Fire Of Life

You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.

A world made to turn: Urbano Monte’s 1587 Planisphere, in His Own Words

Urbano Monte among figures and beasts drawn on his 1587 planisphere
Urbano Monte, with figures and beasts drawn on the 1587 sheets.

Part one: A world made to turn: Urbano Monte’s 1587 Planisphere, in His Own Words
Part two: The complete readings: Urbano Monte’s 1587 planisphere

Urbano Monte’s 1587 planisphere: sixty hand-drawn sheets, a “flattened ball”, and every sentence he wrote across the face of the Earth, transcribed and translated sheet by sheet.

Fire of Life · Cartography · first published 6 October 2026, expanded edition

In 1587 a Milanese nobleman finished a picture of the Earth that was never meant to hang flat. Urbano Monte drew it by hand on sixty sheets, arranged as a disk around the North Pole, and asked that they be pasted to a wooden panel about ten feet square and turned on a pin. You were to walk the rim of a world, or let the world come round to you.

Most people who meet this map today meet it as a single spectacular picture: the “largest early world map”, digitally stitched together at Stanford in 2017 and shared online ever since. Some meet it in a stranger way, as a supposed relic of a “flat earth” that Renaissance mapmakers knew about and modern science hid. Both encounters miss the same thing. Monte did not only draw. He wrote. Across the sixty sheets he left scrolls, cartouches, captions and sonnets: on giants and pygmies, on spices and porcelain, on kings and popes, on cannibals “when these lands were discovered”, on Magellan’s ship coming home to Seville, and, in a frame beside his own portrait, a plain statement of what the map is: una palla schiacciata, a flattened ball.

This post is a reading of that writing. It gives Monte’s Italian and an English version, sheet by sheet, from the copy at the David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford, and then pulls the most revealing passages together by theme.

Urbano Monte’s 1587 planisphere, a circular world map centered on the North Pole, assembled from sixty manuscript sheets
Urbano Monte, planisphere, Milan, 1587. Click the picture. A section lights up, and opening it shows the ink.
Open the sixty manuscripts

The study is best viewed on a desktop. A wide window keeps the list beside the map, and the ink is meant to be read up close.

What this page is, and why it is new

Plenty of pages show this map. The David Rumsey Map Collection holds the scan, and you can slide across the joined picture there. Other sites will turn that picture, change its projection, or wrap it onto a globe. Useful, and still one image with nowhere in particular to stop.

Monte did not draw one image. He drew sixty manuscripts, and he wrote on them. This page reads that writing, sheet by sheet, in his Italian and in English, and each reading sits on the sheet it came from.

The transcriptions and translations here are Fire of Life’s own work. As far as we have been able to find, nobody has put the writing on the 1587 sheets online at this extent before. The scholarship quotes it only in fragments. Chet Van Duzer’s 2020 article prints one of the long edge texts in full (the one on India) to show where Monte copied it from. Annalisa D’Ascenzo’s 2011 article lists the subjects of the edge texts and quotes the cartouche on the map’s design from the Venegono copy. D’Ascenzo’s 2012 monograph includes transcriptions (for example, of the text on his printed map of Japan), but it is a paid book and not online. When the copy was digitised in 2017, David Rumsey hoped that future research would join the text of the treatise to the text on the map itself. The joining of the treatise is still to come. The words on these sheets are here: all sixty sheets and the four corner pieces, including the thirty-six long descriptive texts set round the rim.

It is not the most complete study of Monte in the world. Roberto Almagià wrote the first long study in 1941. Annalisa D’Ascenzo’s monograph of 2012, Cultura geografica e cartografia in Italia alla fine del Cinquecento, is the book. Chet Van Duzer, in Imago Temporis for 2020, is the English study of the sources and of how the map changed. Alessandro Tedesco’s page at the Seminario in Milan is the best free account of the three copies. What this page can claim is narrower, and true. It is the fullest reading online of the writing on this copy.

The man and the moment

Monte was born in Milan on 16 August 1544, the natural son of Giovanni Battista Monti and Angela de Menclozzi, into a family of the minor patrician class. He held no public office. According to his biographer in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, he spent his life on study, on running the family property and on pious works. At 35 he married the eighteen-year-old Margarita Niguarda; they had four sons and a daughter. Before the map he wrote a four-volume family and civic chronicle of Milan, Delle cose più notabili successe nella città di Milano, running from 1386 (the founding of the cathedral and the birth of the first Monte ancestor) to 1587.

