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

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​The Catalan Atlas (1375, image above), created by the workshop of 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 medieval world Mao represents one of the most detailed and well-known cartographic representations of Asia in the European Middle Ages.

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This section of the project, in progress, aims to realise a first digital web map of the Catalan 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 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839) and George Grosjean, Mapamundi. The Catalan Atlas of the year 1375 (Zurich: Urs Graf Verlag, 1978).

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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. You can check also the diplomatic digital edition curated by Giuliano Avicona et al.,  https://letteraturaeuropea .let.uniroma1.it/?q=laboratorio/mapamundi.

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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 - we have currently digitised the last panel of the map (Panel VI), focused on Central and East Asia. We are currently working on a Chinese translation of the atlas' contents.

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