Catalan Atlas (1375): Mansa Musa on a Medieval European Map

The Catalan Atlas is a richly illustrated world map made around 1375 in Palma, Majorca, and attributed to the Jewish mapmaker Abraham Cresques. Its most famous image shows Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, enthroned in West Africa and holding a gold nugget. It is one of the finest medieval maps and a key witness to what Europeans knew, and imagined, about Africa and Asia in the 14th century.

Background: Majorca and the mapmakers

In the 14th century Majorca was part of the Crown of Aragon and one of the busiest trading centres of the western Mediterranean. Its merchants traded with North Africa, Italy, France and the Levant, and its harbour was a meeting place for sailors and information from many lands.

Majorca was also home to a famous school of mapmaking. Its craftsmen produced portolan charts, sea maps showing coastlines and harbours with networks of lines radiating from compass points to help pilots plot courses. Many of the leading mapmakers were Jewish, and their contacts with Jewish communities in North Africa gave them access to information about the routes across the Sahara.

Abraham Cresques (c. 1325–1387) was one of the best known. Aragonese royal documents call him a master of world maps and compasses and record payments to him and his son Jehuda for maps made for the court of King Peter IV and his son, the future John I.

Making the atlas

The atlas is unsigned and undated, but a calendar in it begins in 1375, and most scholars date it to about that year. It is attributed to Abraham Cresques, probably working with Jehuda.

It was drawn on six large sheets of vellum, each roughly 65 by 50 centimetres. The sheets were cut in half and mounted on wooden boards, so that the atlas folds like a screen of 12 panels. Laid out, the map is about 3 metres long. The images are painted in bright colours and gold and silver leaf.

By the early 1380s the atlas was in the French royal library, probably as a diplomatic gift from the Aragonese court. It has remained in French collections ever since and is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

What the atlas shows

The first four panels contain texts and diagrams in Catalan on cosmography, astronomy and astrology, including a perpetual calendar and information on tides. The remaining eight panels form a map of the known world, from the Atlantic islands in the west to China in the east.

The western part, covering Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, is drawn in the accurate style of portolan charts, with a network of rhumb lines and one of the earliest known compass roses on a map. Coastal place names are packed tightly along the shores. Inland, cities are marked with small towers and flags, and rulers are shown seated in their kingdoms.

The eastern part relies on travellers’ accounts, especially that of Marco Polo. It shows Cathay (China) and its capital Khanbaliq, a caravan on the Silk Road, the Three Magi, and legendary figures such as Gog and Magog and the Antichrist. Asia is less accurate but full of detail.

The atlas also shows recent European discoveries in the Atlantic, including the Canary Islands, which Genoese and Majorcan sailors had reached and explored in the early 14th century.

Mansa Musa and the image of Africa

On the sheet covering North and West Africa, south of the Atlas Mountains, sits a crowned black king on a throne. He holds a sceptre in one hand and a large gold nugget or coin in the other. The Catalan caption names him as Musse Melly, lord of the black people of Guinea, and says he is the richest and noblest ruler in the region because of the abundance of gold in his land.

This is Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali whose lavish pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 had become famous throughout the Mediterranean (see Mansa Musa’s Hajj). By 1375 Musa had been dead for decades, but his name had become a byword for Mali’s wealth.

Near him, a veiled Berber rider on a camel approaches, representing the Saharan peoples who controlled the caravan routes. The map marks towns of the West African trade, including Timbuktu (Tenbuch) and the “city of Melli”, and shows the Atlas Mountains with a pass through which caravans travelled (see Trans-Saharan Gold and Salt Trade).

Off the West African coast, the map shows a ship and a caption recording the voyage of the Majorcan sailor Jaume Ferrer, who set out in 1346 for the “River of Gold” and was never heard of again.

What Europeans knew of Africa

The atlas shows a mixture of solid knowledge and hearsay. Its makers knew the names of trading towns and rulers through merchants in North Africa, but no European is known to have travelled to Mali by that time. Information passed along chains of traders, from Saharan caravan towns to the ports of Morocco and Algeria and then across the sea to Majorca. The interior of Africa is filled with symbols of wealth rather than geographical detail.

The image of Mansa Musa’s gold expressed a powerful European ambition: to reach the sources of African gold directly by sea, bypassing the Muslim middlemen of North Africa. In the 15th century this ambition helped inspire Portuguese voyages down the West African coast.

Legacy

The Cresques workshop did not survive the upheavals of the following decades. In 1391 anti-Jewish riots spread from Castile to Majorca, and many Jews were killed or forced to convert. Jehuda Cresques became a Christian and took the name Jaume Ribes. Some historians identify him with a “Master Jacome of Majorca” said to have worked later for Prince Henry of Portugal, but this identification is uncertain.

The atlas itself has become one of the most reproduced medieval maps. Its portrait of Mansa Musa appears in textbooks, museum displays and popular histories as an emblem of medieval Africa’s wealth, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France has published high-resolution digital images of the whole work.

Historians value it as a summary of late medieval geography. It combines the practical knowledge of Mediterranean sailors, the reports of merchants and travellers, and religious and legendary traditions inherited from earlier world maps, all in a single object made for a royal audience.

Key people

• Abraham Cresques: Jewish mapmaker of Palma, to whom the atlas is attributed.
• Jehuda Cresques: his son and collaborator, later a mapmaker in his own right.
• Peter IV of Aragon: king whose court commissioned maps from the Cresques workshop.
• Mansa Musa: ruler of Mali c. 1312–1337, depicted holding gold.

Timeline

• 1324: Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage through Cairo makes Mali famous.
• Early 14th century: Mediterranean sailors reach the Canary Islands.
• 1346: Jaume Ferrer sails from Majorca for the “River of Gold”.
• c. 1375: The Catalan Atlas is made in Palma, Majorca.
• Early 1380s: The atlas is recorded in the French royal library.
• 1387: Death of Abraham Cresques.

Why it matters

The Catalan Atlas is a masterpiece of medieval mapmaking and one of the earliest European images of a named West African ruler. It shows how news of Mali’s gold travelled across the Mediterranean and shaped European curiosity and ambition. It also preserves a snapshot of the world as seen from Majorca on the eve of the age of European exploration.