A cartographical renaissance: the Western recovery of Ptolemy's Geographia, 1397-c.1460

Like his even more famous treatment of astronomy, Ptolemy's Geographia or Cosmographia (2nd century AD) assembled and synthesized knowledge accumulated over centuries in the classic form in which it would be passed down to later centuries. After being lost to the West for several centuries, the work was rediscovered in the thirteenth century by a Byzantine monk named Maximus Planudes. The original Greek version was brought to Florence by the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras in 1397 and translated into Latin by Jacobus Angelus of Scarperia around 1409. It was another half-century or more before the maps were reconstructed to illustrate Ptolemy's text (Image), at the very time when printing itself was being (re-)invented in the West. 

Technical note. This manuscript map is based on a modified conic projection, the first and simplest method outlined in Ptolemy's Geographia. In this projection, the parallels of latitude (running east and west) are drawn as arcs of circles; but the lines of latitude (running north and south) are straight rather than curved and deflected at the equator. This first projection is simpler to construct than the second and more popular projection (illustrated in the following image) but more distorted and fails to capture the impression of the spherical globe.

Image. A reconstruction of Ptolemy's conic projection. Source: Wikimedia Commons, courtesy Enoch Pratt Free Library (CC BY 4.0 DEED). 

Commentary. Howard Hotson (January 2024)