A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  The map certainly represents a totally different world to that of the Hereford mappamundi, the previous map produced in Europe which we examined. In the 200 years that separate the maps, the entire representation of the world, its intellectual and practical creation, even the term used to describe both objects, were transformed (although mappaemundi continued to be made well into the sixteenth century and displayed alongside newer maps showing recent discoveries). In 1290 the Hereford mappamundi is called an ‘estorie’, or a history; by 1507 the Waldseemüller map calls itself a cosmographia (cosmography) – a science describing the earth and the heavens. Gone is the mappamundi’s eastern orientation, its religious apex and monstrous margins. They are replaced on Waldseemüller’s map by a north–south orientation, with a representation of recognizable coastlines and land masses, scientific lines of longitude and latitude, and a series of classical motifs. Bringing together Ptolemy’s recommendation that maps be oriented with north at the top, and the development of navigational methods which drew on the use of compass bearings that privileged north as their prime direction, most late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century European world maps like Waldseemüller’s gradually replaced the east with the north as the basic point of orientation. Both maps display their classical learning, but in very different ways. Where the Hereford mappamundi drew on Roman and early Christian authors to confirm its religious understanding of creation, the Waldseemüller map reaches even further back to the Hellenistic world of Ptolemy, and his geometrical perception of the terrestrial and celestial worlds. Where the apex of the Hereford mappamundi portrays Christ in His majesty, the top of the Waldseemüller map enshrines a classical geographer and a contemporary navigator. While the Hereford mappamundi exhibits little or no interest in explicitly learning from other maps, the Waldseemüller map announces its debt to a whole world of earlier mapmakers – both the theoretical, academic maps and projections of Ptolemy, and the more practical portolans, sailing charts and maps produced by contemporary pilots and navigators trying to work out how to sail beyond Europe’s shores from the early fifteenth century.

  It was sea charts like the so-called Caveri chart, made in 1504–5 by the Genoese mapmaker Nicolo Caveri (or Canerio), that began slowly to map the lands discovered to the east, west and south of mainland Europe over the previous 100 years. The Caveri chart acknowledges the geographical world of the mappaemundi, with its tiny circular world picture placed at its heart, in central Africa, but this has been overtaken by the chart’s elaborate network of rhumb lines (lines crossing a meridian at a constant angle) and compass roses that chart navigational lines of direction and bearing for pilots sailing out of sight of land.

  This kind of chart had been used by sailors in the Mediterranean since at least the twelfth century and developed by pilots sailing beyond Europe in the fifteenth, including Christopher Columbus on his four voyages to the ‘New World’ of America that began in August 1492. By 1498, Columbus’s third voyage led to the first known footfall of a European on continental land in the western hemisphere when his crew landed on the Venezuelan coast on 5 August. Famously, Columbus never believed he was responsible for discovering a new continent: the Waldseemüller map’s full title, and the legend in its bottom left-hand corner, celebrate another Italian explorer who would come to briefly eclipse Columbus as the ‘discoverer’ of the ‘New World’, but would enduringly provide the continent with its name. The legend describes the map as:

  A general delineation of the various lands and islands, including some of which the ancients make no mention, discovered lately between 1497 and 1504 in four voyages over the seas, two commanded by Fernando of Castile, and two by Manuel of Portugal, most serene monarchs, with Amerigo Vespucci as one of the navigators and officers of the fleet; and especially a delineation of many places hitherto unknown. All this we have carefully drawn on the map, to furnish true and precise geographical knowledge.7

  The western voyages undertaken by the Florentine merchant and navigator Amerigo Vespucci at the close of the fifteenth century were, according to Waldseemüller’s map, confirmation that the European voyages of exploration across the Atlantic had indeed discovered a new, fourth part of the world, unknown to the medieval world of the Hereford mappamundi and its tripartite world of Europe, Africa and Asia.

  It was not just the map’s geography that looked so dissimilar to that of the Hereford map. Its style and form came from a world that approached the business of mapping in a very different way to that of the makers and viewers of medieval mappaemundi. The Waldseemüller map was produced through an invention that was new to Europe: movable type. The idiosyncracies of the manuscript scribe and illuminator were gone, replaced by the woodblock cutter, the printer and the compositor, who were responsible for transferring the original hand-drawn map onto the printing presses of early sixteenth-century Germany. Its ideas drew less on religious beliefs concerning the world’s divine creation, and more on classical geographical texts like Ptolemy’s Geography, assessed alongside modern sailing charts like Caveri’s; these mapping practices were compared, contrasted, in some cases incorporated and in others discarded, in the creation of this new world picture. Although Ptolemy’s name is included in the map’s title, and his portrait stands at the top left of the map, it is directly contrasted with the newer discoveries of Vespucci, who is portrayed opposite his classical counterpart.

