Interesting And Fascinating European Maps Of The 1400′s

With the advent of the Age of Exploration, brought on no doubt by the Renaissance’s renewed interest in the Classical World and its long-lost knowledge, maps became an important form of artistic and scientific expression and research. In the Middle Ages maps were mostly useful for business in that they showed correct trade routes the the most efficient ways to import goods, but the study seemed to end there. Fueled in part by the growth of trade and the longer-reaching arms of monarchs around Europe, maps soon became integral tools in the competitive market of world exploration. The country who could navigate quicker and more efficiently to the destination of choice, often called ‘The New World,’ would be the first to colonize that nation. Colonies produced a number of resources for European mother countries, among them exotic goods for trade, added land mass for the kingdom or empire, and manpower provided, however unfairly, by the native population.
By 1450, a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro created a map of the ‘Old World,’ or Asia, Africa, and Europe. He had traveled as a soldier in his youth, and made a point of meeting with returning merchants in his trade-hub home of Venice, and as a result, this map is extremely accurate given the knowledge available at the time. As a testament to how important cartography was becoming in Europe, a similar map was commissioned by Alfonso I of Portugal within the next decade so that he could use it for oceanic navigation, and yet another copy was begun by Fra Mauro shortly before his death. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century copies of the original 1450 map exist today, showing the map’s historical importance. Other such maps were created in the following decades, and beginning in the 1490s, these maps began to include the Americas. The 1400s was just the beginning of a new wave of creative cartography to hit Europe during the Age of Exploration.