A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  The passage which follows is one of the most important statements in early European exploration. ‘The fourth part of the earth, we have decided to call Amerige, the land of Amerigo we might even say, or America because it was discovered by Amerigo.’23 This is the first recorded mention of the naming of America after Vespucci, but remarkably, the passage is made to fit almost seamlessly within the classical understanding of the earth divided into climatic zones. Vespucci’s discoveries in the Americas are incorporated into the same zone running from east to west that includes southern Africa and the islands of the southern Indian Ocean. As a result, according to the Cosmographia introductio, Vespucci’s ‘discoveries’ strengthened, rather than eroded, Ptolemy’s world picture.

  Finally, in chapter 9, the Cosmographia introductio provides a general description of the earth. It begins: ‘There is at this time a fourth part of this small world barely known to Ptolemy and inhabited by beings like ourselves.’ It goes on to describe Europe, Africa and Asia, before returning to the new territories and repeating the idea for naming them:

  Today these parts of the world have been more extensively explored than a fourth part of the world, as will be explained in what follows, and that has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci. Because it is well known that Europe and Asia were named after women, I can see no reason why anyone would have good reason to object to calling this fourth part Amerige, the land of Amerigo, or America, after the man of great ability who discovered it.

  In concluding, the chapter states: ‘The earth is now known to be divided into four parts. The first three of these are connected and are continents, but the fourth part is an island because it has been found to be completely surrounded on all of its sides by sea.’24 At the same time as celebrating the new discoveries, the text tells its readers that Ptolemy ‘barely’ knew the fourth part of the world – which is very different from saying he did not know it at all. The impact of new geographical information and maps can be detected in the phrases ‘now known’ and ‘been found’, but with it comes the ultimate quibble regarding the new-found land’s status as either an island or a continent. Renaissance mapmakers understood islands and ‘parts’ of the world based on classical ‘zonal’ maps, but ‘continents’ were more difficult to define. The cosmographer Peter Apian defined it in 1524 as ‘firm or fixed land which is neither an island nor a peninsula nor an isthmus’,25 which was hardly helpful. Europe, Asia and Africa were understood to be ‘continents’, but Waldseemüller and his colleagues were understandably reluctant to give the new land of America such important status in 1507 without additional verification of its shape and size. As a result, it remained an island until further notice.

  The second part of the publication was, as the dedication promised, a small woodcut map just 24 × 39 centimetres, composed of map gores – strips with curved sides tapering to a point which when pasted together onto a small sphere made up a complete terrestrial globe. These were the first known printed gores for a terrestrial globe ever made, and include a western hemisphere, with South America labelled ‘America’. The globe gores were closely related to the final, and most ambitious element in the whole project, the enormous twelve-sheet world map, Universalis cosmographia, the first printed wall map.

  Although the printing of the whole Cosmographia introductio was a reasonably straightforward task for the small Saint-Dié press, the scale and detail of the Universalis cosmographia was beyond its limited means, and printing was moved to Strasbourg, where it was probably finished in the printing house of Johann Grüninger. Even by today’s standards, its printing was an extraordinary technical achievement. It is composed of twelve separate sheets of individual woodcuts, printed on handmade rag paper, each measuring 45 × 60 centimetres. Once all twelve sheets are assembled, the map measures a massive 120 × 240 centimetres (approximately 34 square feet). It is all the more staggering in the light of the kind of practical problems it presented to its printers.

  Fig. 13 Martin Waldseemüller, globe gores, 1507.

  The map was made using the relief woodcut technique, which was common well into the sixteenth century. Towns and cities like Strasbourg, Nuremberg and Basle, with their strong tradition in craftsmen, and easy access to wood, paper and water, were perfectly positioned to develop printed woodcuts. The woodcut method involved fashioning a block from a plank of wood; the craftsman (in German known as a Formschneider) carved out the non-printed areas (white in the final printed version) with knives and chisels, to leave the linear design of the map in relief, which then received the ink and produced the impression of geographical features. This was a far more laborious and skilled process than setting type for a short written text like the Cosmographia introductio, and prescribed the visual vocabulary of the final printed object. The woodcut technique was limited in its capacity to reproduce gradations of tone and fineness of line and detail, all of which are essential in territorial representation. Where geographical information was limited, the woodcut was left flat, creating no impression on the surface of the paper. The large, blank areas in Africa and Asia on the Universalis cosmographia are therefore a result as much of the printing process as the limitations of geographical knowledge.

