Theater of the World

by Thomas Reinertsen Berg

  Anne Ortel was named after her mother, who taught her how to colour maps. Her grandfather moved to Antwerp from the German city of Ausberg after hearing about the opportunities Antwerp had to offer, and did well for himself–the Ortel family were highly regarded in the city. Anne’s father, Leonard, became an antiques dealer, and inherited his father’s propensity for religious reflection. Like the rest of the city, which at this time was controlled by the Spanish crown, Anne’s parents officially professed to follow the Catholic faith, but like many other Antwerpians held Protestant sympathies. In 1535, Leonard was forced to flee the city due to his involvement in the printing of reformist Myles Coverdale’s English translation of the Bible.

  Charles V, ruler of both the Spanish and Holy Roman empires, had little time for Protestantism, and the Inquisition burned both books and heretics with zeal. When Leonard fled Antwerp, he left behind his wife and children–including Anne’s older brother, Abram, who was just eight years old. The Inquisition stormed the house, looking for forbidden, heretical books, but found none.

  Anne’s father died just four years later, leaving her mother to diligently and successfully continue the antiques business and instruct Anne, Abram and their younger sister Elizabeth in the art of colouring maps. Maps had always been part of their father’s collections, and young Abram showed a keen interest in geography. There was a large market for maps in the Netherlands at the time, which expanded alongside the country’s international trading activities–even outdated maps were desirable, and many of the period’s artists painted everyone from the bourgeoisie to humble shoemakers in settings featuring maps on the walls. Maps were bought and sold at all price levels–and in the Netherlands, coloured maps were particularly in demand.

  Abram and his sisters purchased black-and-white maps, which they glued onto linen canvases before stretching them over wooden frames to be coloured. They sold the coloured maps to private individuals, publishers and booksellers–a coloured map usually cost around a third more than an uncoloured one. Each map’s appearance was dictated by the client–if someone wanted their home town coloured a bright shade of pink, well, their wish was granted. But colours could also be used to convey information. As early as the year 1500, German cartographer Erhard Etzlaub recommended the use of different colours to indicate where different languages were spoken. Later in life, however, Abram would disclose a preference for uncoloured maps. In a letter to his nephew, Jacob, dated 1595, he wrote: ‘You ask for a coloured copy; but in my opinion an uncoloured copy is better; decide for yourself.’

  Abram never gained an education–presumably because he had to work. Perhaps Leonard had hoped for his son to go to university–he had at least done his best to educate him in Latin and Greek–but according to a friend who referred to him in a letter after his death, Abram was ‘hampered by circumstances, having a widowed mother and two young sisters to support.’ The University of Leuven, around sixty kilometres away and one of just two universities in Europe offering cartography as a discipline, must have seemed almost within reach and yet a distant dream. Another friend wrote that Abram ‘studied and practised [mathematics] without an instructor or teacher, attaining only by his own pains and industry, to the great admiration of others, even to the understanding of the great and deepest mysteries of the same.’

  What books might Abram have read? The professor teaching cartography at Leuven in Abram’s time was Gemma Frisius. Crippled and orphaned as a young boy, Frisius grew up under the care of his poor stepmother before being offered a place at the university reserved for talented students of limited means. He made the most of the opportunity, and became an astronomer, mathematician, doctor and instrument maker, creating a globe and publishing De principiis astronomiae et cosmographiae (Of the Principles of Astronomy and Cosmography) as a supplement to it in 1530, in addition to a small volume on surveying three years later. Both books were printed in Antwerp–the most important city in Europe for geographical publications and maps–and it is not improbable that the young Abram Ortel read both of them from cover to cover.

  Abram also read travelogues and historical works: Herodotus, Strabo, works about Marco Polo and Ptolemy’s Geography–probably in the editions published by Sebastian Münster in 1540, 1542 and 1545, the most recent of many versions published since the first translation into Latin over 100 years earlier.

  PTOLEMY RETURNS | The European Renaissance began in 1397, when Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras arrived in Florence to teach Greek to the Florentine monks. Greek had been studied little by European scholars over the previous 700 years, and the monk Jacopo d’Angelo invited Chrysoloras to Italy after meeting him in Constantinople while he was there to study Greek. D’Angelo returned to Florence with a number of Greek manuscripts, including a copy of Ptolemy’s Geography, and a certain anticipation spread through the city’s humanist circles when Chrysoloras began to translate it–so far scholars had heard only rumours about the work, and been able to read only fragments from it. Jacopo d’Angelo took it upon himself to complete the translation when Chrysoloras moved on to other cities.

  In the introduction to the translation of the Geography, d’Angelo wrote that Ptolemy showed us how the world looks (‘orbis situm… exhibuit’). He also emphasised that the Greek scholar offered something that was lacking in the Latin cartographic tradition–methods for transferring the geography of a sphere onto a flat piece of paper. But d’Angelo lacked the mathematical skills necessary to translate Ptolemy’s somewhat complex instructions about how such projections should be created, and consequently the methods were poorly understood by Renaissance readers.

  D’Angelo changed the title of the work from the Geography, or Geographia in Latin, to the Cosmographia. In the Middle Ages, the Europeans had no separate term for geography, and a definition of the word therefore had to be given every time it appeared in a translation–usually as ‘that having to do with describing the world’. ‘Cosmographia’, used by some Roman authors, often served as a synonym, although cosmography describes both the Earth and the heavens. Readers must not forget, d’Angelo reasoned, that the book was primarily concerned with the celestial bodies, since Ptolemy’s longitudes and latitudes are based on observations of the Sun, Moon, stars and planets, and therefore show how these bodies influence the Earth. He thereby incorporated the Geography into a tradition where astrology and astronomy were two sides of the same coin, and this is how we must understand Ptolemy as being read by early-Renaissance readers: the Geography did not suddenly provide the Europeans with a new world view, nor a method of drawing maps that was more scientific than the ones they already had. Instead, they used Ptolemy in the same way they used other maps and astronomical observations–to adjust their existing ideas of the world based on the works of Pliny and the travelogues of the Middle Ages.

  We don’t know exactly when Florentine scholars started drawing maps based on Ptolemy’s list of coordinates, but an undated letter from the early 1400s states that a Francesco di Lapacino was among the first individuals to produce one: ‘He did it in Greek, with the names in Greek, and in Latin, with the names in Latin, which had not been done before in this way.’ In 1423, a Poggio Bracciolini purchased ‘some maps from Ptolemy’s Geography’ from a Florentine statesman.

  The first known map of the Nordic region, drawn by Danish cartographer Claudius Clavus and published by the French cardinal Guillaume Fillastre in his version of Ptolemy’s Geography in 1427. For reasons unknown, Claudius believed that the Nordic region had an east–west orientation, rather than north–south. At the bottom is the British Isles, with Scotland buckling towards the east. Iceland is a half-moon-shaped land mass out at sea, and Greenland extends from the west and out above the Nordic region in the north.

  Ptolemy was rediscovered at a time when the southern Europeans were starting to venture out into the world. The Portuguese embarked on expeditions along the African coast to find gold, supplementing their old, heavier ships with caravels–light, manoeuvrable vessels that c
ould also sail up rivers and in shallow waters. In 1418, two Portuguese ships were blown ashore on the island of Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean; they reached the Azores in 1427 and sailed past Cape Bojador on the coast of Western Sahara–known for its fog and inclement weather–in 1434. The Portuguese had long believed that nobody lived any further south than this, but when they reached the Gambia River, south of the Sahara, they had sailed the full length of the Arab trade routes that cut through the desert, and gold and slaves could be transported directly to European ports.

  The Europeans now found themselves in the part of the world that classical sources claimed was uninhabitable due to the intense heat. After a church meeting in Florence in 1439, at which the Ethiopian delegates were asked a long list of questions about how far south their country was, the Italian Flavio Biondo wrote that ‘Ptolemy, who only knew the smallest initial part of Ethiopia–that contained within Egypt–could not but be ignorant of the regions and kingdoms that lie beyond.’

  To the north, Ptolemy’s world map stretched no further than the mystical island of Thule at a latitude of 63 degrees north. In 1427, after the Geography had reached scholarly circles in Paris, Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre published an edition that included the northern regions. Of the map, Fillastre wrote:

  Beyond that which Ptolemy put here, there are Norway, Sweden, Russia and the Baltic Sea dividing Germany from Norway and Sweden. This same sea, further to the north, is frozen for a third part of the year. Beyond this sea is Greenland and the island of Thule, more to the east. And this fills all the northern region as far as the unknown lands. Ptolemy made no mention of these places, and it is believed that he had no knowledge of them. So that this eighth map might be more complete, a certain Claudius Cymbricus outlined the northern regions and made a map of them which is joined to the other maps of Europe, and thus there are eleven maps (instead of ten).

  This map expanded the Ptolemaic world view to include the countries up to a latitude of 74 degrees north.

  THE NORTHERN REGIONS | The map was created by Claudius Claussøn Swart from Denmark–also known by the names Claudius Clavus and Cymbricus–who became familiar with Ptolemy’s map while in Rome in 1424. Here, he may also have met Fillastre, who was responsible for maintaining contact with the Christian communities in the north, and together they may have agreed on the need for a map of the northern regions.

  Claudius’s map shows a Scandinavian peninsula that stretches from east to west, instead of from south to north. To the far west is Nidrosia, and in the east a road runs from Stockholm to Vadstena Abbey, marking the two most important places of pilgrimage in the Nordic countries. The north coast of Scotland is situated directly south of Stavanger, Norway, and the Orkney Islands in the waters between the two, while Iceland is a half-moon-shaped island out to sea. Furthest west is Greenland–the earliest representation of the country on a map. But in line with the beliefs of the time, Greenland is not an island, but part of a North Pole continent that stretches eastwards, north of the Nordic countries, before curving south to meet Russia, around where Novaya Zemlya sits like a potential and often ice-covered bridge between the land masses.

