The Disappearance of Fanciful Flourish from World Maps of the Middle Ages
So geographers, in Africa maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).


Much of this clutter was to alter its form and gradually to disappear from European maps in the early modern period. It no longer became perfunctory to see empty cartographic space as space to fill with all kinds of flourishes and emblems, as if fearing the emptiness of white sections of parchment. In any case, maps were no longer simply devotional objects, but came to record the progress in that European project which has become known as the Age of Discoveries.
As such, maps came to preserve valuable ethnographical and commercial information as we find in the Cantino map, 1502 and which some historians contend was a copy of the so-called ‘Padron Real’ held in the warehouse of the India House (Armazém da Guiné e Indias) in Lisbon, on which new discoveries were recorded as soon as information was collated in the light of returning expeditions. To provide an example, above the Portuguese trading stations established in Guinea, on the west coast of Africa, the following inscription is made: “. . . they bring to the most excellent prince Dom Manuel King of Portugal in each year twelve caravels with gold; each caravel brings twenty-five thousand weights of gold, each weight being worth five hundred reais, and they further bring many slaves and pepper and other things of much profit.”
As much as new information was added, older information was taken away. Classical constructions such as Taprobana, which was depicted as a giant, unrecognizable subcontinent sticking out into the Indian Ocean on Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographiae Universalis, Basel, 1558, were gradually phased out, though only by around 1640. Aures Chersonesus, or Golden Peninsula, portrayed as a dangling appendage off the Asian underbelly, was another victim of progress. The Great Southern Land, an inheritance from Ptolemaic geography in that Ptolemy had envisioned the Indian Ocean as an ‘inland lake’ hemmed in by land on all sides, was only finally cleared up with Captain James Cook’s repeated voyages across the southern Pacific in the 1770s.

With the explosion of Dutch professional map-making in the service of the Vereinigde Ost-Indische Compagnie in the seventeenth century, the world became more recognizable to us today than was ever the case before. These maps increasingly functioned as hydrographical and topographical tools, they were in themselves commercialized objects and professional tools at the service of the field of geography. We can appreciate some of this from the rhetoric and imaginative flourishes which were packed into the side panels of Joan Blaeu’s world maps. A cosmographer is depicted with his astrolabe, while a geographer sets to employing a pair of compasses (Joan Blaeu world map, 1648, Frederik Caspar Wieder, Monumenta Cartographica, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1925-33, vol. 3, plates 51-71).
But we can most easily appreciate how far we have come from the mappamundi tradition of the Middle Ages when we stop to consider the motifs at the top of each respective map. Rather than a Christ enthroned and a Last Judgement scene, as we find in the Hereford Mappamundi, we see a Dutch company official seated within the clouds and waving a baton of authority. The motif is much the same, but it is decorative rather than authoritative, and the strange icons that litter the map are sidelined curiosities and exotics rather than strange creatures implicated within the strictures and coordinates of Euclidean space, which constitutes reality itself.
