The Indian Ocean on the Walsperger World Map (1448)
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THE WALSPERGER WORLD MAP (Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1362 B.) is a circular south-up map of the world drawn in 1448 CE in Konstanz in southern Germany. The cartographer was a Benedictine monk from Salzburg named Andreas Walsperger; the map (Figure 1) is his best-known work and his claim to historical fame.
In this piece I’m going to take a look at the depiction of Java and of the Indian Ocean more generally on the Walsperger world map. Late-medieval European maps differed greatly in their images of Africa and Asia; several sources of information were available but there was little in the way of trustworthy scientific knowledge. Actually surveying the land and seas of most of Asia was not a realistic possibility until the sixteenth century, and different mapmakers made different choices with regard to the evidence they used and the way they marshalled it. Walsperger made some interesting decisions in putting his map together and the map is worth exploring in a little detail here.
First I’ll go over some of the history of medieval European cartography — just enough to put Walsperger’s map in context — before examining the map and its whimsical Latin captions.
Medieval Latin Christian Depictions of Southeast Asia
The backbone of Latin Christian geographical knowledge in the Middle Ages was the Etymologiae (‘Etymologies’, aka Origines), an encyclopedic work written by Isidore of Seville (Isidorus Hispalensis, c.560–636) in the first quarter of the seventh century (Figure 2). Isidore distilled the essence of several Greco-Roman geographical treatises — Pomponius Mela’s De Chorographia, for example, which was also well-known in the Middle Ages — in describing the world outside Europe in the Etymologiae, and particularly conservative cartographers still relied on the work even late into the fifteenth century.
A new wave of information about Asia came into Europe in the fourteenth century in the form of accounts recounting the travels of Marco Polo (c.1300), Odoric of Pordenone (c.1330), Jordanus (c.1330), and (the now-known-hoaxer) ‘Sir John Mandeville’ (1350s). Some mapmakers enthusiastically adopted the new knowledge brought back by these travellers and incorporated elements from each of them into their cartography. These works frequently conflicted with the received wisdom passed down by Isidore, however, and other cartographers scrupulously avoided using them, doubting their veracity. The new accounts disagreed among themselves about certain things too: Two islands called ‘Jaua’ appear in the Polo texts, for instance, but only one occurs in Odoric’s Relatio (Figure 3). Attempts to reconcile these accounts, or decisions to ignore them in whole or in part, led to the plethora of mutually contradictory cartographic visions of the hemisphere outside Europe that can be seen in surviving fourteenth- and fifteenth-century maps.
Jacopo Angelo da Scarperia’s 1406 Latin translation of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia, a work of mathematical geography written in Greek in Alexandria in around 150 CE, added to the range of plausible depictions. In their Greek, Syriac, and Arabic guises Ptolemy’s works had been influential on Middle Eastern and North African geographies for some centuries; the Latin translation of the Geographia (originally Γεωγραφικὴ Ὑφήγησις ‘Geographical Guidance’) meant that Ptolemy’s ideas could finally be exploited by European cartographers as well (Figure 4).
Many of Ptolemy’s toponyms weren’t deciphered until modern times. Java is mentioned in the Latin Geographia under the name Iabadium or Ibadium (from Ptolemy’s Ιαβαδιου, now believed to have come from the Sanskrit Yavadvīpa), but the connection between this name and the Jaua (vel sim) of Polo and Odoric was not made at the time. It is perhaps for this reason that Ptolemy’s less well-known Asian toponyms are often absent from late-medieval maps, replaced by names taken from Polo et al.
Influence from Ptolemaic mathematical geographical can often be seen, though, in the drawing of the Indian Ocean and its shores. On maps directly influenced by Ptolemy, which is to say most but not all of the ones from the fifteenth century, the ‘Golden Chersonese’ (Aurea Chersonesus), identifiable with the Malay Peninsula or mainland Southeast Asia as a whole, often juts out like a horse’s hoof into the eastern Indian Ocean (as in Figure 4). The Ocean on such maps is often curiously circular, hemmed in by part of Africa in the west and by the Golden Chersonese in the east. This is true even of maps — like Walsperger’s, as can be seen in Figure 8 below — that otherwise barely drew on the Geographia.
This all meant that fifteenth-century European cartographers had plenty of room to manoeuvre. They could take freely from Ptolemy, Isidore, Polo, Odoric, and more spurious sources like Mandeville, as well from Christian apocrypha, hagiographies, and the Bible — or from only one or two of these. They could draw one Java, two Javas, or no Javas at all.
Even scholars working at the same time in the same city could come to different conclusions about how best to depict southern Asia and the Indian Ocean, as can be seen in Figures 5 and 6, both maps drawn in Nuremberg in the early 1490s.
The simple world map in Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (aka the ‘Nuremberg Chronicle, Figure 5) is extremely conservative, taking many of its place names from Isidore — indeed, the description of Asia in the Liber is lifted wholesale from Isidore’s Etymologiae. The jutting Southeast Asia from the popular bastardisation of the Geographia also makes an appearance:
Meanwhile, Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel, the oldest extant globe, also has a Ptolemaic horse-hoof Chersonese sticking out into the Indian Ocean — but it adds to this two islands called Java, one called Pentan (Bintan Island), and a couple of others whose names were taken from Mandeville (Figure 6):
These two maps were drawn at the same time in the same city, a ‘city’ of probably under ten thousand inhabitants. The difference wasn’t down to ignorance of the sources; it was due to doubts about which sources to trust. Behaim appears to have been particularly trusting of the Polo accounts, passages from which appear in the captions, and of Mandeville. Schedel and his collaborators were aware of these texts but appears to have trusted in nothing but ancient scholarship (Figure 7). We now know that Mandeville’s account was an almost complete fabrication and the parts of it that were true were taken directly from Odoric’s Relatio — but people in medieval Europe had no way to know that. Scepticism of all the later accounts seems reasonable in this context.
