Books: Map of History

The simple line map of the world, sketched in faded brownish ink on a single small (about 11 in. by 16 in.) sheet of patched and worm-eaten vellum seems humdrum. In reality, it is by far the most important cartographic discovery of this century. It is the first map (see below) ever found that shows any part of the Western Hemisphere before the voyage of Columbus.

Drawn about 1440, probably by a monk in a Swiss scriptorium, the map’s startling features are a strikingly accurate delineation of Greenland in the upper left-hand corner and a representation of “Vinland” (the name Vikings from Iceland and Greenland in the 10th century gave a portion of the coast of North America). There, crudely drawn but unmistakable, are Hudson Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Above Vinland is a cartographic legend noting that “Eric, legate of the Apostolic See and bishop of Greenland . . . arrived in this truly vast and very rich land . . . in the last year of our most blessed father Pascal, remained a long time in both summer and winter . . .” Since Pope Paschal II died in January 1118, this would presumably fix the time of Eric’s arrival at 1117. Taken together with the depiction of Vinland, this indicates that as early as the 12th century, the rest of Europe knew about the Viking voyages. While it is possible that detailed knowledge of the voyage may not have been generally available by the 15th century, discovery of the map still forces a reappraisal of the entire age of exploration, from the year 1000, when Leif Ericsson and his men were blown ashore on the North American coast, to the late 16th century, when Europeans were exploring the waters of Asia, Africa and America. The map throws further doubt on the legend that Columbus was sailing into completely mysterious and uncharted seas when he set out with his small fleet in 1492. Instead, it appears possible that the Viking voyages may have served as an incentive to Columbus and Cabot and other rediscoverers of America in the 15th century.

Scholarly Detection. Proudly put on display this week by the Yale Library, the map and its accompanying text have been annotated and explicated in a scholarly book published concurrently by the Yale University Press, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation, which describes the eight years of elaborate detective work that were needed to date and authenticate it.

As related by Thomas E. Marston, Yale University Library’s curator of medieval and Renaissance literature, in the gruffly deprecatory language of scholarship, the discovery of the map is quite a dramatic yarn in itself. It began in October 1957, when a New Haven antiquarian bookseller, Laurence Witten, dropped by the Yale Library to show Marston and Map Curator Alexander O. Victor a slim volume that Witten had acquired from a private collection in Europe. The book included the map and 21 pages of text, which were a transcription of an account of the expedition led by Friar John de Piano Carpini across Central Asia in 1245-47. Friar Carpini himself wrote a well-known account of his trip in 1247, but the version in Witten’s book was transcribed by another Franciscan friar, identified only as C. de Bridia, who had heard of the expedition secondhand.

Misplaced Holes. From the first glance, it was the map that excited Marston and Victor. It contained the usual overscaled version of Europe.

India (TERRA INDICA) is slewed around due east of the Mediterranean, with a diminished Asia and China to the north of it. Offshore, across the Magnum mare Tartarorum, are renderings of large offshore islands, probably based on reports of Japan. Africa is lopped off below Ethiopi, but shows the magnus [ft] uuius which is apparently the Niger. In the Atlantic, there are the two mythical quad-shaped islands beyond the Azores that most medieval cartographers insistently put in. But in the upper left-hand corner were the unmistakable outlines of Greenland and Vinland, the latter rounded off into an island in accordance with the medieval assumption that the universal sea surrounded any area that had not been explored. Both were plainly labeled (GRONELĀDA and VINLANDA INSULA).

While the map and text appeared to be genuine and written by the same hand, there were a couple of things that bothered the Yale scholars. Though both the map and text were slightly wormed, the wormholes on the two parts did not coincide. They were even more disturbed by a notation on the map which suggested that it was only part of a larger volume. Until these puzzling features were resolved, the map would always be somewhat suspect.

Several months later, Marston ordered two manuscripts from a London dealer, one of which was a modestly priced portion of the Speculum Historiale (Mirror of History) compiled by Vincent of Beauvais, the famed encyclopedist of the Middle Ages. When the Speculum manuscript arrived, it was in such an attractive 15th century binding that Dealer Witten asked to examine it. That night Witten telephoned Marston in great excitement. The Speculum manuscript was the key to the puzzle of the Vinland map and the text of the Carpini mission, which was later to be called “the Tartar Relation.” The manuscript was written in the same hand, the watermarks on the paper were identical, and the wormholes showed that the map had been at the front of the volume and the Tartar Relation at the back.

The Dating. The chances against anyone having such a stroke of luck were astronomical, and that as much as anything was one of the reasons that Victor and Marston consulted R. A. Skelton and George D. Painter, two experts with the British Museum, for exhaustive research, evaluation and testing of the manuscript. In lengthy papers, crammed with scholarship and bristling with footnotes, Skelton and Painter tell in The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation how they authenticated and dated both the map and the manuscript.

In brief, the dating rests on two major pieces of physical evidence. First, the scribe who drew the map and copied the text used a writing style known as Oberrheinische Bastarda, or Upper Rhineland bastard (or cursive) book hand, which is confined to the period 1415-1460. Since the handwriting is in fully developed form and free of accretions from styles that developed later, a date in the 1440s seems most likely. Second, the parchment and paper used can be traced to the same period, and a unique spectacled head of a bull used as a watermark on the paper shows it most likely was produced at a mill that began operating in Basel, Switzerland, about 1433.

The Speculum, which heretofore had had no great intrinsic value, had suddenly become priceless as a missing piece of scholarly evidence. Since Witten had given the Vinland map and the Tartar Relation to his wife, Marston decided to give Mrs. Witten the Speculum as well, in the hope that some generous benefactor would buy all the parts and give them to the Yale Library. An anonymous donor did just that, and Yale is now the sole owner of the manuscript. The price paid is a closely guarded secret, but it was admitted to be “in the high six figures,” or in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. When the manuscript went on display this week, Yale Librarian James Tanis called the map alone “the most exciting single acquisition of the Yale Library in modern times, exceeding in significance even Yale’s Gutenberg Bible and its Bay Psalm Book.”