This map by the Portuguese mapmaker Diogo Ribeiro is one of the first examples of political geography manipulating reality. Throughout the early sixteenth century Spain and Portugal were rivals for control of the spice trade, centered on the Moluccas islands in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1494 both powers signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, with a line drawn on a map running through the middle of the Atlantic, with everything to the west belonging to the Spanish, and everything to the east the Portuguese. Following Magellan’s first global circumnavigation in 1522, the question was where the line would fall in the eastern hemisphere. The Portuguese Ribeiro switched aides and was paid by the Spanish to make this apparently objective map, full of scientific detail, which shows the Moluccas (in both the far left and right-hand sides of the map) just within the Spanish half of the globe. Modern measurement suggests he was wrong, but it took hundreds of years to disprove his brilliant and extremely effective act of cartographic deception.
A History of the World in Twelve Maps
From Ptolemy to Google Earth, the world has been mapped by visionaries
Diogo Ribeiro, World Map, 1529
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