Page 50 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

50 from Italy to the Canary Islands

(the marteolio or martelogio), which had already started to be used quite
frequently in the Mediterranean during the 1300s.
This new mathematical knowledge, favoured by the recovery of Euclid-
ian geometry, would be needed above all to compile a new type of map,
very different from the traditional mappaemundi, typical products of the
age of imprecision and dreams, of allegory and symbolical numbers. A
new type of map instead indicating and accurately describing the harbours,
i.e. the portolan chart, or more simply the portolan, in which were shown,
in red or black, depending on their importance, the names of the harbours,
taking into account the distances actually known, reported on a network of
lines in the form of a star according to wind directions and cardinal points,
inside mutually tangential circumferences divided into wind areas.
On the one side, therefore, a hierarchical, allegorical and ethical space,
that of the mappamundi, which united all religious and profane history on
one single plan of space; on the other side, a homogenous, uniform space,
built on mathematical foundations on the network of compass directions
and distances calculated based on estimated navigation; thus, drawing in-
spiration from the title of a collection of essays by Jacques Le Goff on
work and culture in the Middle Ages, we could speak of the merchant’s
space, which is believed to have started to antagonise the Church space,
even if not yet clearly and unrepentantly so at that time. With navigational
charts and shipping directions, we are in fact up against orientation instru-
ments produced by the Italian (Genoese in particular) and Catalan mercan-
tile bourgeoisie who, rejecting the encyclopaedic tradition and metaphys-
ical symbolism which had reigned supreme until that time, in favour of
empirical experience translated in pragmatic and mnemotechnical signs,
overturned the medieval vision of space, helping also to gradually dissolve
symbolical and fantastical densities which a longstanding tradition had at-
tributed to places, starting from the Mediterranean area. Therefore, myth-
ical places such as the Pillars of Hercules, marked with the wording non
plus ultra, would be reduced to simple coastal toponyms used to draw and
indicate straits and promontories, and the mysterious and chaotic external
Ocean would become increasingly navigable, to the extent that it would
become similar to a group of more tame and thus accessible Mediterrane-
ans, precisely in the etymological sense of “seas between the lands”.
Underlying all the above is the emergence and development of the
mercantile world and therefore of the cultural conceptions that this would
convey. As Paul Zumthor observed in his enlightening essay on the rep-