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1550 Munster Map of the World According to Ptolemy
WorldPtolemy-munster-1550
Title
1550 (undated) 10.5 x 13.5 in (26.67 x 34.29 cm) 1 : 49000000
Description
This map might be hard to understand from a modern perspective. Ptolemy was a second century A.D. geographer established at the library of Alexandria. He compiled a list of cities and coordinates, as well as geographical descriptions of the known world, in an influential work entitled the Geographia.Although no actual maps from Ptolemy remain, it is presumed that he made them. The Geographia did however survive and Renaissance cartographers embraced it not only as a geographical model but also as a reference to the classical texts they were unearthing.
It is the Ptolemaic vision of the world we see illustrated here. Europe is easily identifiable in the upper left. Africa becomes a massive continent seemingly without end. It is however defined by two great river systems, the Niger, extending form the Atlantic, and the Nile. Arabia and the Persian Gulf are clearly recognizable. The Indian Ocean is entirely enclosed. Tapobrana, in the midst of this great sea, is mostly probably the island of Ceylon or modern-day Sri Lanka, here oversized due to its importance in the classical spice trade. India, appearing amorphously just to the north, is undersized by comparison. Further east a territory called India Extra Gangers (India beyond the Ganges) is in fact Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula. The map extends only so far south as the Equator as Ptolemy believe that as one traveled south they entered an impassible 'Tepid Zone' inhabited only by monsters.
By the time this map was made cosmographers like Munster were well aware that the world was much larger and more complex than Ptolemy ever imagined. Columbus had discovered America, Magellan circumnavigated the Globe, and Bartholomeu Dias and Vasco de Gama rounded Africa. Nonetheless, the influence of Ptolemaic geographic was so extreme that in served as the basis for most contemporary maps and was included in its purer from in most atlases and cosmographies of the period.
This map was first published in 1540 Cosmographia by Heinrich Petri. Subsequent editions of the Cosmographia appeared in 1541, 1542, 1534, and 1552. All examples of the map from these editions are identifiable by a fine vertical cracking running through the right side of the map through Tapobrana. All have Latin text on verso.
CartographerS
Sebastian Münster (January 20, 1488 - May 26 1552), was a German cartographer, cosmographer, Hebrew scholar and humanist. He was born at Ingelheim near Mainz, the son of Andreas Munster. He completed his studies at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen in 1518, after which he was appointed to the University of Basel in 1527. As Professor of Hebrew, he edited the Hebrew Bible, accompanied by a Latin translation. In 1540 he published a Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia, which presented the ancient cartographer's 2nd century geographical data supplemented systematically with maps of the modern world. This was followed by what can be considered his principal work, the Cosmographia. First issued in 1544, this was the earliest German description of the modern world. It would become the go-to book for any literate layperson who wished to know about anywhere that was further than a day's journey from home. In preparation for his work on Cosmographia, Münster reached out to humanists around Europe and especially within the Holy Roman Empire, enlisting colleagues to provide him with up-to-date maps and views of their countries and cities, with the result that the book contains a disproportionate number of maps providing the first modern depictions of the areas they depict. The book, unsurprisingly, proved popular and was reissued in numerous editions and languages including Latin, French, Italian, English, and Czech. The last German edition was published in 1628, long after Münster's death of the plague in 1552. Cosmographia was one of the most successful and popular books of the 16th century, passing through 24 editions between 1544 and 1628. This success was due in part to its fascinating woodcuts (some by Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, and David Kandel). Münster's work was highly influential in reviving classical geography in 16th century Europe, and providing the intellectual foundations for the production of later compilations of cartographic work, such as Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrsrum Münster's output includes a large format 1536 map of Europe; the 1532 Grynaeus map of the world is also attributed to him. His non-geographical output includes Dictionarium trilingue in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and his 1537 Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. Most of Munster's work was published by his son-in-Law, Heinrich Petri (Henricus Petrus), and his son Sebastian Henric Petri.
Heinrich Petri (1508 - 1579) and his son Sebastian Henric Petri (1545 – 1627) were printers based in Basel, Switzerland. Heinrich was the son of the printer Adam Petri and Anna Selber. After Adam died in 1527, Anna married the humanist and geographer Sebastian Munster - one of Adam's collaborators. Sebastian contracted his son-in-law, Henricus Petri (Petrus), to print editions of his wildly popular Cosmographia. Later Petri, brought his son, Sebastian Henric Petri, into the family business. Their firm was known as the Officina Henricpetrina. In addition to the Cosmographia, they also published a number of other seminal works including the 1566 second edition of Nicolaus Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and Georg Joachim Rheticus's Narratio.
Claudius Ptolemy (83 - 161 AD) is considered to be the father of cartography. A native of Alexandria living at the height of the Roman Empire, Ptolemy was renowned as a student of Astronomy and Geography. His work as an astronomer, as published in his Almagest, held considerable influence over western thought until Isaac Newton. His cartographic influence remains to this day. Ptolemy was the first to introduce projection techniques and to publish an atlas, the Geographiae. Ptolemy based his atlas on the "Geographiae" of Strabo, the cartographic materials assembled by Marinus of Tyre, and contemporary accounts provided by the many traders and navigators passing through Alexandria. Ptolemy's Geographiae was a ground breaking achievement far in advance of any known pre-existent cartography, however, it was not without flaws. In a masterstroke of ego that would last over 1,500 years, Ptolemy filled the many unknown and unexplored lands with mountains, lakes, and rivers that he merely assumed must exist. His other great error involved his use of the Cape Verde Islands as a Prime Meridian, thus wildly over estimating distances east of this point, and conversely underestimating the distances west. The ultimate result of this error was Columbus's fateful expedition to India in 1492. In any case, though the text of Ptolemy's Geographiae did survive, the maps that supposedly accompanied it did not. The earliest known Ptolemaic maps are in manuscript format and date to approximately 1300. Most of Ptolemaic maps that have come down to us today are based upon the manuscript editions produced in the mid 15th century by Donnus Nicolaus Germanus, who provided the basis for both the 1477 Bologna and the 1482-6 Ulm Ptolemies. Even after printed versions became broadly available, later authorities - Waldseemuller in 1513, Mercator in 1578 - would consult early manuscript Ptolemies in revising new editions of the work.
Source
Munster's methodology in Cosmographia is notable in particular for his dedication to providing his readers with direct access to firsthand reports of his subjects wherever possible. Many of the maps were the result of his own surveys; others, the fruit of an indefatigable letter writing campaign to scholars, churchmen and princes throughout Europe, amicably badgering them for maps, views, and detailed descriptions of their lands. For lands further afield than his letters could reach, Munster relied on the best that the authorities of northern European scholarship could offer: he was well familiar with the work of Waldseemuller and other geographers of the early 16th century, and was well connected with the best geographers of his own generation. A disproportionate number of the maps of Cosmographia show contemporary geographical knowledge of the their respective areas for the very first time: The first map to show the continents of the Western Hemisphere; the first map to focus on the continent of Asia; the first modern map to name the Pacific Ocean; the first map to use a key; the first modern map of the British Isles and so on. Even in cases where earlier maps exist, Munster's works very often remain the earliest such acquirable by the collector.