A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  37. S. Maqbul Ahmad, India and the Neighbouring Territories in the ‘ nuzhat al-mushtāq khtirāq al-āfāq’ of al-Sharīf (Leiden, 1960), pp. 12–18.

  38. Quoted in Jaubert, Géographie d’Édrisi, vol. 1, p. 140.

  39. Quoted ibid., pp. 137–8.

  40. Quoted ibid., vol. 2, p. 156.

  41. Quoted ibid., p. 252.

  42. Quoted ibid., pp. 342–3.

  43. Quoted ibid., pp. 74–5.

  44. Brauer, ‘Boundaries and Frontiers’, pp. 11–14.

  45. J. F. P. Hopkins, ‘Geographical and Navigational Literature’, in M. J. L. Young, J. D. Latham and R. B. Serjeant (eds.), Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 301–27, at pp. 307–11.

  46. The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’ 1154–69, trans. Graham A. Loud and Thomas Wiedemann (Manchester, 1998), p. 59.

  47. Matthew, Norman Kingdom, p. 112; on Frederick’s Sicilian reign, see David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (Oxford, 1988), pp. 340–74.

  48. Ibn , The Muqadimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, 1969), p. 53.

  49. Jeremy Johns and Emilie Savage-Smith, ‘The Book of Curiosities: A Newly Discovered Series of Islamic Maps’, Imago Mundi, 55 (2003), pp. 7–24, Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith, ‘Medieval Islamic Views of the Cosmos: The Newly Discovered Book of Curiosities’, Cartographic Journal, 41/3 (2004), pp. 253–9, and Rapoport and Savage-Smith, ‘The Book of Curiosities and a Unique Map of the World’, in Richard J. A. Talbert and Richard W. Unger (eds.), Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (Leiden, 2008), pp. 121–38.

  CHAPTER 3. FAITH: HEREFORD MAPPAMUNDI, C. 1300

  1. Colin Morris, ‘Christian Civilization (1050–1400)’, in John McManners (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (Oxford, 1990), pp. 196–232.

  2. On Cantilupe’s career and conflict with Pecham, see the essays in Meryl Jancey (ed.), St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in his Honour (Hereford, 1982).

  3. See Nicola Coldstream, ‘The Medieval Tombs and the Shrine of Saint Thomas Cantilupe’, in Gerald Aylmer and John Tiller (eds.), Hereford Cathedral: A History (London, 2000), pp. 322–30.

  4. David Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography, vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago, 1987), p. 287.

  5. Scott D. Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Turnhout, 2001), p. 21. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the map are taken from Westrem.

  6. Ibid., p. 8.

  7. Quoted in Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, p. 299.

  8. Quoted in Natalia Lozovsky, ‘The Earth is Our Book’: Geographical Know-ledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000 (Ann Arbor, 2000), p. 11.

  9. Quoted ibid., p. 12.

  10. Quoted ibid., p. 49.

  11. Sallust, The Jugurthine War/The Conspiracy of Catiline, trans. S. A. Handford (London, 1963), pp. 53–4.

  12. Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (London, 1997), p. 20.

  13. Alfred Hiatt, ‘The Map of Macrobius before 1100’, Imago Mundi, 59 (2007), pp. 149–76.

  14. Quoted in William Harris Stahl (ed.), Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius (Columbia, NY, 1952), pp. 201–3.

  15. Ibid., p. 216.

  16. Roy Deferrari (ed.), Paulus Orosius: The Seven Books of History against the Pagans (Washington, 1964), p. 7.

  17. Quoted in Edson, Mapping Time and Space, p. 38.

  18. Quoted ibid., p. 48.

  19. Lozovsky, ‘The Earth is Our Book’, p. 105; Edson, Mapping Time and Space, p. 49.

  20. William Harris Stahl et al. (eds. and trans.), Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 2: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury (New York, 1997), p. 220.

  21. Lozovsky, ‘The Earth is Our Book’, pp. 28–34.

  22. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1953), pp. 73–4, 195–6.

