In 2003, the Library of Congress bought Martin Waldseemüller’s world map for a world record $10 million dollars, because it is the first map to name America and show the Pacific. Widely regarded as ‘America’s birth certificate’, the map was believed lost until found by a Jesuit priest in a castle in Germany in 1900, where it remained 2003, when the library persuaded its owner, a German count, to sell it. Made by Waldseemüller and a team of scholars in Germany in 1507, its distinctive bulb-shaped projection reflects their attempt to keep up with the extraordinary period of rapid discoveries made by the Spanish and Portuguese from the late fifteenth century, including landfalls in southern Africa, India, Asia, and of course, the Americas. At the top of the map are Ptolemy (left) and Amerigo Vespucci (right), whose voyages proved conclusively that America was a separate continent, disproving Columbus’ belief that he had landed in Asia. It is a map that remains full of mysteries: how did Waldseemüller know about the Pacific six years before any European discovered it?
A History of the World in Twelve Maps
From Ptolemy to Google Earth, the world has been mapped by visionaries
Martin Waldseemüller’s Universal Cosmography, 1507
Full List
Maps of the World
- Claudius Ptolemy, World Map, 150 AD
- Al-Sharif al-Idrisi, World Map, 1154
- Richard of Haldingham, Mappa-mundi, 1300
- The Yu Ji Tu, 1137
- Martin Waldseemüller’s Universal Cosmography, 1507
- Diogo Ribeiro, World Map, 1529
- Gerard Mercator, World Map, 1569
- Joan Blaeu, Atlas Maior, 1662
- Louis Capitaine, Map of France, 1790
- Sir Halford Mackinder, The Natural Seats of Power, 1904
- Arno Peters, World Map, 1973
- Homepage of Google Earth, 2013