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Time Line
1351
The Medici sea atlas is published that contains a ‘world’ map.
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1375
The Catalan atlas is prepared by Catalan cartographers who made great contribution in the completion of reformation of world map.
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1436
Bianco’s world map is published where the continental mass is placed excentrically to the embracing ocean and eastern Asia breaks through the framework in order to leave more space in the west for the insertion of Antillia.
1447
The world map is prepared by Fra Mauro, a monk of Murano, near Venice, that is often regarded as the culmination of medieval cartography, but in some respects it is transitional between medieval and renaissance cartography.
1448
The Benedictine Andreas Walsperger at Constance draws a world map.
1477
The first printed edition of the ‘Geography’, Bologna is published on the basis of manuscript atlases, produced by Dominus Nicholaus Germanus.
1482
The first edition of the work of Florence Francesco Berlinghieri is published, a rhyming version of the ‘Geography’ accompanied by an important set of maps, including a number of modern maps related to the Massajo and Laurenziana types.
1487
The rounding of the southern promontory of Africa by Bernal Diaz.
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 1492
Columbus discovers West
Indies.
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 1498
The discovery of India by Vasco da Gama.
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1500
The discovery of Brazil by Cabral. |
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Claudius Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy was an astronomer and mathematician of c. 2 A.D., who must apparently have worked in Alexandria between 127 and 148 A.D. since some of his astronomical observations are consistent with those dates. Ptolemy’s most famous works are the Almagest, a textbook of astronomy in which, among many other things, he laid the foundations of modern trigonometry; the Tetrabiblos, a compendium of astrology and geography. The importance of his manuscripts was that they transmitted a vast amount of topographical detail to Renaissance scholars, which profoundly influenced their conception of the world. The manuscript maps fall into two classes; one consisting of the world map and 26 regional maps, and the second containing 67 maps of smaller areas. From the 2nd until the early 15th century, they were almost entirely without influence on western cartography. But the Arab geographers, who possessed translation of his works, and through them, seem to have had some influence on 14th century cartographers such as Marino Sanudo, knew those. With the translation of the text into Latin in the early 15th century, Ptolemy dominated European cartography for a century, and his influence promoted cartographical progress. Ptolemy’s Geography was what we would now call an atlas, the core of which were necessarily the maps. Ptolemy suggested that people replot his data, and a good section of Book I of the Geography offers advice on how to draw maps. Various people at various times have redrawn the maps from the coordinates given in the work: the map appended to Prof. Stevenson’s edition, for example, is a medieval version or copy of just such a replot, but both Planudes and Karl Müller have done it as well.
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In South Asia, the themes obtained from the contributions of the occasional visitors like Fa-hsien, Hsuan-tsang etc. helped in the configuration of historical atlases in the later period. Such information was also supplied South Asia in the age of Gurjara-Pratiharas, Palas and Rastrakutas, by the contributions of al-Biruni, Kalhana, al-Masudi, the literatures of Sandhyakar Nandi, Somadeva Bhatta, al-Idrisi, Bilhana etc. ‘CANTINO PLANISPHERE’ of c.1502 is possibly the oldest extant European map to show an approximation of India’s true shape, executed on parchment by an anonymous Portuguese. On the basis of such historical records, ‘A Historical Atlas of South Asia’ was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1978, which correlates the literary themes with modern cartographic
techniques.
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The most interesting example of the circular world map is the ‘mappa mundi’ of Hereford, dating from as late as c. A.D. 1300. One of the links of it is the Hieronymus map of about A.D. 1150.
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