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One of the Earliest and Most Fascinating Maps of North Africa.
This is Tabula di Libya Seconda, the second of four Libya (i.e. Africa) maps issued in Francesco Berlinghieri’s extraordinary Septe Giornate della Geographia from 1482. This remarkable proto-atlas was produced at a time when the geographic worldview was still squarely Ptolemaic, and printed maps were a completely new concept.
The scope of the map is essentially the central section of North Africa, constituting what today is western Libya, Tunisia, and parts of Algeria. In modern terms, this area stretches from around Sirte in Libya to somewhere between Annaba and Skikda on the Algerian coast. Berlingheri depicts Egypt/Libya and Morocco/Algeria on separate maps. Dividing North Africa into spheres in this way is based on Ptolemaic tradition, and we see roughly the same division in the Rome (1478) and Ulm (1482) editions of the Geographia.
The map extends across two full pages. It is not unusual that the highest density of place names is along the coastline, but if we compare our map to that of the Rome edition, it is immediately clear that Berlinghieri was drawing on different sources, as both the number and density of coastal place names dramatically exceeds the corresponding Rome edition map. Most of the labels on this map identify locations that are unrecognizable today. Beyond the coast, the labels grow larger and less concrete, often using Latinizations of ethnic groupings for regional terminology. At the eastern and western fringes of our map, the terms Mauretania Ceasarensi and Cyrenaica refer to Roman provinces of the 2nd century CE, once again underlining that even for the Mediterranean, most geographic understanding was still anchored in Antiquity.
The upper half of the map is dedicated to the Mediterranean. Filling this space are well-known islands such as Malta, Lampedusa (Lapadusa), Pantelleria, and Linosa (Ethusa), as well as the southern parts of Sicily and Sardinia. In the depiction of the latter in particular, we once again note a discrepancy from the Rome variant of this map, which depicts more of this large island and also includes the island of Corfu. As is quite typical of maps from this era, a number of mythical or non-existent islands have also been included (e.g. Draconotino, Mysino, and Potia).
Along the bottom of the map, Berlingheri portrays a long and winding trans-Saharan mountain range from which at least six rivers extend towards the Mediterranean, some of them forming large lakes along the way. A seventh river descends from the solitary peak labeled Digiove. While the notion of a coherent mountain range cutting across the Sahara Desert is another geographic myth adopted from Antiquity, the fertile plains of North Africa are, in fact, fed in this manner. The only distinction is that the elevations are not part of a common range.
A note on dating
For a long time, most scholars agreed that much, if not all, of the Septe giornate was completed by 1479, including the maps, which were interpreted as having been printed in a single large batch and then subsequently bound (Skelton 1966; Campbell 1987). A significant number of extra sheets were left over from the original printing, and after Berlinghieri’s death in 1501, these were purchased and bound into a new edition with a new title page that was issued around 1503-1504. The majority of known intact copies of Berlinghieri’s work appear to be of this later edition.
A new and comprehensive study by Peerlings and Laurentius (2023) has nevertheless managed to identify subtle distinctions in many of Berlingheiri’s maps, denoting that there were amendments made and that different states thus exist. The current example of this particular map of North Africa is the 3rd state, identified primarily through the presence of the word APHRICA across the bottom half of the map. It is extremely difficult to assign respective dates to each state, although Peerlings, who has done most of the work in identifying, specifically notes that the variants of Libya Seconda were made “at a very early stage of the printing” (Peerlings & Laurentius 2023: 202).
Claudius Ptolemy (fl. AD 127-145) was an ancient geographer, astronomer, and mathematician. He is known today through translations and transcriptions of his work, but little is known about his life besides his residence in Alexandria.
Several of his works are still known today, although they have passed through several alterations and languages over the centuries. The Almagest, in thirteen books, discusses astronomy. It is in the Almagest that Ptolemy postulates his geocentric universe. His geometric ideas are contained in the Analemma, and his optical ideas were presented in five books known as the Optica.
His geographic and cartographic work was immensely influential. In the Planisphaerium, Ptolemy discusses the stereographic projection. Perhaps his best-known work is his Geographia, in eight books. However, Ptolemy’s ideas had been absent from western European intellectual history for roughly a thousand years, although Arab scholars interacted with his ideas from the ninth century onward.
