CLAUDIUS CLAVUS 



scarcely be insulting him if we believe his statements (in two 

 passages of the Vienna text) that he himself had seen Pygmies 

 from a land in the North, and Karelians in Greenland, to be rhe- 

 torical phrases, calculated to strengthen the reader's confidence, 

 and to mean, at the outside, that he had seen something about 

 these people in older authorities. 



After having heard my reasons, Bjombo and Petersen have 

 in all essentials come round to my views. In particular, they 

 agree with me that Clavus cannot have been in Greenland, but 

 that the delineation of that country on his later map is based on 

 the Medicean map of the world, which will be mentioned later. 

 I therefore consider it superfluous to combat any further here 

 the reasons given in their work for their former view. 



Claudius Clavus's task must have been to supplement the 

 newly discovered atlas of Ptolemy by what he knew of the 

 North ; and to this end, his maps were drawn, either by himself 

 or by a professional draughtsman in Italy from his instructions. 

 The text was prepared after each of the maps, as a description 

 of it; and the latitudes and longitudes are taken from the 

 map [cf. Bjombo and Petersen, 1904, p. 130]. With the 

 superstitious respect of the period for older learned authorities 

 in general, and for Ptolemy in particular, he did not venture 

 to alter the latter's coast-lines or latitudes as far as they extended ; 

 even in the Danish islands he has done so with hesitation; 

 thus, Zealand in his first sketch (the Nancy map) has still the 

 same form as Scandia in Ptolemy, etc. He then added to the 

 latter's coast-lines what he knew or could get together from other 

 quarters. 



His first map (the Nancy map) may presuppose the fol- 

 lowing sources, besides Ptolemy's various maps of northern 

 Europe: Pietro Vesconte's mappamundi (circa 1320) in 

 Marino Sanudo's work,^ and the anonymous mappamundi, 



1 Cf. the maps on pp. 223, 224. As we certainly do not know nearly all the 

 maps that were in use at that time, I regard it as probable that Claudius or 

 his draughtsman had older maps, now lost, of this or a similar type, which re- 

 semble the Nancy map even more closely than these two known maps. But, 

 of course, it is wiser to confine ourselves as far as possible to those we know. 



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