Chapter 1

For some time I have wanted to relate a circumstance that has been happening to me in recent years. I do not necessarily want my words to crackle like parchment or give off the aroma of old maps, but I do want them to reflect my deep interest in such things. I want to tell of a journey that I have been making, a journey beyond all known frontiers, that speaks of possibilities rather than anything so prosaic as what we already know.

There are precedents for such an undertaking. Christopher Columbus was looking for Paradise when he set out on his epic voyage across the Atlantic. I have seen annotations made by him to this effect in a treatise by Pierre d'Ailly of France, the Tractatus de Imagine Mundi—a view of an imaginary world. Both he and Columbus (who, I am told, carried d'Ailly's treatise with him on his voyage to the New World) were eager to represent accurately what was as yet undiscovered.

Nor were they the only men to think along such lines. Giovanni dei Marignolli, one of our ambassadors to China, was informed by the people of Serendip that Adam's Peak, the glorious summit from which the world could be witnessed at a glance, was only forty miles from Paradise. They also informed him that on a fine day it was possible to hear water cascading from a river flowing from Eden. He, like John of Hesse, who maintained that Purgatory lay in the Antipodes somewhere, wanted to locate certain places said to exist beyond the known world.

These men were keen observers of the imaginary. As a cartographer attached to the Order of Camaldules at San Michele di Murano here in Venice, I too have made it my life's task to chart the course of such men as they wander the byways of the earth. No seaman's tale is too trivial to hear, no traveler's journal too pedestrian to read. I have been at the mercy of other men's observations ever since I abandoned mathematics and physics in order to study the world that they had encountered.

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to travel. My name is Fra Mauro. I am a monk, mature in years and rather portly. To some I may even appear to be—well, let me admit it—somewhat lazy. My problem is that I have always been afraid of making such a journey, probably because my bones would renounce me as an imposter! It is as if the horizon that I witness at sea off the Lido and Sottomarina, whenever I make the occasional excursion to these places, were an unscalable wall, a barrier. Sometimes I have a strong desire to climb it, but I am still fearful of what might lie beyond. As a result I allow others to live for me, discovering peoples and realms of which I can only dream.

Cartography, however, is no idle pastime. Over the years I have learned to recognize the beauty of rhumb lines and wind roses. They are a navigator's delight, the lines along which every sailor voyages in pursuit of various points on the compass. Where these lines merge becomes their focus. They act as guides. At no time does a sailor reach beyond such a point whence he cannot return. Rhumb lines are the surest link he has with his past, indeed with himself. They keep him in contact with what he knows, with a familiar world.

Ptolemy has always been my hero. Ever since I first read the eight volumes of his massive Geographia during my novitiate, I have been under his spell. He gave us the coordinates of latitude and longitude, the very principle of ordering the surface of the earth. How often have I burned a lamp far into the night poring over his maps, traveling into deepest Africa and across the mountains of the Parmir as far as India. Ptolemy introduced me to a mysterious world, a world at once held aloft in the hands of sages while being cooled by the breaths of cherub-faced winds.

So many names on maps invoke a sense of mystery. India Orientalis, Maris Pacifici, Totius Africae, Pars Orbis, Americae—such a list of terrestrials! Every name conjures up a place peopled by turbaned Orientals, mermaids, and hooved men. I have gazed at many-armed figures and hairy-bodied women etched in the margins of these maps and asked myself why the world is as it is. So far I have not come up with any answers. The world continues to remain as enigmatic as the day I first attempted to make its diversity my own.

Of course, my asceticism has long been fueled by such considerations. But I have also been conscious that certain lines of inquiry can be dangerous. What lies beyond the margin of the world often sings to us with the voice of a siren, as if calling us into its embrace. We listen, we are lured, and finally we are seduced. The heavily scored margins on charts that I have observed over the years are testament to this predilection on the part of many seafarers. They are utterly bewitched by the prospect of continuing along one rhumb line until it reaches its farthest point. They want to find out whether its ultimate destination concurs with their idea of how the world really is.

Moreover, there is little difference between performing my rosary in chapel of a morning or fashioning a wind rose on a chart. Each is a form of meditation. A man staggers along the Via Dolorosa every time he sets out to create a thing of beauty. I have often thought that the fleur-de-lis on a compass card can be as difficult to render truthfully as the Lord's Prayer. Their very pointedness exacts its own kind of demand. They align themselves with all I know to be verifiable but cannot perceive with any degree of certainty myself.

I do not see my obsession with maps and travelers' tales as being in conflict with my spiritual concerns. Not in the least. My role as a cartographer is tantamount to the discovery of the world. Though sometimes spurned by my fellow friars as a thing of evil, I consider this world to be in no way different from that espoused by our Savior. It is yet another manifestation of His kingdom masquerading in the guise of multiplicity and change. As I see it, what tumbles forth from the lips of wayfarers can be as fragrant as myrrh emitted from a saint's bones on feast days.

Every compass I box in my mind directs me toward an imaginary land. I am seeking new ideas, visions. I do not wish to affirm what I already know. Each map I draw is made up of information I have received from visitors to my cell, as well as those ideas of my own that have been inspired by their sage and often noble and fantastical remarks. Strangely, though, I find myself living in the presence of what for them is already a retrospective moment. By speaking to me they are able to regain all that they might have thought forever lost.

It is a salutary event for us both: two men wrangling over an observation one man has perceived above all others. He is the master, I the slave. We sit on stools opposite one another, a breeze from the Adriatic cooling our faces on hot summer days. We gaze at maps that our eyes chart in each other's hearts. Together cartographer and adventurer argue over distances and routes while silently acknowledging that these are really only diversions, since we are struggling to make sense of disparate knowledge. We are like oar and rowlock, trying to exact a measure of leverage from one another, even as we acknowledge that we are probably traveling toward the same destination.