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Nautical , Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and

Chet Van Duzer

Contents

Introduction 2 Conte di Ottomano Freducci and his Charts 4 Freducci and Fra Mauro 19 Freducci’s , , Add. MS. 11548 26 Transcription, Translation, and Commentary on the Legends 30 Legend 1 – Mauritania 30 Legend 2 – Mansa Musa and 32 Legend 3 – The Mountains 37 Legend 4 – The King of Nubia 38 Legend 5 – The Sultan of Babylon (Cairo) 40 Legend 6 – The 42 Legend 7 – Mount Sinai 44 Legend 8 – Turkey 45 Legend 9 – The King of the Tartars 48 Legend 10 – Russia 53 Legend 11 – The 55 Legend 12 – 56 Legend 13 – 58 Legend 14 – The Island of Bra 60 Legend 15 – Ireland 62 Conclusions 64

1 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro

Introduction

The majority of medieval and nautical charts do not have legends describing sovereigns, peoples, or geographical features.1 These legends, like painted images of cities, sea monsters, ships, and sovereigns, were superfluous for charts to be used for , and were extra-cost elements reserved for luxury charts to be owned and displayed by royalty or nobles. When descriptive legends do appear on nautical charts, they are generally quite similar from one cartographer to another, from one language to another (, Catalan, Italian), and even across the centuries: there are some legends on early sixteenth-century nautical charts which are very similar indeed to the corresponding legends on late fourteenth-century charts.

Efforts to revise, update, or replace these traditional legends are unusual and worthy of study. The so-called Genoese world of 1457 has non-traditional legends based on , , and Niccolò de’ Conti.2 Fra Mauro, who was certainly familiar with traditional nautical charts, composed new and much more extensive legends for his mappamundi of c. 1450, which together form a geographical work of encyclopaedic scope (though it is important to distinguish between the genres of mappamundi and encyclopaedia).3 The Borgiano V nautical chart in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana — about which more below — is based on a model from Fra Mauro’s workshop, and also has non-traditional legends. The creator of the so-called Columbus chart of c. 1492 compiled new legends for his chart.4 The cartographer of the Cantino

1 For general discussion of nautical charts see Tony Campbell, ‘Census of Pre-Sixteenth-Century Portolan Charts’, Imago Mundi, xxxviii (1986), pp. 67-94; Tony Campbell, ‘Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of , vol. i, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval and the Mediterranean (Chicago, 1987), pp. 371-463; Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes: la representació medieval d’una mar solcada (, 2007); and Corradino Astengo, ‘The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean’, in David Woodward (ed.), The , vol. iii, Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago, 2007), part 1, pp. 174- 262. On nautical charts up to 1440 see Philipp Billion, Graphische Zeichen auf mittelalterlichen Portolankarten – Ursprünge, Produktion und Rezeption bis 1440 (Marburg, 2011); and on Catalan charts up to 1460 see Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo en la Edad Media a través de la cartografía hispana’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2007. 2 The Genoese is in , Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Portolano 1, and is conveniently reproduced in Guglielmo Cavallo (ed.), Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi: mostra storico-cartografica (, 1992), vol. i, pp. 492-3. The legends on the map are transcribed and translated, but with errors, in Edward Luther Stevenson, Genoese World Map, 1457 (New , 1912); there is a more recent facsimile edition of the map, with a new transcription and translation of the legends by Angelo Cattaneo, in 1457 (Rome, 2008). 3 For transcription and translation of Fra Mauro’s legends see Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (Turnhout, 2006); for discussion of scholars’ assertions that Fra Mauro’s mappamundi or other medieval mappaemundi are encyclopaedias, and on the importance of keeping in mind the differences between the two genres, see Angelo Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 244-9. 4 The ‘Columbus chart’ is in , Bibliothèque nationale de , Rés. Ge AA 562, and it is accessibly reproduced in Kenneth Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries (Chicago, 1990), pp. 22 and 24-5; many of the map’s legends are transcribed and translated in Charles de la Roncière, La carte de Christophe Colomb — The Map of (Paris, 1924). The map has been reproduced in facsimile twice, as Carte nautique sur vélin de l’Atlantique et de la Méditerranée, attribuée à Christophe Colomb, 1492 (Paris, 1992); and La carta de Cristóbal Colón, Mapamundi, circa 1492 (Barcelona, 1995). The commentary volume that accompanies the latter facsimile, by José Luis Comellas, is unfortunately not very helpful. For discussion of the map see Monique Pelletier, ‘Peut-on encore affirmer que la BN possède la carte de Christophe Colomb?’, Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale, xlv (1992), pp. 22-5; and Valerie I. J. Flint, ‘Columbus, “El Romero” and the So-Called Columbus Map’, Terrae Incognitae, xxiv (1992), pp. 19-30.

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chart of c. 1502 has two legends in related to those on nautical charts, but apparently composed new legends for the more southern parts of Africa as well as for the and ;5 Martin Waldseemüller in his Carta marina of 15166 compiled a great many new legends from his reading in the latest travel literature.7 The Kunstmann IV world map, probably made by Jorge Reinel in about 1519, borrows a number of traditional legends from nautical charts, but supplements them with new legends in the New World and on the southwestern of Africa.8 Pierre Desceliers composed new legends for his world map of 1550 based on two sources: the Novus orbis regionum ac insularum ueteribus incognitarum, edited by Simon Grynaeus and Johann Huttich, and first published in 1532; and the supplementary texts in one of four editions of Ptolemy: the 1522 (Strasbourg), 1525 (Strasbourg), 1535 (Lyon), or 1541 (Vienna).9 And Casper Vopel in his world map of 1558 composed new legends based in large part on the Novus orbis regionum ac insularum ueteribus incognitarum.10

This article addresses the legends on three essentially unstudied nautical charts by Conte di Ottomanno Freducci (active 1497-1539). These legends, like those just mentioned, are substantial departures from traditional nautical chart legends, in some cases by the addition of information to traditional legends, in other cases by the replacement of traditional legends with new ones. They are of particular interest for their length, the recondite nature of some of the new information they include, and because some of the information in them came from the workshop of the famous fifteenth-century cartographer Fra Mauro. And this is the paradox of Freducci’s legends: while they demonstrate his willingness to depart from tradition, he did not write legends filled with information about new discoveries, but added details that had appeared on in the previous century. Even while he was breaking with tradition, he was intensely conservative.

5 The Cantino chart is in Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, C. G. A. 2, and is well reproduced in Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus (see n. 4), pp. 35-7; and better in Armando Cortesão and Avelino Teixeira da Mota, Portugaliae monumenta cartographica (, 1960-62), vol. i, plate 5, with discussion, transcriptions, and English translations of the map’s legends on pp. 7-13. A high-resolution digital image of the map has been published on the CD-ROM titled Antichi planisferi e portolani: Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria (Modena and Milan, 2004). 6 Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516 has been published in facsimile in Joseph Fischer and Franz Ritter von Wieser (eds.), Die älteste Karte mit dem Namen Amerika aus dem Jahre 1507 und die Carta marina aus dem Jahre 1516 des M. Waldseemüller (Ilacomilus) (Innsbruck, 1903; Amsterdam, 1968); and now in John Hessler and Chet Van Duzer, Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps (Delray Beach, FL, and Washington, DC, 2012). 7 On the new legends on Waldseemüller’s Carta marina see Chet Van Duzer, ‘The Carta marina, 1516’, in Hessler and Van Duzer, Seeing the World Anew (see n. 6), pp. 49-68; and Chet Van Duzer, ‘Waldseemüller’s World Maps of 1507 and 1516: Sources and Development of his Cartographical Thought’, The Portolan, lxxxv (2012), pp. 8-20. I plan to publish a transcription, translation, and study of the legends on the Carta marina. 8 The Kunstmann IV map was formerly in Munich, Wehrkeisbücherei VII, but has been missing since 1945; it survives in a hand-painted copy by Otto Progel of c. 1843 which is in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Ge AA 564. The legends are transcribed and translated into Portuguese by Armando Cortesão, Cartografia e cartógrafos portugueses dos séculos XV e XVI (Lisbon, 1935), vol. i, pp. 272-78, who includes a reproduction of the original map in vol. ii, plate 5. There is a good discussion of the map and a colour reproduction of Progel’s copy in Ivan Kupcík, Münchner Portolankarten: ‘Kunstmann I-XIII’ und zehn weitere Portolankarten = Munich Portolan Charts: ‘Kunstmann I-XIII’ and Ten Further Portolan Charts (Munich, 2000), pp. 41-8. 9 Desceliers’s 1550 map is in , British Library, Add. MS. 24065, and is conveniently reproduced in Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus (see n. 4), pp. 114-5; and in twelve sheets in black-and-white as Map 3 in James Ludovic Lindsay Crawford and Charles Henry Coote, Autotype Facsimiles of Three Mappemondes (Aberdeen, 1898). It is reproduced at full size and in colour, with translations, transcriptions, and analysis of the legends, in Chet Van Duzer, The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550 (London, 2015): the legends’ sources are discussed pp. 50-52, and they are transcribed and translated pp. 162-174. 10 Peter Meurer, personal communication, 2010.

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The first of these three charts is Freducci’s 1529 nautical chart in London, British Library, Add. MS. 11548 (see fig. 1).11 This chart is in the best condition of the three, its legends are the most readily legible, and it has the most complete set of legends, so it will be the focus of our study here. The second is in Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, which is very similar indeed to Add. MS. 11548, but is in poor condition and has never been carefully studied (see fig. 2). All of the legends on the Lucca chart are faded in comparison to those on Add. MS. 11548, and many have sustained additional damage. The third chart by Freducci which has long legends was sold at Christie’s on 20 May 1998 (see fig. 3);12 the legends on that chart are faded and smudged, and I have not been able to study them closely as the chart is in a private collection, but the placement, length, and initial letters of these legends indicates that they are very similar to those on Add. MS. 11548. All three charts are described in detail below.

As we shall see, some of Freducci’s revisions are closely related to legends on the Borgiano V nautical chart in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, which is regarded as a copy of a chart produced by Fra Mauro as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for his famous mappamundi.13 Other revisions contain information which does not appear in Borgiano V, but does appear in Fra Mauro’s mappamundi, and we can conclude that Freducci had access to not one but two maps or documents from Fra Mauro’s workshop. One of this study’s conclusions is that the Borgiano V chart was made not in Fra Mauro’s workshop or by Angelo Freducci (Conte di Ottomano’s son), as has been suggested previously, but rather by Conte di Ottomano Freducci. This result establishes an even closer link between Freducci and the works of Fra Mauro.

An examination of the legends on Add. MS. 11548 will shed light on the process of commissioning and creating nautical charts in Renaissance Italy, on Conte di Ottomano Freducci, about whom we know little, and on the transmission of cartographic information from Fra Mauro into the sixteenth century.

Conte di Ottomano Freducci and his Charts

Charts and signed by Conte di Ottomano Freducci range in date from 1497 to 1539, so he had a remarkably long career as a cartographer, but we have very little biographical information about him. But one aspect of his family history about which there are records bears discussion here, as it sheds light on one of the legends on Add. MS. 11548. The cartographer’s

11 The description of Add. MS. 11548 in The List of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years MCDCCCXXXVI-MDCCCXL (London, 1843), in the section for 1839, p. 3, is very brief and is incorrect with regard to the coat of arms on the map. The map is mentioned by Heinrich Winter, ‘Scotland on the Compass Charts’, Imago Mundi, v (1948), pp. 74-7, who says that the name in the signature is illegible, but Marcel Destombes in his review of this volume of Imago Mundi in Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, x-xiii (1950), pp. 1016-8, on p. 1017, says that he saw the chart before World War II, and at that time he was able to read the name as ‘Freducci’. The chart measures 89 × 60 cm. 12 On the Freducci chart sold at Christie’s see the sale catalogue Cartography: Christie’s, London, Wednesday 20 May 1998 at 11:30 am (London, 1998), pp. 16-17. The chart is signed Yhs m’ Virgo: Conte Freducci anconitano la facta in ancona, but lacks a date; it measures 82 × 51 cm. 13 On the Borgiano V nautical chart see Roberto Almagià, Monumenta cartographica vaticana (Vatican City, 1944-55), vol. i, pp. 32-40 with plates 13-15 and the colour plate following the title page; Heinrich Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro in the Vatican’, Imago Mundi, xvi (1962), pp. 17-28; Giuseppe Caraci, ‘The Italian Cartographers of the Benincasa and Freducci Families and the So-Called Borgiana Map of the ’, Imago Mundi, x (1953), pp. 23-45; and Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 36-52 and 739-53. There is brief discussion of the chart in Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (see n. 3), pp. 69-70, with a colour reproduction in plate II. The chart measures 132.5 × 75 cm.

4 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro . Conte di Ottomano Freducci’s 1529 luxury nautical chart with innovative long legends (London, British Library, Add. MS. 11548). © British Library Board. Add. MS. 11548). 1529 luxury nautical chart with innovative long legends (London, British Library, . Conte di Ottomano Freducci’s Fig. 1

5 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro . Undated chart by Freducci which is very similar to BL, Add. MS. 11548, and probably made around the same time, i.e. circa 1529 (Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720). Statale, Biblioteca 1529 (Lucca, circa i.e. time, same the around made probably and Add. MS. 11548, BL, to similar is very which by Freducci chart . Undated Fig. 2 Fig. - Biblioteca Statale di Lucca. Reproduction of the image is prohibited. Turismo Attività culturali e del Previa autorizzazione del Ministero dei Beni e delle

6 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro Christie’s Images Limited. Christie’s © . An undated chart by Freducci which is similar to BL, Add. MS. 11548 and Lucca Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720 and has similar long legends (sold at Christie’s on 20 May long legends (sold at Christie’s MS. 2720 and has similar Statale Biblioteca and Lucca Add. MS. 11548 to BL, An undated chart by Freducci which is similar . Fig. 3 1998, and now in a private collection).

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grandfather, named Lillo Ferducci (note the different spelling of the surname), was a merchant and went from Ancona to Turkey, basing himself in Gallipoli, a bit more than 200 km west of Constantinople (modern Istanbul), during the reign of Sultan Murad II (1421-1451). Lillo earned the trust and protection of the sultan, in part by ransoming Turks who had been captured and put up for sale as slaves by Christian forces. After Lillo had spent some years in Gallipoli, his family called him back to Ancona. The sultan tried to persuade him to stay; Lillo felt obliged to go, but promised the sultan to return, and to name his firstborn son Othman, after Othman or Osman (d. 1326), the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. Lillo returned to Ancona, married, and had a number of children; he named the firstborn Othman Lillo.

Othman Lillo wished to follow his father’s example and establish himself as a merchant in Gallipoli, but was unable to do so because of the poor state of the family’s finances. Yet relations between the Ferducci family and the sultanate remained close. Following the fall of Constantinople to Ottoman forces under Mehmed II (reigned 1444-46 and 1451-81) in 1453, Mehmed did a favour for the family; according to Othman Lillo, he did it because of the esteem in which he held the Ferduccis: he liberated Othman Lillo’s brother-in-law Angelo Boldoni, who had been taken prisoner, and returned the fully laden ship that the Turks had taken from him.14 In order to nurture the relationship with the sultanate and curry Mehmed II’s favour, Othman Lillo commissioned the humanist Giovanni Mario Filelfo to write an epic poem praising the Turks, and particularly Mehmed II. Fifelfo wrote this poem, titled Amyris, between 1471 and 1476; the title derives from the Arabic word ‘emir’.15

This family history explains the source of the name ‘Ottomano’ in the name Conte di Ottomano Freducci: he was Othman Lillo’s son. It also explains an interesting feature of Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the similar chart by Freducci which was sold at Christie’s. There are several earlier nautical charts that have images of the sovereign of Asia Minor or Turkey, including the of 1375,16 Gabriel Valseca’s chart of 1439,17 an anonymous chart probably made between 1439 and 1460,18 Bartolomeo Pareto’s chart of 1455,19 and the Catalan Estense mappamundi of about 1460.20 However, these three charts by Freducci are the earliest that have

14 The outline of Freducci’s family history is supplied briefly and somewhat vaguely by D. Giovannozzi, ‘Freducci, Conte’, in Alberto M. Ghisalberti (ed.), Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960-), vol. i, pp. 374-5. There is a good account of Lillo and Othman Lillo in Agostino Pertusi, ‘The Anconitan Colony in Constantinople and the Report of Its Consul, Benevento, on the Fall of the City’, in Angeliki E. Laiou-Thomadakis (ed.), Charanis Studies: Essays in Honor of Peter Charanis (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980), pp. 199-218, esp. 203-205. 15 The poem Amyris survives in one manuscript, Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS. lat. 99, and it has been published as Giovanni Mario Filelfo, Amyris, ed. Aldo Manetti (Bologna, 1978). The epistle, written by Othman Lillo Ferducci, tells some of the family history recounted here, see esp. pp. 42-3. For an earlier partial edition of and commentary on the poem see Guillaume Favre, ‘Vie de Jean-Marius Philelfe’, in Mélanges d’histoire littéraire (Geneva, 1856), vol. i, pp. 9-221, esp. 176-218. For descriptions of the contents of the poem see Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453-1517) (Nieuwkoop, 1967), pp. 148-9; Nancy Bisaha, ‘“New Barbarian” or Worthy Adversary? Humanist Constructs of the Ottoman Turks in Fifteenth-Century Italy’, in David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (eds.), Western Views of in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (New York, 1999), pp. 185-205, esp. 195; and Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 90-2. 16 The Catalan Atlas is in Paris, BnF, MS. Espagnol 30. 17 Gabriel Valseca’s chart of 1439 is in Barcelona, Museu Marítim, inv. 3236. 18 The anonymous chart in question is in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Portolano 16. 19 Bartolomeo Pareto’s chart of 1455 is in Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Cart. naut. 1. 20 The Catalan Estense map is in Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, C. G. A. 1. All of these charts except the last are illustrated on the CD that accompanies Pujades i Bataller’s Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1). A high- resolution image of the Catalan Estense mappamundi is available on the CD-ROM titled Antichi planisferi e portolani: Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria (Modena and Milan, 2004). Other reproductions of these charts will be cited when the charts are mentioned again below.

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a legend that describes the sultan in any detail (see Legend 8 below). The family’s connection with the sultanate must have served at least to some extent as a motivation for the composition of this legend; it is worth remarking that the legend casts the sultan and his realm in a positive light. The legend listing the kings of the Turks in British Library, Add. MS. 10132, mentioned above, is further evidence of this connection between the Freducci family and the sultanate.

Patrizia Licini has maintained that Conte di Ottomano Freducci was actually two cartographers, Ottomano and Conte di Ottomano, and attributes Freducci’s 1497 chart to the former, and also identifies the former with Oliverotto Freducci da Fermo, who died in 1502.21 This interpretation is forced and implausible, depending for example on reading what is clearly ‘conte’ in the signature of Freducci’s 1497 chart as ‘comes’, and on accepting that ‘Otomanno’ in the signatures on Freducci’s chart is a corruption of ‘Etemanno’, the name of a region over which Oliverotto Freducci’s family had control. This interpretation also ignores the information we do have about the Freducci family; and does not give a satisfactory answer for why Oliverotto Freducci da Fermo, if he made the map, did not simply sign his own name. In addition, the violent nobleman Oliverotto Freducci, though he may well have known the Adriatic, does not seem on the face of it a likely candidate for a chartmaker, who were sometimes masters of ships.22

Professor Licini has also maintained that an anonymous and undated nautical chart in Jesi (Biblioteca Comunale Planettiana, Sala Planettiana, no shelfmark), west-southwest of Ancona, should be attributed to the school of Freducci.23 However, the handwriting on the map is very different from that on Freducci’s signed charts, so I will be excluding this chart from consideration here.

The charts and atlases made by Conte di Ottomano Freducci have been listed several times,24 but as none of these lists is complete, we must supply a new list here. This list includes notes on studies and reproductions of the maps, and remarks on the similarities and differences among them.

21 See Patrizia Licini, ‘La cartografia nautica dei Freducci come testo, contesto ed ipertesto della Signoria di Fermo’, in Simonetta Conti (ed.), Amate sponde. Le rappresentazioni dei paesaggi costieri mediterranei. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi del Centro di Studi Storico-Geografici, Gaeta, 11-13 dicembre 2003 (Formia, 2007), pp. 245-90; and Patrizia Licini, ‘Andrea Doria da Genova, i Freducci da Fermo e una carta nautica inedita firmata Freducci’, in Ciro Robotti (ed.),Città castelli paesaggi euromediterranei. Storie rappresentazioni progetti. Atti del Sesto Colloquio Internazionale di Studi, Capua, Castello di Carlo V, 1-2 dicembre 2006 (Lecce, 2009), pp. 306-31, with an English summary on pp. 488-9. 22 Piero Falchetta, ‘Marinai, mercanti, cartografi, pittori. Ricerche sulla cartografia nautica a Venezia (sec. xiv- xv)’, Ateneo , xxxiii (1995), pp. 7-109, esp. 68. 23 See Patricia Licini, ‘L’Europa Orientale in una strana carta nautica di Jesi’, Europa Orientalis, x (1991), pp. 27-58, esp. 43-44 n. 10, and 54; and the same author’s ‘European and Ottoman Landmarks from a Portolan Chart at the Time of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’, in Ingrid Baumgärtner and Hartmut Kugler (eds.), Europa im Weltbild des Mittelalters: kartographische Konzepte (Berlin, 2008), pp. 191-218, esp. 207. Licini has also discussed this map, but without addressing the question of attribution, in ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Armenia from a Portolan Italian Chart of Iesi’, Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre, i-ii (1997-98-99), pp. 56-65. 24 Lists of Freducci’s works are supplied by Edward Luther Stevenson, Portolan Atlas (New York, 1915); Carlo Errera, ‘Carte e atlanti di Conte Ottomanno Freducci’, Rivista Geografica Italiana, ii (1895), pp. 237- 41; Giuseppe Caraci, ‘The Italian Cartographers of the Benincasa and Freducci Families and the So-Called Borgiana Map of the Vatican Library’, Imago Mundi, x (1953), pp. 23-45, at 24; Corradino Astengo, ‘Appendix 7.1. Charts of the Mediterranean in Public Collections, 1500-1700’, in David Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, vol. iii, Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago and London, 2007), part 1, pp. 238-61. Stevenson fails to include some of Freducci’s works, but his descriptions are the most detailed.

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1. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 99, Aug. 2°, nautical chart, 1497, 93 × 70 cm (see fig. 4). This chart has been reproduced twice in hand-drawn facsimiles,25 but I do not know of a previous photographic reproduction. It is a luxury nautical chart, with images of five sovereigns, long legends, many artistic images of cities with flags, the Baltic coloured blue, and an elephant and camels depicted in Africa. This chart is of particular interest here, as the presence of traditional nautical chart legends on an early map by Freducci raises the question of why the cartographer felt the need to compose new, longer legends for BL, Add. MS. 11548 and the two similar charts mentioned above.

2. Weimar, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Kt 400 - 246 E Ms, nautical chart, date almost illegible, name partly illegible, 92 × 59 cm. The chart is in a poor state of preservation, and many details are difficult to distinguish, but it is clear that it is a less luxurious chart than the one in Wolfenbüttel, with many fewer legends, images of sovereigns, and images of cities.26 Alexander von Humboldt noted that the map has an image of Sultan baixit in Turkey, whom he identified with Bayezid I, who reigned from 1389 to 1402, and partly on the basis of this identification, dated the chart between 1403 and 1424.27 But the style of the chart, particularly of the depictions of sovereigns, is clearly similar to that of Freducci’s chart of 1497, and there is no reason why Sultan baixit cannot be Bayezid II (son of Mehmed II), who ruled from 1481 to 1512: there are documents that refer to Bayezid II as Sultan baixit, using the same spelling as the Weimar chart does.28 Winter in his study of the chart notes that there is a legend describing the Baltic, but reports that it is illegible, and it is certainly illegible today.29 Stevenson gives a tentative reading of the signature as ‘Contes he... composuit ancone d no Mccccclx...,’ and the chart may be confidently attributed to Freducci and to the end of the fifteenth century; specifically, between 1481, when Bayezid II came to power, and 1499, as the part of the date that is legible indicates a date before 1500. So this chart is more or less contemporary with Freducci’s 1497 chart in Wolfenbüttel. I know of no published image of the chart.

3. Perugia, Biblioteca Augusta, MS. 2915 (1512), atlas, 1512. This atlas is discussed by Bonasera, with reproductions of the maps;30 images of the maps are also available on the internet site of the Biblioteca Augusta. Its maps have images of a few cities, but no long legends or other luxury decorations, so this was a less expensive commission.

