Geography and Cartography in the Ottoman Empire

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CHAPTER


DOI :10.26650/B/AH03AH08.2024.039.017   IUP :10.26650/B/AH03AH08.2024.039.017    Full Text (PDF)

The Da Vinci Globe Dating From 1504 the First-Ever Naming of Asia Minor for Türkiye on A Globe

Stefaan Missinne

A small artefact was discovered in 2012 at the venue of the Royal Geographical Society in London by the Belgian Prof. S. Missinne, who lives in Austria. In 2018 it was published that this is the oldest globe in the world exhibiting geographic details collected by Columbus, Cabral and Vespucci. The extraordinary piece of art bears the first ever engraved naming of several countries including Germania, Brazil, Arabia Felix, Sinarvm Regio (China), Ivdae (Israel), and Asia Minor for Turkiye on a terrestrial globe. Only one city, namely the spice port of Caliqut in India, an important destination in the trade war for spices between Spain and Portugal, is named. The intricate globe is made of the lower halves of two ostrich eggs that originated from ostriches in the garden of the castle of Pavia. It is masterfully decorated with intertwined waves, a shipwrecked sailor, a volcano, ships and several puns, including a biblical one of Jonah and the monster. The engraved phrase on the Equator in the Orient of HIC SVNT DRACONES combined with ANFVRION bears a warning message by Leonardo. A red copper metal droplet containing traces of arsenic was discovered giving evidence that this globe was produced in a casting environment similar to that of the Lenox Globe, its identical twin, The droplet is of a red copper cast bearing no green or black patina. This Lenox Globe, a copper cast from the da Vinci Globe, kept at the New York Public Library was intended to be the center of an armillary sphere. The ever inventive Leonardo not only wrote to the Ottoman Sultan and designed a bridge for the Sultan to span the Golden Horn inlet of the Bosporus, linking Eminonu to Karakoy, he also conceived a recipe to add arsenic to copper to prevent the patina on copper. The Lenox globe, an identical twin, dating from 1504, also lacks any kind of green or black patina. At the British Library, a preparatory drawing for the da Vinci Globe dating from 1503 portraying the coastline of the New World, East and West Africa was found. Erroneously this drawing by Leonardo was believed to depict the surface of the moon. The chapter ends with a detailed description of the large Asian Peninsula protruding to the west and its natural boundaries bearing the words Asia Minor


Keywords: Asia Minor, Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance, 1504, Turkey, Türkiye, da Vinci Globe, Lenox Globe

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