Introduction to the Carta Marina

This book is devoted to an imposing world map, printed on twelve sheets and rich in detail, that was designed by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller in 1516, whose only surviving exemplar is in the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress.

given rise to claims that some of the maps in the 1522 edition of Ptolemy's Geography published by Grüninger were made by Waldseemüller and intended for one of these books, but this is unlikely to be true, as Waldseemüller had been moving away from Ptolemy for some years before his death. It has been plausibly argued, however, that Waldseemüller's notes for these books were used by Lorenz Fries in writing his Uslegung der mercarthen oder Charta Marina, the booklet that accompanied Fries's 1525 edition of Waldseemüller's Carta marina, and was published by Grüninger in Strasbourg. 22 In addition, the Uslegung contains a map showing the route that Alvise Cadamosto took on his voyage to Madeira and the Canary Islands in 1455, 23 and it is very likely that Waldseemüller made this map for either the Chronica mundi or the Itineraria. 24 Further, a copy of Francanzio de Montalboddo's Itinerarium Portugallensium (Milan, 1508) in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (signature 394.092-C.Kar) has a set of six maps that have been added to the book, a world map and five maps of the coast of West Africa that illustrate the voyages of Cadamosto (1455/56) and Pedro de Sintra (1463). One of these maps is very similar to (but not identical with) that in the 1525 Uslegung, and it seems likely that they were produced as part of the preparations for the Chronica mundi or Itineraria, either by Waldseemüller or by a closely affiliated cartographer. 25 But some passages in the Uslegung and these maps are all that we have of Waldseemüller's final projects.

Comparing and Contrasting the 1507 and 1516 Maps
As mentioned above, Waldseemüller's Carta marina, like his 1507 map, is printed on twelve sheets that were designed to be assembled into a wall map measuring 128 Â 233 cm (50.4 Â 91.7 inches). But while they share these physical characteristics, in most other respects the two maps are very different, and the differences are reflected in their titles. The title of the 1507 map, as mentioned above, is Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii alioru A nautical chart that comprehensively shows the Portuguese voyages and the shape and nature of the whole known world, both land and sea, its regions, and its limits as they have been determined in our times, and how they differ from the tradition of the ancients, and also areas not mentioned by the ancients.
The change from Waldseemüller's following Ptolemy to repudiating him is dramatic, and illustrates a dichotomy of Renaissance culture: on the one hand, admiration for the methods of enquiry and systems of knowledge of the ancients, and on the other, recognition that new investigations or explorations could produce results superior to those of the ancients-for example, the discovery that the equatorial Torrid Zone, which various classical authors held to be uninhabitable and uncrossable, was a myth. 26 In a long introductory text in the lower left corner of the Carta marina, Waldseemüller discusses his earlier map (certainly the 1507 map), 27  , questions whether the earlier map described is in fact the 1507 map, asserting that Waldseemüller says that the earlier map represents the world according to Ptolemy, while the 1507 map contains more than that. Unfortunately this doubt is based on a misinterpretation or incomplete reading of Waldseemüller's text. After Waldseemüller writes that he designed his earlier map so that "it would only have in it those customs and features that are known to have been extant or in use in Ptolemy's time," he continues: "Many things were added that were discovered and confirmed by the testimony of experience by the Venetian citizen Marco during the papacies of Clement IV and Gregory X, and by the Portuguese captains Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci.". names, like his earlier map, is of limited utility, since it is difficult to recognize modern places according to their ancient names, and also remarks that recent explorers have detected various errors in the geographical writings of the ancients, particularly in Ptolemy's Geography. He then writes 28 : Quibus ipse permotus communi eruditorum utilitati studens hunc secundarium totius orbis typum primo adieci, ut sicut illic veterum constetit auctorum totius orbis terra marique descriptio, sic reluceat hic non noua solum ac presens totius orbis facies, sed cum hoc mediorum temporum indita rebus mortalibus consueta et naturalis permutatio pateat ut unico habeas (si ita dici iubet) contuitu quid, quales, quomodo res caduce nunc fiunt, qualesque priscis fuerint temporibus et quales aliquin future a nobis nullatenus dubitari possint. Hanc igitur iuxta Neotericorum traditionem totius orbis spetiem & descriptionem Chartam placuit appellare marinam, eo que in maris descriptionibus vulgarem fuerimus & approbatissimam nauticarum tabularum notificationes insequuti, sumus insuper in mediterranea Asie atque Aphrice descriptione Ne[o]tericorum itinerarios, particulares tabulas, chorographias, & quorundam recensiorum [for recentiorum] lustratorum relationes plerumque imitati….
Moved by these considerations, and in the interest of the common utility of scholars, I have added this second image of the world to my first, so that just as in the first the image of the whold world, land and sea, agreed with that of the ancient authors, so in this one, not only may the new and present face of the world shine forth, but together with that, the customary and natural change introduced into worldly affairs in the intervening times, so that you can see (if I may say so) at a single glance why, of what kind, and how transitory things have come to be now, what they were like in former times, and how they will be in the future, without a doubt. Therefore, it seemed good to call this image and description of the whole world, made in accordance with the tradition of modern authors, a Carta marina, and for that reason, as far as the depiction of the oceans, I have followed the commonly used and the most approved nautical charts and their indications, while in the depiction of the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa I have made ample use of recent authors' travel narratives, regional maps, descriptions of countries, and the accounts of some recent explorers….
Though his 1507 map shows the New World, Waldseemüller here describes his earlier work as an image of the earth according to the ancients, no doubt to increase the attractiveness of his new map, which is based on the most recent information available.
Together with this change in his thought about what a world map should be came a closely related change in cartographic models. His 1507 map is based on Ptolemy's Geography-not only on Ptolemy's geographical data regarding the locations of cities and other features in Europe, Africa and Asia, but also on his system for representing geographical space, using a grid of latitude and longitude. More specifically, Waldseemüller used as the model for his 1507 map a large world map of c. 1491 by Henricus Martellus Germanus ( Fig. 1.1). 29 Martellus's map uses the Ptolemaic grid of latitude and longitude, and is laid out using a modification of Ptolemy's second projection. Waldseemüller followed Martellus closely ( Fig. 1.2), and used the same projection, has similar decorative wind-heads in the border of the map, arranged things so that Japan is at the eastern or right-hand edge of the map as it is on Martellus's, and borrowed many descriptive texts from Martellus. 30 Waldseemüller of course added the New World, often used different sources for place names, and depicted southern Africa very differently, but in other respects he made heavy use of Martellus, particularly for the outlines of Asia and for his long descriptive texts.
In his Carta marina Waldseemüller abandoned the Ptolemaic model, and instead adopted the model of nautical charts or portolan charts. 31 The origin of nautical charts is unclear, but the earliest surviving examples date to the late thirteenth 28 For the full Latin text and English translation of this introductory paragraph see Legend 9.3.   century. In essence they are practical tools for navigation, usually hand-drawn on parchment, with the emphasis on coastal features and place names; rather than being marked with latitude and longitude, they have a system of rhumb lines that radiate out in the standard compass directions (or directions of the traditional winds) from points organized in one or two large circles. In addition to the relatively plain nautical charts used for navigation, others were elaborately decorated with cities, kings, animals, flags, and compass roses, and had descriptive texts added to them. This was the type of map that Waldseemüller chose as the model for his 1516 map, and in fact we know the specific map he used: the nautical chart by Nicolo de Caverio of Genoa, made c. 1503 ( Fig. 1.3). 32 We know this because of the close similarities of place names between Caverio's chart and Waldseemüller's Carta marina, 33 and the striking similarities of layout between the two maps ( Fig. 1.4), including the area of the world depicted and the locations of the nodes of the systems of rhumb lines.
What caused Waldseemüller to abandon the Ptolemaic model and projection he had used in his 1507 map and adopt a nautical chart model-and to abandon the bold idea he had implemented in his 1507 map of depicting the whole circumference of the earth? 34 The former question is particularly intriguing, as we know that Waldseemüller had access to the Caverio map when he made his 1507 map. 35 Yet he still chose to use Ptolemy's system of cartography rather than the nautical chart system, and also to use Ptolemy's information for the shape of North Africa, for example, while the shape of   34 Waldseemüller's boldness in depicting all 360°of the earth's circumference on the 1507 map is emphasized by the accompaniment of that map with a small globe based on the same geography as the map. 35 For a list of some of the place names that are similar in the Caverio chart and Waldseemüller's 1507 map-including the copying of errors-see Joseph Fischer and Franz Ritter von Wieser, Die älteste Karte mit dem Namen Amerika (see note 9), pp. 26-29. that same region is markedly different (and more accurate) on Caverio's chart. Evidently at some point between 1507 and 1516, perhaps while he was involved in the production of the 1513 edition of Ptolemy's Geography, he became convinced of the superiority of the more recent geographical data available in nautical charts. I will explore this question, and the development of Waldseemüller's cartographic thought, in more detail below, but certainly one factor in his decision to follow the nautical chart model was that the best data available was already in that format.
