How two Germans invented America

When you enter the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, the first exhibit you will be facing is their Gutenberg Bible. And it is one of the finest Gutenberg bibles around, one of only three surviving pristine copies on vellum. This was the kind of bible that was so expensive to produce, it bankrupted Gutenberg. When the Library of Congress bought it in 1930, they paid $375,000, roughly $7.5m in today’s money.

But this is not the most expensive piece in the library’s collection. That would a work by two Germans, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. And it is not even a book, but a map. Not a small map, it is 2.3m or 91 inches wide and 1.3m or 50 inches tall. And this map, printed in 1507 claimed to be:

A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH
A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION
OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY
DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN

And the authors wrote that the three continents known since antiquity, Europe, Africa and Asis, quote “have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.” End quote.

This fourth part, they said was “surrounded on all sides by the ocean”. And indeed, in the left lower corner we find a fourth continent, a thin, stretched thing, with few place names and a western shore that hints at the Peruvian bulge, unmistakably, South America and then to north of it a very indistinguishable blob of land.

This map, proudly displayed as America’s Birth Certificate, is full of the most intriguing mysteries. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann know that the Americas had a western shore, when it was only in 1513, 6 years later, that a European first glanced the Pacific?

How did the name America stick though Amerigo Vespucci had never led an expedition, not even commanded a ship? But most of all, why was this first map of America drawn not by a Spanish or Portuguese navigator, but by two Germans in the employ of the duke of Lorraine, working in St. Die, which is as far away from the sea as one can get in Western Europe.

And then, more generally, what did the Germans have to do with the discoveries, the maps and globes that told the world about them? That is what we will explore in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 201 – Mapping the World, or how two Germans invented America, which is also episode 16 of season 10 “The Empire in the 15^th century”.

When you enter the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, the first exhibit you will be facing is their Gutenberg Bible. And it is one of the finest Gutenberg bibles around, one of only three surviving pristine copies on vellum. This was the kind of bible that was so expensive to produce, it bankrupted Gutenberg. When the Library of Congress bought it in 1930, they paid $375,000, roughly $7.5m in today’s money.

But this is not the most expensive piece in the library’s collection. That would a work by two Germans, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. And it is not even a book, but a map. Not a small map, it is 2.3m or 91 inches wide and 1.3m or 50 inches tall. And this map, printed in 1507 claimed to be:

A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH
A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION
OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY
DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN

And the authors wrote that the three continents known since antiquity, Europe, Africa and Asis, quote “have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.” End quote.

This fourth part, they said was “surrounded on all sides by the ocean”. And indeed, in the left lower corner we find a fourth continent, a thin, stretched thing, with few place names and a western shore that hints at the Peruvian bulge, unmistakably, South America and then to north of it a very indistinguishable blob of land.

This map, proudly displayed as America’s Birth Certificate, is full of the most intriguing mysteries. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann know that the Americas had a western shore, when it was only in 1513, 6 years later, that a European first glanced the Pacific?

How did the name America stick though Amerigo Vespucci had never led an expedition, not even commanded a ship? But most of all, why was this first map of America drawn not by a Spanish or Portuguese navigator, but by two Germans in the employ of the duke of Lorraine, working in St. Die, which is as far away from the sea as one can get in Western Europe.

And then, more generally, what did the Germans have to do with the discoveries, the maps and globes that told the world about them? That is what we will explore in this episode.

But before we start another big, big thank you to all of you supporting the show. Not only financially, but also with your emails and messages of encouragement. As you can imagine, solo podcasting can be a bit of a lonely pursuit and feedback, in particular your incredibly nice feedback, makes this so much more enjoyable.

And today we should appreciate Gijs C., Gary W., James M., Vincent V., Fabian S., Mike K., Joseph C., Duncan Hardy, whose upcoming book you can find in the book recommendations, and Eamon M., whose generous help at historyofthegermans.com/support keeps the enjoyment coming.

And with that, back to the show

Maps have always exerted a huge influence on the human mind. I know that if I publish a post on social media with a map in it, it attracts two or three times the audience of my usual posts.

Mapmaking might go as far back as 7000 BC when the neolithic inhabitants of Chatalhoyuk in Turkey painted a plan of their town and two distant volcanos onto the walls of a house. The British museum holds the oldest known world map, the Babylonian world, a map that dates back to 600 BC. The story on how that had been identified as a map is one of the BM’s best tales by the way.

