Free The Map Thief by Michael Blanding

ourselves, without the aid of wings.”
    —
    ALTHOUGH PTOLEMY FIRST REENTERED Western Europe in Florence, he didn’t stay there long.Scholars meeting at church conferences traded and copied manuscripts, bringing the
Geographia
home to France, Germany, and the Low Countries of Belgium and Holland. At first, they looked at his maps as a way to understand the ancient world—but soon they realized they could use Ptolemy’s template to construct their own maps as well.
    Mapmaking hadn’t totally atrophied in Western Europe during theMiddle Ages. World maps, or
mappaemundi,
were mostly diagrammatical in nature, consisting of a large
O
with a large
T
drawn inside separating the three parts of the world (Europe, Asia, and Africa). These
T-O
maps were, of course, useless for navigation—serving as more of a way to understand cosmology than a practical tool for getting from place to place. But one group of people actually needed maps they could use: sailors. Starting in the 1300s, traders plying the Mediterranean began constructing nautical charts called “portolans,” covering small areas of the coast, with virtually no detail of the interior. After a French crusader brought the compass from the Middle East, mapmakers employed two other features as well: strategically placed “wind roses” pointing out the cardinal directions, and spiderwebs of “rhumb lines” showing the bearing needed to sail from one to another.
    In the fourteenth century, regional centers consolidated the best mapmakers in Pisa, Genoa, Sicily, Majorca, and Barcelona. Their maps included broader and broader areas, including some attempts at world maps. To fill the blanks in information, they relied on Christian myths and travelers’ tales. The kingdoms of the Antichrist, Gog and Magog, were located in Far Eastern Asia, just north of the realm of Cathay, the fabulously wealthy kingdom of Kublai Khan mentioned in the writings of Marco Polo. In the eastern ocean were the island of Zipangu (Japan) and the wealthy islands of the Indies, which Marco Polo had also mentioned. Beyond that was located the earthly paradise of the Garden of Eden, the source for the great rivers of the world.
    Another important feature was the kingdom ofPrester John, a Christian king who had set up shop somewhere in East Africa and was supposed to unite with the kings of Europe to battle the Antichrist during the “end times.” Not content to wait until Armaggedon, European kings made seeking out Prester John a priority. The only problem was a gauntlet of Mongols and Turks that prevented Christian caravans from passing. It was thePortuguese who first searched for a way around the impasse by attempting to sail around Africa instead. Starting in the early 1400s the Portuguese king’s third son, Henry the Navigator, began mounting expeditions down the African coast, funding them with gold and slaves acquired in the journeys. In 1488, explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. A decade later, Vasco da Gama kept going, sailing across the sea to the coast of India, which he reached in 1498.
    Even as mapmakers were adding incrementally to the knowledge of the coastlines, bigger developments were afoot in Germany that changed the world in more significant ways. An inventor in Strasbourg named Johannes Gutenberg was working on a secretive new technique to cut down on the laborious process of hand-copying manuscripts. Hisprinting press, the world’s first, worked by pressing a sheet of paper down on woodblock letters arranged on a form. Gutenberg started small, with handbills and calendars, but after he produced his first Bible in the 1450s, Gutenberg presses began spreading throughout Europe. Humanists began printing their own editions of ancient works, including Ptolemy’s
Geographia.
    The first edition of Ptolemy’s work, without maps, came out in Venice in 1475. Within two years, an edition was produced in Bologna, maps and all. That edition made use of new copper