  23. See Patrick Gautier Dalché, ‘Maps in Words: The Descriptive Logic of Medieval Geography’, in P. D. A. Harvey (ed.), The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context (London, 2006), pp. 223–42.

  24. Conrad Rudolph, ‘“First, I Find the Center Point”: Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor’s The Mystic Ark’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 94/4 (2004), pp. 1–110.

  25. Quoted in Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (London, 2006), p. 123.

  26. Quoted in Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, p. 335.

  27. Quoted in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 2nd edn., 2007), p. 54.

  28. Quoted in Scafi, Mapping Paradise, pp. 126–7.

  29. Westrem, The Hereford Map, pp. 130, 398.

  30. Peter Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, in Harvey, The Hereford World Map, pp. 1–44, at p. 13.

  31. Westrem, The Hereford Map, p. 326; G. R. Crone, ‘New Light on the Hereford Map’, Geographical Journal, 131 (1965), pp. 447–62.

  32. Ibid., p. 451; P. D. A. Harvey, ‘The Holy Land on Medieval World Maps’, in Harvey, The Hereford World Map, p. 248.

  33. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2006), pp. 110–15; Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1976).

  34. Robert Norman Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, 1215–1515 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 198–9.

  35. Valerie J. Flint, ‘The Hereford Map: Its Author(s), Two Scenes and a Border’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 8 (1998), pp. 19–44.

  36. Ibid., pp. 37–9.

  37. Dan Terkla, ‘The Original Placement of the Hereford Mappa Mundi’, Imago Mundi, 56 (2004), pp. 131–51, and ‘Informal Cathechesis and the Hereford Mappa Mundi’, in Robert Bork and Andrea Kann (eds.), The Art, Science and Technology of Medieval Travel (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 127–42.

  38. Martin Bailey, ‘The Rediscovery of the Hereford Mappamundi: Early References, 1684–1873’, in Harvey, The Hereford World Map, pp. 45–78.

  39. Martin Bailey, ‘The Discovery of the Lost Mappamundi Panel: Hereford’s Map in a Medieval Altarpiece?’, in Harvey, The Hereford World Map, pp. 79–93.

  40. Quoted in Daniel K. Connolly, ‘Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris’, Art Bulletin, 81/4 (1999), pp. 598–622, at p. 598.

  CHAPTER 4. EMPIRE: KANGNIDO WORLD MAP, 1402

  1. Martina Deuchlar, The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

  2. John B. Duncan, The Origins of the Dynasty (Washington, 2000).

  3. Tanaka Takeo, ‘Japan’s Relations with Overseas Countries’, in John Whitney Hall and Takeshi Toyoda (eds.), Japan in the Muromachi Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), pp. 159–78.

  4. Joseph Needham et al., The Hall of Heavenly Records: Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 153–9, and F. Richard Stephenson, ‘Chinese and Korean Star Maps and Catalogs’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago, 1987), pp. 560–68.

  5. The Chinese map known as Da Ming hunyi tu (‘Integrated Map of the Great Ming’), held in the First Historical Archives of China, Beijing, bears many similarities to the Kangnido map, and is dated by some scholars to 1389. However, others argue that there is no physical evidence to ascribe it to such an early date, and suggest that it is a reproduction fro
m the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. See Kenneth R. Robinson, ‘Gavin Menzies, 1421, and the Kangnido World Map’, Ming Studies, 61 (2010), pp. 56–70, at p. 62. I am grateful to Cordell Yee for corresponding with me about this map.

  6. The most recent detailed description of the map is Kenneth R. Robinson, ‘ Korea in the Kangnido: Dating the Oldest Extant Korean Map of the World (15th Century)’, Imago Mundi, 59/2 (2007), pp. 177–92.

  7. Ibid., pp. 179–82.

  8. Joseph Needham, with Wang Ling, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 555–6.

  9. Ibid., p. 555.

  10. C. Dale Walton, ‘The Geography of Universal Empire: A Revolution in Strategic Perspective and its Lessons’, Comparative Strategy, 24 (2005), pp. 223–35.