  In some respects the Universalis cosmographia shattered the classical Ptolemaic world picture, introducing a fourth continent into Europe’s geographical consciousness, and with it a whole set of new religious, political, economic and philosophical questions that would preoccupy scholars for generations to come. But we must qualify assessments of the map as a radical, even revolutionary description of a new world of geography. This is certainly not how it was first received when it was published – or even how it was first conceived. Neither Waldseemüller’s name nor the supposed date of the map’s first publication in 1507 is to be found in any of its legends or margins. It is in fact not even clear whether the Library of Congress’s treasured map was printed in 1507, or if it really was the first map to name and represent America as a separate continent. In the book published to accompany the map, Waldseemüller and his associates hedged their bets about the nature of the new discoveries in the west, arguing (as we shall see later) that America was not necessarily a new continent, but was instead ‘an island’, a cautious qualification which suggested they would be prepared to revise their assumptions if future voyages to and discoveries of this ‘New World’ persuaded them they should. The map is also based on Ptolemy’s 1,300-year-old map projections, reproducing many of the Greek geographer’s errors, and adhering to a geocentric view of the universe that would only be challenged with the publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543. These were hardly signs of a challenging modernity.

  Waldseemüller went on to create a series of maps up until his death around 1521, but he never again used the name ‘America’ on any other map showing this ‘New World’. The mapmaker appears to have held serious reservations about the wisdom of naming the new continent ‘America’ in 1507, and it took another generation before the name ‘America’ was universally accepted on world maps and in atlases. Although an extraordinary amount of publicity surrounded the acquisition of the map by the Library of Congress, the Universalis cosmographia received little public attention on its first and subsequent publications, and within just a few decades all copies of the map (of which no more than 1,000 were printed) were believed lost.

  The history of the Universalis cosmographia shows that defining origins and establishing a moment of singular geographical discovery are far more complicated than we might imagine. The origins of America as a continent, just like those of this particular map, are shot through with competing claims and disputed beginnings made by a range of explorers, mapmakers, printers and historians. With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to look back on this
period of global history as the ‘Great Age of Discovery’, and the Universalis cosmographia as commensurate with the scale and drama of such events. Certainly the achievements of both the Portuguese and Spanish empires from 1420 to 1500 are extraordinary. In this period the Portuguese sailed into unknown space, making landfalls right down the Africa coast, and colonizing the Azores, the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde islands. By 1488 they had established trading posts in West Africa and rounded the continent’s southernmost tip, and by 1500 they reached India and Brazil. Spain’s financial support for Columbus’s first voyage to the New World in 1492 was the first of three such ventures that would bring the Caribbean islands and Central America to the attention of Europeans, followed by subsequent voyages encountering unknown stretches of the Northern and Southern American coastlines. All these discoveries are recorded on the Universalis cosmographia, which shows a world more than twice the size of Ptolemy’s .

  Nevertheless, the most difficult of all terms to explain in relation to this particular map is the one repeatedly used whenever it is mentioned: discovery. Today, we think of discovery as a straightforward concept, which involves learning about or revealing something previously unknown, especially when associated with travel and the ‘discovery’ of hitherto unknown places. The Waldseemüller map might at first appear to represent a defining ‘discovery’ of ‘new worlds’ in the history of Western mapmaking, but its use of the term indicates that it took a rather more circumspect approach to the ‘new’ lands it portrayed.

  For people in the early sixteenth century, the discovery of new places, even new worlds, was regarded with caution, even suspicion. It challenged the foundations of knowledge inherited from classical writers like Aristotle and Ptolemy, and even questioned biblical authority: if the new world of America and its inhabitants really existed, why were they not mentioned in the Bible? The problem was compounded by the variety of inconsistent and often contradictory meanings associated with the word ‘discovery’ and the contemporaneous rise of European vernacular languages. In English the word only became common currency in the later sixteenth century, where it has at least six different meanings, including ‘to uncover’, ‘disclose’, or simply ‘reveal’. In Portuguese, one of the first languages to record the new seaborne ‘discoveries’ from the early fifteenth century onwards, the term descobrir, usually translated as ‘to discover’, was regularly used to mean ‘exploring’, ‘uncovering’, but also ‘finding by chance’, and even simply to ‘pick up’.8 In Dutch, ‘discovery’ is usually translated as ontdekking, meaning to uncover, to find out the truth, or to detect a mistake. ‘Discovery’ was therefore as much about describing an encounter with territory and lands that were already known, through myth or classical learning, as it was about the revelation of ‘new worlds’ for the very first time. Even the term ‘new world’ is studiedly vague: the Portuguese refer to the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 as the ‘discovery’ of a ‘new world’, even though maps of the time represented a version of the Indian Ocean and its related territories. Renaissance scholars were not as excited by the shock of the new as we are today, and invariably tried to assimilate this kind of ‘discovery’ into classical geographical knowledge. As a result, landfalls in places like Cuba or Brazil might be labelled ‘discoveries’ of ‘new worlds’, but the descriptions of explorers and mapmakers shows that they were often wrongly identified as existing places – Cuba could be named Japan, Brazil China, and so on.

