Martin Waldseemüller was a German cartographer and humanist scholar. Sometimes known by the Hellenized form of his name, Hylacomylus, his work was influential among contemporary cartographers. His collaborator Matthias Ringmann and he are credited with the first recorded usage of the word America to name a portion of the New World in honour of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci in a world map they delineated in 1507. Waldseemüller was also the first to map South America as a continent separate from Asia, the first to produce a printed globe, and the first to create a printed wall map of Europe. A set of his maps printed as an appendix to the 1513 edition of Ptolemy's Geography is considered to be the first example of a modern atlas.
An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth.
Arthur H. Robinson was an American geographer and cartographer, who was professor in the Geography Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1947 until he retired in 1980. He was a prolific writer and influential philosopher on cartography, and one of his most notable accomplishments is the Robinson projection of 1961.
The Dieppe maps are a series of world maps and atlases produced in Dieppe, France, in the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s. They are large hand-produced works, commissioned for wealthy and royal patrons, including Kings Henry II of France and Henry VIII of England. The Dieppe school of cartographers included Pierre Desceliers, Jean Rotz, Guillaume Le Testu, Guillaume Brouscon and Nicolas Desliens.
Herman Moll was a British cartographer, engraver, and publisher.
The earliest known world maps date to classical antiquity, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm. World maps assuming a spherical Earth first appear in the Hellenistic period. The developments of Greek geography during this time, notably by Eratosthenes and Posidonius culminated in the Roman era, with Ptolemy's world map, which would remain authoritative throughout the Middle Ages. Since Ptolemy, knowledge of the approximate size of the Earth allowed cartographers to estimate the extent of their geographical knowledge, and to indicate parts of the planet known to exist but not yet explored as terra incognita.
Jorge Reinel born in Lisbon was a Portuguese cartographer and instructor in cartography, son of the well-known cartographer Pedro Reinel. In 1519 in Seville he participated in the maps designed for the trip of his countryman Ferdinand Magellan, and his depiction of the Maluku Islands served as a basis for Spanish claims to the islands. He had trained many pupils in the art of cartography such as Portuguese Diogo Ribeiro.
Abraham Cresques, whose real name was Cresques (son of) Abraham, was a 14th-century Jewish cartographer from Palma, Majorca, then part of the Crown of Aragon. In collaboration with his son, Jehuda Cresques, Cresques is credited with the authorship of the celebrated Catalan Atlas of 1375.
Pedro Reinel was a Portuguese cartographer. Between 1485 and 1519 Reinel served three Portuguese kings: João II, Manuel I and João III. He and his son, Jorge Reinel, were among the most renowned cartographers of their era, a period when European knowledge of geography and cartography were expanding rapidly. There is some evidence he was of African descent. Historian Rafael Moreira believes Reinel's father was an ivory carver brought from West Africa to serve in the royal workshops.
Portolan charts are nautical charts, first made in the 13th century in the Mediterranean basin and later expanded to include other regions. The word portolan comes from the Italian portolano, meaning "related to ports or harbors", and which since at least the 17th century designates "a collection of sailing directions".
The history of cartography refers to the development and consequences of cartography, or mapmaking technology, throughout human history. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world.
"Majorcan cartographic school" is the term coined by historians to refer to the collection of predominantly Jewish cartographers, cosmographers and navigational instrument-makers and some Christian associates that flourished in Majorca in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries until the expulsion of the Jews. The label is usually inclusive of those who worked in Catalonia. The Majorcan school is frequently contrasted with the contemporary Italian cartography school.
Pietro Vesconte was a Genoese cartographer and geographer. A pioneer of the field of the portolan chart, he influenced Italian and Catalan mapmaking throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He appears to have been the first professional mapmaker to sign and date his works regularly.
The history of French cartography can be traced to developments in the Middle Ages. This period was marked by improvements in measuring instruments and also by an upgrade of work in registers of all types. What is thought to be the oldest land map in Europe, the Saint-Bélec slab, representing an area of the Odet valley, was found in 1900, and rediscovered in a castle cellar in France in 2014. The Bronze-Age stone is thought to be 4,000 years old.
Lopo Homem was a 16th-century Portuguese cartographer and cosmographer based in Lisbon and best known for his work on the Miller Atlas.
The Miller Atlas, also known as Lopo Homem-Reineis Atlas, is a richly illustrated Portuguese partial world atlas dated from 1519, including a dozen charts. It is a joint work of the cartographers Lopo Homem, Pedro Reinel and Jorge Reinel, and illustrated by miniaturist António de Holanda.
La Cartografía Mallorquina is a book of essays on the Majorcan portolans written by Professor Julio Rey Pastor with the collaboration of Ernesto García Camarero. It is a scholarly essay, a key element in the study of portolans, especially those made by Majorcans as half of the book is devoted to the study of more than 400 Majorcan portolans existing worldwide.
Portuguese nautical science evolved from the successive expeditions and experience of the Portuguese pilots. It led to a fairly rapid evolution, creating an elite of astronomers, navigators, mathematicians and cartographers. Among them stood Pedro Nunes with studies on how to determine latitude by the stars, and João de Castro, who made important observations of magnetic declination over the entire route around Africa.
The Egerton 2803 maps are an atlas of twenty Genoese portolan charts dated to around 1508 or 1510 and attributed to Visconte Maggiolo. The manuscript maps depict various regions of the Old and New Worlds, blending both Spanish and Portuguese cartographic knowledge. They have been noted as the earliest non-Amerindian maps of Middle America, and, jointly, as one of the oldest portolan atlases of the Americas. The maps were acquired for the Egerton Collection in 1895, published in facsimile form in 1911, and are now held by the British Library in London, England.