Andreas Walsperger’s c.1448 Mappamundi
The Walsperger map’s Asian cartography is a peculiar mish-mash of all of the above. It draws on a range of different traditions and mixes them in a unique fashion. There’s a bit of Ptolemy in the way some features are drawn, in particular the Golden Chersonese (Aurea Kersonesis) and the closed nature of the Indian Ocean, but some of the place names are taken from Odoric or Polo, and it’s all put together in an odd way.
Here’s the ‘Golden Chersonese’ on the map — drawn right next to South Arabia, which isn’t exactly where we would expect to see it (Figure 8):
CAPTIONS
Aurea ker-
sonesis
‘The Golden Chersonese.’
Hic rex caspar ha-
bitauit
‘Here lived King Caspar.’
Further to the south — which is to say, a little bit further up the map — we find a few islands in the Indian Ocean, including Pomponius Mela’s islands of Gold (Crisa) and Silver (Argeia), as well as the larger ones of Taprobana and Jana (Figures 9 and 10). Jana is Java; the ⟨n⟩ is the result of a scribal error by an earlier copyist of a Polo or Odoric manuscript. (We find roughly the same form on the Catalan Atlas, a world map drawn in Majorca in around 1375.) Taprobana is Sri Lanka, although it was often confused with Sumatra later in the fifteenth century. On Walsperger’s map it is said to be the ‘source of pepper’ (ortus piperis):
CAPTIONS
Jana i᷉sula
‘The island of Jana.’
…which is in:
mare magnu᷉ Indorum
‘The Great Sea of the Indies.’
Taꝓbana
ortꝯ piperꝬ
‘Taprobana — the source of pepper.’
On the Asian coast opposite the island of Jana it says:
Hic sunt
gigantes pug-
na᷉tes cu᷉ draconibꝯ
‘Here be giants fighting with dragons.’
On the African side:
trigodite tres
hñt facies
‘Troglodytes who have three faces.’
And on the Asian coast opposite Taprobana:
hic
sṫ for-
mice in
qu᷉titate
canu᷉
‘Here be ants the size of dogs.’
As you can probably tell, the Walsperger world map is rather useless as a primary source on tropical Asia. Its depiction stuffs together slightly garbled Ptolemaic geography (the Golden Chersonese), toponyms from Polo or Odoric (Jana), ancient lore (Herodotus’s gold-digging ants), and Christian apocrypha (the magus Caspar) in an odd melange.
It does, however, show us something about how the world in general was known and understood in the Middle Ages. Europe is drawn quite well, as it usually is in European maps of the period; Asia is a bit of a mess. Likewise, in medieval Southeast Asian texts pride of place is nearly always given to Southeast Asian toponyms; Europe isn’t mentioned at all in any surviving medieval texts from the region. Before the sixteenth century nobody had anything close to a complete image of the world, and almost nobody travelled across the entire hemisphere, let alone the entire globe. All views were local.
Epilogue
While Walsperger was drawing up his world map in 1448, the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini was putting the final touches to his De Varietate Fortunæ, the fourth book of which contained a Latin recounting of the adventures of a Venetian merchant named Niccolò de’ Conti. Conti had travelled all around the Indian Ocean with his Egyptian wife and children; they had died of plague in Egypt in the 1440s, and this disaster led him to return to Italy shortly afterwards. Pope Eugene IV asked Conti to tell Bracciolini about his travels, apparently as penance for having converted to Islam while abroad, and he did so. Conti also appears to have been an informant on a lavish world map made in Venice c.1450 by the Fra Mauro, a Camaldolese friar.
Niccolò de’ Conti seems to have had a rather different set of experiences to Marco Polo or Odoric of Pordenone, and the works inspired by his account — like the so-called ‘Genoese’ world map of 1457 (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Portolano 1), probably actually made in Iberia — differ substantially from earlier ones. It can’t be said that Conti made Walsperger’s map obsolete: as you can see above, European maps could differ dramatically even at the end of the fifteenth century, and one could know about Conti’s travels and still doubt the truth of his account. In the fifteenth century, though, a single work like Bracciolini’s could have an enormous impact on the way the rest of the world was viewed and what was believed to be in it, in Europe and elsewhere, and the Conti account gave geographers and cartographers new material to reckon with, material that hadn’t been available when Walsperger was working on his map (Figure 11).
The real revolution in European cartography occurred in the sixteenth century, when it became possible for surveyors and cartographers to actually travel to Africa, Asia, and (importantly) the Americas as part of European colonial projects. The demand for accurate maps — the better to conquer and dominate colonial subjects with — led to dramatic improvements in European mapmaking. Maps produced in the 1540s are literally worlds apart from those of the 1440s.
Quick note on the abbreviations found on the map:
⟨ꝯ⟩ = -us, e.g. ortꝯ = ortus.
⟨Ꝭ⟩ = -is, e.g. piperꝬ = piperis.
⟨~⟩ = a missing nasal consonant, e.g. magnu᷉ = magnum.
⟨ꝓ⟩ = -pro-, as in Taꝓbana = Taprobana.
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