A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  In a subsequent poem entitled the ‘Envoy Travels past Liaodong’, Hongwu moves west of the Yalu and imagines a Korean diplomat crossing the peninsula into Ming territory. Filled with images of a peaceful, timeless society, it concludes, ‘The boundary of Zhonghua [China] extends to heaven and the ends of the earth, / grains fill the fields and are reaped year after year.’59 poems responded in a more subservient tone, also describing the politically sensitive regions of the Yalu Liaodong. In ‘Crossing the Amnok [Yalu] River’, he avoids Hongwu’s aggressive historical assertion of Chinese influence, instead posing a clever rhetorical question:

  The Emperor’s virtue knows no boundary between the realm of Ming and we Yi people,

  [so] how can the land be divided into borders of this and that?60

  Similarly, when he describes ‘Passing through Liaodong’, elides the region’s fraught history of military occupation. His focus is exclusively on a Confucian ‘journey’. ‘The road stretches endlessly through plains’, but ‘with a fervour I am resolved to establish works of merit in the central plain’.61

  At a geographical level, poetic diplomacy describes what appears on the Kangnido map that was completed on his return to Korea. Both his poetry and the map reflect the shift in early Korea from Buddhism to Neo-Confucianism. Although China is placed at the heart of the map, ‘in the central plain’, it is a world free of political borders, stressing the close regional and cultural ties between the neighbouring Confucian kingdoms; and the political importance of the Yalu (in Korean Amnok-gang) is obvious, because it is one of only three rivers named on the map. Even in poems not directly related to resolving the dispute, described a moral geography that resurfaces on the Ksangnido map. In ‘Looking towards Japan’, he describes the ‘wickedness and treachery’ of the Japanese, who ‘plunder and raid their neighbour’s border’.62 preface to the Kangnido map reminded its readers of the importance of the addition of a new map of Japan, although the correct orientation and size of its islands was clearly not the issue. What mattered was proximity, based on the relative threat or diplomatic opportunity represented by Japan. consistent response to Japan, in both maps and poetry, enabled him to establish a common cause between China and Korea in their mutual fear of Japanese pirates and the diplomatic difficulties of dealing with the shoguns.

  In its relations with Japan, the pursued a policy of kyorin (or ‘neighbourly relations’), which involved educating the ‘innately stubborn’ Japanese through the principle of ritual, or ye.63 By the time returned from his successful diplomatic mission and wrote rather modestly in his collected works, Yangch’on chip, that he ‘enjoyably watched the making of the [Kangnido] map’,64 the dynasty’s diplomatic and geographical position in the known world was established, as were relations with China and Japan. Anyone able to look at the Kangnido map could see them.

  When we try to reconstruct the 1402 Kangnido map, the best surviving copy is the later fifteenth-century copy held in University. The Kangnido, which has recently been dated to between 1479 and 1485, seems to reflect the later fifteenth-century anxieties of the dynasty. Its toponymy incorporates several civil and administrative initiatives carried out by the during this period, including the establishment of a naval base in in 1479, clearly marked on the map’s south-western coast; in contrast, it makes little attempt to update its geography of the wider world, still showing China as it looked on early fourteenth-century Yuan maps, despite the availability of much more up-to-date ones. The map may therefore not be just a simple copy of the lost, original 1402 Kangnido map, but an updated record of the rapid changes to the state. The late fifteenth-century copyists may have wished to convey that, while the rest of the world stood, the civic and military administration of the relatively new government was forging ahead.65

  By choosing the 1402 map as its template, and retaining preface, the Kangnido shows that the regime’s interests in the 1470s otherwise remained close to those of the beginning of the century. Both versions were concerned to ‘site’ (to use a geomantic term) the kingdom within a wider world. In that shifting world it had to triangulate the imperial ambitions of Korea with those of China and Japan. But it was also a world in which, relatively free from absolute adherence to Chinese principles, the team of scholar-officials responsible for making the original map could project the ‘barbarian’ lands beyond East Asia. Though it was often seen as barbarian by the Chinese, Korea was also sufficiently independent to appreciate that the ‘world was very wide’, and to want to map its place and history within it independently, whatever might lie at its edges.

