Cartography

In the Middle Ages, few people in Christendom could ever have seen a map. Only those concerned with navigation or scholarship were in a position to come across one. Then, what they cast their eyes over were what historians have suggested were essentially two very different kinds of maps: area maps known as portolan charts, especially of southern European waters, as attempts to illustrate an itinerary or sailing instructions in diagrammatic form; secondly, and until the thirteenth century, European world maps, which had been devotional objects, intended to evoke God's harmonious design in a schematic form, appropriate, for instance, for an altarpiece.

These would appear very strange objects to today's public, encyclopedias of Christian lore and legend that were primarily symbolic reflections of the world and that tried to tailor what was genuinely known about the world to what could be gleaned from biblical scripture. The European cartographic revolution of the Renaissance took on many forms, embodied by great technological strides both in dissemination (printing) and production (the nautical revolution, mathematical innovations in how the world could be measured). But it was primarily a change in the way the world was pictured in people's minds, and here the cool, measured rationality of Euclidean geometry slowly came to replace the colorful mental projections of inherited belief.

The arrival of printing in the fifteenth century de-professionalized and democratized geographical knowledge. It did not fully supplant manuscript charts, which flourished in the cultures of secrecy in Iberian absolutist regimes, or the decorative maps that decked Florence's Palazzo Vecchio or the Vatican's Hall of Maps. The greater possibilities for divulgence, as well as the accompanying steps forward in literacy among European populations, meant that cartography could keep better pace with the geographical discoveries as they were being unveiled and break men of learning's enduring reluctance to accept that knowledge could be outdated.

Mapmaking capitalized on the nautical revolution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which saw the widespread adoption of the magnetic lodestone from the late twelfth century; the invention of Jacob's staff from 1300 for checking the heavens; and innovations in ship design, of which the most important was perhaps the sternpost rudder. Maritime navigation was given the tools to move on from coast-hugging to sailing boldly the open seas though, as the Seville pilot Pedro de Medina (1493–1567) expressed in print as late as 1555, it remained a mystery that "a man with a compass and rhumb lines can encompass and navigate the entire world." Maps, then, were an integral part of the nautical revolution.

It would be wrong, however, to see cartographic science as a set of progressive steps toward enlightenment. The illuminated medieval Arab worldview of geographers like ash-Sharif al-Idrisi (1100–1165), for example, as shown on a silver plate presented to King Roger II (1095–1154) of Sicily, was not necessarily passed on to mainland Europe. Secondly, second-century geographer Ptolemy's mistaken legacy of the impossibility to circumnavigate the southern tip of Africa—a corollary of the antique belief in the orbis terrarum, a planet constituted primarily of land in which the seas were little more than giant lakes—was only strengthened with the wave of Latin language editions following the reintroduction into Europe of Ptolemy's Geography from Constantinople. It was a mistake only gradually set right with the Portuguese voyages around the African shoreline from 1418 and which culminated with Bartolomeu Dias's (ca. 1450–1500) rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1496, faithfully reproduced in the world map of Henricus Martellus.

At the same time, it is easy to understand why Ptolemy's map, and particularly the geometric projection printed from 1477, served as the world map of Renaissance times, against all contemporary maps. The crucial concept is that of ordered space. Even the latest and most sophisticated of the circular mappae mundi, the Fra Mauro world map of 1459, appears to have an element of chance, guesswork, almost disorder in its structure. The circular framework was known to be illogical, the sources for its place-names were literary and anecdotal, even legendary, and their location was often arbitrary. Other maps, such as the Genoese map of 1457 drew from a store of graphic images, which by the late fifteenth century were largely rhetorical.

By contrast Ptolemy appeared to have cast a transparent net over the earth's surface, every strand of which was precisely measured and placed. Moreover, Ptolemy's work was a map not a visual encyclopedia, so that a dispassionate sense of geographic reality prevails. This sense of ordered space was precisely the ideal toward what the artists of fifteenth-century Italy were striving, and where one can read Renaissance paintings like one reads a map, with a new emphasis on the spatial dimension.

The historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto has suggested that the undoing of the mythical Atlantic was perhaps cartography's greatest triumph in the fifteenth century. Islands named Brendan, St. Ursula, and Brazil had previously littered depictions and accounts of the medieval Atlantic, reflecting classical and early Christian legend. Over the course of the fifteenth century, Atlantic space was increasingly discovered and appreciated as a body of water in its own right and not just a section of the "all-encircling ocean," and the real mid-Atlantic archipelagos were plotted into it, initially using rhumb lines, but increasingly according to the grid-line geometrics of longitude and latitude. It took a long time, however, both before the full dimensions of the Atlantic were appreciated and before all fictitious islands were removed from the Atlantic. As late as the nineteenth century, concessions were being made to presupposed rocks and islets.

To what degree Christopher Columbus's (1451–1506) landfall of October 12, 1492, on an island in the Bahamas was predicted by Western cartographic science is a lively point of discussion between historians. It is well known how the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli dal Pozzo (1397–1482) suggested in a famous letter of June 1474 addressed to the Portuguese king that the distance from the Canaries to Cathay might be around 5,000 nautical miles, a journey possibly broken at Antilla and Japan—a chronic misguidance then. Columbus himself is thought to have had some doubts as to the Aristotelian model of the earth, as contested in 1483 and 1484 before Spanish royal cosmographers, natural philosophers who specialized in the relation of cosmic and terrestrial spheres and who based their claims on celestial observations. The fact that Ptolemy reduced the earth's circumference probably encouraged Columbus to "sail the parallel" to cross the Atlantic in 1492. In any case, only after some years of doubts and confusions was Columbus's discovery recognized by cosmographers and mapmakers for its novelty, rewarded with the epithet Mundus Novus, the title of a tract based on a letter of Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512). It fell to the German geographer Martin Waldseemüller (1470–1518 or 1521) to put the suggestion into action on the large woodcut world map, printed in 1507 in one thousand copies, in which he showed North and South America as continents, designated by name. The implications of this New World scheme for shibboleths, such as the idea that all men were descended from Adam and that the apostles had preached throughout the world, was profound. Columbus, then, created the problem of the Western Hemisphere, though right down to his death he refused to admit to his delusion and only at the beginning of the eighteenth century was it shown conclusively through the expeditions of the Danish navigator, Vitus Jonassen Bering (1681–1741), that Asia was not connected to North America.

If the discovery of the Western Hemisphere was one problem Western mapmaking was confronted with, then the acknowledgement of the Antipodes was another. The ideas of the Greek cosmographer Strabo (64 or 63 bce–23 ce)—in print in translation by Guarino da Verona (1370 or 1374–1460) from 1469—had fomented this idea, though he probably envisaged the Antipodes as lying to the west in the temperate sphere, rather than underneath, and an impediment to Eratosthenes's (276–194 bce) view that sailing from Iberia directly to India was theoretically possible if the immensity of the Atlantic did not prevent it. The notion of a southern continent nevertheless persisted until Captain James Cook's (1728–1779) successive voyages in the 1760s and 1770s across the South Pacific explicitly sought to engage this last of the great classical cosmographical conundrums.

How maps reflected people's assumptions and beliefs is an engaging and fruitful line of recent scholarship. Maps in medieval times had been chiefly symbolic constructs reflecting the Holy Trinity in the three pars of which the world was constituted (Europe, Asia, Africa), suitably depicted around the form of a cross, Christ's cross. These have been called by historians T-O maps, where the "T" within the "O" is formed by the rivers Don and Nile flowing into the Mediterranean, these waters forming the boundaries of the three continents known to the ancient world. In deference to the Holy Land, not only churches but also maps were commonly oriented toward the east, at the head of which Christ was often depicted enthroned at the Last Judgment, as is the case in the Hereford mappamundi of circa 1300. Also at the top, but located within the bounds of this world, is the Garden of Eden. Jerusalem had previously been considered the center of the world; this is a reflection of Christian belief and the enduring concept of Christendom.

T-O maps continued to be produced well into Renaissance times, as in the Rudimentum Novitiorum published in Lübeck in 1475. However, the first printed editions of Ptolemy to be published north of the Alps launched a profound onslaught on the last T-O maps, whereas the decline of the Christian commonwealth and the corresponding emergence of notions of Europe saw to it that Europe as a whole, rather than Jerusalem, came to be placed in the center of maps of the world. There were other changes, perhaps deeper motivational changes, casting aside the traditional T-O schema. By the fifteenth century, mapmakers were motivated by geographic realism, most probably because they wanted to emphasize the practical utility of their work as navigational aids, but they may also have been influenced by the same current of thought as the naturalism that influenced Renaissance artists. It no longer became perfunctory to see empty cartographic space as space to fill with all kinds of flourishes and emblems, as if fearing the emptiness of white sections of parchment. In any case, maps were no longer simply devotional objects, but came to record the progress in that European project which has become known as the Discoveries.

Maps had other strategic uses. The crusading propaganda of Marino Sanudo (1466–1536), for example, was illustrated with maps of uncanny accuracy, drawn by Pietro Vesconte, while the territorial rivalries of European states saw to it that from 1482 the first maps made with explicit attention to national boundaries started to be produced. Maps were of crucial importance in the protracted negotiations for the series of international treaties (Alcaçovas-Toledo, 1479; Tordesillas, 1494; Saragossa, 1529) that decided upon meridian lines establishing spheres of colonial influence between Portuguese and Spanish crowns. But at the same time we have to be aware that these strategic functions could impinge upon the mapmaker's task of reflecting reality as faithfully as possible. The French royal mathematician Oronce Fine (1494–1555), for example, devised a cordiform (heart-shaped) projection on a central meridian around 1536 in order to emphasize France's proximity to the new world and her colonial possibilities there. J. B. Harley has unearthed the coded relations of power in outwardly realistic Renaissance maps, showing how they concealed information for political or economic reasons, and used allegorical decoration to further hidden agendas. For example, blank spaces in early maps of the Americas presented those territories as available for European conquest. In some cases, what was reality was entirely relative. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the Italian Jesuit missionary to China, presented a world map to the governor of Chao-K'ing in 1584 titled "Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries," but had to spend the next nineteen years redesigning it, primarily to accommodate his host's desire for China to appear as the center of the world and not Europe.

That the world was a sphere was known throughout the Middle Ages and there is even some evidence that the question of map projection had been perceived as a theoretical problem, by Roger Bacon (1220–1292) for example in the Opus Major of circa 1270. But it had little practical importance, since the known world scarcely exceeded the bounds of Europe. It was only when new knowledge enlarged the world that cartography began to acknowledge the sphericity of the world in the elements of rough spectroscopy implicit in the Catalan Atlas of 1375 and the final settlement for the oval world map as we find in Francesco Rosselli's (1448–1513) world map of 1508, or from the early seventeenth century spate of twin-hemisphere maps issuing from England and the Netherlands.

Globe-making, however, only really came into being following Nicholas de Oresma's (1320 or 1325–1382) De sphaera. Part of the project sought to illustrate the cosmographic scheme implicit in Ptolemy's Geography, which as we have suggested was widely disseminated once it had been translated into Latin in the fifteenth century. No medieval globe of the world has, however, survived from before Martin Behaim's (1436–1507) of 1492, now in the National Museum of Nuremberg.

Cartography, of course, specialized into many other branches. Some of the earliest maps we possess are medieval road maps, often for helping pilgrims find their way. The maritime variant was the rutter, which was of great service to pilots. The mid-sixteenth century governor of Portuguese possessions in the East, João de Castro (1500–1548), has left us some of the finest exemplars of this genre. One of the great cartographic particularities of the Age of Discovery, however, was the isolario, an atlas exclusively given over to charting the islands of the world, and for which the prototype was provided by Christopher Buondelmonti at the beginning of the fifteenth century, to be followed up by Benedetto Bordone (1460–1531) and Tommaso Porcacchi da Castiglione (1530–1585), as well as the French geographer André Thevet (1502–1590). It corresponded, as the Florentine scholar Leo Olschki has tried to show, to what he came to label insulamania, a passing social craze for islands.

Increasingly, maps catered to a variety of different professions. Landowners, particularly in England and the Low Countries, began commissioning estate plans to help them manage their holdings. It was not by chance, so historian David Buisseret argues, that it was precisely in these regions that the first signs of the Agricultural Revolution began to appear.

Governments were another patron of an increased outpouring of printed maps from the sixteenth century; they were typically required for the task of fortifying the frontiers, planning campaigns, acquainting heads of state with ill-known parts of their lands, and mounting overseas expeditions. Both in the lagoon and hinterland of the Venetian Republic, water management showed itself to be an important state activity delegated to the Rural Land Office and the Water Management Board for the Lagoon. Some monarchs, such as Philip II (1527–1598), who commissioned the Relaciones Geográficas, or Henry IV (1553–1610) of France, had access to maps that showed even small villages in the whole of their lands, while others such as the Habsburg Maximilian I (1493–1519), rather than commissioning maps of the empire as a whole, preferred to delineate only such separate constituents as Tyrol or Lower Austria. In the territories of eastern Europe, such as Poland, where magnates enjoyed "golden freedoms" and vast powers, particularly after the Law of Entail (1589), it was they, rather than the state, that commissioned maps.

Perhaps the most thorough of the state-sponsored exercises was the 1791 completion of the Ordinance Survey of Great Britain, as its name suggests, for military ends. Even before then, surveyors like James Rennell (1742–1830) had undertaken extensive surveys of British colonial possessions such as Bengal (culminating in his "Bengal Atlas" of 1779) on sophisticated graticules of meridians and parallels, and which illustrated the progression in imperial thinking toward large-scale territorial domination in the East issuant from a period of intense rivalry between French and British interests for control of the lands of the Mughal empire. Rennell's maps of India produced between 1783 and 1788 illustrated the limits of British dominion and depicted the subcontinent as a coherent geographic entity for the first time. Other European imperial powers, such as France, rapidly followed suit. Napoléon Bonaparte's (1769–1821) survey of Egypt following invasion in 1798 was an explicit emulation, motivated by a desire to gain territorial compensation for France's loss of overseas colonies.

Cartography was also deployed as an accompaniment to the mania for travel guides and illustrated gazetteers of cities that engulfed Europe from the middle of the sixteenth century. Originally inspired by the ancients like Strabo and moderns like Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), early antiquarian compendia such as Leandro Alberti's (1479–1553) 1550 Descrittione di tutta Italia or Hartmann Schedel's (1440–1514) Liber cronicarum of 1492 commissioned bird's-eye views of towns, circular area maps, and illustrated maps to aid travelers.

It was in this manner that the uses of cartography, and also the readership of Renaissance maps, spread rapidly. Although maps still tended to be the preserve of the literate upper classes, they were not the preserve of kings only. Merchants, government officials, churchmen, and even sailors and artisans could obtain at least the simpler printed editions, though the maps of state-owned concerns such as the Dutch East India Company (from 1602), the Dutch West India Company (founded 1621), and the Hudson's Bay Company (1670) were still jealously protected as economic and state secrets. In this way, the cartographic way of seeing the world spread through the same sectors of early modern European society that purchased books and became literate. Maps became indispensable to Europeans' sense of space, and thus, Buisseret hints, to the process of modernization that began in the West in the Renaissance.

But as cartography catered to the needs of early modern society, with its specializations reflecting this, the mapping of the world went on at very different paces. The search for El Dorado and the Northwest Passage were reflected in an intense cartographic interest in these regions of the globe, whereas others waned. Desert regions were ignored, so that Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618), believing in and searching for a suitably empty spot on the map where to locate the terrestrial paradise, chose Mesopotamia. Although the external shape of the African continent was, as has been discussed, largely resolved by Bartholomeu Dias and subsequent Portuguese voyages at the end of the fifteenth century, the African interior remained very much a blank space until the late eighteenth century, and cosmographers were forced to fall back on classical schemes as an aid, for example, in resolving questions such as the true sources of the Nile. It is probably for this reason that mythical constructs such as the Kingdom of Prester John were so slow to disappear from European maps as, for example, we find from Abraham Ortelius's (1527–1598) map of 1573. The vast spaces of the Pacific, as understood from Ferdinand Magellan's (1480–1521) epic circumnavigation of the world (1519–1521), were also only gradually revealed in the second half of the eighteenth century and, as historians like Alan Frost have pointed out, functioned as a second New World at the time of the European Enlightenment.

The next great cartographic leap is the work of the Flemish geographer Gerhardus Mercator (1512–1594), who tried in 1568 to solve a very practical problem, that of representing the globe as a flat surface on which courses could be logged and plotted. Basically he turned the globe into a cylinder. Cut down one side and unrolled, this produced a grid of lines of longitude and latitude that would always tell you where you were with reference to the poles. What it could not do was provide accurate comparisons of surface area because, of course, the ends of the cylinders are lines; the poles, though, should be points. Mercator's picture of the world therefore becomes very distorted as one sails a long way away from the equator. Although not universally approved, Mercator's projection provided a good scientific basis for the calculation of position and direction on the high seas. Subsequent work, such as Edward Wright's (1561–1615) correction for magnetic variations in the North Sea, was able to build on Mercator's legacy rather than require an entirely new platform.

Other problems remained for later generations to resolve. The inability to calculate longitude accurately, for example, which resulted in the east-west extensions of the Mediterranean and of North and South America, was initially approached nationally through the establishment of meridian lines running through the national observatory (founded in London 1675; Paris in 1699). This functioned as a basis for the first large-scale general maps of the nation. But as a more widely international and theoretical problem, the solution, as Dava Sobel has shown, was hit upon by five revolutionary timekeepers constructed between 1730 and 1770 by Yorkshireman John Harrison (1693–1776) in his single-minded pursuit of the £0,000 longitude prize offered by parliament.

While mapmakers struggled with the mathematical challenges of depicting the world in two dimensions, a number of scientific steps forward were made in the task of gathering information about the shape of the earth at a local level and transforming that information onto local maps, and then by way of coordinates on to a continuous projection. The mathematician Gemma Frisius (1508–1555) explained the construction of surveying techniques by means of triangulation in 1533, and what followed was a rapid rise in triangulated surveys serving primarily the practical task of defining boundaries, lines of property, and military fortifications, and from which certain conventions of descriptive geography emerged as well as a technical discussion as to the measuring and depiction of land in small scale. These were known as chorographic maps, and the discipline as chorography.

It is, however, one of the paradoxes of the Renaissance that it was not principally a scientific movement. Even the Ptolemaic revival was more of a literary event, a rediscovery of classical theory, whose content, as we have seen, was ultimately irrelevant to the fifteenth century. The most popular works on geography of the age, such as Sebastian Münster's (1489–1552) Cosmographia of 1544, were still essentially traditional topographic catalogues, rich with cultural features such as costumes and illustrations, and, as the French historian Frank Lestringeant has shown, by the end of the Renaissance was a genre in crisis. In cosmology, the classical, geometric model of the heavens with its interlocking spheres was still dominant. The experiment and discovery that were taking place in the projections of the maps, on the other hand, and the treatises from 1590 that dealt with this theme hardly mirrored the conservative world of the seafarers. Seafarers stuck to their unscientific plane-chart model, which was not built on a mathematical projection at all, but simply divided space evenly into squares or rectangles of one latitude degree by one longitude degree. In effect, these charts ignored the fact that the earth was a sphere.

In conclusion, the cartographic revolution of the Renaissance was a revolution that only went so far. Experience and reason were values and approaches much trumpeted, but did not completely outweigh inherited authority as a source of knowledge. Iconoclastic refusals to sanction the past that we find in the French cosmographer André Thevet, for example, were isolated voices. Secularization of the map as an object had certainly occurred and determined both its new form and its new social context. But even mathematicians like Mercator consciously presented traditional geographical thought and legend alongside the recent discoveries of his contemporaries.

see also Art, European; Dutch United East India Company; Dutch West India Company; Treaty of Tordesillas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, L.A. The Story of Maps. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.

Buisseret, David, ed. Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: the Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Buisseret, Davis. The Mapmaker's Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Education, 1987.

Lestringeant, Frank. André Thevet. Cosmographe des derniers Valois. Genève: Droz, 1991.

Sobel, Dava. The Illustrated Longitude. New York: Walker, 1998.

Whitfield, Peter. The Image of the World. Twenty Centuries of World Maps. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994.