Maps are not created equal. They do differ by accuracy, depth of information and most importantly, purpose. Political maps emphasise the borders of countries, states, counties, constituencies etc, geographical maps may look at features like mountain ranges and rivers, the distribution of mineral deposits or fertility of the soil. Sailor’s charts care about depth and maritime hazards and give no heed to what is on the land, unless it is a church tower or a lighthouse, whilst the Michelin guide divides the world up into places to eat, and those where better not to.

I guess after 200 episodes observing our protagonists, not just the kings and emperors, but also the monks, merchants and mercenaries criss-crossing the known world, I do not have to tell you that medieval people were anything but static.

Hence it is not surprising that they made maps. How many is hard to say, but there are several that have come down to us. Amongst Anglo-Saxons the mappamundi of Hereford cathedral is probably the best known, whilst the German equivalent, the Ebstorf map is the more famous here.

Being the History of the Germans, we obviously focus on the Ebstorf map. First up, it is huge, a circular image of the known world, 3.5m by 3.5m. Created around 1240, the original was lost in an air raid on Hannover in 1943, but we have several very detailed facsimiles.

For modern observers it is extremely difficult to get one’s bearings on this map. For one it is oriented towards the east, not the north. Then at the centre of the map sits Jerusalem. Asia makes up the top half, europe the bottom left and Africa the bottom right.  The mediterranean is a giant Tin the centre with Sicily in the shape of a heart. The three continents are surrounded by a thin band of one continuous ocean.

Where it gets even more confusing is when you look closer. The map is extraordinarily detailed. It comprises 2,345 entries, 845 pictures, 500 of which are buildings, the rest rivers, waterways, islands, but also 45 persons and 60 animals. And these are on the one hand comparatively modern cities and features like Antwerp, Riga and the Brunswick Lion. But then it also depicts buildings and cities that are known to be long gone, like the tower of babel, the lighthouse of Alexandria and Carthage. And then there are missing elements, like Cairo, the largest city Europeans regularly travelled to at the time, and instead it features entirely mythical locations, like the place where Alexander had imprisoned Gog and Magog and the earthly paradise, complete with serpent and apple.

So, what was this map for?

The map reflected the sum total of the historical, scientific and theological knowledge of the time, which meant whatever knowledge of the ancients had made it through. Pliny the elder was a particular favourite whose odd notions about the impact of the phases of the moon on the mental state of Monkeys and the like were perennial favourites. Biblical stories were of such great importance to the pious, they were considered contemporaneous, even if they had happened thousands of years earlier.

There was a major devotional element here. The map shows that the world is a confined space, held together by Jesus Christ, who sees and hears everything from his vantage point at the top of the map.

What this kind of maps, the mappamundi, were utterly useless at was to guide a sailor from Venice to Constantinople and further on to the Holy Land. But we know that at the same time these were made, Venetian, Genoese, Pisan and Amalfitani sea captains carried crusaders and trading goods to the east and back. To achieve that they had what we have today, compass, maritime charts and pilot books. No, seriously. There are three maritime charts still in existence that were most likely produced around the same time as the Ebstorf and the Hereford Mappamundi, in the 13^th century.

These maritime charts have no pictures of saints or exotic animals on them, nor do they share the wisdom of Pliny the Elder. These are utilitarian charts that tell you what course to steer and how far you have to sail to get from Palma de Mallorca to Palermo or from Ancona to Alexandria. It tells you where the submerged reefs and rocks are and where dangerous currents run. And they are pretty accurate, which is truly astounding as they did not use latitude or longitude to pinpoint locations.

And then there is the scale of the effort. The so-called Pisan map covers the whole Mediterranean and the Black Sea plus bits of the Atlantic. There are roughly 1,000 topographic sites named in the mediterranean part alone, and all of these are on the coast or in the water, making this an incredibly dense map.

Which begs the question how this information could have been gathered.

One option is that it was a compilation of regional charts, but given every region had different measurements for miles and feet, it would have required a standardisation down to the map’s reference mile, which was 1.25km. Not an easy task.

Some have argued that these charts were originally developed by Greek or Roman sailors and then copied and adjusted as trade routes changed and cities rose and fell. But there is no mention of maritime charts in Roman or Greek sources at all.

So, in all likelihood the makers of these maritime charts gathered the information from the ship’s captains who came in and out of their hometowns. Most cartographers were themselves retired seafarers which must have helped.

