1492: The Year Our World Began Read Free Page B

mouth, the Bosporus flows to the northern edge of the world, dividing Europe from Asia. The more informal maps that appeared frequently in fifteenth-century works derived from the work of one of the finest mapmakers of the Middle Ages—the twelfth-century Sicilian master al-Idrisi. Typically, they also placed Arabia in the center of the composition, but they gave it a reliable shape, and showed the Nile flowing from the Mountains of the Moon, located a little way beyond the equator.
    If Muslim cartography made it hard to picture the world of 1492, surviving Chinese sources are even less helpful. Chinese attempts tomap the world existed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. None has survived, however, beyond purely schematic representations of the cosmos—a circle representing heaven, a rectangle representing the earth—designed to evoke the old Chinese saying that the heavens are round but the earth has sharp corners. For an idea of how Chinese cartography made the world look, the best map to turn to is Korean. The Kangnido was made in 1402 and much copied, not only in Korea but also in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. A copy dated 1470 survives. In a passage of promotional writing accompanying the map, the principal patron, the Confucian scholar Kwon Kun, describes “looking on in satisfaction” as the map took shape and describes its purpose—to inform and enhance government—as well as the process by which the cartographer, Yi Hoe, who is also known for maps of Korea and celestial maps, made it. “The world is very wide,” the text observes. “We do not know how many tens of millions of li [a unit of distance equal to less than half a kilometer] there are from China in the center to the four seas at the outer limits.” The writer condemns most maps as “too diffuse or too abbreviated” but says that Yi Hoe compiled his work from reliable Chinese predecessors of the fourteenth century with corrections and additions, “making it a new map entirely, nicely organized and well worth admiration. One can indeed know the world without going out of his door!” 7
    The map shows Eurasia and Africa in a great sweep from a huge and detailed Korea to a vaguely delineated Europe, sketchy in outline but emblazoned with about one hundred place-names. China is copiously detailed, India less so—though recognizable in shape, with Sri Lanka like a round ball at its toe. Indochina and the Malay Peninsula are a tiny, insignificant stump. Japan is displaced well to the south of its real position, and none of the islands of Indonesia or even of the China Sea, except the Ryukyus, are identifiable. Africa and Arabia are etiolated and squashed toward the western edge of the world. A huge inland sea occupies most of the African interior. The map exudes pride and ambition—an effort at a global vision; a belief, at least, that such a vision waspossible. The excitement the globe of 1492 aroused in Nuremberg seems closely paralleled in Korea.
    Martin Behaim made the Nuremberg globe in his native city. A merchant by vocation, he had traveled around western Europe making deals and knew parts of the Low Countries and Portugal well. One of his trips abroad, in 1483, probably had an ulterior motive: to postpone or avoid a sentence of three weeks’ imprisonment for dancing during Lent at a Jewish friend’s wedding. He was in Lisbon in 1484 and seems to have caught the geography bug in that city of Atlantic explorers, where coastal surveying voyages down the west of Africa were under way, mapping the regions Martin would get so badly wrong on his globe. His claim to have accompanied those expeditions is unsupported by any other evidence, and seems incompatible with his errors. His ambitions exceeded his knowledge.
    When he got back to Nuremberg in 1490, his tales excited expectations he could not honestly or perfectly fulfill. Still, although he had little or no practical experience in navigating or surveying, he was a representative