With regard to the latter question, namely why Waldseemüller chose not to depict the whole circumference of the earth in his Carta marina, although Waldseemüller clearly decided to be less venturous in depicting little-known regions, the answer cannot be simply that he did not have good data about the parts of the world he does not depict on the Carta marina. One notable difference between Caverio's map and the Carta marina is that Waldseemüller depicts less of the eastern part of the world than his model: Caverio shows substantial portions of the northeastern coast of continental Asia and of the ocean we now call the Pacific that Waldseemüller chose not to copy (compare Figs. 1.3 and 1.4). Waldseemüller had reasonably good information about the location of Japan from reading Marco Polo's account of his travels, who placed Japan 1500 miles east of mainland China, 36 and Waldseemüller depicted it on his 1507 map, but not on his Carta marina. The answer seems to be that Waldseemüller designed the Carta marina to be more practical than his 1507 map: it shows only the parts of the world where Europeans had traveled, and where trade was known to occur, and it shows those parts using a fundamentally practical cartographic format, one developed for use on ships.
In addition to omitting some 128 degrees of longitude from the Carta marina, Waldseemüller depicts much less of the northern polar regions: his 1507 map runs all the way to the North Pole, but the Carta marina only to a bit more than 70°N. The Carta marina does include several more degrees of latitude in the southern ocean than the 1507 map, but overall, Waldseemüller's exclusion of large parts of the earth's surface from the Carta marina, together with the Carta marina being almost exactly the same physical size as the 1507 map, and its border being much narrower, meant that Waldseemüller was able to show far more detail, including both texts and images, in the areas that he does depict than he could on the 1507 map. In comparison with the 1507 map, the Carta marina offers a "zoomed in" view of the known parts of the world. Thus, for example, in Arabia on sheet 6 of the 1507 map, there is room only for place names from Ptolemy and indications of mountains and rivers, but on the Carta marina there are images of Mecca and Medina as well as long legends describing the cities and features of the region (see Legends 7.6, 7.8, and 7.9).
One of the most striking differences between Waldseemüller's Carta marina and its principal model, the Caverio chart, is in the interiors of the continents, particularly in Africa and Asia. On Caverio's chart the emphasis (as is common on nautical charts) is on the coastlines, and he provides very few geographical details of the interior. In Africa there are images of two mountain ranges, three cities and three animals, some banners indicating the names of regions, and a decorative circular world map in place of a compass rose. Asia is largely empty, aside from some compass roses and a few banners with place names. The situation on the Carta marina is entirely different: both Africa and Asia are full of rivers, mountains, images of cities, sovereigns, peoples and animals, as well as descriptive texts. Waldseemüller also takes advantage of the open spaces in the unknown interior of South America and in the southern ocean to supply long texts, one the long introduction to the map quoted from earlier, another describing South America, and in the southeastern corner of the map (Legend 12.11), a list of the sources and prices of the spices in the great trading center of Calicut (now Kozhikode, India).
The abundance of geographical information and texts on the Carta marina should be considered from a few different perspectives. First, the advent of printed maps represented a great democratization of cartography, so that the information in a very expensive manuscript map like Caverio's could be made available to many people through the printing press at a much lower cost. 37 What Waldseemüller chose to democratize, however, was not just Caverio's chart, but a richer, more detailed, and more edifying version of the chart, with many more decorative elements and much more textual information. A number of manuscript nautical charts have a similar high level of expensive optional elements, including images and descriptive texts, such as the Catalan Atlas of 1375 38 and Mecia de Viladestes's nautical chart of 1413, 39 but Waldseemüller's Carta marina is the first large printed nautical chart, and it matches or exceeds these particularly elaborate nautical charts in the amount of information it offers.
It is also possible that the large amount of text on the Carta marina, particularly the long introduction in the lower left corner, was intended to render a booklet to accompany the map unnecessary: Waldseemüller and his colleague Matthias Ringmann had accompanied the 1507 world map with the booklet titled Cosmographiae introductio, and the 1511 wall map of Europe with the booklet Instructio manuductionem prestans in cartam itinerariam Martini Hilacomili. 40 We cannot be certain about this surmise, however, as Lorenz Fries's later German-language version of the Carta marina was accompanied by a booklet titled Uslegung der mercarthen oder Charta marina (Explanation of the Sea Map or Carta marina), which was probably written in part from Waldseemüller's notes for his unfinished Chronica mundi or Itineraria. 41

Waldseemüller's Textual Sources on the Carta Marina
Waldseemüller's 1507 map, like his Carta marina, has a large number of descriptive texts, particularly in Africa and Asia, but one of the most remarkable things about the texts on the Carta marina is that the overwhelming majority of them are different from the ones on the earlier map. Waldseemüller abandoned not only his earlier cartographic model (i.e. Ptolemy, by way of Martellus), but also most of his earlier textual sources, in order to create an entirely new and modern image of the world. This must have been exciting but also time-consuming, carefully studying various texts looking for just the right passages to explain different regions or cities or peoples, and also for clues about the relative locations of those places. 37 We do not know the sale price of either of Waldseemüller  • Pierre d'Ailly (1351-1420), a French cardinal, theologian and cosmographer whose Imago mundi (Image of the World) is well known for having influenced Christopher Columbus's geographical thought, specifically his conception of the width of the Atlantic 49 : Columbus owned a copy of the book which he heavily annotated. 50 The work survives in several manuscripts, 51  in a letter by Girolamo Sernigi included in Paesi novamente retrovati, Chaps. 60-62. 58 This book was among Waldseemüller's most important sources, but Caspar is not identified by name in those passages, and Waldseemüller seems not to have made use of those chapters, as he had a superior version of Caspar's account. In the text block on sheet 9 of the Carta marina (see Legend 9.3) Waldseemüller says that he had access to a travel narrative by Caspar that was sent to the King of Portugal, but that document does not appear to have survived.
• Francisco de Almeida (c. 1450-1510), 59 a Portuguese nobleman, soldier and explorer who was essential in the establishment of Portuguese power in the Indian Ocean. 60 On Almeida's voyage of 1505 from Portugal to India, one of the passengers was Balthasar Springer, or Sprenger, the representative of a trading company in Augsburg, Germany. Springer wrote an account of the voyage, which is the work that Waldseemüller is really citing. 61 The first edition of Springer's narrative, which was published in German in 1509, 62 was illustrated by Hans Burgkmair. 63 Waldseemüller made relatively little use of it, just for some toponyms in India and an image of an Indian man and an African man. unnamed member of the fleet and is known as the "Anonymous Narrative"; it was published in the Paesi novamente retrovati, Chaps. 63-83. 67 • Ludovico de Varthema (c. 1470-1517), an Italian adventurer and keen observer who wrote an account of his travels to Egypt, the Middle East, India and the islands of the Indian Ocean, though there is some dispute about whether in fact he traveled anywhere east of Cairo. 68 His narrative was published soon after his return to Europe in 1508, first in Italian (1510), then in Latin (1511), and then in an illustrated edition in German (1515). 69 • Joseph the Indian, or Priest Joseph (fl. 1490-1518), a Christian priest from Cranganore, India, who shipped with Cabral on his return to Portugal so that he could visit Rome and Jerusalem. During the voyage, and also during his stay in Portugal, he supplied detailed information about southwestern India that may have been published in 1505, and was certainly printed in 1507 as the final chapters of the Paesi novamente retrovati. 70 For Waldseemüller, the majority of these sources were recent: Varthema's book, of which Waldseemüller made heavy use, was printed just a few years before Waldseemüller created the Carta marina. A number of the other sources he cites were published in the Paesi novamente retrovati in 1507, about a decade before he made the Carta marina.
There are a couple of interesting omissions from Waldseemüller's list. The first is the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 71 who claimed to have traveled widely in Asia and Africa. The book was written in the fourteenth century and circulated very widely both in manuscript and print, with incunable editions in ten different languages, 72  manuscript, a number of which were illustrated. 75 Given Waldseemüller's wide knowledge of recent travel literature, it is difficult to imagine that he was not familiar with von Harff's book, and in fact it would be at least somewhat ironic, as his 1507 map has data that also appears in von Harff, probably by way of a map by Martellus. 76 Despite the extravagance of Mandeville's narrative, he was accepted as an authority by some other Renaissance cartographers and geographers, 77 but it seems likely that Waldseemüller chose not to use Mandeville and von Harff because he considered them unreliable.