25 Tracings of Freducci’s 1497 chart are reproduced in Manuel Francisco de Barros e Sousa de Santarém, Atlas composé de mappemondes, de portulans et de cartes hydrographiques et historiques, depuis le VIe jusqu’au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1849), republished as Helen Wallis and A. H. Sijmons (eds.), Atlas de Santarém: Facsimile of the Final Edition (Amsterdam, 1985); and in A. E. Nordenskiöld, Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing-Directions (Stockholm, 1897; New York, 1967), plate 22, listed on p. 64. There is some discussion of the coordinates of cities on the 1497 chart in Robert W. Bremner, ‘The Construction and Origins of the Portulan Charts’, Boletim da Biblioteca da Universidade de Coimbra, xxxix (1984) [1986], pp. 177-92, esp. 182-6. 26 The Klassik Stiftung Weimar has a tracing of the chart, probably made by Alexander von Humboldt, which is helpful in studying the chart; its shelfmark is Kt 400 - 247 E Ms. 27 Alexander von Humboldt, Kritische Untersuchungen über die historische Entwickelung der geographischen Kenntnisse von der Neuen Welt (Berlin, 1836-1952), vol. i, pp. 415-16. 28 See Marino Sanuto, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, ed. Federico Stefani (Venice, 1881), vol. v, cols 762-5, where there are reproduced letters written in 1503 from ‘Sultan Bajesit’ or ‘Sultan Baixit’, who is obviously Bayezid II. 29 Heinrich Winter, ‘Notes on the Weimar Portolan’, Geographical Journal, xcii (1938), pp. 150-2. Winter was reluctant to abandon von Humboldt’s early date for the chart. There is a longer (17 pp.) version of Winter’s article in German and titled ‘Die Weimarer Portulankarte (1424?)’, on file in London at the Royal Geographical Society, as Pamphlet no. Z.127.3. This longer study is valuable as Winter transcribes in it some toponyms from the chart that are now extremely difficult to read. 30 See Francesco Bonasera, La cartografia nautica anconetana: secoli XV-XVI (Pesaro, 1997), pp. 170-6.

10 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro Freducci’s earliest surviving map, his chart of 1497 (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 99, Aug. 2°). By permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek. Aug. 2°). By permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 99, Herzog earliest surviving map, his chart of 1497 (Wolfenbüttel, Freducci’s Fig. 4.

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4. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte nautiche 15, a signed but undated nautical chart, 78 × 122 cm. This chart covers a much greater geographical area than traditional nautical charts: it includes not only Western Europe and , but also much of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and northeastern South America. Casanova studied the chart in detail in the late nineteenth century and suggested that it should be dated to c. 1515, but this date is probably too early. More recent studies have focused on the map’s depiction of Florida; a good colour reproduction of the chart has been published.31 The map is not decorated with images of cities or geographical details of the hinterlands (except for the Amazon), and it has no long legends.

5. New York, Hispanic Society of America, K24, nautical chart, 1524, 65 × 38 cm.32 The chart covers the eastern Mediterranean, and has images of Venice, Damascus, Jerusalem, Mount Sinai, and Cairo, and has a legend describing Mount Sinai. It is otherwise undecorated, and has no other long legends.

6. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS. 133 A 4, atlas, 1528. Stevenson describes the atlas briefly,33 while Bonasera provides reproductions of the six maps in the atlas, but little analysis.34 The maps have numerous small images of cities, so it must have been a more expensive commission than Freducci’s 1512 atlas in Perugia.

7. London, British Library, Add. MS. 11548, nautical chart, signed and dated 1529, 89 × 60 cm. This map is the subject of the present study. As mentioned earlier, although the cartographer’s signature is now all but illegible, Marcel Destombes says that he saw the chart before World War II, and at that time he was able to read the name as ‘Freducci’.35 It is a luxury nautical chart, with images of seven sovereigns, fifteen long legends in Latin, the Baltic coloured blue, and many images of cities and artistically rendered mountains. The sovereigns are much more finely executed than those on Freducci’s 1497 chart, which indicates either a substantial artistic development by the cartographer during the intervening thirty-two years, or the use of

31 See Eugenio Casanova, La carta nautica di Conte di Ottomanno Freducci d’Ancona conservata nel R. Archivio di stato in Firenze (Florence, 1894). Bonasera has a few pages on this map in La cartografia nautica anconetana (see n. 30), pp. 177-81, but he merely summarizes Casanova. Other studies of the map include L. D. Scisco, ‘The Track of Ponce de Leon in 1513’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, xlv (1913), pp. 721-35; David O. True, ‘The Freducci Map of 1514-1515: What it Discloses of Early Florida History’, Tequesta, iv (1944), pp. 50-5; David O. True, ‘Some Early Maps Relating to Florida’, Imago Mundi, xi (1954) pp. 73-84; Jerald T. Milanich and Nara B. Milanich, ‘Revisiting the Freducci Map: A Description of Juan Ponce DeLeon’s 1513 Florida Voyage?’ The Florida Historical Quarterly, lxxiv (1996), pp. 319-28; and Douglas T. Peck, ‘The Depiction of Florida on the Early Conte Ottomano Freducci Map’, The Portolan, l (2001), pp. 24-7. The colour reproduction is in Cavallo, Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi (see n. 2), vol. ii, pp. 648-9, with some discussion on pp. 647 and 650. 32 This chart is reproduced in facsimile in Edward Luther Stevenson, Facsimiles of Portolan Charts Belonging to the Hispanic Society of America (New York, 1916), map 4. There are brief accounts of the nautical chart in Edward Luther Stevenson, Portolan Charts, Their Origin and Characteristics: With a Descriptive List of Those Belonging to the Hispanic Society of America (New York, 1911), pp. 38-9; Sandra Sider, Anita Andreasian, and Mitchell Codding, Maps, Charts, Globes: Five Centuries of Exploration: A New Edition of E. L. Stevenson’s ‘Portolan Charts’ and Catalogue of the 1992 Exhibition (New York, 1992), pp. 12-13; and Cinco séculos de exploración: Fondos cartográficos da Hispanic Society of America: exposición (La Coruña, 2005), pp. 24-5 (Spanish text and colour illustration) and p. 101 (English text). 33 See Stevenson, Portolan Atlas (see n. 24), second page of the Introduction. 34 Bonasera, La cartografia nautica anconetana (see n. 30), pp. 182-91. The atlas in The Hague was bound for Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France: see E. de la Fontaine Verwey, ‘Une reliure pour le connétable Anne de Montmorency dans la Bibliothèque Royale à La Haye’, in Studia bibliographica in honorem Herman de la Fontaine Verwey (Amsterdam, 1966), pp. 375-89 and plates 1-2. 35 See Marcel Destombes’s review of volume v of Imago Mundi in Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, x-xiii (1950), pp. 1016-18, at 1017.

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a specialist to paint the sovereigns on one or both of these charts. The legends are longer than those on most other nautical charts. While many cities on Freducci’s 1497 chart have flags, on this chart only and Venice do, so this was one option for artistic decoration which the client did not choose.

8. Private collection, sold at Christie’s (London), on 20 May 1998, signed but undated nautical chart, 51 × 82 cm. The chart has water damage and pieces of parchment missing along the northern margin and also in Turkey, which resulted in the loss of most of the legend describing Turkey. This is an elaborately decorated nautical chart which is very similar to Add. MS. 11548, but somewhat less luxurious: it has images of five sovereigns instead of seven, and the images are smaller; also it has eleven long legends instead of fifteen, and includes fewer images of cities (it does not have images of London and Rome, for example, which are depicted on Add. MS. 11548). It also covers a smaller geographical area: it does not include the Baltic or any of Norway in the north; shows less of the Atlantic, and thus fewer islands; and shows less of Africa south of the . The legends it omits with respect to Add. MS. 11548 are those relating to the British Isles (Legends 12 to 15 below). To judge from the reproduction of the chart in the auction catalogue,36 the legends on this map are of the same length as those on Add. MS. 11548, and to judge from the initial letters of the legends, which in some cases are legible, seem to be very similar to the corresponding legends on Add. MS. 11548. But even if the chart were available for study, the legends on the Christie’s chart have faded, and those on Add. MS. 11548 are much more legible.

9. Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, nautical chart, date illegible, signature partly illegible, 56 × 48 cm (see fig. 2). I know of no earlier published image of the chart. Uzielli and Amat said that the name Freducci was visible on the chart, but that the cartographer’s first name was not;37 Errera said that the name Freducci was no longer legible, and suggested that the map be excluded from Conte di Ottomano Freducci’s works.38 In fact the letters ‘ducci’ are still clearly visible in the signature, and Errera’s conclusion is simply mistaken: the chart is all but a twin of BL, Add. MS. 11548, and can be assigned to Freducci with total confidence, and also to the same period, that is, c. 1529. It is a luxury chart that has images of the same sovereigns as Add. MS. 11548, most of the same images of cities (including the pyramids in Egypt, which the chart sold at Christie’s lacks), and fourteen of the fifteen long legends that appear on Add. MS. 11548, omitting only the legend about England (Legend 13 below). The damage to the chart has rendered some of the legends totally illegible, and others partly illegible, but where the legends are legible, they are all but identical with those on Add. MS. 11548. One noteworthy difference between the Lucca chart and Add. MS. 11548 and the chart sold at Christie’s is that the Lucca chart has two compass roses in northern Africa. Compass roses are also absent from Freducci’s 1497 chart, his chart in Weimar, and his 1524 chart in the Hispanic Society, so the compass roses on the Lucca chart are a somewhat unusual feature for Freducci. On the one hand, it is unfortunate that this important map in Lucca has languished unstudied so long, but on the other, it is a windfall that the very close similarity of the Lucca chart to Add. MS. 11548 allows us to use the latter as a key to understand the former, to know what many of the otherwise illegible texts on the Lucca chart say, and thus to realize that the chart forms part of Fra Mauro’s cartographic heritage.

36 On the Freducci chart sold at Christie’s see the sale catalogue Cartography: Christie’s, London, Wednesday 20 May 1998 at 11:30 am (London, 1998), pp. 16-17. The chart is signed Yhs m’ Virgo: Conte Freducci anconitano la facta in ancona, but lacks a date. 37 Gustavo Uzielli and Pietro Amat di S. Filippo, Studi biografici e bibliografici sulla storia della geografia in Italia, vol. ii, Mappamondi, carte nautiche, portolani (Rome, 1882), pp. 101-2, no. 129, and p. 280, no. 475. 38 See Errera, ‘Carte e atlanti di Conte Ottomanno Freducci’ (see n. 24), p. 240.

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10. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Borgiano V, unsigned and undated nautical chart, 132.5 × 73 cm (see fig. 5). The chart has been illustrated by Almagià and Winter, in both cases principally in black and white, and in colour by Cattaneo.39 This large luxury chart is famous for its long legends, some of which are closely related to those on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi of c. 1450. Almagià argued that Borgiano V was made in Fra Mauro’s workshop to the creation of Fra Mauro’s great mappamundi.40 Caraci in his study of the map concludes that it is by Freducci, but is referring to Angelo Freducci (active 1547-1556), the son of Conte di Ottomano Freducci, rather than to the father, for he discusses an atlas produced by Angelo in which landscapes are rendered in a distinctive style very similar to that used on Borgiano V, and there are close similarities of toponyms as well.41 The atlas in question is Mantua, Biblioteca Comunale MS. 636, dated 1556.42 Caraci also concludes that Borgiano V was copied from a model which was in part the work of Benincasa and which was made after Fra Mauro’s mappamundi. Falchetta, on the other hand, concludes that Borgiano V is based on a map made by Fra Mauro as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the mappamundi, and that it does not matter whether Borgiano V was copied from that fifteenth-century model in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.43 The details of the connections between Borgiano V and Fra Mauro are complicated, and I will address them below, but Borgiano V is actually the work of Conte di Ottomano Freducci. The handwriting of the legends on Borgiano V is an exact match for that of Conte di Ottomano Freducci on Add. MS. 11548, down to the lightly-written extra descender going off to the lower left of the ‘g’s, and the dark mark the ends of the upper tails of ampersands. Also, in the legends on both maps there are a number of random extra capitalizations of words — that is, a number of words in the legends are capitalized that would not ordinarily be capitalized, and the recurrence of this curious feature corroborates Freducci’s responsibility for Borgiano V.44 Moreover, Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s all confirm Conte di Ottomano Freducci’s interest in long legends, and some of the legends on these three charts, like those on Borgiano V, are closely related to those on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi.45 Thus

39 See Almagià, Monumenta cartographica vaticana (see n. 13), vol. i, pp. 32-40, with plates 13-15 and the colour plate following the title page; and Heinrich Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart in the Vatican’, Imago Mundi, xvi (1962), pp. 17-28. Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (see n. 3), illustrates the map in colour in his plate II. 40 See Almagià, Monumenta cartographica vaticana (see n. 13), vol. i, pp. 32-40. 41 Caraci’s attribution of Borgiano V to Angelo Freducci is accepted by Piero Falchetta, ‘Marinai, mercanti, cartografi, pittori. Ricerche sulla cartografia nautica a Venezia (sec. xiv-xv)’, Ateneo Veneto, xxxiii (1995), pp. 7-109, at 55-8, n. 84. 42 The Mantua atlas by Angelo Freducci is reproduced in black and white in Caraci, ‘The Italian Cartographers of the Benincasa and Freducci Families’ (see n. 24). The atlas’s connection with Fra Mauro’s work is briefly discussed by Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (see n. 3), pp. 69-70, who reproduces two maps from the atlas in colour in his plate XI. Angelo made two other atlases in this same style: Warsaw, Polish National Library, BN ZZK 0.2401, dated 1554; and Greenwich, National Maritime Museum, MS. 58-078/P36, dated 1555. One map from the Warsaw atlas is reproduced and the atlas is briefly described in Halina Tchórzewska- Kabata, More Precious than Gold: Treasures of the Polish National Library (Warsaw, 2000), pp. 116-17; another map is reproduced in Ewelina Bykuc, Lucyna Szaniawska, and Maria Wozniak (eds.), Atlas Antonia Milla: Geographicae tabvlae in charta pergamena, z 1583 roku (Warsaw, 2008), p. 28. There are images of all of the maps in the Greenwich atlas on the internet site of the National Maritime Museum. 43 Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 36-52. 44 For quotations of legends from Borgiano V where the unnecessary capital letters may be observed see the commentary on Legends 2 and 12-15 below, or the transcriptions of all of the legends by Winter in ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), and by Falchetta in Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 739-53. 45 The legends on Add. MS. 11548 which are similar to those on Borgiano V are the legends on Mussamellus (Mansa Musa), the Atlas Mountains, Scotland, England, the island Bra, and Ireland (these are Legends 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, and 15 below, respectively).

14 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro Detail of the Middle East on a luxury nautical chart made by Conte di Ottomano Freducci based on a chart by Fra Mauro (Vatican City, City, by Fra Mauro (Vatican chart on a based Freducci Ottomano di by Conte made chart nautical luxury on a East Middle of the Detail Fig. 5. Fig. Vaticana. Apostolica V). By permission of the Biblioteca Borgiano Vaticana, Apostolica Biblioteca

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Borgiano V must be added to the list of Conte di Ottomano Freducci’s works; its connections with Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s suggest that it was made in the same period, that is, c. 1529. It should also be remarked that the handwriting on Borgiano V is not similar to Angelo Freducci’s on the three atlases cited above, and that while those three atlases are connected by visual style and toponyms with Borgiano V, they do not have long legends.

11. Chicago, Newberry Library, Ayer MS. map 8, atlas, 1533. This atlas has not been carefully studied, and I know of only one published image of one of its maps.46 It has no long legends. It does not have the many small images of cities of Freducci’s 1528 atlas in The Hague, so it must have been a less expensive commission.

12. New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, *49 + 1536, atlas, 1536. Like some other of Freducci’s works, such as his 1524 nautical chart at the Hispanic Society of America (K24), this atlas seems to reflect an interest in the eastern Mediterranean: the only cities illustrated are Venice, Damascus, Jerusalem, Mount Sinai, and Cairo, and there is a legend describing Mount Sinai (fig. 6). The city images are larger and more artistically elaborate, but fewer in number, than those in his 1528 atlas in The Hague. I know of no bibliography on or reproductions of this atlas.

13. New York, Hispanic Society of America, K14, atlas, 1537. The atlas is reproduced in facsimile by Stevenson.47 It has many very small images of cities, and one long legend on its first map, a traditional nautical chart legend that describes the coast of West Africa.48 On Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and also his chart sold at Christie’s, Freducci replaced this traditional nautical chart with a new one about Mauritania (see Legend 1 below), so it is interesting that he reverted to the traditional legend in his 1537 atlas. This tends to suggest that Freducci thought about these charts as being in a different category.

14. London, British Library, Add. MS. 22348, atlas, 1538. The maps have numerous small images of cities, but there are no long legends. Bonasera (La Cartografia, p. 196) notes that it is very similar to Freducci’s 1528 atlas in The Hague. I know of no published reproductions of the maps in this atlas.

15. London, British Library, Add. MS. 10132, atlas, 1538. This atlas is very similar to the preceding, including the small images of cities, but it also has (which Add. MS. 22348 does not) an appealing depiction of Mount Sinai with a legend describing the mountain’s history (see Legend 7 below), and also a legend listing the rulers of the Turks. Compare the descriptions of Freducci’s 1524 nautical chart in New York and 1536 atlas in New Haven above. I know of no published reproductions of the maps in this atlas.

46 For some discussion of the atlas in the Newberry see Cartographic Treasures of the Newberry Library (Chicago, 2001), no. 46, pp. 54 (brief text) and 92 (small colour reproduction of the map of the central Mediterranean). 47 See Stevenson, Portolan Atlas (see n. 24). 48 Stevenson transcribes and translates this legend on the first page of the Introduction to Portolan Atlas. On this atlas see also Edward Luther Stevenson, Portolan Charts, Their Origin and Characteristics: With a Descriptive List of Those Belonging to the Hispanic Society of America (New York, 1911), pp. 39-41; and Sandra Sider, Anita Andreasian, and Mitchell Codding, Maps, Charts, Globes: Five Centuries of Exploration: A New Edition of E. L. Stevenson’s ‘Portolan Charts’ and Catalogue of the 1992 Exhibition (New York, 1992), pp. 11 (colour illustration of map of Western Europe) and 12.

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Map of the Eastern Mediterranean from an atlas of nautical charts by Conte di Ottomano Freducci (New Haven, Yale University, University, Yale charts by Conte di Ottomano Freducci (New Haven, from an atlas of nautical Map of the Eastern Mediterranean Fig. 6. University. Yale *49 + 1536, Map 1). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,

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16. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Borgiano XIII, atlas, 1538. This atlas is described and one of its maps is reproduced by Almagià;49 it has no long legends. Almagià remarks that Freducci ‘perpetua una tradizione cartografica anteriore’; this same statement applies to Borgiano V, which is a copy of a chart made by Fra Mauro, but a more nuanced statement would be needed in connection with Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s. In these works Freducci uses information from Fra Mauro, a cartographer who lived about eighty years earlier, but the legends seem to be the result of reworking by Freducci.

17. Bologna, Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Vetrine n. 1, atlas, 1539. Bonasera discusses this atlas and reproduces its maps;50 it has images of Venice, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo (compare the description of Freducci’s 1536 atlas in New Haven above), so this was a more expensive commission, but there are no long legends. Again Freducci seems to show an interest in the eastern Mediterranean.

There is one other anonymous and undated chart that has been tentatively attributed to Freducci, and which is indeed similar to some of Freducci’s works, but ultimately I think that the chart should be excluded from the list of Freducci’s works. The chart is in Turin, Biblioteca Reale, MS. O.XVI.5; it measures 97.5 × 56.5 cm, and is a relatively undecorated chart. Corradino Astengo has suggested that it is the work either of Grazioso or Andrea Benincasa or else of Freducci;51 and Tony Campbell has noted similarities between the cartographer’s handwriting and depiction of the Red Sea and the corresponding elements of Freducci’s 1497 chart in Wolfenbüttel.52 It should also be noted that the images of Genoa and Venice on the Turin chart are very similar to those on Freducci’s 1497 chart and on his Weimar chart. Yet there are differences between the Turin chart and Freducci’s works that render an attribution to Freducci problematic.

First, while the Turin chart’s images of Genoa and Venice are similar to those on Freducci’s 1497 chart and his chart in Weimar, the flags over Genoa and Venice are quite different from all of those in Freducci’s other works, both early and late, namely on Freducci’s 1497 chart, his chart in Weimar, his 1524 chart at the Hispanic Society, Add. MS. 11548, the chart sold at Christie’s, and his 1536 atlas at Yale: in Freducci’s works the ends of the flags over these cities have tassels, but on the Turin chart, the ends of the flags are dagged (cut in a crenelated pattern). In addition, the style and coloration of the flag over Genoa is different on the Turin chart than in Freducci’s works. Further, there are differences between the depictions of the islands in the Lacus fortunatus (in Ireland) on the Turin chart and on Freducci’s maps: Freducci always mixes some dots in with the variously shaped colourful islands (see for example his 1497 chart in Wolfenbüttel, his 1512 atlas in Perugia, and Add. MS. 11548), but there are no such dots on the Turin chart. Also, the legend about the lake on the Turin chart is different from Freducci’s, and the text of this legend is quite consistent across Freducci’s various works.53

49 Almagià, Monumenta cartographica vaticana (see n. 13), vol. i, pp. 60-1 with plate 31, which illustrates map 2, from Spain to Britain and the Atlantic. Bonasera, La cartografia nautica anconetana (see n. 25), in his pages on the atlas (pp. 193-6) merely quotes Almagià. 50 See Bonasera, La cartografia nautica anconetana (see n. 25), pp. 197-208. 51 Corradino Astengo, ‘La produzione cartografica dei Benincasa e una carta nautica anonima conservata nella Biblioteca Reale di Torino’, Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, xi (1990), pp. 223-30. There is a good reproduction of the chart in Maria Letizia Sebastiani and Clara Vitulo (eds.), Terrae cognitae: la cartografia nelle collezioni sabaude: 22 novembre 2007-31 gennaio 2008, Torino, Biblioteca Reale (Milan, 2007). 52 Tony Campbell, ‘Census of Pre-Sixteenth-Century Portolan Charts: Additional (‘E’) Entries’, available at http://www.maphistory.info/portolanextra.html [accessed 2 August 2017]. 53 The legend about the Lacus fortunatus on Freducci’s 1497 chart reads lacus fortunatus ubi sunt insule que dicuntur insule sancte beate n° ccclxvii; his legend is very similar in his 1537 atlas in the Hispanic Society, which Stevenson transcribes in the introduction to his Portolan Atlas (see n. 24), and on Add. MS. 11548 and Lucca Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720. The legend on the Turin chart reads Lacus fortunatus sancti ubi sunt multe insule que dicuntur insule sancte beate cccLxvii. The addition of multe before insule is not surprising, but I have not seen sancti following fortunatus in any other nautical chart.

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Further, the Turin chart has five compass roses, while Freducci’s 1497 chart, his Weimar chart, his 1524 chart in the Hispanic Society, Borgiano V, BL, Add. MS. 11548, and the chart sold at Christie’s have none. It is true that Freducci’s chart in the Archivio di Stato in Florence has one , and his chart in Lucca has two, but nevertheless, the five compass roses on the Turin chart set it apart from Freducci’s works. Finally, on the Turin chart all of the coastlines are coloured, and this not true of any map that is certainly from Freducci’s hand. Thus while the Turin chart seems to show the influence of Freducci, there are too many differences between it and Freducci’s signed or securely attributed works for us to be able to assign it to him.

Freducci and Fra Mauro

In addition to Fra Mauro’s great mappamundi, other maps and geographical writings of his survived after his death. Matteo Gherardo, of the Monastery of San Michele where Fra Mauro worked, recorded that on 20 October 1459, he deposited copies of Fra Mauro’s mappamundi, drawings (disegni, probably maps), and writings in a locked chest which he entrusted to Don Andrea, prior of the Monastery of St John at Giudecca, retaining the key to the chest himself; five years later he recovered the chest and its contents.54 According to Mittarelli’s late eighteenth-century catalogue of the library of Monastery of San Michele, some of these works found their way into that library, including the library’s Codex 607, ‘Planisferio con le sue annotazioni’ (A map with its annotations); Codex 626, ‘Memorie per servire ad una dissertazione da farsi sopra il di lui antico Planisferio’ (Notes for a dissertation on his earlier world map); and Codex 1112, ‘Adnotationes quas fecit suo Planispherio’ (Notations that he made regarding his world map); Mittarelli considered publishing the contents of the last mentioned manuscript, as the descriptive texts were more detailed than those on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi.55 One way or another, some of the works of Fra Mauro that had been stored in a chest by Matteo Gherardo were available to sixteenth-century cartographers working in Italy. It is possible that they were consulted in the library at San Michele, but it seems more likely that some of Fra Mauro’s works were sold.

