Catalan World Atlas
The Catalan World Atlas is an atlas created around 1375 in the map workshop of Abraham and Jehuda Cresques on Mallorca . It consists of a total of six double images, 64 cm × 50 cm in size, which, as so-called portolan maps, depict the coasts and ports of some areas with particular accuracy. The atlas also marks the first appearance of a compass rose on a geographic map.
The atlas shows the then known world from the Atlantic to China . It is based on information that the Jewish Cresques family obtained from seafarers whose routes ran through the Mallorca hub. The atlas was given to the French King Charles V by King Peter IV of Aragón in 1380 . It is kept to this day in the French National Library in Paris under the shelf mark Espagnol 30 (also Esp. 30 ).
The Catalan World Atlas and some other maps from the 14th and 15th centuries that have survived show some islands in the Atlantic that are not shown on any current map. These so-called phantom islands only existed in the imagination of seafarers of the time. In reality they don't exist.
literature
- Urs Bitterli : The discovery of America. From Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt . Munich, 1991.
- The Catalan World Atlas from 1375 , with an introduction and translation by Hans-Christian Freiesleben, facsimile based on the original kept in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-87103-017-1
- Mapamundi , ed. and annotated by Georges Grosjean, facsimile print, Dietikon-Zurich 1977, ISBN 3-85951-128-9
- Lena Asrih : The Catalan World Atlas and the emergence of the purslane maps in the late Middle Ages . Master thesis at Ruhr University Bochum, 2010
- Katrin Kogman-Appel : Eschatology in the Catalan 'Mappamundi' , in: Philippe Buc , Martha Keil , John Victor Tolan (eds.): Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe: the historiographical legacy of Bernhard Blumenkranz . Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016, ISBN 978-2-503-56516-3 , pp. 227-252
Web links
- The Catalan Atlas, 14th century. (BNF, ESP 30) - further images from the Catalan World Atlas ( Bibliothèque nationale de France , Paris)