What bewildered me is that according to the almost unanimous opinion in the literature, the medieval navigators did not use a logbook or other form of noting down the position, course and speed throughout a voyage. This only came in during the 15^th century when explorers ventured out to find the route to India. I find that incredibly hard to believe. The maritime charts did not feature latitude and longitude, meaning to determine a position the skipper would have to constantly check the angle and distance to at least two landmarks, which changed all the time. And once on the open sea, he would have to remember exactly for how long he had stayed on which course at which speed. Not impossible but just hard to believe. If there had been logbooks, they would have been a huge help to cartographers confirming the accuracy of their charts. But apparently, they could keep all of that in their heads.

Accompanying these charts were Portolans, something we would call today a pilot book. These are books guiding sailors through the entrance to ports, tell them what they will find there in terms of fresh water, provisions, facilities to make repairs etc.

They even new about compass variation, i.e., the fact that magnetic north and geographic north are not identical, and that this variation was not the same everywhere, and that it changed over time.

It is just mindboggling to think that they knew that but believed that bears cups would have to be licked into shape by the mothers.

As one can imagine, these two traditions of mapping the world started to coalesce in the great maritime republics, in Venice, Genoa and Pisa and the seafaring Iberian kingdoms. One of the most famous of these hybrid maps that combine the historic and theological content of a mappamundi with the accuracy of the maritime charts is the so-called Catalan Atlas, produced in Barcelona as a present for king Charles VI of France.

This map, created in 1375 not only incorporated the maritime charts of the mediterranean, but also new information about places, the ancients knew little about. Marco Polo had travelled to China in the late 13^th century and a trade in Chinese silks developed rapidly thereafter that brought Genoese traders to the courts of the Mongol rulers and further into Mainland China. Their reports are included in the Catalan Atlas. The Canary Islands had been discovered in 1339 and its original population wiped out by disease and slaughter. So, they, i.e., the islands, not their inhabitants, too make it onto the map.

So far we have two mapping traditions that fused into one in the 14^th century, the medieval Mappamundi that tries to educate about the way the world is or should be and the maritime charting tradition that cares about where exactly places are and how to get there.

And in 1397 a third technique for mapmaking appeared, or more precisely, re-appeared. In 1397 the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel II Palaiologos sent an ambassador to Venice, asking the western Christians for help in the defence against Ottoman attack. This ambassador, Manuel Chrysoloras would become one of the catalysts of the Renaissance. Chrysoloras was not just a diplomat, but a classical scholar, philosopher and teacher as well. Whilst his ambassadorship was a failure, and no soldiers came to Manuel’s aid, his cultural mission was a huge success.

He had brought with him copies of classical Greek works that had been lost to the west for centuries which he translated into Latin. He taught the intellectuals of Florence and Bologna to read Greek and published textbooks that were enthusiastically received. Within less than 100 years Greek, which had largely been forgotten, returned to the curriculum of the educated classes all across the continent.

Chrysoloras never returned to Constantinople but established a constant flow of Greek books going west. He died in 1413 en route to see the emperor Sigismund to discuss a suitable location for the Great Church council, that would ultimately be held in Constance (episodes 171-174).

Amongst the treasures he carried in his luggage was a work by Ptolemy, the 2^nd century Greek mathematician. This work, the Geography would revolutionise the way maps were drawn.

If you put Ptolemy’s Geography into a search engine, it will inevitably show you a map. But there are no maps by Ptolemy that survived from antiquity. What was found in 13^th century was a book with instructions on how to create a map of the world and 26 regional maps. And so in around 1295 Byzantine scholars created a world map from the instructions Ptolemy had left a 1000 years earlier.

The reason this worked was down to Ptolemy’s great invention, longitude and latitude. The medieval maritime charts did not show a long-lat grid that almost every modern map now features. What they showed were rump lines, connecting lines between points on the map that showed the course to steer if you wanted to get from A to B. These rump lines criss-crossed the map as commerce, not geography demanded.

Ptolemy’s genius lay in his realisation that to convey a three-dimensional object, aka Planet Earth on to a two-dimensional surface, aka a map, it required some form of projection. This was a minor problem when designing regional charts but became a huge one trying to depict the entirety of the known world.

And in this context, we need to clear up one constant misunderstanding. Very few people in the Middle Ages believe the earth was flat. From the days of the ancient Greeks, people knew that the Earth was spherical. The first globe was produced by Cratos of Mallos in the 2^nd century BC and Erotosthenes had accurately calculated the circumference of the earth based on the difference in the angle of the sun between Aswan and Alexandria.

