A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  The so-called Waldseemüller map of 1507 takes us a long way from the mappaemundi that preceded it, and the debates around ‘discovery’ that defined it ever since its creation in Saint-Dié between 1505 and 1507. It does represent a shift in the mentality of mapping and its makers which can be seen as representative of European Renaissance cartography. Mapping now drew on classical geography, and in particular Ptolemy, more confidently than ever before. It proposed a new role for itself as cosmography, the science of describing the earth and the heavens in a harmonious, universal whole. As well as drawing on classical geography to describe the world, maps like Waldseemüller’s incorporated contemporary maps and charts showing navigational breakthroughs and explorations of places unknown to Ptolemy and his predecessors. This approach to knowledge was cumulative. It did not represent a revolutionary break with previous geographical beliefs. The map and its makers cautiously proposed changes to their classically inspired world, and where evidence conflicted, they were as likely to fall back on the old rather than accept the new.

  In the new era of print, Waldseemüller and his colleagues worked with what little information on exploration and discovery they had in front of them, and made decisions accordingly. Naming a new region ‘America’ in 1507 was a highly provisional decision, and dependent on the ability of the printing press to circulate sensational but unverified news of the ‘discoveries’ of Columbus, Vespucci and others. For the scholars in Saint-Dié, this resulted in calling a continent an island, and then withdrawing the name they had given to one part of it, America, as subsequent publications cast doubt over their initial findings.

  Ultimately, printing changed the whole tenor of our understanding of the Universalis cosmographia, and so many of the other maps surrounding it. This was not only because printing increased the possibility of exact reproducibility, standardization and preservation of maps and books, but also because it gave rise to piracy, forgery, misprinting, and the financial interests of printers, typesetters, compositors and editors in any attempt to describe what really happened in the creation of these maps. Printing introduced a whole new dimension to the making of maps that was unknown to medieval manuscript mapmakers, where the mapmaker alone, sometimes with a scribe and illuminator, had been responsible for creating a map. It added a new layer of personnel into the process of making a map, which is why identifying Waldseemüller, or Ringmann, or a particular printer as the author of a map becomes virtually impossible. Printing transformed how a map looked, including its depiction of geographical relief, shading, symbols and lettering; and it altered the purpose of a map, which became tied to money, and a new, humanist scholarship that saw it as a device for understanding the expansion of the world beyond Europe’s borders.

  The history of the Waldseemüller map remains in many respects a mystery. Questions about it remain unanswered, from its depiction of the Pacific and that peculiar wedge of America, to its almost immediate disappearance from historical records. But what it inadvertently shows is that the discovery of origins – of America and of the chronological primacy of one map over another – is a chimera. What is found at the historical moment of the creation of any world map is not the inviolable identity of its origin but the dissension of disparate stories, competing maps, different traditions. The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s criticism of the belief in the certainty of origins could equally describe the history of the Universalis cosmographia: ‘devotion to truth and the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussions, and their spirit of competition.’42 The dynamic complexity of early printing means that, for all its beautiful execution and years of scholarly labour, we shall probably never know for sure if the Universalis cosmographia can be called the ‘first’ map to properly describe and name America.

  6

  Globalism

  Diogo Ribeiro, World Map, 1529

  Tordesillas, Castile, June 1494

  In the summer of 1494, delegations representing the Castilian and Portuguese crowns met in the small town of Tordesillas near Vallodolid in central Castile. Their purpose was to resolve the diplomatic and geographical dispute caused by the return of Columbus from his first voyage to the New World in March 1493. Since the early decades of the fifteenth century the Portuguese had navigated their way down the African coast and out into the relatively unknown Atlantic, until Castile demanded clarification of the limits of the Portuguese sphere of possession. In 1479 the Treaty of Alcáçovas stipulated that Portuguese influence extended to territories ‘in all the islands hitherto discovered, or in all other islands which shall be found or acquired by conquest from the Canary Islands down toward Guinea’1 – a vague compromise which required immediate reappraisal upon news of Columbus’s discoveries in 1492. The rulers of Castile and León, Queen Isabella I and her husband, the Aragonese-born King Ferdinand V, petitioned Pope Alexander VI (a native of Valencia) to uphold their claims to the newly discovered territories. Much to the anger of the Portuguese, the pope agreed in a series of bulls issued throughout 1493, which prompted the Portuguese king John II to demand a new round of negotiations.

  The result was the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on June 7 1494. In one of the earliest and most hubristic acts of European global imperial geography, the two crowns agreed that ‘a boundary or straight line be determined and drawn north and south, from pole to pole, on the said ocean sea, from the Arctic to the Antarctic pole. This boundary or line shall be drawn straight, at a distance of three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.’2 Everything to the west of this line, including the territories discovered by Columbus, fell under the control of Castile, and everything to the east, including the entire African coastline and the Indian Ocean, was allocated to the Portuguese. The world was divided in half by two European kingdoms, using a map to announce their global ambitions.

  The exact map used to demarcate the kingdoms’ relative spheres of influence has not survived, but some world maps of the period reproduce the newly agreed meridian running west of the Cape Verde islands. The results of the partition were immediate: Spain took the opportunity to push on with voyages to the New World, while the Portuguese realized that if they were to capitalize on their control of the sea routes eastwards, they needed to reach India. The Portuguese king John II had informed Pope Innocent VIII in 1485 that he was confident ‘of exploring the Barbarian Gulf [the Indian Ocean]’, and that ‘the farthest limit of Lusitanian maritime exploration is at present only a few days distant’ from this ocean, ‘if the most competent geographers are but telling the truth’.3 John’s claims may have been exaggerated, but by December 1488 the Portuguese pilot Bartolomeu Dias returned to Lisbon from a sixteen-month voyage during which he sailed down the African coast and became the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope.

  Henricus Martellus’s 1489 world map was one of the first to depict Dias’s voyage. The mapmaker broke the frame of what is otherwise a typically Ptolemaic map to show that the southern tip of Africa was circumnavigable, a decision that Waldseemüller followed in his own attempt to represent the impact of the Portuguese voyages on his 1507 world map. By the late 1490s, with the route open into the Indian Ocean and the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas barring Portuguese expansion westwards into the Atlantic, King John’s successor Manuel I turned his attention to supporting an expedition to reach India.

  The motives for such an expedition might have been couched in the language of religious conversion, but were equally concerned with breaking into the fabled spice trade. By the fifteenth century pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mace, camphor and ambergris were starting to trickle into Europe from the East, expensive and aspirational condiments enabling Christian courts to imitate exotic Arab recipes, as well as curing a variety of real and imagined ailments, and providing the constitutive elements for a range of perfumes and cosmetics. Until the late fifteenth century, it was Ven
ice, the fabled ‘Gateway to the East’, which controlled all spice imports into Europe. From their harvest in South-east Asia, spices were sold to Indian merchants, who transported them back to the Indian subcontinent, where they were in turn sold on to Muslim merchants, who shipped them on via the Red Sea to Cairo and Alexandria. From there, they were bought by Venetians and shipped back to their native city, then sold to merchants from across Europe. The sheer length of time involved, and the customs duties imposed on transporting these precious commodities the thousands of kilometres from their origin, meant that by the time they reached Europe their price was high, but their freshness low.

