Mecia de Viladestes, also known as Mecià or Macià de Viladestes was a 15th century Jewish cartographer, one of the Mallorcan school of cartography.[1] The name Mecia is a variant of Matias or Matthew. His birth name was Samuel Corchos.[2] In 1401, he was conveyed to Sicily under license from the governor of Mallorca, presumably one of the Jews forcibly converted to Christianity around this time.[3][4]
The map is notable as one of the first to show detail of Africa south of the Atlas Mountains. This includes factual material, such as Mali with Timbuktu and an image of its 14th Century King Mussa Melli; as well as conjectural material, such as Prester John, shown in Ethiopia.[2] The north Atlantic shows a whaling ship, and Great Britain is shown without the distortion or "turning" of Scotland that is found in later maps, after Ptolemy's Geography became available in Latin translation.[8] The border between England and Scotland is very stylized, with mountains and two castles (probably Carlisle and Edinburgh) shown at right angles to the border, and rivers running east and west from the mountains. This convention may have led to later portolan charts showing England and Scotland as separate islands.[9][10]
Details from the 1413 chart
Mussa Melli and Timbuktu
Whaling in the north Atlantic
Scotland and northern England
^Entralgo, Pedro Laín; Piñero, José M.López (1960). "The Spanish contribution to world science". Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale. 6 (1): 948–968. ISSN0022-5436.
^ abBrunnlechner, Gerda (2018). "In Search of Prester John and the 'River of Gold'. Mecià de Viladestes' Map and Late Medieval Knowledge about Africa". Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies. 5 (2): 261–294. doi:10.1515/JTMS-2018-0021. S2CID186962200.
^Steinberg, Philip E. (2005). "Insularity, sovereignty and statehood: The representation of islands on portolan charts and the construction of the territorial state". Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography. 87 (4): 253–265. doi:10.1111/j.0435-3684.2005.00197.x. S2CID145072522.