The Fra Mauro Map: Portugal’s Guidebook to Africa
show Africa as a free-standing continent (see top).
The Fra Mauro map (1450), one of the first in Europe to show Africa as a free-standing continent (see top).
The Fra Mauro map gave Portugal solid reason to turn down Columbus’s 1480s proposal to sail west to the Indies.
The giant map at St. George’s Castle in Lisbon was the first in Europe to show Africa as a free-standing continent surrounded by a waterway around the far tip. It challenged the widely accepted view of Ptolemy that the Indian Ocean was a closed-in sea.
When the Fra Mauro map was created around 1450, Portugal had already begun exploration of the West African coast.
This was an impoverished nation on the far edge of European civilization. But Portugal’s isolated geography suddenly offered huge prospects — in Africa. First and immediate were gold and slaves from the continent. Beyond that were dreams of a river route to the Nile and the legendary kingdom of Prester John, and possibly a greater holy grail, a sea route to the Indies bypassing the Middle East and Islam.
Two original editions of the map were produced by the Italian cartographer Fra Mauro and a team of cartographers and artists in Venice, a project that took several years. Portugal’s edition was commissioned by King Alfonso V, the other by the Signoria of Venice, the supreme governmental body of the republic. The latter has survived and is on public display in the city.
The huge Fra Mauro map is 2.4 by 2.4 meters and oriented to the south (upside-down) in the Arab tradition. It contains several thousand textual commentaries taken from accounts of travelers such as Marco Polo and Niccolò de’ Conti. They include also new discoveries by the Portuguese.
Africa on the right.
With gold leaf and minute illustration, the map shows a clear sea route around Africa, with pictures of caravels making the journey. It also offers substantial details of the Spice Islands and ports along the Indian Ocean — of interest to the Portuguese.
To Portugal, Fra Mauro’s work was a treasure map. It provided that holy grail of a sea route to the Indies, one that would allow access to spices such as cloves that the entire continent craved. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the spice trade had been controlled by Islamic traders.
King João II and his advisers turned down Columbus’s proposal for a number of reasons, but Portugal was already committed to seeking a route around Africa.
It turned out to be a good bet. Within two decades Portugal was brutally establishing a secret trade network and empire at ports in East Africa and India, where Ferdinand Magellan would get his early experience as a soldier. Both Magellan and Columbus underestimated the size of the Earth, by, coincidentally, roughly the width of the Pacific Ocean (again, Ptolemy). As a result, the strait Magellan later found for Spain never did pay off.
Fra Mauro’s spherical map of the Earth is surrounded in the four corners by small spheres, one showing the solar system according to Ptolemy, one the four elements, one the Garden of Eden, and one the Earth as a globe.
NASA created the comparison below that matches the Fra Mauro map to a satellite image. The matchup shows Fra Mauro was closer to the real shapes of continents and land masses than first impression suggests.
By John Sailors, Enrique’s Voyage
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Images
Fra Mauro map: Piero Falchetta, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php
Fra Mauro–NASA Image: By NASA — http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Fra-Mauro_Global-comparison-south.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38697958
© 2022 by John Sailors. All rights reserved.
