Cantino planisphere

Cantino planisphere (1502), Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy.

The Cantino planisphere (or Cantino World Map) is the earliest surviving map showing Portuguese Discoveries in the east and west. It is named after Alberto Cantino, an agent for the Duke of Ferrara, who successfully smuggled it from Portugal to Italy in 1502. The map is particularly notable for portraying a fragmentary record of the Brazilian coast, discovered in 1500 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, and for depicting the African coast of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a remarkable accuracy and detail.

History

West and the recently reached Americas, Tordesillas line depicted - Cantino planisphere detail

In the beginning of the 16th century, Lisbon was a buzzing metropolis where people from diverse backgrounds came in search of work, glory or fortune. There were also many undercover agents looking for the secrets brought by the Portuguese voyages to remote lands. Among them was Alberto Cantino, who was sent to Portugal by the Duke of Ferrara, with the formal intention of horse trading, while secretly collecting information on the Portuguese Discoveries. Cantino’s diligence is shown in two of his letters to the Duke, dated from 17th and 18 October 1501, where he describes, amongst other things, hearing Gaspar Corte-Real detailing his latest voyage to Newfoundland (Terra Nova) to King Manuel I of Portugal.

Most probably the Cantino Planisphere is a copy of the official prototype existing at Casa da Índia (The House of India), in Lisbon, where the new discoveries made by the Portuguese were recorded, held in secret and named the Padrão Real. It is conjectured that Cantino was able to bribe a certain Portuguese government mapmaker with 12 golden ducats (a considerable amount for the time) to copy this map for him, between December 1501 and October 1502. From a letter signed by Cantino, it’s thought that he sent the map to Duke Ferrara on the 19th of November, 1502. An Italian inscription in the back of the map reads: “Carta de navigar per le Isole nouam trovate in le parte de India: dono Alberto Cantino al S. Duca Hercole”. As a result, this historic cartography work, from an anonymous Portuguese author, was named Cantino Planisphere (or Cantino World Map) – Carta del Cantino (in Italian).

Replica of the major wind rose of the Cantino planisphere

While it enlightened the Italians to many new territories as of yet unknown to them, it was obsolete within months due to subsequent mapping voyages by the Portuguese. Nevertheless, its importance to the Portuguese-Italian trade relations should not be understated; this map provided the Italians with knowledge of Brazil's coastline and that of much of the Atlantic Coast of South America long before other nations even knew South America extended so far to the south. It also supplied great details of the Indian Ocean. The geographical information given on the Cantino map was copied into the Italian-made Canerio (or Caveri) map shortly after the Cantino map arrived in Italy and the Canerio, in turn, became the primary source for the design of the newly discovered western lands on the highly influential wall map of the world produced by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 under the auspices of Rene, Duke of Lorraine.

This old map, made-up by 6 glued parchment sheets, was kept in the Ducal Library, Ferrara, for about 90 years, until Pope Clement VIII transferred it to another palace in Modena, Italy. More than two centuries later, in 1859, the palace was ransacked and the Cantino Map lost. It was found by Giuseppe Boni, Director of the Biblioteca Estense, in that same year, in a butcher’s store in Modena. The Cantino world map can currently be found in Modena, Italy, at the Biblioteca Estense.

Construction

Two-circle construction of the compass line grid in the Cantino planisphere

The construction of the compass line grid (or rhumb lines) in the Cantino planisphere uses two focal points (most portolan charts use only one). The construction is based on two focal circles ("wheels with spokes") - the western circle is centered on the Cape Verde islands, the eastern focal circle is placed in India. Each focal circle has an implied outer circle (more precisely a hexadecagon with 16 vertices), and the two together cover most of the map. The circumference of each outer circle is ringed with sixteen equidistant 32-point compass roses - sometimes an elaborately drawn compass rose, sometimes left as a mere confluence of rhumb lines (when an illustration would conflict with the coastal details). The western and eastern outer circles are tangent to each other at a rose in central Africa. The map also has several scattered scale bars to help measure distances (including an atypical diagonal scale bar for the coast of Mozambique).

Illustrations are few, but elaborate. Two cities are grandly depicted - Venice and Jerusalem. There is also an elaborate depiction of the Portuguese castle of São Jorge da Mina (Elmina Castle, on the Gold Coast of west Africa), flanked by two African towns. Other illustrations include a lion-shaped mountain representing the Sierra Leone mountain range, the Alexandria lighthouse (laid horizontal), the mythical Mountains of the Moon (legendary source of the Nile River) in central Africa, and either the Table Mountain or Drakensberg range in South Africa. Along the central African coast are the various cross stone markers (padrões) erected by Diogo Cão and Bartholomew Dias in the 1480s.

In north Africa, there is the "Montes Claros" in the usual place of the Atlas mountains, the legend below on the left reading that "this is the land of King Organo, whose king is very noble and very rich", and to the right that this is the "land of the King of Nubia, the king of which is continuously making war on Prester John and is a moor and a great enemy of Christians".

Discoveries

The Cantino map contains evident corrections, made either in the course of 1501-02, while it was being composed by the anonymous Portuguese cartographer, or shortly after it was delivered in November 1502, possibly by an unknown Italian draftsman. The coast of Brazil, in particular, seems to have adjustments.

See also

• Ancient world maps
• Portuguese discoveries
• World map

Notes

1. ^ Harvey, p. 145.

References

• Harvey, Miles The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. New York:Random House, 2000. ISBN 0-7679-0826-0. (Also ISBN 0-375-50151-7).
• Rodrigues, Jorge Nascimento; Devezas, Tessaleno Portugal - O Pioneiro da Globalização. Famalicão, Portugal: Centro Atlântico, 2007. ISBN 978-989-615-042-6.
• Roukema, E. (1963) "Brazil in the Cantino Map", Imago Mundi, Vol. 17, p. 7-26

External links

• (Italian) Cantino Planisphere (Carta del Cantino) at Centro di Documentazione della Provincia di Modena
• (French) Carta del Cantino, Cantino planisphere image, zoomable to very high resolution, at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. (Click on 1:1 button to get maximum resolution. Click on Image plein écran to get full-screen view.)