  Claudius’s influence is evident on the first printed map of the Nordic countries, which was included in a Geography printed by Nicolaus Germanus in the German city of Ulm in 1482. On this map, however, Greenland (Engronelant) has been moved to just north of the Nordic countries–it is connected to Russia by a spit of land named Pilappelanth, which in turn is connected to the northern part of Suetia by a spit of land named Gottia orientalis. The name Engronelant crops up again on the northern part of Norway, named Norbegia, further south.

  Greenland is again located above Norway on the oldest surviving European globe, created by the German mariner Martin Behaim in 1492. Behaim wrote that the globe was created in accordance with Ptolemy’s Geography, but that ‘the far-off places towards midnight or Tramontana, beyond Ptolemy’s description, such as Iceland, Norway and Russia, are likewise now known to us, and are visited annually by ships, wherefore let none doubt the simple arrangement of the world, and that every part may be reached in ships, as is here to be seen.’

  Looking at the globe, it also seems that Asia can be easily reached by ship from Europe, because Behaim underestimated the size of the Earth and placed Japan around where Mexico is located. From the island of Antilia, supposed to be situated out in the sea to the far west and populated by Portuguese who had fled there several hundred years earlier, it is only 50 degrees of longitude to the coast of Japan.

  Christopher Columbus used Behaim’s globe when he set out to look for the sea route to Asia, travelling westwards later that same year. When his ship was far out to sea, far further west than the old world, he looked towards where Antilia was supposed to be located at 28 degrees north. In his log, Columbus wrote that the island could not be seen, but at two o’clock in the morning on 12 October, as the Moon illuminated a beach some kilometres away, seaman Rodrigo de Triana called out that he had spotted land.

  AMERICA | Fifteen years later, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller began to create a new Geography. His original plan included no enlargement of the Ptolemaic view of the world, but he had just obtained a new nautical chart from the Genoan cartographer Nicolò Caveri, which featured large, recently discovered areas in the far west, and a book by Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci titled Mundus novus (The New World)–the biggest bestseller of the age.

  Vespucci’s book describes a voyage to the east coast of South America, where ‘we discovered many lands and almost countless islands (inhabited as a general rule), of which our forefathers make absolutely no mention.’ The book was the first to assert that the countries in the west were a separate continent, and not, as Columbus believed throughout his life, the east coast of Asia.

  Caveri’s map and Vespucci’s book gave Waldseemüller new ambitions–he now wanted to do more than simply touch up Ptolemy’s earlier work. Instead, he wanted to create a world map that combined Ptolemy’s findings with new discoveries, a globe presenting the same, and a book explaining why it was necessary to create something other than yet another version of the Geography.

  In the spring of 1507, Waldseemüller published the Cosmographiae Introductio. In Chapter 7, a fair way into what is a rather dry and theoretical section about the principles of geometry, astronomy and geography, is a passage that would change world geography for ever: ‘the fourth part of the earth, which, because Amerigo discovered it, we may call Amerige, the land of Amerigo, so to speak, or America.’ In Chapter 9, after describing Europe, Africa and Asia, Waldseemüller elaborates as follows:

  … a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci. Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why anyone should object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability […]. Thus the earth is now known to be divided into four parts. The first three parts are continents, while the fourth is an island, inasmuch as it is found to be surrounded on all sides by the ocean.

  The text is remarkably prophetic. In 1507, nobody had yet discovered that America was surrounded by water–it would be another six years before the first European, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, would cross the continent at Panama to set eyes on the Pacific Ocean, and another thirteen years before Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the continent’s southern tip.

  Waldseemüller’s world map was published later the same year. It was large, measuring 240 by 120 centimetres, and divided across twelve sheets–an ambitious example of just how advanced geography had become through the combination of the classical and the modern. This combination of knowledge is expressed at the top of the map–where hundreds of years earlier an image of Jesus watching over the world would have been included, two human representatives of their respective ages with their scientific instruments, a quadrant and a compass, now look down over their respective parts of the world: Ptol
emy above the old oikoumene–Africa, Asia and Europe–and Vespucci above the new world. The map’s full name is ‘Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes’ (The Universal Cosmography According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others).

  Much of Ptolemy remains in the map, including an over-dimensioned Taprobane (Sri Lanka) out in the Indian Ocean, while elements from the Middle Ages are also included in the form of African cannibals. The way in which the northern regions are represented is recognisable from the work of Nicolaus Germanus: Nidrosia is situated furthest west; Engronelant is north of Norbegia; Thule is south of Bergen with the Orkney Islands to the west; and Finland doesn’t exist at all.