The Catalan Atlas

By Ariel Fein

What did Europeans know of the geography, politics, and peoples around the globe in the late 14th century?  A celebrated Jewish mapmaker in Majorca, Elisha ben Abraham Cresques, with his knowledge of Catalan, Hebrew, and Arabic, visualized his conception of the universe and the inhabited world in his remarkable 1375 Catalan Atlas. Measuring nearly ten feet in width and spread across six parchment leaves mounted on wooden boards, the map he created represents the height of medieval mapmaking in Majorca—an island off of the eastern coast of the Iberian peninsula (today Spain and Portugal) and a territory of the Crown of Aragon, which, in the 14th century, dominated much of the Mediterranean basin.

Combining various approaches to mapmaking, Cresques created a visual encyclopedia of the world, containing extensive commentary in captions and images designed to encompass all known geographical, historical, and human knowledge. In its ambitious geographic scope, covering lands from the Atlantic to China and from Scandinavia to Africa, the Catalan Atlas presents a highly connected medieval world. By examining the imagery of his Catalan Atlas, we can see how one 14th-century Jewish man understood the political and ethnic realities of his world.

The map’s rich and colorful imagery is exceptionally well-executed; it is no surprise that Cresques, a gifted painter and scribe, worked as the mapmaker to the King of the Crown of Aragon. In fact, he was the only mapmaker of his generation known and documented in the service of the Crown, and his Catalan Atlas was likely a royal commission by King Peter IV of Aragon possibly as a gift to King Charles V of France. The images in the map are oriented in every direction, suggesting that the Atlas would have been prominently displayed on a table to be seen from all sides when viewed by the king and his privileged guests. The Catalan Atlas served as a visualization of the king’s power and worldview. As expected, Cresques imbued the map with the desires of his royal patron, but if we look closely we see that he imbued it with his own worldview as well.

Ruler portraits: Documenting power and race

Moving south and east from the Mediterranean, into Africa, and West and East Asia, Cresques again diverged from earlier medieval maps by populating his map with images of rulers. Although often described as portraits, these images are not accurate renderings of the historical individuals, but visual markers of distinct political groups. The rulers are shown using a combination of royal imagery popular in European visual culture, such as scepters and crowns, and costumes and attributes more commonly seen in Islamicate imagery, such as turbans and cloth headcoverings, robes ornamented with tiraz armbands, and attributes such as a sword or shield. Contemporaneous European texts often characterized the Islamic world and its non-European, non-Christian rulers not only as exotic and different, but also as threatening enemies. For the patron of the Catalan Atlas, Peter IV of Aragon, the Islamic world was associated with the centuries-long enemy of the Reconquista and the Crusades, or with new rising threats, such as the emerging Ottoman power. However, through the use of European and Islamicate royal vocabulary, the rulers are rendered not as foreign or menacing, but rather as respected, powerful, and prosperous political rivals.

Perhaps the most famous ruler portrait in Cresques’s map, Mansa Musa, is the 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire known for its abundant resources in gold. In 1324, 50 years prior to the production of the Catalan Atlas, Musa embarked on the hajj, traveling throughout the Islamic lands of West Asia. During his journey in Cairo, Mecca, and Medina, he spent so much gold that the overall value of gold decreased in Egypt for over ten years, causing severe inflation and crippling the local economies.

Whereas Africa often appears on the margins of medieval European maps, Cresques’s depiction of Mansa Musa represents Africa as a powerful economic center. He is shown seated cross-legged atop a cushioned, golden throne, and he wears a golden crown and carries an orb and scepter, traditional emblems of medieval European kings. A turbaned nomad riding on a dromedary approaches Mansa Musa, who gazes at him and extends a piece of gold in his hand, a monetary transaction reinforced by the golden adornments on the nomad’s tents.

Together, they highlight the pivotal role played by the region of Mali in trans-Saharan trade. Since antiquity, networks of exchange had connected Africa and Europe, with commerce in gold and other materials bringing inhabitants of both continents into frequent contact. Gold mined south of the Sahara, along with salt, ivory, and enslaved peoples, was transported to the north by caravans of Saharan traders, reaching the shores of the Mediterranean and its maritime trade networks. The Catalan map pays special attention to this area of trade in both images and written legends, noting not only the abundance of gold, but also knowledge of the region’s fertile soil, settlements along caravan routes, and the production of leather goods.

The imagery of Mansa Musa and the Saharan camel-traders also visualizes 14th-century European notions of race and cultural difference. While skin color could denote geographical regions known or believed to be inhabited by Black people, color symbolism in medieval imagery was predominantly tied to Christian theology, whereby lightness or brightness was associated with virtue, and darkness with sin. For example, during the Crusades, a period of increased anti-Muslim sentiment, Muslims were frequently depicted as dark-skinned by European artists, despite the fact that most Muslims they encountered would have had medium or light complexions. Rather than physiognomic accuracy, color denoted a perception of violence and religious error. In contrast, the majority of the rulers depicted in the Catalan Atlas are shown with fair skin, as political rivals of the Atlas’s patron, but not necessarily as monstrous others. The light complexion of the Muslim rulers as well as accompanying legends praising them as great and powerful may also have related to Cresques’s own positive associations with Islamic culture.

In contrast, the representation of Africa denotes Cresques’s keener awareness with respect to geopolitical diversity and racial difference. The image of King Mansa Musa, although employing common features of European stereotypes of Africans, including tightly curled hair and beard, a low-bridged nose, and full lips, appears mostly to mark geographical distance (rather than blackness as an exotic other). However, in his rendering of the adjacent figures (the nomadic rider to the left and a camel-trader to the right), Cresques’s image takes on a more insidious tone. On the one hand, the distinction between the light skin of the nomadic North African tribes and the dark skin of the Black African camel-trader from further south suggests accurate knowledge of the region, likely drawn from contemporaneous Islamic maps and treatises. At the same time, the depiction of the black-skinned camel-trader renders the figure as primitive. Represented with his mouth ajar and nude (both often associated in medieval art with barbarism or sexual sin), the figure embodies racist interpretations found in some contemporaneous Islamic and Jewish texts. Perhaps such an image would have promoted Africa as a region ripe for colonization to its Aragonese patron.