As noted above, it has been amply demonstrated that there is a close relationship between the legends on the Borgiano V nautical chart in the Vatican, which was made by Conte di Ottomano Freducci, and Fra Mauro’s mappamundi of c. 1450. The Borgiano V chart has been associated with the Freducci name in the past because an atlas by Conte di Ottomano Freducci’s son Angelo,56 namely Mantua, Biblioteca Comunale MS. 636, dated 1556, is stylistically very similar

54 See , Il mappamondo di Fra Mauro (Venice, 1806), p. 81; and Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (see n. 3), p. 37. 55 See Giovanni Benedetto Mittarelli, Bibliotheca codicum manuscriptorum Monasterii s. Michaelis Venetiarum prope Murianum (Venice, 1779), col. 757; there is some discussion of these documents in Antonio Ratti, ‘A Lost Map of Fra Mauro Found in a Sixteenth Century Copy’, Imago Mundi, xl (1988), pp. 77-85, on pp. 83-4. 56 Other works by Angelo Freducci, including the two atlases mentioned in the next sentence: (1) Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS. 7877 (II 292), a largely undecorated nautical chart dated 1547, described in J. Van Den Gheyn, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (Brussels, 1904-), vol. xi, pp. 243-4, and illustrated in Wouter Bracke, Formatting Europe: Mapping a Continent: tien eeuwen kaarten van Europa uit de collecties van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, 17 novembre 2007 - 8 février 2008 (Brussels, 2007), p. 44; (2) Warsaw, Polish National Library, BN ZZK 0.2401, an atlas dated 1554, for citations of reproductions of maps from this atlas see n. 42; (3) Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS. 4866, a luxury nautical chart dated 1556, well illustrated in Angela Adriana Cavarra (ed.), La Biblioteca casanatense (Rome, 1993), pp. 96-7; and (4) Greenwich, National Maritime Museum, MS. G.230:1.16, a luxury nautical chart attributed to Angelo which depicts mountains and rivers in a way reminiscent of Borgiano V; an image of the map is available on the internet site of the National Maritime Museum, and it is illustrated in colour in Edward Grierson, King of Two Worlds, Philip II of Spain (New York, 1974), p. 18

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to Borgiano V, and its toponyms are also very closely related to those on Borgiano V. In fact Angelo also made two other atlases in the same style: Warsaw, Polish National Library, BN ZZK 0.2401, dated 1554 (fig. 7); and Greenwich, National Maritime Museum, MS. 58-078/P36, dated 1555. While on most luxury nautical charts, the cartographers show interest only in specific inland geographical features, and include images of just a few important rivers, mountains, or cities, on the maps in Angelo’s atlases most of the landscape is rendered artistically in a style that presents topographical features as if from an oblique or bird’s-eye view, while the coastlines are still rendered as if from directly overhead.

The new information revealed above, namely that Conte di Ottomano Freducci was the cartographer of Borgiano V, and that he used information from legends in Borgiano V in Add. MS. 11548, the chart sold at Christie’s, and Lucca MS. 2720, allows us to recreate the transmission of Fra Mauro’s cartographic data. The sequence of events seems to have been as follows. Fra Mauro, probably in the 1440s, created, as a dress-rehearsal for his mappamundi of c. 1450, a nautical chart with innovative long legends and a distinctive artistic style for rendering landscape. Conte di Ottomano Freducci came into possession of this chart. In 1529 he made use of information in the legends on Fra Mauro’s map in his revision of traditional nautical chart legends for Add. MS. 11548, and it was no doubt around this same time that he made the very similar charts Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, and the chart that was sold at Christie’s. Also around this time he made a copy of Fra Mauro’s chart, and this copy is Borgiano V. Conte di Ottomano Freducci passed Fra Mauro’s chart on to his son Angelo Freducci, or else Angelo had access to Borgiano V, and in 1554-56, Angelo made three atlases using the Fra Mauro style of chorographic depiction. As far as his surviving maps indicate, Angelo did not make use of the long legends on Fra Mauro’s map (or on Borgiano V) in his own maps. Four of Freducci’s charts — BL, Add. MS. 11548; Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720; the chart sold at Christie’s; and BAV Borgiano V — use information from Fra Mauro’s workshop. This is almost a quarter of Freducci’s surviving works (four out of seventeen), and fully half of his surviving nautical charts (as opposed to atlases); in fact all of his surviving later charts use data from Fra Mauro’s workshop. It is true that luxury charts are more likely to survive than less decorated charts, and it is probable that Freducci also produced less decorated charts in his later years, but clearly data from Fra Mauro became a very important part of Freducci’s business as a cartographer in the latter part of his career.

Remarkably, there is another case of the reuse of Fra Mauro’s cartographic data in the sixteenth century. In 1541 the cartographer Giorgio Calapoda, also known as Giorgio Sideri, who was born in Crete and worked in Venice from 1537 to 1565, made a nautical chart in a style very different from that of his other charts (see fig. 8). The chart covers a smaller geographical area than Borgiano V, 57 but the chorographic style of the chart is exactly the same as that of Borgiano V, and Calapoda’s chart has long legends which, although they have not been transcribed (the chart is now in private hands, and thus is not available for study), seem to be very similar to

57 The scales of Calapoda’s map and Borgiano V are almost exactly the same, but Calapoda’s map covers a much smaller West-to-East swath of the world: Borgiano V covers from 30° West to 80° East, while Calapoda’s map covers from 15° West to 42° East. Partly as a result, Borgiano V is much larger than Calapoda’s map, 132.5 × 73 cm versus 83.5 × 61 cm.

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Fig. 7. Map of the region around the Caspian, from an atlas by Angelo Freducci (Warsaw, Polish National Library, BN ZZK 0.2401, Map 5; atlas dated 1554). Courtesy of the Polish National Library.

21 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro Christie’s Images Limited. Christie’s © Giorgio Calapoda’s nautical chart of 1541, sold in Milan in 1984 and currently in a private collection. The map was copied from a map by from a map was copied map The collection. in a private in 1984 and currently of 1541, sold in Milan chart nautical Calapoda’s Giorgio Fig. 8. Fig. Fra Mauro.

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those on Borgiano V.58 Calapoda’s chart bears the coat of arms of the Zeno family of Venice, and the monogram ‘F.Z.,’ and was made for Francesco Zeno, the commander of a fleet of galleys. Ratti in his study of Calapoda’s chart concludes that Calapoda copied it not from Borgiano V, but rather from a map by Fra Mauro.59 He does not specify his evidence for this conclusion, but it would seem to be the fact that for example on Calapoda’s chart (as Ratti mentions), a column north of Cairo is labeled Cholona idololatria (idolatry column), while this label is missing on Borgiano V.60 Thus the conclusion that Calapoda was copying from a chart by Fra Mauro rather than from Borgiano V seems justified.

Ratti also maintains that the Fra Mauro map that Calapoda used as a model for his 1541 chart was not the same as Freducci’s model for Borgiano V.61 To me the matter is not so clear. The details of Calapoda’s chart are very similar indeed to those of Borgiano V, and it is at least possible that Calapoda bought the Fra Mauro chart that Freducci had used as a model for Borgiano V, and employed its data to create a smaller chart covering the geographical area typically covered by nautical charts — and that Angelo Freducci made his three atlases on the basis of Borgiano V. This scenario is perhaps rendered more likely by a connection that Tony Campbell has noted between the Freduccis and Calapoda, namely that they all followed the Benincasa (Grazioso and Andrea) style of nautical charts.62 This suggests the possibility of influence of Conte di Ottomano Freducci on Calapoda, and thus contact between them — but there does not seem to be any way to know for certain whether the models that Calapoda and Freducci used for their charts were the same or different.

In any case, the creation of these copies of Fra Mauro’s charts in the sixteenth century, by Conte di Ottomano Freducci, Giorgio Calapoda, and Angelo Freducci, is a powerful testament to the appeal and perceived value of Fra Mauro’s cartographic work up to a hundred years after he was active — despite the fact that a geographical revolution had taken place in the meantime, with

58 For discussion of Calapoda’s map with two black-and-white illustrations of it see Ratti, ‘A Lost Map of Fra Mauro’ (see n. 55), pp. 77-85: the chart was sold in the Salamon-Agustoni-Agrati Gallery in Milan on 24 October 1984, to a Milan bookseller and apparently then to a French client; it is described in the auction catalogue, Libri antichi e manoscritti: asta n. 19: esposizione dal 13 al 23 ottobre 1984 ... asta mercoledì 24 ottobre (Milan, 1984), no. 98, and there is a colour image of the map on the front cover of the catalogue. It was subsequently sold at Christie’s on 25 April 1990, and is described in Valuable Travel, Books and Atlases: Which Will be Sold at Christie’s Great Rooms on Wednesday 25 April 1990 (London, 1990), pp. 58-9. For a list of Calapoda’s works (here listed as Sideri) see Corradino Astengo, ‘Appendix 7.1. Charts of the Mediterranean in Public Collections, 1500-1700’, in David Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, vol. iii, Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago and London, 2007), part 1, pp. 238- 61; for further discussion of Calapoda and his works see Antonio Ratti and Paola Ratti-Vidoli, ‘Giorgio Sideri Callapodà, cartografo cretese del Cinquecento’, Thesaurismata, xxi (1991), pp. 347-57; and Giórgos Tolias, The Greek Portolan Charts: 15th-17th Centuries: A Contribution to the Mediterranean Cartography of the Modern Period (Athens, 1999), pp. 86-120 (illustrations) and 179-90 text, esp. pp. 90-1 (colour illustration of Calapoda’s 1541 map) and 180 (brief description with one-sentence mention of the Fra Mauro connection). The connection between this chart by Calapoda and Fra Mauro is briefly discussed by Cattaneo,Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (see n. 3), p. 69. 59 See Ratti, ‘A Lost Map of Fra Mauro’ (see n. 55), p. 83 for his conclusion that Calapoda was copying from a chart by Fra Mauro rather than from Borgiano V. 60 Ratti, ‘A Lost Map of Fra Mauro’ (see n. 55), p. 82. 61 See Ratti, ‘A Lost Map of Fra Mauro’ (see n. 55), p. 84 for his suggestion that Calapoda was using a different chart by Fra Mauro than that used as a model for Borgiano V. 62 See http://www.maphistory.info/ToponymyTableExplanREVISED.html [accessed 2 August 2017], in the explanatory note to Column K.

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the discovery of the New World and the opening of the route around the southern tip of Africa to India and Asia.63 Conte di Ottomano Freducci, Giorgio Calapoda, and Angelo Freducci all made charts in a more conventional style, but all three evidently had clients who wanted charts in the Fra Mauro chorographic style, and in some cases, with long legends. We do not know whether the cartographers advertised the charts as being derived from the work of the cosmographus incomparabilis Fra Mauro, but the demand certainly existed.

Another important piece of evidence regarding the map by Fra Mauro that served as a model for Borgiano V is supplied by an Italian map of the Balkan Peninsula that follows an illustrated Tractatus de re militari et machinis bellicis, evidently by Paolo Santini, who borrowed heavily from Mariano Taccola, in a fifteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.64 The map is in BnF MS. lat. 7239, ff. 113v-114r (fig. 9), and follows the Tractatus (which ends on f. 110) after some blank folios, and precedes a collection of Italian works that begins on f. 125 (ff. 114v-124 are blank). The area depicted on the map ranges from the Transylvanian in the north to the Sea of Marmora in the south, and includes parts of Hungary and Transylvania, as well as Wallachia, , Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Thrace.65 Banfi has dated the map to October of 1443, and has also noted correspondences between the toponyms on the map and those on Borgiano V.66 Moreover, the MS. lat. 7239 map renders landscape in the same style as Borgiano V and Angelo Freducci in his three atlases cited above, that is, it shows the landscape from an oblique or bird’s-eye view. Banfi, while acknowledging the similarity of style between the map in MS. lat. 7239 and Borgiano V, professes to see a difference, claiming that the map in MS. lat. 7239 is of a purely chorographic character, whereas Borgiano V and Angelo Freducci’s two atlases render landscapes chorographically within a framework of coastlines based on nautical chart data. This distinction does not seem valid to me, as the MS. lat. 7239 map covers a much smaller area than Borgiano V and the individual maps in Angelo Freducci’s atlases, and it is for that reason that nautical-chart-based outlines of land are not salient in the map.

63 This interest in copies of Fra Mauro’s maps about a century after they were originally made is particularly remarkable as a document from 1463 in the Torre do Tombo indicates that the Portuguese crown was somewhat dissatisfied with its copy of Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made shortly after the original. On this document, which is Lisbon, Torre do Tombo, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V., Liv. I, fl. 2, see Armando Cortesão, Cartografia e cartógrafos portugueses dos séculos XV eXVI (Lisbon, 1935), p. 122; Angelo Cattaneo suggests that the Crown was dissatisfied with the map because its data about West Africa had been rendered obsolete by the reports of , who returned to Lisbon in 1455: see Angelo Cattaneo, ‘Fra Mauro Cosmographus incomparabilis and his Mappamundi: Documents, Sources, and Protocols for Mapping’, in Diogo Ramada Curto, Angelo Cattaneo, and André Ferrand Almeida (eds.), La cartografia europea tra primo Rinascimento e fine dell’Illuminismo: Atti del convegno internazionale, The Making of European Cartography (Firenze, BNCF-EUI, 13-15 dicembre 2001) (Florence, 2003), pp. 19-48, at 29. Piero Falchetta, ‘Il mappamondo (scomparso?) di Fra Mauro’, Studi Veneziani, lxii (2011), pp. 113-32, argues that Fra Mauro’s original map was what was sent to , and that Alfonso V rejected it for its inaccuracies, and it is that same map which is on display today at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. 64 For basic information about Taccola and his works see for example Lon R. Shelby, ‘Mariano Taccola and His Books on Engines and Machines’, Technology and Culture, xvi (1975), pp. 466-75; and Lawrence Fane, ‘The Invented World of Mariano Taccola: Revisiting a Once-Famous Artist-Engineer of 15th-Century Italy’, Leonardo, xxxvi (2003), pp. 135-43. 65 For discussion of the map see Franz Babinger, ‘An Italian Map of the Balkans, Presumably Owned by Mehmed II, the Conqueror (1452-53)’, Imago Mundi, viii (1951), pp. 8-15; Florio Banfi, ‘Two Italian Maps of the Balkan Peninsula’, Imago Mundi, xi (1954), pp. 17-34; and I. Dumitriu-Snagov, Tratat despre arta militara si masinile de razboi = Tractatus de re militari et machinis bellicis: codicele latin de la Paris, 7239: text latin (facsimile si transcriere) (Bucharest, 1979), pp. 66-105, a very detailed discussion of the map, with a colour reproduction of the map between pp. 616 and 617. 66 On the date of the map see Banfi, ‘Two Italian Maps’ (see n. 65), p. 22; on the corresponding toponyms on the MS. lat. 7239 and Borgiano V maps see his p. 20.

24 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro An Italian map of the Balkan Peninsula made in 1443, probably by a cartographer connected with Fra Mauro’s workshop (Paris, Bibliothèque with Fra Mauro’s connected in 1443, probably by a cartographer made Peninsula map of the Balkan An Italian Fig. 9. Fig. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 113v-114r). nationale de France, MS. lat. 7239, ff.

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The stylistic similarity between the map in MS. lat. 7239 and Borgiano V confirms that the style which we ascribe to the map used as a model for Borgiano V was being used by an Italian cartographer at precisely the time that the model for Borgiano V is thought to have been made: the map in MS. lat. 7239 was made in 1443, and the map on which Borgiano V is based was made by Fra Mauro in the 1440s. Banfi’s suggestion that the map in MS. lat. 7239 was made by Paolo Santini67 cannot be accepted: even a cursory comparison of the handwriting on the map with that of Santini’s Tractatus in the same manuscript shows that they are different. On stylistic grounds it seems very likely that the maker of the map in MS. lat. 7239 was connected with Fra Mauro’s workshop, which produced the map that Freducci copied as Borgiano V. However, it should also be noted that the handwriting on the map in MS. lat. 7239 does not match that on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi, so the map in MS. lat. 7239 was not produced by Fra Mauro himself.

There is a final and important point to be made regarding the connections between Freducci and Fra Mauro: Freducci had access to a second source of geographical information from Fra Mauro’s workshop, that is, another source besides the map that he used as a model for Borgiano V. In the commentary on Legends 2, 3, and 10 below, I remark on cases (Freducci’s use of the toponym gulphus auri, mention of manna in north central Africa, and description of the division of Russia into Red, Black, and White, respectively) in which Freducci cites information that appears on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi but not on Borgiano V. So Freducci had some other document from Fra Mauro’s workshop. We cannot be sure of the nature of this document: certainly it contained legends, but it may have been a map or a transcription of the legends from a map.

Freducci’s Chart, British Library, Add. MS. 11548

The chart by Freducci under consideration here raises interesting questions about its commissioning. Freducci made three similar charts, Add. MS. 11548, Lucca Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s, but it seems most likely that it was a commission that drove him to devise new legends for one of these charts — for why else would he go to the trouble of composing new legends? — and that he then made copies of that chart to amortize the time he had invested in making the new legends. As Add. MS. 11548 has the fullest set of the new legends, and as it has the coat of arms of the client, while the other two charts do not, Add. MS. 11548 seems the most likely candidate for that original commissioned chart.

Add. MS. 11548 is a luxury chart with costly artistic decoration,68 but the client’s request for legends that differed from those of traditional charts must have made this a particularly expensive and unusual commission. Freducci’s chart of 1497 shows that the cartographer was able to employ standard nautical chart legends if a client wanted them, and it is difficult to imagine why Freducci went to the trouble of using new legends unless the client insisted on them. At the beginning of this article I listed other maps that revise or replace traditional nautical chart legends, but Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s are the only charts I know of where the cartographer was demonstrably familiar with standard nautical chart legends and chose to modify them extensively. The additions that Freducci made to the standard nautical chart legends contain curious and recondite pieces of information (see the commentaries on the legends below), so it seems that considerable effort went into the revision.

67 See Banfi, ‘Two Italian Maps’ (see n. 65), pp. 23-4. 68 As n.d above, the client did not choose all of the decorative options available: Freducci’s chart of 1497 shows that he was perfectly capable of decorating most cities with flags, but on Add. MS. 11548 there are flags only on Genoa and Venice. On flags as part of the paid-for artistic decorations on manuscript maps specified in the commission see R. A. Skelton, ‘A Contract for World Maps at Barcelona, 1399-1400’, Imago Mundi, xxii (1968), pp. 107-13, esp. 108.

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It is worth trying to see what we can determine about the nature of the commission by examining the legends on Add. MS. 11548. It should be noted that the legends are in Latin. When Freducci made Add. MS. 11548, he had access to the long legends in Italian on the map that he used as a source in making Borgiano V (which source map was from Fra Mauro’s workshop). If the client had merely wanted long legends, Freducci could have copied the long legends in Italian from the predecessor to Borgiano V, so the client must have specified legends in Latin. Freducci’s Latin is less than perfect, for in Legend 5 about the Sultan of Babylon (Cairo) he writes taltim in place of saltim (he repeats this error in the same legend on the Lucca chart), and in Legend 9 about the Tartars he writes Visserit in place of jusserit, and one wonders whether he had help in composing the new legends in Latin.

The legends on Add. MS. 11548 that are essentially new, rather than being revised or expanded versions of traditional nautical chart legends, are those on Mauritania (Legend 1 below), Turkey (Legend 8), Russia (Legend 10), Scotland (Legend 12), and England (Legend 13).69 These legends do not have any obvious distinguishing characteristics in terms of their subjects; they describe the history, inhabitants, and sovereigns of the lands in question, as traditional nautical chart legends do. The legend on Mauritania (Legend 1) replaces a traditional nautical chart legend (which occupies this part of other charts) that describes the of West Africa and the depth of the waters, while the legend on Turkey (Legend 8) replaces a traditional nautical chart legend that describes the source of the name ‘Asia’ and the geographical limits of the continent. Thus the new legends show a greater interest in ethnography and politics than the legends they replace, which were geographical in nature. The addition of legends on Scotland and England suggests an interest in Britain. There is perhaps some confirmation of this latter interest on the part of the client for Add. MS. 11548 in the absence of legends on Scotland, England, Ireland, and the island of Bra on the chart sold at Christie’s, but the matter is not clear, as these legends may be absent simply because the chart sold at Christie’s was made on a smaller piece of parchment.

The client’s interest in ethnography and politics is confirmed by some of the material Freducci added to standard nautical chart legends on Add. MS. 11548. For example, in the legend about the Sultan of Babylon (Cairo) (Legend 5), he adds information about the succession of Mamluk sultans, and in the legend on the Baltic (Legend 11) he adds information about fishermen building huts on the winter ice and fishing through holes in it, and also describes the trade that passes across the sea. Indeed, it seems that the client had an interest in trade, for the new legend about Russia (Legend 10) and the material added to the legend about the King of Nubia (Legend 4) and the Sultan of Babylon (Legend 5) also contain significant data on trade.

Thus we can conclude that the client for Add. MS. 11548 was well educated, wealthy, and interested enough in the nations of the extended Mediterranean world and their ethnography and trade to pay handsomely for the creation of new, more detailed legends describing those countries. The fact that the client did not ask Freducci to include the New World (which his chart in Florence, Archivio di Stato, carte nautiche 15, shows that Freducci could do) indicates a client with chiefly Old World interests.

Add. MS. 11548 has a coat of arms, and thus we can identify the client who commissioned it from Freducci. The British Library’s very brief catalogue description of the map says that it was ‘drawn in 1529 for Cardinal Giulio Feltri della Rovere’.70 This is incorrect: first, Giulio Feltri della Rovere was born in 1533, four years after the map was made; second, the coat of arms on

69 The legends on Scotland and England are not entirely new, as they are adapted from the legends on Borgiano V. 70 See The List of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years MCDCCCXXXVI-MDCCCXL (London, 1843), in the section for 1839, p. 3.

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the map has only one element, namely a tree, in common with that of Giulio.71 The colours of the coat of arms on Add. MS. 11548 are faded, and the lower part of the design has sustained some damage, but it may be described thus: ‘Or, a tree with a cock sable on the dexter; a chief or, charged with an eagle displayed sable’; that is, in the lower part of the coat of arms there is a tree with a black cock on the left, and in the upper portion there is a black eagle with its wings spread. The best match for this coat of arms is that of Niccolò Galletti of the noble Galletti family of Pisa. Life in Pisa at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century was difficult, as Florence was plotting and fighting to recapture the city, laying siege to it three times between 1499 and 1505. So in the early years of the sixteenth century Niccolò immigrated to Sicily in search of better fortune. He was granted citizenship of Messina and Palermo, and was senator of Palermo in the years 1521-22, 1533-34, 1537-38, and 1551-53.72

I know of no published or manuscript account of Niccolò’s personality, education, or interests, but what little we know of him indicates that he is the sort of man who would commission a luxury nautical chart: he was a powerful member of a noble family, and had moved from one port city (Pisa) to another (Palermo), so he was certainly familiar with the sea. Neither of these cities is close to Ancona, where Freducci worked, but no doubt both the cartographer and the client travelled on occasion.

Lucca MS. 2720 and the chart sold at Christie’s both lack a coat of arms, so unfortunately we do not have the opportunity to learn about the clients who commissioned them. The coat of arms was no doubt an extra-cost feature, like most other artistic decorations of nautical charts.

One question regarding the legends on Add. MS. 11548 that should be addressed is the degree to which we can be certain that the legends were compiled for these two maps, and not copied from an earlier chart. One possibility that bears mentioning, but which I think can be quickly dismissed, is that Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s are close copies of a lost chart by Fra Mauro, much as Borgiano V is. However, Fra Mauro’s mappamundi does not have images of sovereigns, and neither (evidently) did the model of Borgiano V, so it seems that these images were not part of Fra Mauro’s artistic repertoire, and hence it seems very unlikely that Freducci in making his these two charts was closely copying a chart by Fra Mauro.

