Cyprus Cartography

It has been said, with some justice, that there are really only “four maps” (and two charts) of Cyprus published up to 1885. Yet, how can that be true, when there are some eighty or so different maps of Cyprus from that period mounted on this website - and the many more owned by the Foundation, and not displayed here?

The earliest published atlas published in Europe appeared in 1477; however, its author was Claudius Ptolemaeus, a Greek cartographer living in Alexandria in Egypt about 150 A.D. Despite the many fables current in common perception, classical Greek scientists had proved the world was round, and even calculated its circumference with some precision, hundreds of years before Christ, let alone Columbus, and mapped the “oecumene” (the known world) with commendable accuracy, given their rudimentary tools.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the scientific arts declined, in the so-called “Dark Ages”. When Ptolemaeus’ work was rediscovered by western scholars it caused a sensation, with numerous printed editions published over the next hundred years or more. But, as might be expected, contemporaries also realized that Ptolemaeus’ opus was hopelessly out-dated. Within forty years, successive Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English mariners (or adventurers sailing under these various flags) filled in many of the blank spaces on the map - adding the Americas, southern Africa, China and the Far East, the East Indies, Australia and the Pacific Ocean - while new skills enabled the re-mapping of Europe.

It was unfortunate for Cyprus that the island lay at the furthest extremity of Europe from the new cartographic centres, and also under the control of the Turks - enemies of the Christian West. This inaccessibility meant that the mapping of Cyprus developed spasmodically; there would be an important advance, establishing a new prototype for main-stream publishers to use in their atlases, and then development would be in slow increments, until a new landmark map appeared, to be copied in the same way. 

The map prototypes are:

1485: Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti, the first separate printed map of Cyprus, and copied by Bordone, Camocio, Ortelius (1570), these others containing many new names, as well as many publishers of travel accounts, 

1570: Giacomo Franco, used by Ortelius in 1573, and the basic model for printed maps of Cyprus into the nineteenth century.

1762: Jean Baptist d’Anville, a significant new map of the island based on a Turkish manuscript but, through a misunderstanding of the geography, not a significant improvement.

1885: Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the first scientific survey of the island, published on sixteen sheets, and the model into the mid-twentieth century.

The charts:

1618: Willem Jansz. Blaeu, a sea-chart, only really superceded in 1849.

1849: Thomas Graves, a new sea-chart for the British Admiralty, used into the 20th Century.