  Another problem the printers faced was lettering. Maps need to combine text with line, and this led early printers to cut letters directly onto the block alongside the map’s visual detail, which then carried the distinctive square, severe Gothic lettering produced by flat-bladed knives, but the Waldseemüller map was being produced at exactly the moment when the older technique was giving way to the more elegant Roman type favoured by Italian humanists. It is a sign of the speed with which the map was put together that it uses both Gothic and Roman lettering, although this led to various inconsistencies in letter size and shape. In fact, the map shows two ways of reproducing the letter forms. The first was to cut them directly onto the block, although this was time-consuming. Another was to chisel a slot in the woodblock and wedge in type using glue. This also presented the printer with problems, as mistakes could easily creep in, and multiple insertions of type led to the block looking like a honeycomb, which could produce warping or even splitting. Setting one masterforme (the two-sided frame on which type was set to print both sides of a folio sheet) could be at least one day’s work by two compositors, just for the text. This did not include carving intricate geographical outlines onto a woodblock, and then setting it with type, which would have taken much longer, stretching over weeks rather than days. Multiplying this kind of specialized labour by twelve (the number of sheets which made up the Universalis cosmographia) gives some idea of both the daunting nature and the remarkable speed with which the Gymnasium’s project was executed throughout 1506–7.26

  A further difficulty was reconciling the use of woodcut illustrations with type. Printers would often take as many ‘pulls’, or imprints from the woodcut map illustration as they felt were required for a particular edition, then put them to one side, while they broke up the valuable type for use in the printing of other books. When the maps were reassembled for another print run, the type needed to be reset, at which stage minor corrections could be made – or new errors could appear. This might have important consequences for the surviving Waldseemüller map. Many other apparently ‘identical’ printed maps from the early sixteenth century still exist in different editions with noticeably different lettering, giving the lie to the belief that printed maps are always exact copies of an original.27 These problems of reproduction led many readers and scholars to temper the enthusiasm for print expressed by the likes of Sebastian Brant; one of Brant’s contemporaries warned that such errors by careless printers turned the medium of print ‘into an instrument of destruction when they, completely devoid of judgment, do not print well-emended books, but ruin them by bad and careless editing’.28

  Fig. 14 T-O map from Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 1472.

  A final problem faced by the Strasbourg printer was how to
transfer the enormous cartographic design (presumably drawn by Waldseemüller) onto the woodblocks. With prime responsibility for the original manuscript map, Waldseemüller also had to supervise its transfer onto the twelve blocks, either by drawing on the blocks in reverse or by pasting the original manuscript maps onto the block and cutting through it before it was carved in relief. This second method would have involved varnishing the map on the back to allow the image to come through, and then cutting through and down into the block. The major drawback to this process was of course that the original map was destroyed, although it might also explain why Waldseemüller’s handdrawn map has not survived (like many maps from this period that went into print). With simple, diagrammatic maps like the first known printed example, a T-O map used to illustrate an edition of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, printed in Augsburg in 1472, many of these problems were relatively straightforward. But with maps printed on the scale of the Universalis cosmographia, the logistical problems involved were immense.29

  We do not know exactly whether the tripartite publication was sold as a package, or if its elements were sold separately. They were certainly very different: each of the wall map’s twelve sheets was nearly twice the size of the dimensions of both the introductory text and the globe gores. But taken together this was an ambitious declaration of the classical and modern state of cosmography and geography in all its dimensions. These texts collectively represented an irrevocable departure from medieval mappaemundi. The causes were obvious: the impact of printing, which produced the map’s utterly different appearance; the influence of Ptolemy’s Geography; and the effect of contemporary geographical discovery, most noticeably that of Vespucci in the ‘New World’ of the Americas. The Gymnasium’s achievements were not confined to changing the geographical representation of the world: they were also part of a new approach to geography as an intellectual discipline, in terms of both the ways it was produced and how it was used. Where the Hereford mappaemundi provided answers to the world’s divine creation and the afterlife, the Universalis cosmographia tried to unify classical, medieval and modern representations of the world in line with Renaissance humanist thinking, and made possible the circulation of multiple copies of roughly the same image to a range of individuals – scholars, navigators and diplomats – all with very different interests in this emerging ‘new world’.

  The Universalis cosmographia neatly divides the world into two halves, a western and an eastern hemisphere (although they are not named as such), oriented with north at the top. To the right, the six sheets run down from north to south through the Caspian Sea, the Arabian peninsula and the east coast of Africa. Although the orientation and shape of the medieval mappaemundi has gone, much of the descriptive detail on the map still derives from medieval and classical geography. The depiction of central and eastern Asia is mainly drawn from Marco Polo’s late thirteenth-century travels, and the rest of the region reproduces Ptolemy’s erroneous geography. Although the map draws on Caveri’s sea chart with traces of early Portuguese voyages to the Indian subcontinent (starting with Vasco da Gama’s first voyage in 1497–9), India is almost completely unrecognizable, as Waldseemüller retreats from contemporary information to reproduce Ptolemy’s mistakes. The region is far too small in its western description (labelled ‘India Gangem’), and then extends too far eastwards into what is now South-east Asia, where Waldseemüller and his colleagues again reproduce Ptolemy and his ‘Sinus Magna’, or ‘Great Gulf’. Referred to by modern cartographic historians as ‘Tiger-leg peninsula’ for obvious graphic reasons, it approximates to the position of modern-day Cambodia. The map’s depiction of India also reproduces the medieval belief in ‘Prester John’, a mythical Christian king thought to inhabit either this region or eastern Africa (both of which had their own small Christian communities). Although he is not directly portrayed (unlike on some other contemporary maps), his existence is acknowledged in the Christian crosses that dot eastern India, labelled ‘India Meridionalis’.

  Fig. 15 Detail of the eastern hemisphere of the Universalis cosmographia.

  To the west, Madagascar is named but placed too far east, while Sri Lanka (‘Taprobana’) is placed too far west, and disproportionate to its actual size. Further eastwards the map depicts a mix of real and imagined islands, including ‘Java Major’ and ‘Java Minor’. Japan (‘Zipangri’) is placed in the top right-hand corner of the map, but also wildly out of place. Africa is portrayed more accurately in line with the recent Portuguese voyages of discovery. It shows Portuguese flags flying around its coast, and also departs from Ptolemy in showing the continent as circumnavigable, with the Cape of Good Hope (‘Caput de bona speranza’), and its native inhabitants (the only human figures depicted on the map). The Cape breaches the frame of the map, as if to indicate its departure from classical geography. Further north, the map retains further traces of the ethnographic assumptions of medieval mappaemundi, describing regions to the north-west as ‘Ichtiophagi Ethiopes’, or the land of fish-eating Ethiopians, and to the north-east labelling ‘Anthropophagi Ethiopes’, or Ethiopian cannibals. Closer to home, the religious and political allegiances of Europe are prominently displayed with the Habsburg imperial eagle and the papal keys of the Roman Church, and contrast with the Islamic Ottoman crescent in Africa and western Asia. But the map’s enduring importance resides on the two woodcut sheets on the far left of the Universalis cosmographia, with their depiction of the ‘fourth part of the world’: America.

  Fig. 16 Detail of the western hemisphere of the Universalis cosmographia.

  Still, the map is not quite what it seems. What we today call North and South America are depicted as a continuous continent, joined by a narrow isthmus at approximately 30° N. To the north, the continent ends abruptly with a right-angled line drawn at 50° N; to the west are mountains and a legend stating ‘Terra ultra incognita’ (the land beyond is unknown). It is a highly abbreviated version of modern North America, but with intriguing elements, including what look like the Florida peninsula and a Gulf coast. The Caribbean Islands, including ‘Isabella’ (Cuba) and ‘Spagnolla’ (Hispaniola), are shown off the eastern coast, in a sea labelled for the first time as ‘Oceanus Occidentalis’, or Western Sea. The continent supports Spanish claims to the region by flying the flag of Castile, but is not given the name of America. Instead, in its southern regions, it is named ‘Parias’ in capital letters. So the great birth certificate of America actually calls North America ‘Parias’, a word taken from Vespucci’s account of his meeting with the local inhabitants who used it to designate their homeland.

  The map reserves the name ‘America’ to describe the southern land mass, and is placed in the location of modern-day Brazil. This southern region is far more extensive and detailed than its northern neighbour. Although the southernmost point is cut off at 50° S (conveniently eliding questions of its possible circumnavigation), the region bears the imprint of fifteen years of intensive Spanish and Portuguese exploration of the coastline. To the north, a legend reads, ‘This province was discovered by order of the King of Castile’, and a legend above the Castilian flag flying off the north-east coast states that ‘these islands were discovered by the Genoese admiral Columbus by commission of the Castilian king’. Although these legends give prior political claim to Spain, the legend off the south-east coast below the depiction of a Portuguese ship reads, ‘the vessel was the largest of ten ships, which the King of Portugal sent to Calicut [in India], that first appeared here. The island was believed to be firm and the size of the previously discovered surrounding part was not known. In this place men, women, children and even mothers go about naked. It was to these shores that the King of Castile later ordered voyages to ascertain the facts’ – a reference to Pedro Alvares Cabral’s voyage of 1500.30 Because Cabral sailed further out into the Atlantic than da Gama, he accidentally ‘discovered’ Brazil. Like Waldseemüller and his colleagues, he assumed it was an island, and left to sail on to Ind
ia.

  The map’s representation of this new western continent was without precedent, but within the map as a whole it was hardly advertised as revolutionary. Look again at the first known depiction of separate eastern and western hemispheres at the top of the map: to the left, Ptolemy is shown holding a quadrant, a symbol of his classical measurement of the stars and land. He stands next to an inset map of the classical of Europe, Africa and Asia, which is also the world on which his gaze falls as he looks at the larger map below. To the right stands Amerigo Vespucci, holding a pair of compasses, a more practical emblem of his modern navigational method, who is depicted next to an inset of the western hemisphere, which lacks any mention of ‘America’, and is simply designated as ‘Terra incognita’. It does, however, show the first known image of the Pacific Ocean, with the geographically unfeasible straight line demarcating the west coast of North America improbably close to ‘Zipangri’, or Japan, and further to the west, Java. Like Ptolemy, he looks down on the half of the world with which his discovery is associated. The two men’s eyes meet as they gaze across each other’s respective spheres of influence, a suitable look of mutual admiration, as if to emphasize the map’s interpretation of the world: it records the monumental discoveries of Vespucci and his forebears, including Columbus, and places them on a par with classical geography, but it also remains indebted to Ptolemy.