Portolan chart
Carta portulana
- Date
- c. 1290 · confidence high
- Place
- Pisa / Genoa, Italy (Carta Pisana)
- Credited to
- Genoese cartographers; the Majorcan school (Cresques)
- Field
- Movement
What it is
A nautical chart drawn on parchment with accurate coastlines and a network of rhumb lines radiating from compass roses, used to plot courses with the compass. The first realistic, practical map of the West.
The Carta Pisana (c. 1275–1300) is the oldest to survive; the precision of these charts is still not fully explained.
What it led to
- the Majorcan cartographic school (the Catalan Atlas, 1375) and Lisbon
- Portuguese exploration cartography and the padrón real
- a shift in the geographical conception of the world towards measurement
Built on
- Euclidean axiomatic geometryc. 300 BCE
- Magnetic navigational compassc. 1100
- Dry compass with wind rosec. 1300
- Dry compass with wind rose
- rutters (portolani)
- Euclidean geometry