', translated and edited by David Woodward, Imago Mundi 39 (1987).
Further reading: Cornelis Koeman and Peter van der Krogt, Atlantes Neerlandici; Marcel van den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps; Philip Burden, The Mapping of North America; Rodney Shirley, The Mapping of the World; Robert Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps; Michiel van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection.