On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

  The map contains almost three thousand place names and a vast amount of explanatory text, and although it contained the usual misplaced rivers and regions, it was a geographical masterpiece. It is also – almost definitively – transitional, hovering between the old world and the new, and between the medieval depiction of the earth as one round ‘planisphere’ and the dual-hemisphere projection that emerged in the sixteenth century. It is the last great map of a former age, history as soon as it was framed.* Venice’s role as ‘the hinge of Europe’ was beginning to come to an end, and Mauro’s vision of a world enclosed within a fishbowl would also lose its dominance. Columbus would set sail within a couple of decades, and Mercator would chart his voyages on a map enticingly open to the navigable oceans.

  The map’s location in Venice is apt for another reason. Its ground-breaking depictions of China, Japan and Java derived from the journals of the most famous of all Venetian travellers, Marco Polo. Polo recounted his travels during his year-long incarceration in a Genoese jail (how he got there is uncertain: one theory runs that he had sponsored a Venetian war vessel for its attack on Genoa in 1298 and his opponents regarded him as a prize catch). His Boswell was a fellow prisoner named Rustichello da Pisa, and although the veracity of some of his journeys has been challenged (Polo was famed for his storytelling, and in da Pisa, a romantic novelist, he had found his perfect amanuensis), there is no doubting the great impact of his account. The book was influential on cartographers after its first printing in Old French in 1300, but when the Venetian presses got hold of it 150 years later it became the most popular travel book of its day, examined by traders on the Rialto much as one might consult a train timetable today.

  Somewhere between the old and the new: Fra Mauro’s map of the world, shown inverted with Britain, Ireland and Europe clearly recognisable on the left. The mass of grey on the land is text.

  The travels of Marco Polo had little corroboration, and in many ways their worth should be measured not in terms of discovery – others had made spectacular journeys to the East before him – but in terms of their recording. As with maps, it is not the exploration itself we encounter, but its historical footprint.

  The story begins with the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Matteo Polo leaving their trading base in the Crimean port of Soldaia around 1260 to trade in jewels with Mongols in present-day Volgograd. Their journey was extended by war, and while residing in the Central Asian city of Bukhara they met an envoy of the Great Khan Khubilai, who invited them to his court. The Great Khan asked them to return one day with oil from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and a hundred skilled educators from Rome to act as missionaries. The brothers returned to Venice after an absence of some fifteen years, with Niccolò now seeing his son Marco for the first time. Two years later the three of them ventured back to the East.

  Marco Polo’s (or rather da Pisa’s) descriptions of their journeys begin in the Holy Land and eventually reach the summer palace of the Great Khan in Cathay (northern China). Polo boasts of becoming indispensable to the court, travelling back and forth to India, and learning of Java and Japan before returning to Europe via Sumatra and Persia. But his Book of Travels is very far from the sort of travel literature we read today; there is very little route detail, and great areas are covered without mention of sea or land, merely of trade; we learn as much about the abundance of sapphire, amethyst, silk, perfume and spices as we do about geography.

  On his deathbed, Polo is supposed to have said he had recounted but half of what he had seen. But the jury remains out, even today, as to whether he really did take the Silk Route, or sail close to Japan. Nonetheless, if his routes are uncertain, the existence of these mystical lands in such a popular account did more than anything to expand the fifteenth-century European view of the world. For Columbus, who is known to have treasured his own copy of Polo’s Travels, it was to serve as goal and inspiration.

  But no one was as heavily influenced by Polo’s Travels as Fra Mauro, and he refers to it several times in the text that covers his map. Almost two centuries had elapsed between Polo’s expeditions and Fra Mauro’s visual representation of it, yet the traveller’s accounts in Cathay had not yet been superseded by further Western explorations. Fra Mauro and his collaborator Andrea Bianco used Polo’s place-names and legends, perhaps also drawing on a mural of his travels at the Doge’s Palace that was later destroyed by fire. In 1550, the geographer Giovanni Ramusio wrote that Mauro had also relied on a map that Polo himself drew while in Cathay, although no such map has survived.

