The impact of the new printing presses also affected visual communications – particularly mapmaking. Part of the importance of printing was that it allowed for what one critic has famously termed ‘the exactly repeatable pictorial statement’.12 The new presses allowed mapmakers to reproduce and distribute identical copies of their maps in their hundreds, even thousands, at a level of precision and uniformity that was hitherto unimaginable. By 1500 there were approximately 60,000 individual printed maps in circulation within Europe. By 1600 this number had risen to a staggering 1.3 million.13 These figures are all the more extraordinary when we remember that transforming manuscript maps into printed versions presented fifteenth-century mapmakers and printers with a series of enormous technical challenges.
It was with some awareness of the problems and opportunities afforded by the printing press that Martin Waldseemüller arrived in the town of Saint-Dié in the duchy of Lorraine in 1506. Now known as Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, close to the border with Germany, the town’s geographical location at the confluence of so many aspects of European culture has decisively shaped its history. From the Middle Ages the duchy of Lorraine was on the axes of trade routes from the Baltic in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, and from Italy in the east to the markets of the Low Countries in the west. It was also sandwiched between the rival states of the French, Burgundian and Imperial rulers, and easily became entangled in their political and military conflicts. This made for a tense, but extremely cosmopolitan atmosphere. By the late fifteenth century the duchy was under the control of René II, duke of Lorraine, who in 1477 fought and won the Battle of Nancy over his rival Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy. The victory gave René the political autonomy and military security he craved, and he set about establishing Saint-Dié as a centre of learning to rival those of the French, Burgundian and Habsburg courts that surrounded his duchy.
René entrusted Gaultier (or Vautrin) Lud, his personal secretary and a canon of Saint-Dié, with the task of establishing a humanist academy, known as the Gymnasium Vosagense, for the pursuit of his personal glory rather than financial gain. To ensure that the academy’s ideas could be successfully disseminated, Lud drew up plans (on René’s orders) to establish Saint-Dié’s first printing press, using the expertise of printers based in Strasbourg, just 60 kilometres away, already one of northern Europe’s biggest printing centres, and by the later sixteenth century home to more than seventy printers. Lud was looking for a Strasbourg-based cosmographer, and identified Martin Waldseemüller as ‘the most knowledgeable man in these matters’.14 Like Lud, Waldseemüller was a theologian with an interest in cosmography, as well as in the new techniques of representing them in print. By 1506 he was one of the earliest and most important members of the Gymnasium Vosagense.
Waldseemüller was joined at the academy by a handful of other humanist scholars, in particular two who were to become intimately connected with the production of the Universalis cosmographia. The first was Matthias Ringmann (also known by his Hellenized name of Philesius). Born in Alsace around 1482, Ringmann studied in Paris and Heidelberg before working for various Strasbourg printing shops as a corrector, proofreader and scholarly adviser. Like Lud, Ringmann was involved in the printing of books on Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration, which probably explains his involvement in the Gymnasium. The second was Jean Basin de Sendacour, another theologian with an expertise in Latin, who would prove indispensable in translating classical and contemporary texts.