If we look at Waldseemüller's list again in the light of his 1507 map, one of the authors included in this list and another who is omitted from it are surprising. The 1507 map proclaims Amerigo Vespucci as the discoverer of the New World: Vespucci's portrait is at the top of the map, and the southern part of the New World bears the name "America," which Waldseemüller and Ringmann created from "Amerigo." 78 Moreover, their book Cosmographiae introductio includes Vespucci's accounts of his four voyages. So it is surprising that Waldseemüller does not include Vespucci in his list of sources for the Carta marina, but does include Columbus. 79 Indeed, the Carta marina makes it clear that Waldseemüller had realized, probably through the account of Columbus's 1492 voyage in the Paesi novamente retrovati, the precedence of Columbus as discoverer: the name "America" does not appear on the map, and a legend in the South Atlantic explicitly names Columbus as the first discoverer of the New World, Cabral as the second, and Vespucci as the third (Legend 10.2).
Thus in making his Carta marina Waldseemüller not only abandoned the Ptolemaic cartographic model in favor of the nautical chart model; he also abandoned Vespucci as principal discoverer of the New World in favor of Columbus. The fact that the two figureheads, Ptolemy and Vespucci, displayed so prominently at the top of the 1507 map, had both fallen by the wayside in 1516 is a powerful testament to the rapid development of Waldseemüller's cartographic thought and his willingness to change his ideas in light of new information, as well as to the dynamism of early sixteenth-century cartography in general. Waldseemüller's willingness to discard all of the work he had invested in the 1507 map is all the more impressive given that the map was evidently well received. 80 It was not the demands of customers, but rather his own determination to find the best method for representing the world that led him to undertake the creation of an entirely new world map in the Carta marina.
In addition to recognizing Columbus's primacy as discoverer of the New World, in the Carta marina Waldseemüller adopted a Columbian conception of the New World. This can be seen particularly clearly in the different indications of what is west of the New World on the two maps. One of the most striking and oft-discussed aspects of Waldseemüller's 1507 map is his depiction of an ocean west of the New World before the European discovery of the Pacific by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa in September 1513. He also explicitly stated in the Cosmographiae introductio that the New World was an island. 81 This depiction and statement have generated claims of an earlier, pre-Balboa discovery of the Pacific by a European voyage of which no other record survives. But there is a much simpler explanation for Waldseemüller's depiction. Marco Polo had said that Japan was 1500 miles east of mainland Asia 82 ; Polo clearly stated that Japan was an island; so there must be water east of Japan, and thus between Japan and the New World. Quite probably on the basis of this reasoning, Waldseemüller shows water separating the New World from Asia on the 1507 map: they are two distinct regions.
Columbus had been seeking a route to Asia by sailing west, and during all four of his voyages and to the end of his life believed that he had been in Asia, albeit in some previously unknown outlying reaches of the continent. 83 This is the view of the New World that Waldseemüller adopts in the Carta marina. It is particularly clear in the legend on North America, on sheet 1, which reads TERRA DE CVBA • ASIE PARTIS, "The land of Cuba, part of Asia" (Legend 1.1) 84 Other evidence for this view is in the legend on sheet 5 describing Hispaniola in the Caribbean, which begins Spagnolla que et Offira dicitur, "Hispaniola, which is also called Ophir" (Legend 5.1)-identifying the island with the region mentioned in the Bible from which gold and other riches were brought to King Solomon. 85 Columbus had shown great interest in the location of Ophir, and had himself asserted that Hispaniola was to be identified with that region. 86 Thus in the Carta marina Waldseemüller has adopted a Columbian view of the New World. His decisions to show less of the ocean east of Asia than Caverio on his chart, and to exclude Japan, should be seen as part of this same new perspective.
In attempting to update his information about and depiction of the New World in the Carta marina, Waldseemüller inadvertently took a step backwards, since Columbus's belief that the New World was Asia was incorrect. 87 But in other parts of the map, particularly in Asia and the Indian Ocean, the updating is breathtaking, and in examining the changes one appreciates Waldseemüller's assertion that the 1507 map shows the world according to old authors, while the Carta marina depicts the world according to the very latest information.
On the 1507 map, in western Asia Waldseemüller follows Ptolemy, while in eastern Asia-which was unknown to Ptolemy-he follows Marco Polo. Thus in western Asia his source was more than a thousand years old, while in eastern Asia it was some two hundred years old. On the 1516 Carta marina, Waldseemüller uses information from John of Plano Carpini, 81 In Chap. 9 of the Cosmographiae introductio, Waldseemüller writes of the four parts of the world, "the first three parts [i.e. Europe, Africa and Asia] are continents, and the fourth [America] is an island, since it is seen to be completely surrounded by water." 82 On the distance of Japan from mainland Asia see note 36 above. Simon of Saint Quentin, and an unidentified source to describe Russia (the upper left part of sheet 3), using medieval names of Grand Duke's domain (Russia) and the Principality of Moscow (Moscovia Regalis); the inhabitants are said to follow the "Greek Rite," meaning that they belong to the Orthodox Church (see Legends 3.2 and 3.3). The contrast with the 1507 map is stark: there the information comes from Ptolemy, who wrote long before the East-West Schism of 1054 and the founding of Moscow in 1147. In addition to much of the information being more recent on the 1516 map, it is far more detailed, with particulars about the religion and political relationships of the inhabitants and sovereigns.
In the Middle East on the 1507 map, Persia is merely a collection of place names from Ptolemy, while on the Carta marina, in addition to there being modern names for the cities, there is a legend describing the region that mixes information from Marco Polo and a recent account from Varthema (see Legend 3.35): persia prouincia nobilis destructa multum per tartaros sed nunc sub ditione victoriosssimi [sic] regis Sophi reparata est enim diuisa in octo regna sunt Macometani et homines fallaces The noble country of Persia was largely destroyed by the Tartars, but now, under the control of the unstoppable king Sophi, it has been restored and divided into eight realms. The people are followers of Mohammed and are deceitful.
"Sophi" is Shah Isma'il es-Sufi (1487-1524), the founder of the Safavid dynasty, who gained control over Persia and Khorasan (now Iran and adjoining territories to the east) around the year 1500. 88 This information was very recent indeed, compared with that on the 1507 map, and much more detailed, as it does not merely list place names, but also reveals the current political situation.
Northern India (the lower left hand part of sheet 4) is another area where Waldseemüller was following the most recent sources, but since those sources recycled traditional information, his depiction of the area is not, in fact, particularly modern. Both John of Plano Carpini and Pierre d'Ailly describe monstrous races of men in India-men with the heads of dogs, Cyclopes, men whose faces are in their chests (elsewhere called blemmyae), pygmies, and so on. In listing these races, Plano Carpini and d'Ailly are availing themselves of the traditional view of India as a land of marvels and monsters, a perception that goes back to ancient Greece. 89 Waldseemüller is the first cartographer to depict several of the monstrous races of India together on a map, but the source material, although it appears in relatively recent books, is old. 90 In the northeastern corner of the map (sheet 4) is a large image of the Great Khan in his tent, and to the left of him, a long legend describing Tartaria (northern and central  emblems, bearing the Khan's symbol (the anchor) in western Asia, but strangely, not in eastern Asia. The great emphasis on the Khan on the Carta marina should be read as part of Waldseemüller's new emphasis on practical matters: the Khan represented a threat to Europe, so Waldseemüller provides information about him, and a large image to emphasize his importance. As for the legend describing Tartaria, this is a case where Waldseemüller used an older source rather than a newer one, for his information comes primarily from John of Plano Carpini, who traveled to Asia a couple of decades before Marco Polo. This is no doubt an indication that Waldseemüller thought Plano Carpini more reliable than Polo.
The Indian Ocean is one of the regions where Waldseemüller's updating of his image of the world is the most dramatic. On the 1507 map, his information about the Indian Ocean comes from Ptolemy and Marco Polo, and his legends about sea monsters come from an illustrated encyclopedia titled Hortus sanitatis, first published in 1491, 92 by way of a large world map by Henricus Martellus. 93 There are only small bits of information from the recent Portuguese explorations in the Indian Ocean, which followed Vasco da Gama's first voyage from Portugal to India and back in 1497-99: for instance, there is a brief legend about the important trading center of Calicut, which da Gama had reached. 94 On his Carta marina, almost everything about the Indian Ocean has changed. On the 1507 map, the depiction of Taprobana (modern Sri Lanka) is straight out of Ptolemy. On the 1516 map, in a legend in the upper left corner of sheet 12, Waldseemüller disputes the equatorial position that Ptolemy assigned to the island, siding instead with the Roman author Solinus and evidence from recent Portuguese voyages that place it further south (Legend 12.1); and on sheet 8, he discusses whether Taprobana is to be identified with Sumatra (Legend 8.10). Ptolemy had said there were 1,378 islands near Taprobana, and Waldseemüller quotes him to that effect on the 1507 map; on the 1516 map he instead quotes Varthema's statement-around 1300 years more recent-that there were 8,000 islands near Sumatra (Legend 12.2). Ptolemy's various islands of cannibals, together with the magnetic islands that pull the nails from ships, are simply gone, though there are still cannibals in the area, now on the island of Java, and the information about them now comes from Varthema (Legend 12.3).