The last volume of that chronicle is why the map exists. At the end of July 1585 the first Japanese ambassadors ever received in Europe came through Milan. They were four young noblemen from Kyushu’s Christian lords, on their way home from Rome with their Jesuit escorts. Monte watched the official celebrations and described them. D’Ascenzo argues that the encounter, and above all his contact with the Jesuits who accompanied the envoys, gave him the wish to bring the whole newly enlarged world into one work. He began with Japan. On 6 April 1589 the Milanese printer Giacomo Piccaglia issued his woodcut Descrittione e sito del Giapone. The planisphere extends that trial to the whole Earth. Monte’s own note on Japan, on Tavola LIII, still remembers the visit: the envoys “saw [Pope Gregory XIII’s] death, and the creation of Pope Sixtus the Fifth, et venero a Milano, and they came to Milan”.

The map belongs to a larger work, the Trattato universale. Descrittione et sito de tutta la Terra sin qui conosciuta (“Universal treatise: description and site of all the Earth known so far”). Its long title, as transcribed by D’Ascenzo from the 1590 copy, says what Monte was making and for whom:

Two phrases matter for everything that follows. The sheets join into a world map in forma piana circolare, a deliberately flat, circular rendering of something he knew was not flat. And the audience was studenti. Van Duzer uses that phrase, and Monte’s own coat of arms and portrait on the map where a patron’s would normally go, to argue that the map was a teaching instrument and not a nobleman’s wall ornament.

One copy, of three

Monte signed himself Monte. He left three autograph copies of the Trattato.

This one is the working copy of 1587, now at the David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford, shelf mark G1015.M6 1587 F. It has the sixty map sheets and the running title Libro terzo. It does not have the treatise. Van Duzer notes that the foliation leaves gaps that match the text pages of the 1590 copy exactly, so the text was once there or was planned. The sheets also carry fold creases where Monte tried fitting the rings together, and later notes in his hand: reminders to add degree scales, a “narrative”, compass roses. On one sheet a centaur sticks out past the edge of the map; in the fair copy he moved it. This copy came to light at Sotheby’s in 1981, passed through H. P. Kraus (1983) and Bonhams (2012), and was bought by David Rumsey in 2017.

The fair copy, dated 1590 on the title page, is at the Biblioteca del Seminario Arcivescovile di Milano, Venegono, FV.B-VII-56. It has the text and the maps, and it is not digitised (there is a 1994 facsimile of the maps and a 1999 CD-ROM). On that copy a description follows each sheet. Those descriptions are not reconstructed here. In the fair copy Monte added sea monsters and ships to empty stretches of sea. He admits in its text that he did this just to fill space, and that his drawing hand was not a professional’s.

The third copy is at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, A 260 inf. The text is manuscript. The plates were engraved by Leone and Lucio Palavicino. A privilege for printing (for fifteen years, from the governor of Milan) was granted in July 1603. Revisions run to about 1604. That copy has sixty-four sheets, and the lands south of the equator are cut into four lobes, which Monte called an “open pomegranate”. It was never published. Van Duzer judges the half-revised plates unpublishable, because Monte moved the meridians without moving the coastlines with them. Family quarrels over the inheritance scattered the copper plates and proofs after his death.

The treatise is four books. The first is cosmography. The second is a short glossary of pole, equator, latitude and longitude. The third is these sixty sheets. The fourth has fourteen unnumbered plates of eclipses and a perpetual calendar, then the indices. This page is the third book of the 1587 copy, and nothing else. (The Rumsey set also includes the key sheet, the covers and several Book Four diagrams. Four of those circular diagrams sit in the corners of the assembled image, and they are read here too.)

How the disk is meant to turn

North is the pin. Four sheets touch it. The rings run out to a rim of eighteen. The degrees go from 1 to 360. Monte’s own instruction, at the end of the third book on the fair copy, asks for a board five braccia square (a Milanese braccio was about 0.6 m, so roughly 3 m), able to turn, so the disk can be read from every side. Van Duzer quotes the opening of it from the Venegono manuscript:

On this copy he says the same thing on Tavola XL, according to the original version of this page, which followed the Rumsey description. (In our sheet-by-sheet reading, the clearest statement of the plan is the cartouche on Tavola XLII, given in full below.) He signs the work and sets his portrait on Tavola XLII. The only date he writes on these sheets is 1587, there. Every element of the map is lettered to be read from the rim inward, which is why Van Duzer concludes that it was meant to hang upright on a wall and turn, not lie on a table.

The banners that say che ha sua superiore (“which has above it”) are his assembly notes. They name the sheet above, and the foot notes name the sheet below, so the map could not be put together wrongly. One of them is wrong on its face: Tavola LIX writes LVIII again, and writes sua twice. The reading keeps that.

“A flattened ball”: what Monte said his map was

If you read only one passage on the map, read this one. It sits on Tavola XLII, beside his portrait, in the only text cartouche on the map with an elaborate frame. Van Duzer traced the cartouche’s frame to a 1558 map of Scandinavia printed by Michele Tramezzino.

Read slowly, it is a small lesson in map projection. Take a ball. Keep the top (the North Pole) as the centre. Now imagine slitting the lower half into points, like peeling an orange from the bottom, and spreading those points out flat until the whole surface lies in a disk. The South Pole, a single point on the real ball, is now smeared all the way round the rim, and in every part of that circumference you must imagine it. Fold the points back up and they would meet at the bottom, just as the inner sheets meet at the top. He writes both ponte and punte for those points.

The sonnet on the same sheet tells the reader what else to look for, including the corner diagrams:

He was not being modest, and he was not wrong. Assembled, the map would have been larger than any printed wall map of the sixteenth century.

How to read the transcriptions

His Italian is in italic. The English is in the ordinary face. Monte’s spelling is kept as written: Magalianes, Pigafeta, fuogo, Brasielia, doubled X’s in the numerals and all. A few conventions recur:

  • “A word … may still move.” The hand in the smallest boxes, especially in the corners, is tiny. Where a reading is not yet settled, the transcription says so instead of guessing. In several corner scrolls the heading is given in Italian and the body is summarised in English while the small hand is still being read.
  • Head note, foot note, side note. The head and foot banners are Monte’s assembly notes. Libro terzo is the running title. Later hands (folio numbers, a few corrections and reminders) are marked as such.
  • Place names are left out unless a name is the whole of a label.
  • Where a frame is empty, it stays empty. Beasts that are drawn and not named are not given names.
  • “The old draft” in some remarks refers to an earlier, looser description of the sheets, kept as a record of what was corrected after checking against the scan.

The complete readings, all sixty sheets and four corners with an index, form Part Two below. Part One gathers the highlights.

What he was compiling: Monte’s library

He was not surveying. He was teaching a room. On Tavola XXV, under the Monte arms and the motto Nuntius custos, he lists the books and the men:

That last sentence is a compiler’s honest confession, and it is the key to the whole map. The coasts follow maps already in print, Mercator’s among them. The projection does not. A polar disk is an old way to draw the world. He kept it, and later tried to revise the south.

Part Two identifies every name on the list in a table. Two additions from the scholarship are worth noting here:

  • “Coiro”, which our table leaves unidentified, is glossed by D’Ascenzo (2011), transcribing the Venegono version of the same list, as Bernardino Corio, the Milanese historian of Milan. That fits a Milanese author well. Her transcription of the 1590 list also includes Plutarch (Plutarco), who does not appear in the 1587 list as we read it.
  • Where the long texts come from. Van Duzer showed that the thirty-six triangular texts round the rim are borrowed and condensed, not written fresh. For the eastern hemisphere Monte took the modern descriptive notes in Girolamo Ruscelli’s Italian Ptolemy (first published 1561). For most of the western hemisphere he used an Italian edition (Venice, 1558) of Johannes Boemus’s ethnographic compendium, with Girolamo Giglio’s material on the New World. The Xalisco, Mexico and Gulf of California texts come from Italian translations of Francisco López de Gómara (1576), and the Japan text is condensed from his own printed map of Japan. Van Duzer prints Monte’s India text from this very copy beside Ruscelli’s. It matches our transcription of Tavola L word for word, apart from spelling, which is a welcome independent check. He also traced pictures: Philip II enthroned in the Atlantic with Atahualpa, the old man of the sea, and the sea monster near Madagascar all come from Giacomo Gastaldi’s great world map of about 1561, and the line Terra de vista discoperta da Portughesi per fortuna ma non si fermorno is Gastaldi’s almost word for word. As Van Duzer puts it, the map is “the product of library research rather than of interviews with explorers”.

The sky in the corners

Outside the scalloped edge sit the instruments. Upper left, the wind rose and the degrees of the earth. Upper right, the eclipse of the sun, and the claim that the sun is 166 times the earth. Lower left, the eclipse of the moon. Lower right, a second rose, named in the Spanish manner, and why some places are cold. One panel for the world, and for how to measure it. (In the Rumsey set these are Book Four plates placed in the corners of the composite, exactly where Monte’s sonnet says the “adorned circles” with winds and two eclipses belong.)

