In 2003, the US Library of Congress spent $10m on a beautiful world map,
created in 1507. The price was justified by a single, magical name,
inscribed in capitals on a strange tract of blank space in the far west:
“AMERICA”. As Toby Lester tells in this boundlessly engaging book, this map
was not just the first to give America a name, it was the very first to show
it as a continent, separated from Asia by a new ocean.
Advertising its purchase, Congress called the map “America’s birth
certificate”; Lester rates its importance much less narrowly. It charts an
astonishing shift in world-view, he argues, from the Europe-centred,
God-driven world of the Middle Ages to the brave new imperial vision of the
early modern age. To justify this expansive claim, he tells the story not
just of the map’s creation, but pretty much the story of Europe’s discovery
and mapping of the entire world up to that point.
The map’s creators were a young Alsatian poet, Matthias Ringmann, and a
provincial German cleric-cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller. In Lester’s
hands, they emerge from a Europe ablaze with excitement over the great new
discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. The young
mapmakers were even more excited, however, by the great rediscoveries of
lost classical learning that were taking place at the same time. Following
the example of Italy’s pioneers, they created a “parallel little humanist
universe” in Saint-Dié, a small town in the Vosges mountains some 60 miles
from Strasbourg. They studied Greek texts, penned playfully literary poems
and gave themselves classical nicknames.
They also established that powerful new tool, a printing press, and set about
publishing an updated, improved edition of Ptolemy’s 2nd-century Geography,
which had described the extent of the world known to the Romans. But they
would do better than Ptolemy: they would also print 1,000 accompanying world
maps that depicted all 360 of the globe’s degrees. This was a radical idea,
and it created a problem: how would they draw those areas of the globe
unknown to Ptolemy?
Ringmann and Waldseemüller’s extraordinary and rather brilliant solution was
to portray the world not as it was in 1507, but as it had been progressively
discovered in the centuries leading up to that date. Lester, equally
brilliantly, mirrors the map in telling its story. So the centre of the
“Waldseemüller map” portrays classical Europe just as Ptolemy described it —
and Lester duly tells Ptolemy’s story. In the East, the map depicts a
medieval world peopled by Mongol hordes, fantastical Christian kings, and
friars who, “clad only in their robes and sandals”, as Lester puts it,
“plod eastward in search of the Great Khan”. And Lester accordingly gives us
chapter and verse on the search for the legendary land of Prester John, the
impact of Genghis Khan on knowledge of the lands east of Byzantium, the
nature of theologically minded mappae mundi and even the number of horses in
the stables of the bustling Benedictine monastery of St Albans, circa 1200,
where Brother Matthew Paris was carefully and cartographically illustrating
his Great Chronicle.
As the map turns south with the 15th-century Portuguese mariners working their
way down the west coast of Africa, Lester charts the ambitions of Portugal’s
Prince Henry the Navigator, and the confrontations between Europe and the
Islamic world. He then follows Columbus into the Atlantic in three chapters
that splendidly capture the verve and tension of the era: international
councils debate dubious maps and questionable manuscripts; people “of
strange and wonderful appearance” are washed up on the coast of Ireland in
dugout canoes; mariners’ charts are smuggled out of secret Spanish and
Portuguese archives. And in 1502, Columbus writes to Pope Alexander VI that
his newly discovered island is somehow all the legendary Asian islands of
the medieval imagination in one: “This island is Tarshish,” he writes, “it
is Chittim, it is Ophir and Ophaz, and Cipangu, and we have named it
Hispaniola.”
The mapmakers got their freshest, newest information not from Columbus,
however, but in letters purportedly written by the Florentine explorer,
Amerigo Vespucci, which were then being reprinted all over Europe. The
mapmakers therefore honoured their new western lands with a Latinate form of
Vespucci’s Christian name. Pleasingly enough, “America” also functioned as a
playful classical pun, as its Greek roots could be read as both “born new”
and “no-place-land”. Like Columbus, Vespucci believed he had found a
previously unknown part of Asia. For some reason, the 1507 mapmakers thought
differently. They showed America as an entirely new continent, separated
from Asia by ocean — and this was six years before any European saw the
Pacific.
Quite why the mapmakers drew it in this way is a mystery. They may have had
access to information about a secret Portuguese voyage through to the
Pacific, or have been misled by Florentine propaganda designed to play up
the achievements of Vespucci over those of his Genoese rival, Columbus. They
may have been trying to spin their own German Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian
I, as a new Caesar rising to power to fulfil Virgil’s prophecy of the
discovery of a land “beyond the stars, beyond the paths of the year and the
sun”. They may even have misread the artful blurring on the western edge of
earlier maps, thinking it depicted sea — and thus raising the possibility
that America’s first appearance on a map was not just a joke, but an error.
Lester could easily have written a fine book focused more narrowly on the
creation of the Waldseemüller map (and incorporating its remarkable
afterlife: all copies of the map were lost for centuries, he tells us, until
one was recovered in 1901, in the garret of the tower library of the castle
of Prince Franz zu Waldburg-Wolfegg und Waldsee, hidden in a large folio
edition bound in beech wood and finely tooled pigskin). Instead, he has told
the genuinely epic story of Europe’s quest to explore the unknown, using the
Waldseemüller map as his chart. In pursuit of that historical quest, few
books could provide a surer guide.
The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester
Profile £25 pp462
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