Fra Mauro

From Meredith Small's book "Here Begns th Dark Sea".

Fra Mauro's mappamundi

In 1459, a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro completed an astonishing map of the world. Seven feet in diameter, Fra Mauro's mappamundi is the oldest and most complete medieval map to survive into modernity. ... Fra Mauro's map was the first in history toshow that a ship could circumnavigate Africa, and that the Indian 'Sea' was in fact an ocean, enabling international trade to expand across the globe.

Effect on the Age of Discovery

The overarching geographic effect of this map is thatit pictorially, and verbally, expands the world of the Middle Ages. It's also clear that Fra Mauro concentrated on the places where humans had inhabited the earth... Fra Mauro was also interested in human movement. He was adament that people could easily sail from one place to another, as in rounding the tip of Africa and entering the Eastern Ocean, where many goods and glories were waiting. With a nod to international trade as the commercial advantage to exploration, Fra Mauro also depicts eight different kinds of boats across the waters, some from non-Western ports and barrels and big boxes presumably full of trade goods floaing in the seas. This is, after all, the map that launched the Age of Discovery...

Revealing the Unknown

If someone knows about Fra Mauro's map, they usually know that its major contribution to world maps was the first clear purposeful depiction of the southern tip of the African continent showing the possibility of sailing from the Atlantic Ocean into the Indian Ocean. Other world maps before this one uually sported a truncated Africa, as if half the contient had been sliced away. Some others either push southern Africa rightinto the frame, which represented the end of the world or, as in Ptolemy's maps, curve it sharply right and attached the lower tip of Africa to the Indian Peninsula.

But there were also ancient stories about the possibility of rounding the southern tip of Africa from either direction. For example, Eudoxus was a Greek explorer who at least twice in the second century BCE started from Greek-occupied Egypt and sailed down the Arabian Sea, out across the Gulf of Aden, and then using the Indian monsoon winds, sailed further into the Indian Ocean. Eudoxus also did some trading in the East and brought back to Egypt gems and other goods, so presumably, these were trading expeditions.

Sailor Stories

But during the second voyage on this route, so the story goes, Eudoxus and his crew were blown off course by the terrible winds in the area and their boat was sent around the Horn of Africa and further down the east coast of Africa instead of out to sea. Somewhere along that coast, Eudoxus and company found a shipwreck that was said to be left by a crew that originated in Span and sailed down the west side of Africa, rounded the tip of the continent, and sailed up the other side of Africa until it shipwrecked.

Assuming he could make the same trip but in the opposite direction, Eudoxus supposedly sailed down the east coast of Africa as well and tried to round the tip going south and then west, but no one knows if he ever made it.

There were also anecdotal reports of Arab sailors going back and forth below the tip of Africa, but again, there is no documentation of these voyages. For centuries, Arab sailors ruled the Indian Ocean and for centuries they had been peacefully trading in those waters, known to Arabs as the Sea of Zani, going as far as the island of Mauritius and just east of Madagascar, both close to the African coast. But until Fra Mauro, there was no documentation of any of this and everything was in speculation.

Round the Tip of Africa

When Fra Mauro was working on his map, explorations down the coast had not yet even covered the top western half of Africa, the rounded bump. For a very long time, there seemed to be some kind of psychological barrier stopping expeditions from going further south to the tip. That hesitance was probably fueled by previous maps that had truncated Africa and inhabited it with monsters, combined with those that decried that the lower part of Africa as terra incognita and an empty wasteland.... It would take until 1488, long after Fra Mauro was dead, for the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias to go all the way down to the tip of Africa and swing left and around the tip.

Information Aggregator

But why was Fra Mauro so confident that Africa was its own conitnent and not connected to Asia? And why did he believe so deeply that Africa could be circumnavigated? The answers to those questions appear right on the map where he relies heavily on Portuguese explorers and their maps, which Fra Mauro alleges to have seen in person.... Then Fra Mauro dropped the other shoe, one that few had considered, "One can therefore claim without any doubt that this southern and south-western part is navigable and that the Sea of India is an ocean and not an inland sea." That simple sentence changed the Western view of the world as it "revealed" another ocean, and the idea was revolutionary.

Sources of information

Fra Mauro had never visited the places he was describig. In drawing and writing about the East, he relied heavily on Il Milione, which was dictated by the Venetian merchant Marco Polo and written down in the late 1200s or early 1300s by Rustichello da Pisa, the travels of Venetian explorer Niccolo de Conte, and the missionary Odoric of Pordernone.

Legendary tunnels

Fra Mauro also wrote a long iscription to portray two tunnels or passages used as shortcuts for Tartar caravans going to and from Cathay and tells us these tunnels are dark and one of them might have roaming lions. "It was dug entirely with stonecutter's chisel andis about twenty miles long and very dark. Thus, those inside have to shout and beat drums so that they can be heard by the other caravans coming in the opposite direction. They also do this to drive off the lions tha sometimes go into the cave."

This detailed description comes from Marco Polo, who must have seen these tunnels, maybe even passed through them 150 years earlier. One problem with this dramatic note is that there are no lions in China or Mongolia and there never have been. He might have been referring to the snow leopard, or this tale had been embellished with an idea of lions that someone gleaned from stories about India, where these lions are endemic.