First Bible to include a map helped spread the idea of ​​borders

Catholics didn’t give a damn about the rest of the world, but this Bible has a place for a little space called Palestine.

Five hundred years ago the first Bible with a map was published. The anniversary went unnoticed, but this edition transformed the way Bibles were produced.

The map appeared on Old Testament of 1525 by Christopher Froschauer, published in Zurich and widely distributed in 16th-century Central Europe.

However, despite being an innovative moment in the history of the Bible, the initial attempt It was far from being a triumph.

The map is inverted along the north-south axis (i.e., it’s backwards). As a result, the Mediterranean appears to the east of Palestine rather than to the west. This shows how little many people in Europe knew about the Middle East, to the point that such a map was published without anyone in the printing shop contesting it.

The map had originally been drawn about a decade earlier by the celebrated Renaissance painter and engraver Lukas Cranach the Elder, based in Wittenberg, in present-day Germany.

Written in Latin, shows Palestine with several important holy sites such as Jerusalem and Bethlehem. At the bottom you can see the mountains of Sinai and the route followed by the Israelites when fleeing slavery in Egypt.

Looking closely, it is possible to see the Israelites and their tents, as well as several small paintings illustrating episodes of their journey. However, the landscape is more European than Middle Eastern, reflecting the printers’ lack of knowledge about that region.

There is walled cities with countless trees and, contrary to reality, the Jordan meanders much more dramatically towards the Dead Sea, and the coastline has more bays and inlets.

In the previous century, Europeans had second-century Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy rediscovered and with it the art of making accurate maps using latitude and longitude (as far as possible, since longitude would only be calculated with greater precision later).

With the arrival of printing, Ptolemy’s Cosmographia conquered Europe. Your scientific treatise on geography was published and his maps of the ancient world reproduced.

Printers quickly discovered, however, that buyers wanted contemporary maps. Soon new maps of France, Spain and Scandinavia appeared. To our eyes, these are truly modern: north is at the top of the page and city locations, rivers and coasts are presented with great precision.

These maps quickly replaced medieval cartography, with its symbolic approach to the world — like the famous mappa mundi de Herefordfrom around 1300 —, which was more concerned with conveying cultural or religious meaning than geographic accuracy. Except in one case: Palestine.

The printers of Ptolemy’s time also gave their readers a “modern map of the Holy Land” that was anything but modern. It was a medieval map produced not using latitude and longitude, but with a grid to measure distances between locations.

I was oriented with the east at the top of the page and west at the bottom. It represented the holy sites of Christianity and divided the land of Palestine into tribal territories.

Cranach’s map combines these two types of maps. In the top and bottom margins has meridian linesbut the coast is sloping, so the entire map is oriented with northeast at the top of the page.

It’s as if Cranach couldn’t decide what kind of map he wanted to create. The representation is realistic and modern, but the map is full of symbolic geography: when we look at it, we travel with the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to the promised land, with all its places full of meanings — such as Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the Jordan River and Jericho.

Perceptions of Palestine

The map was characteristic of Europe’s lack of interest in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. What European buyers really What they valued was the strange hybrid space that is the “Holy Land”: a place that belonged to our world, but at the same time was not part of it.

The cities represented on the map were those that had flourished two millennia earlier and that, for Christians, were in some ways more real. They were part of the imaginary space described in the churches and in the Scriptures.

This curious juxtaposition between ancient and modern was particularly influential in the way Palestine was represented in 12 tribal territories. The 12 tribes descended from Jacob symbolized the Christian claim to be the true heir of Israel and its holy sites, as well as what these sites represented: the inheritance of the heavenly Jerusalem. Lines on the map communicated God’s eternal promises.

But in the early modern period, lines began to be used to mark the borders between sovereign states. The maps of the Holy Land, meticulously divided among the Israelite tribes, defined the cartographers’ agenda. As the 16th century progressed, More and more atlas maps divided the world between distinct nations with well-defined borders.

The fact that a map divided into territories appeared in the Bible gave an apparent religious legitimacy to a world full of borders. Lines that once symbolized unlimited divine promises became communicate the limits of political sovereignty.

Within the Bibles themselves, maps were here to stay. In the following years, the printers experimented with various configurations, but ended up fixing four maps: one of the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert, one of the territories of the 12 tribes, one of Palestine in the time of Jesus and one of the missionary journeys of the apostle Paul.

There is a pleasing symmetry: two maps for the Old Testament and two for the New Testament. But also two travel maps and two of the Holy Land. These symmetries conveyed connections between events: the Old Testament was fulfilled in the New, and Judaism in Christianity.

So the first map in a Bible is a fascinating moment in history—but also a disturbing one.r. Transformed the Bible into something akin to a Renaissance atlasbut deeply rooted in assumptions of Christian superiority: the Holy Land imagined by Christians to replace contemporary Palestine, and Christianity to supplant Judaism.

He was also one of the agents who contributed to the creation of the modern world of distinct nation-states. In many ways, we still live with the consequences of this today.