The Catalan Atlas
The Catalan Atlas was created by Cresques Abraham, a Jewish cartographer, in the late 1370s to early 1380s. It is widely considered the most important medieval map in the Catalan language for its extreme geographic detail and cartographic precision thanks to Abraham’s experience creating mappae mundi, compasses, and illuminated manuscripts. The original atlas consisted of six vellum leaves folded vertically, painted in various colors including gold and silver.
Manuscript books like the Catalan Atlas shaped medieval visual and verbal literacy by utilizing both written Catalan text and rich graphic iconography. Similarly to Mesoamerican maps, the Catalan Atlas recorded more than just the shape of the land and the notable landmarks. The manuscript combined narrative captions on cosmography with visual symbols, such as flags indicating political allegiance, red or black ink to distinguish major ports, and crosses versus domes to signal Christian or non-Christian cities. Mesoamerican maps also depicted regional history and social connections through their maps, highlighting the functionality of maps as both full of geographical and social information.
The Catalan Atlas shaped European perceptions of foreign lands, reinforcing early Orientalist perspectives. Through deliberate illustrations, the "East" was exoticized as a land of incredible wealth and marvels. For example, Asian monarchs were illustrated through icons of lavish power, guarded by thousands of horsemen or surrounded by elephants, gold, and precious stones. Simultaneously, eastern territories were marked with supernatural threats, depicting desert devils calling lost travelers by name, the forces of Gog and Magog, and the Antichrist stationed beyond the Great Wall of China.
By combining descriptive textual captions with graphic icons of luxury, myth, and religious difference, the Catalan Atlas demonstrates how medieval manuscript design structured visual and verbal literacy to exoticize the East for Western viewers as a place of riches, completely overlooking the poverty that simultaneously existed. Furthermore, the Catalan Atlas highlights how cartography also served as a form of storytelling and entertainment for the Occident (the West), staging the Orient (the East) as the foreign, mysterious, yet intriguing character on the world stage. The depiction of a foreign land from an outsider perspective suggests inherent distortions and inaccuracies to the content presented on the map, which provides some reasoning behind early Orientalist beliefs and fascinations with Eastern culture. The deliberate framing and presentation of information in visual communication like maps dictates our understanding of the world around us, underscoring the necessity of identifying potential biases and skewed opinions in the information we consume.
