[Sidenote:  The Catalan Map of 1375, the most complete mediaeval embodiment of Polo’s Geography.]

84.  The first genuine mediaeval attempt at a geographical construction that I know of, absolutely free from the traditional idola, is the Map of the known World from the Portulano Mediceo (in the Laurentian Library), of which an extract is engraved in the atlas of Baldelli-Boni’s Polo.  I need not describe it, however, because I cannot satisfy myself that it makes much use of Polo’s contributions, and its facts have been embodied in a more ambitious work of the next generation, the celebrated Catalan Map of 1375 in the great Library of Paris.  This also, but on a larger scale and in a more comprehensive manner, is an honest endeavour to represent the known world on the basis of collected facts, casting aside all theories pseudo-scientific or pseudo-theological; and a very remarkable work it is.  In this map it seems to me Marco Polo’s influence, I will not say on geography, but on map-making, is seen to the greatest advantage.  His Book is the basis of the Map as regards Central and Further Asia, and partially as regards India.  His names are often sadly perverted, and it is not always easy to understand the view that the compiler took of his itineraries.  Still we have Cathay admirably placed in the true position of China, as a great Empire filling the south-east of Asia.  The Eastern Peninsula of India is indeed absent altogether, but the Peninsula of Hither India is for the first time in the History of Geography represented with a fair approximation to its correct form and position,[11] and Sumatra also (Java) is not badly placed.  Carajan, Vocian, Mien, and Bangala, are located with a happy conception of their relation to Cathay and to India.  Many details in India foreign to Polo’s book,[12] and some in Cathay (as well as in Turkestan and Siberia, which have been entirely derived from other sources) have been embodied in the Map.  But the study of his Book has, I conceive, been essentially the basis of those great portions which I have specified, and the additional matter has not been in mass sufficient to perplex the compiler.  Hence we really see in this Map something like the idea of Asia that the Traveller himself would have presented, had he bequeathed a Map to us.

[Some years ago, I made a special study of the Far East in the Catalan Map. (L’Extreme-Orient dans l’Atlas catalan de Charles V., Paris, 1895), and I have come to the conclusion that the cartographer’s knowledge of Eastern Asia is drawn almost entirely from Marco Polo.  We give a reproduction of part of the Catalan Map.—­H.  C.]

[Illustration:  Part of the Catalan Map (1375).]

[Sidenote:  Confusions in Cartography of the 16th century, from the endeavour to combine new and old information.]