Mapping Africa
This page of our website will discuss the mapping of Africa in the sixteenth century and elaborate on a few developments leading to the publication of Livio Sanuto's Geografia dell'Africa in 1588. Historically, Africa had long been represented as a schematic on T-O maps, but as exploration boomed in the sixteenth century, cartographers, beginning with Juan de la Cosa, a pilot who served under Columbus, began making maps based on knowledge from eye witness accounts by navigators. Juan de la Cosa produced a manuscript map accurately representing part of the African coastline, demonstrating a shift away from sketching schematic representations of the continent. His map also reflects a growing emphasis on depicting Africa’s rivers. References to the African coastline and topography, particularly Africa’s waterways, will reappear frequently throughout this page.
Juan de la Cosa’s map was followed by Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map (left), which prominently features Africa’s rivers, in addition to a few other topographical features. Waldseemüller's map draws from both nautical charts and Ptolemaic ideas, demonstrating that when mapping regions during this time, cartographers sought to combine both old and new understandings of the world. This map includes port names, a few rivers and mountain ranges, and a few images, including an image of an elephant. However, Africa’s topographical features are somewhat sparsely represented in this map compared to in later maps. As a result, contrasts of early maps of Africa primarily focus on how they portray famous rivers, such as the Nile. Waldseemüller's map includes a conventional representation of the Mountains of the Moon and the two lakes where the Nile originates in the eastern portion. Somewhat unconventionally though, Africa's tip seemingly juts past the map’s original border, perhaps reflecting surprising new knowledge of the possibility of sailing around Africa’s tip, which becomes critical in the production of later maps.
Andrea Benincasa’s portolan chart of the Mediterranean from 1508 (right) shows part of Africa as well, but only the part bordering the Mediterranean because portolan charts focus on navigation. When mapping inland Africa, Benincasa emphasizes port cities, setting the stage for future hydrographic mapping. Despite this emphasis on waterways, a key characteristic of how mapmakers imagined the region, Benincasa’s portolan chart also reflects the presence of certain topographical features, such as mountain ranges, with the most prominent being the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. The trend of focusing on Africa as it relates to the Mediterranean and waterways, and illustrating the continent’s topographical features, continues throughout the sixteenth century.
Later maps from the sixteenth century continue to focus on depicting new understandings of the world obtained from exploration, a driving motivation in mapmaking. Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro created the Castiglioni World Map (left) in 1525 based on information from Spanish explorers and navigators. Africa's depiction in this map is much sparser than it is in the aforementioned maps. Its coastline includes detailed port names, but the previously seen topographical features, such as mountains, in addition to other images, are noticeably missing; instead, this map primarily features coastlines and wind roses. However, Africa’s coastline is complete and appears possible to sail around, demonstrating progress in representing the continent’s shape.
By the second half of the sixteenth century, topographical features become very common in the mapping of Africa due to trends in Venetian cartography. As a printing center and clearinghouse for knowledge, Venice became a hub of mapmaking, and many of the maps produced there focus on waterways due to the Venetian economy’s dependence on maritime trade. Giacomo Gastaldi's topographically focused Map of 1564 (right), a regional map of Africa, primarily depicts Africa's mountains, rivers, and port cities. These rivers include the Nile and Congo, in addition to other other central lakes and rivers and their connections, features that became fundamental in representing Africa.
Sanuto's Geografia dell'Africa, an atlas published in 1588 and containing 12 regional maps of Africa, similarly sought to depict as many of Africa’s geographical features as possible based on eye witness accounts gathered during the Age of Exploration. Therefore, like many of the other maps featured on this page, Sanuto's maps drew on new knowledge, rather than simply treating Ptolemy’s Geography, a dominant text at the time, as incontestable. Maps one through 11 of Sanuto’s work capture specific regions of Africa, and five of those maps depict different sections of the Mediterranean Sea and the African coastline. In this way, Sanuto's maps again share commonalities with the other maps on this page; they focus on the coastal regions, particularly the Mediterranean, due to the importance of exploration and navigation and the desire to map regions according to these goals. The other six maps depict snapshots of other corners of Africa.
Sanuto’s twelfth map (left) depicts Africa as a whole and shares many similarities with Gastaldi's map, particularly in its depiction of topographical features; hills and mountain ranges symbolized by bump-like shapes litter this map, and the difference in size among these features becomes more apparent in the 11 more zoomed in maps. Sanuto also depicts rivers, continuing the longstanding trend of emphasizing African waterways when mapping the continent. Overall, Sanuto’s atlas helps to synthesize much of the knowledge of Africa reflected in the other maps on this page.
Bibliography
Cosgrove, Denis. “Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in Sixteenth-Century Venice.” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 65–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1151230.
Randles, W. G. L. “South-East Africa as Shown on Selected Printed Maps of the Sixteenth Century.” Imago Mundi 13 (1956): 69–88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1150243.