  The arrival of da Gama’s fleet in Calicut on the south-western coast of India in May 1498 threatened to alter completely the balance of commercial power in Europe and in the Indian Ocean. Having successfully traded with the local merchants to obtain a cargo of pepper, spices and a variety of precious woods and stones, da Gama proved it was possible to circumvent the slow and expensive overland trade routes between Europe and Asia by transporting low-volume, luxury commodities like spices by sea back to Lisbon via the Cape of Good Hope. Manuel I quickly understood the consequence of da Gama’s voyage for his kingdom’s standing in European imperial politics. Writing to his Castilian counterpart following da Gama’s return, Manuel piously hoped that ‘the great trade which now enriches the Moors of those parts, through whose hands it passes without the intervention of other persons or people, shall, in consequence of our regulations, be diverted to the nations and ships of our own kingdom’. He solemnly concluded that ‘henceforth all Christendom, in this part of Europe, shall be able, in a large measure, to provide itself with these spices and precious stones’.4 Cloaking his delight at beating Castile to India in the rhetoric of Christian solidarity, Manuel knew that the principal kingdom in Christendom to benefit from da Gama’s voyage would be Portugal.

  It was not only Castile which felt eclipsed by news of da Gama’s voyage: the Venetians were horrified at what they saw as a direct challenge to their control of the spice trade. Writing in his diary in 1502, the Venetian merchant Girolamo Priuli wrote that ‘all the people from across the mountains who once came to Venice to buy spices with their money will now turn to Lisbon because it is nearer to their countries and easier to reach; also because they will be able to buy at a cheaper price’. Priuli understood that Venice could not compete with a situation where ‘with all the duties, customs, and excises between the country of the [Ottoman] Sultan and the city of Venice I might say that a thing that cost one ducat multiplies to sixty and perhaps to a hundred’. He concluded that ‘in this, I clearly see the ruin of the city of Venice’.5

  Such predictions of Venice’s demise turned out to be premature, but da Gama’s voyage, and the subsequent establishment of the Carreira da India, the annual Portuguese commercial fleet sailing to India, transformed the emerging global economy. At its height in the mid-sixteenth century the Portuguese empire was dispatching more than fifteen ships a year to Asia, returning with an annual average of over 2,000 tons of cargo, rising to nearly double that towards the end of the sixteenth century. Nearly 90 per cent of Portugal’s imports were made up of spices from the Indian subcontinent; pepper accounted for over 80 per cent of these spices. By 1520 the revenue from these imports represented nearly 40 per cent of the Portuguese crown’s total revenue, although even that did not include the money collected from customs duties on trade moving in and out of Portugal’s overseas possessions throughout the Indian Ocean.6 The wealth that flowed into Lisbon and the Portuguese crown’s revenues enabled the kingdom to transform itself into one of Europe’s richest empires. Portugal’s wealth and power now lay not in the possession of territory, but in the strategic control of commercial networks that lay thousands of kilometres from the imperial centre. Unlike earlier empires built on the acquisition and control of land, this was a new kind of empire built on water.

  Without predominantly Portuguese scientific innovations in long-distance seaborne navigation developed throughout the late fifteenth century, the establishment of a regular fleet to the markets of South-east Asia would have proved hazardous at best. In such a climate, possession of geographical information became more precious than ever, and both crowns jealously guarded their cartographic secrets. In August 1501, at the height of Portugal’s rivalry with Venice over control of the spice trade, Angelo Trevisan, secretary to the Venetian ambassador to Castile, wrote to his friend Domenico Malipiero, explaining the difficulties of obtaining Portuguese maps of India:

  We are daily expecting our doctor from Lisbon, who left our magnificent ambassador there; who at my request has written a short account of the [Portuguese] voyage from Calicut, of which I will make a copy for Your Magnificence. It is impossible to procure the map of that voyage because the king has placed a death penalty on any one who gives it out.

  Less than a month later, however, Trevisan wrote to Malipiero again, with a very different story:

  If we return to Venice alive, Your Magnificence will see maps both as far as Calicut and beyond there less than twice the distance from here to Flanders. I promise you that everything has come in good order; but this, Your Magnificence may not care to divulge. One thing is certain, that you will learn upon our arrival as many particulars as though you had been to Calicut and beyond.7

  Trevisan had somehow managed to obtain Portuguese maps whose circulation was, according to the Venetian, forbidden on pain of death. The maps offered invaluable information on the Portuguese sea route to India, but Trevisan was also interested in the more intangible, almost magical power of a map: the ability to allow its owner to imagine the territory itself. Trevisan rhetorically assures Malipiero that the map has the power to simulate the experience of actually being in Calicut – but safely insulated in his Venetian study from the dangers and hardships of months of life-threatening seaborne travel.