In 1295, a Greek monk found a copy of Geographia in Constantinople; the emperor ordered a copy made and the Greek text began to circulate in eastern Europe. In 1393, a Byzantine diplomat brought a copy of the Geographia to Italy, where it was translated into Latin in 1406 and called the Cosmographia. The manuscript maps were first recorded in 1415. These manuscripts, of which there are over eighty extant today, are the descendants of Ptolemy’s work and a now-lost atlas consisting of a world map and 26 regional maps.
When Ptolemy’s work was re-introduced to Western scholarship, it proved radically influential for the understanding and appearance of maps. Ptolemy employs the concept of a graticule, uses latitude and longitude, and orients his maps to the north—concepts we take for granted today. The Geographia’s text is concerned with three main issues with regard to geography: the size and shape of the earth; map projection, i.e. how to represent the world’s curve proportionally on a plane surface; and the corruption of spatial data as it transfers from source to source. The text also contains instructions as to how to map the world on a globe or a plane surface, complete with the only set of geographic coordinates (8000 toponyms, 6400 with coordinates) to survive from the classical world.
Francesco Berlinghieri (1440-1501) was a Florentine engraver. Nicolas Laurentii published Berlinghieri's edition of Ptolemy, which was written in Italian terza rima, comprising 123 folios of text and 31 engraved maps. The work was first printed in 1482, but most surviving examples come from the edition of 1486, which was the first edition to include red printing in the title page. The full title is Geographia. In Questo Volume Si Congengono Septe Giornate Della Geographia Di Francesco Berlingeri Fiorentino Allo Illustrissimo Federigo Duca . . .
Berlinghieri's edition of Ptolemy is unique, in that it includes 31 maps covering Europe, northern Africa and the south part of Asia and is the first atlas to attempt the introduction of modern geography, with the inclusion of four new maps - France, Italy, Spain and Palestine, which are based on contemporary knowledge. rather than a strict plotting of Ptolemy's coordinates. A number of other maps in the Berlinghieri edition of Ptolemy include data which is drawn from modern sources, albeit more subtlely so, in part because of transcription errors and in part because of corrections made over time by later scholars.
While Berlinghieri's atlas was the third Italian printed edition of Ptolemy, it was very important in other respects. Berlinghieri's Ptolemaic regional maps are drawn on Marinus' plane projection; and although not generally considered an edition of Ptolemy, the maps are the only examples of Ptolemy's maps to be drawn on the original projection, with equidistant meridians and parallels. Berlinghieri's work was also the first to include a printed Gazetteer for each of the maps.
The text by Berlingheiri is a metrical paraphrase of Ptolemy, the first atlas in the Italian language. Francesco Berlinghieri was an Italian scholar and humanisrt. He promoted the value of classical Greek learning and therefore was the first to print an edition of Ptolemy in vernacular Italian, rather than Latin. The maps look distorted as compared to modern maps, because Ptolemy's data was inaccurate. One reason is that Ptolemy estimated the size of the Earth as too small: while Eratosthenes of Cyrene, a Greek mathematician, elegiac poet, athlete, geographer, and astronomer, made several discoveries and inventions including a system of latitude and longitude and conceived the idea of 700 stadia for a degree on the globe, in the Geographia Ptolemy uses 500 stadia. It is not certain if these geographers used the same stadion, but if we assume that they both stuck to the traditional Attic stadion of about 185 meters, then the older estimate is 1/6 too large, and Ptolemy's value is 1/6 too small. Because Ptolemy derived most of his topographic coordinates by converting measured distances to angles, his maps get distorted. So his values for the latitude were in error by up to 2 degrees. For longitude this was even worse, because there was no reliable method to determine geographic longitude.
Ptolemy was well aware of this. It must be added that his original topographic list cannot be reconstructed: the long tables with numbers were transmitted to posterity through copies containing many scribal errors, and people have always been adding or improving the topographic data: this is a testimony to the persistent popularity of this influential work in the history of cartography..
As early as 1938 Arthur M. Hind, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, hinted that the engravings might have been made by Francesco Rosselli (1448-before 1527), the principal engraver in Florence in the 1480s and 1490s. Subsequently, this possibility was rejected by Roberto Almagiagrave, R. A. Skelton and Tony Campbell. In the author's view, however, both stylistic and circumstantial evidence argues that Francesco was indeed the engraver, and that this first major commission launched the career that eventually made him known to his contemporaries as 'Franciscus rosellus florentinus Cosmographus'.
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