The Mediterranean Sea Its history and present challenges
This volume is an indispensable addition to the multidisciplinary coverage of the science of the Mediterranean Sea. The editors have gathered leading authorities from the fields of Marine Biology, Ecology, paleoclimatology, Chemical and Physical Oceanogra
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The Mediterranean Sea Its history and present challenges
The Mediterranean Sea
The Catalan Atlas of 1375 The Catalan Atlas is a large scale map, dated 1375, that is made up of six leaves of vellum. The first two leaves reveal various astrological and cosmological data of the period, highlighting the known qualities of the world and illustrated with various charts and diagrams. The last four vellum leaves contain the Atlas itself. It has been argued that the Catalan Atlas was the product of the Majorcan Jewish mapmaker Abraham Cresques (d.1387) and his son Jehuda, who were patronized by the king of Aragon Pedro IV (1336–1387) in the latter half of the fourteenth century. As a royally commissioned piece, the Catalan Atlas is thought to have been a gift from the royal house of Aragon to the newly crowned king of France, Charles VI (1368–1422). The Catalan Atlas illustrates, however, a much more complex – or global – view of the world than just the interaction between a French and a Spanish monarch and their patronage of a Jewish mapmaker. At least three cultural groups generally distinguished by their religion into Islamic, Jewish and Christian peoples often coexisted side by side, creating societies that demonstrated remarkable integration, especially in their cultural output. The Catalan Atlas created in 1375, at the end of the medieval period in Europe, can be seen as a product of this fluorescence of interaction. This multi-cultural interaction, facilitated by the communication between these social groups, led to a different, more global way of viewing the world. It is in a cosmological, geographic, cultural and performative sense that the Catalan Atlas should be seen as a document illustrating this more global view. It is an attempt to use the accumulated information taken from communication between cultures to portray a more complete idea of the world while illustrating how cosmology, trade, religion and politics coexist. It represents a more complete and complex vision of communication between medieval cultures emerges. The world it describes is not one of cultural isolation but of a steady and growing knowledge, not just of the geographic contours of the world, but of the diverse people who inhabit it. (This text originates from the paper “Looking Beyond: Globalization in the Catalan Atlas of the Fourteenth Century”, by Kathleen Holland, University of North Texas, 2010.)
Map of Europe and the Mediterranean from the copy to nineteenth century of Catalan Atlas of 1375
Stefano Goffredo • Zvy Dubinsky Editors
The Mediterranean Sea Its history and present challenges
Editors Stefano Goffredo Department of Biological Geological and Environmental Sciences Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna Bologna, Italy
Zvy Dubinsky Faculty of Life Sciences Bar Ilan University Ramat Gan, Israel
ISBN 978-94-007-6703-4 ISBN 978-94-007-6704-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6704-1 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946128 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2
