Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Where were we?At the end of the last installment, we were still in the 15th-century Mediterranean, when maps were oriented every way imaginable. But with compasses that always pointed north. Over the next century, the center of map-making itself would move to Germany and the Low Countries. New geographic discoveries would lead to the creation of the first modern world maps. And north would gradually emerge as the default orientation for them.In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a distinctive heart-shaped world map. This was the first to show the Americas as separate from Asia and the first to call them the Americas. In 1569, Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator produced a world map using his eponymous projection, which was an act of transformative human technical genius — and it also had sea monsters.Johannes Honter, Universalis Cosmographia, 1546. (Inspired by Waldseemüller’s map and honestly a lot better looking)Waldseemüller’s and Mercator’s maps helped cement north as up in Western cartography. But it’s still not clear why they did it this way. Each of them had also produced maps using other orientations, including a west-facing Palestine and a south-facing Europe. One possibility is that both men were obsessed with Ptolemy, a Hellenic cartographer who lived in Egypt in the second century AD. Waldseemüller actually included a small portrait of Ptolemy alongside Amerigo Vespucci in the top of this world map. Mercator went one step further, devoting ten years of his life to producing a 28-map definitive edition of Ptolemy’s geography at the very moment modern science had rendered it obsolete.Donnus Nicholas Germanus, reproduction of Ptolemy’s Geography, 1482.Ptolemy earned such reverence for being the first cartographer
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Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Where were we?At the end of the last installment, we were still in the 15th-century Mediterranean, when maps were oriented every way imaginable. But with compasses that always pointed north. Over the next century, the center of map-making itself would move to Germany and the Low Countries. New geographic discoveries would lead to the creation
