Before the Maps Had Edges: What the World Looked Like 500 Years Ago

The sharp, warm scent of cinnamon hit Luca’s nose before he even stepped through the heavy oak door of his father’s shop in the Genoese port, 1400 CE. He was nine years old, with scraped knees from climbing the dockside crates and a head full of stories about sea monsters told by the old sailors who gathered at the tavern down the street. But today, all he could think about was the small, curled stick of cinnamon his father had pressed into his palm that morning. “This little piece,” his father said, holding it up to the dim light of the shop, “costs as much as three months of our family’s bread. Maybe more, if the harvest is bad.” Luca stared at the stick, stunned. It was so light, so small, how could it be worth that much? His father smiled and tapped the wooden counter, where piles of dark peppercorns, pale cloves, and folded bolts of red silk were stacked. “These things come from places most people here have never even heard of. Cinnamon grows only in the rain forests of an island called Sri Lanka, thousands of miles away. Pepper comes from the southern tip of a land called India. Silk is woven by families in a country called China, farther east than the farthest map any scholar has ever drawn. To get them here, merchants walk for years across burning deserts, climb snow-covered mountains, and sail through stormy seas, paying taxes to a dozen different kings along the way. Some never make it home at all.” Luca had heard the stories before, but this time, he looked at the small stick in his hand and felt a weird, tingly feeling in his chest. The world, he realized, was much bigger and more mysterious than the narrow streets of Genoa, the hills of the Italian countryside, and the ports he had visited with his father. And most of it was a complete blank, even to the smartest scholars in Europe.

The World as People Knew It (Sort Of)

If you had asked a scholar in a European university in 1400 to draw a map of the entire world, he would have pulled out a copy of a book written 1,200 years earlier, by a Greek scholar named Claudius Ptolemy who lived in Egypt. Ptolemy’s *Geography* was the closest thing to a world atlas anyone had ever made. It showed three giant continents: Europe in the northwest, Asia stretching all the way to the east (so big it took up half the map), and Africa in the southwest, all surrounded by a giant ocean called the “World Sea.” But if you looked closely at Ptolemy’s map, you would notice huge blank spaces between the continents. No one had ever sailed far enough out into the World Sea to map the coasts of Africa south of the Sahara Desert. No one knew how far east Asia stretched, or if there was any land at all between Europe and Asia if you sailed west across the ocean. The only parts of the map that were filled in were the places where Greeks, Romans, Arabs, or Chinese had traveled, traded, or written about. For the blank spaces, people filled them with stories. Sailors told tales of giant whirlpools in the Mediterranean that could swallow a whole ship in seconds, of six-headed sea monsters that lived in the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily, and of beautiful women called sirens whose songs lured sailors to crash their ships on rocky shores. The most famous story of all was about the “Cape of Storms” at the southern tip of Africa, which sailors said was guarded by sea monsters that would tear any ship that came too close to pieces. No European had ever tried to sail past it. No one even knew if it was possible. The most valuable goods in the world at the time—cinnamon, pepper, cloves, silk, gold, and ivory—all came from the lands east of the Mediterranean, or south of the Sahara Desert. The only way to get them to Europe was over land, along routes called the Silk Road (which stretched from China to the Mediterranean) and the Incense Route (which carried spices from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean ports). These routes were controlled by Arab, Persian, and Central Asian merchants, who charged huge fees to carry goods through their territories. Caravans of camels traveled for months across burning deserts, where bandits often attacked to steal the valuable cargo. By the time the spices reached the ports of Venice and Genoa, their price had gone up 100 times or more. A single pound of pepper, for example, cost the same as a skilled worker’s wages for five full months. That’s why pepper was sometimes called “black gold.” Only the richest nobles and kings could afford to buy these luxury goods. Ordinary people like Luca’s family almost never tasted pepper, cinnamon, or cloves. The only time Luca had ever had cinnamon was at Christmas, when his mother put a tiny pinch in the honey cake she made for the family. It tasted like magic, like warm sun and sweet flowers, and he couldn’t understand why something so wonderful was so expensive.

> Sidebar: Myth Buster: Did People in 1400 Think the World Was Flat? > If you’ve heard the story of Christopher Columbus, you might have been told that when he set sail in 1492, most people thought the world was flat, and they were afraid he would sail off the edge. That’s not true at all! > More than 1,500 years before Columbus was born, Greek scholars already knew the world was round. A scholar named Eratosthenes, who lived in Egypt in 240 BCE, measured the angle of the sun in two different cities on the same day, and used simple math to calculate the Earth’s circumference. He got it almost exactly right: the real circumference is about 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles), and Eratosthenes calculated it at 39,690 kilometers (24,662 miles). By 1400, every educated person in Europe, Asia, and Africa knew the world was round. They had seen ships disappear over the horizon hull-first, which would only happen if the Earth was curved. They had seen the shape of the Earth’s shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse, which was always round. > So why was no one sailing west to find Asia? Three big reasons: > 1. Ptolemy had made a mistake when calculating the Earth’s circumference. He said it was only 28,000 kilometers (17,400 miles), much smaller than it really is. Scholars thought that if you sailed west from Europe, you would have to travel more than 60,000 kilometers (37,000 miles) to reach Asia—way farther than any ship could go with the food and water it could carry. > 2. No one knew that two huge continents (North and South America) were sitting between Europe and Asia. If you sailed west in 1400, you would hit the coast of North America long before you got to Asia, but no one knew that land was there. Many people thought if you sailed far enough west, you would either fall off the edge of the world (even though they knew it was round, they didn’t understand gravity, so they thought you might slide down the curved side into space) or starve before you got to Asia. > 3. Sailing far out into the open ocean was extremely dangerous. Ships were small, made of wood, and could be broken to pieces by a single storm. There were no accurate maps of the open ocean, no way to measure how far east or west you had traveled (no one had figured out how to measure longitude yet), and no way to carry enough fresh water and food for a trip that might take months or even years. Most sailors stuck close to the shore, where they could see land and hide in harbors if a storm came. > So when Columbus set sail in 1492, no one was afraid he would fall off the edge of the world. They were afraid he had made a mistake about the distance to Asia, and that his crew would starve before they got there. Spoiler alert: they were right to be worried, but they were very, very wrong about what was waiting for them across the ocean.

The Tiny Country That Decided to Sail Into the Unknown

While kings and merchants in Italy fought over control of the land trade routes to the east, a tiny, poor country on the western edge of Europe decided to try something different: sail south along the coast of Africa, to find a