1492: The Year Our World Began Read Free Page A

world. The lacquered wooden sphere, mounted on a metal frame soas to be free to spin at a touch, gleams with continents and islands painted in tawny browns. Seas shimmer in what at the time would have been expensive dark blue pigment—except for the Red Sea, which is a vivid, and also expensive, carmine. Little, scroll-like insets speckle the surface, full of tiny texts in which the cartographer explained his methods and pretended to esoteric knowledge. It was not the first globe ever made. Nor, even for its time, was it a particularly good attempt at realistic mapping: the length of Africa was distorted; the cartographer wildly misplaced capes along the coast, which explorers had measured with some accuracy; he made up names, otherwise unrecorded, for many places; he inserted evidently false claims to have seen much of coastal Africa for himself.
    Despite the errors and rank falsehoods, the globe is a precious record of one vision of what the world was like at the time and a key to what made the year special—why 1492 is the best year from which to date the beginnings of the world we are in now and the era we call modernity. The globe made the world seem small: a nephew of St. Francis Borgia’s, writing a thank-you letter to his uncle for a gift of a globe in 1566, said that he had never realized how small the world was until he held it in his hands. Martin Behaim, like Columbus—who based his theory of a navigably narrow Atlantic on the conviction that, as he said, “[t]his world is small” 6 —underestimated the size of the planet. But he was a prophet of one of the effects of the processes that started in 1492: the world became smaller in a metaphorical sense, because the whole of it became imaginable and mutually accessible.
    Behaim’s globe was, at least, an attempt to innovate—an ambition curiously absent in the work of Muslim mapmakers at the time. Perhaps because they were heirs to a rich medieval legacy, scholars in the Islamic world seem to have been satiated with cartography and uninterested in mapping the world afresh until Western advances forced them to try to catch up. One of the classical texts that Europeans hailed as a novelty in the fifteenth century—the Geography of the second-century Alexandrian scholar Claudius Ptolemy, had been well known in the Islamicworld for many centuries; but until an Italian map based on Ptolemy’s information arrived in Constantinople in 1469, no Muslim cartographer seems to have thought of making use of it to enlarge the representation of the world. In 1513, an Ottoman cartographer produced a world map in Western style, copied from Western prototypes and using data, apparently captured at sea by Turkish warships, on Columbus’s voyages. After a long period of dominance in all the sciences, the Islamic world seems to have fallen suddenly behind in that of mapping.
    Muslim cartographers largely contented themselves with recycling old world images, derived from great pioneers of mapmaking in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The only innovation in the interim was the attempt to superimpose a grid of lines of longitude and latitude—a technique Ptolemy had first proposed—on out-of-date information. Broadly speaking, Muslims in the 1490s had two types of map at their disposal: one formal and rigid, with no attempt at realism; the other, free-flowing and conceived—at least—to be realistic. The first form was familiar to many readers from the work of Ibn al Wardi, who died in 1457, and whose compendium of geographical tidbits, The Unbored Pearl of Wonders and the Precious Gem of Marvels, was much copied. In his version of the world, Arabia is tiny but perfectly central, gripped between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea like a nail head in a vise. Africa extends eastward almost to the limits of the Ecumene. Deep in East Africa, the legendary Mountains of the Moon—twin triangles of gold—seem to pour the Nile across the continent. Opposite the great river’s