There are other facts that tend to confirm that the legends on Add. MS. 11548 were composed for that chart, rather than having been copied from another chart. First, the legends on Add. MS. 11548 make use of material from the chart made by Fra Mauro that Freducci used as a model for Borgiano V. The handwriting of Borgiano V shows that Conte di Ottomano Freducci made that chart, so he had access to material from Fra Mauro’s workshop, but we know of no other earlier cartographer who had such access, so it is reasonable to conclude that Freducci himself used this material in compiling the legends for Add. MS. 11548. Further, as demonstrated above,

71 It is worth remarking that the della Rovere family did own maps: see Tiziana Biganti and Giulia Semenza, L’eredita dei della Rovere: inventari dei beni in Casteldurante (1631) (Urbino, 2005), p. 260, no. 1224; p. 378, no. 2432; p. 381, nos. 2490 and 2493; and p. 510, no. 4434. 72 For the Galletti coat of arms and some family history see Vincenzo Spreti, Enciclopedia storico-nobiliare italiana (Milan, 1928-1932), vol. iii, pp. 331-3; Spreti takes his information about the family from Antonio Mango di Casalgerardo, Nobiliario di Sicilia (Palermo, 1912-15; Bologna, 1970). On the family’s history also see Filadelfo Mugnos, Teatro genologico delle famiglie nobili titolate feudatarie ed antiche nobili del fidelissimo Regno di Sicilia: viuenti ed estinte (Palermo, 1647-1670; Bologna, 1978), vol. i, pp. 369-71, with an image of the coat of arms on p. 369, and information about Nicolò on p. 371; and Paolo Galletti, Riccordo storico-genealogico sulla famiglia Galletti (Florence, 1877), pp. 15-16. Two manuscripts from the 1950s in the Biblioteca Comunale of Palermo contain some basic information about Niccolò Galletti and his family: Mario Pluchinotta’s Genealogia della nobiltà siciliana, MS. 2 Qq E 166-167, pp. 732-3; and the same author’s Lessico delle famiglie nobili siciliane, MS. 2 Qq E 182 n. 1-4, n. 2, pp. 134-5.

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the Freducci family had close ties with the Ottoman sultanate. It would make sense that a cartographer whose family had ties to the sultanate would be the first to compose a legend about the Ottoman sultan and empire (see Legend 8 below), and the fact that this legend casts the sultan and his realm in an entirely positive light makes it even more likely that the author had ties to the sultanate. For while a few Renaissance humanists had positive views of the Turks, and others saw them in neutral, pragmatic terms as trading partners, the general attitude toward the Turks in Renaissance Europe was overwhelmingly negative.73 It is instructive to contrast Freducci’s legend about Turkey with the largely negative text about Turkey that accompanies the Tabula moderna Asiae minoris in the 1522 (Strasbourg), 1525 (Strasbourg), 1535 (Lyon), and 1541 (Vienna) editions of Ptolemy’s .74

In addition, the source of part of the legend on Mauritania (Legend 1) was only translated into Latin twenty years before Freducci made Add. MS. 11548. It is possible the information in the legend came from the workshop of Fra Mauro, for Fra Mauro could access works in Greek,75 and Freducci had a source of information from Fra Mauro’s workshop in addition to the model for Borgiano V. But the information does not seem to be something that would have been of great interest to Fra Mauro, and thus this part of the legend probably comes from the 1509 Latin translation of the work in question, which reduces the likelihood that Freducci copied the legend from an earlier map, as there were only twenty years between the translation of the work and Freducci’s creation of Add. MS. 11548. The legend about Mauritania on Freducci’s map states of the inhabitants that ‘They were never under Roman law both because the area they live in is mountainous and difficult and also because they were not worth much respect.’ This is a startling assertion, for although not all of the circumstances under which Rome annexed Mauritania are recorded, and the Roman occupation of Mauritania was fraught with difficulties, the region most certainly was conquered by Rome in the first century after Christ, and it

73 For discussion of the attitudes of Renaissance humanists towards the Turks see Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453-1517) (Nieuwkoop, 1967); Kate Fleet, ‘Italian Perceptions of the Turks in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, v (1995), pp. 159-72; Nancy Bisaha, ‘“New Barbarian” or Worthy Adversary? Humanist Constructs of the Ottoman Turks in Fifteenth-Century Italy’, in David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (eds.), Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (New York, 1999), pp. 185- 205; Amanda Wunder, ‘Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of the Turk in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Early Modern History, vii (2003), pp. 89-119; and Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia, 2004). For discussion of the Turkish menace reflected in early sixteenth-century German hymns see Sydney H. Moore, ‘The Turkish Menace in the Sixteenth Century’, Modern Language Review, xl (1945), pp. 30-6; and in German pamphlets see John W. Bohnstedt, The Infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as Seen by German Pamphleteers of the Reformation Era (Philadelphia, 1968) 74 These editions of Ptolemy’s Geography use maps made by Laurent Fries which were based on maps in Waldseemüller’s 1513 edition of Ptolemy. For descriptions of these editions of Ptolemy see Wilberforce Eames, A List of Editions of Ptolemy’s Geography 1475-1730 (New York, 1886), pp. 15-17, 17-18, 18-19, and 20-21. More recent discussions of these editions are available in Carlos Sanz, La Geographia de Ptolomeo, ampliada con los primeros mapas impresos de América, desde 1507; estudio bibliográfico y crítico, con el catálogo de las ediciones aparecidas desde 1475 a 1883, comentado e ilustrado (Madrid, 1959), pp. 150-5, 156-64, 169-79, and 187-8. 75 Fra Mauro cites Strabo before the first Latin translation of that author was completed. Fra Mauro’smappamundi is dated to c. 1450, and the first Latin translation of Strabo, that of Guarino da Verona, was made between 1453 and 1458. For discussion of Guarino’s translation see E. B. Fryde, ‘The Historical Interests of Guarino of Verona and his Translations of Strabo’s Geography,’ in his Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London, 1983), pp. 55-82. For the legend in which Fra Mauro cites Strabo see Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 444-7, no. *1380.

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is simply false to say that the Mauri were ‘never under Roman law’.76 Moreover, while some modern authors have concluded (as the sentence of the legend just quoted suggests) that the mountainous terrain of Mauritania was one of the factors that rendered the Roman occupation difficult,77 no classical or medieval author that I know of makes such a statement with regard to the classical period, and this corroborates the problematic nature of this sentence of the legend.

It seems likely that the sentence is intended to refer not to the classical period, though that is what one would naturally first think of when reading the words ‘Roman law’, but rather to the sixth-century Vandalic War, in which the forces of the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian the Great fought to re-establish control of North Africa. In this case the conquest of Mauritania was incomplete, and the historian Procopius (c. 500 - c. 565) in his account of the war explicitly refers to the difficulties presented by the mountainous terrain in conquering the native peoples.78 A Latin translation of Procopius’s account of the Vandalic War was first published in 1509,79 and thus it seems most likely that the legend about Mauritania on Add. MS. 11548 was composed after 1509. This terminus post quem tends to confirm that it was Freducci himself who was responsible for revising and expanding the legends for Add. MS. 11548.

Transcription, Translation, and Commentary on the Legends

The legends are transcribed beginning in northwest Africa, and proceeding counterclockwise: to the east through Northern Africa to the Red Sea, then to the north, through the Middle East into Asia, then west through Asia into Europe, ending with the British Isles.

Legend 1 – Mauritania

Hic rex mauritanie est fortissimus & crudelis estque dominus dominu et prexertim diuitiarum: nam eius homines sunt et bellcosi et aurum paruipendunt et argentum hiy [i.e. hii] nunquam passi sunt Romanas leges tum quia loca incolunt montuosa & dificilia tum quia digni erant paucha exstimatione sic[ ] homines sunt feri et bestiales et in ea uius [i.e. huius] rengni [sic] parte populi umana carne uescuntur.80

76 On the Roman conquest of Mauritania see Duncan Fishwick, ‘The Annexation of Mauretania’, Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte, xx (1971), pp. 467-87; Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto, ‘La conquista romana de la Mauritania’, Studi Magrebini, xx (1988), pp. 1-43; and Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto, ‘El ejército romano de ocupación en Mauritania Tingitana en el siglo I’, Hispania antiqua, xx (1996), pp. 253-72. On the difficulties of the Roman occupation see Marlene C. Sigman, ‘The Role of Indigenous Tribes in the Roman Occupation of Mauritania Tingitana’, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1976; Marlene C. Sigman, ‘The Romans and the Indigenous Tribes of Mauritania Tingitana’, Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte, xxvi (1977), pp. 415-39; Chiara Melani, ‘Roma e le tribù della Mauritania Cesariense nel III secolo d.C.: una difficile convivenza’, Athenaeum, lxxxii (1994), pp. 153-76; and Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto, ‘Tumultos y resistencia indígena en Mauretania Tingitana (siglo II)’, Gerión, xx (2002), pp. 451-85. 77 See Sigman’s dissertation cited in the previous n., and also her article ‘The Romans and the Indigenous Tribes’, p. 415; Brent D. Shaw, ‘Autonomy and Tribute: Mountain and Plain in Mauretania Tingitana’, Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, xli-xlii (1986), pp. 66-89, esp. 77. 78 See Procopius, The Vandalic War, Book II, chapter 4 (in his History of the Wars, Book IV), in Procopius, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing (London and New York, 1916), vol. ii, pp. 240-5; and also The Vandalic War, Book II, chapter 12, which is vol. ii, pp. 304-7 in the same edition. For general discussion of Byzantine (= Eastern Roman) activities in Africa see Charles Diehl, L’Afrique byzantine: histoire de la domination byzantine en Afrique (533-709) (Paris, 1896); and Averil Cameron, ‘Vandal and Byzantine North Africa’, in Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors A.D. 425-600, The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. xiv (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 552-69. 79 A Latin translation of Procopius’s Vandalic War by Raphael Volaterranus, i.e. Raffaele da Volterra, is included in Procopius De Bello persico (Rome, 1509). The original Greek text was not published until 1607.

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Translation:

This is the king of Mauritania who is very strong and cruel, who is lord lords and particularly of riches, for his men are and warlike and think little of gold and silver. They were never under Roman law both because the area they live in is mountainous and difficult and also because they were not worth much respect. The men are wild and beastlike and in this part of the realm the people eat human flesh.

Commentary

This legend on Add. MS. 11548 is damaged and a few words are illegible. The legend replaces a traditional nautical chart legend that first appears on the c. 1380 nautical chart of Guillem Soler,81 which describes the coasts of West Africa, says that the local people are black, and that the sea is shallow. This legend was repeated on nautical charts for more than 150 years; a relatively error-free version of it appears on Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476 (Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, MS. lat. 81, map 1):82

In hac regione sunt plage arenose et deserte valde magne et ideo terra istam [sic] scilicet maritima est et pro maiori parte inhabitata, nisi hominibus qui sunt nigri et semper vadunt nudi qui dicunt quod quot miliaria tenditis in mare tot passus habebetis de fundo.83

In this region there are sandy shores and large deserts, and therefore the sea coast is for the most part uninhabited, except by people who are black and always go naked, who say that as many miles as you go out to sea, so many paces deep the water will be.

Freducci has a similar legend on his 1497 nautical chart in Wolfenbüttel, so he was familiar with this traditional legend before he decided to replace it on Add. MS. 11548, the chart sold

80 The corresponding legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720 is almost totally illegible. 81 Soler’s c. 1380 nautical chart is in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Ge B 1131, and it is reproduced in Gabriel Marcel, Choix de cartes et de mappemondes des XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1896); and in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), on the accompanying CD, number C14. 82 For discussion of Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476 see Etienne Clouzot, ‘La carte marine d’Andrea Benincasa (1476)’, Le Globe, lxxxii (1943), pp. 129-37. There are good images of the maps of that atlas in the short commentary volume by Arthur Dürst that accompanies the facsimile of Benincasa’s 1508 chart, Seekarte des Andrea Benincasa: (Borgiano VIII) 1508 (Zurich, 1984). For general discussion of the maps by the Benincasas see Marina Emiliani, ‘Le carte nautiche dei Benincasa, cartografi anconetani’, Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, lxxiii (1936), pp. 485-510. 83 The fifteenth-century Portuguese Gomes Eanes de Zurara (c. 1410-1474) pointed outthat the indication of shallow water on the coast of Africa in related nautical chart legends was incorrect, an interesting case of correction of a traditional nautical chart legend. See Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Chronique de Guinée, ed. and trans. Léon Bourdon (Dakar, 1960), chapter 76, p. 214: ‘On se trompait encore sur la profondeur de la mer, car on indiquait sur les cartes que les côtes étaient des plages si basses qu’à une lieue des terres il n’y avait pas plus qu’une brasse d’eau. Or on trouva tout le contraire, car les navires eurent et ont encore assez de profondeur pour naviguer, si l’on excepte les bas-fonds et les sèches de certains bancs, comme vous le verrez maintenant sur les cartes nautiques que l’Infant a fait faire’. For discussion of indications of depths on early nautical charts see Marcel Destombes, ‘Les plus anciens sondages portes sur les cartes nautiques aux XVIe et XVIIe siecles: contribution a l’histoire de l’oceanographie’, Bulletin de l’Institut Océanographique Fondation Albert Ier Prince de Monaco, Numéro Spécial ii (1969), pp. 199-222; reprinted in Marcel Destombes, Marcel Destombes, 1905-1983: contributions sélectionnées à l’histoire de la cartographie et des instruments scientifiques = Marcel Destombes, 1905-1983: Selected Contributions to the History of Cartography and Scientific Instruments, ed. Günter Schilder, Peter van der Krogt and Steven de Clercq (Utrecht and Paris, 1987), pp. 265-88.

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at Christie’s, and Lucca MS. 2720. As mentioned earlier, he reverted to the traditional legend in his 1537 atlas at the Hispanic Society in New York, which tends to confirm that he regarded Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s as belonging to a distinct category. Freducci’s legend on Add. MS. 11548, the chart sold at Christie’s, and Lucca MS. 2720 is new, and his illustration of the king of Mauritania is the first on any nautical chart. He depicts the king holding a sceptre in one hand and a shield with a prominent boss in the other, and wearing a distinctive crown and a cape but no other clothes; his skin is dark brown (see fig. 10). The image on Lucca MS. 2720 is damaged, and it is not possible to determine what the king is wearing, but his sceptre, crown, and shield are the same that we see on Add. MS. 11548. As noted above, the part of the legend which says that the Mauritanians were never conquered because of their mountainous terrain probably comes from Procopius in his description of the Vandalic War; Procopius was first published in a Latin translation in 1509, so it seems likely that legend was composed after that time. I have not found any source for the assertion that Mauritanians eat human flesh. It is tempting to think that this represents information about cannibals elsewhere in West Africa that Freducci simply gathered into the legend on Mauritania, but in fact very few sources mention cannibalism in West Africa.84 So perhaps the statement about cannibals is a generic way of asserting the barbarity of the local people.

Legend 2 – Mansa Musa and Guinea

Rex iste dictus mussamellus dominatur prouintie ghinee et est non minus prudens et sapiens quam sit potens Abet secum Mattematicos excellentes hominesque liberalibus artis preditos: et possidet copias Texauri maximas quum sit uicinus Ramo nili qui dicitur gulphus auri ex hoc affertur magna copia balucarum siue Tibri et hac est transitus Regni sui et hec loca abundam omnibus que sunt super terram et prexertim dactilis & manna ceterarumque aberi possunt optima sed tantum sale carent.85

Translation

This king Mansa Musa rules the province of Guinea and is no less prudent and knowledgeable than powerful. He has with him excellent mathematicians and men versed in the liberal arts, and he has great riches, as he is near the branch of the Nile which is called the Gulf of Gold. From this is brought a great quantity of gold dust or tibr, and this is a passage through his kingdom, and these regions abound in all the things that there are above the ground, particularly in dates and manna, and the best of all other things that can be had — they only lack salt.

Commentary

This legend is a substantial expansion of a traditional nautical chart legend using material that comes from Fra Mauro’s workshop. A legend about Mansa Musa, who ruled from 1312

84 Only two early Renaissance works come to mind that mention cannibals in West Africa. The first is Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, trans. and ed. George H. T. Kimble (London, 1937), with mentions of cannibals on pp. 97, 129-30, and 132. Pereira wrote his work between 1505 and 1508, but it was not published until 1892, so it is not a likely source for Freducci. The second work is Raffaele Maffei’s Commentariorum urbanorum (Rome, 1506): in the section titled ‘Loca nuper reperta’ at the end of Book 12, on f. 138v in this edition, Maffei mentions that the local people ate some cooked human heads. In the more easily accessible Lyon edition of 1552 published by Sébastien Gryphius the passage is in col. 364. The passage is briefly discussed by W. G. L. Randles, L’Ancien royaume du Congo des origines à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris and The Hague, 1968), p. 95. 85 The corresponding legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, is severely faded and the latter part of it is illegible, but the parts that are legible show that the legend is essentially identical with that on Add. MS. 11548.

32 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro Detail of the king of Mauritania, Mansa Musa, and the king of Nubia on Freducci’s chart at the British Library (Add. MS. 11548). © British Library Board. chart at the British Library (Add. MS. 11548). Detail of the king Mauritania, Mansa Musa, and Nubia on Freducci’s Fig. 10.

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to 1337,86 and who was famous for his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324,87 first appears on the Catalan Atlas of 1375,88 and was repeated on nautical charts into the early sixteenth century with little variation. A typical example of this legend appears on Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476 (Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, MS. lat. 81, map 3):

Iste dominus vocatur Rex musamelli dominus prouintie Giuneue et iste est ditior et nobilior omnium istarum partium propter magnam habundantiam Auri quo habbundant in sua terra et est de progenie de ham.

This sovereign is called King Mansa Musa and he rules the province of Guinea, and he is richer and nobler than all others in these regions because of the great abundance of gold which abounds in his land, and he is of the progeny of Ham.

Freducci’s legend is much longer, and he has added details about Mansa Musa’s advisors, the source of his gold, other products of his realm (dates and manna), and the lack of salt. The legend about this region on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi of c. 1450 says that the blacks here have lips so thick that they would putrefy unless salt is applied to them, and that they trade their gold for salt using a system of barter in which the other party leaves a quantity of salt at a designated spot, and they leave what they believe to be a corresponding quantity of gold.89 When they come back the next day, if the gold is gone, the salt is theirs; if not, they add gold until an exchange is made.90 This is the so-called silent trade.91 So the legend on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi involves the salt that Freducci mentions, but the legend on Borgiano V is closer to Freducci’s, particularly as it contains the word tibro, derived from the Arabic word tibr (gold dust) that Freducci uses, which does not appear on any other fifteenth- or sixteenth-century map with which I am familiar:92

86 For discussion of Mansa Musa see Nawal Morcos Bell, ‘The Age of Mansa Mūsa in Mali: Problems in Succession and Chronology’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, v (1972), pp. 221-34; and John Sutton, ‘The African Lords of the Intercontinental Gold Trade Before the Black Death: Al-Hasan bin Sulaiman of Kilwa and Mansa Musa of Mali’, The Antiquaries Journal, lxxvii (1997), pp. 221-42. 87 For an account of Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca see Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (New York, 1980), pp. 208-15; and Warren C. Schultz, ‘Mansa Mūsā’s Gold in Mamluk Cairo: A Reappraisal of a World Civilizations Anecdote’, in Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh A. Quinn (eds.), History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden, 2006), pp. 428-47. 88 The Catalan Atlas is Paris, BnF, MS. Espagnol 30, and has been reproduced in facsimile several times; for example in Mapamundi del año 1375 de Cresques Abraham y Jafuda Cresques (Barcelona: Ebrisa, 1983), and in this edition the legend in question is transcribed and translated into Spanish on p. 45. The map is also reproduced in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), on the accompanying CD, number C16. For discussion of Mansa Musa on the Catalan Atlas and other charts see Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 559-62. 89 The problem with the putrefying lips, the cure with salt, and the trade of gold and salt are mentioned by Alvise Cadamosto in his account of his travels on the Atlantic coast of Africa in 1455-56, first published in the Paesi nouamente retrouati et Nouo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato (Vicenza, 1507), chapter 11 on the exchange of gold and salt, and chapter 12 on the putrefying lips and curing them with salt. This collection of travel narratives was translated into Latin the next year as Itinerariu[m] Portugalle[n]siu[m] e Lusitania in India[m] ([Milan], 1508), and the passages appear in the same chapters, specifically on ff. 9r-9v and 10v, respectively. For an English translation see The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century, trans. G. R. Crone (London, 1937), pp. 22-3 and 24-5, respectively. 90 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 388-9, *1054. 91 On the silent trade see P. J. H. Grierson, The Silent Trade, a Contribution to the Early History of Human Intercourse (Edinburgh, 1903), pp. 41-68; E. W. Bovill, ‘The Silent Trade of Wangara’, Journal of the Royal African Society, xxix (1929), pp. 27-38; and P. F. de Moraes Farias, ‘Silent Trade: Myth and Historical Evidence’, History in Africa, i (1974), pp. 9-24. 92 The text and translation of the legend are from Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), p. 741; also see Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), p. 27, legend 33.

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Qui fra terra sonno una generazione de negri li quali hanno li labri grandissimi per modo tale che li bisogna portarvici suso del sal aciò che non se li putrefaccia et questi sono quelli che baratano tibro de horo per sale et loro consueto è de venir a un certo tempo de l’anno a un loco deputado e qui metteno a l’incontro del sale tanto tibro d’oro quanto che li pare e poi se parteno e torna l’altro dì et se trova tolto l’oro elora tolli el sale et se l’oro et questo fanno tante volte che Riman contenti et mai non si vedono né parlano Insieme ho rare volte.

In these lands there is a population of blacks that have lips so thick that they have to put salt on them to stop them putrefying. These barter gold dust for salt, and it is their habit to go at a certain time of the year to a pre-established place and there they put as much gold for the salt as seems fair to them. Then they go away; and come back the next day to see if the gold has been taken, and then they take the salt. But if the gold has been moved but not taken, then they add some more. And they go on like this until [everyone] is satisfied; and they never see or speak [to their trading partners] except on some very rare occasions.

As far as Freducci’s other additions to the traditional nautical chart legend about Mansa Musa, the presence of dates in this region is mentioned in legends on some earlier nautical charts, including an anonymous late fourteenth-century chart in Paris (BnF, MS. Rés. Ge AA 751), that of Mecia de Viladestes of 1413 (BnF, MS. Rés. Ge AA 566), an anonymous mid fifteenth- century chart in Florence (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Portolano 16), and the Catalan Estense mappamundi of c. 1460 (Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, C. G. A. 1).93 The idea that a branch of the Nile in West Africa produced great quantities of gold appears on a number of nautical charts, including Giovanni da Carignano’s of c. 1327,94 Mecia de Viladestes’s of 1413,95 Gabriel Valseca’s of 1439,96 and Fra Mauro’s mappamundi.97 Indeed, on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi it is called colfo daloro, the Gulf of Gold,98 and Freducci gives it the same name in

93 The legends that relate to dates on these charts are transcribed by Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 562-3. The legend on the Catalan Estense mappamundi is transcribed in the commentary volume that accompanies the facsimile, Ernesto Milano and Annalisa Batini, Mapamundi Catalan Estense, escuela cartografica mallorquina (Barcelona, 1996), p. 191. 94 Carignano’s chart was destroyed in 1943, but a large black-and-white photographic print of it is preserved as Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte nautiche 2, and it is reproduced in Theobald Fischer, Raccolta di mappamondi e carte nautiche del XIII al XVI secolo (Venice, 1881); Youssouf Kamal, Monumenta Cartographica Africae et Aegypti (Leiden, 1926-53), vol. iv, fasc. 1, f. 1138; and in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1) on the accompanying CD, number C6. The legend relating to the river of gold reads iste fluuius exit de Nilo, in quo multum aurum repperitur, i.e. ‘This river flows from the Nile, in which much gold is found’: see Theobald Fischer, Sammlung mittelalterlicher Welt- und Seekarten italienischen Ursprungs und aus italienischen Bibliotheken und Archiven (Venice, 1886), p. 141. 95 Mecia de Viladestes’s chart of 1413 is in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Ge AA 566, and is reproduced in Gabriel Marcel, Choix de cartes et de mappemondes des XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1896); Michel Mollat and Monique de la Roncière, Sea Charts of the Early Explorers: 13th to 17th Century, trans. L. le R. Dethan (New York, 1984), chart 12; and in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), pp. 202-3 and on the accompanying CD, number C30. 96 Valseca’s 1439 chart, which is in Barcelona, Museu Marítim de Barcelona, MMB 3236, is reproduced in Cavallo, Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi (see n. 2), vol. i, p. 435, and in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), pp. 264-5 and on the accompanying CD, number C40; and has been published in facsimile as Gabriel de Valseca, Carta náutica (Barcelona, 2008), with a volume of commentary by Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, La carta de de 1439 (Barcelona, 2009). 97 For discussion of the river of gold see E. G. R. Taylor, ‘Pactolus: River of Gold’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, xliv (1928), pp. 129-144; and Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 378-8. 98 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 282-3, no. *483

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Latin (gulphus auri). In fact Fra Mauro’s mappamundi is the only other source I know that uses this name — in particular, the name does not appear on Borgiano V.99 This is a very important piece of information, as it demonstrates that Freducci had access to more than one source of data from Fra Mauro’s workshop, i.e. more than just the map that served as a model for Borgiano V.