The roundel is geocentric. The Earth sits in the middle, with the Moon, Mercury, Venus and the Sun outward, the order he was taught. The figure 166 is the old volume ratio, not the width: a body about five and a half times as wide as the Earth has about 166 times its bulk, and that is the number the schools used. The Sun is in fact about 109 times as wide and more than a million times the bulk. His miles are Italian miles, and 62½ of them to a degree is the school figure, a little short of the distance measured since. But the physics of eclipses he has right, and says plainly. A lunar eclipse happens not because the sun fails, but because the earth stands in the way. The Earth’s shadow “is a cone, narrowing as it goes, and the moon is small enough to enter it”. The Moon, though smaller than the Sun, hides it “because the moon is near us, and the sun is far”.

The tables of the parallels are the classical seven climata, the bands named for Meroë, Syene, Alexandria, Rhodes, Rome, the mouth of the Borysthenes (Dnieper) and the Riphaean mountains. Each is defined by its longest day, rising by half an hour from 13 hours to 16, then out to Tartary, Moscow, Prussia, Gothia and Norway, to 24 hours at the Arctic circle and six months at the pole. Monte adds the five zones (one “torrid”, two temperate where men can live, two cold) and the classical wind rose of Levante, Ponente, Tramontana, Ostro and their four companions. In the lower-right corner he adds the Spanish compass names (Nort, Nordest, Est …) that a navigator would use. It is a Ptolemaic and Aristotelian framework, ancient and still standard in 1587, laid round a world that the voyages had just doubled in size.

Highlights from the sheets, by theme

What follows gathers the most revealing passages. Every one is given in full, with its sheet, in Part Two.

1. The far north: King Arthur, a whirlpool at the pole, and white griffins

The four sheets at the centre are the strangest. Tavola I:

This is the medieval picture of the Arctic that Mercator also put on his 1569 world map: four great islands divided by four rushing channels, with the sea pouring down into the Earth beside a tall rock at the pole. The story of King Arthur’s northern conquests belonged to the same body of northern lore. D’Ascenzo quotes the printed Ambrosiana version of this legend as l’oceano per queste quatro porte scorre sotto il polo circa una gran rupe ove si somerge, “through these four gates … where it sinks”. Readers comparing the two may want to check parte/porte and rompe/somerge against the 1587 ink. Monte believed the same thing happened at the South Pole. In his treatise he suspected that the currents off the Strait of Magellan “run under the Antarctic pole … and enter under the earth”.

Further out, on Tavole II–IV, the north fills with peoples and marvels drawn from Olaus Magnus, Marco Polo and the classics. There are the Sereningeri, “almost pygmies, who live underground in every season”. Pygmies “no taller than four palms”, and others “an arm long” who “war with the storks”, the ancient battle of pygmies and cranes told since Homer and Pliny. Reindeer riders. Tartars who “carry leather tents and drive covered carts, which they use in place of houses”. And:

Tavola IV also carries a series of boxes giving the length of the longest day at each northern parallel. They run from 16¾ hours at 53° to “5 months, 20 days, and 23 hours, continuous” nearest the pole, with a little hand pointing to each degree. They are a reminder that this was a scientific instrument as well as a picture book.

2. “When these lands were discovered”: giants, cannibals and the language of conquest

Several notes open with the same formula: Quando si scopersero questi paesi, “When these countries were discovered …”. It is a telling phrase. Monte describes peoples as they were reported at the moment Europeans arrived, and he never saw any of them.

The theme recurs round the American rim. Of Xalisco: “They eat human flesh, and they had other most wicked sins, before the Spaniards lived there” (Tavola LIV). Along the Plata, people catch an enemy with a stone ball on a cord “and they drag him to eat him” (Tavola LVIII). At the Strait of Magellan, “some inhabitants … eat bread of shaved wood, and human flesh” (Tavola LIX). The charge is not reserved for the Americas. Monte’s Scythians of Asia go “robbing, and eating human flesh, and that of horses, raw” (Tavola XLIX), straight out of the classical stereotype of the steppe.

