IN NORTHERN MISTS 



point to Northern authorities having been consulted since the 

 production of the Nancy work, are the accurate latitude of 

 Trondhjem, already referred to, and the island of Byorno 

 between Iceland and Greenland. The latter might be the Gunn- 

 bjornskerries (or Gunnbjarnar-eyar) mentioned, among other 

 places, in Ivar Bardsson's description of Greenland; but the 

 abbreviation of the name is curious. Perhaps the island may 

 be due to some oral communication, or an erroneous recollec- 

 tion of something the author may have heard of in Denmark in 

 his youth. 



On the whole, we shall be compelled after all to detract 

 considerably from Claudius Clavus's reputation as a Northern 

 traveler and cartographer. His journey did not extend farther 

 north than the Danish islands, and perhaps Skane. On the 

 other hand, he was in Italy, where he drew his maps or had them 

 drawn, and where he also found his most important authorities. 

 His chief merit as a cartographer is that he is the first we 

 know of to have adopted Ptolemy's methods and that he gave 

 the name of Greenland to the westernmost tongue of 

 land in Norway on the Medicean mappamundi, and altered this 

 a good deal with the help of other compass-charts and Ves- 

 conte's mappamundi, to make it agree better with the 

 ideas of the North which he may have acquired to some 

 extent in his youth through legendary tales, and later through 

 Saxo and other writers. 



Claudius Clavus's later map of the North exercised for a 

 long period a decisive influence on the representation of 

 Scandinavia and to some extent of Greenland. This was 

 chiefly due to the two well-known cartographers, Nicolaus 

 Germanus and Henricus Martellus.^ The former must have 

 become acquainted with Clavus's map soon after 1460, and 

 included copies of it in the splendid MSS. of Ptolemy's " Geog- 

 raphy" which proceeded from his workshop at Florence. In 

 these copies, of which several are known (cf. p. 251), he 



1 On the influence of these men on the cartographical representation of the 

 North, see, in particular, J. Fischer, 1902, 

 276 



