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[22] [23]
European Cartographers
and Cyprus 1320–1918
From the collection of
Professor Andrew Nicolaides
Andrew nicol Aides
introduction
Before the discovery of printing, maps of Cyprus and the rest of the world for
that matter were drawn on vellum. Those used by sailors often showed only
the outline of the shores with names of ports (portolan maps).
Such were the maps used on the sailing ships of the crusades.
The discovery of printing soon after 1450 using movable
type made books available to a large number of people speeding
up dissemination of knowledge. Until then manuscripts,
which were expensive, were the privilege of the rich, the church
and the noble. Strangely enough, the first printed atlases were
not reproductions of portolan maps, but were based on the
works of Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus 100–178 Ad) of Alexandria
who was a mathematician, astronomer and geographer.
Ptolemy worked in the great library in Alexandria where
he had access to all accumulated knowledge including astronomy,
geography and history. With this, with information he
collected from travellers passing through Alexandria, culturally the centre of
the Hellenic world, and with his own observations he produced two important
books, his Almagest a manual on astronomy and his Geographike hyphegesis
(known as Geographia or Cosmographia in some Latin editions), which was
a summary of the geographical knowledge at 150 Ad and a guide to drawing
maps of the known world. He provided instructions for drawing the map on a
globe and for three possible projections on a plane surface; also for drawing a
series of regional maps and a catalogue of approximately 8,000 localities with
their coordinates of latitude and longitude.
With the fall of the Roman Empire the classical Greek texts were lost to
the West. Western scholars had been aware of Greek authors such as Homer,
Plato, and Aristotle from references in Roman texts but they did not have any
access to them. Thanks to the Byzantines who copied the Greek classics, many
of which were taught at school, these texts including the Geographia survived.
Today there are at least 53 known Greek manuscripts in existence, some with
maps, the oldest dated 1300. The West became aware of the existence of Greek
MAPPING CYPRUS EUROPEAN CARTOGRAPHERS AND CYPRUS
Fig. 1: Cyprus. From Cosmographia Universalis
(German edition) by Sebastian Munster,
Basle, 1550; 96 x 150 mm