Here again, Waldseemüller has set aside the information about Java on his 1507 map that came from Marco Polo.
On the 1507 map a short legend describes the trading center of Calicut, 95 while on the 1516 map, at the right-hand edge of sheet 7 (just west of Calicut, which is at the left-hand edge of sheet 8), a long legend describes the merchandise available in that city (Legend 7.18). It also gives an account of the king and his many wives as well as the unusual sexual and religious practices in the region, and includes a few words about what the people drink and eat (rice, fruit, butter, sugar, and some fish, but no meat)-all of this from Varthema. Then in the lower right-hand corner of the map, a long legend (Legend 12.11) describes the systems of weights and money at Calicut, the regions from which the various spices were brought to that city, and the price of each of them in the Calicut markets, 96 all of which information comes from Chaps. 82-83 of the 1507 Paesi novamente retrovati. 97 Again, Waldseemüller is providing an abundance of current practical information about trade, navigation, and local customs. 92 The Hortus sanitatis "major," which is the work that interests us here, is to be distinguished from the Hortus sanitatis "minor," which is a Latin translation of the German herbal often titled Gart der Gesundheit, first published by P. Schoeffer, Mainz, 1485. The herbal published in 1485 has 435 Chapters, while the Hortus sanitatis "major" of 1491 has 1,066 chapters. Details and discussion of the early editions of the Behaim describes the alleged stops that cargoes of spices make on their journey from islands near Java Major, to Java Major itself, to Ceylon, and so on to Europe. Behaim seems to ascribe considerably too many stages to the journey, and the subject of his legend (the route the spices take) is different from Waldseemüller's (the sources and prices of the spices), but nonetheless Behaim's legend probably prompted Waldseemüller to think about a more detailed and informative legend about spices, with updated information. Here is seen the orca, an extraordinary sea monster, like the sun when it glitters, whose form can hardly be described, except that its skin is soft and its body huge.
Although this information ultimately comes from the illustrated encyclopedia Hortus sanitatis, Waldseemüller's source for his legends about Indian Ocean sea monsters on the 1507 map was Henricus Martellus's large world map discussed earlier. 98 On the 1516 map, these sea monsters are gone, and the cartographer presents just one image of a sea monster in the southern ocean (sheet 11), south of the southern tip of Africa. In this image King Manuel of Portugal rides a sea monster through the waves, holding aloft a scepter and the banner of Portugal, proclaiming his nation's mastery of the ocean, particularly of the passage to India around the Cape of Good Hope. The image alludes to a new title that Manuel had adopted following Vasco da Gama's return from his first voyage to India, Senhor da conquista e da navegação e comércio de Etiópia, Arábia, Pérsia e da Índia, "Lord of the conquest, and navigation, and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India"-the adoption of which title is reported in the Paesi novamente retrovati, Chap. 62. 99 The differences between the sea monsters on the two maps reflect a radical reconceptualization of the Indian Ocean. Most of the sea monsters on the 1507 map-all of which derive from Martellus-are dangerous, and thus would discourage navigation, while the image of King Manuel riding a sea monster on the Carta marina boldly proclaims human control over the dangers of the sea, and by extension, dominion over the oceans themselves. 100 The riches on the distant shores of the Indian Ocean are no longer mere abstractions, things told of in tales; they are now commodities that are weighed out and sold in markets at specific prices (which are listed in the lower right corner of the map). And those markets can be reached by ship along well-established routes 101 that are evidently untroubled by sea monsters. In the short space of nine years, Waldseemüller had set aside an essentially medieval view of the ocean and adopted a much more modern conception.

The Carta Marina's Iconographical Program, and Its Sources
As mentioned earlier, in creating the Carta marina, Waldseemüller used Caverio's chart as a basis, but added so many features as to create something essentially new: it has much more geographical detail in the hinterlands, far more textual information, and a more elaborate artistic decoration. This increased level of decoration sets the map apart not only from Caverio's chart but also from the 1507 map. The borders of the 1507 map are decorated with finely depicted wind-heads and the portraits of Ptolemy and Vespucci, but the map proper is artistically quite plain: there are renderings of mountains and small trees, flags and some small coats of arms, one city in Asia, one elephant and a few people in Africa, one ship in the South Atlantic and one parrot in South America, but little more. The Carta marina, on the other hand, boasts a rich and ambitious iconographical program, particularly in Asia. On traditional manuscript nautical charts, many of the decorative elements were optional: the person commissioning the chart could choose to have various elements added to a basic chart, including images of cities, animals, trees, ships, and sovereigns ( Fig. 1.5). On sumptuous nautical charts made in the fourteenth century, the sovereigns depicted are in North Africa, but on later charts, sovereigns in Asia and sometimes Europe appear as well. The Caverio chart has just one image of a sovereign, the Magnus Tartarus, or Great Khan. Waldseemüller included many images of sovereigns on the Carta marina -a far larger number than on any surviving manuscript nautical chart. The abundance of sovereigns can be interpreted as reflecting Waldseemüller's interest in the world's politics-that is, in adding practical information to the Carta marina. Moreover, Waldseemüller made use of a simple graphical convention that, although common in other media in ancient, medieval and Renaissance art, had essentially not been employed in the depictions of sovereigns on nautical charts 102 : he used size to indicate the relative importance of the different sovereigns. Waldseemüller's decision to make many of the sovereigns quite small allowed him to include the large number that appear on the map, and also meant that most of the sovereigns are artistically rather simple, and thus took less time to design and to cut into the woodblocks.
Two particularly large images of sovereigns appear on the map, one of the Great Khan in the northeast corner of sheet 4, and the other of King Manuel of Portugal riding the sea monster on sheet 11. It seems likely that Waldseemüller intended the viewer to compare and contrast the greatest power in the East with the greatest power in the West, one powerful on land, the other on the oceans. On Caverio's map, the Great Khan is pudgy and unimposing, while on the Carta marina he is large, stern, and warlike ( Fig. 1.6). The image is finely executed, and was probably made by a special artist rather than by Waldseemüller himself (we have no evidence that Waldseemüller had any woodcutting skills). 103 This likelihood is increased by the fact that some details of the image do not agree as well with Waldseemüller's textual sources as we might expect. The Khan's facial features do not agree with Plano Carpini's description of typical Tartar features, for example, and while the Khan's braided hair accords with Plano Carpini's description, he also is quite clear that most Tartars do not have beards, but on the Carta marina the Khan does have one. 104 While the model of Waldseemüller's image of the Khan is unknown, in the case of the image of King Manuel riding the sea monster ( Fig. 1.7), which also seems to be the work of a specialized artist, we can identify the likely iconographical sources, as there are few surviving earlier Renaissance images of humans riding sea monsters. The Italian painter Andrea Mantegna produced a print in about 1485-88 known as the Battle of the Sea Gods, in which one of the gods rides a sea monster much as King Manuel does on the Carta marina ( Fig. 1.8). 105 But Waldseemüller's direct source was more likely Jacopo de' Barbari's monumental six-sheet view of Venice of c. 1500, which was itself no doubt influenced by Mantegna: in front of the city, right in front of St. Mark's Square, de' Barbari has an image of Neptune riding a sea monster and holding aloft on his trident a sign that reads AEQVORA TVENS PORTV RESIDEO HIC NEPTVNVS ("I, Neptune, reside here, watching over the seas at this port") ( Fig. 1.9). 106 This is a powerful image of the protection that Venice enjoyed from the 102 The only earlier chart I am aware of where greater size is used to indicate the greater importance of a sovereign is on the Catalan Atlas of 1375: Antichrist in the northeastern corner of the map is much larger than the other sovereigns. There are sovereigns of different sizes on the first map in an atlas of nautical charts by Vesconte Maggiolo (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS parm. 1614), but it is not clear that these differences in size always reflect differences in importance: for illustrations see Carte per navigare: la raccolta di portolani della Biblioteca Palatina di Parma   108 Waldseemüller also made use of recent sources for other images on his map, as part of his effort to create an entirely fresh and modern image of the world. In South America Waldseemüller has an image of an opossum (sheet 5), and this is the earliest surviving European depiction of that animal. Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was the first European to see an opossum in 1499; in fact it was the first marsupial that Europeans had ever seen, and was regarded as a marvel. Pinzón brought an opossum back to Spain and left this description of the creature 109 : Between these Trees he saw a strange Monster, the foremost part resembling a Fox, the hinder a Monkey, the feet were like a Mans, with Ears like an Owl; under whose Belly hung a great Bag, in which it carry'd the Young, which they drop not, nor forsake till they can feed themselves. As Waldseemüller's image is quite detailed, it seems likely that it was taken from a contemporary illustration of Pinzón's opossum that no longer survives. 110 Waldseemüller's image was copied both on later maps and in other media, mostly by way of the reproduction of Waldseemüller's image in Lorenz Fries's Carta marina of 1525, 1530, and 1531. 111 In Scandinavia, near the northern edge of the map (sheet 2), the animal that looks like an elephant is intended to be a walrus ( Fig. 1.10). The accompanying legend reads (see on Legend 2.3): Morsus animal ingens quantitate Elephantis huius dentes longos duos et quadrangulares carens quibus iuncturis in pedibus. Reperitur in promontoriis septentrionalibus Norbegie incedit gregatim agmine ducentorum animalium.The walrus is a huge animal, the size of an elephant, and it has two long teeth which are quadrangular, and lacks joints in its legs. It is found in the northern promontories of Norway, and they travel together in groups of two hundred animals.