How to read this. The word cannibal itself was born of Columbus’s reports of the Caribs (caniba) of the Caribbean, and by Monte’s day man-eating had become the standard marker of the savage in European geography. It was also politically useful. In Spanish law an accusation of cannibalism could license war and enslavement, and Monte’s phrasing makes conquest the cure: before they were subjugated, before the Spaniards lived there. The same ideology speaks in the verse he gives the captive Inca king Atahualpa (Tavola XXIII), addressed to Philip II:

Monte was a Milanese subject of the Spanish crown (Milan had been ruled from Madrid since the 1530s), a devout Catholic writing in the age of the Counter-Reformation. His notes repeat what his printed sources said. Van Duzer traces most of the American texts to Boemus and López de Gómara, and they in turn drew on conquistador and missionary accounts. Yet the sources were not uniform, and the map shows the seams. Of Yucatan he writes: Non rubano, né mangiano carne humana, benché la sacrificano, “They do not steal, nor do they eat human flesh, though they sacrifice it” (Tavola LVI). In Florida the people are “so light that they take a stag on the run”. In Borneo “they do not rob, and they do not deny their friendship to whoever asks it”. In Quito “the country people are more familiar than others of Peru”. Seven years before Monte finished this map, Montaigne had published his essay “Of Cannibals” (1580), which turned the charge back on European cruelty. Monte’s map stands on the other side of that argument, and it records the commonplace view of a well-read Italian of the 1580s.

3. Monsters, marvels and real animals in disguise

The map is crowded with beasts, and the notes sort them, unknowingly, into three kinds.

Classical marvels, carried forward. On Tavola II: Qui si trovano animali con facia di donzella, il corpo di leone, et coda di scorpione, “animals with a maiden’s face, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion”. That is the creature Pliny called the mantichora (Monte gives it no name, and neither do we on the sheet). In the deserts of Central Asia (Tavole II and VII), “spirits … deceive travelers, so as to put them in danger, and there they are lost”. The haunted desert is an image familiar from Marco Polo’s desert of Lop, which Monte draws on Tavola VIII. In Happy Arabia lives the phoenix, “a most happy bird that lives five hundred years, then of itself falls to ruin and is born again among precious scents”. Monte cites the lines of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso for it (Tavola XLVIII). Prester John “keeps his children under guard” in the Ethiopian mountains (Tavola XV) and commands an armada (Tavola XIII).

Marvels he struck out. On Tavola XLIX a sentence is crossed through: et fra essi, come dice Plinio, sono i popoli Arimaspi, quali hanno uno occhio solo nella fronte, “and among them, as Pliny says, are the Arimaspian peoples, who have only one eye in the forehead”. We cannot know why he cancelled it. A one-eyed figure still appears on Tavola XXXV, labelled Ciclops vel monoculus. But the deletion is a rare glimpse of Monte weighing a classical authority and setting it aside.

Real animals, described at second hand. Many of the “monsters” are recognisable once you read them as reports passed along by people who had seen something new:

  • Vacche et torri che hanno la gobba come cameli, “cows and bulls that have a hump like camels, the chest and the tail like lions” (Tavola X), and the humped, woolly oxen of Quivira that “run like horses” (Tavola LIV): the American bison.
  • Vache che hano le orechie grandi, et hano un grugno come li elefanti, “cows that have large ears, and they have a snout like the elephants” (Tavola XXII, Central America): very likely the tapir.
  • Pecore grande come cameli … et sono bonissime da mangiare, “sheep as large as camels … and they are very good to eat”, used to plough and carry loads (Tavole XL, LX): the llama.
  • Rosmarus piscis, “the walrus fish” (Tavola XXVI), a name and an image at home in Olaus Magnus’s northern lore.
  • Una serpe detta sonaglio, perché caminando risuona come sonagli, “a snake called sonaglio (the bell), because in walking it sounds like bells” (Tavola LVIII): the rattlesnake.
  • The elk of Muscovy, whose hoof, made into a ring, cures cramp and epilepsy, “but … has no virtue unless it is cut … before the beast has finished dying” (Tavola XLVI).

Sea monsters. Off Sumatra, whales “so monstrous that at first sight they seem hills or mountains … kill [men] with their poisonous breath … and often swallow a boat with everything that is found inside” (Tavola LI). Off Zubut (Cebu), birds “like crows, called Lagane … let themselves be swallowed [by whales], and when they are inside they eat the heart and kill them” (Tavola LIII). At the bottom of the world, near the Strait of Magellan, there are “birds much greater [than ostriches], which with their talons hold up an elephant in flight” (Tavola LIX). That is an echo of the giant bird that Marco Polo said could lift an elephant.

