How a medieval monk who never left home created a world map

On the second floor of St. Mark's library in Venice, a single room is occupied by a single map - and justified, taking into account its historical significance and size (2.4 m x 2,4 m). It is Mappa Mundi (translated - "Map of the World"), completed in 1459, which gathered all the geographical knowledge of the time and is considered the best medieval map.

Almost twice as large as the famous English Geraford map of the world (c.

Although the monk's leg has never stepped beyond Venice, his mappa mundi is amazingly depicting cities, provinces, continents, rivers and mountains.

There is no America on the map - since Christopher Columbus made his journey through the ocean only 33 years later - as well as Australia. But there is Japan (or, as Fra Mauro, Cipango) - and this is its first image on the western map. And perhaps the most striking is that Africa is depicted in the surrounding water from all sides - long before the Portuguese overtook the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.

"This is the oldest medieval map that has survived," says Meredith Francesca Smoll, the author of the book "The Dark Sea begins here," and adds that it is also the most complete.

"This is the first map to be based on science than religion. The Gerford map is propaganda, religious propaganda," the scientist said.

Gereford portrayed paradise and hell. It was created as a collection of world knowledge from a spiritual point of view, but instead Fra Mauro applied a scientific approach to its cartography. In his records, he argued that he "tested the text with practical experience, exploring for many years and visiting persons worthy of faith who saw with my own eyes what I am here honestly informed."

However, the map is not only scientific and historical. The most striking in it and immediately falls into the eyes after the lifting of the white marble stairs of the St. Mark Library, where the most valuable and ancient manuscripts of the world are stored, so it is its grandeur and sophistication.

"She is huge, beautiful, fantastically made," says historian Pierialis Zorzi.

Mappa Mundi Fra Mauro is not just the contours of countries and continents, it is a wonderful gold-blue picture that contains small drawings of luxurious palaces, bridges, ships, blue waves, and huge marine creatures, as well as 3000 Cartigli. stories, anecdotes and legends.

In Norway, for example, such an inscription is accompanied by a place where the Venetian merchant Pietro Kerini went ashore after a shipwreck. According to legend, he not only survived as a result of the accident, but also brought home dried fish, thus laying down the Venetian passion for the Bakkala dishes.

Another inscription points to Tarsh - "the kingdom, where the Magi came" - which, as they thought, was somewhere between China and Mongolia.

All these annotations are evidently applied on the map and are relatively easy to decipher the natives of the Venetian language, since the current dialect is not much different from the language of the 15th century.

These inscriptions also translated into English on an interactive map, created by the Institute and the Galileo Museum in Florence. It is shown on screen in the same exhibition space as Mappa Mundi, and it gives the opportunity to look at the world through the eyes of a medieval monk.

And it was not a small world. Although Fra Mauro has lived his entire life in the Monastery on the Gulf Island, he used the knowledge of travelers and merchants who flocked to the flowering Venice, which was the "capital of cartography of the time", explains Margarita Venturelli, a staff of St. Mark Library.

"The maps were key to trade, because if you have a good map, you can go everywhere," Zorzi adds. "Venice greeted every innovation in the field of cartography and was well paid."

The main source of Asia for Fra Mauro was a merchant and his compatriot, Venice Marco Polo, who published his travels 150 years before.

150 seats on the map can be directly correlated with his travels. For example, on the island of Ceylon (the current Sri Lanka) Mount Adam, where, according to legends, the body of the first person was buried-along with his teeth and a bowl, which allegedly had a magical property of multiplying food.

In addition to Polo, Fra Mauro had numerous other sources around the world. The fact that a map for modern Western eyes looks inverted, with south above, it may indicate that he has been inspired in Arabic cartography, including the 12th century map of the North African geographer Muhammad Al-Idrisi.

The numbers that Fra Mauro calls "the distance of heaven" come from the mathematician and astronomer of Campanus de Novar. "From the center of the world to the surface of the earth 3245 miles. From the center of the world to the lower surface of the heavens of the month - 107 936 miles", etc., he writes in the upper left corner of the Mappa Mundi.

Fra Mauro also showed healthy skepticism and was not ashamed to criticize - but sometimes use - revered "geography" of Ptolemy, which he wrote in Alexandria in Egypt Claudius Ptolemy in 150 AD. This work for the Western world has been lost for centuries, until in the 1400s it was discovered and translated into Latin.

The rationalistic approach of the Renaissance also turned out to be in the way Adam and Eve in the Eden Garden outside the Planisfer, making it clear that the sky is not a place on Earth. This view divided religion and geography and was progressive for any medieval man, not to mention the monk.

All of these innovations and the fact that the map was completed several decades before Christopher Columbus sailed to America, contribute to the fact that Mappa Mundi Fra Mauro is considered a geographical connection between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Modern map visitors are a reminder that once cards were not only practical tools, but also a work of art - and a way to tell the most unusual stories.