Waldseemüller Map (1507): The First Map to Name America

The Waldseemüller map, printed in 1507 in the small town of Saint-Dié in Lorraine, is the first known map to use the name “America”. Its makers, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, also showed the New World as a separate land mass with an ocean to its west, years before Europeans had seen the Pacific from American shores. The only surviving copy is now one of the treasures of the Library of Congress.

Background

By 1507 Europeans had known about lands across the Atlantic for fifteen years, but nobody agreed on what they were. Christopher Columbus maintained that he had reached islands off Asia. Printed letters attributed to the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, by contrast, described a “New World” and became bestsellers across Europe.

In Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a group of scholars known as the Gymnasium Vosagense worked under the patronage of René II, Duke of Lorraine. They planned to publish a new edition of the ancient geographer Ptolemy and to update his picture of the world with the latest discoveries. The cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, born around 1470 near Freiburg, and the poet and scholar Matthias Ringmann were at the heart of the project.

The map and its book

The map’s full Latin title means “A general cosmography according to the tradition of Ptolemy and the surveys of Amerigo Vespucci and others”. It was printed from twelve woodblocks, and when the sheets are assembled it measures roughly 1.3 by 2.4 metres. It uses a curved, heart-like projection adapted from Ptolemy.

At the top, two inset figures face each other: Ptolemy, representing the old world view, and Vespucci, representing the new. On the far left, a long, narrow New World appears, separated from Asia by an open sea. On the southern part of it, the word “America” is printed.

The map came with a small book, Cosmographiae Introductio (Introduction to Cosmography), published in April 1507 together with a Latin translation of Vespucci’s four voyages. In a now famous passage, the authors argued that because Amerigo had discovered this fourth part of the world, it could be called “America”, the land of Amerigo, in a feminine form to match Europa and Asia. Many historians think Ringmann, the group’s Latin stylist, wrote this passage and may have coined the name.

The workshop also printed a set of globe gores, small segments that could be cut out and pasted onto a ball to make a globe. A few copies of these survive.

Key people

• Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470 – c. 1520): cartographer who designed the map and later produced the Carta Marina of 1516.
• Matthias Ringmann (c. 1482 – 1511): humanist scholar and editor, widely credited with the wording that introduced the name.
• Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512): Florentine navigator whose published voyages inspired the name; he does not seem to have been consulted.
• René II, Duke of Lorraine: patron of the Saint-Dié circle.
• Johannes Schöner: Nuremberg mathematician who owned the surviving copy in the sixteenth century.

What the map got right

The most debated feature is the ocean shown west of the Americas. Vasco Núñez de Balboa did not sight the Pacific from Panama until 1513, and Magellan did not cross it until 1520 and 1521. Some writers have suggested that the mapmakers had secret information. Most historians think the open sea was a logical guess: if Vespucci was right that this was a new land and not Asia, then a sea had to lie between the two.

The map also contains many errors, and it relies heavily on Ptolemy for Asia. Its value lies in its bold idea of a separate fourth continent, not in accurate coastlines.

The name controversy

The name America did not come from Vespucci himself, and there is no sign that he knew of it before his death in 1512. The Saint-Dié scholars based their choice on two printed accounts of his voyages, the Latin letter Mundus Novus and a longer Italian letter addressed to the Florentine statesman Piero Soderini. Historians have long debated how much of these texts Vespucci actually wrote, and some details, especially his claimed first voyage of 1497, are widely doubted.

Other explanations for the name have been suggested. In the early twentieth century a theory linked it to Richard Amerike, a Bristol customs official connected with the voyages of John Cabot. This idea has attracted popular interest, but there is no document connecting Amerike with the name, and the Saint-Dié book states its own reasoning clearly. Most historians therefore accept that America honours Amerigo Vespucci, whose first name in Latin was Americus.

Lost and found

Waldseemüller later stated that 1,000 copies had been printed, but wall maps were used, hung and thrown away, and for centuries no copy was known. In 1901 the Jesuit scholar Joseph Fischer found one in the library of Wolfegg Castle in southern Germany. It was bound in a volume that had belonged to Johannes Schöner, together with a copy of the 1516 Carta Marina.

The Waldburg-Wolfegg family agreed to sell the map to the Library of Congress, and the purchase, for 10 million dollars, was completed in 2003 after the German authorities allowed its export. German Chancellor Angela Merkel took part in a ceremony marking the transfer in Washington in April 2007, and the map has been displayed in the library’s Thomas Jefferson Building since then. To protect the fragile paper, it is kept in a sealed display case filled with inert argon gas, built with help from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The surviving copy shows signs of its history. Its twelve sheets were never joined and hung on a wall, which helps explain why it survived. Some scholars have argued that this copy was printed a few years after 1507, perhaps close to the date of the 1516 Carta Marina it was bound with, but its exact printing date is uncertain.

Timeline

• c. 1470: Martin Waldseemüller is born near Freiburg im Breisgau.
• 1507, April: Cosmographiae Introductio is published at Saint-Dié, explaining the name America.
• 1507: The twelve-sheet world map is printed.
• 1516: Waldseemüller’s Carta Marina appears, without the name America.
• 1538: Gerardus Mercator applies the name America to both the northern and southern continents.
• 1901: Joseph Fischer discovers the only known copy at Wolfegg Castle.
• 2003: The Library of Congress completes its purchase of the map.
• 2007, April: The map is formally handed over in Washington and goes on display.

Legacy

The name America spread quickly because it was printed. Thanks to the printing press, books and maps from Saint-Dié circulated widely, and other mapmakers copied the label even after Waldseemüller himself dropped it. Gerardus Mercator, later famous for the Mercator projection, used the name for the whole double continent on his world map of 1538.

The choice was controversial. Later writers, including the Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, felt it unfairly overlooked Columbus. Yet the name stuck. Today the map is often called “America’s birth certificate”, and it remains one of the most valuable single items ever acquired by the Library of Congress.

Why it matters

The Waldseemüller map marks the moment Europeans began to see the Americas as a separate continent rather than a corner of Asia. It gave two continents their name and shows how printing could fix a new idea in the public mind within a few years.