Introduction
Theater of the World
On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the
back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those
brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day
nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then,
in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it’s that time
when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road
is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
-William Least Heat-Moon,
Blue Highways
He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with
the augmentation of the Indies.
-Malvolio, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
As William Least Heat-Moon revealed in his travels across America in
Blue Highways: A Journey into America, a map can be more than a
guide to find one’s route from one point to another. Through his
attraction to the scenic blue high ways he found on a road map,
Least Heat-Moon discovered an America where he could lose himself.
He also learned that a map can be a storyteller, not only about the
places documented on the map but also about the people who populate
those places.
Like Least Heat-Moon’s blue highways, the maps in the pages of
Cartographia not only tell the story but themselves become the
story. Maps, atlases, and related images serve as primary documents
on a continent-by-continent exploration of the world. As each
chapter traces the broad sweep of human history, the maps center on
individual but representative images that illustrate major themes in
the development of significant cultures and political empires. The
maps are examined not only as a record of a specific place at a
particular time but also as documents that have a story to tell,
both about how and why the maps were created and about what the maps
have to say regarding the culture in which they were created.
Cartographia begins by exploring the remnants of maps that have
survived from the ancient civilizations that surrounded the
Mediterranean Sea, setting the stage and establishing the base of
geographical knowledge that was available to Abraham Ortelius and
his sixteenth-century contemporaries as they entered a new era of
gathering and disseminating geographic knowledge. These early
geographers made not only Europe but also the other continents-the
eastern parts of Asia, the southern parts of Africa, and the newly
“discovered” Americas-part of Europeans’ geographical consciousness.
Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is one of the earliest landmarks
in the history of cartography and world geography. First published
in Latin in 1570 in Antwerp (when Shakespeare was six years old),
Ortelius’s map book was subsequently translated into six other
languages-German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, and English.
Cartographically it is a landmark because it is recognized as the
first modern atlas. This was the first time that a set of maps
contemporary to the time of publication was designed, drawn, and
engraved in a coherent style with the intention of publishing them
in a bound book. Geographically it was important because it
represents one of the first attempts to compile a composite treatise
on the geographical knowledge of the world, incorporating the new
geographical data that was becoming available to Europeans during
the sixteenth century.
But Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum also represents a significant
cultural development: the merger of two very important historical
processes during the Renaissance-the advent of the printing press
and the dawn of the European age of discoveries and exploration.
Using a technology that was not quite a hundred years old, Ortelius
employed movable type and copper-engraved plates and melded text
with a uniformly designed set of maps that brought together the
known geographic information about Europe and neighboring lands, as
well as the Europeans’ recently acquired knowledge of the Americas,
southern Africa, and southern and eastern Asia. Through this
technological development, Ortelius’s atlas captured a period of
transition and uncertainty as European culture attempted to
synthesize and reconcile the information about the discovery of
newfound lands. Geographic concepts that had been commonly accepted
during the Middle Ages, such as a “flat earth” and “three
continents,” were suddenly challenged.
This first “atlas” is also important, symbolically, for
Cartographia, and provides a conceptual framework for its story.
Both the title and the title page of Ortelius’s compendium use
textual and pictorial icons, which were well known to the European
audience, to symbolize the contents of the book. Ortelius’s atlas,
first published in 1570, was reissued in more than thirty editions
over the next forty years. The title page’s iconography was
introduced in the first edition and remained the same throughout all
the editions. Likewise, these icons highlight the theoretical basis
of Cartographia-that maps are powerful storytellers, providing
graphic documentation of human activity as it unfolded on the planet
Earth.
Ortelius selected the title Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, meaning Theater
of the World, possibly reflecting a custom in European Renaissance
cities, where the city fathers staged pageants and parades with
costumed figures representing the countries of the world. Applying
the word “theater” to his book of maps, Ortelius suggests that it
too was a microcosm representing the diverse parts of the world in a
similar fashion. The decorative elements of the title page use an
architectural framework, echoing the proscenium arch of the
theater’s stage. This massive structure is adorned with four female
figures personifying the continents-civilized Europe at the top,
ruling over the rest of the world, exotic Asia and Africa on the
supporting pillars, and the savage Americas at the base, portrayed
as cannibals. There is also a fifth incomplete figure, a truncated
bust next to the Americas, representing Magellanica (Tierra del
Fuego), or the unknown lands that were not yet explored. Such
iconography epitomized the Europeans’ worldview at that time, as
well as the contents of the atlas. While the atlas included maps of
the individual continents, the preponderance of the maps were of
European countries and regions.
Applying the image of theater to Cartographia implies that the
physical earth provides a stage for human action. It also allows the
introduction of a concept from human or cultural geography: the
cultural landscape. The action of the play’s story unfolds amid an
array of appropriate props and backdrops that enhance the setting.