  • • •

  To modern Western eyes, the Kangnido map is a paradox. It appears to be a map of the world that is comparable with those found in The Book of Curiosities, or with the Hereford mappamundi. At the same time, Western viewers also sense that they are looking at a world picture produced by an alien culture with a very different method of understanding and organizing physical space. The idea of the world may be common to all societies; but different societies have very distinct ideas of the world and how it should be represented. Nevertheless, as the Kangnido map and its Chinese predecessors show, these very different world views are absolutely coherent and functional for those who make and use them. The Kangnido map is a particular cartographic response to one of the world’s greatest classical empires, one shaped by Korea’s perception of its own physical and political landscape. Both the Chinese and Korean experiences created maps that were concerned with so much more than accurately mapping territory: they were also effectively plotting structured relationships.66 The Kangnido map and its copies were proposing a way in which a small but proud new dynasty could locate itself within the sphere of a much larger empire.

  5

  Discovery

  Martin Waldseemüller, World Map, 1507

  Hamburg, Germany, 1998

  Philip D. Burden is one of the most respected map-dealers in the United Kingdom, an expert in the cartography of the Americas, and author of The Mapping of North America. In the summer of 1998 he was approached by a London book-dealer on behalf of a client based in Hamburg who required his services to authenticate an antique map. Such approaches were not unusual in Burden’s line of work, but his curiosity was piqued when told his expertise was needed as a matter of urgency, and that he would have to sign a confidentiality agreement before discovering the nature of the map involved. After signing the agreement, Burden later recalled, ‘there followed a telephone conversation I will not quickly forget.’

  The information Burden was given was sufficiently extraordinary for him to interrupt a family holiday to Disneyland in California and agree to fly straight back to London and then on to Hamburg. He was met by his client’s representatives and driven to Hamburg’s banking district. Ushered into a conference room in one of the district’s banks, Burden was presented with the object he was being asked to authenticate: what was claimed to be the only surviving example of the printed world map attributed to the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, entitled Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes: ‘A Map of the World According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and Others’, which is thought to date from 1507 and is generally accepted as the first map to name and describe ‘America’ as a continental land mass separate from Asia. Burden had spent years handling antique maps, and the distinctive feel of the paper on which this one was printed convinced him him that ‘it was the genuine article, and not some elaborate fraud’. He was well aware that he was looking at one of the most important (and valuable) objects in the history of cartography. ‘I believed’, he later wrote, ‘that it was, after the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, the most important item of printed Americana in existence and the birth document of America, having named it so.’1

  Burden spent four hours with the map before preparing a report for his client, a wealthy German bu
sinessman who had recently sold his computer software company and was interested in acquiring the map from its then owner, Count Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg of Wolfegg Castle, in Baden Württemberg, southern Germany. Once it became known that the map was for sale, another buyer with a particularly compelling interest stepped forward: the US Library of Congress. Burden’s original client lost interest, choosing to invest his money in another company rather than a map. With an asking price of $10 million, the Waldseemüller map was valued as the most expensive in the world. The library’s representatives now posed Burden a different question: was the map really worth what many regarded as an exorbitant sum? Once Burden confirmed that he had at least two clients prepared to pay the asking price, the library’s representatives moved to buy it in the summer of 1999. In drawing up the contract, the library listed a series of points which explained the map’s importance for both cartographic and American history to justify the acquisition:

  The Map contains the first known use of the name ‘America’ as an original invention by Martin Waldseemüller to designate the new continent discovered by Christopher Columbus in the year 1492;

  The Map is the only existing copy of a woodcut made by Martin Waldseemüller, probably in the year 1507;

  The invention of the name ‘America’ by Martin Waldseemüller for a new continent that had previously been designated as ‘terra incognita’ bestows an historical identity upon the continent, and

  On this basis, the Map by Martin Waldseemüller represents a document of the highest importance to the history of the American people.

  The document went on to say that a further ‘objective behind selling the Map to the Library is to enhance the cordial relationship between Germany and the United States’.2

  The origins of the map’s sale went back to the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1901 Father Joseph Fischer, a German Jesuit priest and teacher of history and geography, discovered the map’s only surviving copy in the archives of Wolfegg Castle. Fischer’s discovery led to a series of efforts by American libraries and collectors to buy it, including the Library of Congress, which was first offered the map in 1912, but declined due to lack of resources. The library made subsequent efforts to buy the map over the next fifty years, but it was not until 1992, and the quincentenary of Columbus’s first landfall in the Americas, that the fate of the map’s future took a decisive turn. The celebrations designed to mark the anniversary included the Washington National Gallery’s exhibition ‘Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration’, which featured the rarely exhibited Waldseemüller map as its centrepiece. Keen to interest Count Waldburg-Wolfegg in selling it, the Library of Congress asked Daniel Boorstin, its Emeritus Librarian and Pulitzer-prize-winning author of The Discoverers, to write to him. Boorstin wrote that ‘As the first map to contain the name for the American continent, the document signals the opening of the continuing relation between Europe and America and the pioneering role of European cartographers in the development of Western civilization’. The count, who, since inheriting his title had turned Wolfegg Castle and the family estate into a thriving health and golf resort, needed little persuading. He quickly let it be known to the Library of Congress that he was willing to sell the map, owned by his family for more than 350 years, later claiming in an interview that his decision to sell was based on a combination of ‘a nobleman’s awareness of tradition with modern entrepreneurship’. But before the count and the library could agree to a deal, they needed to overcome a serious political obstacle: the map was listed on the National Register of Protected German Cultural Property, and no item on the Register had ever been granted an export licence. When in 1993 the Library of Congress’s representatives petitioned the then chancellor Helmut Kohl (a historian by training), their request was flatly denied.

  Chancellor Kohl’s defeat at the hands of Gerhard Schröder in the 1998 German national elections signalled a change in German-American cultural relations. Schröder’s appointment of Dr Michael Naumann as the first Minister of Culture since 1933 (when the post was abolished by the Nazis) was key in deciding the map’s future. Naumann, a former publisher for the Holtzbrinck Group, a multinational publishing group with holdings in the United States, was unsurprisingly a keen advocate of closer cultural ties, and perhaps trade relations, between the two countries. He strongly supported both the count and the Library of Congress in restarting negotiations with the German federal government, even going so far as to suggest that the recently amalgamated car corporation DaimlerChrysler might be interested in funding the map’s acquisition as ‘the perfect partner in this dramatic expression of German-American friendship’. Throughout 1999 Naumann deftly paved the way for an agreement granting the map an official export licence, while lawyers drew up the contract agreeing the terms of the sale.

  On 13 October 1999 the count and the Library of Congress signed a contract agreeing the sale of the Waldseemüller map. Though the price was $10 million, the library could only for the moment afford a $500,000 down payment: the contract stipulated that they had just two years to find the balance, or face the humiliation of returning the map to the count. The Library went on a frantic fundraising effort to cover the extra cost. They consulted the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest individuals, and approached individuals and corporations, from the Texan businessman and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, Henry Kissinger and Henry Mellon, to AOL and American Express. As the library solicited millions from the multinationals, more modest offers came in from the great American public. ‘I’m not rich,’ emailed Greg Snyder in October 2000, ‘but I do have a few hundred dollars I would like to donate for the acquisition of the Waldseemüller map.’ Despite this, initial efforts to secure the money were disappointing, and the library pursued other avenues. After deciding against a plan to offer rare books from its collection as part-payment, the library acquired $5 million from a House of Congress Committee towards the cost, on agreement that the money would only be forthcoming once matching funds had been secured from the private sector. The Committee justified its contribution by citing a bizarre precedent: that in 1939 Congress paid $50,000 for the ‘Castillo Locket’ – a gold and crystal crucifix containing ‘fragments of the dust of Christopher Columbus’. The private half of the money was raised from a small group of wealthy private donors, including a substantial contribution from the Discovery Channel, which the library agreed to help develop a series of programmes entitled ‘The Atlas of the World’. Not everyone was delighted with the purchase. The German academic Dr Klaus Graf had already complained in an online article that ‘any attempt to buy cultural property which is officially listed in the very small catalogue of national cultural property is an act of immorality’, and asking: ‘Has the Library of Congress no sense of shame?’ Commenting on the acquisition, the New York Times acerbically noted that the United States’ relations with Germany had in fact recently plummeted, and that Congress’s decision to provide so much money for the map was in stark contrast to the federal government’s simultaneous cuts in funding public libraries.3

