Thanks to his connections in high places, Monte met with the first official Japanese delegation to visit Europe when they came to Milan in 1585. He drew on the works of more famous cartographers like Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, and he included recent discoveries of his time, such as the islands of Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, first sighted by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520. Monte appears to have been quite geo-savvy for his day.

It was, after all, an exciting age of discovery, writes Katherine Parker, a historian of cartography, in a recent essay about Monte’s map: “Their world was growing each day and Monte wanted to understand all of it.” He came from a wealthy and well-connected family in Milan, and like many gentleman scholars of his day, he had a keen interest in geography. Little is known about the mapmaker, Urbano Monte. “No one has really studied this because it’s been hidden for centuries.” Only three surviving versions of the map are known to exist. Salim Mohammed, the head and curator of the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, which recently added the map to its collection. It portrays the Earth as it would be seen looking directly down on the North Pole from space, a perspective not commonly used by mapmakers until the 20th century. The map reflects the geographical knowledge (and misconceptions) of its time, but in some ways it’s surprisingly advanced. The map is packed with fantastical creatures, from unicorns in Siberia to mermen frollicking in the Southern Ocean and a terrifying bird flying off with an elephant in its talons. For the last 430 years, its 60 individual sheets were bound together as an atlas, but now they have finally been put together-digitally-to reveal a complete picture of the world as it was understood at the time.Īnd what a world it was. This colorful and intricately detailed map from 1587 is more than nine feet by nine feet when fully assembled.

Map of earth flat