Fra Mauro: The magnificent medieval map that made cartography into a science

DURING a hold in Venice various years previously, I frolicked throughout the Correr Museum, absorbing the city’s historic previous. Located in Saint Mark’s Sq., the museum exhibits imposing statues, work of sea battles and historic weapons. Nonetheless as I handed via the ultimate room of reveals, one different artefact hanging alone in an alcove caught my eye. It was a map of the world – a “mappa mundi” in Latin – nevertheless it was not like all I had encountered sooner than.

Framed in gold and a pair of.4 metres in diameter, the world pictured proper right here was a mix of rolling blue seas with cresting waves and off-white landmasses, all coated with handwritten notes. It was one of many essential beautiful, and beautifully superior, points that I had ever seen.

Created by a monk known as Fra Mauro 550 years previously, the map had been largely ignored for lots of of years, a lamentable state of affairs considering it exhibits a stage of accuracy absent in earlier maps. Flip it the opposite method up – Mauro positioned south on the prime – and it’s recognisable as a map of Africa and Eurasia.

Following my go to to Venice, I decided to hunt out out additional about this map, a enterprise that culminated in my book Here Begins the Dark Sea. I spent higher than a yr delving into the literature on world maps, poring over Fra Mauro’s creation and making an attempt to know what he supposed it to say. It appears that evidently it was part of the inflection stage from the Heart Ages to the Renaissance because of it was the…