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Literary Review
The world scaled down
ACCORDING to Joseph Needham, ancient and medieval China was between one and 13 centuries ahead of the West in important technical innovations. Europe caught up gradually, laboriously, borrowing the bases of its own later supremacy: paper and printing, for instance, gunpowder, the compass, the rudder and the blast furnace. Of inventions which proved to have major significance, only the lens and clockwork travelled in the opposite direction, eastwards across Eurasia. In the 17th Century, however, the prevailing direction of exchanges began to shift. One way of measuring the pace of Europe's early-modern scientific revolution is to monitor the reception in China of the Jesuit sages — the wise men from the West, who proved embarrassingly adept, by barbarian standards, as astronomers, engineers, architects, clockmakers and gunsmiths.
As David Buisseret points out in The Mapmakers' Quest, the process of China's enlightenment from the West began with maps. In the early 17th Century, Matteo Ricci's entrée into the Mandarin acceptance world was as the creator of a "Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries". From then on, Western cartographic conventions began to displace indigenous traditions in most of Asia. This breakthrough seems all the more surprising in view of the previously backward state of Western cartography. In the 16th Century, when cartographic traditions were exchanged across Eurasia with greater intensity than ever before, the balance of borrowings still favoured the cartographers of the East. Vasco da Gama's Muslim pilot drew "a chart of India in the fashion of the Moors" with "meridians and parallels". The extraordinary fidelity with which Francisco Rodrigues mapped the coasts between the Bay of Bengal and the Banda Sea, on slight acquaintance, would be inexplicable save by reference to indigenous maps; and the early Portuguese charts of Eastern seas can safely be assumed to incorporate information from them. In 1512, a Javanese map, which was said to include information from Chinese maps or sailing directions, was dispatched to the court of Portugal by Afonso de Albuquerque, who called it "the best thing I have ever seen". It was lost in a shipwreck en route in 1513. Yet within a century, Europeans' dependence on indigenous mapping had been broken and the superiority of European cartography began to assert itself. How was this reversal possible?
Buisseret explains it piecemeal. He argues that the rise of cartography was, like realism in painting, the result of a late-medieval revolution in imagination: a way of seeing the world as it really is, then reducing it to scale. The proliferation of maps in Europe responded to demand. Much of it came from rulers who wanted to know their realms and hung their palaces with maps — like those which lined the council chambers of popes and kings of Spain. Some of the most important developments of the 17th Century were stimulated by French royal projects to produce accurate maps, first of France, then of the world.
Scientific curiosity was indistinguishable from political ambition. Louis XIV liked to visit the Parisian Academy where a great world-map was taking shape on the floor. The growth of long-range navigation required maps: from the early 16th Century, Portuguese and Spanish navigators were obliged to record information on routes unfamiliar to fellow pilots. The monarchies which inaugurated prize competitions in the quest for longitude did so in order to spare ships and save revenues. The "military revolution", according to Buisseret, made a major contribution: maps of territory to traversed, towns to be taken, or fortifications to be mined or manned became part of the commanders' equipment. The author might usefully have added a chapter on the growing market for maps as decorative and educational objects in private homes: the interiors that 17th-Century painters depicted in the Netherlands rarely seem to have been complete without maps of the householders' regions or towns. He also mentions — though rather non-committally, the growing scholarly consensus that medieval European mapping has been underrated and actually provided a solid basis for early-modern progress in the art: the makers of pilgrims' maps, historical maps, estate maps, portolan charts, maps required for boundary disputes at law, and maps of itineraries and progresses all helped to lay the foundations of later European cartographic supremacy.
The trouble with piecemeal explanations is that they can be picked off piecemeal by a critical sniper. China had long experience of painterly realism and scale mapping: so Europe's achievements in these respects can hardly explain the origins of a superior tradition. Long-range navigation did require maps; but few were forthcoming until the 17th Century, when explorers at last began to take seriously their responsibility for charting discoveries. Most army commanders, too, remained cartographically illiterate for most of the period. Still, the power of David Buisseret's arguments is cumulative: no single explanation seems adequate to the task he sets himself, but in sum the many lines of inquiry he raises help to set the problems in context and make them more intelligible.
The Mapmakers' Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe, David Buisseret, Oxford University Press, p.227, £20 (US $35). 0 19 210053 X
- The Times Literary Supplement
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FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO
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