The Carta Marina of Martin Waldseemüller from 1516 – political geography in context of the struggle for the spices of Southeast India

Martin Lehmann

doi:10.1080/23311983.2020.1741983

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that the highly accurate depiction of the Indian Ocean on the Carta marina of Martin Waldseemueller from 1516 is mainly caused by the extremely powerful political and econom...

Highlights

It was made clear that the cartographic depiction of the Indian Ocean and the Spice Islands—the key drivers of the India trade, which is closely related to the depiction of America, was quite deliberately prepared on the basis of over one thousand year old Ptolemaic specifications, despite the availability of newer maps—in particular, the manuscript map of Nicolo Caveri dating from 1503 was cited as evidence—in order to confuse the Iberian competitor, after confronting them with the sobering representation of America, by obfuscating the actual geographical situation in the Indian Ocean and in this way effectively preventing them from accessing the extremely lucrative spice trade, at least for a certain period of time
Maximilian I of Habsburg and Martin Waldseemüller when we look at this widely branching network of complex relationships and mutual political and economic dependencies in the power elite of Europe, we cannot help but ask why exactly Martin Waldseemüller was entrusted with this task that was politically delicate and extremely important from a financial point of view, as well as why this controversial work was performed in the small Lorraine town of St
It is extremely important to understand that, on the one hand, especially during the first two decades of the sixteenth century, the primary and almost exclusive interest of the Iberian powers consisted in securing the profitable spice trade with India while the pursuit of the discoveries in the western Atlantic Ocean initially played a subordinate role to this project, and, on the other hand—and this represents a logical consequence from the circumstance just described here —the depiction of America on both maps cannot be viewed as an isolated occurrence as it is inseparably linked to the reproduction of conditions in the Indian Ocean, and the two should be regarded as two sides of the same coin

Summary

Introduction

The paper on hand wants to prove that the accurate depiction of the Indian Ocean and of the Spice Islands on Martin Waldseemüller’s 1516 Carta marina is mainly driven by the documentation needs and the thereby associated ownership of the Portuguese crown in order to protect their political and economic interests as well as those of the Upper German-trading companies as opposed to the Kingdom of Castile.

Results

Conclusion