  Even today, Fra Mauro’s enthusiasm for the novelty of Polo’s discoveries is infectious. He describes how the great city of Cansay (Quinsay) was built, like Venice, upon water. He mentions its 12,000 bridges and vast population of 900,000. He wonders too at the splendour of the Yangtze, and its exotic trade in porcelain, ginger and rhubarb.

  d d d

  It was inevitable that the western cartographic view of China was determined by prospects of exploitation; the attractions of ‘opening up’ such an enormous and lucrative market has changed little from the earliest silk route to the present. It was also inevitable that Fra Mauro’s interpretation of Marco Polo’s travels was not quite how the Chinese saw themselves.

  Geopolitics carved in stone: the Xian ‘Map of China and Barbarian Lands’ placing China firmly at the centre of the world.

  Our knowledge of the mapping tradition in the Far East goes back to the second century, when a man called Chang Heng drew up a mathematically based system of size and scale. His guidelines were advanced by P’ei Hsiu, an official of the royal court who constructed an eighteen-sheet atlas upon the principles outlined in the Ch’in Shu, the official history of the Ch’in dynasty. The world was shaped by a construct of angles, curves and straight lines upon a rectangular frame, with the intention that the result ‘can conceal nothing of their form from us.’ Neither Heng or Hsiu’s maps, alas, have survived.

  The earliest maps from China that we do have are dated 1137, and reside on two large stone slabs at the Pei Lin Museum in Xi’an. Measuring almost a metre square, they represent the two traditional styles of Chinese map-making, although one of them, with a strictly etched grid system, would not look out of place on a modern draughtsman’s drawing board. The first, more classical, is translated variously as ‘The Map of China and Foreign Lands’ or – in a precursor to its strict isolationist policy – ‘The Map of China and Barbarian Lands’. It is a heavily annotated and highly politicised representation of China’s place in the world, with the administrative centres of the country receiving prominence over distant rivers and coastlines. This was not a map for plotting trade, but a teaching aid apparently designed for those preparing for civil service examinations, reinforcing the message that China was the ‘Middle Kingdom’ in which the Emperor ruled ‘all under Heaven’.

  The second and more contemporary-looking map dispensed with the rest of the world altogether. Called ‘Maps of the Tracks of Yu The Great’, its purpose is again believed to have been instructional and historical rather than practical, although the location and flow of rivers are uncannily accurate for a map from the twelfth century. The grid scale maintains its integrity throughout the map, with the side of each tiny square representing about thirty miles (and there are hundreds of such squares). As such, it invites generous comparisons not only with the mathematical cartography of Ptolemy, but with the far less accurate sea charts used by western explorers for centuries to come.

  China did, in fact, have a Ptolemy of its own, albeit one with blinkers on. In a country where maps were tools of power like nowhere else, the work of Chu Ssu-Pen (1273–1337) was to be the official basis not only of its maps for five hundred years (first in traced and rubbed copies of his manuscripts and then printed), but also indicative of the fears and wilful ignorance its citizens held towards the outside world. Ssu-Pen’s ‘Earth-Vehicle Map’, inevitably focussed its attention on the cartographer’s homeland, with the Great Wall symbolically dominant. Knowledg
e of the wider world derived predominantly from Arab traders, but Chu Ssu-Pen remained wary of their attributes. ‘Regarding the foreign countries of the barbarians south-east of the South Sea and north-west of Mongolia,’ he reasoned, ‘there is no means of investigating them because of their great distance, although they are continually sending tribute to the court. Those who speak of them are unable to say anything definite, while those who say something definite cannot be trusted; hence I am compelled to omit them here.’

