Marco Polo and the Catalan Atlas​​​​​​​​​

 

The Catalan Atlas (1375), crafted by the Majorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques, stands as a masterpiece of medieval cartography that incorporated information from a variety of medieval sources, including Polo's account. Created as a gift from the Crown of Aragon to Charles VI of France, this illuminated mappamundi represents one of the most detailed and well-known cartographic representations of Asia in the European Middle Ages.

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This project, still in progress, aims to realise a first digital web map of the Catalan Atlas. We are currently working on the digitisation of the first half of the sixth panel of the atlas, providing a transcription and translation of the captions included in the map and an identification of the cities and localities included by Cresques in his work. The panel includes fifty-two illuminations and geographical locations, mostly concerned with India and Asia.

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Transcriptions have been based on the work of Jean Alexandre Buchon. Notice d'un atlas en langue catalane, manuscrit de l'an 1375, conservé parmi les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque royale sous le numéro 6816, fonds ancien (No. 2). Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839.

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A parallel digitisation project devoted to the Catalan Atlas has been developed by Juan Ceva and is available here: The Cresques Project.

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High resolution images are of public domain and have been provided by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  Feel free to navigate the map and zoom on its details and click the shaded areas to read captions and toponyms.
 

The visualization interface is still in its beta version.

Open the map in a separate window here.​