Waldseemüller’s arrival in Saint-Dié in 1506 provided the catalyst for work on an ambitious geographical project intended to put the Gymnasium at the heart of northern European intellectual life, but not initially designed to produce a world map depicting the discovery of America. Instead, the trio of Waldseemüller, Ringmann and Sendacour began with the intention of producing a new edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. It may now seem surprising for such a group to turn to Ptolemy’s 1,300-year-old book just when its geographical knowledge was being undermined by seaborne voyages to the west and east of mainland Europe, but it was in fact a logical choice. Although Ptolemy’s book was mentioned by scholars from at least the sixth century, it was not until the fourteenth century that manuscripts of the Greek text found their way to Italy for serious study and translation. In 1397 the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to travel from Constantinople to Florence to teach Greek to the humanist circle surrounding one of Italy’s leading scholars, Coluccio Salutati. Chrysoloras’s Florentine colleagues were so eager to learn Greek that they also paid for manuscripts to be sent from Constantinople, and these included copies of Ptolemy’s Geography. Chrysoloras began work on the first Latin translation, completed by another Florentine humanist, Jacopo Angeli, around 1406–10. Angeli gave an indication as to how the early Italian humanists regarded Ptolemy’s book by translating its title as Cosmography, rather than Geography, a decision that would influence mapmakers and their maps for the next two centuries. Cosmography, as we saw in Chapter 1, describes the features of the universe by analysing both the heavens and the earth. For the Renaissance, with its belief in a divinely created geocentric universe, this involved providing a mathematical description of the relations between the cosmos and the terrestrial earth. Cosmography therefore included a comprehensive (if somewhat vague) description of the activities of what we would today ascribe to a geographer, all overlaid with a veneer of classical authority through its evocation of Ptolemy and his own celestial-terrestrial methodology.15
For Angeli and his Florentine friends, the translation of Ptolemy’s Geography as Cosmography was of more interest in resolving celestial and astrological matters than making scientific claims to project the terrestrial sphere on a plane surface. Many Italian humanists consulted the text for philological reasons, checking the ancient topographical nomenclature against that of modern place names. Angeli’s translation produced a garbled and truncated version of Ptolemy’s complex mathematical projections, and as a result it was read far more prosaically throughout the fifteenth century than many scholars since have believed. It did not launch the revolution in Renaissance mapmaking that is often claimed, because its innovative methods were poorly understood and ignored by most of its readers.16 Even with the publication of Ptolemy’s text through the new medium of print, most of the newly designed and updated maps which accompanied it were printed without a network of mathematical coordinates, showing that there was only a limited understanding of Ptolemy’s scientific methods of projecting the earth onto a map. The challenge of simply printing maps was quite enough to occupy most printers and scholars.
By the time Waldseemüller and his colleagues began work on their map, no fewer than five new printed editions of Ptolemy’s text had been published. The first, printed in Latin in Vicenza in 1475, lacked any maps, but this was quickly followed in 1477 in Bologna by the first to reproduce regional and world maps (and which is therefore regarded as the first ever printed atlas, although it did not use the name). The following year another edition was printed in Rome, and then a loose translation of Ptolemy’s text into Italian, complete with maps, was published in Florence in 1482. In the same year the first German edition of Ptolemy was published in Ulm. While woodcut flourished north of the Alps and was used in the Ulm edition, all these early Italian maps were printed using the technique of copperplate engravings. This was more time-consuming, in that, unlike a woodcut, a copperplate engraving plate could not be set alongside movable type, but it held the advantage of a finer and more versatile use of line, which by the later sixteenth century would allow it to supercede woodcut maps.
The recovery and publication of Ptolemy’s Geography in the fifteenth century did more than just satisfy the philological curiosity of humanist scholars. Ostensibly, Ptolemy’s account of the world looked increasingly outdated in the face of the Portuguese and Spanish seaborne voyages of exploration. The early Portuguese voyages down the coast of West Africa revealed that, contrary to Ptolemy’s belief, i
t was possible to circumnavigate Africa, and that the Indian Ocean was not landlocked. Even more significantly, Columbus’s voyages into the western Atlantic proved the existence of land masses apparently unknown to Ptolemy and the Greeks, and had profound consequences for Ptolemy’s overall calculations about the scope and shape of the known world. But at the same time that these voyages were undermining Ptolemy, his texts were proving more popular than ever. New editions of the Geography were published following Columbus’s return – by 1500, of the 220 recorded maps in print, over half were based directly on Ptolemy – but those printed after 1492 contained little or no acknowledgement of Columbus’s findings.17
Rather than discarding Ptolemy, Renaissance scholars adopted a more accumulative approach in their attempt to unite classical with modern geographical knowledge. Ptolemy’s tables and written descriptions alongside medieval mappaemundi were the only comprehensive models of the world available to scholars and navigators like Columbus whose approach was therefore to try to reconcile their discoveries with these classical and medieval paradigms, even where the models apparently contradicted what they had found. Although it was still poorly understood by many, Ptolemy’s Geography did explain how to draw a geographical projection of the known world using spaced parallels and converging meridians within which navigators and scholars could try and plot their new discoveries. The results were often puzzling and contradictory, but they stimulated further physical and intellectual exploration. They can be seen in the early printed editions of Ptolemy, which increasingly incorporated the new discoveries to the point that Ptolemy’s original description appeared almost unrecognizable.
