Sacrae Geographiae Tabulam

Benedict Arias Montanus (1527 – 1598), also known as Benito Arias Montano, was a Spanish orientalist and polymath active in Spain during the second half of the 16th century. Montanus studied in Seville and Alcala and joined the Benedicting order in 1559. He later became a clerical member of the militant monastic Order of St. James. Arias Montanus is best known for editing the eight-volume Antwerp Polyglot Bible. This work contains several important maps, including a world map that some consider to be the first mapping of Australia (although it was printed well before Australia as officially discovered). Arias Montanus was a friend and correspondent with Abraham Ortelius, who encouraged his interest in cartography.

The map is the first-known double-hemispheric world map in a Bible, and virtually the earliest acquirable full-size double-hemisphere map of the world printed overall, predated only by the smaller 1561 Ruscelli and the unacquirable 1555 Calapoda map. (The form was not an innovation, but did not appear in an ‘atlas’ until Ruscelli.)

Montanus’ map, appearing as it did in a Bible, was intended for religious study. Specifically, it was drawn to illustrate the re-population of the Earth by the descendants of Noah following the Deluge, and to include the population of the New World in that number. The names of these descendants and their tribes are listed in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Aramaic, with numbers and letters keying the names to locations. In particular, the settlements of Ophir, Jobab, and Sephermos – all sons of Shem – are in the Americas. Thus, this indicates, for the first time on a map, that after the Great Flood the children of Noah repopulated not only the Old World, but also the New.

This was not an academic issue, particularly for Philip II: it is a clear statement of the humanity of the Native Americans, carrying with it Philip’s responsibility to convert them – and carrying with that, his authority over the world west of the Tordesillas line.

Montanus’s delineation of the world was not invented: he was a scholar and orientalist but not a geographer. He relied on existing geographic frameworks, in this case, the 1561 Ruscelli map of the world. Features on the Montanus shared by the Ruscelli include:
• A clear (or at least strongly implied) connection between North America and Asia.
• The distinctive river system extending from the Gulf of California into the middle of the continent, and the pattern of imaginary mountain ranges in North America.
• An insular Northeast, possibly derived from Gastaldi’s connection of the Hudson River with the Saint Lawrence, and possibly influenced by the Sea of Verrazano.
• The overall shape of South America, including its pattern of mountains and rivers.
• An insular Tierra del Fuego.
• The depiction of the Arctic landmasses.
• The delineation of Africa, including the scattering of islands north of Madagascar.
• The absence on the map of the southern continent dominating the southern hemispheres of most other maps of the period, notably the Ortelius.

The notion that Terra Australis might include Java or some other Southeast Asian island may be a legacy of the Dieppe School Maps which, dating to the 1540s, illustrated a large landmass just south of the Island of Java called Java La Grande or even Land of Java. Typically, in these manuscript maps Java La Grande is connected to some version of Terra Australis extending to the South Polar regions. The landmass, in both the Ruscelli and the Montanus, shares the northernmost terminus of the Dieppe School maps, but they do not resemble the long, narrow form indicated on them.

It is also possible that Java Grande reflects actual observations of the Australian mainland by Portuguese (or possibly French) navigators on their way to or from the Indies. Navigators in the early 16th century guarded their secrets closely, and so it is not unreasonable that there would be no surviving mention of either the voyages or their discoveries. So, while it is unlikely that Montanus (or Ruscelli for that matter) was representing an actual discovery of Australia, it reflects an ongoing cartographic thread that may have its roots in actual discovery.