  The earliest surviving copy of Chu Ssu-Pen’s map of China, in the Kuang Yü T’u (Enlarged Terrestial Atlas) of about 1555.

  d d d

  Back in northern Italy, the tradition of Venetian exploration was extending well beyond Marco Polo. Forty years after Fra Mauro made his world map, John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), the Venetian commissioned by Henry VII of England, planted the flag of Saint Mark beside an English one when he made landfall in the New World, while his son Sebastian, who also claimed the city as his own, explored uncharted parts of South America and may have found one of the earliest trade routes via the Northwest Passage. Alvise de Mosto, another native, made great inroads into West Africa in the 1450s and is credited with the discovery of the Cape Verde islands.

  All of these explorations soon found their way onto the city’s maps. Andrea Bianco, who was largely responsible for the Venetian copy of Fra Mauro’s world map, also made important navigation charts for wealthy patrician merchants. And Giacomo Gastaldi, who worked in Venice for most of his life, was the first to map many areas of the New World in the mid-sixteenth century. He also drew large murals of Asia and Africa in the Doge’s Palace, and in 1548 produced what is recognised as the first pocket atlas when he published a version of Ptolemy that included the new and old world. He made a major technical innovation in the printing of maps, too, using copper plates in place of woodcuts, which allowed much greater detail.

  What made the Venetians such purposeful cartographers and their maps the envy of Europe? Power, in the main. The Serene Republic wanted a solid and irrefutable display of governance and fiscal strength, not only over Venice but over all dominions under their control. Maps provided the documentation. But how did the famous cartographers of Venice see their own home? With the same sort of wonder that renders us breathless today. Not long before Marco Polo set forth, the writer Boncompagno da Signa had seen it as ‘incomparable … its floor is the sea, its roof is the sky, and its walls are the flow of its waters; this singular city takes away the power of speech because you cannot nor will ever be able to find a realm such as this.’ But perhaps maps could help define what words could not.

  Jacopo de Barbari’s woodcut ‘aerial photograph’ of Venice, centuries before such a thing was possible.

  The most famous map of the city, and the one that cemented its teeming, intriguing, Byzantine image, was published in 1500 by the painter and engraver Jacopo de’ Barbari. It was a huge six-woodblock undertaking, an aerial view that reflected the ease of trading with the city’s merchants and established the defining (and true) image of the city as a pair of interlocking hands, or – more famous still – a monstrously sized flounder. His work was all the more remarkable because Venice is seen from above – a bird’s eye view four centuries before aerial photography made such images possible and commonplace.

  Above all, though, de’ Barbari’s map suggested that Venice was a place of the imagination, a civic notion both mythic and unfathomable. It was a place where the tourist – from 1500 or 2012 – would get lost no matter how good the map they brought, the tiny calli and confusing sestieri only an invitation to further disorientation. The sat nav is hopeless here, as is the digital map on your phone. You just walk and hope and ask and point, and you may still never get your bearings beyond the four corners of St Mark’s Square (the only grid in the city). Long after you have ceased to notice the lack of cars, long after you have been fleeced in a gondola ride, and long after you have stumbled across a church with the glorious Giorgiones, you will continue to get lost and profit from it. It is this, its charming and ancient unmappability, quite as much as its Bellinis and Carpaccios, that will draw you back into history.

  d d d

  But there is one more place that became important to this story, and it lies far beyond Cathay. It is the Moon. On 5th February 1971, Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell landed on the near side of the moon by a 1000-foot diameter crater formed by a meteorite. In those rare intervals between hitting golf balls and jumping around, they began gathering rock samples, and the rocks they brought back were a little younger than researchers at Caltech in Pasadena had expected – only about 3.9 billion years old rather than an anticipated 4.5 billion.

  The area where the spacecraft landed was called the Fra Mauro Formation, named after the Fra Mauro crater, one of the largest on the moon at 80km across. This didn’t quite have the mellifluous ring of Sea of Tranquillity, the site of the first moon landing in 1969, and there is no official record of why members of the International Astronomical Union nominated this particular fifteenth-century Venetian monk as a small but significant addition to its Planetary System Nomenclature. But it may be safe to assume that they were mapheads, and they dug his work.

