The first published map to reflect
the voyages of the Age of Exploration

Modified Ptolemaic map of the world in Pomponius Mela’s Novellae etati ad geographie..., Erhard Ratdolt, Venice, 1482.

Woodcut. 135 x 185 mm. Excellent. $25,000.

Rare. According to Nordenskiold, this map is "generally wanting" from the already rare book it accompanied. It is the earliest published map reflecting Portuguese penetration south around West Africa, and thus the first printed map to reflect in any way the voyages of the Age of Exploration.

The single greatest impetus for the Age of Exploration was the desire of European kingdoms to gain better access to the Orient. The overland routes were difficult and unpredictable, and were poorly suited to transporting cargo. Thus an alternate sea route, free of the uncertainties of the various powers controlling the overland routes, and with a ship to be able to carry considerable merchandise, was a dream for Europe’s rulers and entrepreneurs. Two routes were theorized; one, around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, the other due west to meet Asia on its eastern shores.

The circum-Africa theory is first known to have been attempted in 1291, a few years before the return of Marco Polo from China. In that year Genoa sent an expedition under two brothers, Ugolino and Guido Vivaldi, on an attempted ocean crossing to ‘India’. They were never heard from again.

In 1415 Portugal conquered Ceuta, the first permanent European foothold in Africa and thus the beginning of European overseas expansion. Under methodical exploratory policies formulated by Prince Henry "the Navigator" in the early fifteenth century, Portugal continued pushing southward along the African coast.

This they did not knowing whether the route could in fact lead them to the Indian Ocean. Two conflicting theories circulated among scholars at the time. One, supported by the text of Claudius Ptolemy, depicted a landlocked Indian Ocean; if Ptolemy were correct, no sea route to the Indian Ocean via Africa existed. The other concept, seen on the map of Macrobius as well as on many Arabic maps, depicted an open Indian Ocean and a markedly truncated Africa.

The 1479 Treaty of Alcacovas gave the Guinea coast, the Azores, the Madeiras, and Cape Verde Islands to Portugal, and gave the Canaries to Castille. Prior to that, the Portuguese dominated in the Canaries, and in fact had temporarily won official sanction for their claim with the bull Romanus Pontifex of Pope Nicholas V in 1454.

This map modifies the Ptolemaic rendering of western Africa to cut in to the east, revealing a true Western Africa, based on reports of Portugal’s successes further south around Africa. Despite its simplicity, this map was thus in this important sense more advanced than the larger, more detailed but strictly Ptolemaic maps of the day. Eleven years after its publication, it became the model for the world map by Hartmann Schedel in the Nuremberg Chronicle.

A border of Greek columns encases the whole. The cosmographical treatise of Mela, a Roman geographer who lived during the very early Christian era (contemporary with Emperor Claudius, circa 40 A.D.), is a compilation of the views of Greek writers, hence the relevance of the map's unusual embellishment.

Following is from Tony Campbell (Earliest Printed Maps) :

This map of the known world ... is drawn on the conical projection and is based for the most part on Ptolemy. An important improvement, however, lies in its clear recognition of the south-eastward trend of the west African coast below the 12̊ parallel. These accord with Portuguese discoveries up to the year 1447 and the gradual unfolding of the Gulf of Guinea in the light of information brought back by subsequent expeditions in the period 1460-71. No earlier printed map recognized this important step towards the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and no map in the incunable editions of Ptolemy reflected this knowledge. Nordenskiold detected a supposed improvement to the representation of Scandinavia but attempts to link the Mela map with the distinctive Ulm Ptolemy form of the same year are unconvincing (Shirley, p.8). In other respects, the map is unsophisticated, taking more care to identify wind heads than geographical features. Only the three continents and the Indian Ocean are named.

The remaining lettering forms part of the Latin inscription above the map (transcribed at the head of this entry), which can be translated as follows:

If, in a new lease of life, a man seeks to attain the worm-like paths of geography, he is bound to find the flowers that belong there for he deserves them'.

Nordenskiold suggested, unconvincingly, that it should be rearranged (with the contractions filled out) as follows: Votum ponitur bene merenti humano viro aspiranti flores novellas aetati necessaries ad vermiculatos calles geographies ("The man who favours the new age is bound to find the flowers that belong to the worm-like paths of geography since he deserves them" — both translations by Dr Lotte Hellinga).

Pomponius Mela, born in the first century A.D. in southern Spain, is considered to have been the earliest of the Roman geographers. Apart from sections of Pliny's Natural History, Mela’s Cosmographia is the only formal geographical treatise in classical Latin. Mela’s concepts were similar to those of the leading Greek geographers, but the printed map of 1482 makes no attempt to convey his belief in an inhabitable southern temperate zone, albeit inaccessible from Europe because of the torrid zone between. Since maps accompanying manuscripts of Mela's Cosmographia have been traced back no further than the early fifteenth century (Destombes, 1964), it is not surprising that the printed version should reflect its own period, rather than the ideas found in the work it illustrates.

The person responsible for compiling the 1482 world map is unknown but it is not impossible that it was the book's versatile printer, Erhard Ratdolt. As a notable innovator (Mayor, nos 74-6), Ratdolt, was clearly more interested in new techniques than in proven ones and he would probably have been attracted by new geographical ideas as well. His Mela map and the T-0 diagram illustrating his 1480 edition of Rolewinck (212 i) were the first woodcut maps to be produced in Italy. Mela’s Cosmographia was originally printed at Milan in 1471 without a map. Nordenskiold noted that the map to this 1482 edition, which should occupy the first leaf, was "generally wanting".

The 1482 Mela map was to be copied for the Salamanca edition of 1498 and for Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 (219).