The Fra Mauro Medieval World Map

Podcast Transcript

Sometime around the year 1450, a monk living just outside of Venice created one of the greatest maps of the medieval world.

It was an enormous map, even by modern standards, and it had a level of detail that had never been seen before.

It took years to make and was a major advancement in cartography.

Perhaps most importantly, it contained many details that no one had yet verified firsthand, opening the door to the Age of Exploration.

Learn more about the Fra Mauro map, how it was created, and its significance on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Before I start, let me clarify that for the purpose of this episode, I’m calling the events I’ll be covering the late medieval period. Some people call the Fra Mauro Map a Renaissance work, but I’m going to be calling it a medieval work for reasons that will become obvious.

It was created at the borderline period between the end of the medieval period and the start of the Renaissance, and the transition isn’t cut and dry.

With that, it is necessary to understand the roles that maps played in medieval Europe.

In the medieval world, cartographers were not trying to do what we expect maps to do today. For much of the period, especially in Latin Christendom, the main world maps or mappaemundi were visual encyclopedias and theological diagrams rather than tools for precise navigation or measurement.

They were organized around salvation history and biblical geography, so they placed Jerusalem at the center, the Garden of Eden at the top, and arranged the three continents according to the sons of Noah, even when this distorted their actual shape and size.

This emphasis on theology made it hard to incorporate new empirical information without disrupting the theological structure, and it meant that accuracy in distance, orientation, or coastline shape was often a secondary concern.

In addition to theology, there were also major conceptual and mathematical limits. Medieval mapmakers were aware of classical sources that described the Earth as a sphere, but they lacked a theory of map projections to translate that curved surface into a flat sheet.

The Mercator Projection, which I covered in a previous episode, wouldn’t be developed for over a century.

For many charts, the Earth was treated as effectively flat, and distances and bearings were simply plotted on the plane, which worked tolerably over short ranges but introduced growing distortion over larger ones.

Without a systematic projection, there was no controlled way to manage trade-offs between shape, area, and direction, so scales wandered across the page, parallels and meridians were inconsistent, and different regions sitting side by side on the same map might be based on incompatible geometric assumptions.

Measurement technology imposed another set of constraints. Latitude could be estimated roughly from the height of the Pole Star or the length of the day, but the resulting values were often off by a degree or more. Longitude was effectively impossible to determine at sea before the advent of accurate timekeeping.

Lastly, information about many regions was thin, patchy, or mediated through texts rather than surveys. For the Mediterranean and Black Seas, sailors gradually produced remarkably accurate charts whose coastlines agree closely with modern maps, likely compiled from accumulated bearings and distances sailed. Outside those intensively traveled waters, however, knowledge declined rapidly.

So with that background, the story begins in Venice in the mid-15th century.

Venice at this point was one of the great clearing houses of global information, a maritime republic that handled trade between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and, via caravan routes and Islamic intermediaries, the distant markets of India and China.

If one wanted to know about the rest of the world, or at least what could be known of it at this time, there was no place better to be than Vencie. Merchants and sailors who traveled throughout Europe, the Near East, and parts of Africa all came to Venice.

It was here that a monk known to us only as Fra Mauro lived and worked.

Fra Mauro was a fifteenth-century Venetian Camaldolese monk and cartographer who lived and worked at the monastery of San Michele on the island of Murano, which today is known for its famous glasswork.

Born probably in the late 1300s, he had been a lay brother involved in commerce and travel before entering monastic life, which allowed him to travel widely and gave him an unusual grasp of the world’s trade networks.

Later in life, he lived at the monastery and became a full monk, and among his duties, he was a cartographer. The monastery had become an essential center for mapmaking by the mid-fifteenth century, given its strategic position in Venice.

The reason why I’m doing an episode on this topic had to do with a request from King Afonso V of Portugal.

At some point in the mid-to-late 1440s, Alfonso requested a map that provided the most accurate representation of the known world.

Portugal was at the forefront of maritime exploration during this period, and Portuguese sailors were gradually pushing down the West African coast, seeking routes to the wealthy markets of Asia and hoping to bypass the Ottoman-controlled eastern Mediterranean trade routes.

It is essential to note that this occurred very early in the period that would later become known as the Age of Exploration. No one had yet sailed around Africa to India, and no Europeans had sailed to the Americas. All of the information that would come from these voyages had yet to be discovered.

This is why I consider this to be late medieval, rather than early Renaissance, at least in terms of cartography.

Fra Mauro worked on the map for over a decade. Records show that the map was completed on April 24, 1459. What he and his assistant, the Venetian pilot and cartographer Andrea Bianco, created was the most revolutionary map in history.

What makes the Fra Mauro map revolutionary for its time is its departure from the theological cartography that dominated medieval European mapmaking.

Unlike the maps common in medieval Europe, which placed Jerusalem at the center and organized geography according to biblical interpretation, Fra Mauro’s map attempted to represent the world based on empirical knowledge gathered from travelers, merchants, and explorers.