The action is cumulative, building on previous actions within the
confines of the setting, until the play’s story is told and the
curtain falls. Similarly, human activity unfolds within the con
fines of a physical setting or landscape. As each new generation and
culture enters that setting, there are human modifications to it-the
addition of roads, houses, fields, towns, place names, and political
boundaries. These changes are cumulative, building on the past,
saving some elements and replacing others. These manifestations of
culture (the totality of human activity) leave an imprint on the
physical landscape. As successive peoples inhabit a particular
geographical area, they leave behind layers of their cultural
heritage. Fortunately maps become one of the primary sources for
reading through the palimpsest created by these cultural landscapes.
Ortelius’s personification of the continents implies the need for
regionalization, a major device used by modern-day geographers to
organize and generalize data. In other words, how will we divide up
the earth to talk about it in a coherent and meaningful manner?
Region, simply defined, refers to a geographic area that displays
common characteristics. Regions can be large or small depending on
the generality or specificity of the criteria defining the area.
Regions can have precisely defined boundaries, such as a state or
country designating a geographic area where inhabitants are governed
by the same laws, or may have ill-defined boundaries that fade
imperceptibly into a neighboring region. Over the years geographers
have developed innumerable regional constructs, many of which have
entered into common usage-the South, the West, the Great Plains, the
Middle East, or the Far East. Most people have a general concept of
what geographic area and what cultural traits help define these
particular regions. But on the other hand, it will be almost
impossible to get any two people to agree on the specific boundaries
or the exact geographic extent of any one of these regions.
One of the regional constructs that geographers and educators have
used most successfully over the years is the idea of “continents,”
particularly as an organizing concept when talking about the earth
at its grossest or most general scale. Continents, representing the
earth’s major landmasses, were a tried-and-true teaching device from
the age of European discoveries until the end of the nineteenth
century and well into the twentieth century.
In the twentieth century, as geographers became more interested in
the human role in shaping the face of the earth, the continental
concept of classifying geographical knowledge became less relevant
and less useful. The concept of continents, which is based on a
physical attribute, namely large, easily identified landmasses
surrounded by water, was increasingly questioned. Is Antarctica
really a continent, or is it a series of islands joined only by a
massive ice shield? Aren’t Europe and Asia actually one landmass?
Their boundary was an arbitrary convention rather than a line
following a recognizable natural feature. Then, from the 1950s to
the 1970s, as the detailed mapping of the ocean floors progressed,
the theory of plate tectonics was confirmed, providing a more
precise definition of continental plates which established the
geological basis for our supposed continental landmasses.
Is there a better way of regionalizing geographic data at a global
level? Certainly, and geographers have proposed numerous schemes,
many of which are based on single themes or topics such as climate,
vegetation, or economic activity. Another scheme, which takes into
account the totality of human activity, is cultural realms. In this
categorization the focus is on identifying large groups of people
with similar cultures, as defined by religion, language families,
economic activity, and predominant settlement patterns. In this
context, the Americas are divided into an Anglo-speaking realm
(basically north of the Rio Grande) and a Latin-speaking world to
the south. Or an Arabic-Islamic world occupies northern Africa and
southwestern Asia, while sub-Saharan Africa forms another unit. Such
a conceptualization is not without its problems, however. It was
certainly a valid categorization until the middle of the twentieth
century; but as society moves into the new millennium and the
computer age, and as the world becomes more urbanized, modernized,
and homogenized, it is less meaningful.
Despite the limitations of a continental categorization,
Cartographia uses a combination of continents and cultural realms as
its organizational device. This traditional approach to world
history and geography works because the cartographic record from the
sixteenth to the twentieth century, which serves as the anchor for
our journey through the world of maps, strongly supports it. Whereas
the first chapter focuses on the Mediterranean world before the age
of European discoveries and the Renaissance, the succeeding chapters
deal with the individual continents-Europe, Africa, Asia, and the
Americas. A fourth chapter deals with Ortelius’s implied fifth part
of the world, the lands that were primarily discovered and explored
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-Australia, Antarctica,
and the Pacific islands. However, throughout Cartographia, attention
is paid to the major cultural realms represented in those areas,
because the central point of our discussion is how maps help us read
the ever-changing story of world civilization.
Ortelius’s placement and portrayal of the continents on his title
page, giving them superior and inferior positions on its
architectural framework, suggests that there is a perspective or
bias to the “story” he is about to present. A map by definition is a
selective graphic representation, implying that the cartographer
exercises a certain amount of judgment and bias, no matter how
scientific the presentation purports to be. As in the case of
Ortelius, the examination of this judgment and bias will guide the
reader on a journey around the world through the maps presented in
Cartographia. This examination will also lead the reader to find a
beckoning, sometimes a strangeness, and always a place to lose
oneself.
Ronald E. Grim, curator, retired,
Geography and Map Division,
Library of Congress
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Cartographia
by Vincent Virga
Copyright © 2007 by Vincent Virga.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Little, Brown and Company
Copyright © 2007
Vincent Virga
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-99766-9
