La Florida / Peruviae Auriferae Regionis Typus / Guastecan

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This map is actually a collection of three maps that formed a part of the famous atlas that Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish mapmaker, made in the 16th Century. It actually includes three sections: one a part of the connecting tissue between the two continents of North and South America; one showing Florida; and one showing the Peruvian coast. Ortelius was one of the most decent mapmakers and collectors of maps. When he published his atlas, unlike many others who simply stole the ideas or the maps from someone else and attributed them to themselves, Ortelius always gave credit to the actual mapmaker. I particularly like the Peruvian coast, and, if you look at that, you’ll see the mountain ranges, of course the mountainous western coast of South America is famous. And this map would have been very useful to the Spanish as they continued their exploration and conquest of the South America and Central American portions of the Western Hemisphere. It’s also illustrated with some wonderful ships at sea, and communities that probably did not have anything very substantial in them are represented by little castles and somewhat larger structures than are real at various points in the mountainous Peruvian coast.

 

 

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Des Nouvelles Isles, comment, quand & par qui elles ont este trouvees

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This map is a page from a compilation of maps by our friend Sebastian Munster, the 16th-century cartographer. In this particular case, it is a French edition, Des Nouvelles Isles, the new islands, and it represents not a very real portrayal of the Caribbean islands but an impressionistic sense that there were lots of new islands that are now entering into the mind of the European explorer, and without trying to be accurate, I think Munster just throws a whole bunch of interesting Island-looking places together, together with a couple of ships, and this is the headline for what will be his more careful rendering of various islands in the Caribbean.

 

 

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Battle of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola

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This map is a map of the then-settlement of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. And one can see the fairly orderly center of the town, surrounded by various gardens and other human activity. One of the features that I like particularly is this nondescript sea monster, looks a little bit more like a salamander. A giant salamander, as big as any of the ships in the fleet, swimming alongside, heading toward the fleet. This is a good example of the woodcut technique and a very early 16th-century map of that settlement.

 

 

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Spagnola

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This map is a very early 16th-century rendering of the island of Hispaniola. It’s a little misleading because a discussion of Jamaica appears at the bottom that would continue on to the next page where the map of Jamaica would appear. But this is Hispaniola, and you’ll see an effort to render a town on the island called Isabella. Bordon was operating with very little information here, and so one can’t really see very much of the actual outline of the island of Hispaniola, which of course now includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Nevertheless, here again was an early, early mapmaker doing his best and creating what is at least a very interesting rendering.

 

 

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Engraving of Sebastian Münster

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This is an engraving of a mapmaker. The mapmaker is the well-known mapmaker of the 16th century called Sebastian Münster. We don’t know exactly who engraved this portrait of Münster, but in the course of the rest of the collection at Villanova University’s Falvey Library there will be many, many wood-cut maps, early maps, famous maps, performed by this mapmaker. He was born and lived his life largely in what is now Germany, and his work was pioneering work, copied by many in the years that followed.

 

 

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Map of Europe as queen

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This map is a creative rendering of the continent of Europe. As you’ll see, it’s been made to look like or conform to the figure of a queen. It took some work to make all that work out. The Queen’s head is more or less where Spain is, her left shoulder is more or less where France is, her right arm extends down into the water, representing the Italian peninsula. So, Sebastian Munster, the mapmaker, had some fun with this, and as was the case with some other mapmakers engaged in a little bit of fantasy cartography. This is a good example; she’s fun to look at.

 

 

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Tabula Asiae IIII

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This map is a map by Münster from the first half of the 16th century. It reflects basically the Middle East – that part of the world which is so turbulent and so fraught with conflict today. In the upper left-hand corner, one sees Cyprus and the eastern part of the Mediterranean. And then moving ashore, you can see where Palestine is, Samaria, Galilee, on up through what we think of today as Israel and the Holy Land, continuing on over to Syria. Moving further to the right we enter the Arabian Peninsula, and there are some of the tents that were characteristic of the day. On over to the right-hand most side, are the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and Mesopotamia, referred to here as “Babylonia,” which, of course, was roughly where the famous mythical city of Babylon was located.

This woodcut was in a style that follows what is known as the Ptolemaic way of portraying maps. Claudius Ptolemy was a geographer in the Second Century of the Common Era operating out of Alexandria in Egypt. And, in his day, not much was known about the whole world, but he made it his business to know a great deal about the then-known world and included what were then very rough longitude and latitude markings. In any event, maps made from his geographic pinpoints – his longitudes and latitudes – were the best maps of the then-period of time and, for a thousand years more, continue to be the best maps – or at least the model of maps. So what we have here is a map that was made in the 16th Century, but follows the style and the locations of many of the points of the area that were devised by a 2nd Century Greek.

 

 

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Typus orbis terrarum, ad imitationem universalis Gerhardi Mercatoris

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This map is a marvelous effort to capture what the whole world looked like. It is after the much larger and very famous map[1] by Gerard Mercator, and among its many wonderful features are its effort, again, to portray what the New World looks like. It had been known for roughly seventy years, but the explorers of the world were still trying to make sense of it. You’ll see at the very very bottom, a large continuous landmass that seems to go on forever. It’s one of the many terras incognitae[2] that you will find on older maps, and that large landmass was posited by mapmakers, in part, because there was so much landmass on the northern side of the equator and there was at least some theorizing that without a large landmass on the bottom, the globe was in danger of tipping over, so it was speculated that, of course there had to be a large landmass – and there it is, whether it really is- existed or not. Another interesting feature of this map is the medallion showing Jesus in the upper left-hand corner. Some people think that this medallion was placed there strategically because, while there was a hope there would be a Northwest Passage above and around the North American continent, they weren’t quite sure. And so at least one theory here is that Jesus and his medallion were strategically put at that location, so the mapmaker did not have to make a definitive choice.

[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_1569_world_map Accessed 23 Mar. 2021.
[2] “When Roman mapmakers drew a land area that no one had yet explored, they often labeled it “Terra Incognita”—that is, “Unknown Territory”—and the term continued to be used for centuries afterward.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terra%20incognita Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691561