DURING a stay in Venice a few years ago, I spent time in the , soaking up the city鈥檚 history. Located in Saint Mark鈥檚 Square, the museum displays imposing statues, paintings of sea battles and ancient weapons. But as I passed through the last room of exhibits, another artefact hanging alone in an alcove caught my eye. It was a map of the world 鈥� a 鈥渕appa mundi鈥� in Latin 鈥� but it was unlike any I had encountered before.
Framed in gold and 2.4 metres in diameter, the world pictured here was a combination of rolling blue seas with cresting waves and off-white landmasses, all covered with handwritten notes. It was one of the most beautiful, and beautifully complex, things that I had ever seen.
Created by a monk called Fra Mauro 550 years ago, the map had been largely overlooked for centuries, a lamentable state of affairs considering it displays a level of accuracy absent in earlier maps. Turn it upside down 鈥� Mauro placed south at the top 鈥� and it is recognisable as a map of Africa and Eurasia.
Advertisement
Following my visit to Venice, I decided to find out more about this map, a project that culminated in my book . I spent more than a year delving into the literature on world maps, poring over Fra Mauro鈥檚 creation and trying to understand what he intended it to say. It turns out that it was part of the inflection point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance because it was the first world map based on science and geography rather than religion. As such, it initiated the discipline of cartography.
Fra Mauro was a lay monk of the Camaldolese order living on the monastery island of San Michele just off the northern edge of Venice, which, at the time, was the world鈥檚 most important trading hub. He was commissioned by the Venetian government to make his map, which took him nine years, even with the help of a team of artists and calligraphers. We know little about his qualifications as a map-maker, only that he did some survey work on behalf of the monastery and had been hired to help with a project rerouting a river away from the Venetian Lagoon. All his geographic work on the map was informed by past maps and visitors to Venice, including sailors and traders.
Medieval map-making
In 15th century Europe, world maps were usually full of images of Christ and biblically important places, and imbued with warnings of death at the hands of barbaric hordes. Monsters inhabited their geographic unknowns. Fra Mauro rejected those conventions. For example, he didn鈥檛 centre the map on Jerusalem, as was usual at this time; he reduced the Holy Land to its correct size; and Noah鈥檚 Ark is just a tiny house atop a mountain. Nor did he include any monsters, although he did mention those stories within the map鈥檚 inscriptions 鈥� before dismissing them. He still showed the Garden of Eden and his take on the cosmos, but he placed these images off the map, separated from it by a large, golden frame, making them officially otherworldly.
Fra Mauro also made a major geographic decision that rocked the world of international trade. He was the first cartographer to show definitively that ships could sail around the southern tip of Africa, which made trade with Asia and the Spice Islands more efficient and cheaper than was the case with the combination of land and sea routes used at the time. That also meant people in Europe had to accept that the Indian 鈥淪ea鈥� was an ocean, rather than an enclosed body of water. He was also the first European cartographer to place Japan on a world map. Of course, he had no idea of the existence of the Americas, Australia and Antarctica, but his geography of the then-known world is surprisingly accurate.
Yet Fra Mauro鈥檚 creation is so much more than a map. It is also a medieval encyclopaedia, intended as a conversation with the viewer. It is festooned with more than 3000 inscriptions written in Veneziano, the language of Venice, rather than the more traditional Latin, suggesting Fra Mauro wanted to communicate with everyone, not just the intellectual elite.
The range of topics in the inscriptions is extensive and informative. For example, he uses the words of Marco Polo and other traders and adventurers to describe the lifestyles, belief systems and physical features of peoples in Africa, South-East Asia and the far north of the Atlantic as well as northern Russia. Being Venetian, it was also natural for him to point out where to find trade goods and natural resources, such as gold, gems, animals, cloth, spices and all sorts of edible items. He underscored the international nature of this trade by drawing various types of boat floating on the seas, from Chinese junks to Arabian dhows. Line by line, Fra Mauro is explaining to the viewer that it is a big, wide world out there and not everyone looks or acts like people in Europe. He was acting as a medieval anthropologist.
Fra Mauro was also prepared to reject received wisdom if it clashed with more recent observations, unlike previous scholars who typically accepted without question the works of ancient writers like 2nd century AD polymath Ptolemy. And like modern scientists, he sometimes changed his mind 鈥� some of his inscriptions are glued on, like Post-it notes, covering up past knowledge that was no longer deemed accurate or relevant.
He also noted where he obtained his information, often relying on conversations with sailors and foreign visitors to Venice. Such explanatory inscriptions rarely appear on other medieval world maps, and never to this extent. Fra Mauro鈥檚 map, although a fine work of art, is also a visual and verbal defence of a point of view that was based on known geography. As such, he initiated the science of cartography based on direct observations by travellers and explorers, not beliefs.
Map projections
In that sense, Fra Mauro鈥檚 map was an effort to represent the world more truthfully, something cartographers still struggle with today. Even though we now have clear pictures of our world taken from space, there remains the frustrating issue of projection: how to peel off the skin of the globe and flatten it out onto a 2D surface without distorting the geography.
Ptolemy first wrestled with this problem by advocating for lines of latitude and longitude as a grid curved into the shape of a cloak to keep landmasses in their correct relative position. Map-makers after Fra Mauro chose other types of projection, such as the cordiform or heart-shaped projection with curving longitudinal lines, or the cone shape projection with a polar orientation. But these both distort landmasses.
Such distortions can, intentionally or not, carry political messages. The Mercator projection, for example, stretches the landmasses nearer the poles and so makes some countries 鈥� those of northern Europe, for instance 鈥� look larger than they really are. Many observers have noted that .
published in 2021 by physicists J. Richard Gott, David Goldberg and Bob Vanderbei minimised such distortions. In fact, they argue it is the truest flat projection of the world yet produced. It comes in the form of two discs representing the southern and northern hemispheres, glued together to create a two-sided map.
It is unlikely that this will be the final word. It seems we never stop fiddling with world maps. That is why there is a reproduction of Fra Mauro鈥檚 map hanging on my wall: to honour our cartographic past and acknowledge our ongoing attempts to fully understand who we are and where we live.
