Tabula Asiae XI

Giacomo Gastaldi was one of the leading Italian cartographers of the mid-sixteenth century, and his maps for the 1548 Italian edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia helped bring ancient and modern geography together in a compact printed atlas. The edition, translated into Italian by Pietro Andrea Mattioli and published in Venice by Giovanni Battista Pedrezano, included both Ptolemaic maps and new modern maps prepared by Gastaldi. Tabula Asiae XI belongs to the Ptolemaic sequence and presents Southeast Asia according to the inherited geography of Claudius Ptolemy.

The map shows Southeast Asia as a large southward-projecting peninsula extending beyond India extra Gangem. The Sinus Gangeticus, Mare Indicum, Aurea regio, and Sinae appear within a classical geographical framework, while the island world to the south includes Bazacata, Bone fortuna, Maneolae insulae, Sindae, and other islands drawn from older textual traditions. The map’s structure depends on Ptolemy’s ancient geography rather than the more recent maritime knowledge visible in Gastaldi’s modern India tercera nova tabula (57). The mountain associated with the mainland interior was described in Ptolemy’s Geographia (Book 7, Chapter 2) as a place inhabited by tigers, elephants, lions, and "wild men who live in caves, with skins like the hippopotamus, who can easily hurl darts." Such details show how the map preserved not only Ptolemy’s geography, but also the ethnographic and natural-historical traditions attached to it.

The map also includes marvellous island geography typical of the Ptolemaic tradition. At left, a cartouche describes India as a land of leopards and other fierce animals, accompanied by a leopard and an exotic bird. In the surrounding seas, Bazacata, likely representing the Nicobar Islands. was associated with the unclothed Agmatae. Islands such as Maneolae and Sindae were thought to be inhabited by anthropophagi, while the Maneolae were were also believed to be magnetic, posing a danger to ships with iron nails.

Within the collection, this Ptolemaic map is closely connected with Gastaldi’s modern India tercera nova tabula (57), since both appeared in the same 1548 edition but present very different conceptions of Southeast Asia. It also compares well with Fries’s earlier Ptolemaic and modern maps of the region (1 and 2), allowing comparison between northern European and Italian attempts to place Southeast Asia between classical geography and newer voyage information.