Behaim Globe (1492): The Oldest Surviving Terrestrial Globe

The Behaim globe, known in German as the Erdapfel (“earth apple”), is the oldest surviving globe of the Earth. It was made in Nuremberg between 1490 and 1492 under the direction of the merchant Martin Behaim. Because it was finished just before news of Columbus’s voyage reached Europe, it offers a rare picture of the world as educated Europeans imagined it on the eve of contact with the Americas.

Background: Martin Behaim and Nuremberg

Martin Behaim was born in Nuremberg in 1459 into a family of merchants. In the 1480s he moved to Portugal, where he traded and mixed with people involved in the Portuguese voyages along the coast of Africa. King John II made him a knight in 1485, and he later married into a family in the Azores.

Behaim claimed to have sailed on a Portuguese expedition down the African coast, possibly with the navigator Diogo Cão. Historians have found little firm evidence for this, and his own account contains errors. What is clear is that he had access to the geographical talk of Lisbon, then the leading centre of European exploration.

Nuremberg was one of the great commercial and scientific cities of the Holy Roman Empire, with skilled craftsmen, printers and mathematicians. During a visit home between about 1490 and 1493, Behaim persuaded members of the city council to fund the making of a globe.

How the globe was made

The globe is about 51 cm (20 inches) in diameter. Its makers first built a sphere of clay and covered it with layers of linen and paper to form a shell. The shell was then cut in two, the clay removed, and the halves joined again around a wooden frame and reinforced with metal hoops.

The craftsman Ruprecht Kolberger is recorded as making the sphere. The surface was covered with parchment, and the painter Georg Glockendon painted the map, coats of arms, flags and pictures of rulers, ships and animals. City accounts preserve details of the payments, which is unusual for an object of this age.

The globe has well over a thousand place names and many long inscriptions that describe peoples, trade goods and wonders of distant lands.

What the globe shows

The geography rests mainly on the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy, the travels of Marco Polo and the fanciful travel book attributed to John Mandeville. It also reflects recent Portuguese discoveries along the African coast, including Bartolomeu Dias’s rounding of the southern tip of Africa in 1488, although southern Africa is drawn in the wrong shape.

The most striking feature is the Atlantic Ocean. With no Americas, it appears as one ocean stretching from Europe and Africa to Asia. Cipangu (Japan), described by Marco Polo, lies far to the east of China and is placed in mid-ocean. Legendary islands such as Antillia and St Brendan’s Island are scattered across it.

Like many scholars of his time, Behaim greatly underestimated the distance westward from Europe to Asia. This was the same assumption that encouraged Christopher Columbus to attempt a western crossing. There is no evidence that the two men ever met or that Columbus saw the globe.

Key people

• Martin Behaim (1459–1507): the Nuremberg merchant who planned the globe and supplied its geographical content. He died in Lisbon in 1507.
• Georg Glockendon (died 1514): a Nuremberg illuminator and printmaker who painted the map.
• Ruprecht Kolberger: the craftsman who built the sphere.

Legacy

The globe remained with the Behaim family for centuries. In 1907 it was placed in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, at first on loan; the museum later bought it outright. In 1908 the geographer E. G. Ravenstein published a detailed study and facsimile that is still widely used.

Within a few years of its completion, the globe was out of date. Columbus’s voyage of 1492, described in Columbus’s first voyage, and the voyages that followed revealed lands unknown to Behaim. By 1507 the Waldseemüller map was showing a separate continent named America. The Erdapfel is valued precisely because it records the older picture of the world. In 2023 it was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Timeline

• 1459: Martin Behaim is born in Nuremberg.
• 1485: Behaim is knighted by King John II of Portugal.
• 1488: Bartolomeu Dias rounds the southern tip of Africa.
• c. 1490–1492: The globe is made in Nuremberg with funding from the city.
• 1493, March: Columbus returns to Europe, making the globe’s Atlantic outdated.
• 1507: Behaim dies in Lisbon.
• 1907: The globe enters the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.
• 2023: The globe is inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Why it matters

The Behaim globe is the oldest surviving three-dimensional picture of the whole Earth. It captures the European view of the world in the final months before the voyages of Columbus changed that view for good, and it shows the mixture of ancient learning, travellers’ tales and new Portuguese knowledge that shaped the age of exploration.