Charts for an empire. A global trading zone in early modern Portuguese nautical cartography

Abstract

The global phenomenon of maritime expansion and the measures of control imposed by the interventionism of the Iberian crowns generated a context that sheds light on the Zilselian issue: the contact between artisans and university-trained men in early modern Europe. This is an old and controversial topic. However, this article does not focus solely on the economic and social reasons for this contact, but also on epistemological and political motivations. With the specific aim of illustrating this collaboration, the article analyses some of the empirical practices developed under the Portuguese maritime empire throughout the 16th century. This is achieved through the reconstruction of the process of production of nautical charts in the Armazéns da Guiné e Índia (Storehouse of Guinea and Indies) of Lisbon, which I consider a large-scale "trading zone." This reconstruction throws light not only on the technical complexity of these cognitive processes and the coordinated work of the different agents involved in their production, but also on the emergence of new spaces of knowledge and new communities of practitioners (with new professional statuses) linked to them; new methods of collection and management of information; and, finally, new forms of circulation and standardization of knowledge in the early modern period. K E Y W O R D S Armazéns da Guiné e Índia, cosmographers, nautical charts, pilots, Portugal

Making a Global Image of the World: Science, Cosmography and Navigation in Times of the First Circumnavigation of Earth, 1492-1522

“…Thus, since the early years of the 16th century, Seville had an institution of applied science, a scientific profession of high qualification and a cartographic model to provide regulatory support for any political-diplomatic decision. Something similar took place in Portugal, and probably earlier, with the Armazéns da Guiné and Índia, the position of Cosmógrafo-Mor (Chief-Cosmographer) and the cartas padrões d'el Rei (standard charts) (Sánchez, 2016(Sánchez, , 2018.…”