Here Begins the Dark Sea by Meredith Francesca Small;

Author:Meredith Francesca Small;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

THE EASTERN (INDIAN) OCEAN

The Indian Ocean and its islands and coastlines as drawn by Fra Mauro were important because this is the area of the spice trade from which Venetian merchants had made their wealth. These trade routes were not conducted along the Silk Road, which involved years of hard land travel, but instead over water among the islands of the Indian Ocean and at ports along the coastlines of India, Southeast Asia, and China. Trade here had been established by Arabic traders who then brought goods to port cities in Asia Minor on the Black or Caspian Seas where they could trade with Europeans. But that “sea” was an ocean, and it was virtually unknown to Europeans except for hearty exporters such as Marco Polo and Niccolò de Conte. Unlike Africa, this part of his geography is less revolutionary and less idiosyncratic; instead, it aligns with Ptolemy, which also engenders some mistakes, such as making India strangely shaped and Sri Lanka way too big.59

While mapping the area of the Indian Ocean, Fra Mauro continued to rely on first-person information. Much of that information must have come from Arab sailors and traders, presumably those who passed through Venice and may have had direct conversations with him. Fra Mauro repeatedly underscores whatever he says about the area of the Indian Ocean with the phrase those who sail in these seas, and those witnesses can only be Arabic traders.60 He was also schooled in Arabic geographers and their thoughts, and he surely knew the travels of Ibn Battuta from the fourteenth century, although he may have hesitated to give them credit on the map because such knowledge might have been considered “outside the canon” for a Catholic monk.61 He must have also worked from a base of Arabic navigational charts (portolans), which would have contrasted somewhat with Ptolemy’s view of the area. He strongly maintains that this ocean is “internally navigable” and not the scary unknown swath of deep blue sea, the mar scuro, represented on other Western maps. On this map, he also constantly refers to various established trading routes across the Indian Ocean and the products the various islands offer (see also chapter 6), which underscores how he expected the map to affect the future of international trade. Fra Mauro also points out that this area of endless water is full of human life and activity. Historian Marianne O’Doherty writes, “On the map the Indian Ocean world comes across as positively crowded; populous and well-traversed, it is a cog in the economic machinery of the world.”62 Fra Mauro further claimed there were over twelve thousand islands in the Indian Sea and that the inhabited ones were fertile.63 Even if this part of the world was so vast, Fra Mauro ran out of space for everything: “In this sea there are many islands that cannot be specially noted because of lack of space.”64

And yet, he goes on to describe many of the islands in detail, often including the products grown or made on these islands, or the practices of various peoples (see also chapter 6).

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