Cantino Planisphere: Europeans’ World View in the Year 1500
The Cantino planisphere is the earliest-surviving map that shows Portuguese discoveries in Asia and South America up to 1500.
The map is also a guidebook to their voyages, its detail showing where they had ventured, and less or none where they had not. It contains considerable accuracy of both the west and east coasts of Africa, which by that time they had thoroughly explored. To the east beyond Africa the detail fades, along the coast of India and into Asia.
Notably, the Cantino planisphere was created a decade before the Portuguese reached Malacca. It illustrates their sketchy knowledge of the Southeast Asia region, with the Malay Peninsula pointing westward at the tip, instead of eastward. Then to the west of the peninsula it shows a small island in place of the much-larger Sumatra. The Portuguese knew of the Strait of Malacca and its strategic importance and may have added the island to define the strait.
The map shows little beyond that to the east. Europeans of course knew that China lay not far beyond, and the fabled Spice Islands lay to the southeast, but they had yet to map those lands out.
It is worth mention, also, that alongside cold geographical detail, Europeans still saw in maps like this the myths and legends popularized by Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and others.
For instance, a decade after the Cantino planisphere was created, Duarte Barbosa, brother-in-law of Ferdinand Magellan, wrote about the African and Indian coasts where he had traveled as a Portuguese officer between 1500 and 1516. In his writing, Barbosa added substantial detail of the kingdom of Prester John, a legendary Christian emperor in the east with great power and wealth (identified with the kingdom of Ethiopia). Legends of Prester John arose in the eleventh century, and five hundred years later still held the imagination of Europeans.
To the west, the map’s scant detail chronicles landings made in the decade after Columbus’s first voyage. By this time it was clear that Columbus had reached not several east Asian islands as he believed, but rather something that was looking more and more like a continent. Or possibly two.
Toward the top is Cuba and above that, Europeans’ first glimpse of Florida, while farther down, the map outlines the coasts of Venezuela and Brazil.
At this point the map shows us the world view of Magellan and his crew, who were, basically, journeying south off the end of the map.
Making this prospect scarier, the farthest point previously reached to the south along this coast was Rio de la Plata, near modern-day Buenos Aires. There, the Portuguese explorer Juan Díaz de Solís, after leading a successful expedition, had a few years earlier been captured by cannibals and eaten in clear view of his crew, who looked on from their ships offshore.
As for the Cantino world map, the Portuguese protected all knowledge of their discoveries. It was a crime to take maps and other documents out of the kingdom. The Portuguese were building a lucrative trade route around the Cape of Good Hope and up to India with armed forts spread along the way — all largely unknown to most of Europe at the time.
The Cantino planisphere, as we know it today, was named after Alberton Cantino, who smuggled it from Portugal to Italy in 1502.
© 2022, by John Sailors. All rights reserved.