The map is oriented with south at the top, a convention common in Islamic and some European nautical charts of the period, although it may seem unusual to modern viewers accustomed to north-oriented maps.

The map’s sources were extraordinarily diverse for its time. Fra Mauro drew upon the works of Ptolemy, the ancient Greek geographer whose “Geography” had been recently reintroduced to Western Europe through Byzantine and Arabic sources.

However, Fra Mauro was not slavishly devoted to Ptolemaic geography and was willing to correct or reject Ptolemy’s assertions when they conflicted with more recent information.

He incorporated knowledge from Marco Polo’s travels to China in the late thirteenth century, as well as accounts from Niccolò de’ Conti, a Venetian merchant who had traveled extensively in Asia and the Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century and whose reports provided relatively recent information about these distant regions.

Islamic geographic knowledge played a crucial role in shaping the map. Through Venice’s extensive trading relationships and the availability of Arabic sources, Fra Mauro had access to sophisticated Islamic cartography and geographic texts that contained information far superior to contemporary European knowledge about Africa, Asia, and the Indian Ocean.

The map reflects this Islamic influence in its detailed depiction of the Indian Ocean, its relatively accurate representation of the African coastline, and its inclusion of numerous Asian place names and geographic features.

The physical execution of the map is itself remarkable. It was drawn on parchment mounted on wooden panels and features thousands of inscriptions in Venetian dialect, providing descriptions of regions, cities, peoples, and phenomena from around the known world.

The map is a square approximately 2 meters, or six feet, on each side.

These inscriptions are not merely labels but often contain extended commentary, reflecting Fra Mauro’s critical engagement with his sources. The map is richly illuminated with miniature illustrations depicting cities, ships, animals, rulers, and various scenes of human activity, making it not only a geographic document but also a visual encyclopedia of mid-fifteenth-century knowledge about the world.

One of the map’s most significant features is its representation of Africa. Unlike earlier European maps that often depicted Africa as a relatively small landmass or left its southern extent unknown, the Fra Mauro map shows Africa as a large continent that could potentially be circumnavigated.

The map includes an inscription suggesting that a Chinese junk had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic, demonstrating that such a voyage was possible.

While the accuracy of this claim remains debated among scholars, it reflects the contemporary interest in finding a sea route to Asia around Africa, a quest that would culminate in Bartolomeu Dias’s actual rounding of the Cape in 1488.

The map’s depiction of Asia is extensive and detailed, showing not only the Near East and India but also extending to China and Southeast Asia. Fra Mauro included information about the Mongol Empire, though by his time it had already fragmented, and depicted various Asian kingdoms and peoples.

The representation of the Indian Ocean is particularly sophisticated, showing it as an open sea connected to the Atlantic rather than as an enclosed body of water as Ptolemy had suggested. This correction of Ptolemaic geography had enormous implications for the age of exploration that was just beginning.

In depicting Europe, Fra Mauro naturally had access to the most detailed and accurate information, and the continent is represented with considerable precision for the period.

The Mediterranean region, which was the center of Venetian commercial interests, receives particularly detailed treatment. The map also shows parts of northern Europe, including Scandinavia, though with less detail and accuracy than southern regions.

The inscriptions on the map reveal Fra Mauro’s methodology and his awareness of the limitations of his knowledge. He frequently cites his sources, acknowledges uncertainties, and notes where different accounts conflict.

This scholarly approach distinguishes his work from many earlier maps and demonstrates a proto-scientific attitude toward geographic knowledge. He was particularly interested in recent discoveries and contemporary reports, showing that he conceived of geography as an evolving field of knowledge rather than a fixed body of inherited wisdom.

If you look at a map, your initial reaction might be that this isn’t a very good map, but you have to grade it on a curve. Yes, this doesn’t look like a modern map, but if you zoom in on particular parts of the map, it isn’t bad, especially given all of the limitations of cartography that I listed at the start of the episode.

The original map created for the Portuguese king is believed to have been lost, possibly in a fire or an earthquake.

However, Fra Mauro created a second version for the Signoria of Venice, and this is the map that survives today. It is housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice.

The map suffered damage over time, including water damage and deterioration of the parchment and pigments; however, conservation work has helped preserve this invaluable historical document for future generations.

In honor of his work, there is a crater on the moon named after Fra Mauro, and the Fra Mauro Highlands became the landing site for Apollo 14.

The Fra Mauro map wasn’t just a landmark in cartography. While we don’t have any direct proof, it is reasonable to assume that the map commissioned by King Alfonso played a role in the continued support for voyages to seek a route to Asia that sailed around Africa.

Likewise, because it showed the Indian and Atlantic oceans being connected, it may have planted the seed for explorers to sail west in an attempt to reach Asia, which ultimately led to the discovery of the New World.

As such, the Fra Mauro world map is more than just a monument of medieval European cartography; it is a work that, in a very real sense, may have changed the course of history.