Fun fact, the term Antarctica goes back to the ancient Greeks. It means literally, land of no bears, being the opposite of the Arctic, which translates as “land of the bears”. Sadly, that had less to do with intrepid travellers checking out the fauna on the North Pole, but with the star sign of Ursus Major that hovers over the north.

Going back to medieval understanding of the spherical structure of the earth; emperors from Charlemagne onwards received an orb as a sign of their power over the entire earth, not a flat plate but. Medieval maps were circular, and for instance the one Al Idrisi produced for king Roger of Sicily in 1154 mentioned that the earth was a sphere as something that was common knowledge.

So, when Columbus set off to seek a route to India by going west, the concern was less that his ships would fall off the edge of the world, but that the journey would simply be too long to be survivable. Given the circumference of the earth was known, as was the eastward extent of Asia thanks to Marco Polo and other Italian travellers, one could estimate the distance from Seville to the Philippines or Japan at ~20,000 km or ~13,000 miles. Given Columbus ships were averaging 90 to 100 miles a day, the whole journey would be 150 days, well beyond the capacity to carry water and food of contemporary ships. Columbus got around that problem by mixing up Roman and Italian miles hence pretending the world was 25% smaller and by stretching China and Japan out further east than the reports warranted. In his pitch to Ferdinand and Isabella he claimed the distance was just 2-3000 miles. Some historians believe he did that deliberately. How he thought he would survive is then unclear. He may have hoped there would be islands along the way where he could find food, water and timber.

Ok, back to Ptolemy. Thanks to the curvature of the earth, two-dimensional maps will always get some dimension wrong, be it the surface area, the shapes, distances or direction. Which is why Ptolemy suggested to create globes, rather than maps. But he also recognised that Globes are difficult to produce and awkward to handle. So, he offered three types of projections, each with advantages and disadvantages. That question of projections is the content of Book I of Ptolemy’s geography.

The next 6 books contain 8,000 place names with their longitude and latitude, covering the whole known world from China to the mythical island of Thule, in the far, far north.

Ptolemy’s maps were a revolution, and copies were produced at a rapid pace. In 1409 the Geography was translated into Latin and as we heard in episode 172, was one of the central intellectual debates at the Council of Constance.

What is interesting is how little the early copyist and publishers changed on these ancient maps. They showed the world, its roads and cities as it was in around 200 AD. Little heed was given to fact that in the intervening 1200 years many lands have been discovered or at least better understood, cities had vanished and new ones had emerged. Germany, an empty forested swamp in the 2^nd century AD was now a thriving place full of cities and roads, as was Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavia.

In 1427 the Cardinal Fillastre, an important protagonist at the Council asked the Danish traveller Conradus Clavus to create and then add a map of Scandinavia using the Ptolemy’s system of longitudes and latitudes, which he did, adding Greenland and Iceland as a bonus. But that was the exception. Mostly people just copied the ancient maps and left them as they were.

So we end up with the scenario where we have on the one hand maps based on the medieval mappamundi concept but containing some very accurate maritime charts , the information gathered from the intensifying trade with the East, the Canaries, the Azores the Cape Verde Islands and the coast of Africa, whilst at the same time the leading intellectual lights used a hugely advanced mapping methodology to present even more massively outdated information.

It was a German, Donnus Nicolaus Germanus who was the first to fundamentally revise and improve Ptolemy in 1466. He translated or replaced the antique place names in Italy and Spain with modern names and a more accurate view of northern Europe. We know little about him apart from the fact that he was likely German given his name and that he worked in Florence and Rome.

In 1477 pope Sixtus IV ordered two globes to be produced by Nicolaus Germanus, one a celestial globe and one a terrestrial globe. We know that these globes were produced because there are bills preserved in the Vatican library and the marquise of Mantua asked for a copy to be produced in 1507. They were probably destroyed in the 1527 sack of Rome.

That made Donnus Nicolaus Germanus the first person we know for certain to have produced a globe since antiquity.

By now Gutenberg’s printing press had radically changed the way information was distributed. Maps became an important product for printers. Several Ptolemy-based maps were published in Italy and Germany in the 1480s. But as people compared them to the information contained in the maritime charts it became clear that Ptolemy, for all his innovative mathematics, was full of inaccuracies.

In 1489 Henricus Martellus, another German, produced a world map that applied the longitude and latitude system of Ptolemy on the latest geographic information available. And latest really means latest. Barthomeu Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in March 1488 and returned to Lisbon in December 1488. Less than 2 years later Martellus map shows Africa as being circumnavigable and even some shapes in the Indian ocean that were previously unknown.

Before we go further down the route of German mapmakers, we have to mention someone else, Johannes Müller from Königsberg, not Konigsberg in Prussia but Konigsberg in Franconia. Since Müller was already extremely common, he called himself Regiomontanus, the latinised form of his hometown. He was probably the most influential astrologer and mathematician in the generation before Copernicus. As you know I dabble in all sorts of topics, literature, art, architecture, theology, philosophy etc., but I draw the line at mathematics and linguistics. That is not something I know anything about, nor do I feel capable of talking about it. So, if you want to know about the Regiomontanus Paradox and his contribution to the development of calculus you will need to find another podcast.

But what I can talk about and what matters for our subject here is that Regiomontanus, alongside his mathematical works, produced a practical guide, the Ephemerides. These are tables showing the trajectory of astronomical objects, in particular the planets, their position, speed and direction of movement at specific time intervals. These tables are naturally useful to Astronomers, even more to astrologers, but absolutely crucial to navigators sailing into the Southern Hemisphere.

One of the features of the Southern hemisphere is that you cannot see the polestar anymore. The Southern Cross and Sigma Octantis are reasonable replacements, indicating South, but the Portuguese sailors following the African coast did not know that. What they could do instead is use the angles of the planets from their current location and time to determine where they were. And for that, they needed a reliable table telling them where the planets should be on that specific day and time. And that is where Regiomontanus came in. His tables, called the Ephimerides were more accurate and more detailed than anything else contemporaries had access to.

Regiomontanus developed and compiled these tables when he lived in Nurnberg in 1474. Nurnberg may not have a university that funded this kind of research, but what it had was a large number of rich merchants who combined commercial acumen with scientific curiosity. These men were happy to finance Regiomontanus’ efforts and the publication of his tables in 1474. These tables were a huge success and were still reprinted 300 years later. At least one copy made it to the university of Krakow, where a certain N. Copernicus drew some literally earthshattering conclusions using this data.

In the last third of the 15^th century astronomy and geography were considered two sides of the same medal. They called it Cosmology. Regiomontanus did consider making maps and as we have seen some of the terrestrial mapmakers worked on celestial globes.

Add to that scientific endeavour the rise of the printing press and we can see why the great free imperial cities of the Holy Roman empire became a key node in the distribution of knowledge about the planet. Nicolaus Germannus modified atlas was printed in a luxury edition in Ulm in 1482, in 1486 Johannes Reger published a set of maps together with what he called a Registrum, which allowed to cross-reference all of Ptolemy’s placenames with the modern notations.

Over in Nurnberg, Hartmann Schedel compiled his famous Nürnberg chronicle which included two maps. One was a world map, a combination of Ptolemy’s geography and the weird and wonderful elements of the medieval mappamundi. The second map was something completely different. This was a map of Germany and central Europe, the very first ever printed. It used the longitude and latitude now familiar to cartographers, but where Ptolemy had shown just empty space and swampy forest, it presented the magnificent Hanseatic cities, the trading centres of southern Germany, Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk, the capitals of the Baltic states and even Moscow and Lviv, but strangely not Kiev.

The man who produced that, Hieronymus Münzer, was another one of that circle of intellectuals that emerged in Nürnberg. He undertook a journey to Spain and Portugal on behalf of the emperor Maximilian to find out more about these new discoveries. This produced one of the most detailed descriptions of the Iberian Peninsula in the 15^th century.

Because of the quaint half-timbered houses and the lack of an overseas empire, the idea has taken hold that 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century Germans spent most of their time at home whilst Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch and English set out to conquer the world. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we heard in the season about the Hanseatic league and about the Fuggers, German merchants were going almost everywhere. They connected east and west and north and south. They had representatives in Lisbon, Antwerp, London, Bergen, Riga, Novgorod, Cracow, Budapest and Venice. Much of the timber the Portuguese caravels were made of came from the forests of Prussia, their design a development based on the cog. The copper and silver they traded into India and China came from the mines and smelters of the Fuggers, Welsers, Hirschvogels etc. In fact, these metals were pretty much the only European exports the much more advanced societies of India, China and Japan were interested in.

Amongst the crews of the Portugues explorers who set out into the unknown in the 15^th century were almost always Germans. They were hired to operate the artillery. Germany had become highly regarded for the guns they produced and the gunners who had trained to operate them. The Portuguese called them Bombardeiros Alemaes and hired them for most expeditions. In 1489 the Portuguese crown standardised its naval artillery to German-made bronze guns and their experienced gun teams. Of the 18 men who survived Magellan’s circumnavigation, one was a German, Hans de Plank or Juan Aleman.

Which gets us to the most controversial figure in the history of German cartography, Martin Behaim. So, before we go into who he was and what he did, there is one undeniable thing that is associated with him, the Erdapfel, the oldest terrestrial globe in existence today. As we know it is not the oldest globe ever made, that was the one created in the 2^nd century BC by Cratos of Mallos. And it was not even the first one made after antiquity, that was the globe of Nicolaus Germanus in Rome.

All that being said, it is still the oldest Globe in existence. And it is intriguing in as much as it was produced in 1492, in other words just as Columbus was stepping ashore in the Bahamas.

Given timing this globe does not show the Americas and obviously neither does it show Australia or Antarctica. So, what did Behaim put in the space where America is? Islands, lots of them, some known, others invented. The Canaries and the Cape Verde islands, today the jumping off points for an Atlantic crossing west and the Azores, the staging post 2/3rds on the way back east were already known. But then he put dozens, even very large blobs all over the surface and gave them names like the Antilles and the island of St. Brandan. Japan ends up being more or less where Florida is.

The Germanische Nationalmuseum in Nurnberg that holds the globe says in its description; the continents are too big. But it would be more accurate to say the planet is too small. Which may be down to Behaim subscribing to Columbus’ view that the planet was a lot smaller than it actually is and hence sailing to China or Japan was feasible in one go.

Which also ties in with the purpose of the globe. It was obviously not something one was supposed to take on a voyage. It was certainly meant as a piece of decoration, ordered by the city council of Nurnberg to adorn their city hall. It conveyed the message that Nurnberg was at the forefront of intellectual developments, was plugged into the worldwide flow of information and had extraordinary artistic and mechanical skills. None of which was actually an exaggeration.

But its main purpose was commercial. Like the Mapppamundis the globe is covered in text, but this text does not contain biblical events or spurious facts about exotic animals, it is about business opportunities. Where best to acquire rare materials, like pearls, precious stones, spices and luxury woods. It is here to entice the Nurnberg bankers and merchants to get involved in the financing of these journeys. It is first and foremost a spherical pitchbook.

So far, so good. A fascinating object from literally the year that changed history, and maybe a depiction of what Columbus expected to find when he sailed west, but why does it get almost everyone who writes about it so hot under the collar.

David Blackbourn in his excellent book “Germany in the World” describes the maker of the globe, Martin Behaim, as a “slightly raffish man of affairs” whose exploits are almost “grotesquely exaggerated”.

On the other end of the spectrum sits the polish historian Wojciech Iwanczak, who entertains the idea that Behaim held an important role at court and in the commercial world of Lisbon during the time of the discoveries. According to him, Behaim introduced Regiomontanus’ Ephimerides to the Portuguese and was appointed to the Royal council of navigational experts. Behaim might have participated in at least 2 journeys down south, one leading to the discovery of the Congo. Iwanczak even suggests Behaim may have known Columbus and might have shared his views on a journey west.

I initially wanted to design this whole episode around Martin Behaim, the great explorer, scientist and cartographer, a bit like I did with Johannes Gutenberg. But in the end, the evidence was all a bit too flimsy. It is a typical German story in as much that Behaim was pumped up relentlessly in the 19^th century, streets and schools named after him, statues erected and even one of the oldest locomotives was named after him. The Nazis then went stratospheric, claiming Behaim had been the one convincing Columbus to sail west, then he had discovered Brazil before Cabral and had sailed around cap Hoorn before Magallan.

Which created the typical post-war backlash, where any claim to fame was dismissed on the basis of a lack of explicit contemporary sources until nothing was left than the story of a conman who died a pauper in Lisbon in 1507. And now everything is so convoluted and vague that even the Germanische Nationalmuseum, treads a careful balance not dismissing the previous storylines but being sufficiently vague not to get caught out. So here you go, Martin Beheim, explorer of far-flung lands and master cartographer, or exploiter of gullible city fathers, God only knows….

Which gets us now to the final piece, the map in the Library of Congress they call the Waldseemüller map and America’s Birth Certificate. At first glance it is just another world map, a larger one at 2.3m by 1,3m where Europe is based on the Ptolemy maps and the rest is based on maritime charts, Portugues and Spanish discoverer’s logs and reports of travellers to the east.

Where it differs is in the long stretchy landmass in the bottom left-hand corner that is surrounded by water and that bears a name that became familiar to all of us, America. In the copious notes the authors explain that they named America after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator who went along on four or maybe only two voyages along the South American Coast, and wrote two letters home about it, letters that had been massively bigged up by publishers and had become early bestsellers.

