ABSTRACT
This chapter tells a story of how the making of early modern cartographic representations at the transition between the Majorcan Portolan mapping tradition and the geometric projections that appear in the second half of the sixteenth century help reveal some of the most outstanding and useful elements of mapping for understanding the making of orders of governance in time. It focuses on two maps, Juan de la Cosa’s 1500 ‘mappa mundi’, the first cartographic representation to show the Americas as a separate and single continent, and Gerardus Mercator’s world map of 1569, a projection that allows for a flat representation of a globe considered as the first modern geometrical depiction of global space. Both maps reveal a particular quest in the development of a European understanding of spatiality: the problem of location. They also reveal the usefulness of maps as instruments for travel and imperial business offering an opportunity to explore the particularities of how geopolitics were understood in the context of time. By focusing on issues such as the location of waters and lands, geometric projections and the representation of latitude and longitude, the drawing of imaginary lines with political significance, the role of empty and ‘silent’ spaces, and the use of scales, symbols, forms of writing, languages, and images, allows for a reconstitution of a rhetoric of power that sheds light on the making of a European ordering of global space; or, in other terms, of a making of European globality.
