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The compass sparked a shift
back to geographical maps
made for practical navigation.
Religious symbolism defined
most medieval European map-
making. (Maps could tell you
the rough direction of Eden, but
not how far away it was.) In theearly 15th century, European
monarchs began to explore the
Atlantic and Indian Oceans in
search of new trading routes to
the East. At the time, Ptolemy’s
Geographia was translated
into Latin, marking the start
of a boom in exploration and
mapmaking.
As the 16th century saw
the most complete maps of the
world, it also overcame one of the
thorniest problems of cartogra-
phy: how to navigate a spherical
globe on a two-dimensional map.
Picture flattening an orange
peel against a f lat surface—it’s
impossible to do so without dis-
torting its shape. Ptolemy had
tackled this, but navigators still
couldn’t achieve the simple taskof plotting the shortest course
between points on a map with a
straight line.
In 1569, Flemish-German
cartographer Gerardus Mer-
cator solved this millennia-old
problem with a new map projec-
tion: Earth as a cylinder, which
unrolled to a square grid of
latitude and longitude. The pro-
jection spaced lines of latitude
increasingly far apart as they
got farther from the equator.
The disadvantage of this pro-
jection, which we still see today,
is that it distorted landmasses
toward the poles. Eurasia and
North America are enlarged,
while regions at the equator,
such as most of Africa, appear
misleadingly small.MERCATOR
MAP OF
THE WORLD
THE FIRST MODERN MAP
◀ Mercator’s
projection was
inspired by the
accuracy of
portolan maps.