New Routes and Portuguese Map Makers

Abstract

European maps changed dramatically around 1500. Old distinctions faded and old categories applied less and less. The shape of change and its roots are most obvious in the work done in Portugal. The pattern set there was in the short but especially in the long run followed throughout Europe. Traditionally historians have discussed cartography in the Renaissance in national terms. Studies have dealt with maps in Spain, France, England, or Portugal. The map makers themselves have been identified with specific states. The study of cartographic history began in the mid nineteenth century in an era of growing nationalism. It is not surprising then that historians of maps treated their objects in the ways that historians of political and constitutional history treated their governments, trying to demonstrate the precedence, primacy, and superiority of their nations. The result, until the latter part of the twentieth century, was for individual scholars to concentrate on maps from just one country. It is now obvious that the old way was wrong and on a number of grounds. The European states of the nineteenth century did not exist in the fifteenth and the kingdoms that would emerge as national states had only the rudiments of government structures. The process of state building was a long one, only just beginning in the minds of political theorists and in political institutions of the sixteenth century. People who made the maps did not think in terms of nations.