“Monte’s map reminds us of why historical maps are so important as primary resources,” says Stanford University’s David Rumsey Map Collection, which holds one of only three extant versions of the map and which conducted the digital project of scanning each of its pages and assembling them into a whole. King Philip II of Spain rides what looks like a floating throne off the coast of South America, a nod to Spanish prominence on the high seas.”

“Monte appears to have been quite geo-savvy for his day,” writes National Geographic‘s Greg Miller, noting that “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,” as well as an uncommonly detailed Japan based on information gathered from a visit with the first official Japanese delegation to Europe in 1585.Īnd in accordance with the mapmaking style of the time, he got more fanciful in the less-understood spaces: “Animals roam the land, and his oceans teem with ships and monsters. View it above, or in a larger format here. In 1587, he created his “planisphere” map as a 60-page manuscript, and only now have researchers assembled it into a single piece, ten feet square, the largest known early map of the world. For the 16th-century Milanese gentleman scholar Urbano Monte, figuring out what the whole world looked like turned into an enormous project, in terms of both effort and sheer size.

Most of us can dimly recall a time when it wasn’t quite so easy, but imagine trying to satisfy your geographical curiosity in not just decades but centuries past. We in the early 21st century can call up detailed maps of almost any place on Earth with little more effort than typing its name.

Flat earth map 1587