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East and South-East Asia: Cartographers' Attempts to Reconcile the Maps of Ptolemy and Martellus with Marco Polo's Travels and with Portuguese Charts

Several manuscript world maps, such as the "Genoese" one of 1457,1 and the more famous, very different, Fra Mauro map, normally dated 1459,2 showed that it was at least hypothetically possible to sail around the south of Africa to reach Asia. Yet, most Europeans' conception of Asia during the last quarter of the XVth century and the first part of the XVIth century was strongly influenced by the maps of Ptolemy and Martellus, and the text of Marco Polo's Travels.3 Maps of Ptolemy's world, more widely known with the appearance of printed editions of his Geographia from 1477 onwards, showed East Asia joined to Africa via a landmass which turned the Indian Ocean into a vast lake (Fig. 1).4 Clearly Ptolemy had no idea of the real triangular shape of the Indian subcontinent, even though it is shown between rivers identified as the Indus and the Ganges; to the south is an outsized Taprobana (Ceylon or Sri Lanka); to the east is the Aurea Chersonesus (the Golden or Malay peninsula), even though it bears little resemblance to its real shape. To the east again, is the Sinus Magnus (the Great Gulf). Beyond it, as on