FIFTEENTH CENTURY MAPS 



has redrawn Clavus's map in the trapezoidal projection invented 

 by himself, whereby his Greenland has been given a more oblique 

 position than the Greenland of the original map and the corre- 

 sponding peninsula on the Medici map. He also introduced 

 this Greenland into his map of the world [cf. J. Fischer, 1902, 

 pis. I, iii; Bjornbo, 1910, p. 136]; but, in order to make 

 it agree better with the learned mediaeval view of the earth's 

 disc surrounded by ocean, he surrounded it by sea on the 

 north, so that it 

 came to 

 long and 

 tongue 

 projecting 

 northern 

 instead 



northern mass 



land extendmg to North-western portion of Nicolaus Germanus's first 

 the North Pole ac- revision of Ptolemy's map of the world (after 



cording to Clavus. ^^66) [J. Fischer, 1902. pi. i] 



But this long peninsula does not seem to have entirely satisfied 

 this priest's erudite ideas of the continent, and on later maps 

 (which were printed after his death, in the Ulm editions of 

 Ptolemy of 1482 and i486) he shortened it so much that it 

 became a rounded peninsula to the north of Norway, with 

 the name " Engronelant," ^ and at the same time he moved 

 Iceland out into the ocean to the north-west. This apparently 

 quite arbitrary alteration may perhaps be due to a desire to 

 bring the map as far as possible into agreement with the 

 learned dogma of the continent [cf. Bjornbo, 19 10, pp. 141 f.] ; 

 but older conceptions of Greenland may also have contributed 



1 As shown by Bjornbo and Petersen, this is evidently Clavus's name " Eyn 

 Gronelandz aa " for a river on the east coast of Greenland, which was misun- 

 derstood on Clavus's map and made the name of the country, assisted, per- 

 haps, by the resemblance in sound with the name " Engromelandi " (for An- 

 germanland), which Clavus has on the north side of Scandinavia (p. 248). 

 This resemblance of sound may also have had something to do with the re- 

 moval of Greenland to the north of Norway. 



^77 



