Theater of the World

by Thomas Reinertsen Berg

  The creatures in the southern part of the world are mostly taken from the Roman author Gaius Julius Solinus and his book De mirabilibus mundi (The Wonders of the World). Here we see cannibals munching on legs, headless people with their eyes, nose and mouth on their torsos, an individual with a single, large leg, a person with only a small hole for a mouth drinking through a straw, someone eating a snake, a person with six fingers and another with two pairs of eyes. North of Norwegia is the island of the Hyperboreans, a people who according to the Greeks lived where the north wind started, and even further north the island of Aramphe, also a feature of the far north in Greek myths.

  At the very top, furthest east, is the Garden of Eden. Within a ring of mountains that symbolises how difficult the garden is to access, we see Adam, Eve and the tree of life. From the mountains, the four rivers of Paradise join the Indian River Ganges–the easternmost place the cartographer knew of, apart from the Garden of Eden. A third of Asia is the scene of biblical events, and south of Jerusalem, Bethlehem is marked. East of the city is the Sea of Galilee, drawn with a large fish in the middle–a reminder that it was here that Jesus fed the five thousand with five loaves of bread and two fish–and in Armenia we see Mount Ararat, where Noah’s Ark lies stranded. In the south-east is an enlarged Red Sea, parted as Moses and the Israelites flee.

  Turning from the map to the next page in the prayer book reveals yet another map–a round, text-based map divided into the three continents and featuring the names of the most important kingdoms and cities in Africa, Asia and Europe. For the reader who wishes to learn about geography, the two maps complement each other. The image-based map provides a simple overview of our place in creation, the world and biblical history, while the text-based map can be studied to learn the names of countries and various locations.

  The mappæ mundi reached a highpoint with the creation of the English Hereford Mappa Mundi around the year 1300. Like the map in the prayer book, it depicts a round land mass with Jerusalem at the centre and strange beings living on its outskirts–including people with dog heads not far from Noreya, where we see the world’s first drawing of a ski trail–but this map is much larger and far more detailed. The Hereford Mappa Mundi is drawn on a large piece of calfskin measuring an entire 159 by 133 centimetres, and features Paradise, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, Jordan, Jericho, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt, the Mount of Olives, the crucifixion and–at the very top–the resurrected Jesus allowing the Day of Judgement to come down. Two rows of people to the right and left of him represent the recently deceased on their way to their designated final destinations. The Hereford Mappa Mundi is a theatre of the world, in which all of history is played out, from start to finish.

  One of the most beautiful maps in the world–Fra Mauro’s world map, dated 1460. In many ways, the map marks the end of the medieval, biblical map tradition and the start of a more modern, scientific tradition. For example, Fra Mauro did not wish to place paradise somewhere in the Far East because he could not be certain that it existed there–he had read about the travels of Marco Polo. Fra Mauro therefore situated paradise beyond the edge of the map.

  NAUTICAL CHARTS | While mappæ mundi were being painted on the walls of palaces and cathedrals and in prayer books, textbooks and geographical works, another entirely different type of map was also being developed across medieval Europe–nautical charts presenting with striking accuracy the stretches of coastline along the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Atlantic Ocean north and south of Gibraltar. These maps cared little for inland areas–almost all the included place names are those of coastal cities–and only the mouths of rivers are added. None of the religion, history, ethnography or zoology presented by the mappæ mundi is found here–all the geographical information included on the nautical charts has a purely practical function.

  The oldest of these maps to survive is the rectangular Carta Pisana from around 1275. This map, along with two others from around the same time, is so highly developed that many others must have been created before it. But nautical charts are particularly vulnerable due to their use–they are liable to get sprayed with seawater or lost overboard.

  The Carta Pisana features as many as 927 place names, from Lebanon in the east to Morocco and England in the west. One wind rose, which indicates the orientation of the cardinal directions, is drawn to the west of Sardinia, another south of Rhodes, and from these extend several geometric figures that specify wind directions and travel routes. The map also features a scale for calculating distances, and isn’t oriented with any particular direction at the top–all the text is written at right angles to the coastline, and the navigator must turn the map to read it while sailing along.

