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ABSTRACT
For about 100 years, an emerging world of islands and coastal rims appeared indistinctly on European cartographic representations of the “Atlantic” and “Southeast Asian” worlds, as if they somehow belonged to one emerging oceanic order. It is this inchoate and legendary historical moment dramatized by Venetian chartmakers that offers us an ideal, epistemologically rich starting point for an inclusive and interconnected history of multiple oceanic worlds.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
William Boelhower, a former editor of Atlantic Studies, has recently written on cartography, Atlantic Studies as a research paradigm, African-Italian autobiographies, and New Orleans jazz. He has translated, and written on, the work of Antonio Gramsci and Lucien Goldmann. His books include Immigrant Autobiography in the United States, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature, and Autobiographical Transactions in Modernist America: The Immigrant, the Architect, the Artist, the Citizen.
Notes
1 See Lester, The Fourth Part.
2 These cities in the eastern Mediterranean all had Venetian colonies. See Jacoby, “L’expansion occidentale dans le Levant,” 225–264.
3 Henry VII of England sent Giovanni Caboto, a Venetian navigator, to discover a northern sea route to Cathay, while Giovanni da Verrazano was commissioned “to penetrate [the New World] to those blessed shores of Cathay.” See Suárez, Early Mapping, 196f; Suárez, Early Mapping, 48–59.
4 See Hessler, A Renaissance, 76, fig. 30.
5 See Ravenstein, Martin Behaim, 68. The problem of measuring longitude would not be resolved until the mid-eighteenth century.
6 The Spanish captain Balboa first named this ocean “Mar do Sur” in 1515; Magellan named it “Pacific” in November, 1520. See Pigafetta, Il primo, 124, par. 42.
7 In Pacific Worlds, Matsuda insists that we be aware of the genealogy of such categories as “the Pacific,” “Southeast Asia,” and “Polynesia” when constructing a narrative of Pacific-world history. See Matsuda, 1–8, 355–378. By focusing on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi, I hope to return to EpeliHau‘ofa’s vision of the Pacific as a “Sea of Islands,” rather than as an immense space to cross. See Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, 2–3.
8 See McKeown, “Movement,” 143–165; see Jones, “The Environment,” 121–142.
9 See Strabo Geography, Book 1.3, 5, and Herodotus, The Histories, Book IV.42: “for Libya [meaning all of Africa] furnishes proofs about itself that it is surrounded by sea, except so much of it as borders upon Asia [ … ].” Herodotus also wrote: “Asia is inhabited as far as the Indian land; but from this onwards towards the East it becomes uninhabited, nor can any one say what manner of land it is” (Book IV.40).
10 See Ptolemy’s world map in Ptolemy, The Geography, 167; Francesco Berlingheri still portrayed the Indian Ocean as a closed sea on his world map in Geographia of 1482 (Florence). See Roberts, “Poet and ‘World Painter’.”
11 See Armitage and Bashford, “Introduction,” 6.
12 For the importance of Fra Mauro’s map see Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map, 19–32; Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 19–25.
13 See Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis.
14 Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 208. See also Braudel, Perspective of the World, 116–156.
15 See Burke, “Early Modern Venice,” 389–419.
16 See Ronchi’s notes and bibliography in Marco Polo, Milione e Le divisament, 663–690; Larner, Marco Polo, 58. Larner mentions 150 surviving medieval manuscripts of Polo’s narrative.
17 See Falchetta, “Introduzione alla storia,” 149.
18 The travel accounts of Marco Polo, Nicolò de’ Conti, Pietro Querini, and Antonio Pigafetta appeared in Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, Vols. III, II, IV, and II, respectively.
19 Burke, “Early Modern Venice,” 398.
20 Ibid., 401.
21 See Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 371–463; see also Falchetta, “Carte veneziane,” 168–205.
22 Harvey, The History, 61.
23 See Schulz, “Maps as Metaphors,” 97–122.
24 Fra Mauro was commissioned to make a copy of his world map for King Afonso of Portugal (1459) and the Medici family of Florence (1480). Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 37, 48; see Carlton, Worldly Consumers; Schulz, “Maps as Metaphors,” 97–122.
25 Ma Huan, who accompanied Zheng He on several of his voyages, published an account of the expeditions entitled Ying-yai sheng-lan (1451). Fra Mauro may be the first European to allude to Chinese expansion in the Indian Ocean. Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 119.
26 Lestringant, L’atelier du cosmographe, 1.
27 Vesconte’s world map is the first to incorporate portolan mapping practices. See Edson, The World Map, 66–68.
28 Lestringant, L’atelier du cosmographe, 15.
29 See Shalev and Burnett, Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance.
30 On cartographic semiosis, see Boelhower, “Inventing America,” 475–497; Jacob, L’empire des cartes, 40.
31 Didi-Huberman, Atlas ou le gai, 12–14.
32 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map, inscription *2834. Falchetta has listed and translated all the place-names and inscriptions on the Fra Mauro map; all further references to them will be included in the text as follows: (Falchetta *).
33 Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 21.
34 The quote from Bacon is in Edgerton, Jr., “From Mental Matrix,” 30. The author reproduces Bacon’s diagram of the earth.
35 See Lester, The Fourth Part of the World, 75.
36 The English translation of this passage is from Edson, The World Map, 71.
37 Didi-Huberman, Atlas ou le gai, 12.
38 Falchetta, “Maps and Mapmakers,” 76, 77–78. For a discussion of the map, see Cartographic Images (Virgas World Map).
39 See Pregliasco, Antilia, 3–54.
40 The asterisked numbers, referring to the map’s inscriptions, are from Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map.
41 See Cartographic Images (Catalan Atlas). Already in the fourteenth century, as John Rigby Hale notes, “The Indian Ocean resembled an Arabic-speaking Mediterranean.” Hale, Renaissance Exploration, 36.
42 See Wright, The Leardo Map.
43 See Falchetta, “Introduzione alla storia,” 142–144. For a view of Bianco’s map, see Cartographic Images (Catalan Atlas).
44 Edson, The World Map, 210.
45 Schulz, “Maps as Metaphors,” 114.
46 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (2006) and Storia del Mappamondo (2016); Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (2011).
47 Fra Mauro does not mention Marco Polo or Conti, although he relied heavily on them when annotating Asia and the islands of the Indian Ocean. For the borrowings, see Falchetta, Storia del Mappamondo, 66–71.
48 See Cartographic Images (Hereford Mappamundi).
49 Fra Mauro is the first to put Japan on a European map (Falchetta, *1334).
50 See Suárez, Early Mapping, 48–49; the commentary of Falchetta (*19); Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 118–123.
51 Ptolemy, The Geography, Book Seven, Chapter V, 159.
52 See Rujivacharakul, “Asia in World Architecture,” 17–34.
53 See Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 232–233.
54 Pigafetta, Il primo viaggio, 125, par. 42.
55 Ibid., 127, par. 49.
56 Maximilian of Transylvania, qtd.in Suárez, Early Mapping, 126.