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Hungary on Two Portolan Charts by Angelino Dulcert (1325/30, 1339)

Portolan charts are primarily thought of as tools for navigation, with little need to show anything in the interior of the continents. The detailing of more than twenty places in Hungary on one of Angelino Dulcert's charts and more than thirty on the other is thus intriguing. Why Hungary should have been singled out for special treatment, and why the towns and regions of Hungary were marked on a chart primarily for navigation within the Mediterranean, or perhaps along the Atlantic coasts of Europe and northern Africa, is a question worth exploring. While Dulcert's charts are familiar to historians of cartography, hitherto no attention has been paid to the fact that they show not only the main towns of the Carpathian Basin and the Danube river system, but also, by implication, one of the major trans-European international trade routes of the period. The two portolan charts in question were made in 1325/30 and 1339 respectively by the Genoese cartographer Angelino Dulcert (also known as Dalorto), who lived and worked in Palma, Mallorca.1 The original of the earlier chart is in the private collection of Prince Filippo Corsini in Florence; the later chart is now in the Bibliotheque nationale de France.2 The earlier chart is drawn on a single piece of parchment with neck and measures 66 x 107 centimetres. The later chart, which is on two sheets of parchment, without the necks, glued together, forms a rectangular sheet 75 x 102 centimetres (Fig. 1). Both charts show not only the Mediterranean Sea, but also northern Africa (down to Cape Bojador), the Middle East (to Mesopotamia; the head of the Persian Gulf is shown only on the 1339 chart, however), and all Europe, including the Danish peninsula and Scandinavia.