What has confused scholars for centuries is how Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, the two makers of the map, could have known or could have guessed that America was a continent when most authorities, including Columbus himself, believed the lands re-discovered in the west were part of Asia. And to rule one thing out, Amerigo Vespucci had never claimed that America was a continent. He might have called it Novo Mundus, New World, but that is not the same thing.

And then comes the even more bewildering part. Not only is the positioning of South America fairly accurate, the map also shows the Pacific coast of South America with its characteristic bulge north of Chile. All that 6 years before Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama and became the first European to officially report the existence of the Pacific Ocean.

How this was possible is the kind of question that sells books by the wagonload and got the Library of Congress to pay $10million for a map.

So let’s take a look at some of the theories – I cannot do all of them because at some point I want to go to bed today, and so might you.

The simplest idea is that Waldseemüller and Ringmann had made it all up. They had Vespucci’s exaggerated reports of the discoveries along the Atlantic coast of South America and spiced it up by showing the continent surrounded by water. The key witness for this theory is Waldseemüller himself. In 1513 he produced another map that did not show a new continent in the West and did not call it America. In the explanatory note he said quote: “As we have lately come to understand, our previous representation pleased very few people. Therefore, since true seekers of knowledge rarely colour their words in confusing rhetoric, and do not embellish facts with charm but instead with a venerable abundance of simplicity, we must say that we cover our heads with a humble hood.” end quote.

But this admission does not mean they had just willy-nilly made up an ocean that nobody had even thought of. That would be very much out of character. Waldseemüller and Ringmann provide references for much of what they show, quoting sources, ancient and modern for the better-known regions and the records of travellers for the parts of Africa, eastern europe and Asia not well known to the ancients.

And there is a further aspect. The two mapmakers had been hired by duke Rene II of Lorraine to create these maps as a prestige project. The duke wanted to impress his peers by setting up a humanist school in his duchy, and that humanist school had to produce something that would be widely respected as a great piece of scholarship. If Waldseemüller and Ringmann had consciously been making things up, they would have made their duke the laughingstock of europe, which could get very uncomfortable.

There is a variation of that theory which has to do with the size of the world they show. Waldseemüller and Ringmann’s map is in the main based on Ptolemy’s geography. In fact, both authors had initially been hired to produce a revised version of the book, rather than to draw up maps. It was only when the fake letters by Vespucci circulated in Europe that they decided to create a map instead.

But where their map differs dramatically from other maps based on Ptolemy is in scale. This is one of the earliest maps that assumes 360 degrees for the circumference of the earth, rather than the 270 degrees for instance Behaim showed. In other words, Waldseemüller and Ringmann believed or knew that the Earth had a circumference of 40,000km. And they knew the distance from Europe to the Caribbean and South America. At which point the cartographers had to make a choice. Either they assume that Asia stretches all of the way to the Caribbean and east coast of South America. That would make it a landmass that covers 50% of the Planet. A continent of that size did not match up with what Marco Polo and other travellers had reported. So, the only logical conclusion was that there must be an ocean between Asia and the newly discovered lands; admittedly a very bold assumption, but a justifiable one.

Dr. Martin Lehmann from the University of Freiburg took a closer look at the political environment in which the map was created.

As I mentioned, Waldseemüller and Ringmann worked for duke Rene II of Lorraine, a prince on the western edge of the Holy Roman empire at a place called St. Die. St. Die is roughly 100km from Strasburg and 80km from Nancy, in other words, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, hundreds of miles from the Sea and even further away from Lisbon, Cadiz and Seville.

Since the map is correct in many respects, there is at least a theoretical option that it was based on information from voyages that had been kept secret. Which leads straight to the question how such incredibly valuable secrets could end up in the hands of two guys hired by a mid-level prince in a dark forest? Makes no sense, or does it?

Spain and Portugal were in a fierce competition, not over who could find America, that was not interesting at the time, but over the route to India and even more important, the route to the Spice islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. Being able to obtain these spices at source would cut out the middlemen, aka, India, the Silk Road and Venice, and the enormous margins that paid for the palazzi on the Canale Grande. In this race to get to the Malaka islands, the Portuguese travelled eastwards, whilst the Spaniards, who were a lot later to the game, travelled westwards. In 1494 the two sides agreed the treaty of Tordesillas that is often described as Spain and Portugal dividing the world between themselves. But that is not quite true. What Tordesillas said is that Portugal had the exclusive right to sail eastwards and Spain was free to seek their fortune in the west. May the best man win.