There is at least one discussion of a walrus by a medieval author, namely Albertus Magnus in his On Animals, 112 but Waldseemüller did not make use of Albertus. 113 The word Waldseemüller uses for the walrus, morsus, is usually held to have entered European literature in 1517, in Maciej of Miechów's Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis. 114 In fact, William Caxton used it in 1480 in his Chronicles of England 115 -but certainly Waldseemüller's is among the earliest uses of it. On the one hand, it is clear that Waldseemüller (or his unknown iconographical source, if there was one) made the image from a vague description that emphasized the creature's elephant-like tusks and size, rather than on the basis of seeing a walrus. On the other hand, Waldseemüller's text about the animal is surely based on information derived from an examination of a walrus, as no other known early document mentions the walrus's quadrangular tusks. 116 The image and text pertaining to the walrus thus contain a mixture of good information and extrapolation, a common characteristic of attempts to interpret incomplete reports about unfamiliar things.     In West Africa (sheet 6), Waldseemüller shows a small image of a rhinoceros (Fig. 1.11), and this is another instance where he was using the most recent iconographical sources available. In 1514 Sultan Muzafar II of Gujarat had presented a rhinoceros to Afonso de Albuquerque, the governor of Portuguese India. Albuquerque sent the rhinoceros to King Manuel of Portugal, 117 and Albrecht Dürer made an influential print depicting the animal in 1515 (Fig. 1.12). 118 Waldseemüller used as his model not Dürer's print, however, but a different one, also made in 1515, by Hans Burgkmair, that survives in only one copy (Fig. 1.13). 119 The images of the rhinoceroses are similar in the two artists' prints, but there are differences, and those differences indicate that Waldseemüller used Burgkmair's print: in particular, Dürer shows hard plating and a small ancillary horn on the crest of the creature's neck where Burgkmair places hair-and it is hair that we see in Waldseemüller's image. It has been suggested that Dürer might have been involved in the engraving of the Carta marina, 120 but given that Waldseemüller used Burgkmair's image of the rhinoceros rather than Dürer's, this seems unlikely.
In northeastern Asia, specifically in northern India at the bottom of sheet 4, is an image of sati or suttee, the Hindu practice whereby a widow burned herself to death on the funeral pyre of her husband. This custom very much surprised Western visitors to India, and there are legends on the subject on earlier maps, for example the metal Borgia mappamundi from the first half of the fifteenth century, 121 and Andreas Walsperger's mappamundi of 1448. 122 The image on the Carta  (Fig. 1.14) shows a woman who has leapt into a fire pit, with a man standing over her and about to strike her with something in his hand, no doubt so that she will die sooner; on the right a horned devil stands looking on. No legend accompanies the scene, but it illustrates a passage in Varthema about the practice of sati in the city of Tarnassari. Varthema describes the fire pit, the beating of the woman with sticks and balls of pitch, and the participation of men clothed like devils. 123 Waldseemüller's scene here was clearly inspired by that in the first illustrated edition of Varthema, which has  woodcuts by Jörg Breu 124 and was published in 1515, 125 just one year before the Carta marina ( Fig. 1.15): in this scene two men instead of one are beating down the woman, and a king and noble are present, but in other respects the scenes are quite similar, particularly the poses of the women and the depiction of the flames. Once again, Waldseemüller was using a recent iconographical source, and the evidence from these images gives us a window into Waldseemüller's workshop, for we now know that the cartographer had a copy of the 1515 edition of Varthema on his bookshelf.
Waldseemüller used this same edition of Varthema as the source for two other images on his map. On f. 9v of the book there is an image of the mosque of Medina, with Varthema himself on the far left, and his guide beside him (Fig. 1.16). The guide points to the flames emanating from the top of the building, which he claims indicate the presence of the prophet's body. 126 This image of Medina, with its buttresses, windows, and other features, is used by Waldseemüller with very few changes to depict Mecca on the Carta marina ( Fig. 1.17). The cartographer removes the flames issuing from the building's roof, and replaces them, in effect, with an Islamic crescent which he may have borrowed from the building to the left in the image in Varthema. Waldseemüller's choice to use an image of Medina for Mecca was perhaps guided by a desire to use the example he had of supposedly Islamic architecture for the more famous city; but certainly his use of this image demonstrates again his interest in giving his map a rich and accurate iconographical program from recent sources.
The important trading center of Calicut in India, mentioned above, is the only city in eastern Asia to bear a flag, and the flag is a curious one: it is of a black devil or demon (Fig. 1.18). The allusion is to the worship of devils that Varthema says    Fig. 1.19).
On sheet 8, in southwestern India, there is a curious image of an Indian king with a crown on his turban who is standing rather than sitting on a throne (Fig. 1.20). Waldseemüller borrowed this image from another recent source, the 1509 edition of Balthasar Springer's account of Francisco de Almeida's voyage to India, which was illustrated by Hans Burgkmair (Fig. 1.21). Waldseemüller has rotated the man to the left, added the crown to his turban to make him a king, and shortened the handle of his weapon, but there can be no doubt where he obtained the image. Waldseemüller used Burgkmair's image of this Indian man a second time on the map, in West Africa (sheet 6), to illustrate a king in the delta of the Senegal River ( Fig. 1.22). The king stands almost with his back to us, and Waldseemüller seems to have borrowed this stance from that of a figure in another of Burgkmair's illustrations of Springer's narrative, namely the man shading the king in the fold-out Triumphus Regis Gosci sive Gutschmin, or Triumph of the King of Cochin (Kochi, India) ( Fig. 1.23). 129 It is interesting that Waldseemüller did not hesitate to use an image of an Indian man to illustrate an African, particularly as the 1509 edition of Springer's book has images of Africans that Waldseemüller could have copied. 130 One reason might have been that the Africans in Springer's book are naked, and Waldseemüller's colleague Matthias Ringmann, who had worked closely with him on the Cosmographiae introductio, the 1511 Carta itineraria Europae with its accompanying booklet, and the 1513 edition of Ptolemy, 131 had written against the illustration of full-frontal nudity in 1509. 132 On the other hand, the natives in southern Africa on the 1507 map are naked, and it would not have been difficult to add clothes to Burgkmair's naked figures, so the matter is not clear.
