Abstract
Abstract The text of the British Library's manuscript Harley 3686 is an undated and anonymous Latin version of Ptolemy's Geographia with an innovative set of eighteen non‐Ptolemaic maps of Europe, Asia and Africa. Links with Andrea Bianco's nautical atlas (1436) suggest a Venetian provenance for the manuscript and a date of between 1436 and 1450. Map outlines were derived from portolan charts but inland topographical detail and toponymy appear to have come from the Ptolemaic text. The codex constitutes one of the earliest examples of the synthesis of portolan chart, Ptolemaic map and medieval mappamundi that characterised fifteenth‐century cartography and the only example of such a synthesis on a regional scale. Harley 3686 reveals some of the technical and methodological problems that the Geographia must have presented to the period's cartographers.
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