By the early sixteenth century, the leading innovations in print were taking place in German city states like Nuremberg and Strasbourg (which would play a part in the publication of the Waldseemüller map), with their active interest in classical learning and seaborne discoveries. Both cities were closely tied to intellectual developments in Renaissance Italy and seaborne exploration in the Iberian peninsula through trade and finance. The first known terrestrial globe of the world was created in Nuremberg in 1492 by the merchant Martin Behaim, who had financed and taken part in a Portuguese trading voyage down the coast of West Africa in the 1480s. Cities like Nuremberg were also acknowledged centres of excellence in the production of not just print but also scientific instruments used in mapping and navigation.
Writing to a friend in 1505, Matthias Ringmann revealed that the original plan of the Gymnasium printers was to publish a new edition of Ptolemy to eclipse both the Italian and the first German edition published in Ulm. But as work on the edition began, the group was confronted with texts that appeared to describe a new and very different world to the west of Europe from that envisaged by Ptolemy. These were printed translations of the Florentine merchant and traveller Amerigo Vespucci’s letters describing a series of voyages undertaken between 1497 and 1504 in which he claimed to have discovered a new continent. In the same letter Ringmann explained the two main elements that would come to influence the Universalis cosmographia on its publication just two years later:
The book itself of Americus Vespucius has by chance fallen in our way, and we have read it hastily and have compared almost the whole of it with the Ptolemy, the maps of which you know we are at this time engaged in examining with great care, and we have thus been induced to compose, upon the subject of this region of a newly discovered world, a little work not only poetic but geographical in its character.18
In 1503 a Latin translation of a letter ostensibly written by Vespucci to his Florentine patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, was published under the sensational title Mundus Novus. Describing a voyage to the east coast of South America, this short letter described ‘those new regions which we searched for and discovered’, and which ‘can be called a new world, since our ancestors had no knowledge of them’.19 For the first time, the discoveries in the western hemisphere were regarded as a new continent. The publication of Vespucci’s letter seems to have been a deliberate attempt to rival Columbus’s earlier letter to Luis de Santángel, published in 1493, which described his momentous landfalls in the Caribbean during his first voyage between August 1492 and March 1493. By claiming the discovery of a ‘new world’ (in contrast to Columbus’s belief that he had landed in Asia), and adding some lurid accounts of the sexual and dietary customs of the natives, the success of the Mundus Novus was assured. Within weeks it was rushed into print in Venice, Paris and Antwerp, and by 1505 there were at least five printed editions published in German, including a version edited by Matthias Ringmann.
In the same year another letter attributed to Vespucci was published, entitled Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (‘Letter of Amerigo Vespucci Concerning the Isles Newly Discovered on his Four Voyages’), addressed to a ‘Magnificent Lord’, believed to be Piero di Tommaso Soderini, the then head of the Florentine Republic, and describing four voyages undertaken by Vespucci for the Spanish and Portuguese crowns between 1497 and 1504. Although the letter lacked the sensationalism of the Mundus Novus, it dramatically claimed that on Vespucci’s first voyage, between May 1497 and October 1498, the Florentine ‘discovered many lands and almost countless islands’, ‘of which our forefathers make absolutely no mention’. From this the writer concluded ‘that the ancients had no knowledge of their existence’.20 The account goes on to describe a series of landings along the coast of Central and South America, which predated Columbus’s first recorded landfall on the continent in Venezuela in August 1498 by nearly a year.