We know that Waldseemüller had the Caverio chart in his workshop, but he twice alludes to having more than one nautical chart at his disposal. In the Cosmographiae introductio he says that he has followed nautical charts (plural) particularly with regard to the newly discovered lands, 133 and in the long text block on sheet 9 of the Carta marina he says that eo que in maris descriptionibus vulgarem fuerimus & approbatissimam nauticarum tabularum notificationes insequuti, "as far as the depiction of the oceans, I have followed the commonly used and the most approved nautical charts and their indications" (plural). It seems very likely that some of the illustrations on the Carta marina were inspired by nautical chart legends or illustrations-legends or illustrations that do not appear on the Caverio chart-and an examination of these images can give us information about the other chart or charts that Waldseemüller had.   At the top of sheet 7 of the Carta marina there is a small image of Moses kneeling before Mount Sinai and receiving from God the two tablets with the commandments written on them (Fig. 1.24). I do not know of an earlier nautical chart that has a similar image of Moses, but many nautical charts have a legend that probably inspired Waldseemüller to include this scene. The Pizzigani chart of 1367, 134 for example, has a legend that reads (in very idiosyncratic Latin) Mons Sinay quo dominus jesus a de moyss instrudebat et ey legem cunferebat propter populum, "Mount Sinai where Lord Jesus or God instructed Moses and gave him the law for the people." 135 The legend on the Catalan Atlas of 1375 136 is similar, Mont de Sinai en lo qual Déu dona la Ley a Moyssés, "Mount Sinai where God gave the law to Moses." 137 Similar legends appear on many other nautical charts, including some sixteenth-century works by Ottomano Freducci, such as London, British Library, Add. MS 11548, made in 1529. 138 It seems likely, then, that such a legend inspired Waldseemüller to add an image of Moses to his map; Waldseemüller may have drawn iconographic inspiration from the scene of Moses receiving the laws in Hartmann Schedel's Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), f. 30v (Fig. 1.25), as in both cases Moses is receiving the tablets with his hands gripping them from the sides, 139 but there are so many representations of this scene that it is impossible to be certain that the Liber chronicarum was the source. 140 On sheet 3 of the Carta marina just west of the Caspian (which is labeled Mare Abacuc…) there is a short legend that reads Arach mons super quam requieuit Archa noe, "Mount Ararat, upon which Noah's Ark rested," above which there is a small image of a ship on the mountains (see Fig. 1.26 and Legend 3.12). Isidore, Etymologiae 14.3.35, Marco Polo, and Pierre d'Ailly mention that Noah's Ark can be found on some mountains in Armenia, but they do not give the mountains' name. 141 The case is much the same with Odoric of Pordenone, 142 and Varthema does not mention Noah's Ark. But there is a nautical chart tradition  Viladestes's chart of 1413, 148 the chart of Joan de Viladestes of 1428, 149 and the Catalan-Estense map of c. 1460 150 ; there is also an image of Noah's Ark on an elaborately decorated chart made by Grazioso Benincasa in 1482, but without the brief explanatory text. 151 When the descriptive text does appear, it is quite similar to that on Waldseemüller's Carta marina. On nautical charts the Ark is represented either as a chest, in a curious pyramidal shape, 152 or as a building, whereas Waldseemüller's image is distinctly a ship, 153 but it would be quite natural for Waldseemüller to change the image he found in a nautical chart to something more shiplike. 154 Thus we can be quite certain that in addition to the Caverio chart, Waldseemüller had a heavily illustrated luxury nautical chart.
In northeastern Asia on the Carta marina Waldseemüller has an image of a man riding a deer, certainly a reindeer, and a brief legend that says magis Septentrionales equitant ceruos, "In the far north they ride deer" (see Legend 4.17). On his 1507 map in the same area Waldseemüller has a legend about Balor Regio that derives from Marco Polo, and mentions that the inhabitants ride deer. 155 The image and legend on the Carta marina are in essentially the same location as the legend on the 1507 map, but the image comes from a nautical chart illustration of an inhabitant of Scandinavia riding a reindeer-that is, Waldseemüller has transplanted a nautical chart image relating to Scandinavia to a location that accords with what Marco Polo says about northeastern Asia. There are just a few nautical charts that have an illustration of a Scandinavian man riding a reindeer: Mecia de Viladestes's chart of 1413 156 ; the Vatican Borgia XVI metal mappamundi from the first half of the fifteenth century, which uses nautical chart data 157 ; the anonymous nautical chart which is Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale   159 In addition, a mid fifteenth-century nautical chart which is now lost, but whose legends are preserved in a manuscript in Genoa has a text that says that in the provinces de Scachia et de Gotia…. Sunt magni venatores et equitant ceruos, "of Scachia and Gothia… they are great hunters and ride deer." 160 In addition to the evidence of images, below in my discussion of the names Waldseemüller gives to the Caspian Sea (see Legend 3.25) I will show that those names come from a nautical chart, and are most similar to the names assigned to the sea on the Catalan Atlas of 1375 and the Catalan-Estense mappamundi of c. 1460.
The images of Noah's Ark and the man riding the reindeer, and also the names of the Caspian Sea, are of particular value in shedding light on the type of nautical chart from which Waldseemüller drew these images. First it was a luxury nautical chart, as the hinterlands contained illustrations. Also, as most nautical charts show the rectangular area defined by a diagonal from the Red Sea northwest to Ireland, plus a bit more of the Atlantic, we know that Waldseemüller's chart was larger than average, as it included lands north to Scandinavia and east to Armenia (Mount Ararat), and in fact to the Caspian. In particular, the surviving charts that have the illustration of a man riding a reindeer date from 1413 to about 1460. It would not surprise me if the chart fragment of c. 1375 which is in Istanbul, Topkapi Saray, H. 1828, once contained such an illustration, 161 but in any case there are no charts later than c. 1460 that have this illustration. So in addition to the quite recent and no doubt very expensive Caverio chart, Waldseemüller had an older large luxury nautical chart, on which the hinterlands were much more elaborately decorated than on the Caverio chart. This is one case in which Waldseemüller was content to make occasional use of a somewhat older source. Waldseemüller's use of so many recent sources, both textual and iconographical, clearly reflects his ambition to create a thoroughly up-to-date image of the world. It also provides insight into the cartographer's schedule of work on the Carta marina: he was actively working on the map right until it was printed in 1516.

The Development of Waldseemüller's Cartographic Thought
Waldseemüller's use of Ptolemaic cartographic principles in his 1507 map and his repudiation of them in his 1516 map merit tracing in more detail. As we saw earlier, the title of the 1507 map describes an essentially Ptolemaic world map, with the addition of the New World. Waldseemüller's description of his project in the accompanying Cosmographiae introductio is similar, except that he says he was influenced not only by verbal accounts of the new discoveries but also by nautical charts 162 : Haec pro inductione ad Cosmographiam dicta sufficiant si te modo ammonuerimus prius, nos in depingendis tabulis typi generalis non omnimodo sequutos esse Ptholomeum, presertim circa nouas terras, ubi in cartis marinis aliter animaduertimus, equatorem constituti, quam Ptholomeus foecerit. Et proinde non debent nos statim culpare qui illud ipsum notauerint. Consulto enim foecimus quod hic Ptholomeum, alibi cartas marinas sequuti sumus.
All that has been said by way of introduction to cosmography will be sufficient, if we merely advise you that in designing the sheets of our world-map we have not followed Ptolemy in every respect, particularly as regards the new lands, where on nautical charts we observe that the equator is placed otherwise than Ptolemy represented it. Therefore those who notice this ought not to find fault with us, for we have done so purposely, because here we have followed Ptolemy, and elsewhere nautical charts.
So there was some tension between the Ptolemaic and nautical chart models in the 1507 map. In fact, expressions of doubt about or criticism of Ptolemy go back to the first Latin translation of the work, which was made in 1409 by Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, 163 who mentions other authors qui et alia quedam habent quae ab auctore hoc Ptolomeo uidentur pretermissa, "who have other things which seem to have been omitted by this author, Ptolemy." 164 A manuscript of Ptolemy's Geography from c. 1436-1455 shows marked influence of nautical charts, using nautical chart data for the coastlines, but Ptolemaic place names in the interior. 165 Fra Mauro on his world map of c. 1455 notes that Ptolemy's information about various regions is incomplete, and declines to employ his system of latitude and longitude. 166 The addition of Tabulae modernae, or modern maps, to both manuscripts and printed editions of Ptolemy represents a profound if unarticulated criticism of Ptolemy's data, 167 and such maps existed in the 1486 Ulm edition of Ptolemy, of which Waldseemüller owned a copy. 162 In 1505, Waldseemüller together with Matthias Ringmann and other colleagues began work on a new edition of Ptolemy's Geography, which after several long delays was published in 1513. Two years earlier, Bernardus Sylvanus had published an edition of the Geography in Venice. 168 In his introduction, Sylvanus says that in studying Ptolemy, 169 Cum Ptolemaeum inter alios geographiae scriptores diligentissime et situs et distantias locorum scripsisse conspicerem admirabar profecto cur illius tabulae paucis admodum in rebus cum nostri temporis navigationibus consentirent: eoque magis admirabar quod Ptolemaeum quoque navigationibus comprimis innixum ea quae scripserit scripsisse arbitrabar.
Although I used to view Ptolemy as having recorded the sites and distances of places more diligently than other writers of geography, I was none the less puzzled as to why his tables agreed in very few instances with the navigations of our times: and I was all the more puzzled because I used to think that Ptolemy too had recorded what he recorded relying on navigations more than anything else.
Sylvanus revised Ptolemy's maps and data in accordance with recent nautical charts, convincing himself that in doing so he was actually restoring them to what Ptolemy had originally intended. Specifically, he copied the coastlines from nautical charts (where available), but retained the place names and hinterland geographical details of Ptolemy, then extrapolated latitude and longitude values for the new coastlines, and adjusted the data in Ptolemy's text appropriately. 170 Thus Sylvanus's edition clearly shows that nautical charts were seen as superior to then-available Ptolemaic maps at least in some quarters in the early sixteenth century, and from a comment that Waldseemüller makes in the introduction to the index in his edition of Ptolemy, it seems very likely that he had seen Sylvanus's edition. 171 On the title page of his 1513 edition of Ptolemy, 172 Waldseemüller says that it consists of two parts; first the text of the Geography, an index, a brief account of the Greek numbering system, and twenty-seven Ptolemaic maps, and then: Pars secunda moderniorum lustrationum viginti tabulis veluti supplementum quoddam antiquitatis obsoletae suo loco quae vel abstrusa vel erronea videbantur resolutissime pandit.
The second part, through twenty maps of modern explorations, boldly offers a kind of supplement to obsolete antiquity [i.e. obsolete ancient authors] wherever it seems to be obscure or erroneous.
The separate one-page introduction to the second part of the work discusses how time changes many things, and how the names of many cities and regions are different than what they had been previously-a passage very similar to part of the introductory paragraph on the Carta marina (compare Legend 9.3) 173 171 Waldseemüller writes Quod tanta ordinis sui confusione scatet, ut in plerisque locis an modernioribus an Ptolomaeo ipsi conquadret, lector etiam studiosissimus nesciat, that is, "There is so much confusion in the presentation, that in many places even very learned readers cannot tell which data comes from modern authors, and which from Ptolemy himself." We have confined the Geography of Ptolemy to the first part of the work, in order that its antiquity may remain intact and separate. But since the course of time changes many things from day to day as it passes, it has become generally evident that the author deviates notably from those more modern, as may be seen in the two Pannonias, which are now called Hungary and Austria; and the region which was called while it flourished, by the sole appellation of Sarmatia or Sauromatia, we now name in its divisions, Poland, Russia, Prussia, Muscovy and Lithuania. Change in the names of nations has also come into use. For those whom the ancients called Helvetii and Sequani, we now commonly call Burgundians and Swiss. Certain cities, too, have lost their primitive names, for who with his finger will point out on the River Rhine the cities Canodorum, Augusta Rauricum, Elcebus and Berthomagus mentioned by Ptolemy?
These or similar [inaccuracies in place names] let no one attribute to the ignorance of the author [i.e. Ptolemy], but rather from this supplement let him learn to inform himself more accurately about modern explorations, in which he will see an image of the three parts of the world more clearly adapted to our times. Specifically the nautical chart which they call a hydrography, which was surveyed by the very authentic explorations of a former Admiral of Ferdinand, the Most Serene King of Portugal, and of other explorers….
There is a slip of the pen here, as Ferdinand was not king of Portugal, but rather of Aragon, and through his wife, Isabela, of Castile. 175 The Admiral in question must be Columbus, 176 but it is misleading to call the map (as a number of scholars have done) "The Admiral's Map," implying a particularly close connection with Columbus. Waldseemüller clearly states that the map is based on the discoveries not only of Columbus but also of other explorers. In any case, we see that by 1513 Waldseemüller had realized that Columbus, rather than Vespucci, was the first to reach the New World.
The new world map in the 1513 Ptolemy ( Fig. 1.27) serves as an important indicator of the development of Waldseemüller's thinking about cartography at that time. The title of the map is Orbis Typus Universalis Iuxta Hydrographorum Traditionem, "General Map of the World According to the Tradition of the Hydrographers." By "hydrographers" Waldseemüller means the makers of nautical charts: the map has a system of rhumb lines like a nautical chart, and no Ptolemaic grid of latitude and longitude, though it does indicate the equator and tropics. Thus the cartographer is clearly proclaiming that a world map "more clearly adapted to our times" must be based on nautical charts, and the depiction of southern Asia shows the influence of the Caverio chart, while the shape of Africa is also clearly based on recent Portuguese cartographic data. Moreover, and this is very important, of the twenty modern charts in the 1513 Ptolemy, all but one are made using a nautical chart projection, rather than one of Ptolemy's projections-a strong confirmation of Waldseemüller's recognition of the value of nautical cartography. 177 At the same time, even while Waldseemüller proclaims that his new world map in the 1513 Ptolemy is based on nautical cartography, certain elements of the map do not derive from that genre: his depiction of Scandinavia and the sweeping rounded coast of eastern Asia clearly derive from one of the world maps by Henricus Martellus (Fig. 1.28). 178 Waldseemüller had based his 1507 map on a large world map by Martellus similar to that at Yale, so the elements from 174 This passage is translated into English by Stevens, The First Delineation of the New World (see note 173), p. 40, and part is quoted in Robert W. Karrow Jr., "Intellectual Foundations of the Cartographic Revolution," Ph.D. Dissertation, Loyola University of Chicago, 1999, pp. 184-185; I modify that translation slightly here. 175 Martellus in this new world map in the 1513 Ptolemy show that in some ways Waldseemüller was still holding onto this older style of cartography.
The 1513 Ptolemy shows Waldseemüller at a point of transition. Certainly he would not have devoted the time and energy to creating a new edition of Ptolemy if he did not believe in the value of Ptolemaic geography and cartography. The elements of Ptolemy and Martellus in his new world map also reflect that belief. But his twenty modern maps in the book, 179 almost as many as Ptolemy's twenty-seven, and all but one of which are made according to the principles of nautical charts, constitute a cartographic parallel universe to Ptolemy's. Further, his declarations about the value of nautical charts clearly indicate that if one has to choose a cartographic system for a modern world map, it will be that of nautical charts-manifestly anticipating the purer expression of that philosophy in the Carta marina. Careful examination of the sheets of the Carta marina shows that multiple artisans were involved in cutting the woodblocks, and also a lack of close coordination among those workers. This contrasts with the situation with Waldseemüller's 1507 map, where the signs of different hands and of lack of coordination between those cutting adjacent blocks are more subtle. Illustrations supporting the points made in the following paragraphs can be found in Fig. 1.4, of the whole Carta marina, and in the plates of each sheet of the map below at the beginning of the relevant sections of the transcription.
On the Carta marina there are significant differences of style in the rendering of the wind-heads and associated decorations in the map's margins. For example, the lines representing the wind blown by two of the wind-heads in the margin of sheet 9, in the lower left corner of the map, cross the border into the map proper, but this is not the case on the other sheets. The margins of some of the sheets have stars as part of their decoration (1, 2, 4, 8, and 12), while the others do not; the styles of rendering the clouds varies, with those in the border of sheet 9 being particularly puffy; and the styles of drawing the heads themselves are inconsistent, with those in the border of sheet 12 being more stern in appearance, for example.
The style of rendering the oceans also varies from sheet to sheet. On sheet 1 in the upper left corner of the map the texture of the surface of the water is intermittently depicted, and some clouds are shown above the water, but the ocean on the adjacent sheet 2 has neither of these features-the difference is quite dramatic. On sheet 10 the block cutter gives some texture to the surface of the water, and shows a few clouds (differently than in sheet 1), and both sheet 6 above it, and sheet 11 to its right, have notably more plain styles of rendering the ocean.
The vast majority of the cartouches on the map are simple frames; a few have small geometrical decorations at their tops or sides, namely those on sheet 2 by the southern tip of Greenland, on sheet 6 by the Canary Islands, on sheet 7 off the coast from Mogadishu, on sheet 10 off the coast of Brazil, and on sheet 12 the large cartouche east of Java. And two other cartouches have very elaborate artistic decoration: the large cartouche on sheet 9 is embellished with vegetal motifs, knots, scrollwork, and two dragons; and the small cartouche at the right edge of sheet 12 with vegetal motifs and knots.
The block cutters also rendered differently the very simple compass roses at the nodes of the rhumb line network. These compass roses consist of two concentric circles and pointers to the north and east. On sheet 10 they are small and there is very little gap between the two circles, while on sheet 6 directly above they are larger and have a larger gap between their circles. These many stylistic differences among the sheets of the Carta marina demonstrate clearly that multiple block cutters were working on the map.
There are additional differneces between the sheets that point not so much to differences of style between the block cutters as to a lack of coordination among them. The most egregious example is found in the scale of latitude at the left-hand edge of the map, which runs down sheet 1 and sheet 5, but is not continued on sheet 9. Also on sheet 9, it is surprising that the decorative cartouche is cut off by the right-hand edge of the sheet-this sheet shows the most differences from its neighbors of any on the map, and is quite problematic. In addition, there are a few cases of rivers and mountain ranges that are discontinuous from one sheet to another, for example the mountains in Africa just north of the equator at the left edge of sheet 7 that do not continue onto sheet 6. Mention should also be made of the mountain range that extends from sheet 4 in India south onto sheet 8: it consists of sharp peaks north of that point, and rounded peaks south of that point.
