Antique World Map — Sanudo’s Mappa Mundi, Jomard Facsimile

Every inscription on the sheet

Names are given letter for letter, with the sheet’s abbreviation marks, placed as in standard transcription; words in square brackets are our expansion or translation. The sheet is read with east at the top. Only names that can be read with certainty at the full resolution of the scan are listed; doubtful letters are left out, not guessed.

• The top of the circle, the east: finis Indie [the end of India]; a legend that begins India and ends iohīs pbri [of John the Priest]; India magna [Greater India]; beside them an eastern sea scattered with small oval islands, none of them named.
• The upper left, the north-east of Asia: hic regnū cathay [here is the kingdom of Cathay] in bold letters; a second, smaller legend lower down, ending cathay; h[ic] stat magn[us] canis [here is the Great Khan], beside a river; mōtes caspy [the Caspian mountains]; caspium mare [the Caspian Sea], drawn as a closed sea; Bacta.
• Beside yrcania: the longest legend on the map, about twenty lines of abbreviated Latin; of its words, mōtes caspios [the Caspian mountains] can be read with certainty.
• The Indian Ocean, down the right side: islands, among them celta les and elfa rie, and a ring of small oval islands; on the far shore Ethyopia orientali[s] [eastern Ethiopia].
• Africa, at the lower right: egyptus, spelled out letter by letter along the Nile; Nubia; ethyopia īferior [lower Ethiopia]; Garamātia p.; on the coast p. bizacena and zeugis cartago [the district of Zeugis and Carthage].
• The middle of the Mediterranean: tracia, macedōia and achaya on the European side; Galacia and lidia in Asia Minor; Sicilia; ystria at the head of the Adriatic.
• Northern Europe, at the lower left: Riga, prucia [Prussia] and estonia on the Baltic; framed at the very edge, Kareli īfideles [the infidel Karelians]; inland polonia and Boemia; across the sea Scania and dacia [Denmark]; the river odra [Oder].
• Western Europe, at the foot of the circle: frācie [France] with burgūdia, picādia and nōmania; gascōia and pictauia; colonia, spira and basila; in Iberia castela, aragon, catelōia and galicia; on the African side maūtania and Numidia.

Differences on the sheet itself: Cathay is named twice, once in a bold legend and once in a smaller one lower down. No rhumb lines are drawn anywhere on the sheet.

Editions and other known copies

• Bibliothèque de Genève, BGE Musée cartogr. 1/72 — this copy. [Mappemonde de Sanudo], from Jomard’s Monuments de la géographie, “publiés en fac similé de la grandeur des originaux par M. Jomard”, Paris: Duprat, [18--?], number 13 in the record; 1 map, diameter 34 cm; creator in the record: Sanutus, Marinus; scan on e-rara, Public Domain Mark.
• Bibliothèque nationale de France — Jomard’s atlas as a whole, dated in its catalogue Paris, Duprat, [1846–1862].
• The manuscripts: according to Cortney Berg, maps are found in nine of the twenty surviving copies of Sanudo’s book. She studies the London copy, British Library Add MS 27376, which the British Library catalogue describes as fourteenth-century maps illustrative of Sanuto’s work on Palestine.
• The printed edition: by 1911 the whole Secreta fidelium crucis had been printed only once, by Bongars in 1611, in the Gesta Dei per Francos, according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Stanford University Libraries: a printed world map after Pietro Vesconte from the Bongars edition of 1611.

The record does not say which manuscript Jomard reproduced, and none of the sources above names one; what is said here about the manuscripts rests on their descriptions.

Catalog entries and sources

Bibliothèque de Genève: shelfmark BGE Musée cartogr. 1/72; e-rara record 26117835, scan file 26117836; DOI 10.3931/e-rara-91509; the record’s date field reads 1800, and its DataCite entry gives the language as it, Italian, while the inscriptions on the sheet are in Latin. Bibliothèque nationale de France: catalogue record FRBNF40701189 for the atlas. British Library: Add MS 27376.

Sources for the story and this record: the Bibliothèque de Genève record on e-rara and its DataCite entry; the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, article on Marino Sanuto; Cortney Berg, “Sanudo’s Vision, Vesconte’s Expertise, and the Ghost Hand: Reception of the Maps in the MS Additional 27376”, Material Culture Review 94 (2022); David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi”, The History of Cartography, volume 1, chapter 18; the British Library catalogue; the Bibliothèque nationale de France on Jomard and its record of the atlas; the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia on its copy of the atlas; the Stanford University Libraries record of the 1611 printed world map.

This copy

The sheet is printed in black and grey on cream paper, without color: the seas are shaded with wavy lines and the land is left plain. A fold runs down the middle, with a fainter vertical crease to the left of it, and near the top edge, above the islands of the eastern sea, there is a small hole in the paper. On the archive scan a pasted label at the upper left read …me siècle., its first part cut away, with XIV written beside it in pencil; both were removed from the print file, and under the label the ring of Ocean was continued with the texture of the same ring. The grey-blue background around the round sheet is the scanner’s, taken back from the archive scan.