  11. Quoted in Gari Ledyard, ‘Cartography in Korea’, in Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, pp. 235–345, at p. 245.

  12. Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), pp. 164, 220. I am deeply grateful to Professor Brook for drawing this illustration and further references to my attention, and enabling me to reproduce it here.

  13. Kenneth R. Robinson, ‘Yi Hoe and his Korean Ancestors in T’aean Yi Genealogies’, Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, 21/2 (2008), pp. 221–50, at pp. 236–7.

  14. Hok-lam Chan, ‘Legitimating Usurpation: Historical Revisions under the Ming Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424)’, in Philip Yuen-sang Leung (ed.), The Legitimation of New Orders: Case Studies in World History (Hong Kong, 2007), pp. 75–158.

  15. Zheng Qiao (AD 1104–62), quoted in Francesca Bray, ‘Introduction: The Powers of Tu’, in Francesca Bray, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann and Georges Métailié (eds.), Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China (Leiden, 2007), pp. 1–78, at p. 1.

  16. Nathan Sivin and Gari Ledyard, ‘Introduction to East Asian Cartography’, in Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, pp. 23–31, at p. 26.

  17. Bray, ‘The Powers of tu’, p. 4.

  18. Quoted in Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol. 3, p. 217.

  19. Ibid., p. 219.

  20. Quoted in John S. Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought (New York, 1993), p. 32.

  21. John B. Henderson, ‘Nonary Cosmography in Ancient China’, in Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J. A. Talbert (eds.), Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies (Oxford, 2010), pp. 64–73, at p. 64.

  22. Sarah Allan, The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art and Cosmos in Early China (Albany, NY, 1991).

  23. Mark Edward Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (Albany, NY, 2006), pp. 28–30.

  24. Quoted in Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol. 3, p. 501.

  25. Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, ‘Ritual Practices for Constructing Terrestrial Space (Warring States – Early Han)’, in John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (eds.), Early Chinese Religion, pt. 1: Shang through Han (1250 BC–220 AD) (Leiden, 2009), pp. 595–644.

  26. Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol. 3, pp. 501–3.

  27. Quoted in William Theodore De Bary (ed.), Sources of East Asian Tradition, vol. 1: Premodern Asia (New York, 2008), p. 133.

  28. Quoted in Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China (Albany, NY, 2006), p. 248.

  29. Quoted in Cordell D. K. Yee, ‘Chinese Maps in Political Culture’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, pp. 71–95, at p. 72.

  30. Hung Wu, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford, Calif., 1989), p. 54.

  31. Quoted in Yee, ‘Chinese Maps’, p. 74.

  32. Ibid., p. 74.

  33. Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, ‘Mapping the Chinese City’, in David Buisseret (ed.), Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban Cartography (Chicago, 1998), pp. 1–33, at p. 11; Cordell D. K. Yee, ‘Reinterpreting Traditional Chinese Geographical Maps’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, pp. 35–70, at p. 37.

  34. Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford, 1997), pp. 15–44.

  35. Yee, ‘Chinese Maps’, pp. 75–6.

  36. Quoted in Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol. 3, pp. 538–40.

  37. Cordell D. K. Yee, ‘Taking the World’s Measure: Chinese Maps between Observation and Text’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, pp. 96–127.

  38. Quoted ibid., p. 113.

  39. Quoted in Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol. 3, p. 540.

  40. Ibid., p. 546.

  41. Quoted in Alexander Akin, ‘Georeferencing the Yujitu’, accessed at: http://www.davidrumsey.com/china/Yujitu_Alexander_Akin.pdf.

  42. Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, ‘Paper and Printing’, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, pt. 1: Chemistry and Chemical Technology: Paper and Printing (Cambridge, 1985).

  43. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 136–63.

  44. Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, ‘Mapping a “Spiritual” Landscape: Representation of Terrestrial Space in the Shanhaijing’, in Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt (eds.), Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries, and Human Geographies in Chinese History (Oxford, 2003), pp. 35–79.

  45. Quoted in Hilde De Weerdt, ‘Maps and Memory: Readings of Cartography in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Song China’, Imago Mundi, 61/2 (2009), pp. 145–67, at p. 156.

  46. Ibid., p. 159.

  47. Quoted in Ledyard, ‘Cartography in Korea’, p. 240.

  48. Ibid., pp. 238–79.

  49. Quoted in Steven J. Bennett, ‘Patterns of the Sky and Earth: A Chinese Science of Applied Cosmology’, Chinese Science, 3 (1978), pp. 1–26, at pp. 5–6.

  50. David J. Nemeth, The Architecture of Ideology: Neo-Confucian Imprinting on Cheju Island, Korea (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), p. 114.

  51. Quoted in Ledyard, ‘Cartography in Korea’, p. 241.

  52. Quoted in Nemeth, Architecture of Ideology, p. 115.

  53. Ledyard, ‘Cartography in Korea’, pp. 276–9.

  54. Ibid., pp. 291–2.

  55. I am deeply grateful to Gari Ledyard for explaining this point to me.

  56. Quoted in Dane Alston, ‘Emperor and Emissary: The Hongwu Emperor, , and the Poetry of Late Fourteenth Century Diplomacy’, Korean Studies, 32 (2009), pp. 104–47, at p. 111.

  57. Quoted ibid., p. 112.

  58. Ibid., p. 120.

  59. Ibid., p. 125.

  60. Ibid., p. 129.

  61. Ibid., p. 131.

  62. Ibid., p. 134.

  63. Etsuko Hae-Jin Kang, Diplomacy and Ideology in Japanese-Korean Relations: From the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), pp. 49–83.

  64. Quoted in Ledyard, ‘Cartography in Korea’, p. 245.

  65. Robinson, ‘ Korea in the Kangnido’, pp. 185–8.

  66. Bray, ‘The Powers of Tu’, p. 8.

  CHAPTER 5. DISCOVERY: MARTIN WALDSEEMÜLLER, WORLD MAP, 1507

  1. All subsequent quotations relating to the acquisition of the map are taken from the files held in the US Library of Congress Map Division collection. I am grateful to John Hessler and John Herbert of the Map Division for allowing me access to these files, and to Philip Burden for supplying emails and discussing with me his involvement in the acquisition.

  2. Quoted in Seymour I. Schwartz, Putting ‘America’ on the Map: The Story of the Most Important Graphic Document in the History of the United States (New York, 2007), pp. 251–2.

  3. New York Times, 20 June 2003.

  4. See http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2001/01–093.html.

  5. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London, 1990), pp. 213–22.

  6. Quoted
in John Hessler, The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map and the ‘Cosmographiae Introductio’ (London, 2008), p. 34.

  7. Ibid., p. 17.

  8. Samuel Eliot Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), pp. 5–10.

  9. On the early history of printing and the volume of publications, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979), and Lucien Febvre, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard (London, 1976).

  10. Quoted in Barbara Crawford Halporn (ed.), The Correspondence of Johann Amerbach (Ann Arbor, 2000), p. 1.

  11. For a more sceptical approach to the ‘revolutionary’ thesis, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998).

  12. William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communications (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 1–50.

  13. Robert Karrow, ‘Centers of Map Publishing in Europe, 1472–1600’, in David Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, pt. 1 (Chicago, 2007), pp. 611–21.

  14. Quoted in Schwartz, Putting ‘America’ on the Map, p. 36.

  15. See Denis Cosgrove, ‘Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450–1650’, in Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 55–98.

  16. Patrick Gautier Dalché, ‘The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Fourteenth to Beginning of the Sixteenth Century)’, in Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 3, pt. 1 pp. 285–364.

  17. Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472–1500 (London, 1987), p. 1.

  18. Quoted in Schwartz, Putting ‘America’ on the Map, pp. 39–40.

  19. See Luciano Formisano (ed.), Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America, trans. David Jacobson (New York, 1992).

  20. Quoted in Joseph Fischer SJ and Franz von Weiser, The Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in Facsimile (Freeport, NY, 1960), p. 88.