Representing Europe Over Time

Fig 2. T-O map visually depicting the known world, see Europe in the lower left corner (Liber Floridus)

The way that Europe’s geographic portrayal has shifted over time has naturally developed with mapping technologies and ideas of the representation of space. However, from its conception, Europe has had a consistent desire to represent itself as significant and powerful. 

Some of the earliest map depictions of Europe are found in medieval Christian “T-O” maps. As we can see in Fig. 1, T-O maps take the form of the two letters — the “O” representing the encircling ocean, and the “T” depicting the great rivers which divided the land: the Mediterranean, the River Don, and the Nile. The land, cut into three clear segments by the waters, represented the three known continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. Thus, in these T-O maps, Europe always inhabited a quarter to a third of the world’s surface. In a strongly Chrisitan society, medieval T-O maps emphasized the symmetry and order of God’s universe. This form of mapping was flexible, and encompassed religious, informational, cultural, and geographic purposes.

As new mapping technology emerged, and increased sea exploration led to a better understanding of the world, the spatial perception of Europe began to change. The influence of Ptolemaic mapping techniques, increased interaction with the Turkish and Arab communities, and advances in cartographic mathematics led to the development of maps with increased empirical accuracy. With this increased empirical understanding of the world’s geography, the relative size of Europe shrunk dramatically – European cartographers were faced with the reality that Europe is relatively insignificant on a geographic scale. This posed an issue to their agenda of portraying Europe as a center of power and culture on maps. 

To counter this decrease in size and perceived importance, cartographers created Eurocentric representations of the world, placing Europe as the central focus. In the 1550s, Mercator’s new projection provided a successful means to position Europe in the center of the world. The Mercator projection (Fig. 3), designed to aid in sea navigation, flattened out the curves of the Earth, minimizing the Mediterranean and emphasizing the Northern hemisphere. This projection effectively exaggerated both the centrality and size of Europe. In Fig. 4, we can see this visual “stretching” of Europe in more focus in a regional map of the area included in the Mercator Atlas. This projection suited Renaissance desires to highlight Europe’s role as influential and significant. The influence of this type of representation of Europe is still very common in contemporary world maps, and has influenced the way Europe has been perceived for thousands of years.