There is some evidence to support Freducci’s statement that Mansa Musa ‘has with him excellent mathematicians and men versed in the liberal arts’: for example, when he returned from his pilgrimage to Mecca, Mansa Musa brought back with him to Mali the Andalusian scholar Abū Isḥāq Ibrahim al-Sāḥilī, who, though thought to be a poet, is also said to have done some work as an architect in Mali, though the extent of his work in this latter area is disputed. But it is not clear how Freducci got access to this information, as the sources that mention Mansa Musa’s support of scholars are in Arabic;100 one possible source for this information is the second document from Fra Mauro’s workshop (besides the map that served as a model for Borgiano V) that we know Freducci possessed. On Add. MS. 11548 Mansa Musa is depicted playing a violin, which is a surprising and unprecedented image (see fig. 10).101 He is first depicted on ’s chart of 1339;102 on the Catalan Atlas of 1375 he is quite appropriately shown holding up and looking at a golden circle which is probably intended to represent a gold nugget; the image on Mecia de Viladestes’s chart of 1413 is very similar. The images of this sovereign on other charts — Gabriel Valseca’s chart of 1439, Bartolomeo Pareto’s chart of 1455,103 the Catalan Estense mappamundi of c. 1460,104 Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476 (Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, MS. lat. 81), and so on — are more generic. I do not know of a source that mentions Mansa Musa being a musician, but the image of him playing the violin is probably intended to allude to his support of culture.

99 Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), p. 18, remarks in passing that the river of gold does not appear on Borgiano V. 100 See John O. Hunwick, ‘An Andalusian in Mali: A Contribution to the Biography of Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, c. 1290-1346’, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, xxxvi (1990), pp. 59-66; and Suzan B. Aradeon, ‘Al-Sahili: The Historian’s Myth of Architectural Technology Transfer from North Africa’, Journal des Africanistes, lix (1989), pp. 99-131. 101 The image of Mansa Musa on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, is essentially the same as that on Add. MS. 11548. On the chart sold at Christie’s, it seems that Freducci moved the image of the King of Nubia, who holds a bow rather than a violin, and put him in Mansa Musa’s place. Several images of Mansa Musa as he is depicted on nautical charts are reproduced in Pujades, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), p. 232. 102 Dulcert’s 1339 chart is in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Ge B 696. It is reproduced in Gabriel Marcel, Choix de cartes et de mappemondes des XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1896); in colour in Cavallo, Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi (see n. 2), vol. i, pp. 164-5, with descriptive text on pp. 162-3; and again in colour in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), pp. 120-1, and on the accompanying CD, number C8. 103 Bartolomeo Pareto’s chart of 1455 is in Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Cart. naut. 1; it is illustrated with a tracing in Konrad Kretschmer, Die Entdeckung Amerika’s in ihrer Bedeutung für die Geschichte des Weltbildes (Berlin, 1892), Altas, plate 5; Cavallo, Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi (see n. 2), pp. 314-5; and Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), on the accompanying CD, no. C57. For discussion of Pareto’s map see Giovanni Andres, ‘Illustrazione di una carta geographica del 1455, e delle notizie che in quel tempo aveansi dell’’, Memorie della Regale Accademia Ercolanense di Archeologia, i (1822), pp. 129-73; and Pietro Amat di San Filippo, Del planisfero di Bartolomeo Pareto del 1455 e di altre quattro carte nautiche ritrovate testè nella Biblioteca V.E. in Roma (Rome, 1878). 104 The Catalan Estense map is in Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, C. G. A. 1, and has been reproduced in facsimile, with transcription of and commentary on the legends and toponyms, in Milano and Batini, Mapamundi Catalan Estense (see n. 93); there is a high-resolution digital image of the map on the CD-ROM titled Antichi planisferi e portolani: Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria (Modena and Milan, 2004), and a good study of it in Konrad Kretschmer, ‘Die katalanische Weltkarte der Biblioteca Estense zu Modena’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, xxxii (1897), pp. 65-111 and 191-218.

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Legend 3 – The Atlas Mountains

Yniuersa hoc montium poxitio [i.e. portio] dicta est charena barbarie plerique appelant Montes claros quidam uero Montes athlantis habent hiy [i.e. hii] multas ciuitates & oppida et sunt in his loca multa fructifera inueniunturque res multe pretiose Manna dactali & alia et in his uersus mauritaniam fuit inuenta astronomiam.105

Translation

This whole part of these mountains is called Charena of Barbary and many call them the Montes Claros or the Atlas Mountains. These have many cities and towns and in these regions there are many fruit trees and many precious things are found, manna and dates and other things, and in these mountains towards Mauritania astronomy was discovered.

Commentary

This is an expansion of a traditional nautical chart legend, with some material added from Fra Mauro’s workshop. A legend about the mountains first appears on the Catalan Atlas of 1375, and that legend was repeated on later charts with little variation:106

Tota aquesta muntanya de lonch és appellade Carena per serrayns, e per crestians és appellade Muntis Claris. E sepiats que en aquesta dita muntanya ha moltes bones villes e castels los quals combaten los huns ab lus altres; encara con la dita muntanya és abunda de pae de vi e d’oli e de totes bones fruytes.

All this mountain range is called Carena by the Saracens and the Clear Mountains by the Christians. Know that in this mountain there are many good cities and castles that fight against each other, and also in these mountains there is an abundance of bread, wine, oil and many good fruits.

The dates that Freducci mentions are remarked upon in other nautical chart legends, for example those on Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476 (Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, MS. lat. 81, map 4), and on Andrea Benincasa’s nautical chart of 1508 which is in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Borgiano VIII.107 The assertion that there is manna in this area, which we also saw in Legend 2, comes from Fra Mauro, for there is a legend to this effect on

105 The corresponding legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, is faded and damaged, but the few words that are legible are the same as those on Add. MS. 11548. 106 The transcription is from Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 45; the translation is mine. There is one chart besides Add. MS. 11548 and the chart sold at Christie’s that has a longer version of this legend, which is Guillem Soler’s chart of c. 1380 (BnF Rés. Ge B 1131), which adds to the traditional legend information about the extent of the mountain range and the savage beasts in it. The legend is transcribed in Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, ‘La història de l’Atles Català i l’enigma de l’autor’, in G. Llompart i Moragues et al., El mon i els dies: l’Atles Català, 1375 (Barcelona, 2005), p. 39. For discussion of legends about the Atlas Mountains on nautical charts see Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 394-400, esp. 397-400. 107 The legend on Andrea Benincasa’s 1508 chart is transcribed by Almagià, Monumenta cartographica vaticana (see n. 13), vol. i, p. 49, and there is an illustration of the map on plate 20. The map has been reproduced in facsimile with a brief volume of commentary by Arthur Dürst as Seekarte des Andrea Benincasa (Borgiano VIII) 1508 (Zurich, 1984).

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his mappamundi.108 But there is nothing about manna on Borgiano V, so this is more evidence (see the commentary on Legend 2 above regarding the gulphus auri) that Freducci had another source of geographical information from Fra Mauro’s workshop besides the map that served as a model for Borgiano V. The assertion that astronomy was discovered in the Atlas Mountains derives from the ideas that Greek god Atlas, by supporting the heavens, had knowledge of them, and the association of Atlas with Africa. This assertion appears in Isidore, Chronicon 16; Isidore, 14.8.17; Honorius Augustodunensis’s Imago mundi 1.32, and Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia 2.11.109 However, given Freducci’s use of Fra Mauro in other cases, it seems likely that he took the information about the invention of astronomy from either the map he used as a model for Borgiano V or from another document from Fra Mauro’s workshop that contained material from the legends on his mappamundi, both of which have legends on this subject.110

Legend 4 – The King of Nubia

Rex iste potentissimus Nubie est ditissimus Tum thexauri cum equitum et peditum hic fere senper gerit bellum cum Rege indie cui materna lingua est nomen el prete ianni et eorum prelia sunt adeo incredibilia ut porcentosa credantur mendatia tamem quodcunque de is dicitur uerum est: Rex iste Abita ex hostibus uictoria Donauit suis simulacris et idolis Margaritas gemasque cuiuscunque generis Tantum ponderis quantum sibi erat armis indutto: Et auri pondo que ipsum arriua et equum quater contineret indigene omnes fere sunt idolatre: sed cum hac loca sunt mercantilia ad que multi Curunt mercatores abent homines cuiuscumque eresis [for haeresis] et secte.111

Translation

This is the very powerful king of Nubia who is very wealthy both in riches and cavalry and foot soldiers. He is almost always at war with the king of India whose name in the local language is Prester John, and their battles are so incredible that they might be thought portentous falsehoods, yet whatever is said about them is true. This king, after obtaining victory over his enemies, gave to his statues and idols pearls and gems of every type, which a weight equal to his own when he is wearing his armour, and of gold an amount equal to himself and the weight of four horses. The inhabitants of the region are almost all idolaters, but as these areas are good for trade and many merchants come there, they have men of every school of thought and sect.

108 Fra Mauro’s legend on the manna is supplied by Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 390-1, *1061. The manna that Fra Mauro and Freducci mention has been variously identified as the gum of a desert tree such as tamarisk, a lichen, or the excretion of an insect: see F. S. Bodenheimer, ‘The Manna of Sinai’, The Biblical Archaeologist, x (1947), pp. 1-6; Harold N. Moldenke and Alma L. Moldenke, Plants of the Bible (Waltham, MA, 1952), pp. 125-8; and R. A. Donkin, Manna: An Historical Geography (The Hague and Boston, 1980). 109 The text of Isidore’s Chronicon is supplied in Patrologia Latina 83:1017-1058, and also in Theodor Mommsen, Chronica Minora saec. IV-VII, Monumenta Germania Historica, vols. ix, xi and xiii (Berlin, 1892-98), vol. ii, pp. 391-488; the passage in the Etymologiae is translated in Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge and New York, 2006), p. 298; the passage in Honorius is supplied in Patrologia Latina 152:131 and by Valerie I. J. Flint, ‘Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, xlix (1982), pp. 7-153, at 46; and the passage in Gervase is supplied in Latin and English in Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, edited and translated by S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), pp. 322-23. For further discussion see Volker R. Remmerta, ‘Visual Legitimisation of Astronomy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Atlas, Hercules and Tycho’s Nose’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, xxxviii (2007), pp. 327-62. 110 For the legend on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi see Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 420-1, *1236; and for the legend on Borgiano V, see Falchetta, p. 740; and Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), p. 27, legend 39.

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Commentary

This is a much expanded version of a traditional nautical chart legend, but in this case there is no evidence that the new material comes from Fra Mauro, and I have not been able to determine the source of the additions. A legend about the King of Nubia first appears on Angelino Dulcert’s chart of 1339:112

Nubia saracenorum: iste rex saracenus habet continue gueram cum christianos Nubie et Ethiopie qui sunt sub dominio preste Jane, christianus niger.

Nubia of the Saracens: this Saracen king is in continuous war with the Christians of Nubia and Ethiopia, who are under the dominion of Prester John, a black Christian.

Similar legends appear on later charts, for example on the Catalan Atlas and the Catalan Estense mappamundi;113 the sovereign is first represented on the Catalan Atlas. Freducci in his additions to the traditional legend places great emphasis on the king’s idolatry and wealth. The text about the king of Nubia giving to his idols his own weight in pearls and gems, and also in gold, is puzzling. I know of no similar statement about Nubia,114 and in fact it is usually in Indian contexts that one reads about rites of donating the king’s weight in gold, and in India this was typically done in conjunction with the ascension of a monarch to the throne rather than to celebrate a military victory.115 It is interesting that Freducci makes the King of Nubia sound more wealthy than Mansa Musa (see Legend 2 above), who was famous for his wealth. Freducci depicts the King of Nubia holding a bow, with a quiver lying on the ground (see fig. 10),116 and this image bears no relationship with the images on the Catalan Atlas, Mecia de Viladestes’s chart of 1413, or Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Portolano 16, made

111 The corresponding legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, is faded and the lower left part is damaged and illegible, but the parts that are legible show that the legend is essentially identical to that on Add. MS. 11548. 112 The legend is transcribed in Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, ‘La història de l’Atles Català i l’enigma de l’autor’, in Llompart i Moragues et al., El mon i els dies: l’Atles Català, 1375 (see n. 106), p. 38; the translation is mine. 113 The legend on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed and translated into Spanish in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 66; for the legend on the Catalan Estense mappamundi see Milano and Batini, Mapamundi Catalán Estense (see n. 93), p. 191. For general discussion of this region on nautical charts see Bertrand Hirsch, ‘L’espace nubien et éthiopien sur les cartes portulans du XIVe siècle’, Médiévales: langue, textes, histoire, xviii (1990), pp. 69-92; also see Robin Seignobos, ‘Nubia and Nubians in Culture. The Evidence of Maps (12th-14th cent.)’, in Julie R. Anderson and Derek A. Welsby, eds., The Fourth Cataract and Beyond. Proceedings of the 12th Conference for Nubian Studies (Louvain/Paris/Walpole, MA, 2014), pp. 989-1004. 114 The best concise account of medieval Nubia is Luboš Kropáček, ‘Nubia from the Late 12th Century to the Funj Conquest in the Early 15th Century’, in General History of Africa (London and Berkeley, California, 1981-93), vol. iv, pp. 398-422. 115 See P. Shungoonny Menon, A History of Travancore from the Earliest Times (Madras, 1878), who describes the ceremony of Thulapurusha danam which was ‘performed by weighing the body of the king against an equal weight in gold, and distributing the same, among Brahmans’ (pp. 55-6), and says that according to tradition this ceremony was performed by King Veera Kerala Vurmah on his ascent to the throne in A.D. 311 (p. 55), and by King Veera Marthanda Vurmah on his ascent to the throne in A.D. 731 (p. 88). Also see U. Balakrishnan Nair, ‘A Travancore State Ceremony’, Calcutta Review, cxi (1900), pp. 330-42, esp. 334; and Phillip B. Wagoner, Tidings of the King: A Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Rāyavācakamu (Honolulu, 1993), pp. 81 and 245. 116 The image of the King of Nubia on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, is very similar, differing only in some details of colour; on the chart sold at Christie’s, the image of the King of Nubia has been moved over the legend about Mansa Musa, and there is no image of the King of Nubia. The relocated image of the King of Nubia is similar to that on Add. MS. 11548 and Lucca MS. 2720, but the king’s clothes are more brightly coloured on the chart sold at Christie’s.

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between 1439 and 1460:117 on these maps he is portrayed as an Islamic sovereign, with a turban and an Islamic shield. Freducci’s King of Nubia looks more like a European sovereign, which is strange considering the textual emphasis on his idolatry. The last sentence of the legend contains some information on trade, and this same interest is reflected in other legends on the map (see Legends 5, 10, and 11).

Legend 5 – The Sultan of Babylon (Cairo)

Hic princeps babilonie cui nomen est uernaculum gram soldam est potemtissimus tamen eius inperium non est ereditarium sed sorte ductum nec potest quiquam deputari nisi verne et seruo ter taltim [for saltim] empto: Thesauri est dictissimus ob multitudinem nauigiorum auri spetierum utriusque generis & margaritarum transeuntium terra & fluminibus sub eius dictione & ob multe que iubet exigi uectigalia quum sit dominus Sirie Mesopotamie Chaldee Medie aliarumque prouintiarum et prexertim terre sacre.118

Translation

Here is the prince of Cairo whose name in the vernacular is ‘Gram Soldam’ [i.e. Great Sultan]. He is very powerful, yet his rule is not hereditary, but is transferred by lot, nor can anyone be chosen for the role unless he is a home-born slave and a slave sold three times. He is very wealthy in treasure because of the many ships carrying gold, spices of both kinds, and pearls that cross his territory and the rivers under his power and because of the many taxes he orders collected, since he is the lord of Syria, Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Medea, and other provinces, and particularly of the Holy Land.

Commentary

This is a very substantial expansion of the traditional nautical chart legend about the Sultan of Babylon, which (confusingly) is the designation of the sovereign of Egypt: ‘Babylon’ was the name of an old Roman fortress in Cairo. The first legend about and depiction of the Sultan of Babylon are on the Catalan Atlas of 1375; the legend is short: ‘Aquest soldà de Babillònia és gran e poderós entre los altres de aquesta regió’, that is, ‘This Sultan of Babylon is the greatest and most powerful among those of this region’.119 This legend appears with minor variations on many later charts; one of those variations is the inclusion of the fact that the Sultan also controls the Holy Land. This is the form of the legend that Freducci uses on his 1497 chart:

Iste soldanus babilonie vocatur Melcanaçar & est valde magnus & potens inter alios istius regionis & possidet totam terram santam.

This Sultan of Babylon is called Al-Nasir and he is very great and powerful among the others of this region and he controls all of the Holy Land.

117 The anonymous chart in Florence, BNCF, Portolano 16 has been little studied. There is a brief notice of the chart in Gustavo Uzielli and Pietro Amat di S. Filippo, Studi biografici e bibliografici sulla storia della geografia in Italia, vol. ii, Mappamondi, carte nautiche, portolani (Rome, 1882), p. 230. More detailed discussion, with transcriptions of several of the map’s legends, may be found in Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), passim; for discussion of the image of the King of Nubia on the charts just listed, see her vol. i, pp. 563-5. 118 The corresponding legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, is in good condition and is essentially identical to that on Add. MS. 11548, including the error of taltim for saltim. 119 The legend on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed and translated into Spanish in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 66.

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Melcanaçar or Al-Nasir Muhammad (1285-1341) was the ninth Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. It is interesting to compare the legend on Freducci’s 1497 chart with that on Add. MS. 11548: the fact that the sultan controls the Holy Land, mentioned at the end of the Add. MS. 11548 legend, comes from the traditional legend which Freducci used on his 1497 chart, but he has added considerable material to the traditional legend. The detail that the sultan must be a thrice-bought slave is an exaggeration of the Mamluk system of succession. The sultan of Egypt was chosen from the mamluks, a warrior class of slave origin.120 Young slaves were purchased, were taught the elements of Islam and given military training, and then manumitted upon the completion of their training and became soldiers. There were a few cases in which the sultan was unsure whether a mamluk had been purchased, and the sultan would buy him again, probably as a mere formality, in order to be able to manumit him according to the law. But Western descriptions of the system are exaggerated. Felix Fabri, who stayed in Cairo in 1480 and 1483, said that a mamluk could not become sultan unless he was bought and sold twice, and Francesco Suriano (1450-c. 1529) claimed that a mamluk had to be bought and sold five times to become sultan.121 I do not know of a text which says that the mamluk had to be bought and sold three times in order to become sultan, so it is not clear what Freducci’s source might have been.

Freducci also adds information about the transit trade and taxes levied by the Mamluk sultanate. He does not explicitly say that the sultan taxed the ships carrying gold, spices, and pearls that cross his territory, but seems to imply this, and does speak of the taxes the sultan earned through his control of Syria, Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Medea, and the Holy Land. In fact until the end of the fifteenth century, Cairo controlled all of the trade between India and the Near East,122 and all goods passing through the country were subject to the zakāt, a tax of 2.5 percent, which might be levied in more than one place in the country.123 In this case we can be certain that Freducci was using outdated information, for during the first half of the sixteenth century the spice trade between India and the Mediterranean had been almost entirely diverted to the Portuguese-controlled route around Africa.124 In addition, the Mamluk system of succession that Freducci describes was no longer operating in 1529, when Freducci made his chart, as the Ottomans had conquered Egypt in 1517.

120 On the Mamluk sultans see Peter M. Holt, ‘Mamlūks’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden, 1954-2009), vol. vi, pp. 321-31; on the mamluk warrior class, see D. Ayalon, ‘Mamlūk’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden, 1960-2009), vol. vi, pp. 314-21. 121 See Felix Fabri, Voyage en Égypte de Félix Fabri 1483, trans. Jacques Masson (Cairo, 1975), pp. 551-3; and Francesco Suriano, Il trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente (Milan, 1900), p. 203. These passages are cited and discussed by Ulrich Haarmann, ‘The Mamluk System of Rule in the Eyes of Western Travelers’, Mamlūk Studies Review, v (2001), pp. 1-24. 122 Several nautical chart legends mention that spices from India passed through Chos (al-Quṣayr) and then on to Babylon, i.e. Cairo, or Alexandria, for example on Angelino Dulcert’s chart of 1339, and on the Catalan Atlas of 1375. On the Catalan Atlas the legend reads ‘En aquesta ciutat de Chos aporten la especiaria, la cual se ve de les Índies; puys s’aporten en Babillònia e en Allexandría’, i.e. ‘To this city of al-Quṣayr are brought spices from the Indies which are then taken to Cairo and Alexandria.’ The legend is transcribed in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 65. 123 See Gaston Wiet, ‘Les marchands d’épices sous les Sultans Mamlouks’, Cahiers d’Histoire Egyptienne, vii (1955), pp. 81-147, esp. 99; and A. Zysow, ‘Zakāt’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden, 1960- 2002), vol. xi, pp. 406-22, esp. 413. For general discussion of the spice trade during this period see John L. Meloy, ‘Imperial Strategy and Political Exigency: The Red Sea Spice Trade and the Mamluk Sultanate in the Fifteenth Century’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, cxxiii (2003), pp. 1-19; on the route that the spices travelled to reach Cairo see Walter J. Fischel, ‘The Spice Trade in Mamluk Egypt: A Contribution to the Economic History of Medieval Islam’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, i (1958), pp. 157-74, esp. 162-4.

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Freducci’s image of the Sultan of Babylon on Add. MS. 11548 is traditional, unlike his image of the King of Nubia (see the commentary on Legend 4 above): he shows the sultan seated on a pillow in a tent, wearing a turban and holding a sceptre in one hand and a parrot in the other. This sultan is holding a parrot in his first depiction on a nautical chart, on the Catalan Atlas of 1375, and on various other charts, including Freducci’s chart of 1497.125 While the contents of the images of the sultan on Freducci’s 1497 chart and Add. MS. 11548 are very similar, the styles are quite different, and as suggested above, either Freducci’s artistic style underwent substantial development in the thirty years between the creation of the two charts, or a special artist was hired to paint the sovereigns on one or both of the charts. The image of this sultan on Lucca MS. 2720 is very similar to that on Add. MS. 11548, except that the interior of the tent is red on the Lucca chart, while it is black on Add. MS. 11548, and the face of the sultan is somehow more European looking on the Lucca chart. It is difficult to distinguish the details of the sultan on the chart sold at Christie’s in the image of the chart in the auction catalogue.

Legend 6 – The Red Sea

Hoc mare dictum est rubeum non quod eius aqua uiusmodi [i.e. huiusmodi] abeat colorem sed quia arena Rubescit: per hoc mare transitum abuit populus Israel aufugiens pharaonem qui obrutis hostibus euascit: hac ueniunt aromata & nauigia multa a mare indie set nequeunt ad estremum maris peruenire quum ad ea substentanda non suffitiat paucitas aquarum & quia in imis uadis magna est copia magnetis necesse est clauata esse nauigia clauis ligneis ne retentione patiantur.126

Translation

This sea is called red not because its waters are of that colour but because its sands are red. Through this sea the people of Israel crossed while fleeing the Pharaoh, and when their enemies were destroyed, they escaped. Here there come spices and many ships from the Indian Ocean, but they cannot reach the end of the sea because the water is not deep enough to keep them afloat, and because in the deepest shallows there is a large amount of magnet, and the ships must be nailed together with wooden nails lest they be held in place [by the magnet].

124 On the Portuguese control of the spice trade between India and the Mediterranean during the first half of the sixteenth century, see Giancarlo Casale, ‘Ottoman Guerre de Course and the Indian Ocean Spice Trade: The Career of Sefer Reis’, Itinerario, xxxii (2008), pp. 59-79. Incidentally in the second half of the sixteenth century the Ottomans, who controlled the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt after 1516-17, mounted a serious challenge to the Portuguese monopoly on the India-to-Mediterranean spice trade: see C. R. Boxer, ‘A N. on Portuguese Reaction to the Revival of the Red Sea Spice Trade and the Rise of Atjeh, 1540–1600’, International Trade and Politics in Southeast Asia 1500-1800, Journal of South East Asian History, x (1969), pp. 415-28; reprinted in M. N. Pearson (ed.), Spices in the Indian Ocean World (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1996), pp. 269-82; and Giancarlo Casale, ‘The Ottoman Administration of the Spice Trade in the Sixteenth-Century Red Sea and Persian Gulf’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, xlix (2006), pp. 170-98. 125 For discussion of a possible textual source for the presence of the parrot see Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Un cuento árabe para la imagen del Sultán de Babilonia en las cartas náuticas mallorquinas’, in V. Paül i Carril and J. Tort i Donada (eds.), Territorios, paisajes y lugares, Trabajos recientes de pensamiento geográfico (Cabrera del Mar and Madrid, 2007), pp. 313-26; for a more general discussion of the Sultan of Babylon on nautical charts see Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 565-73. 126 The corresponding legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, is in good condition, and is identical to that on Add. MS. 11548 aside from negligible differences in spellings.

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Commentary

This is an expansion of a traditional nautical chart legend, but there is no evidence for the use of Fra Mauro as a source. A brief legend about the Red Sea first appears on Angelino Dalorto’s chart of 1330,127 where the legend runs: Mare Rubrum, non tamen quod aqua sit rubea, sed de terra trait colorem, that is, ‘The Red Sea [which is so called] not because its water is red, but it takes its colour from the earth [i.e. the bottom]’.128 The legend on the Catalan Atlas is longer and offers more detail:129

Aquesta mar és appellade la Mar Roga per on passaren los •XII• trips d’Issraell. E sepias que l’aygua no és roga, mas lo fons és d’achela color. Per esta mar passa la major pertida de l’espècies qui vénen [en] Allexandria de les Índies.

This sea is called the Red Sea, through which passed the twelve tribes of Israel. Know that water is not red, but the bottom is of this colour. Over this sea pass most of the spices that come to Alexandria from India.

Similar legends appear on several nautical charts, including Freducci’s chart of 1497:130

Istud mare vocatur Mare rubrum, perquod transietur duodecim tribus Isdrael et non tamem perquod aqua sit rubea sed quod fundus sit rubei coloris: et per hoc mare naue mercatorum Indiarum ferunt spetias quas deferunt ad Kirum postea vero alexandriam.

This sea is called the Red Sea, through which passed the twelve tribes of Israel, but not because the water is red, but because the bottom is red. And through this sea the ships of Indian merchants carry spices which they bring to Cairo and then to Alexandria.

Thus we see that Freducci added considerable material to the traditional nautical chart legend in his new legend on Add. MS. 11548.131 He adds some more detail about the Crossing of the Red Sea by the tribes of Israel (see Exodus 13.17-14.29), and adds geographical details about the sea that affect trade on it: ships are not able to reach the end (presumably the northern end) of the sea because it is shallow, and there is magnet on the bottom of the sea that would hold in place any ship built with iron nails. There are in fact extensive shallows in the Red Sea, but I do not know from what source Freducci might have garnered this information. The idea that there are magnetic islands in the Indian Ocean goes back to Ptolemy’s Geography 7.2, and the history of this myth, which was adduced by various medieval authors to explain the lack of iron nails

127 Angelino Dalorto’s chart of 1330 is in the Archivio Corsini in Florence. The chart is reproduced in The Portolan Chart of Angellino de Dalorto, MCCCXXV, in the Collection of Prince Corsini at Florence (London, 1929); and in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), pp. 114-5 and on the accompanying CD, number C7. For discussion of the Red Sea on nautical charts see Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 364-7. 128 The transcription comes from the insert of transcriptions of legends from various charts in Pujades i Bataller, La carta de Gabriel de Vallseca de 1439 (see n. 96). 129 The legend on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed and translated into Spanish in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 64. 130 In my transcription of the legend I have omitted an extraneous ‘o’ before ‘Indarum’. 131 Another revision of the traditional nautical chart legend about the Red Sea may be found on the so-called Columbus Chart (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Ge AA 562). The whole legend is transcribed by J. K. Wright in his review of Charles de la Roncière’s La carte de Christophe Colomb in Isis, viii (1926), pp. 168-73, at 171 (Roncière himself does not transcribe the entire legend). This legend is the one that Roncière claimed derived from Columbus’s postil on d’Ailly’s Imago mundi, and which he used as grounds for arguing that the chart was made by Columbus; Wright in his review argues against this conclusion.

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in Indian ships, has been surveyed more than once.132 A number of authors locate these islands in the Red Sea, but the only author I know who speaks of magnetic rocks at the bottom of the Red Sea, rather than of islands of magnetic rock, is Johannes Witte de Hese in his Itinerarius in partes orientales (1389), who writes:133

Et mare Iecoreum est talis naturae quod attrahit naves propter ferrum in navibus, quia fundus illius maris dicitur quod sit lapideus de lapide adamante, qui est attractivus.

And the nature of the Liver Sea [i.e. Red Sea] is such that it attracts ships on account of the iron in the ships because the bottom of this sea is said to consist of rocks of lodestone, which has attractive power.

But as there is no other evidence that Freducci (or Fra Mauro) knew Hese’s work, it is difficult to believe that Hese was the source of this information.134 Incidentally there is a certain logic to the idea that there were magnetic stones at the bottom of the Red Sea, beyond the presence of ships without nails: the traditional nautical chart legend speaks of the bottom of the sea being red, and various authors (Isidore 16.13.2; Marbod, Liber lapidum 1.4; Bartholomaeus Anglicus 16.43) say that the magnet is ferrugineus or red.

Legend 7 – Mount Sinai

Mons sinai in quo deus dedit legem Moixi et in eodem loco iacet corpus beate catarine Virginis.135

Translation

Mount Sinai in which God gave the law to Moses, and in the same place lies the body of the virgin St Catherine.

Commentary

This is a traditional nautical chart legend, which Freducci did not modify at all on Add. MS. 11548. A similar legend first appears on the Catalan Atlas, in a mixture of Catalan and Latin:

132 For discussion of the passage in Ptolemy see G. E. Gerini, Researches on Ptolemy’s Geography of Eastern Asia (Further India and Indo-Malay Archipelago) (London, 1909), pp. 420-4; for discussion of the myths of magnetic islands see A. Graf, ‘Un mito geografico (il monte della calamita)’, in his Miti, leggende, e superstizione del medio evo (Turin, 1892-93), pp. 363-75; Claude Lecouteux, ‘Die Sage vom Magnetberg’, Fabula, xxv (1984), pp. 35-65, revised in ‘La montagne d’aimant’, in Claude Thomasset and Danièle James-Raoul (eds.), La montagne dans le texte médiévale: entre mythe et réalité (Paris, 2000), pp. 167- 86; and Caroline Cazanave, ‘L’île d’Aimant’, in Jean-Claude Marimoutou and Jean-Michel Racault (eds.), L’insularité thématique et représentations: actes du colloque international de Saint-Denis de La Réunion, avril 1992 (Paris, 1995), pp. 37-46. 133 The Latin and English are from Scott D. Westrem, Broader Horizons: A Study of Johannes Witte de Hese’s ‘Itinerarius’ and Medieval Travel Narratives (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 129 and 210, respectively. It is worth remarking that in Zarncke’s earlier edition of the work the phrase is ‘attrahit naves in profundum propter ferrum in navibus’ (my emphasis): see Johann von Hesse, Peregrinatio, edited in Friedrich Zarncke, Der Priester Johannes (Leipzig, 1876-79), vol. ii, p. 164. 134 Franciscus Monachus (François Le Moyne) in his De orbis situ ac descriptione (Antwerp?, 1527?), sig. A[vv – A[vi]r, disputes the claim that ships in the Indian Ocean are not made with nails because of the danger presented by magnets, asserting that it is rather because there is little iron available in the region. 135 The legends on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720, and British Library, Add. MS. 10132, are the same.

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Mont de Sinai en lo qual Déu dona la Ley a Moissès. Hic est corpus Catarina virginis, that is, ‘Mount Sinai in which God gave the law to Moses. Here is the body of Catherine the virgin’.136 There was once a similar legend on Andrea Benincasa’s chart of 1490 which was previously Ancona, Museo Nazionale delle Marche, MS. 253, but is now in Ancona, Soprintendenza per i Beni archeologici delle Marche, Cat I, inv. n. 15 Beni Mobili: this chart was heavily damaged by fire in 1944, and the eastern part of the chart was destroyed, but the legend about Mount Sinai was transcribed before this loss.137 Above the legend on Add. MS. 11548 there is an image of Mt. Sinai with the Monastery of St Catherine at its summit. There are similar images of Mount Sinai, but no legend, on Grazioso Benincasa’s chart of 1482 (Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Rot. 3),138 and on Freducci’s chart of 1497. There are very similar images of and legends about Mount Sinai on four other works by Freducci, namely his 1524 chart at the Hispanic Society, his 1536 atlas at Yale (see fig. 6), Lucca MS. 2720, and his undated chart sold at Christie’s. The frequency with which he used this image and legend perhaps reflect his interest in the eastern Mediterranean mentioned above.

Legend 8 – Turkey

Hic inperator qui appellatus magnus turcus eorum hominum maximus et tres abet coronas et inperia Vltra alia regna et dominia estque dominus thexauri multi et diuitiarum hac maxime hobedientie sub eius dictionem est mare superum gretiam totam: bossinam moria seruia Asia minor insule multe hac locha abundantissima rebus omnibus delectabilibus que posunt usquam inueniri.139

Translation

This emperor, who is called the Great Turk, is the greatest of those men and has three crowns and other empires, other realms and dominions, and is lord of many treasures and riches. These places with great obedience are under his control: the Adriatic Sea, all of Greece, Bosnia, the Peloponnese, Serbia, Turkey, and many islands — places abounding in all the delectable things that can be found anywhere.

Commentary

As mentioned above, this is the first legend on any nautical chart that offers a detailed description of Turkey, and thus represents an important innovation by Freducci; it is likely that the decision to compose this new legend, which contains nothing negative about the sultan of Turkey, was motivated at least in part by the close ties between the Freducci family and the

136 The legend on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed and translated into Spanish in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 40. The legend is also transcribed y Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, ‘La història de l’Atles Català i l’enigma de l’autor’, in Llompart i Moragues et al., El mon i els dies: l’Atles Català, 1375 (see n. 106), p. 40, and on p. 41 he transcribes the very similar legend on the late fourteenth-century chart Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Ge AA 751: ‘Hic est corpus Caterina virginis. Mont de Sinay, en lo qual Déus donà [la ley a] Moissès’. 137 The legend on the 1490 chart of Benincasa is transcribed by E. Spadolini, ‘Il Portolano di Grazioso Benincasa’, La Bibliofilia, ix (1907-08), pp. 58-62, 103-9, 205-34, 294-9, 420-34, and 460-2, at 61: ‘Mons Sinai in quo deus dedit legem Moisi et in eodom loco jacet corpus beate Catarine’, and on p. 429 there is an image of the whole undamaged chart. On the damage to the chart in 1944 see Armando Cortesão, History of Portuguese Cartography (Lisbon, 1969-), vol. ii, p. 193. 138 Grazioso Benincasa’s 1482 chart in Bologna is well illustrated in Cavallo, Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi (see n. 2), vol. i, pp. 356-7, with brief discussion and bibliography on pp. 353 and 358. On Grazioso Benincasa generally see C. Feroso [i.e. Michele Maroni], Grazioso Benincasa marinaro e cartografo anconitano del secolo 15 (Ancona, 1884). 139 The legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720, is faded but legible, and is almost identical to that on Add. MS. 11548, aside from some negligible differences in spelling.

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Ottoman sultanate detailed above. The legend shows no sign of influence from Fra Mauro; in fact, Fra Mauro does not use the words ‘Turk’ or ‘Ottoman’ or any variant thereof on either his mappamundi or on the map that was later copied as Borgiano V. The reference to the sultan’s three crowns, which alludes to his dominion of Greece, Asia, and Trebizond, suggests that the sultan in question is Mehmed II (1432-1481): there are portraits of Mehmed II with images of three crowns,140 and an impressive bronze in the Ashmolean Museum of c. 1480 that depicts Mehmed II on a victory chariot, holding personifications of Greece, Trebizond and Asia with a lasso in the back of the chariot.141 I have not been able to find a list of the regions conquered by Mehmed II which is a close match for that given by Freducci, so it is not clear what textual source he was using. As mentioned earlier, Freducci’s chart that was sold at Christie’s also had a long legend about Turkey, but much of the text went missing with a piece of parchment that was lost from the chart.

To the right of the image of the sultan on Add. MS. 11548 and Lucca MS. 2720 there is a short legend that reads Asia minor que dicitur turchia, i.e. ‘Asia Minor which is called Turkey’ (see fig. 11). This is a vestige, as it were, of a longer traditional legend about the extent of Asia which Freducci’s new legend about Turkey replaces. The first chart on which this legend appears is Angelino Dalorto’s of 1330, there is a similar legend on the Pizzigani chart of 1367,142 and a typical version of the legend appears on a lost fifteenth-century Genoese chart whose legends were transcribed before its disappearance:143

Assia vocatur tertia pars mundi ratione cuiusdam regis Arcuis Diaschones qui eam partem dominabatur. Que Asia incipit a partibus maris Rubei vsque ad flumen Krixii versus meridiem; et finit ad flumen de Latana versus tramontanam. Et comprehendit Tartariam et totum orientem.

The third part of the world is called Asia because of a king named Arcuis Diaschones who ruled it. Asia stretches from the Red Sea to the river Nile in the south and the River Tanais [i.e. the Don] in the north, and includes Tartary and all of the Orient.

140 On Mehmed II and the three crowns see Basil Gray, ‘Two Portraits of Mehmet II’, The Burlington Magazine, lxi (1932), pp. 2 and 4-7; Armenag Sakisian, ‘The Portraits of Mehmet II’, The Burlington Magazine, lxxiv (1939), pp. 172-3, 176-8 and 181; Julian Raby, ‘Pride and Prejudice: Mehmed the Conqueror and the Italian Portrait Medal’, in J. Graham Pollard (ed.), Italian Medals (Washington, DC, 1987), pp. 171-94; and Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘From Byzantine Constantinople to Ottoman Konstantiniyye: Creation of a Cosmopolitan Capital and Visual Culture under Sultan Mehmed II’, in Anthony Cutler et al., From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8000 Years of a Capital (Istanbul, 2010), pp. 262-77, esp. 270-3. 141 The bronze is Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Accession Number HCR6589. 142 The chart by the Pizzigani brothers is in Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, Carta nautica no. 1612; the legend in question is transcribed by Mario Longhena, ‘La carta dei Pizigano del 1367 (posseduta dalla Biblioteca Palatina di Parma)’, Archivio Storico per le Provincie Parmensi, v (1953), pp. 25-130, at 100: ‘Asia incipit in partibus Egipty ad meridiem, finit ad flumen Tanay versus septentrionem, comprehendit tota Tartariam scilicet pars orientalem.’ 143 The legend from the lost Genoese map is transcribed and translated into French by Jacques Paviot, ‘Une mappemonde génoise disparue de la fin du XIVe siècle’, in Gaston Duchet-Suchaux (ed.), L’Iconographie: études sur les rapports entre textes et images dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 2001), pp. 69-97, at 82-3 (Latin) and 92 (French). Paviot claims that the lost chart was from the late fourteenth century, but as one of its legends cites Antoniotto Usodimare, it must be from 1455 or later. This legend quoted here seems to have some relation to Isidore 14.3.1.

46 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro Detail of the Ottoman sultan on London, British Library, Add. MS. 11548. © British Library Board. Add. MS. 11548. Detail of the Ottoman sultan on London, British Library, Fig. 11.

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And there is a similar legend on Freducci’s 1497 chart, so he had used this legend himself before deciding to replace it on Add. MS. 11548. Freducci’s version of this legend on his 1497 chart is incomplete:

Asia uocatur tertia pars mundi ratione cuiusdam regis qui uocabatur diascatius qui dominabatur. Que Asia incipit a partibus maris rubei uidelicet a flumen carsiz.

The third part of the world is called Asia because of a king named Diascatius who ruled [it]. Asia stretches from the Red Sea, that is from the River Nile.

Many earlier charts have images of the Ottoman sultan, beginning with the Catalan Atlas of 1375 and including Freducci’s chart of 1497 and his undated chart in Weimar.144 The styles in which the sultans are depicted on the two earlier charts are quite different from the style on Add. MS. 11548, and as suggested above, either Freducci’s artistic abilities underwent substantial development in the thirty years between the creation of the two charts, or a special artist was hired to paint the sovereigns on Add. MS. 11548, or one artist was hired for the earlier chart, and a different one for Add. MS. 11548. Given the Freducci family’s connections with the Ottoman sultanate, we might hope for accuracy in Freducci’s images of the sultan, particularly in the more artistically sophisticated portrait on Add. MS. 11548 (see fig. 11), but in fact the face of the Ottoman sultan on Add. MS. 11548 is quite similar to that of the Sultan of Babylon on the same chart. On Lucca MS. 2720, the face of the Ottoman sultan is more European than on Add. MS. 11548 — much as is the case with the Sultan of Babylon. That is, on both maps the face of the Great Turk is similar to that of the Sultan of Babylon, but on Lucca MS. 2720 they are both more European in appearance. It should be remarked that the designation Magnus Turcus does not refer to any Ottoman sultan, but specifically to Mehmed II, who was accorded that title in the West because of his conquest of Constantinople in 1453.145 The earliest chart to use this title is Pareto’s chart of 1455 — quite soon after the event.146

Legend 9 – The King of the Tartars

Hic inperator qui dictus est magnus & dominus canpanie est potentissimus: Nam quum Visserit [for jusserit] equitum ducentorum milia peditum uero turba absque numero in unum coguntur: Sed eorum mores sunt ferini potius quam Vrbani habent hyi [i.e. hii] efigiem turpem et obscenam faties [i.e. facies] latas hoculos paruos eorum domicilia et ciuitates sunt currus quos traunt equi et boues hos cum familiis habitant loca eorum sunt aquosa & ex his inter alios inperatores fuit Vir quidam maxime strenuus & potentissimus qui suo subegit inperio uniuersam gretiam Asiam minorem utranque Armeniam mesopotamiam caldeos Siriam Mediam persiam et partem indie et multas ciuitates incendio consumpsit fuitque appellatus magnus Tanborlam. 147

Translation

This emperor who is called the Great Tartar and the ruler of the countryside is very powerful: for when he orders it, two hundred thousand horsemen and a mass of foot soldiers without number are gathered together, but their habits are wild rather than urbane. They have an ugly

144 There is a brief discussion of representations of the sultan of Turkey in Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 582-3. 145 Isaac d’Israeli, ‘The Great and Little Turk’, in his Curiosities of Literature: Consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations (London, 1798), vol. i, pp. 355-6. 146 For discussion of the representation of Turkey in later maps, see Palmira Brummett, ‘Imagining the Early Modern Ottoman Space, from World History to ’, in Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (eds.), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 15-58. 147 On Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS. 2720 the legend is faded and the left part is damaged and illegible, but the legible parts show that the text is essentially the same as on Add. MS. 11548.

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and repulsive visage, with wide faces and small eyes. Their houses and cities are wagons which are pulled by horses and cows, which they live in with their families. Their land is marshy. From among these people and among other emperors came an extremely active man and very powerful who brought into his empire all of Greece, Turkey, both Armenias, Mesopotamia, the Chaldeans, Syria, Medea, Persia, and part of India, and he burned many cities, and he was called Tamerlane the Great.

Commentary

This legend is a substantial expansion of a traditional nautical chart legend, without any apparent influence from Fra Mauro. However, the traditional nautical chart legend on which Freducci’s long legend is based is more recent than most of the others discussed here. There are legends about Kublai Khan on the Catalan Atlas and the Catalan Estense mappamundi,148 but these are quite different from the legend that seems first to appear on the lost fifteenth-century Genoese chart mentioned above (and there is a very similar legend on Pareto’s chart of 1455):149

Iste dominus tartarus est magnus et potens; vocatur Bonsaiti, dominus Tartarorum de Tarsia et de Persia. Et in eius prouintia est habundantia septe, et alliorum donorum specierum, et mercantiarum; qua prouintia submissa, vel magno Tartaro, Tambolano; que per nomine vocatur Theyomet.

This Tartar king is great and powerful; he is called Bonsaiti [i.e. Abu Saïd], and he is the king of the Tartars of Tarsia and of Persia. In his province there is an abundance of silk and of other goods, spices, and merchandise. This province was conquered by the Great Tartar, Tamerlane, and is called Theyomet.

The somewhat shorter legend on Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476 (Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, MS. lat. 81, map 5) is typical of the versions of this legend on late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italian maps:

Hic Inperator Magnus tartarus appellatus adeo potentissimus est ut et equitus quadringentorum milium: peditum vero pene sine numero exercitum ducit et ideo semper moratur in campaneis.

This emperor, who is called the Great Tartar, is so very powerful that he leads 400,000 horsemen and foot soldiers beyond number, and for that reason he always remains in the fields.

Freducci added a great deal to this textual foundation. The detail about the wide faces and small eyes of the Tartars occurs in a number of sources. John of Plano Carpini (ca. 1180-1252) in his Ystoria mongalorum, chapter 2, writes that:150

148 The legend about Kublai Khan on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed and translated into Spanish in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 87; the legend on the Catalan Estense mappamundi is transcribed in Milano and Batini, Mapamundi Catalán Estense (see n. 93), p. 199. 149 The legend from the lost Genoese map is transcribed and translated into French by Paviot, ‘Une mappemonde génoise disparue’ (see n. 143), pp. 69-97, at 82 (Latin) and 91 (French). The English translation is mine. 150 The English translation is from Christopher Dawson, The Mongol Mission (London, 1955), p. 6.

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In appearance the Tartars are quite different from all other men, for they are broader than other people between the eyes and across the cheek-bones. Their cheeks also are rather prominent above their jaws; they have a flat and small nose, their eyes are little and their eyelids raised up to the eyebrows.

There are similar passages in Simon de Saint-Quentin’s account of his voyage to the East in 1245-1248,151 Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’s Liber perigrinationis, written in about 1300,152 and in the Andanças e viajes of Pero Tafur (ca. 1410-ca. 1487).153 However, there is no evidence to prove that Freducci used any one of these four sources, and he may well have used some other source. The wagons or carts of the Tartars are described by John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck,154 and also by ; Riccoldo da Monte di Croce and Pero Tafur do not mention them. Polo’s description is the most similar to Freducci’s; he writes that ‘They also have wagons covered with black felt so efficaciously that no rain can get in. These are drawn by oxen and camels, and the women and children travel in them’.155 Except for the detail about which animals draw the carts (Freducci says that they are horses and cows), Marco Polo’s and Freducci’s statements are similar, though again, we cannot be sure that Freducci was using Marco Polo as his source. John of Plano Carpini mentions both the Tartars’ wide faces and small eyes and their wagons, but there is no reason to be confident that Freducci used him as a source. Fra Mauro on his mappamundi has a total of five images of carts northeast of the Caspian Sea, but his brief legend on the subject shows no connection with the legend on Add. MS. 11548.156 It should be mentioned that there are two nautical charts that have long legends about the carts of the Tartars: the lost fifteenth-century Genoese chart mentioned above, and Pareto’s chart of 1455, whose legend on the subject is very similar to that on the lost Genoese chart. The legend on the lost Genoese chart runs:157

Hec est quedam planities Tartarie, in qua Tartari nullam habent habitationem, videlicet ciuitatem nec locam muratam. Sed eorum habitationes habent super currus qui ab equis ducuntur. Non habent stabilitatem nec firmam mansionem, quia solummodo in vno loco quo permanent quantum in eo loco reperiunt pro viuere; et postea recedunt tendentes ad

151 Extracts of Simon’s work are preserved in ’s Speculum historiale; for the passage in question, see Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum quadruplex; sive, Speculum maius (Douai, 1624; Graz, 1964- 65), vol. iv, p. 1210 (Book XXIX, chapter 71 in this edition); also see Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, ed. Jean Richard (Paris, 1965), p. 31. For discussion of Vincent’s preservation of excerpts from Simon see Gregory G. Guzman, ‘The Encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais and His Mongol Extracts from John of Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin’, Speculum, xlix (1974), pp. 287-307. 152 See Ricoldo da Monte Croce, Pérégrination en Terre Sainte et au Proche Orient, texte latin et traduction, trans. René Kappler (Paris, 1997), pp. 78 (Latin) and 79 (French); and also Ricoldo da Monte Croce, Libro della peregrinazione; Epistole alla Chiesa trionfante, ed. Davide Cappi (Genoa and Milan, 2005), p. 40. 153 See Pero Tafur, Travels and Adventures, 1435-1439, trans. and ed. Malcolm Letts (New York and London, 1926), p. 136. 154 For the descriptions of the Tartars’ carts see Willem van Ruysbroeck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253-55, trans. William Woodville Rockhill (London, 1900), pp. 54 (Plano Carpini) and 55-6 (William of Rubruck); for Plano Carpini’s description also see Christopher Dawson, The Mongol Mission (London, 1955), p. 8. 155 See The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian: Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, trans. and ed. Henry Yule (London, 1903), Book I, chapter 52, vol. i, p. 252, with good discussion on p. 254. For discussion of the Tartars’ tents and carts see Michael Gervers and Wayne A. Schlepp, ‘Felt and “Tent Carts” in The Secret History of the Mongols’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of & Ireland, 3rd Ser., vii (1997), pp. 93-116, esp. 98-103. 156 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 619-20, *2411, ‘Amaxobi, zoè che hano li cari in luogo de case’, or in English, ‘Amaxobi — that is, people who live in carts instead of houses’. 157 The legend from the lost Genoese map is transcribed and translated into French by Paviot, ‘Une mappemonde génoise disparue’ (see n. 143), pp. 69-97, at 82 (Latin) and 91-92 (French). The English translation is mine.

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alliud locum. Sunt de istis multe et diuerse societates, videlicet da [sic] carris xo vsque in xxxxo, qui suescunt ire et vadunt de loco ad locum. Et certis temporibus predicte societates in unum se congregant ad locum deputatum cum eorum carris. Et de ipsis carris faciunt stratas et vias. Ac se omnes circumdant, et murant de eis vt si esset vna ciuitas. Et in eo allogiamento nemo potest intrare nisi per portas et per loca deputata. Hoc faciunt pro recoligere eorum semina et pro facere consilium. Et hec congregatio gentium vocatur lordo.

Here is a plain of Tartary where the Tartars have no home, that is to say neither city nor fortified place. But they have their homes in carts pulled by horses.They have no fixed place or sturdy houses because they find what they need to live in each spot they stop, and then they move on to other places. There are many different tribes among them, [each consisting of] from ten to forty carts, which travel from one place to another. And at certain times these tribes gather into one group with their carts at a designated place. They make streets and ways from the carts themselves, and make a circular barrier of them as if it were a city. No one may enter the city except through the gates and places prescribed. They do this to collect seeds and to hold a meeting. This gathering is called the horde.

Thus it is at least possible that Freducci obtained his information about the Tartars’ carts from a chart in the Pareto tradition.

Freducci’s statement that the land of the Tartars is marshy is surprising, as most Inner Asian nomads lived in arid environments.158 Finally, while Tamerlane (1336-1405) is mentioned in the legends on the lost Genoese chart and by Pareto on his chart of 1455, Freducci adds information about his character and the regions he conquered. One of the earliest Western authors to take an interest in Tamerlane (or Timur) was Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), in his De varietate fortunae. Poggio lists the peoples that Tamerlane conquered and cities that he destroyed, but there is not a very close relationship between Freducci’s list and Poggio’s.159 Freducci may have been paraphrasing Poggio, but the matter is not clear.

There is an image of the Magnus tartarus on Pareto’s chart of 1455, Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476, Grazioso Benincasa’s chart of 1482, Freducci’s own chart of 1497, and an unpainted outline of the sovereign on Andrea Benincasa’s chart of 1508. If we compare the image on Freducci’s 1497 chart with that on Add. MS. 11548 (see fig. 12), again the later image is artistically much more sophisticated, and in addition, the sovereign on Add. MS. 11548 is more warlike: on the 1497 chart he holds a rod (probably a sceptre missing its tip) and an orb, while on Add. MS. 11548 he holds a shield and what is probably intended to be a scimitar, rather like the sovereign on Grazioso Benincasa’s chart of 1482. The image of the sovereign on Lucca

158 See Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (Basel, 1552; first published in German in 1544), Book V, in the chapter ‘De Tartaria’, p. 1059 in the 1552 edition: Regio est plurimum montosa, et ubi campestris est, admixta glarea arenosa est & sterilis, nisi aquis fluuialibus irrigetur.... In hyeme ibi nunquam pluit, in aestate frequenter, sed adeo parce ut uix terra madefiat, that is, ‘The region is quite mountainous, and where it is flat, the soil is sandy and sterile, unless it is irrigated by rivers…. In winter there it never rains; in the summer often, but so little that the soil barely becomes damp’. 159 See Poggii Bracciolini Florentini Historiae de varietate fortunae libri quatuor, ed. Giovanni Oliva (Paris, 1723), pp. 36-8. There is also a list of the areas that Tamerlane conquered in H. Moranvillé, ‘Mémoire sur Tamerlan et sa cour par un Dominicain en 1403’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, lv (1894), pp. 433- 64, on pp. 448-9, but again there is no close correspondence between this list and Freducci’s. For general discussion of Renaissance views of Tamerlane see Tilman Nagel, ‘Tamerlan im Verständnis der Renaissance’, Oriente Moderno, xv (1996), pp. 203-12.

51 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro Detail of the kings of Russia and of the Tartars on London, British Library, Add. MS. 11548. © British Library Board. Add. MS. 11548. on London, British Library, Tartars Detail of the kings Russia and Fig. 12.

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MS. 2720 is very similar indeed to that on Add. MS. 11548, the main difference being that the decorations on his shield are more intricate on Add. MS. 11548. The image on the chart sold at Christie’s is also similar, but the sovereign’s clothes are more vividly coloured.

Legend 10 – Russia

Hic Rex coronatus Rossie est maximus & potentissimus huius regnum in tres diuiditur prouintias quarum prima dicta est Rossia secunda Maura Rossia tertia uoro [i.e. vero] Alba Rossia: hec regio habet homines in qualibet arte ingeniosos mercatoresque & maximas diuitiarum copia prexertim pellium cuiuscumque generis quarum frequenter tractant mercimonia in persia et transitum habent per mare caspium & per montes caspios & similiter in flandria & alibi per mare alamanie.160

Translation

This crowned king of Russia is very great and powerful. His realm is divided into three provinces, of which the first is called Russia, the second Black Russia, and the third White Russia. This region has men skilled in every art and merchants and great quantities of riches, particularly of furs of every type, which they often take as merchandise to Persia by crossing the Caspian Sea and Caspian Mountains and similarly to Flanders and to other places by way of the Sea of Germany.

Commentary

There are earlier charts that have images of the king of Russia (see below), but this is the first chart that has a detailed legend about Russia, so this is apparently a significant innovation by Freducci.161 There is a possibility of influence from Fra Mauro, as hismappamundi has a legend about the division of Russia into Red, Black, and White,162 but Borgiano V does not — so this is another probable instance of Freducci using information from Fra Mauro’s workshop, but from a source other than the map that served as a model for Borgiano V (compare the discussions above regarding tibro in Legend 2 and manna in Legend 3). The source of Freducci’s statement that Russia has men skilled in every art is uncertain; it recalls the statement in Legend 2 above that Mansa Musa has with him excellent mathematicians and men versed in the liberal arts. The rest of the legend is devoted to the Russian fur trade and the routes merchants took across the Baltic to Flanders and across the Caspian to Persia. The fur trade from Russia to Flanders

160 The corresponding legend on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720 is in good condition, is the same as that on Add. MS. 11548, except at the end, where it adds the words que dicitur glatiale, so that the sense is, ‘… the Sea of Germany, which is called the glacial sea’. This is the largest difference I have seen between the legends on Lucca MS. 2720 and Add. MS. 11548. 161 It is interesting to contrast Freducci’s legend about Turkey with the text about Russia that accompanies the Tabula moderna Gronlandiae et Russiae in the 1522 (Strasbourg), 1525 (Strasbourg), 1535 (Lyon), or 1541 (Vienna) edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. 162 Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), *2768, pp. 686-7. Another map from the same period as Fra Mauro’s which includes the division of Russia into White and Red is that of Nicholas Cusanus: see Alexandre V. Soloviev, ‘Weiss-, Schwartz- und Rotreussen: Versuch einer historisch-politischen Analyse’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vii (1959), pp. 1-33, reprinted in the author’s Byzance et la formation de l’État russe: recueil d’études (London, 1979), pp. 10 n. 25, 11 and 13-14, with discussion of the map’s date in Dana Bennett Durand, The Vienna-Klosterneuburg Map Corpus of the Fifteenth Century: A Study in the Transition from Medieval to Modern Science (Leiden, 1952), pp. 259-66; Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472-1500 (London, 1987), pp. 33-55; and Robert W. Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and their Maps (Chicago, 1993), pp. 131-7.

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had been under the control of the Hanseatic League, but around 1480 Russia began to win back trading rights in the West.163 Also, Russia’s trade to the south and east was impeded from the late fifteenth century well into the sixteenth century, so it seems that Freducci is using outdated information here. But it is not clear what his source is — the information does not come from Marco Polo, for example.

On Add. MS. 11548, Freducci (or the artist he hired) depicts the king of Russia as a Western sovereign (in contrast with the King of the Tartars) who holds a spear and a shield; his collar and cuffs seem to be lined with fur, which is appropriate given the information in the legend about the fur trade (see fig. 12). The image of the king on Lucca MS. 2720 is very similar to that on Add. MS. 11548, but the king is bare-chested and bare-armed, and is not wearing any fur. Freducci also depicts the king of Russia on his 1497 chart and the chart in Weimar which is attributed to him. The king on the Weimar chart, who is labelled Rex rossiae, is generic in appearance, and holds a sceptre; the sovereign on the 1497 chart, who is not labelled but who is just west of the toponym rossia, holds a scimitar and a shield. The greater artistic sophistication of the images on Add. MS. 11548 and Lucca MS. 2720 again suggests either substantial artistic development by Freducci or his hiring of a specialist to paint the sovereigns on Add. MS. 11548 and Lucca MS. 2720.

In fact, not only is Freducci’s legend about Russia on Add. MS. 11548 an important innovation, but the images of the Russian sovereign on his earlier charts are among the first in a cartographic context. The only earlier such image that comes to mind is that on Andrea Bianco’s mappamundi in his atlas of 1436.164

163 The stalls of the Church of St Nicolas in Stralsund, Germany, have fourteenth- or fifteenth-century wooden sculptures that depicted Russian hunters providing German Hanseatic traders with furs: see Janusz Sztetyłło, ‘Wokół snycerki ze Stralsundu (Strzałowa) zdobiącej stalle hanzeatów kupczących w Nowogrodzie’ [‘Regarding the Wooden Sculpture of Stralsund (Strzałów): The Case of the Stalls of the Hanseatic Merchants Dealing in Novgorod’], in Marta Młynarska-Kaletynowa and Jerzy Kruppé (eds.), O Rzeczach minionych: Scripta rerum historicarum Annae Rutkowska-Płachcińska oblata (Warsaw, 2006), pp. 319-27. On Russia’s efforts to win back trading rights from the Hanseatic League beginning in 1480 see Ju. A. Tihonov, ‘Feodaalisen Venäjän ulkomaankauppapolitiikka (ennen 1600-lukua)’ [‘The Foreign Trade Policy of Feudal Russia Before 1600’], Turun Historiallinen Arkisto, xxxvi (1982), pp. 87-105. Unfortunately the standard work on the medieval Russian fur trade, Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge, 1986), is not of help in connection with this legend of Freducci’s. 164 Bianco’s atlas is in Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS. It. Z 76 (4783), and has been reproduced in facsimile in Andrea Bianco, Atlante nautico 1436, ed. Piero Falchetta (Venice, 1993); and reproduced digitally in Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes (see n. 1), on the accompanying CD, number A18. The mappamundi in this atlas is reproduced in a hand-drawn facsimile in A. E. Nordenskiöld, Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing-Directions (Stockholm, 1897; New York, 1967), p. 19. The toponyms and legends are transcribed by Manuel Francisco de Barros Santarém, Essai sur l’histoire de la cosmographie et de la cartographie pendant le Moyen-âge (Paris, 1849-52), vol. iii, pp. 366-98; and Konrad Miller, Mappaemundi: Die ältesten Weltkarten (Stuttgart, 1895-98), vol. iii, pp. 143-5. In some of the atlases of Battista Agnese there is a map of Muscovy that includes an image of the King of Moscovy, and these maps are copies of a map by Paolo Giovio made in 1525, but Giovio’s map is lost, and not all of Agnese’s maps of Muscovy include this king, so it is not clear whether Giovio’s map included him. For discussion see Heinrich Michow, Die ältesten Karten von Russland, ein beitrag zur historischen Geographie (Hamburg, 1884), pp. 25-32 and plate 3; and Leo Bagrow, ‘At the Sources of the Cartography of Russia’, Imago Mundi, xvi (1962), pp. 33-48, esp. 39-42.

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Legend 11 – The Baltic Sea

Hoc mare apellatur mare alamanie suetie et gotilande et est nauigabile quum glatie non inpeditur verum per sex menses adeo per maximis frigoribus gelacsit [sic] et solidatur quum sit sub sidere quod dicitur la tramontana: ut currus tan quam terra sustineat et in eo piscatores construunt casas & tuguria & uiunt [sic] piscibus quos capiunt Ructa glatie per hoc mare transeunt merces magna copia maxime Tum Rossie quum tartarie et multa .c. Rebus persie que transeunt per mare caspium & Sericha & margarite et alia multa ut pellium maxima copia in boni genere et etiam de montibus caspiis.165

Translation

This sea is called the sea of Germany, of Sweden, and of Gotland, and is navigable as long as the ice does not interfere, but for six months [of the year] it freezes and solidifies because of the great cold under the North Star. The ice can bear wagons just like the ground and fishermen build houses and cottages on it and live from the fish they catch by breaking the ice. Across this sea there passes a great quantity of goods, mostly from Russia and Tartary and many hundreds of things from Persia which pass across the Caspian Sea, and silk and pearls and many other things, such as a great quantity of high-quality furs from the Caspian Mountains.

Commentary

This legend is an expansion of a traditional nautical chart legend about the Baltic166 that first appears on the Catalan Atlas of 1375:167

Aquesta mar és appallada mar de Lamanya e mar de Gothilàndia e de Súsia. E sapiats que aquesta mar és congalada .VI. meces de l’ayn, so és a saber, de migant uytubri tro migant març, axi fort que hom pot anar per esta mar ab carros de bous d’aquel temporal per la fredor de la tramontana.

This sea is called the German Sea, the Sea of Gotland, and the Sea of Sweden. And know that the sea is frozen for six months a year, that is, from mid-October to mid- March, and is so hard that you can pass over a bullock cart during that time because of the coldness of the north wind.

This legend appears on various other nautical charts with little variation, including Mecia de Viladestes’s chart of 1413, Gabriel Valseca’s chart of 1439, and Grazioso Benincasa’s chart of 1482. There is no legend about the Baltic on Freducci’s chart of 1497, but there is one on his attributed chart in Weimar, though it is now illegible; the presence of a legend on this latter chart (although we cannot read it) suggests that Freducci was familiar with the traditional legend. On Add. MS. 11548, Freducci has added two things to the traditional legend: information about

165 There is a corresponding legend about the Baltic on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720, but it is heavily damaged and almost completely illegible. 166 For general discussion of the history of the cartography of the Baltic see V. Bellio, ‘Alcune osservazioni sulla cartografia medievale del Mar Baltico’, Rivista Geografica Italiana, xiv (1907), pp. 449-75; M. Longhena, ‘Il mare del Nord ed il mare Baltico nelle carte del Pizigano (1367 e 1373) e del Bechario (1435)’, Atti del Congresso Geografico Italiano tenuto in Venezia 1907 (Venice, 1908), vol. ii, pp. 398-408; W. Kowalenko, ‘Baltyk i Pomorze w historii kartografii (VII-XVI w.)’, Przeglad zachodni, x (1954), pp. 353-89; and Mieczysław Stelmach, ‘The Beginnings of Cartography of the Baltic Sea: From Sailors’ Instructions to First Sea Maps (15th-16th Century)’, Studia maritima, xiii (2000), pp. 5-24. Also see Luigi G. de Anna, ‘Il Baltico e la coscienza europea’, Miscellanea di storia delle esplorazioni, xxv (2000), pp. 79-106. 167 The legend about the Baltic on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed and translated into Spanish in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 49; the translation here is mine.

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the fishermen building houses on the ice and fishing through it, and information about the trade that passes across the Baltic. I have not been able to determine the source that Freducci used for his information about huts for ice-fishing built on the frozen Baltic.168 With regard to the information about the trade on the Baltic, as indicated above in the commentary on Legend 10, it seems that Freducci is using outdated information here, as Russia’s trade to the south and east was impeded from the late fifteenth century well into the sixteenth century, but in any case I have not been able to determine what this evidently older source was.

Legend 12 – Scotland

Scotia uersus anglie aderet: sed aqua a montibus a parte meridionali est diuisa gens uius [i.e. huius] insule contra hostes suos est ferox ualerque ingenio acutissimo: In bello potius mortem quam seruitutem appetit Ista uero insula pascuis animalibus fructibis fontibus fluminibus hac homnium bonorum abundantium prestat et excellit.169

Translation

Scotland thus approaches England but is separated by water from the mountains in the southern part. The people of this island are ferocious and strong against their enemies and of a sharp intellect. In war they prefer death to servitude. This island is excellent for pasture animals, fruits, springs, rivers and all abundant good things.

Commentary

Legends about Ireland and its wonders are common on nautical charts, but there is no traditional nautical chart legend about Scotland. This legend represents another case where Freducci is using information from Fra Mauro’s workshop.170 There is a very similar legend about Scotland on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi,171 but the legend on Borgiano V is even more similar:172

Scotia come apare è contigua con anglia Ma è divisa da aqua et da monti da la parte meridionae E li popoli de ditta ixola est legerissima et feroce contra loro Inimici E sonno molto acuti de Ingegno E sonno de questa conditione che più tosto elegiranno la morte In batalia che la servitù Circa la Insula è fertilissima et da pascoli et animali frutti In copia fonti fiumi et abundantia de omni beno.

168 Olaus Magnus describes some huts built on the ice of the Baltic in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus 1.26, but says nothing about huts for ice-fishermen, and describes some elaborate ice-fishing techniques in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus 20.13, but this book was published well after Freducci made Add. MS. 11548. See Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, Romae 1555 = Description of the northern peoples, Rome 1555, trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens and ed. Peter Foote and John Granlund (London, 1996-98), vol. i, pp. 59-60, and vol. iii, pp. 1044-5, respectively. Unfortunately there is nothing about ice-fishing in Perrine Mane, ‘Images médiévales de la pêche en eau douce’, Journal des Savants, iii (1991), pp. 227-61. 169 There is a corresponding legend about Scotland on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720, but it is heavily damaged and almost completely illegible. 170 This legend is one of only two on Add. MS. 11548 (for the other see the commentary on Legend 14 below) that have been transcribed and translated before: see Heinrich Winter, ‘Scotland on the Compass Charts’, Imago Mundi, v (1948), pp. 74-7, at 76. Winter’s transcription and translation both contain a number of small errors. 171 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), p. 671, no. *2697; Falchetta’s translation of the legend runs: ‘As it is shown, Scotia appears contiguous to Anglia, but in its southern part it is divided from it by water and mountains. The people are of easy morals and are fierce and cruel against their enemies; and they prefer death to servitude. The island is very fertile in pastures, rivers, springs and animals and all other things; and it is like Anglia’.

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As it is shown, Scotia appears contiguous to Anglia, but in its southern part it is divided from it by water and mountains. The peoples of this island are of easy morals and very fierce against their enemies; and they are very sharp-witted. They are such that they would prefer death in battle to slavery. The island is very fertile and rich in pastures, animals, fruit, springs and river and all sorts of produce.

In this case Freducci did not expand the legend at all, in fact he abridged it slightly, removing the part about the Scots being legerissima or ‘of easy morals’. Fra Mauro’s source seems to have been Domenico Silvestri’s De insulis et earum proprietatibus (On Islands and Their Properties), an alphabetical encyclopaedia written between 1385 and 1410 that gives an account of every island Silvestri could find mentioned by classical or medieval authors.173 Silvestri’s entry for ‘Scotia’ has phrases that are very similar to the legends on Add. MS. 11548 and Borgiano V:174

Hec ex parte australi separatur ab Anglia ... Huius olim incole leves animoque feroces, erga suos benivoli et affabiles, contra hostes crudeles et asperi, sibi in campo mori quam in lecto gloriosus reputantes ... Hec autem in glebis fertilis, amena nemoribus, fluminibus inrrigua, pecorum et iumentorum fecunda ...

Scotland in its southern part is separated from England ... Its inhabitants were formerly unreliable and of a fierce spirit; towards their own people, they were kind and gentle, but against enemies, they were cruel and harsh, considering it more glorious to die in the field than in bed ... Moreover, this is fertile agricultural land, pleasant with forests, well watered by rivers, productive of flocks and beasts of burden ...

It seems then that Fra Mauro was making use of Silvestri’s island-book in composing this legend.175

At the same time it should be noted that Freducci’s depiction of the border between England and Scotland is essentially the same on Add. MS. 11548, Lucca MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s is essentially the same as on his various other works both earlier and later, beginning

172 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), p. 739; and Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), p. 20, legend 3. 173 For discussion of Silvestri’s work see Marica Milanesi, ‘Il De Insulis et earum proprietatibus di Domenico Silvestri (1385-1406)’, Geographia Antiqua, ii (1993), pp. 133-46. The text has been edited twice, first as Domenico Silvestri, De insulis et earum proprietatibus, ed. C. Pecoraro, Atti della Accademia di scienze, lettere e arti di Palermo, xiv (1954), pp. 1-319, and then as José Manuel Montesdeoca, Los islarios de la época del humanismo: el ‘De Insulis’ de Domenico Silvestri, edición y traducción (La Laguna, 2004) (CD-ROM edition). 174 See Pecoraro’s edition, pp. 216-7, and Montesdeoca’s, pp. 512-7. The translation is mine. Silvestri at the beginning of his entry on Scotland cites Fazio degli Uberti (1305 or 1309 to after 1367), referring to his Il Dittamondo, which suggests the possibility that Fra Mauro used Fazio as a source rather than Silvestri. The chapter of Fazio’s Dittamondo on Scotland (Book 4, chapter 26) has a couple of phrases similar to Fra Mauro’s and Freducci’s legends, but the similarities with Silvestri’s text are much closer, so it seems quite certain that Fra Mauro was using Silvestri. 175 Falchetta in his Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3) refers to Silvestri’s work a few times (see his legends *208, *220, *595, *2212, and *2690), but does not address the question of whether Fra Mauro made use of Silvestri’s work. On Fra Mauro’s sources see also Falchetta, pp. 52-60; Ingrid Baumgärtner, ‘Kartographie, Reisebericht und Humanismus. Die Erfahrung in der Weltkarte des venezianischen Kamaldulensermönchs Fra Mauro († 1459)’, Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung, iii (1998), pp. 161-97, esp. 177-92; Cattaneo, ‘Fra Mauro Cosmographus incomparabilis’ (see n. 63), pp. 37-42; Andrew Gow, ‘Fra Mauro’s World View: Authority and Empirical Evidence on a Venetian Mappamundi’, in P. D. A. Harvey (ed.), The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context (London, 2006), pp. 405-14; and Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (see n. 3), passim and esp. pp. 234-6 and 363-76. None of these works mentions Silvestri.

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with his chart of 1497. Freducci was already showing water between England and Scotland, following the practice of Grazioso Benincasa,176 so he did not need to modify his representation of the region based on his new legend derived from Fra Mauro.

