India extrema XXIIII Nova Tabula

1545

Woodcut on paper

Print size: 10.75 x 13.5 in (27 x 34 cm)
Sheet size: 12.25 x 14.25 in (31 x 36.5 cm)

A seminal Renaissance map of Asia and India by Sebastian Münster, combining Ptolemaic antiquity, medieval travel lore and the first Portuguese discoveries to produce one of the earliest printed images of the Indian Ocean world

Woodcut map printed in Basel by Heinrich Petri for the 1545 Latin edition of Sebastian Münster’s Geographia. Latin text on verso, as issued. The sheet depicts “India Extrema” and adjacent regions, extending from the Indus and Ganges across Cathay and the fabled archipelago of 7,448 islands to the Spice Islands and Malaysian peninsula, with the Indian subcontinent framed by the Arabian Sea and “Mare Indicum”. The outlines of India, Sri Lanka (“Zaylon”), Sumatra (“Taprobana”), Java, the Malay Peninsula (“Malaqua”) and the Moluccas are all present in a recognisable but still stylised form, reflecting the cartographic state of knowledge shortly after the Portuguese voyages around the Cape.

Sebastian Münster’s India extrema XXIIII Nova Tabula is widely regarded as one of the most influential mid-sixteenth-century maps of the Asian world, and an important early representation of India and the Indian Ocean in print. Issued in Basel in 1545 as part of Münster’s epoch-making edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, the map combines three distinct layers of geography: the classical schema of Ptolemy, the mediaeval narratives of travellers such as Marco Polo, and the more recent intelligence brought back by Portuguese navigators active along the coasts of India and Southeast Asia.

In the map, the Indian subcontinent – lying between the Indus and Ganges rivers – begins to assume a recognisable triangular form, with the prominent island of “Zaylon” (Sri Lanka) correctly shown as separate from the mainland. Key ports on the western seaboard, including Goa and Calicut (the landfall of Vasco da Gama in 1498), anchor the Arabian Sea littoral, while further east the Malay Peninsula with “Malaqua”, the divided double-island configuration of Java, and the “Moloca” or Spice Islands testify to the pre-eminent commercial and strategic importance of these waters. To the east and south, an archipelago of thousands of islands stretches across a still-unnamed Pacific, anticipating later, more accurate mappings of Southeast Asia and Oceania.

Münster overlays this emergent empirical geography with a dense textual and visual apparatus. The map preserves Ptolemaic toponyms such as “Scythia” and “Serica”, and labels the distant realm of “Cathay” (China) in a manner still largely derived from Venetian and other medieval sources. The famous note “Archipelagus 7448 insularum” evokes the enduring European fascination with a sea studded with countless islands, while the margins of the map are enlivened by a large sea monster and a double-tailed mermaid in the southern ocean – visual emblems of the wonder and danger associated with these distant regions. The northeastern coast of Asia and the Japanese archipelago are notably absent or displaced, reflecting the fragmentary and uneven nature of available information at the time.

As a printed object, the map belongs to Münster’s broader project of popularising geography and cosmography for a wide learnt audience. His Geographia (1540 onwards) and Cosmographia (from 1544), with their woodcut maps, city views and descriptive texts, did more than any other works of the period to disseminate new geographic ideas across Europe. India extrema circulated in numerous editions and was closely studied, copied and adapted by later mapmakers, including Ortelius and Mercator. It stands at a crucial moment when the Indian Ocean is shifting from the realm of classical conjecture to that of early modern observation, and when India itself is being re-situated from the edge of the known world to the centre of a new global trading system.

For collectors of South Asian and Indo-Oceanic cartography, the map offers not only an early printed image of India, Sri Lanka and the Bay of Bengal corridor, but also a compendium of sixteenth-century European attitudes to the region – a synthesis of inherited authority, fresh discovery and visual imagination. Its presence at the head of this Eastern India auction underscores the longue durée of the region’s cartographic representation, reaching back to the earliest attempts to reconcile antiquity with the Age of Discovery.

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