1595 Abraham Ortelius Map of the World

One of the most iconic maps of all time, this is Abraham Ortelius's 1589 map of the world, in an original color example of the third plate. This map was published in Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern published atlas. It embraces the entirety of the known world and represents the most widely-disseminated and eagerly-copied image of the world available to the European reader at the end of the 16th century. In compiling this map, Ortelius drew on the best cartography available, including Gerard Mercator's map of 1569, Giacomo Gastaldi's 1561 World Map, and Diego Gutierrez's portolan of the Atlantic, as well as other works by Sebastian Cabot, Jodocus Hondius, Orontius Finaeus, Petrus Plancius, Gemma Frisius, Laurent Fries, and more.

'Terra Australis Nondum Cognita' or the Speculative Southern Continent

The map exhibits a host of striking features, but perhaps none stand out more than the enormous continent at the base of the map identified as Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (Unknown Southern Land). Medieval scholars imagined a massive continent encompassing the south pole - Aristotelian thought supposed the world to be a place of balances, and so it was natural to assume that the masses of land in the north hemisphere would be balanced symmetrically to the south. Many explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries, fueled by such images, sought the Great Southern Continent, but Antarctica - much smaller than supposed - itself would not be discovered until Edward Bransfield and William Smith sighted the Antarctic Peninsula in 1820.

Philippine Cartography

This 1587, third plate of Ortelius' map is the first of his atlas maps of the world to apply the placename Philippinas to that archipelago. This amendment coincides with Ortelius' similar 1587 correction to his map of China. While not the first appearance of this term on a map - that would be the 1554 Gastaldi Terza Tavola - its use here is the first to be found on a generally acquirable map of the world. The first we have identified was Ortelius' 1564 wall map of the world (which survives in only three copies;) that leaves only Gerard De Jode's 1571/78 map based on the 1564 Ortelius, which is orders of magnitude rarer and more expensive than the present work.

There is a puzzle this chronology presents us. Ortelius' 1564 world map referenced Gastaldi heavily, and so it is reasonable that Gastaldi's 1554 informed Ortelius' choice in adding Philippina to his wall map. But the 1570 Ortelius world, and the second plate of 1579 both lack the term. Why? The word fits typographically, as the 1587 map proved. We suspect that Ortelius abandoned his 1564 cartography in toto upon encountering Mercator's 1569 world map. The omission of the Philippine placename may be a case of Ortelius having thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

Marco Polo's Geography

Much of the speculative geography here relates to interpretations of Marco Polo's Travels. Among these are several identified lands in Terra Australis, including 'Beach', 'Lucach', and 'Maletur'. All three locations appear in Polo's Travels, but where Polo was describing places in Java, later cartographers ascribed them to the speculative southern continent. This is probably related to a printing error in the 1532 edition of Polo's Travels wherein Java Minor appeared disproportionally gigantic. Attempting to reconcile the 1532 Polo geography with actual discoveries in the East Indies, cartographers relocated 'Beach', 'Lucach', and 'Maletur' further south and attached them to the Southern Continent.

Similarly, the land of Anian is identified in the far northwestern part of America in what might today be considered a proto-Alaska. At this time no European navigator had explored these extreme Arctic seas but again, cartographers turned to Marco Polo. Polo described a Chinese province named 'Ania' located on a large gulf. This was in fact the Gulf of Tonquin, near modern day Vietnam, which then was referred to as Anian. Polo's description was vague enough that the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi included it on the northwest coast of America on his world map of 1562. This error was followed by numerous subsequent cartographers including Zaltieri, Mercator, and of course, Ortelius. The identification of this region as 'Anian Regnum' persisted until the late 18th century, when Cook, La Perouse, and Vancouver recorded their explorations of the Pacific Northwest.

Cities of Gold

Also in North America, several cities appear, among them Quivara (Quivira), Cibola (Ceuola), Tiguex (Teguayo), Totonte, Axa, and Granata - these are known in aggregate as the Seven Cities of Gold. The origin of the Seven Cities may connect to legends of Antilla, a mythic island that appears on some early portolan charts of the Atlantic and even appears here on Ortelius's map at the center of the Atlantic as Sept Cites (Seven Cities). The legend describes how when the Moors invaded Porto in the early 8th century, the city's seven bishops took all their wealth and fled to the sea. In response to their prayers, they were granted a refuge in the form of a magical paradise in the Atlantic where each bishop established a mighty city. When navigators failed to discover Antilla in the Atlantic, legends pushed the Seven Cities further west into unexplored lands north of Mexico. Years later, the gold and glory-seeking conquistador Hernando Coronado ploughed through the region with a massive army sacking several Zuni Pueblos (generally associated with Cibola) and a city on the Great Plains known as Quivira, but failed to find the gold he sought.

The Seas of the North

Far to the north, open water can be seen circling the globe. The notion that the oceans of the north might be navigable led to eager searches for a Northwest Passage (to the north of America) and Northeast Passage (over Asia), affording European navigators easy access to the rich Asian markets of spices, silks, and other trade goods coveted in Europe. The dream of finding such a passage spurred many voyages of exploration at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. Ortelius’ map still bears the fraudulent cartography of Nicolo Zeno in the northern extremes of the Atlantic (witness the phantom islands of Frisland and Drogeo and the imaginary monastery-city on the coast of Greenland). Accurate mapping of the northern parts of the world would wait.

Publication History and Census

This map exists in three plates, all of which were published in editions of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the world's first proper atlas. The first plate appeared in 1570 and lasted many editions of the atlas, with many instances of repair. A second plate was engraved to replace it completely in 1586, dated but without significant changes. This third plate was engraved in 1587 and is so dated. It contains both cartographic and aesthetic changes, notably replacing the earlier plates’ cloud borders with an elegant strapwork design, with its corner medallions containing quotes from Cicero and Seneca. It was not included in the Theatrum until it appeared in some copies of the 1589 German edition. The present example conforms typographically with the 1595 Latin edition of the Theatrum. Eight examples of this edition of the complete atlas are cataloged in OCLC. The separate map in its various editions is well represented in institutional collections, although we see only two listed of this edition.