Slide #239
TITLE: World Map of de Noha
DATE: 1414
AUTHOR: Pirrus de Noha
DESCRIPTION: Claudius Ptolemy worked in Alexandria in the early and
mid-second century A D and we know of him only through his writings on a
variety of scientific subjects. Among these is the work known from the Arabic
version of its title as the Almagest, which catalogues over a thousand
stars, defining the position of each and explaining how to construct a celestial
globe. His Geographia can be seen as a logical sequel. It gives the
latitude and longitude of places, ideally from astronomical observation,
as a basis for drawing maps of individual regions and of the whole world,
and discusses possible ways of projecting the curved surface of the world
on to the flat surface of a map. Ptolemy saw the world as a complete sphere,
but the inhabited area as only a part of it, stretching south some 16 degrees
beyond the Equator, north to about the Arctic Circle, east a little beyond
Malaya, and bounded on the west by the Atlantic. Although his lists locate
places by their geographical coordinates it is clear that these did not
all come from immediate observation but were worked out from whatever information
was available, such as accounts of journeys giving distances from one place
to another; this means that their appearance of great accuracy is often
spurious.
The oldest surviving manuscript of Ptolemy's Greek text was copied more
than a thousand years after he wrote; it dates from the late 12th or early
13th century. Enough other copies survive from the 13th and 14th centuries
to show that it was, perhaps had suddenly become, a popular work in the
Byzantine Greek cultural world. Some, not all, of these manuscripts include
maps, and of these there are two versions. In both there is a world map,
but one has 64 regional maps while the other, following Ptolemy's text more
literally, has 26. These maps may or may not have been compiled by Ptolemy
himself. His book gives instructions for making the maps but does not say
in so many words that he has actually drawn them. They may have been constructed
from the text and added to the book by a copyist at any date between Ptolemy's
own time and the earliest known manuscripts. There is also some reason to
suppose that the world map was constructed separately from the regional
maps of either version.
It was a text with maps that was translated into Latin by Jacobus Angelus
in about 1406 that first introduced Ptolemy's Geographia (Slide #119) into western Europe. Its impact is shown by the
number of surviving 15th century manuscripts of the Latin version and by
the succession of early printed editions. The first, at Vicenza in 1475,
had no maps, but it was then published with maps at Bologna in 1477, Rome
in 1478 (40) and 1490, Ulm in 1482 and 1486, and so on. It is shown too
by the way other world maps quickly assimilated elements from Ptolemy's.
Thus the map copied by Pirrus de Noha about 1414 to illustrate a quite different
geographical text of the Roman period, the Chorography of the 1st
century author Pomponius Mela, takes from Ptolemy its land-locked Indian
Ocean, the shapes of Malaya and Sri Lanka (Taprobana) , the Mediterranean
Sea 20 degrees too long, the Mons Lune [Mountains of the Moon] as
the source of the river Nile, no clear indication of the shape of central-southern
Africa or the Far East, etc. Again, this is only the oikoumene or known
world, not an attempt to display those parts still unexplored. Measuring
18 x 27 cm the parchment has been painted so that the oceans and seas are
displayed in blue (the Red Sea is an exception and is shown in red), the
mountains as symbolic sawtooths in brown on the natural colored parchment
landmasses and the text is in red. There is the influence of the portolan
charts with regards to familiar coastlines, particularly the outlines
of the Baltic and Caspian Seas, although Scandinavia is shown as a massive
peninsula with Greenland not yet joined to it, as it is in the later work
of Clavus. Many of the geographical names in the countries of the interior
recall Ptolemy and a total lack of adornment such as castellated towns,
pictures or vignettes to occupy unknown areas.
Much later in the century we see Ptolemy's influence just as clearly in
the world maps of Henricus Martellus (Slide #256 ),
who was working at Florence in the 1480s and 1490s. But not all world maps
were affected. We see little trace of the Ptolemy in Andrea Bianco's world
map of 1436 (Slide #241) or in the Vinland Map
(Slide #243) which is closely related; instead
we see the portolan charts and the tradition represented by the Cotton
Map (Slide #210).
In fact, although this will not have been apparent in the 15th century,
the Ptolemy maps, while impressive in their detail and their scope, were
not so very much better than those already available in western Europe.
Again, the portolan charts of the early 15th century had achieved
a better coastal outline of Italy than the Ptolemy map. The importance of
the Ptolemy maps does not lie in their accuracy, which people in the 15th
century could not easily assess. Partly it lay in the detailed coverage
of maps and text alike, they were systematic and comprehensive. But much
more it lay in the merits of the method, irrespective of the accuracy of
the information. Any of the geographical coordinates could be checked, however
crudely, by actual observation and corrected. Ptolemy's text could be seen
as a starting point for a process of correction and improvement. Moreover,
by defining so many fixed points it provided a check on the accurate copying
of the maps. Ptolemy's maps may, or may not, have been copied for a thousand
years before the earliest known manuscript; but insofar as the locations
of the places they name accord with the lists of coordinates we know that
they differ little from their prototypes.
LOCATION: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio di San Pietro,
Rome, Italy.
REFERENCES:
*Bagrow, L., History of Cartography, p. 70, plate XLI.
*Harley, J.B., The History of Cartography, Volume I, pp. 317, 357, 358,
379, plate 19 (color).
Harvey, P.D.A., Medieval Maps, pp. 51-52.
*illustrated