1561 / 1562 Ruscelli Edition of Nicolo Zeno's Map of the North Atlantic

This is Girolamo Ruscelli's 1562 edition of the 1558 Carta Da Navegar De Nicolo et Antonio Zeni Furono In Tramontana Lano MCCCLXXX by Nicoló Zeno the Younger, revealing the alleged 14th century voyages of his ancestors, Nicoló and Antonio Zeno. The fraud, seen largely as an attempt to co-opt the 1492 Columbian discovery of America, is responsible for the tenacity with which 16th and early 17th century geographers mapped the phantom islands Frisland, Icaria, Deogeo, and the coastline of Estotiland, which was taken to be the coast of Labrador. This first-plate example of Ruscelli's 1561 engraving, in its 1562 Latin text edition, which would have seen the greatest early dissemination of this image outside of Venice, and the biggest impact of its content on European geographical ideas.

Zeno's Success

Although eventually exposed as a deliberate fraud, in his day Zeno the Younger’s deception was widely accepted as genuine. While the 1558 edition of Zeno’s book reached a relatively small audience, its embrace by mapmaker Girolamo Ruscelli spread the Zeno geography to a broad European audience in so authoritative a context that it was accepted virtually without question. Therefore, Zeno’s map remains one of the most important maps of the 16th century, for its having successfully misinformed the greatest geographers for over a hundred years, including not only Ruscelli but also Mercator, Ortelius, De Jode, and Ramusio. The fantasies of the Zeno map continued to be reproduced by Wytfliet, Blaeu, and even Coronelli. The map hoodwinked not only scholarly cartographers, but also practical seamen: Martin Frobisher, upon sighting the southern coast of Greenland in 1576, believed that he had seen Frisland and loyally claimed it for England.

The Scope of the Map

Despite its inclusion of lands familiar to Europeans, the map's content emphasizes the remoteness of Iceland, Greenland, and the mythical Frisland. Despite the projection's distortion at the extremes, Denmark and the Norwegian coast are recognizable. At bottom center, the northern part of Scotland is named. The north of the map is dominated by Greenland. In a divergence from the 1558 original, Ruscelli's map separates Greenland from Europe - a change that he appears to have made at the last minute. This copperplate shows a trace of an original coastline connecting Greenland and Scandinavia between 35º and 45º longitude, incompletely burnished out. The 1558 map showed an unbroken coastline there, although it included a note indicating that it was unknown whether that area was sea or land. Iceland appears just left of center: its eastern coast broken into an archipelago, in a misinterpretation of the ice floes indicated on the Olaus Magnus Carta Marina, revealing that map as one of Zeno's sources. The waters between Iceland and Scotland are populated by the imaginary islands of Icaria, Estland, and Frisland (whose cities are depicted in greater detail even than Iceland). In its western extremes, the map shows the coastlines of Estotiland and Deogeo - these are believed to indicate Labrador and Newfoundland, respectively, and it is their appearance here which is likely to have been of the greatest importance to the 16th century Zeno, above and beyond the spurious islands commanding the center of the map.

The Party Line

This cartography - particularly the phantom locales of Frisland, Icaria, Estotiland, Deogeo and the monastery of St. Thomas in Greenland - had its germ in the 1558 publication, by Venetian Senator and politician Nicoló Zeno the Younger, of several letters and a map which he attributed to his ancestors Nicoló and Antonio Zeno. The Zeno brothers, so claimed their descendent Nicoló, traveled these waters discovering in the process the novel islands here presented. The letters indicated that on a 1380 voyage, the elder Nicoló Zeno's ship was shipwrecked on the island of Frisland. There, he was taken in by King Zichmni of Frisland, who enlisted the Venetian's aid in conquering neighboring islands. Nicoló then wrote to his brother Antonio to encourage him to join him in those efforts. Antonio - in Venice - not only received the missive, but also successfully navigated to Frisland. From there, Nicoló and Antonio reputedly spent the next 14 years leading military campaigns against Frisland's enemies. Their journeys took them to Iceland and Greenland, and various other locations here indicated. Nicoló reportedly died on Frisland; meanwhile Antonio encountered fishermen who visited the shores of (civilized, Latin-speaking) Estotiland and Drogeo (uncivilized, cannibal-ridden). In his attempt to find these lands, Antonio 'discovered' the island of Icaria. He explored Greenland with King Zichmni; the King stayed, but Antonio left him there - returning first to Frisland and then to Venice. Centuries passed before Nicoló the Younger, claiming to have discovered the letters and a map in his family records, presented their deeds in 1558 to a world hungry for information about the part of the world which the brothers Zeno alone had visited, and which their family had revealed to no one.

Initial Reception

The revelation of a Venetian discovery of North American shores in the 14th century would have been well received in Venice, preempting the famous 1492 discovery by the Genoese Columbus. Given the political motivations present to the younger Zeno, his presentation of 'a navigating chart which I once found that I possessed among the ancient things in our house, which… is all rotten and many years old,' might have been viewed with some skepticism, had his account's audience not themselves been predominantly Venetian, and had Zeno not been a powerful Venetian politician. The 1558 account might not have spread far, but for Girolamo Ruscelli's inclusion of an edited copy of the map in his 1561 Ptolemy. The impact cannot be overstated: it placed the Zeno geography at the same level as not only the ancient founder of geography, but also the towering Venetian cartographer, Giocomo Gastaldi, whose work provided the basis for most of the maps in Ruscelli's book. Propelled in part by its reproduction in Ruscelli's Ptolemy, Zeno's map was eagerly accepted by contemporary mapmakers. The Zeno narrative found its way into both Hakluyt and Ramusio. It was accepted by Mercator, whose previously correct 1554 depiction (for instance) of the Faeroe Islands he altered for the worse in subsequent maps. Mercator's depiction of Greenland and his inclusion of Frisland, Estotiland and Drogeo can all be attributed to the Zeno map. Ortelius also embraced the Zeno cartography, which appeared in his map of the north parts of the world. It was also be reproduced on the maps of De Jode, Wytfliet, Blaeu, and others. Even Coronelli, at the end of the seventeenth century, was forced to contend with the inability of explorers to find the Zeno discoveries.

Further Scrutiny

The Zeno geography remained authoritative until actual exploration found it wanting. By 1661, Dutch navigators and mapmakers knew the truth of the matter. In the following centuries geographers scrambled to explain the map's obvious flaws, the disappearance of its islands, and finally to explain how Zeno could have got it so wrong. Despite Nicoló the Younger's never having claimed that either of the Zeno brothers, or Zichmni, themselves ever visited Estotiland or Deogeo, from the 18th century on the map was taken as the (sole) proof that they had, and it is supported upon this tatter the notion of the Venetian (or indeed, Scottish) discovery of America in the 14th century. Nineteenth century scholars no less respected than Humboldt and Nordenskiöld looked to the Zeno map for its Greenland revelations, and even Humboldt wrote that he believed there were no published maps that could have provided Zeno the younger a source for the 1558 map. Nevertheless, the 1898 work of Frederick W. Lucas -The Annals of the Voyages of the Brothers Nicolo and Antonio Zeno in the North Atlantic about the end of the Fourteenth Century and the Claim founded thereon to a Venetian Discovery of America: A Criticism and an Indictment - effectively destroyed the Zeno map's credibility by carefully enumerating the literary and cartographic sources for the entire account. Lucas, with the new tools of photographic evidence, and the recent rediscovery of actual lost maps such as the 1539 Olaus Magnus Carta Marina, was able to scrutinize and compare historic maps in a way not previously possible. He was thereby able to determine very convincingly that Zeno’s map was a pastiche of information drawn from other maps including the Scandinavia maps added to 15th century Ptolemies, the 1528 Bordone Isolario, and the 1539 Olaus Magnus Carta Marina. A comparison of the Zeno map with these precursor maps makes plain that Zeno constructed his map from others already in print, and that the letters themselves were a patchwork of the discovery tales of other parts of the Americas. (Indeed, the island of Icaria should have been a dead giveaway, its name and history having been taken from the ancient Greek myths of Icarus and Daedalus.) It was Lucas' radiantly optimistic desire that 'it may even be hoped that the last word has been written on this great and mischievous imposture'. Unfortunately, Lucas' excellent work was published in a sole edition of 400 copies, while the work of his chief opposition remained in constant publication throughout the following century under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society. Therefore, Zeno defenders were able to persist in such claims as King Zichmni having been the Scottish Henry Sinclair, imagined by 1980s conspiracy theorists to have brought the Knights Templar to America in the 14th century. A reading of Lucas' book is of the greatest value to map collectors of any area. Despite its archaic language, Lucas' systematic and gleeful destruction of flawed earlier scholarship based on his meticulous analysis of antique maps is both an entertaining read and a window into the study of these documents.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved by Giulio Sanuto for inclusion in the 1561 edition of Girolamo Ruscelli's Ptolemy, with the title Septentrionalium Partium Nova Tabula and with the placename in the lower left spelled 'DROGEO.' The maps for the 1561, 1562, and 1564 printings of the book were printed two-to-a-plate, and examples of such maps exhibit plate marks running off the top of the page, as is the case here. For the 1574 edition, this map was entirely reengraved, either by Sanuto or an imitator. It can be distinguished by changes in the spelling of the title ('Septenirionalium Partium Nova Tabula') and the placename in the lower left ('DEOGEO.') There are other differences between the plates in the spacing of text and placement of words in relation to the lines of longitude. Examples of this second plate would, for the 1599 editions of Ruscelli's Ptolemy, include letter press text and pagination above the map, which was lacking in the earlier editions. Our example is of the first plate, and it conforms typographically to the 1562 Latin text edition published in Venice by Valgrisi.