Munster Tabula Novarum Insularum 1540 UTA

Religion and politics are often closely allied, and this was especially the case in the sixteenth century. In this famous map, the Spanish flag flies prominently in the West Indies, while the Portuguese flag dominates the south Atlantic – reflecting pronouncements by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal of 1494. These declarations divided the non-Christian world between the two countries and charged the Portuguese and Spanish rulers with the responsibility of bringing the non-Christian inhabitants into the Catholic faith. This is reputedly the first printed map to name the Pacific Ocean and it is also among the earliest printed maps of the Western Hemisphere to show North and South America as separate but connected landmasses. The map’s creator, Münster, was a German Catholic Franciscan theologian and priest (ordained in 1512) as well as cartographer, cosmographer, humanist, mathematician, and scholar.

Date

1540

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

map

Original size

3,674 × 2,835 pixels

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