What emerges from this examination of the details of the map is the fact that the production of the Carta marina was chaotic, with inadequate coordination among the artisans cutting the blocks for the map. Was the problem that the cutting was done hastily? Or could it have been the opposite, that the production was drawn out due to lack of funds (for example), and that the different blocks were cut at different times, and that was what reduced the consistency among them? In Legend 9.1 Waldseemüller offers thanks to Hugues des Hazards, Bishop of Toul from 1506 to 1517, presumably for his financial contribution to the production of the Carta marina, but this could have been funds that allowed the project to be brought to completion after a period of difficulties. Thus it does not seem possible to know the nature of the difficulties in the production of the Carta marina without additional evidence, but the inconsistencies among the sheets of the map show that it was indeed a challenging process.

Evidence for the Diffusion of the Carta Marina
Hildegard Binder Johnson has argued that the Carta marina was never published or sold, and that the only surviving copy was not part of the map's print run, but rather a special proof printing 180 ; to my knowledge, no evidence to the contrary has been presented by other scholars.
The fact that only one exemplar each of Waldseemüller's 1507 and 1516 maps survives has been used to raise questions about the degree to which both maps were diffused. But this fact does not tell at all against the maps' diffusion: wall maps are notorious for their low survival rates, and there are many sixteenth-century printed maps, both wall maps and in smaller formats, that do not survive at all, or survive in only one or two exemplars. Such maps include:    (Fig. 1.35). 210 Again, it is inconceivable that the cartographer of the Vallard Atlas could have arrived at an image so similar to Waldseemüller's if he were only working from Fries's map.
There is additional corroboratory evidence in Northern Europe that the maker of the Vallard Atlas used of Waldseemüller's Carta marina as a source. As we saw earlier, Waldseemüller portrays the walrus as a creature that looks very much like an elephant (see Fig. 1.10). Lorenz Fries copies this image in the 1522 edition of Ptolemy in the Tabula moderna Gronlandie et Rusie and also in his version of the Carta marina (1530, 1531), and there is a similar image in the Vallard Atlas in the map of Western Europe and the Mediterranean (ff. 7v-8r). But again, only Waldseemüller's map can have been the source. The walrus in the 1522 Ptolemy has a long elephantine trunk, which the image on the Vallard Atlas does not have; the image on Fries's Carta marina is much more similar to that on the Vallard Atlas, but it shows the elephant's far ear sticking up above the elephant's head to some extent, which is the case on Waldseemüller's map, but not on Fries's.
There is also good evidence that Waldseemüller's Carta marina was available to the sixteenth-century Norman cartographer Pierre Desceliers. Elsewhere I have argued that Desceliers copied his image of the former Hindu practice of suttee or sati (in which a widow threw herself on her husband's funeral pyre) on his 1546 world map from Waldseemüller's Carta marina, rather than from the Tabula moderna Indiae in Fries' 1522 Ptolemy or from Fries' edition of the Carta marina. 211 It also seems very likely that Desceliers copied his image of Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval's 1542 settlement in Martin Waldseemüller, Universal nautical chart (which is commonly called a marine chart) published in Germany. I think that this cartographer is the same as the Ilacomylus just mentioned. This passage is the clearest possible corroboration that the Carta marina did in fact circulate and influence other cartographers, and not just in the Dieppe region.
However, some other claims that Waldseemüller's Carta marina influenced later globes and maps, and thus implicitly must have been well diffused, cannot be accepted as proven, largely because of the difficulty presented in distinguishing between the influence of Waldseemüller's map and Fries's. It has been asserted that Gerard Mercator used Waldseemüller's Carta marina as a source in his depiction of southern Africa on his terrestrial globe of 1541, 214 but without any attempt to determine whether the influence was from Waldseemüller's Carta marina or from Fries's. 215 In fact the place names in southern Africa are very similar on Waldseemüller's map and Fries's, 216 so the similarities between Mercator's globe and Waldseemüller's map cannot be taken as providing additional evidence that the 1516 map was disseminated.
Fischer and von Wieser, in their introduction to their facsimile edition of Waldseemüller's 1507 and 1516 maps, indicate that Gerard Mercator borrowed from Waldseemüller's Carta marina in creating his famous 1569 world map, 217 particularly in his legends in India and the topography and hydrography of southern Africa. 218 But they do not provide details, and in fact after examining the legends on the 1516 and 1569 maps, 219 I find a close correspondence in only one place, in the legends describing the opossum in South America-and Mercator could have borrowed that legend from the 1531 (Latin) edition of Fries's Carta marina, where it is the same as on Waldseemüller's Carta marina. With regard to southern Africa, as just mentioned, the place names in this region are very similar on Waldseemüller's map and Fries's, so the very similar place names on Mercator's 1569 map and Waldseemüller's Carta marina do not establish that Waldseemüller's map reached Mercator. 220 Another aspect of the diffusion of Waldseemüller's Carta marina is its copying by Lorenz Fries in his editions of 1525, 1530, and 1531, which have been mentioned several times now. It is unlikely that Fries made use of Johann Schöner's exemplar of the map-the only one that now surives-as the model for his maps, so his editions suggest the existence of at least one other exemplar of Waldseemüller's Carta marina. As Fries's maps are smaller than Waldseemüller's, they contain fewer legends and illustrations; they are also of a substantially lower artistic quality than Waldseemüller's map, 221 and in fact introduce a number of errors. But as the historian Henry Bruman has noted, the Fries-Grüninger Carta marina had a rather different aim than Waldseemüller's map. Waldseemüller aimed to bring the latest geographical scholarship to a broad audience, while the Fries-Grüninger map was "an object of popularization and commerce, merchandised to a wide public," designed "to disseminate reasonably recent, reasonably accurate information about different parts of the world in a picturesque, decorative way." 222 On the 1530 edition of the map, and presumably in the lost 1525 edition as well, most of the legends are translated into German-an effort at the democratization of cartographic knowledge that is a logical step forward from Waldseemüller's own Carta marina, itself a democratization of an expensive manuscript nautical chart. But in the 1531 214 edition, the legends are in Latin again, so either the edition in German was not well received, or the publishers wanted to sell a new version of the map to scholars.
Waldseemüller's Carta marina also influenced another early sixteenth-century cartographer, a topic that has been little discussed by map historians, and this influence explains some features of the surviving copy of the Carta marina. As mentioned above, it was Johann Schöner who preserved the only surviving copies of Waldseemüller's 1507 and 1516 maps. Schöner's printed globe of 1515 was heavily influenced by Waldseemüller's 1507 map, 223 and his magnificent but largely unstudied manuscript globe of 1520 224 borrows a number of legends from the Carta marina. 225 The copy of the Carta marina that Schöner preserved has a number of corrections made by hand, in accordance with the list of corrections that was printed on the lower of two escutcheons in the southwest corner of the map, but is now covered by a small piece of paper (Legend 9.2). 226 Thus Schöner seems to have taken care that the map was as correct as possible. The grid of red parallels and meridians drawn on much of the map bespeaks careful study and analysis of the map's geography, no doubt by Schöner himself. 227 Moreover, stored in the Schöner Sammelband together with the twelve printed sheets of the Carta marina was a careful manuscript copy that Schöner made of sheet 6 of the map (here labeled sheet 6A), which covers western Africa. The existence of this manuscript copy has not been previously explained, but we can be quite certain that it was made as part of Schöner's preparations for using data from the Carta marina on his 1520 globe. 228 This is confirmed by a difference between the printed sheet 6 and manuscript sheet 6A: on the printed sheet no legend appears in the Gulf of Guinea, but on the manuscript sheet there is a legend describing the islands in the São Tomé group (see Legend 6A.1)-and there is a similar legend in the same location on Schöner's 1520 globe.
We have few records that tell us much about Martin Waldseemüller, but his two multi-sheet world maps shed important light on his character. The maps are products of a cartographer with a great creative vision, and a great ambition to disseminate the latest cartographic knowledge to scholars throughout Europe. The fact that he and his colleagues were able to gather in the small town of Saint-Dié the diverse array of cartographic and geographic information necessary to produce these maps-rare manuscript maps, codices of Ptolemy's Geography, recent travel narratives, images of exotic animalstestifies to a remarkable drive and experience in research. Waldseemüller's willingness to cast aside all of the work that had gone into his 1507 map, and to create less than a decade later a new world map based on a new cartographic philosophy and almost entirely new sources, demonstrates a wonderful open-mindedness, energy, and thirst for knowledge. His Carta marina represents the culmination of more than a decade of thought about how the world should be mapped, and much painstaking research into the latest texts and images that could be used to create a rich and detailed image of the earth as it was known and traveled by human beings.