  We see maps of the Renaissance as embracing the ‘discovery’ of new lands, but their creators were trying, rather, to reconcile new information with established classical models of the world produced by writers like Ptolemy and Strabo: empirical reports often differed from learned authority, and mapmakers were reluctant to give up on revered classical texts unless they had compelling grounds to do so. Such information as they received was piecemeal and often contradictory, a problem noted by writers and mapmakers such as and even Herodotus, and assessing it alongside classical geographical models that seemed perfectly adequate was a delicate process. Mapmakers also needed to balance their desire for comprehensiveness and accuracy with a new imperative introduced through the new medium of print, and hitherto unknown in mapmaking: the need to sell maps and make money. Printing was a commercial industry that needed to make a profit, as well as providing a new way of making maps. The delicate balancing act of meeting all these objectives is central to the Universalis cosmographia’s creation. To celebrate the Waldseemüller map as a central object in the history both of Europe’s discovery of itself and of America misunderstands the practical and intellectual development of geography in the early sixteenth century. To understand this development, a good place to start is with the map’s putative creator.

  Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470–c. 1521, also known by the Hellenized version of his name, Hylacomylus or Ilacomilus) was born in the village of Wolfenweiler, near Freiburg im Bresgau, in what is today the state of Baden Württemberg in south-western Germany. The son of a butcher who rose to a position on the city council, Martin enrolled at the University of Freiburg in 1490, where he studied (presumably theology) under the renowned Carthusian scholar Gregor Reisch. Waldseemüller would have pursued the study of subjects advocated by Martianus Capella in his fifth-century book The Marriage of Philology and Mercury: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. The geometrical and astronomical elements of the quadrivium introduced him to writers such as Euclid and Ptolemy, giving him a basic grounding in the principles of cosmography. In the late 1490s Waldseemüller moved to Basle, where he came into contact with the renowned printer Johannes Amerbach, an associate of Reisch. Amerbach was part of a second generation of printers who were starting to refine the original development of printing using movable type, publishing a mixture of biblical, devotional, legal and humanist books for a growing community of literate readers. It was probably here that Waldseemüller began to learn how to translate his humanist education in cosmography and mapmaking into the kind of printed map for which he would become famous.

  The development of movable type in Germany around 1450 post-dated its invention in China by around 400 years. Nevertheless, it is arguably the most important technological innovation of the European Renaissance. The first printing press is believed to have emerged from a partnership in Mainz in the 1450s between Johann Gutenberg, Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer. By 1455 Gutenberg and his team had printed a Latin Bible and by 1457 an edition of the Psalms. By the end of the fifteenth century, printing presses were established in all the major cities of Europe, and it is estimated that these presses were responsible for printing between 6 and 15 million books in 40,000 different editions – more than had been produced in total in manuscript since the fall of the Roman Empire (the European population in 1500 has been estimated at 80 million).9 Those who experienced this first wave of mass printing were quick to grasp its significance: the German humanist Sebastian Brant noted, with only mild exaggeration, that ‘by printing, one man alone can produce in a single day as much as he could have done in a thousand days of writing in the past’.10

  In recent years scholars have questioned the revolutionary impact of the printing press as what Elizabeth Eisenstein has called ‘an agent of change’, but there is little doubt that the new invention (or re-invention) transformed knowledge and its method of communication.11 Print promised speed, standardization and accurate reproducibility in the publication and distribution of books of all kinds. The reality of the working of printing houses and the technological and financial pressures they faced meant that these promises were not always fulfilled, but the ability of printed texts to introduce relatively consistent pagination, indexes, alphabetical ordering and bibliographies – all of which were virtually impossible in manuscripts – allowed scholars to approach learning in exciting new ways. Two geographically separated readers who owned, say, the same printed edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, could
now discuss and compare the book, right down to a specific word (or map) on a particular page, knowing that they were looking at the same thing. The idiosyncrasies of manuscript culture, which was so reliant on the hand of the particular scribe, could never allow for such uniformity and standardization. This new process of exact duplication also gave birth to the phenomenon of new and revised editions. Printers could incorporate discoveries and corrections into the work of a writer or a particular text. New reference books and encyclopedias were published on subjects like language, law and cosmography, which claimed the ability to produce precise definitions, comparative study, and the classification of knowledge according to alphabetical and chronological order.