  The Carta Pisana is probably originally not from Pisa but from Genoa, since the first reference to a nautical chart was found onboard a Genoan ship, and many cartographers lived in the city. But how anyone was able to draw it is unclear. Who explored all these coastlines? What instruments did they use? How was all the information collated onto a single map? One answer is that the cartographer may have combined several regional maps, which may explain why the scales for the Mediterranean and Black Sea are different on several of the later nautical charts. The first nautical atlas was produced in the early 1300s, when someone had the idea of binding several nautical charts together. This offered a more practical and durable format than a long map that required rolling out and in, and also provided space for greater detail.

  Despite the Italian clergy’s complaints that nautical charts failed to show the world’s most important aspects, the nautical charts began to influence the mappæ mundi. The merchant class–frowned upon during the Middle Ages because they neither worked, waged war nor served God–was growing, particularly in the city-states of northern Italy, and had the resources to create secular maps for practical purposes. The influence of the nautical maps made the mappæ mundi less schematic, and more detailed.

  But the mappæ mundi also influenced the nautical charts, which were improved and expanded as the Italians, Spanish and Portuguese began to travel both over greater distances and more often, and eventually began to feature cities, mountains and rivers within the coastal areas. A map from 1339 shows an African king, the queen of Saba in Arabia, a large area of Africa to the south and Asia in the east, and features explanatory texts in the manner of the mappæ mundi. The added decorations indicate that the nautical charts no longer had a solely practical function–they had also become objects of status, bearing witness to discoveries and power.

  The most extravagant of all these maps is the Catalan Atlas from 1375–a gift from the king of Aragon to the king of France, consisting of six calfskin vellum leaves mounted on wooden panels. The first two panels consist of geographical and astronomical texts and diagrams, while the map occupies the next four panels, providing an overview of the known and not-so-well-known world from the Canary Islands in the west to Sumatra and China in the east, and from Norway in the north to the Sahara in the south. The map is elaborately decorated with sumptuous gold leaf and illustrations of cities, animals, kings and flags. Regió de Nuruega is situated beside Suessia and Dasia, completely surrounded by mountains, and here we read: ‘This region of Norway is very rugged, very cold, mountainous, wild and covered with forests. Its inhabitants eat more fish and meat than bread; there is no abundance of barley because of the reigning cold. There are also many beasts, like deer, white bears, and gyrfalcons.’

  FRA MAURO | In Venice in the mid-1400s, monk Fra Mauro is in conversation with a captain who was once shipwrecked on the coast of Norway. In the early summer of 1431, Pietro Querini set sail from Crete for Bruges in modern Belgium, the three ships in his fleet loaded with wine and spices. But out on the Atlantic they encountered a violent storm that drove the ships far off course. In the lifeboats, the crew fought the storm, cold and hunger for several weeks, and just after the new year in 1432, the boa
t containing Querini and eleven other survivors ran ashore on an island at Røst in Lofoten, where the crew was cared for by the local population for three months. Once safely back home, Querini wrote a book entitled In the First Circle of Paradise, in which he couldn’t praise the hospitality of the coastal inhabitants of northern Norway enough. He is now one of the experienced seamen–‘i marinari experti’–who Fra Mauro is consulting as he works on a large world map.

  Fra Mauro lives and works in the Monastery of St Michael, situated on one of Venice’s many islands. He is a cartographer, and the monastery foots the bill for his materials and paints. He has previously mapped an area in modern Croatia, and created a mappa mundi in 1449. The new world map he is working on is a commission from the Venetian authorities.

  As a God-fearing monk, Fra Mauro is well versed in the symbolic maps of the Middle Ages. But he also lives in a city where new information about the world is continually being brought into port, and discoveries of far-off countries cast doubt over the supposedly eternal and holy truths.

  Nevertheless, Fra Mauro starts with a traditional circle on a large piece of vellum. Here, he outlines the three continents Africa, Asia and Europe, but in a far more detailed manner than on the mappæ mundi. He follows the coastlines as they are drawn on the new nautical charts and, possibly inspired by Arabic cartographers, he orients the map with the south at the top instead of the east.

  Outside the map, Mauro includes diagrams that provide answers to cosmographical questions. At the top left he draws the heavens surrounding the Earth, where the Sun, Moon, five planets and stars are located. In the top right we see the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. At the bottom right is a round map, illustrating the five climatic zones, and at the bottom left is the Garden of Eden.

  The question of where to place paradise became increasingly problematic for cartographers as the Far East became better known–not least after the Travels of Marco Polo was published around the year 1300. Some started to draw Eden in southern Africa, which was still largely unknown, but Fra Mauro locates it beyond the map. In the accompanying text he calls it ‘paradiso terrestro’–the earthly paradise–and cites Augustine of Hippo, who like Isidore of Seville believed that the Garden of Eden was located down on Earth. Fra Mauro, however, refuses to situate the Garden of Eden in a location he knows to be inaccurate, thereby combining the cartographic expulsion of paradise with an orthodox text in order to link the new geography to the old truths.

  Fra Mauro comes up against a similar problem when deciding where to place Jerusalem. Again, new knowledge about the Far East is the issue here–it is so far away that Jerusalem has been revealed as being situated west of the centre of the world. Fra Mauro’s solution is to explain that Jerusalem is not at the centre of the world in terms of longitude. But if we look at the population, he argues, because Europe is more densely populated than Asia, Jerusalem lies at the centre of all people.

  The Holy Land takes up less space in Asia than it did on earlier maps: ‘Those who are knowledgeable would put here Idumea, Palestine and Galilee, things which I have not shown, such as the river Jordan, the sea of Tiberias, the Dead Sea and other places, because there was not enough room,’ Fra Mauro writes on the map.

  Fra Mauro gives geography precedence every time it contradicts the old truths. He believes the Tanais can no longer be the border between Europe and Asia, since it also runs through large areas of Europe, and states that ‘I have this from very worthy persons who have seen with their own eyes.’ The same applies to the question of strange beings living at the fringes of the world. Fra Mauro states that ‘many cosmographers and very learned men write that in Africa […] there are many monstrous men and animals,’ but that he himself has found ‘not one person who could give me knowledge of what I have found written,’ and therefore leaves the issue to be settled by others.

  Fra Mauro’s world map reflects the geographical confusion of its age–a confusion due not only to Marco Polo, but also to the fact that the Europeans of the early 1400s finally had access to Ptolemy’s Geography in Latin translation. ‘Andrea Biancho de Veneciis me fecit, mcccc xxxvi’ (‘Andrea Biancho of Venice made me, 1436’) is written on the outside of a folder containing three maps: the first is based on Ptolemy’s coordinates; the second a mappa mundi decorated with Adam and Eve, people with dog heads and kings; and the third is a nautical chart that stretches from the Canary Islands in the west to the Black Sea in the east, and from the Nile in the south to Norway in the north. Biancho, a seaman and captain, has written nothing about the maps, but the fact that he has placed them side by side neatly illustrates the great cartographic question of the 1400s–how should the world be mapped? Fra Mauro’s solution is to combine Ptolemy, mappæ mundi and nautical charts in a single map. He laments that some will probably complain that he hasn’t followed Ptolemy to a greater extent in terms of form or the calculation of latitudes and longitudes, but adds that even Ptolemy believed he was unable to say anything certain about the parts of the world that were seldom visited.

  But by this time the Europeans are travelling east towards Asia, west across the Atlantic and south towards Africa in search of goods; new countries and coastlines are being mapped, and even the northern regions are starting to be represented with more accurate contours. These are easily recognisable on Fra Mauro’s map–Datia has worked loose from the continent to become an island, but retained its shape, and Norvegia and Svetia are a peninsula that stretches from south to north. ‘In this province of Norway came ashore Piero Querini, as is well known,’ he writes next to the Norwegian coast.

  Fra Mauro changes his mind several times over the years in which he works on the map–many of its over 200 texts are entered on labels he has affixed over something else. Perhaps he wrote the labels when the map was finally finished, after receiving new information from an increasing number of travellers from distant regions–or perhaps the map was never finished, as it was dated 1460, the year after his death. But Fra Mauro did write a final greeting to all those who would study his map:

  This work […] has not achieved all it should, for truly it is not possible for the human intellect without divine assistance to verify everything on this cosmographia or mappamundi, the information on which is more like a taste than the complete satisfaction of one’s desire.

  Fra Mauro’s map could never be finished because he was working in an outdated format–it was almost bursting at the seams. The new discoveries in both the east and west meant that the land mass no longer fitted within a round map without minimising the old world. Almost 2,000 years after the Greek philosopher Democritus criticised round world maps, the Europeans once again began to understand that they should be oval. And just thirty-three years after Fra Mauro, even more countries would be discovered–this time far off in the west.

  TRADITION | The medieval period is often presented as breaking with antiquity, but cartographic history shows that during the Middle Ages, scholars often both conveyed knowledge from antiquity and built upon it. The church fathers took up Augustine of Hippo’s challenge to ‘plunder the Egyptians’ and use the knowledge obtained by the Greeks and Romans, and used this to draw the maps they needed–images of the world with all that is holy at their centre. These maps contained huge volumes of geographical, theological, historical and ethnographic information, but were almost useless for navigation. Christian geography combined time and space in a way that would have been incomprehensible to the Greeks and Romans–their religions involved no fall from grace, damnation or salvation; nor did they imagine a time at which world history would come to an end. If Greek maps had been scientific and theoretical, and Roman maps practical, medieval European maps were for the most part theological, didactic and narrative in nature. Later, practical needs led to the development of nautical charts–a genre begun by travelling Italian merchants and continued by the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch when new ships and the desire for wealth triggered a period in which the Europeans set out across the high seas.
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br />   Detail of a map of the Duchy of Brabant, which comprised parts of today’s Belgium and the Netherlands, including Antwerp, Abraham Ortelius’s home town. Printed in the 1570 edition of the Theatrum orbis terrarum.

  THE FIRST ATLAS

  Antwerp, Belgium

  51° 13′ 6″ N

  4° 23′ 53″ E

  With her brush, Anne Ortel carefully applies light-green paint to an area of woodland, then uses pale and darker brown to indicate the lowlands of Brabantia, Flandria, Hannoia and Hollandia. Two shades of blue denote the water: light for the vast ocean, and dark for the rivers, lakes and navigable waterways along the coast. She paints the ships brown and dark yellow, then dips her brush in red to colour the cities, one by one: Brueßel, Utrecht, Louen and Oosterwijck; Amsterdam, Delft, Eyndhouen and Antwerpen–her home town. In 1570, Antwerp is the richest city in the world thanks to the trade that takes place along the River Schelde. The significance of this waterway is clear, as a five-metre-long map of it was created in 1486. In Antwerp, the Spanish and Portuguese purchase copper and silver mined in southern Germany, before transporting it to India and Africa where they exchange it for spices, ivory and slaves. English cloth, Flemish embroidery and German leather goods are traded here, and the city itself exports luxury products such as glass, gems and wallpapers.

  The Antwerp of Ortel’s time is a cosmopolitan city. If you take a walk beside the port, where over 2,500 ships dock each year, you might hear merchants speaking Dutch, English, French, Italian, Yiddish, Portuguese, Spanish and German, in addition to African and East Asian languages. Traffic to the city is so great, and the new, modern cranes so numerous, that Antwerp even has its own crane operators’ guild. A network of canals spreads from the port to the city’s many warehouses, and then further out into the Brabantian countryside. Like Alexandria 1,500 years earlier, Antwerp is a trading hub with a significant interest in geography and the wider world. Antwerp has no major library or renowned educational institution, but makes up for this with its many printing houses, booksellers and publishers–since German printer Johannes Gutenberg began producing books in the 1450s, the book market has developed at such a pace that the need for libraries has reduced. Dutch humanist Erasmus praised a printer friend by asserting that he was ‘building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself,’ and Antwerp’s printing houses act as libraries, booksellers, publishers, workshops and meeting places for scholars of all kinds. Most of them are located in Kammenstraat, including Europe’s biggest and most important printing house at this time, De Gulden Passer (The Golden Compasses), where business has increased to such an extent that the premises now span seven buildings located side by side.