  Chapter 5

  The Mystery of Vinland

  If they know what they’re doing, rare book and map dealers can make a lot of money, but they hardly ever make a lot of history. Laurence Claiborne Witten II was an exception to the rule – a dealer who found a map with the power to change our fundamental understanding of the world.

  Witten was based in New Haven, Connecticut, but he often travelled to Europe to increase his stock. In the autumn of 1957 he was browsing in a fellow dealer’s shop in Geneva when he came across something that set his heart racing – a crude map on vellum that suggested that North America had been discovered and settled by Norse travellers some five hundred years before Columbus.

  Viking voyages to that part of the globe had long been an accepted part of geographic folklore, but there had never before been cartographic evidence. And now, perhaps, there was. The map showed what may have been part of Newfoundland or Labrador, which would have been the earliest European document to show any part of the New World. But there was also colossal controversy. Could everything we had been taught in school be wrong? Or was the map an elaborate forgery that would go on to fool some of the most brilliant map historians in the world? And if it was a fake, who was the faker?

  The Vinland Map (with Vinland itself on the far left). A true voice from the past, or one of the most elaborate hoaxes ever created?

  The story of the Vinland Map – so called because Vinland (or Wineland) was, by AD 1000, the name given by the Vikings to North America – is one of the most important and compelling in the history of cartography. Its story also demonstrates to perfection the romantic and mysterious allure of maps, amplifying the impression that they are seldom what they appear to be on the surface.

  e e e

  Larry Witten was born into a family of wealthy Virginian tobacco farmers who later moved into furniture manufacture. He opened his rare book store in New Haven in 1951, and swiftly established a reputation for selling fine medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. He had entered the market at the perfect time: many European libraries and collectors were selling prized possessions to make ends meet, and collections that had been ransacked during the war were finding their way to dealers at knockdown prices. One of Witten’s most trusted suppliers was a Swiss bon viveur called Nicolas Rauch, who not only arranged currency deals at a time of heavy European restrictions, but also a salon in Geneva for the rare book trade to meet and exchange information; his gala dinners before a big sale were unmissable fixtures.

  One of Rauch’s regular suppliers, occasionally from unspecified and uncertain sources, was one Enzo Ferrajoli de Ry, a former Italian army officer who had taken to ‘running’ rare books and manuscripts around Italy, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland in search of a swift profit. In September 1957,
Witten happened to be with Rauch when Ferrajoli drove up to his door in his Fiat Topolino and began unloading his new wares.

  One of these rarities was what we now know as the Vinland Map. The map measured 27.8cm by 41 cm (10.9in x 16.1in) and had been folded vertically in the middle. It appeared in a slim volume alongside a version of a manuscript called The Tartar Relation, a handwritten description on vellum and paper of the travels of the Franciscan friar John de Plano Carpini to Mongolia in 1247–48. Both works were thought to date from around 1430 to 1450, although when Witten first saw them they were in a modern binding.

  If genuine, the map would show two stunning things. The first was that there was European knowledge of Norse sailings to North America some fifty years before Columbus. And the second was that, according to an explanation on the map, tightly written in a gothic script above the depiction of Vinland, the discovery itself had occurred between 985 and 1001, uncovering a great island of impossible promise.*

  What did Larry Witten make of it all in his friend’s Swiss shop in the middle of the twentieth century? He was excited but sceptical. The map felt right to him (map dealers pride themselves on instinct) but he was aware that there were many people far more expert in medieval maps than he was. What he didn’t know at that point was that several of them had already viewed the map and felt nervous about it.

  Witten thought about buying the map and the accompanying manuscript for several hours. ‘My reasons for ruling out forgery are unchanged today,’ he wrote thirty years later. He explained that such forgeries are usually instantly obvious, and the hurdles were large: you needed the right vellum, the correct writing instruments, ink made of the right ingredients, a perfect command of the current writing style and language, and a firm grounding in cartographic knowledge and practice. It would be rare for one person to possess all these skills, and even a team of forgers would struggle to meet the material requirements.