Maps are among the most political objects in history because they pretend to be neutral

The Kangnido was produced in Korea in 1402. Its proportions are unfamiliar to a modern viewer. Korea and China occupy a commanding place; Africa appears in recognisable outline; Europe is compressed toward the edge. The map does not resemble the world as it would later be arranged in European atlases, and that difference is precisely what makes it useful.

Other maps produce other worlds. Al-Idrisi’s twelfth-century geography drew upon information gathered across the Islamic world and beyond. The Catalan Atlas placed commercial routes, rulers, ports, and distant kingdoms within a Mediterranean field of knowledge. Fra Mauro assembled reports from merchants and travellers into a world that extended well beyond Europe. Ottoman cartographers later worked with material inherited from several geographical traditions.

None of these maps can be treated as a simple record of the world as it was. Each depends upon the information available to its makers, the routes through which that information travelled, and the places considered important enough to represent. Their distortions therefore deserve as much attention as their accuracies.

The difficulty comes when the history of geography is read backwards from European maritime expansion. Earlier maps are then made to look like imperfect preparations for a later and supposedly complete knowledge of the world. That sequence gives European exploration a coherence it did not possess at the time and reduces other traditions to preliminary stages in someone else’s story.
By the fifteenth century, distant regions had already been described, named, connected, and imagined from several centres. European voyages altered the movement of people, goods, and power on an enormous scale. They entered an existing geography of knowledge.

This is why historical maps are so revealing. They preserve the limits of what people knew, but they also preserve the worlds within which that knowledge made sense. The history of cartography becomes much less linear once those worlds are allowed to remain visible.

Images:
Kangnido, Korea, 1402
Al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-Mushtaq / Tabula Rogeriana, 1154
Catalan Atlas, Majorca, 1375
Fra Mauro Map, Venice, c. 1450
Piri Reis Map, Ottoman Empire, 1513