So, both sides were racing to the same spot, roughly 1200km north of Australia. Which means neither side wanted the other side to know what they were up to. That is why very few maps were published in Seville, Lisbon or Cadiz where the explorers made landfall and the best information about the new discoveries could be obtained. Both the Spanish and the Portugues surely produced maps, but they were only made accessible to the select few. And they kept voyages secret. For instance, it is widely believed the Portuguese knew about Brazil before the official discovery in 1500.

But all that secrecy had its drawbacks. This was a winner takes all race. Both sides wanted to send as many fleets as possible in the hope that at least one of them makes it through. It was a venture capital approach which needed venture capitalists willing to share some of the costs and risks of the voyages. This was the 15^th century equivalent of the streaming wars, the race for AI leadership or the rush to dominate the ride sharing industry.

And where were these financiers? With the Italian banking houses in decline, it was the Southern German mercantile firms, the Fuggers, Welsers, Imhoffs, Tuchers etc., that were the obvious business partners for the Iberian kings. But if you wanted to get them on board, you needed to lift up the skirt a bit. That is the reason Martin Behaim was allowed to put a fairly detailed map of West Africa on to his globe, information that almost certainly came from Portugal.

And that could also explain the astounding accuracy of the Waldseemüller Map. If the Portugues had information about the West coast of South America and would have wanted to share it, they would probably have used someone in the German lands. But I personally find it hard to believe they had managed to sail up the whole of the west coast of South America to Panama and then made it back, all before 1507. And what for, this was the route they had ceded to the Spanish. And the Spanish are unlikely to have furnished the information, since they would have insisted on naming the continent after Columbus, not Vespucci.

Which gets to the next twist in the theory. Let’s put yourself into the shoes of a Portuguese strategist in 1505/6. You cannot know whether or not the Spaniards are in with a chance to make the race. But if you could find a way to slow them down, that would certainly be worth something. What if you could convince the Spaniards that there was an enormous landmass and another Ocean between them and the spice islands. Maybe that could discourage them from sending lots of ships, and more importantly it could hold their investors up from funding these efforts.

And who could be a better vehicle to convey this message than a group of humanists locked up in a village in the Vosges mountains trying to impress their ducal sponsor. Like journalists at a minor newspaper, they were looking for the great scoop that would put them on the national news. So it may be that the Portuguese suggested to Waldseemüller and Ringmann that South America was surrounded by water, even though they did not know that for a fact. That may also explain why the letters published in 1503 and 1504 and attributed to Vespucci are unlikely to be by his own hand and are full of exaggerations and inaccuracies. It could be part of a larger sting operation.

But, as my father-in-law used to say, if it is a choice between cockup and conspiracy, 9 out of 10 times, it is just cockup.

Irrespective of whether Waldseemüller and Ringmann were duped or dupers, the name America went around the world. The original print run of their map was for 1,000 copies. The name America then shows up on the so-called green globe in Paris from that same year. Then again on the Jagiellonian globe of 1510 produced in Krakow. Johanns Schöner who was the owner of the only surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s 1507 map, includes America in his two globes. From there it meanders across Europe;  between 1520 and 1540 reprints and slightly revised versions of Waldseemüller’s map are published in Vienna, Paris, Strasburg, Basel and Zurich. Finally in 1538 Gerard Mercator, he of the Mercator projection, published a world map where he was the first to declare the existence of two continents, South America and North America. Once the term had been embraced by the foremost geographer of the time, despite vigorous objections from the Spanish side, the naming had become irrevocable.

There you have it; the name America came about because a bunch of German humanists stuck in the back of beyond either made up or were made to make up a continent that then actually turned out to be real. And people say that Bielefeld does not exist….

Thanks for listening. This was a bit of a long one and I apologize. I was carried away by far too many fascinating facts. But if you have listened all the way I guess you liked it too.

Next week will be the last of our deviations around the Holy Roman empire in the 15^th century. What we will be talking about is Arms and Armor, the greatest of the German exports in the 15^th and 16^th century and beyond. Shah Jahan, the great Mughal emperor and the man who commissioned the Taj Mahal, counted 200 Firangi swords amongst his most valuable possessions. Firangi means foreigner, but originally Franks, meaning Franconians -not Frenchmen – since most of his steel blades came from Solingen. How Germany gained its reputation as the source of the finest weapons and amour around is what we will discuss next week.