'Venice is too small'

I'm deep in the history of cartography and exploration at present for the book I'm writing about the Portuguese in Asia. As they worked their way down the coast of Africa in the middle years of the fifteenth century, their discoveries were avidly followed by the mapmakers, noting each successive bay or cape as it was named. By the end of the century Lisbon was the go-to place for cartography. Maps were knowledge and power. The Portuguese tried vainly to prevent their leakage to foreign powers but fifty years earlier, when Venice was the clearing house for everything that was known from travellers' tales, the King of Portugal, Afonso V, commissioned a map of the world from a monk on the island on Murano.

Fra Mauro, who had been a soldier and adventurer before taking to the cloister, produced a remarkable image, summarizing all that was reasonably known about the world, and annotating it with his comments and judgements. The map was orientated with south to the top, but is here rotated to make us feel more at home with ways of seeing the world. It includes tantalizing information - the idea that the Chinese had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope - but what was revolutionary, apart from its scepticism about the ideas of the classical authors who had dominated thinking for so long, was that it clearly presented Africa as a continent that could be circumnavigated to reach India. (There was a widely prevailing view that the Indian Ocean was probably a closed sea.)


The Mauro Map was a powerful incentive for the Portuguese kings to continue investing in voyages down the coast of Africa to seek a seaway to the east, which would end with Vasco da Gama's arrival on the shores of India in 1498.

The Portuguese map has disappeared, but the Venetians also had a copy. It hangs in the Biblioteca Nationale Marciana in Venice. It's reported that when the doge saw the map he complained to the monk that he'd made Venice disproportionately small for its importance. 'That's the size it is' came back the reply - Mauro was not to be budged from his notions of objective truth. By the time the Portuguese had stolen some of Venice's spice trade after Vasco da Gama, it might have seemed still smaller.

There's a good little video on the significance of Mauro's map produced by the British Library.