"Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does
so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant,
beguiling Waldseemuller world map of 1507." So begins this
remarkable story of the map that gave America its name.
For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three
parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in
countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they
hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the world," a
mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast
expanse of ocean. It was a land of myth--until 1507, that is, when
Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure scholars
working in the mountains of eastern France, made it real. Columbus
had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but
Waldseemuller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic
discoveries of Columbus's contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a
startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the
world. To celebrate his achievement, Waldseemuller and Ringmann
printed a huge map, for the first time showing the New World
surrounded by water and distinct from Asia, and in Vespucci's honor
they gave this New World a name: America.
"
The Fourth Part of the World "is the story behind that map, a
thrilling saga of geographical and intellectual exploration, full
of outsize thinkers and voyages. Taking a kaleidoscopic approach,
Toby Lester traces the origins of our modern worldview. His
narrative sweeps across continents and centuries, zeroing in on
different portions of the map to reveal strands of ancient legend,
Biblical prophecy, classical learning, medieval exploration,
imperial ambitions, and more. In Lester's telling the map comes
alive: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries trek across
Central Asia and China; Europe's early humanists travel to monastic
libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up
the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo
Vespucci make their epic voyages of discovery; and finally,
vitally, Nicholas Copernicus makes an appearance, deducing from the
new geography shown on the Waldseemuller map that the earth could
not lie at the center of the cosmos. The map literally altered
humanity's worldview.
One thousand copies of the map were printed, yet only one remains.
Discovered accidentally in 1901 in the library of a German castle
it was bought in 2003 for the unprecedented sum of $10 million by
the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public
display. Lavishly illustrated with rare maps and diagrams, "The
Fourth Part of the World "is the story of that map: the dazzling
story of the geographical and intellectual journeys that have
helped us decipher our world.
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