Henricus Martellus Germanus

Germanus

Germanus is the Latin term referring to the Germanic peoples. A probably related meaning for the word in Latin is "brother", cognate to germen "seed"...

is the latinized name of Heinrich Hammer, a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 cartographer who lived and worked in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 from 1480 to 1496.

Around 1489 or 1490, he produced a world map which was remarkably similar to the terrestrial globe

Globe

A globe is a three-dimensional scale model of Earth or other spheroid celestial body such as a planet, star, or moon...

 later produced by Martin Behaim

Martin Behaim

Martin Behaim , was a German mariner, artist, cosmographer, astronomer, philosopher, geographer and explorer in service to the King of Portugal.-Biography:The Behaim family had immigrated to Nuremberg because of religious persecution around...

 in 1492, the Erdapfel

Erdapfel

The Erdapfel produced by Martin Behaim in 1492 is considered to be the oldest surviving terrestrial globe. It is constructed of a laminated linen ball in two halves, reinforced with wood and overlaid with a map painted by Georg Glockendon....

. Both show heavy influences from Ptolemy

Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy , was a Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the...

, and both possibly derive from maps created around 1485 in Lisbon by Bartolomeo Columbus

Bartolomeo Columbus

Bartholomew Columbus was an explorer and the younger brother of Christopher Columbus.In the 1470s Bartholomew was a mapmaker in Lisbon, the principal center of cartography of the time, and conceived with his brother the "Enterprise of the Indies", a scheme to reach the Orient and its lucrative...

.

One of his two manuscript world maps, 201 cm x 122 cm in size, rediscovered in 1960, was donated to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. The building was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and is the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books...

 http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2007580&iid=1040214&srchtype=ITEM

The other similar manuscript world map is in the British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

.http://catalogue.bl.uk/F/TI4QN9IQ3XP5VJGRFQJ7PV49NVCY43I2G389LBT1X9A667LV7L-42246?func=direct&local_base=BLAC&doc_number=004961326

Martellus also in 1484 produced an Insularium Illustratum, or book of islands, that contained maps.http://gallery.sjsu.edu/cartography/maps/maps-Full.00002.html

Variants of the name

• Henricus Martellus Germanus
• Henricus (Germanus)
• Enrico Martello
• Henricus Martellus
• Martellus
• Heinrich Hammer

External links

• Arthur Davies: Behaim, Martellus and Columbus, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 143, No. 3 (Nov., 1977), pp. 451-459
• Alexander O. Vietor: A Pre-Columbian Map of the World, Circa 1489, Imago Mundi, Vol. 17, 1963 (1963), pp. 95-96
• Index of Cartographic Images
• An essay on the world maps created by Henricus Martellus Germanus
• SUB GÖ
• http://www.halifax.ca/cah/documents/earlyportuguese.pdf
• http://www.danstopicals.com/germanus.htm