  Although we do not know which maps the Venetian smuggled home, there is an example of a similar process of cartographic espionage, again at Portugal’s expense, which took place the following year. The beautifully illustrated map known as the ‘Cantino planisphere’ is named not after the unknown Portuguese mapmaker who made it, but the Italian who stole it. In the autumn of 1502, Ercole d’Este, the duke of Ferrara, sent his servant, Alberto Cantino, to Lisbon, ostensibly to trade in thoroughbred horses. Instead, Cantino paid a Portuguese mapmaker twelve gold ducats to make a world map, which was smuggled out of Lisbon and sent back to Ferrara, where it was installed in Ercole’s library.

  The map remains to this day in northern Italy, in a library in the former Este residence of Modena, and shows the ferment of geographical knowledge at the beginning of the sixteenth century in gorgeous hand-illuminated colour. America is still undefined as a continent, with only a fragment of the Florida coast represented, dwarfed by the recently discovered Caribbean Islands. The interior of Brazil is also indeterminate, showing the Portuguese discovery of its eastern coastline in 1500. India and the Far East are only vaguely sketched in, reliant on da Gama’s still relatively recent landing in Calicut in 1498. The map’s detail is reserved for what mattered to the Portuguese crown: its trading stations in West Africa, Brazil and India, supplemented by a series of legends describing the commodities available in this newly emerging world. Ercole was uninterested in exploiting the map’s navigational information about how to reach India: Ferrara was too small and geographically landlocked to consider itself a potential seaborne power. He was interested, rather, in displaying his access to the arcane knowledge which described how the shape of the sixteenth-century world was changing before the eyes of its rival kingdoms and empires.

  In the western Atlantic, the Cantino planisphere reproduced the key feature of the Treaty of Tordesillas: a vertical line running from north to south, to the east of the Caribbean Islands, and bisecting Brazil. This partition appeared straightforward enough when projected upon a flat, plane map like this one, but it begged one monument
al question: as the Portuguese sailed ever further east in the early years of the sixteenth century, and Castile pushed further into the New World, where would it fall if it ran right round the globe? A flat map conveniently avoided answering such a politically divisive question, but subsequent events would require both Europe’s empires and its mapmakers to start to imagine the world globally, projected onto a sphere, rather than flat on a map attached to a wall or spread out on a table.

  In 1511 the Portuguese captured Malacca on the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula, one of the great distribution centres for spices arriving from the nearby Moluccas. The Portuguese realized that they were in touching distance of capturing the islands, and with it global domination over the spice trade. Then, just two years later, in 1513, the Castilian adventurer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Darien in present-day Central America and became the first known European to see the Pacific Ocean. For Balboa, the discovery of the Pacific represented the possibility of claiming a whole new world for Castile. How far further westwards from Darien could Castile’s claim to territorial possession extend? Where would the line drawn at Tordesillas fall when drawn through the Pacific? After taking Malacca in 1511, the Portuguese asked themselves the same question from the other direction. Could their influence extend as far eastwards as the Moluccas?

  One man who thought that the Portuguese had reached the limits of their territorial claims under the terms of Tordesillas was one of the kingdom’s most respected pilots: Fernão de Magalhães, better known today by his Hispanicized name, Ferdinand Magellan. Born around 1480 in Ponte da Barca in northern Portugal, Magellan joined the Portuguese fleet in 1505. By 1511 he participated in the Portuguese assault on Malacca, and it was at this point that he began to have doubts about Portugal’s claim to territories any further to the east. Magellan himself never gave his reasons for doing so, but later writers gave fulsome explanations. Writing in 1523 after the return of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, the Habsburg adviser and scholar Maximilianus Transylvanus claimed: