This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| Cartae Antiquae | |
|---|---|
| Name | Cartae Antiquae |
| Caption | Hypothetical example of a Cartae Antiquae-style map |
| Type | Cartographic artifact |
| Period | Antiquity to Early Modern Period |
| Material | Parchment, papyrus, vellum, parchment-cloth composites |
| Location | Various museums, archives, private collections |
Cartae Antiquae Cartae Antiquae denotes a corpus of pre-modern cartographic sheets associated with antiquity and the early medieval to early modern transition, preserved in collections such as the Vatican Library, British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bodleian Library, and Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. These sheets are studied across institutions like the Ashmolean Museum, Museo Nazionale Romano, Library of Congress, Deutsches Historisches Museum and by scholars at Cambridge University, Oxford University, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Research intersects projects at the Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian Institution, Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
The term derives from Latin cartae and antiquae as used in medieval inventories compiled in archives at Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Vatican Secret Archives, Archivo General de Indias and referenced in catalogues from the British Museum, Royal Library of Belgium, National Library of Russia and Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Early modern cataloguers at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden used related labels in inventories alongside manuscripts from the collections of Ludovico Sforza, Cosimo de' Medici, Francis I of France, Maximilian I, Charles V, and Henry VIII. Philologists at École des Chartes, Instituto degli Studi Romani, Real Academia de la Historia, Austrian Academy of Sciences and Royal Historical Society clarified its usage in catalogues.
Cartae Antiquae originate in practices linked to cartographic works from the era of Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Marinus of Tyre and itineraries tied to Antonine Itinerary and Tabula Peutingeriana, with transmission through scribes in scriptoria affiliated to Monte Cassino, Lorsch Abbey, Saint Gall Abbey, Cluny Abbey and royal chanceries of Carolingian Empire, Byzantine Empire, Umayyad Caliphate, Abbasid Caliphate and later Ottoman Empire. They were influenced by treatises such as those by Al-Idrisi, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, Gerard of Cremona, Roger Bacon, Marco Polo’s accounts, and navigational compilations from Prince Henry the Navigator, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook. Patronage from courts including Medici, Habsburgs, Bourbons, Stuart monarchy, Portuguese Crown and Spanish Crown shaped their proliferation.
Categories include portolan-style sheets used by merchants from Marseilles, Genoa, Venice, Lisbon and Barcelona; mappa mundi associated with scholars from Canterbury Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, University of Paris and University of Bologna; itineraries and periplus texts used by agents of Knights Templar, Templars records, Teutonic Order, Hanseatic League merchants and Order of Saint John; and cadastral or chorographic sheets commissioned by authorities in Florence, Naples, Seville, Vienna, Prague and Warsaw. Substrates include papyrus collections from Oxyrhynchus, vellum codices in Saint Petersburg, parchment fragments in Jerusalem, and paper introduced via workshops in Seville, Antwerp, Nuremberg and Amsterdam influenced by papermakers from Xàtiva and Fabriano.
Production combined practices recorded by technicians linked to workshops of Fra Mauro, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Abraham Ortelius, Gerardus Mercator, Matteo Ricci, Martin Waldseemüller, Sebastian Münster and instrument-makers in Nuremberg and Padua. Techniques include portolan rhumb-line networks used by pilots from Palermo, Majorca, Sicily and Catalonia; projection experiments discussed in correspondences involving Johannes Kepler, Eratosthenes’s legacy, Hipparchus’s methods, and later refinements by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville and William Faden. Illumination and script styles show influence from workshops connected to Luca Pacioli, Vincenzo Coronelli, Andrea Alciato, Athanasius Kircher and print houses such as Gutenberg, Aldus Manutius, Plantin Press and Christopher Plantin.
Cartae Antiquae are documented across regions documented by travelers like Ibn Fadlan, Zheng He, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, Ibn Majid, Friar Odoric of Pordenone, William of Rubruck and diplomats in records of Treaty of Tordesillas, Peace of Westphalia, Treaty of Utrecht, Treaty of Nystad and Treaty of Karlowitz. Collections appear in repositories such as Hermitage Museum, Louvre Museum, Rijksmuseum, Prado Museum, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Morgan Library & Museum, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and ecclesiastical treasuries in Santiago de Compostela, Canterbury Cathedral and Chartres Cathedral. Regional practices vary in Iberia, Italy, Levantine centers like Damascus and Alexandria, North African ports like Tunis and Algiers, Scandinavian archives in Stockholm and Copenhagen, and East Asian courts including Ming dynasty and Tokugawa shogunate repositories.
The corpus influenced cartographers such as Abraham Ortelius, Gerardus Mercator, Martin Waldseemüller, Pieter van der Aa, John Speed, Jodocus Hondius, Herman Moll, Thomas Jefferys, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville and Alexander von Humboldt and informed navigational practices of Royal Navy, Dutch East India Company, British East India Company, Portuguese India Armadas and explorers like Samuel de Champlain, Henry Hudson, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Ferdinand Magellan, Francis Drake and Abel Tasman. Its motifs recur in atlases such as those by Ortelius Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Mercator Atlas and in cartographic theory debates involving Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Ratzel and Carl Ritter.
Preservation efforts involve conservation labs at Smithsonian Institution Conservation Center, Bibliothèque nationale de France Conservation Department, British Library Conservation Centre, Vatican Museums Restoration Laboratory, Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and digitization initiatives by Europeana, World Digital Library, Digital Public Library of America and university projects at Princeton University Library, Harvard Library, Yale Center for British Art and Bodleian Libraries. Modern reconstructions employ GIS methods from Esri, spectral imaging developed with teams at NASA, European Space Agency, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and computational analyses by groups at Oxford Internet Institute, MIT Media Lab, Stanford Libraries and University College London. Exhibitions have been mounted at Victoria and Albert Museum, Museo Galileo, Royal Geographical Society, Science Museum London, New York Historical Society and Field Museum.
Category:Cartography Category:Historical maps