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The most important map of the medieval period - the so-called Catalan Atlas, drawn by the Majorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques in 1375.
Consists of 4 leaves - the first two covering most of Europe, the 3rd one Middle East, and the last one China.
Includes beautiful illustrations of kings, animals, and a caravan on the Silk Road, described by some historians as the caravan of Marco Polo (4th image).
In 1375, Cresques and his son Jehuda received an assignment from Prince John of Aragon (the future John I of Aragon) to make a set of nautical charts which would go beyond the normal geographic range of contemporary portolan charts to cover the East and the West, and everything that, from the Strait [of Gibraltar] leads to the West. For this job, Cresques and Jehuda would be paid 150 Aragonese golden florins, and 60 Mallorcan pounds, respectively, as it is stated in 14th-century documents from the Prince himself and his father Peter IV of Aragon. Prince John intended to present the chart to his cousin Charles (later to be Charles VI, King of France) as a gift. In that year 1375 Cresques and Jehuda drew the six charts that composed the Catalan Atlas at their house in the Jewish quarter of Palma./wiki |