Legend 13 – England

Notandum que ab antiquo insula Anglie Albium uocabatur hac uiusmodi [i.e. huiusmodi] nomine ab albedine montium et Riparum insule que sunt o plurimum albe et tunc a gigantibus abitabatur: Sed non nulli troiani a troiana subuersione superstites hanc insulam abitatum Acesserunt et cum ibidem moram trahere decreuissent: cum essent bellaces a ob diuturnam armorum usum militie experti ut essent animosiores et fortiores nauigia omnia sua ingne [sic] disiecerunt & ita totius insule inperium adepti fuerunt et a brito ipsorum duce britania uocitarunt: Mox saxones & germani eandem aquisiuerunt Ac ab una ipsorum Regina nomine Anglia Angliam uocauerunt: Istique populi studio diui gregorii pape qui ad ipsos Agustinum episcopum transmisit ad fidem yhesu christi conuersi sunt.177

Translation

Note that in ancient times the island of Anglia was called Albion, and got this name from the whiteness of the mountains and the shores of the island, which are mostly white, and which was then inhabited by giants. But some Trojans who survived the destruction of Troy came to this island to live and decided to stay there. As they were warlike and expert soldiers from their long practice with arms [and] as they were spirited and strong they burned all of their ships and so gained control of the whole island, and they called it Britain from the name of their leader, Brutus. Soon the Saxons and Germans acquired the island, and from the name of one of their queens, Anglia, they called it Anglia. And these people through the zeal of holy Pope Gregory, who sent to them Bishop Augustine, were converted to faith in Jesus Christ.

Commentary

There is no traditional nautical chart legend about England, but there is a legend on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi which is similar to the legend here.178 Borgiano V also has a legend about England; it is so faded that Winter declares it illegible, and Falchetta in his transcription and translation of the legends on that map does not mention it,179 but in fact the legend is just barely legible, and it is very similar indeed to Freducci’s legend on Add. MS. 11548:

Nota che anticamente la ixola di anglia era chiamata Albium e questa nome era deriuato della bianchesa delle montagne E dalle ripe dellixolla lequale o plurimum sonno bianche E in quel tenpo era abitata da giganti. Ma alcuni troiani che rimasero dopo le ruine de la gran Troia Vennero a questa ixola et auendo eu deliberato uolesse

176 Michael C. Andrews, ‘The Boundary between Scotland and England in the Portolan Charts’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, lx (1925-26), pp. 36-66, esp. 44. 177 There is no corresponding legend about England on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720. 178 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 672-73, no. *2706; Falchetta’s translation of the legend runs: ‘N. that in ancient times Anglia was inhabited by giants, but some Trojans who had survived the slaughter of Troy came to this island, fought its inhabitants and defeated them; after their prince, Brutus, it was named Britannia. But later the Saxons and the Germans conquered it, and after one of their queens, Angela, called it Anglia. And these peoples were converted to the Faith by means of St Gregory the pope, who sent them a bishop called Augustine’. 179 See Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), p. 20, legend 2; Falchetta transcribes and translates the legends on Borgiano V — except for the legend about England — in Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 739-53.

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patriare qui & esserr loro homini bellicosi & maistri di guerre per la continua & longe pratica dele arme Delibero per eser piu animosi & feroci de abiusare tutti loro Nauilij & cosi facendo Conquisto & obtinne la aquisto a tuta lixola & dal Suo principe chiamato brito la nomino britania Ma li sacsonii & germani la conquisto & da Vna su Regina chiamata Anglia cosi la chiamarono Anglia & questi popoli forono Alla fide conuertiti per de san gregorio papa el qui le limandoVn suo uescouo El quale era chiamato Agustino.

Note that in ancient times the island of Anglia was called Albion, and this name was derived from the whiteness of the mountains and the shores of the island, which are mostly white, and at that time [the island] was inhabited by giants. But some Trojans who remained after the destruction of great Troy came to this island and having deliberated carefully decided to stay here. As their men were warlike and expert soldiers from their continuous and long practice with arms, they decided, in order to be more spirited and fierce, to burn all of their ships, and doing so they gained control of the whole island, and from the name of their leader Brutus they called it Britain. But the Saxons and Germans conquered the island, and from one of their queens named Anglia they called it Anglia. And these people were converted to the faith by of the pope Saint Gregory, who sent to them a bishop named Augustine.

Thus we have here another case of Freducci drawing information for a legend on Add. MS. 11548 from the map by Fra Mauro that Freducci used as a model for Borgiano V. Brutus, incidentally, is a legendary descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas; according to medieval British legends, he was the founder and first king of Britain.180 Pope Gregory the Great chose Augustine, who later became St Augustine of Canterbury and known as the ‘Apostle of the English’, to lead a mission of evangelization to England in 595.181

With regard to Fra Mauro’s source for this legend, there is a similar passage in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum 15.14 (probably written between 1242 and 1247), which passage is abridged by Ranulf Higden in his Polychronicon 2.4-6 (finished in the 1340s).182 There is also a similar passage in Domenico Silvestri’s De insulis. As there is no passage in Bartholomaeus or Higden that might have been Fra Mauro’s source for his legend on Scotland, so that we can be quite certain that Fra Mauro used Silvestri’s De insulis for his legend on Scotland (see the commentary on Legend 12 above), it seems very likely that he used that same source for his legend on England. Here is the passage from Silvestri’s entry on Anglia:183

180 For discussion of the legend of Brutus see Marie-Françoise Alamichel, ‘Brutus et les Troyens: une histoire européenne’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, lxxxiv (2006), pp. 77-106. There is a brief legend on the late fourteenth-century Gough Map of Britain (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Gough Gen. Top. 16) about the arrival of Brutus and his Trojan followers to the island: off the South coast there is a text that reads hic Brutus applicuit cum Troiani, ‘Here Brutus landed with the Trojans’. See Nick Millea, ‘The Gough Map: Britain’s Oldest Road Map, or a Statement of Empire?’ in Robert Bork and Andrea Kann (eds.), The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 143-56, at 150; and Nick Millea, The Gough Map: The Earliest Road Map of Great Britain? (Oxford, 2007), pp. 41-3. 181 For discussion of Augustine and his mission to England see for example Richard Gameson, ‘Augustine of Canterbury: Context and Achievement’, and Robert Austin Markus, ‘Augustine and Gregory the Great’, in Richard Gameson (ed.), Augustine and the Conversion of England (Stroud, 1999), pp. 1-40 and 41-9, respectively. 182 The passage in Higden’s Polychronicon is conveniently translated into English and quoted in Latin by Kathy Lavezzo, on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), pp. 85 and 169-70.

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Hec olim vocata est Albiona propter rupes albas, sed post Ilionis eversionem quidam nobiles, ut in Cronicis Britannorum legitur, quorum dux Brito fuit, ex troiana provincia descend, habito responso ab oraculo Palladis, ad predicte insule litora, tunc a gigantibus occupate, applicuerunt. Qui, gigantibus superatis, insulam subiecerunt imperio ipsamque, ab ipso Britone eorum principe, Britaniam vocaverunt, ex cuius progenie virtuosi reges ac preclarissimi processerunt. Britones tamen suam prolem nobilitare volentes dicunt istum Britonem, sive Brutum, Silvii Iulii filii Enee fuisse. Deinde post longa tempora a Senonibus Germanicis insulam occupatam et inter eos divisam et cuilibet provincie nominibus impositis secundum proprietatem sue lingue. Tandem totam insulam ab Angela regina clarissima, ducis Senonum filia, ibidem predominata Angliam appellaverunt.

In the past it was called Albion because of its white rocks, but after the destruction of Troy, some nobles, as we read in Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, whose chief was Brutus and who came from the province of Troy, after receiving a response from the oracle of Pallas, reached the coast of the island, which was then occupied by giants. Having defeated the giants, they took control of the island and called it Britain after their chief Brutus, from whom virtuous and very distinguished kings descended. For the Britons, wishing to exalt their ancestry, say that Brito or Brutus was the son of Silvius Julius, the son of Aeneas. Then, much later, the island was occupied by the Germanic Senones, who divided it among themselves and named the provinces according to the nature of their own language. Finally, they called the whole island Anglia after the famous queen Angela, daughter of the chief of the Senones, who ruled there.

The two main details that appear in Fra Mauro’s and Freducci’s legends which are not in Silvestri are the burning of the ships184 and Pope Gregory’s sending of Augustine to England to convert the people to .

Legend 14 – The Island of Bra

Bra apelata est quedan insula hic infra que huiusmodi abet uitium ut homines nassi fatiat chaudatos & chodardi ditci sunt Uerum mulieres quum ad tenpus Veniunt pariendi ab hac abeunt ne pariant caudatos.185

Translation

A certain island here below is named Bra which has this fault, that it makes men to be born with tails, and they are called ‘chordadi’. In fact when the women come to the time of giving birth they leave it [the island] lest they bring forth tailed men.

183 See Pecoraro’s edition of Silvestri’s De insulis (see n. 173), p. 43, and Montesdeoca, Los islarios de la época del humanismo (see n. 173), pp. 38 and 40. The translation is mine. It should be remarked that there is a similar text about England in the supplementary descriptive text accompanying the first map of Europe in the 1522 (Strasbourg), 1525 (Strasbourg), 1535 (Lyon), or 1541 (Vienna) edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, but there is no evidence that Freducci made use of any other texts from any of these editions. 184 The detail about the burning of the ships, no doubt to be interpreted as a method to insure the commitment of the followers to victory, may have been borrowed from Orosius’s account of Agathocles of Syracuse, who burned his ships when he landed in Africa to attack Carthage (Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos 4.6.25), or from the account of Constantius Chlorus’s invasion of Britain in A.D. 296 in the Pangyrici Latini 8.15.1-3, on which see D. E. Eichholz, ‘Constantius Chlorus’ Invasion of Britain’, Journal of Roman Studies, xliii (1953), pp. 41-6.

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Commentary

This legend186 is a revised version of a traditional nautical chart legend, and the revisions are based on information from Fra Mauro’s workshop. On Add. MS. 11548 the legend is written just west of Ireland, and seems to describe an island in the Atlantic, though the traditional nautical chart legend apparently describes an island in a lake in Ireland. The traditional legend first appears on Angelino Dulcert’s chart of 1339, where it is part of a long legend about Ireland; I quote here just the part related to the legend on Add. MS. 11548 just cited:187

Etiam est allia insula in qua mulieres pregnantes nonquam pariunt sed quando sunt determinate ad peperiendon extra insulam deferuntur sem consuetudinem.

And there is another island in which pregnant women never give birth, but when they are ready to give birth, they are carried off the island in accordance with custom.

The corresponding part of the legend about Ireland on the Catalan Atlas is very similar, and the same is true of the lost Genoese chart mentioned above, Pareto’s chart of 1455, and map 2 of Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476.188 The corresponding part of the legend about Ireland on Freducci’s chart of 1497 is also very similar, so we know that Freducci was familiar with the traditional legend. The great difference, of course, between the traditional legend and that on Add. MS. 11548 is the assertion that the women leave the island because if they stay on it while they give birth, their children will have tails. There is nothing similar in Fra Mauro’s legend about Ireland on his mappamundi,189 but the legend on Borgiano V has a sentence which is very similar indeed to what we have on Add. MS. 11548:190

... e questo è certissimo de veduta pui è In una di queste ixolette piccole qui dintorno che tutti quelli che li nassi in ditta ixola nassi con la coda come d’un castrone e senpre che le loro donne voliono partorire vanno fora de ditta ixula elli partorissi secondo li loro antichi et consueti costumi.

There is also the fact that in one of the small islands around here all the people are born with a tail, like a goat; and when their women are about to give birth they leave that island and give birth in accordance with their ancient and usual customs.

185 There is a corresponding legend about the island of Bra on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720; it is faded and damaged, but the parts of it that are legible confirm that it is essentially the same as the legend on Add. MS. 11548. 186 This legend was previously transcribed and translated by Heinrich Winter, ‘Scotland on the Compass Charts’, Imago Mundi, v (1948), pp. 74-7, at 77, with minor errors. 187 The legend is transcribed by Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, ‘La història de l’Atles Català i l’enigma de l’autor’, in Llompart i Moragues et al., El mon i els dies: l’Atles Català, 1375 (see n. 106), p. 40; the translation is mine. Incidentally the source of the traditional legend seems to be Giraldus Cambrensis’s Topographia Hibernica 2.4. 188 The legend on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 31; the legend on the lost Genoese map is transcribed in Paviot, ‘Une mappemonde génoise disparue’ (see n. 143), p. 79, no. 2, with a French translation on p. 89. 189 For the legend about Ireland on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi see Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), p. 579, no. *2212. Just above (that is, just south of) Fra Mauro’s legend about Ireland on his mappamundi there is a cartouche for a legend that was not completed. This was perhaps intended for a legend about the Island of Bra, but we cannot be certain. 190 The transcription and translation of the legend on Borgiano V are from Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), p. 790; also see Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), p. 20, legend 1.

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Thus here again Freducci is using information from Fra Mauro’s workshop in the composition of his revised legends. As far as Fra Mauro’s source, once more he seems to be using Silvestri’s De insulis, in this case the entry on ‘Iberia’ (Ireland):191

… et etiam in illa villa, seu insula secus Anglia, homines chaudatos nasci, cuius argumentum fidei sit cum anglici sibi ad contumeliam reputent cum caudati vocentur.

… and in that town or island near Anglia, men with tails are born, which is believable, as the English consider it an insult when they are called ‘tailed’.

The claim that the English have tails is a medieval insult with a long history.192

Legend 15 – Ireland

In hac insula ibernie que supramodum est fertilissima dicitur et uere est inueniri quedam lacum maximum in eo insularum copia celebrem Cui est hoc mirum ut siquis in eo astam lignem ficserit pars aste que sub terra est per tenporis spatium Transit in ferrum: illud autem quod aquis circumdatur fit lapis & id quod super est lignum remanet prout erat et est uerissimum.193

Translation

In this island of Ireland which is extremely fertile it is said (and it is true) that there is a large lake in which there is a famous group of islands, and there is this marvel, that if one fixes a wooden post in the lake, the part which is below the ground turns into iron with the passage of time; the part which is surrounded by water turns to stone, and the part which is above [the water] remains wood as it was before — and this is entirely true.

Commentary

This legend is another revision of a traditional nautical chart legend using information from Fra Mauro’s workshop. The earliest surviving chart that has the traditional legend is Dulcert’s of 1339; that legend runs thus (including the text corresponding to Legend 14 above):194

In Hibernia, que Irlande dicitur, sunt multa mirabilia que credenda sunt, ut narat Yssidolus. Est autem in Hibernia insula quedan parva in qua homines nonquam moriuntur, sed quando nimio senio aficiuntur ut moriantur extra insulam deferuntur. Est alia insula in qua sunt arbores quibus aves portant et si papanos maturant. Etiam est allia insula in qua mulieres pregnantes nonquam pariunt sed quando sunt determinate ad peperiendon extra insulam deferuntur sem consuetudinem. Nulus est serpens, nula rana, nula aranea venenosa, ymmo tota tera est contraria, adeo venenosis terra, ut inde delata et dispersa, periunt.

191 See Pecoraro’s edition of Silvestri’s De insulis (see n. 173), p. 127, and Montesdeoca, Los islarios de la época del humanismo (see n. 173), p. 292. The translation is mine. 192 For discussion of the insult about the English having tails see George Neilson, Caudatus Anglicus: A Mediaeval Slander (Edinburgh, 1896); Albert Stimming, ‘Die ‘geschwäntzen’ Engländer’, in Studi letterari e linguistici dedicati a Pio Rajna nel quarantesimo anno del suo insegnamento (Florence, 1911), pp. 475-90; and Peter Rickard, ‘Anglois coué and l’Anglois qui couve’, French Studies, vii (1953), pp. 48-55. 193 There is a corresponding legend about Ireland on Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720; it is faded and damaged, but the parts of it that are legible confirm that it is essentially the same as the legend on Add. MS. 11548. 194 The legend is transcribed by Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, ‘La història de l’Atles Català i l’enigma de l’autor’, in Llompart i Moragues et al., El mon i els dies: l’Atles Català, 1375 (see n. 106), p. 40; the translation is mine.

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In Hibernia, which is called Ireland, there are many wonders which are to be believed, as Isidore describes. In Ireland there is a small island in which men never die, but when they are very old they are carried away so that they die off of the island. There is another island in which there are trees that have birds which grow like vines. And there is another island in which pregnant women never give birth, but when they are ready to give birth, they are carried off the island in accordance with custom. There is no serpent, no frog, no poisonous spider, indeed just the contrary: the land is so poisonous, that if these creatures are brought there, they die.

The source of the traditional legend on Ireland is not Isidore, as Dulcert suggests, but rather Giraldus Cambrensis’s Topographia Hibernica (written c. 1188), directly or indirectly.195 The traditional legend about Ireland appears with few significant variations on many later nautical charts, including the 1367 Pizzigani chart, the Catalan Atlas, Mecia de Viladestes’s chart of 1413, map 2 of Andrea Benincasa’s atlas of 1476, and Freducci’s chart of 1497. The legend on Add. MS. 11548 says that when a wooden post is fixed in a particular lake, part of it changes to iron, and part to stone, and the legend on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi is very similar,197 as is the legend on Borgiano V (I omit the part of this legend about the children with tails cited in the commentary on Legend 14 above):198

Nota che anticamente In questa ixola de ibernia la qual oltra modo è fertilissima se dici eserli un’aqua In la quale chi li mette dentro legno quella parte che è In la terra con tempo diventa ferro e quella parte che è circondata dall’aqua reman legno e questo è certissimo de veduta....

Note that in ancient times it was said that in Hibernia, which is most extraordinarily fertile, there was water which, if wood was immersed in it, that part which had remained [fixed in] the ground turned into iron, while the part in the water remained wood; and this thing is certain because it was seen….

Falchetta in his commentary on the legend in Fra Mauro’s mappamundi cites the same story about the post in Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo 4.26.46-51, and also in Silvestri’s De insulis; given Fra Mauro’s apparent use of Silvestri’s work in his legends about Scotland, England, and the island Bra (see the commentary on Legends 12, 13, and 14 above) which were copied onto Borgiano V, it seems very likely that he used Silvestri as a source for his legend about Ireland as well. Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum (composed c. 1185 - c.1216) tells of a spring

195 So Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘Imagen y conocimiento del mundo’ (see n. 1), vol. i, pp. 408-9: the island where men do not die comes from Topographia Hibernica 2.4, the island with the tree that produces birds from 1.11, and the island where women do not give birth from 2.4. For discussion of the tree that produces birds like fruit, see Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, ‘Report on a Wild Goose Chase’, Journal of the History of Collections, vii (1995), pp. 25-44, revised as Peter Mason, ‘Birds that Grow on Trees’, in his Before Disenchantment: Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World (London, 2009), pp. 61-86; and Maaike Van Der Lugt, ‘Animal légendaire et discours savant médiéval. La barnacle dans tous ses états’, Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali, viii (2000), pp. 351-93. 196 The legend on the Catalan Atlas is transcribed in Mapamundi del año 1375 (see n. 88), p. 31; that on the Pizzigani chart is transcribed by Mario Longhena, ‘La carta dei Pizigano del 1367 (posseduta dalla Biblioteca Palatina di Parma)’, Archivio Storico per le Provincie Parmensi, v (1953), pp. 25-130, at 68-70. 197 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), p. 579, no. *2212. 198 See Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), p. 739; also see Winter, ‘The Fra Mauro Portolan Chart’ (see n. 39), p. 20, legend 1.

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in Iceland that turns any object into stone,199 and a similar story about wood turning into stone through the action of water is told by Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia imperialia, written c. 1215.200

Conclusions

The legends on Add. MS. 11548 represent a laborious revision and expansion of traditional nautical chart legends. Several of Freducci’s legends (Legends 2, 3, and 12-15) incorporate information from Fra Mauro’s workshop, and thus this map demonstrates the continued influence and appreciation of Fra Mauro in the sixteenth century. The sources of the additional information in some other legends are difficult to determine, and some of the added information is surprising or unexpected, such as the claim that Mauritania was never subject to Roman law (Legend 1), the description of the rite in which the King of Nubia gives his weight in gems and pearls to his idols (Legend 4), and the claim that the land of the Tartars is marshy (Legend 9). Freducci’s choice of these recondite pieces of information — information which in some cases is contrary to what one would find in the usual sources about these regions — is difficult to account for. Perhaps Freducci or his client had a taste for exotic geographic and ethnographic information.

One possible explanation is that Freducci was making use of an author who had already gathered recondite ethnographical and geographical information from many sources, some of which are no longer available to us — namely Fra Mauro.201 As mentioned above in the commentary on Legends 2, 3, and 10, Freducci’s use of the toponym gulphus auri, mention of manna in north central Africa, and description of the division of Russia into Red, Black, and White, which Fra Mauro mentions on his mappamundi but do not appear on Borgiano V, indicate that Freducci had access to geographical information from Fra Mauro’s workshop besides that in the map that he (Freducci) used as a source for Borgiano V. Thus Freducci had some of Fra Mauro’s notebooks or other writings in which Fra Mauro had assembled the information he used in the compilation of the legends on his maps, and it is tempting to think that some of the recondite information in the revised legends may have come from that document. Perhaps this other document from Fra Mauro’s workshop was something like Codex 1112 in Mittarelli’s catalogue of the library of San Michele in , which was a manuscript by Fra Mauro that had descriptive texts more detailed than those on his mappamundi (see p. 12 above).

It is worth emphasizing again, however, that it seems very unlikely that all of Freducci’s new information could have come from this document. We have good reason to think that Freducci composed some of the new legends on Add. MS. 11548 himself, such as the legend on Turkey (see Legend 8 above), and Legend 1 on Mauritania seems to make use of Procopius’s account of

199 See Saxo Grammaticus, The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans. Oliver Elton (London, 1894), p. 10. 200 See Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, edited and translated by S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), Book III, chapter 4, pp. 568-71: ‘I know of a wood in England, in the diocese of Lincoln, between London and Northampton, at a hamlet which the people call Aspley; if any trees of this wood are felled and thrown into the water of a brook which flows through it, or buried in the dry ground by the water’s edge, and are then left for the space of a year lodged in either the water or the earth, when the year has turned full circle the timber proves to have taken on the hardness of rock; and into whatever shape it is transformed by any manner of hewing or carving, it appears as heavy and solid as stone. If, however, the timber is not hewn, but is planted, it takes root, as happens in other soil’. 201 One example of a legend on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi that contains exotic information from an unknown source is his account of a Chinese junk reaching the southern parts of Africa in 1420: see Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 178-81, *19. As Angelo Cattaneo notes, this may be the first European report of the Chinese expansion in the Indian Ocean: see his Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (see n. 3), pp. 118-22, at 119.

64 eBLJ 2017, Article 6 Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro

the Vandalic War, which was not published until 1509. It is possible that Fra Mauro had access to information from a Greek manuscript of Procopius, but the matter is not clear: I know of no other information on Fra Mauro’s mappamundi or Borgiano V that comes from Procopius, but on the other hand it does seem that Fra Mauro could access works in Greek, as he evidently cites Strabo before the first Latin translation of that author was completed.202

Setting aside the question of sources, British Library MS. Add. 11548, Lucca, Biblioteca Statale MS. 2720, and the chart sold at Christie’s are unique in medieval and Renaissance cartography. At the beginning of this article I cited other examples of maps with new legends, but Freducci’s are the only maps with new legends which in all other respects are so purely traditional nautical charts: both the geographical area they cover and most of the graphical elements (rhumb lines, , images of sovereigns, etc.) are traditional. The client evidently wanted a traditional luxury chart with just one difference, longer legends, that is, more detailed geographical and ethnographic information. He evidently had no interest in the recently discovered parts of the world (southern Africa, Southeast Asia, the New World), but did want more information about the long-known parts of the world.

This investigation has enabled us to emphasize the distinctive character of these three charts and make some deductions about their commission; it has also allowed us to recognize these three maps, together with Borgiano V, Giorgio Calapoda’s 1541 chart, and the three atlases by Angelo Freducci, as part of a remarkable sixteenth-century diffusion of Fra Mauro’s cartographic knowledge. The rich connections between the Freduccis and Fra Mauro’s cartographic legacy certainly deserve further study.203

202 Fra Mauro’s mappamundi is dated to c. 1450, and the first Latin translation of Strabo, that of Guarino da Verona, was made between 1453 and 1458. For discussion of this question see Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, (see n. 3), pp. 44-6; for discussion of Guarino’s translation see E. B. Fryde, ‘The Historical Interests of Guarino of Verona and his Translations of Strabo’s Geography’, in his Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London, 1983), pp. 55-82. For the legend in which Fra Mauro cites Strabo see Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (see n. 3), pp. 444-7, no. *1380. 203 I wish to thank Natalia Lozovsky, Gregory McIntosh, Bill Richardson, and Corradino Astengo for their advice with various questions I encountered in preparing this study.

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