4. Peoples and customs: the world as an ethnographer’s catalogue

Monte’s title promised “the customs of the peoples … where the difference between us and them may be called notable”. The rim texts read like an early ethnography, half observation and half hearsay:

  • Florida: the natives “do not live to forty years, and the women nurse the children until they are twelve” (Tavola XI). Their bows are “twelve palms long … with which they shoot two hundred paces and pass every strong cuirass” (Tavola LVII).
  • Patalia, in the far south: “it is not permitted that a foreigner live there, and they all go naked, and they are very white” (Tavola XXX).
  • New Guinea: the inhabitants “do not want trade with foreigners, nor their friendship, and this is forbidden by their kings under very grave penalties” (Tavola XXXIII).
  • Quito: “The women work the fields … and the men spin, weave, make clothes, and govern the house” (Tavola LX).
  • Popayán: pursued by Spaniards, the people burn their own houses, rebuild “in three or four days” elsewhere, and so remain “untamed” (Tavola LX).
  • Mexico, in the year 1521, “a great city of seventy thousand houses … founded upon water, as Venice is”, with streets of water, of earth, and of both (Tavola LV).
  • The northern islanders (Iceland, Frisland, Greenland): Christians who live on fish, burn fish oil “in those seasons when they have continual night”, use bones for firewood, and govern themselves “in the form of a republic, or rather of cantons of their peers” (Tavola XLV). Frisland is an island the maps of this century invented, after the Zeno brothers’ narrative.
  • The Romani: Da questi paesi sono sparsi per il mondo li cingari, “From these countries the gypsies are scattered through the world” (Tavola XIV). The note sits in Africa, reflecting the old belief, preserved in the English word gypsy, that they came from “Egypt”.
  • The Lucayans (Bahamas): one line about the young women’s coming-of-age feasts is struck through on the sheet (Tavola LVIII), a small act of self-censorship we have kept visible.

5. Japan, China and the East

Japan is the sheet that explains why he began. On Tavola IX he draws Giapone as a large island, with the Lequios (Ryukyus) as a chain, names “the true porcelain”, and writes the circle of Cancer, the summer circle, on the line where a sun and a crab stand. The longer note on Tavola LIII is a snapshot of what an educated Milanese knew about Japan in the 1580s:

The “sixty-six kingdoms” are the sixty-six provinces of pre-modern Japan, as reported in Jesuit letters. Historians usually date the first Portuguese landfall to 1543, so Monte’s 1545 is a couple of years late. Milanesi (quoted by D’Ascenzo) judged his knowledge of Japan more up to date than that of contemporary Italian cartographers, and D’Ascenzo notes that his 1589 map of Japan has far more place names than the famous printed maps of its day.

China gets the most gossip. Its king “always takes for wife his sister”, is never seen except by his wife, who passes dishes through a turning box “made after the manner of the monasteries of Italy” (Tavola L). He lives in a palace “with seven wonders about it” guarded by ten thousand men, flays unjust ministers in public, and his people revere the cross, which Monte hopes is a seed sown by St Thomas the Apostle (Tavola LI). Porcelain, notably, is “a very fine stone and of great value” (Tavola XXXIII). Of Calicut he reports Jesuit seminaries and a viceroy ruling “in the name of the majesty of King Philip, as heir of the crown of Portugal” (Tavola XLIX), news of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580.

6. Europe, power and faith along the southern rim

From Tavola XL to Tavola LX the empty sea carries Spain, France, the pope, Prester John, a Roman emperor, the king of China, Popayán, and Quito. He is filling a habitable south with rulers, because a blank was not how he wished to draw. The European texts are portraits of national character as an Italian Catholic saw them:

  • Spain, likened to Italy, chosen by God for “the finding of a new world, so great and notable” and “a continual bulwark against the infidels” (Tavola XLIII).
  • France: “courageous men, fair, more given to wars than to letters” (Tavola XLIII).
  • Flanders: gentle, witty and noble-minded, but “ruined … by the wars made against the king, its natural lord, they wishing to keep themselves in the Lutheran liberty against all reason” (Tavola XLIV), a Spanish-Milanese view of the Dutch Revolt, then in full swing.
  • Germany: once “horrid, barbarous and uncivil”, now the equal of the best in war, letters and “the mechanical arts” (Tavola XLIV).
  • Italy: “by the common voice of all the nations … called the paradise of the world”, bounded, as Petrarch said, by “the Apennine … and the sea and the Alps” (Tavola XLV).

