Björnbo and Petersen have asserted that Iceland, on the later map and in the Vienna text, has been given a position more in agreement with the sailing directions than on the Nancy map. I cannot see the necessity for this supposition, as it has almost exactly the same position in relation to the southern point of Greenland and to Norway in both works; the chief difference is merely that the longitude of all three countries is made 3° farther east in the later work (and the latitude of the southern points of Iceland and Greenland is put somewhat farther south), and that the east coast of Greenland has a more oblique north-eastward direction than the corresponding north-east coast on the Medici map, with the direction of which the Nancy map agrees fairly well. In this way it is brought nearer to Iceland; but that this should be due to a knowledge of the sailing directions seems very uncertain, and is not disclosed, so far as I can see, elsewhere in the later work. The only things I have found which might possibly point to northern authorities having been consulted since the production of the Nancy work, are the accurate latitude of Trondhjem, already referred to, and the island of “Byörnö” between Iceland and Greenland. The latter might be the Gunnbjörnskerries (or Gunnbjarnar-eyar) mentioned, amongst other places, in Ivar Bárdsson’s description of Greenland; but the abbreviation of the name is curious. Perhaps the island may be due to some oral communication, or an erroneous recollection of something the author may have heard of in Denmark in his youth.
Clavus’s merits
On the whole we shall be compelled after all to detract considerably from Claudius Clavus’s reputation as a Northern traveller and cartographer. His journey did not extend farther north than the Danish islands, and perhaps Skåne. On the other hand, he was in Italy, where he drew his maps or had them drawn, and where he also found his most important authorities. His chief merit as a cartographer is that he is the first we know of to have adopted Ptolemy’s methods, and that he gave the name of Greenland to the westernmost tongue of land in Norway on the Medicean mappamundi, and altered this a good deal with the help of other compass-charts and Vesconte’s mappamundi, to make it agree better with the ideas of the North which he may have acquired to some extent in his youth through legendary tales, and later through Saxo and other writers.
North-western portion of Nicolaus Germanus’s first revision of Ptolemy’s
map of the world (after 1466). (J. Fischer, 1902, Pl. I.)
Clavus’s influence on later cartography
Nicolaus Germanus, circa 1460-1470
Claudius Clavus’s later map of the North exercised for a long period a decisive influence on the representation of Scandinavia and to some extent of Greenland. This was chiefly due to the two well-known cartographers, Nicolaus Germanus and Henricus Martellus.[267] The former must have become acquainted with Clavus’s map soon after 1460, and included copies of it in the splendid MSS. of Ptolemy’s Geography which proceeded from his workshop at Florence. In these copies, of which several are known (cf. [p. 251]), he has redrawn Clavus’s map in the trapezoidal projection invented by himself, whereby his Greenland has been given a more oblique position than the Greenland of the original map and the corresponding peninsula on the Medici map. He also introduced this Greenland into his map of the world [cf. J. Fischer, 1902, Pl. I., III.; Björnbo, 1910, p. 136]; but, in order to make it agree better with the learned mediæval view of the earth’s disc surrounded by ocean, he surrounded it by sea on the north, so that it came to form a long and narrow tongue of land projecting from northern Russia, instead of the northern mass of land extending to the North Pole according to Clavus. But this long peninsula does not seem to have entirely satisfied this priest’s erudite ideas of the continent, and on later maps (which were printed after his death in the Ulm editions of Ptolemy of 1482 and 1486) he shortened it so much that it became a rounded peninsula to the north of Norway, with the name “Engronelant,”[268] and at the same time he moved Iceland out into the ocean to the north-west. This apparently quite arbitrary alteration may perhaps be due to a desire to bring the map as far as possible into agreement with the learned dogma of the continent [cf. Björnbo, 1910, pp. 141, ff.]; but older conceptions of Greenland may also have contributed towards it [cf. J. Fischer, 1902, pp. 87, ff.]. We have already seen that Adam of Bremen regarded Greenland as an island “farther out in the ocean opposite the mountains of Suedia” (see vol i. p. 194), and in his additions to the copy of Ptolemy, Cardinal Filastre (before 1427) states that Greenland lay to the north of Norway; we find the same view in the letter of 1448 from Pope Nicholas V. (see above, [p. 113]).[269] It is also somewhat remarkable that on the Genoese mappamundi of 1447 (or 1457) there occurs a peninsula north of Scandinavia just at the place where Clavus’s Greenland should begin (see [p. 287]).[270] On Fra Mauro’s mappamundi (1457-59) there are several peninsulas to the north of Scandinavia, some of which proceed from Russia (see [p. 285]).
Map of the North by Nicolaus Germanus (before 1482), after Claudius
Clavus, but with Greenland transferred to the north of Norway
Henricus Martellus, circa 1490