Both printed letters were forgeries, or at least inflated and sensational versions of Vespucci’s travels, as can be seen when they are compared to the more prosaic letters he actually wrote, which were only discovered in manuscript in the eighteenth century. These letters proved that Vespucci’s first continental landfall was in 1499, a year later than that of Columbus, and that it was not Vespucci but his over-zealous publishers who pushed for his claims to be the first to ‘discover’ America. By the time Vespucci’s letters were discovered, national interests had already downgraded his achievements: from the mid-sixteenth century, Spanish writers eager to celebrate Columbus and his Spanish-sponsored voyages poured scorn on the claims made by Vespucci’s printers, even going so far as to call for the suppression of all maps using the name ‘America’.
In Saint-Dié in 1505–6 the members of the Gymnasium Vosagense were unaware of how Vespucci’s travels were being manipulated and sensationalized. They had no alternative but to rely on the trickle of information which reached them about Vespucci’s voyages, which meant the Mundus Novus and, more recently, the four voyages letter, with its claim that Vespucci reached the new continent before Columbus. As Ringmann’s 1505 letter shows, Vespucci’s letters transformed the Gymnasium’s project. They now embarked on an even more ambitious project than just editing the Geography: the creation of a world map comparing Vespucci’s geographical information with Ptolemy’s, and to publish alongside the map a geographical description describing their reasons and methods for departing from Ptolemy’s Geography.
The Gymnasium worked remarkably quickly, and by the spring of 1507 their endeavours were complete. Their project was published in three parts. The first, the Cosmographia introductio, was published in Saint-Dié on 25 April 1507. It was a short, forty-page theoretical introduction to cosmography, followed by a further sixty pages containing a Latin translation by Jean de Sendacour from a French printed text of The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. The Cosmographia introductio’s full title announced the other two parts of the project: ‘Introduction to Cosmography: containing the requisite principles of geometry and astronomy beside the four voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, and a proper representation of the whole world, both as a globe and a map, that includes remote islands unknown to Ptolemy recently brought to light.’21 It was hardly snappy, but it indicated the scale and ambition of the project, as did its dedication to ‘Maximilian Caes
ar Augustus’, the Habsburg prince and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519). Ringmann dedicated a poem to Maximilian, which was followed by Waldseemüller’s prose dedication, in which he gave a brief account of the Gymnasium’s labours. ‘I have studied’, he began, ‘with the help of others the books of Ptolemy from a Greek manuscript and, having added the information from the four voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, I have drawn a map of the whole world for the general education of the scholars as a way of introduction to cosmography, both as a globe and as a map. These works’, he concluded, ‘I am dedicating to you, since you are the lord of the known world.’
Subsequent chapters provided a fairly orthodox account of cosmography closely based on Ptolemy, explaining the principal elements of geometry and astronomy, and their application to geography. The first mention of Vespucci’s discoveries comes in chapter 5, which describes the division of the earth into five zones in line with Ptolemy and other classical geographers. Describing the ‘torrid’ zone situated south of the equator between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the chapter explains: ‘there are many peoples who inhabit the hot and dry torrid zone, such as the inhabitants of the Golden Chersonese [the Malay peninsula], the Taprobanenses [Sri Lanka], the Ethiopians, and of a very large part of the earth that for all time was unknown, but has recently been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci.’22 In this account, Vespucci’s putative discoveries in the western hemisphere are easily incorporated into Ptolemy’s classical zones, and are seen as contiguous from east to west with other inhabitants of countries within the same parallel. Two chapters later, refining this description of climatic zones that divide the earth, the Cosmographia introductio describes seven zones north and south of the equator, again drawing on Ptolemy. Almost in passing, the chapter explains that ‘the farthest part of Africa, the islands of Zanzibar, the lesser Java, and Seula and the fourth part of the earth are all situated in the sixth climate towards Antarctica’, south of the equator.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 21