Interspersed are portraits with eight-line verses: the pope, Prester John (“the black king of Ethiopia”), the Roman emperor (for whom “the eastern serpent flees”), the Turkish emperor (“as much as his power is great … so much the greater is his perverse error”), the king of Spain “who rules the east and the west”, Motezuma, the king of Portugal and the king of Poland. And the seas carry fleets: of the King of Spain, the Indies fleet, the Grand Turk, the Sophy of Persia, the King of China, even Prester John. In the 1590 copy Monte admits in the text that he placed the King of Spain’s armada and the Indies fleet on Tavola XII partly “to fill with something this space in the sea”.

7. The voyages: Columbus, Magellan and the shape of the world

The map is also a chronicle of discovery, dated and named. “Guanaba, the first island of the New World, discovered by Christopher Columbus in the year 1492” (Tavola XI). “The South Sea, discovered in the year 1513 by the Spaniard Vasco Nuñez” (Tavola XXII). Pizarro taking Atahualpa at Cajamarca (Tavola XXIII). The Portuguese spice route round Africa to the Moluccas, “where the best spices in the world grow” (Tavola XXVIII). Cortés’s captains on the “Vermeio” sea (Tavola LV).

The longest narrative on the map, on Tavola XXXIX, tells Magellan’s voyage: departure from Seville in 1519 with five ships, the passage of the strait, Magellan’s death in a skirmish on Mactan, and the return.

Monte makes Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza, the expedition’s Italian chronicler, the captain of the surviving ship. The Victoria was in fact brought home by Juan Sebastián Elcano, and Pigafetta was her best-known passenger. It is an Italian author’s pardonable pride in an Italian traveller. On Tavola XXVII the scribal history is visible: de capitan is crossed out and et Magalhones written over it.

8. The south, as he named it

The old account of this map called the outer land Terra Australis, and gave it a beast. That name is not on these sheets. The pink land is Terra del fuogo, and on the last sheet fogo. The green land is Terra de Vista, Patalia, Lacach, Galleca, each written so. Van Duzer is right that a southern continent is part of the argument: in the 1587 and 1590 manuscripts it is a broken ring of eight great islands round the South Pole, probably inspired by Tramezzino’s world map of 1554. The argument is in the notes, not in a name we add.

Monte says almost nothing about why these lands should exist. Terra de vista discoperta da Portughesi per fortuna ma non si fermorno, “Terra de Vista, discovered by the Portuguese by chance, but they did not stay” (Tavola XXVII), is borrowed from Gastaldi. On Tavola XXXVII, a scroll over two tiny islets reads simply Viste da lontano, “seen from afar”, with three figures on a point looking out across the water. In his treatise, Van Duzer notes, Monte attributes Lacach and Galleca to Spanish Pacific voyages (Legazpi’s and Gallego’s), following Giovanni Lorenzo d’Anania. Along the shore runs the Oceano Avstrale Giaciato, the frozen southern ocean, and down the left of Tavola XLIII a column of boxes gives the longest day at each southern parallel, out to Antiparallelo 96 gradi 90 … mesi 6, e giorni 6, e hore 7, continui. The mirror image of the north is a mathematician’s south, not a wall.

Small things the ink tells us

A close reading turns up details that no reproduction of the joined image reveals:

  • The banners miscount. Tavola XIX’s head banner says XVIII. Tavola XXIV repeats XXIII. Tavola XXIX repeats XXVIII. Tavola XLII writes XXXXXII, one X too many. Tavola LIX writes LVIII again and sua twice. The foot notes of Tavole XXVI–XXIX write five or six X’s where four would do. These are a copyist’s slips by a man numbering sixty sheets by hand.
  • Monte’s age. The roundel under his portrait on Tavola XLII is read here as Urbano Monte d. anni XXXXX, “of fifty years”, with five X’s between the stops. David Rumsey’s 2017 presentation reports that in 1589 Monte pasted a new hinged portrait over the 1587 one, updating his age from 43 to 45. The Venegono title page reads d’anni XXXXV. Since Monte was born in 1544, the overlay should read 45. The last stroke on the 1587 sheet deserves a second look, and the hinged flap may hide the earlier figure.
  • Later hands. Folio numbers, sums and reminders in other inks appear on many sheets. “Take care to make the degrees of latitude on the face of this sheet” (Tavola XIII). “Length 264 and breadth 50” (Tavola XL), written under a strait the map itself measures at 400 miles by 9. A crossed-out note about cutting the latitude scale free (Tavola XLIII). These match Van Duzer’s picture of a working copy that Monte kept revising for years.
  • Words that break off. Several long texts run under the border or end at the point of a gore: the nutmeg tree on Tavola LII, the Japanese envoys on Tavola LIII (si può comprendere is all that is clear), the pearl divers on Tavola LVI, the Strait of Magellan on Tavola LIX.
  • Corrections to the record. Several remarks note that an “old draft” description named things (a unicorn, a llama, a southern continent, a sea monster) that are not on the sheet. They have been removed, and the removal is recorded.