  Finally, in June 2003, the library announced that the acquisition of the map was complete. On 23 July 2003, after more than a decade of negotiations, Waldseemüller’s map was unveiled for the very first time as the property of the American Library of Congress in its Thomas Jefferson Building. Appropriately enough, it was displayed as a companion piece to an exhibition on the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803–6, the first state-sponsored mission to map North America systematically from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Led by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and other members of the Corps of Discovery, the expedition began the epic process of surveying the 9.5 million square kilometres of the interior of a continent whose name and outline had apparently first been placed on a map by Martin Waldseemüller almost 300 years earlier.

  The circumstances surrounding the library’s purchase of the Waldseemüller map are not unusual to anyone working in the cultural industries. The traffic in hist
orical artefacts between powerful nations and empires has invariably involved the development or resolution of larger diplomatic, political and financial interests. In this case, the library’s acquisition and display of the Waldseemüller map says much about America’s understanding of itself as a nation and its place in the wider world. When the sale was completed, the Library of Congress’s website drew on Burden’s evaluation, hailing the map as ‘America’s birth certificate’, the first ‘to depict the lands of a separate Western Hemisphere and with the Pacific as a separate ocean’. It was ‘an exceptionally fine example of printing technology at the onset of the Renaissance’, which ‘reflected a huge leap forward in knowledge, recognising the newly found American land mass and forever changing mankind’s understanding and perception of the world itself’.4 The Waldseemüller map gave America what most nations crave: the legitimacy of a precise point of origin, usually tied to a particular event or document. In this instance it was a birth date of 1507, when, as Waldseemüller showed, America was recognized as a continent in its own right.

  Along with a birth certificate comes paternity, and America’s was identified by the Waldseemüller map as unquestionably European. As Daniel Boorstin’s letter to the count in 1992 had suggested, the map enabled America to see itself as intimately involved in the drama of the European Renaissance, the moment when Europe reinvented itself through the rediscovery of the values of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, leading to what the great nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt called ‘the discovery both of the world and of man’.5 By this interpretation, the rebirth (the literal meaning of the French word ‘renaissance’) of the classical past went hand in hand with the rise of Renaissance humanism, a new method of thinking about the individual self, as well as the ‘discovery’ of the individual’s place within a rapidly expanding world, that anticipated the rise of Western modernity. And indeed, the map’s bottom right-hand legend supports such an approach. ‘Although many of the ancients were interested in marking out the circumference of the world,’ it says, ‘things remained unknown to them in no slight degree; for instance, in the west, America, named after its discoverer, which is now known to be a fourth part of the world.’6 This sounds like the confident modernity of a newly discovered rationality, which draws on the classics only, ultimately, to discard them as a modern, European self-consciousness is shaped. It is this belief that permeates the Library of Congress’s statements on the Waldseemüller map: that it represents a huge leap forward in knowledge; that it utilizes the revolutionary new technology of print; and that it changes our understanding not just of our world, but of our place within it. The map is, in other words, a quintessential document of the European Renaissance.