What is read, and what is not

The index in Part Two opens every sheet. The name goes to the reading. Map opens the study window on that manuscript. The words are taken from the ink. Where a line is crowded, the reading says so. Where a frame is empty, it stays empty. Beasts that are drawn and not named are not given names.

Two things are deliberately left out. The descriptions that follow the sheets on the Venegono copy are not online, and they are not guessed from the cartouches. The later revision, the sixty-four engraved sheets and the four lobes south of the equator, belongs to the Ambrosiana copy. This page does not silently correct 1587 into 1604.

A reader who wants the life, the failed printing, and the projection can go to D’Ascenzo and to Van Duzer. A reader who wants the sentence Monte wrote beside Japan, or beside the ship Victoria, or under the pole, can stay. That sentence is the study.

Conclusion: a world you were meant to turn

As far as anyone knows, Urbano Monte never travelled to the lands he described. He never saw a bison, a cannibal or a Japanese temple. He saw four young envoys in Milan in 1585, and he had a library. From those he built, in about two years, a ten-foot world meant to rotate on a pin. He crowded it with what his books told him and kept correcting it: the whole enterprise occupied him for at least seventeen years. He died with it unpublished, and his sons quarrelled over the copper plates.

What survives is not a window onto the Earth as it is. It is a window onto how one well-read man in 1587 assembled the Earth from what he could read: Ptolemy’s climates, Pliny’s monsters, Marco Polo’s deserts, Jesuit letters from Japan, Spanish chronicles of conquest, Gastaldi’s pictures and Mercator’s coasts. Its prejudices are on the surface, and so is its curiosity. It is round, insistently and in his own words. When he flattened it, he told us how, and he told us to imagine the South Pole all the way round the rim.

Read the map as he asked. Turn it. And read the writing.

Sources and further reading

About the transcriptions. All transcriptions and translations of Monte’s writing on the 1587 sheets are Fire of Life’s own readings from the David Rumsey Map Collection scans. Passages from the Venegono and Ambrosiana copies, which we have not seen, are quoted from the published transcriptions of Van Duzer (2020) and D’Ascenzo (2011), and are marked as such in the text. Monte’s sixteenth-century words are in the public domain. Modern scholarship is paraphrased, with only brief quotations.

The map itself (free online)

Key scholarship (free)

Books and print-only studies

  • Roberto Almagià, “Un prezioso cimelio della cartografia italiana: il planisfero di Urbano Monti”, La Bibliofilía 43 (1941): 156–193 (JSTOR: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26210250>). The foundational study.
  • Annalisa D’Ascenzo, Cultura geografica e cartografia in Italia alla fine del Cinquecento. Il Trattato universale di Urbano Monte (Rome: Viella, 2012). The only monograph. <https://www.viella.it/libro/9788883349966>
  • Paula Findlen et al., A World in the Making: Urbano Monte’s Global Map Circa 1587 (Stanford: David Rumsey Map Center, 2025), catalogue of the 2024 Stanford exhibition. <https://history.stanford.edu/publications/world-making-urbano-montes-global-map-circa-1587>
  • Urbano Monte, Descrizione del mondo sin qui conosciuto, ed. Maurizio Ampollini (Lecco: Periplo, 1994), a facsimile of the Venegono map sheets. Also Il planisfero di Urbano Monte. Il fantastico mondo (CD-ROM, Lecco: Novantiqua Multimedia, 1999).
  • John P. Snyder, Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), quoted here via D’Ascenzo 2011.
  • Leonida Besozzi, “Gli ultimi anni di Urbano Monti, geografo e cronista (1544–1613)”, Libri e documenti 21/3 (1995): 66–89.
  • J. J. S. Goss, “An Unusual Manuscript Wall Map by Urbano Monti 1544–1613”, The Map Collector 15 (1981): 18–22, on the copy now at Stanford.

Catalogue records

Lectures, exhibitions and good popular accounts

The table identifying each author on Monte’s source list (Tavola XXV, in Part Two) gives its own references for each name.

Open the sixty manuscripts

Menu

Last ten

Subjects

Discover more from Fire Of Life

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading