Antillia the island of seven cities
Pedro de Medina, writer Spanish of the 16th century, reports that, in a Ptolemy offered to Pope Urban VI, who reigned from 1378 to 1389, he noticed the island Antilia which bore the legend next :
"Isla insula Antilia, aliquando a Lusitanis est inventa, sed modo quando quaeritur, non invenitur".
It is likely that this is just one of those additional maps that scholars added to Ptolemy's manuscripts, as geographical discoveries progressed, in order to somehow inform their favorite author, because we do not find Antilia Island marked on any of the fourteenth-century maps. It is true that people still wanted to find Antilia on the map drawn up in 1367 by Pizzigani. We can indeed distinguish on an island very to the west in the Atlantic on which appear two statues with the following mention:
"Hae sunt statuae quae stant ante ripas Antilliae, quarum quae in fundo ad securandos homines navigantes, quare est fusum ad ista maria quousque possint navigare, and foras porrecta statua est mare sorde quo non possint intrare nautae".
But Pizzigani's map is difficult to read. Ad ripas Antilliae reads just as well as Ad ripas Atullio, and even Ad ripas istius insulae. It is therefore not in the 14th century that we find the Antilia mentioned with precision.
The first certain indication of Antilia is fixed in the year 1414, when, according to Behaim, a Spanish ship first approached this island and made it known to Europe. From then on Antilia appears on almost all maps. Jean-Antoine Letronne in a series of articles on book by Alexander of Humboldt Critical review of the history of the geography of the New Continent and the progress of nautical astronomy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries centuries, indicates in Journal of scholars of the Institut de France, confirms the term Antillia appears on nautical charts and world maps after the fourteenth century.
The island of Antilia is indicated in particular on the globe of Martin Behaim (1491-1493), on the map of Paolo Toscanelli (1468), that of the Genoese Bartolomeo Pareto, drawn up in 1455 and published by Andrés, the world map of Fra Mauro in 1457 and the map of Andrea Benincasa drawn up in 1476, as well as on the Atlas of Andrea Bianco (1436) published by Formaleoni in 1789. The map of Vinland (1434) indicates an island called "Antilia" located north of another island called "island of Branzilæ".
The nautical chart of Pizzigano (1424) also indicates a red-colored island named “Antilia”. It is found on the Portulan Ancônitain of 1474, preserved at the library Grand Ducal of Weimar, and on that of the Genoese Beccaria or Becclaria kept in the library of Parma.
The Florentine mathematician Toscanelli, who was Columbus's correspondent and confirmed him in his resolution to seek the route to the Indies in the west, had carefully drawn a map of the journey to be undertaken in that direction, and Antilia figured there as a station. intermediary on the road from Lisbon to the Indies by the west. In the letter that accompanied this map, he speaks of Antilia as a known country:
“From Antilia Island, which you know, to the most noble island of Cippangu, etc. ".
Unfortunately the map of Toscanelli is lost, and it is almost impossible to evaluate with precision the distances fixed by the Florentine scholar.
However, a globe drawn up a few years later by Behaim, and which is believed to be a reproduction of the map of Toscanelli, places Antilia under the 33rd of western longitude. Ortelius and Mercator still draw it in their atlases. In general all these maps give it a rectangular shape, and make it a country about as big as Spain.
The ribs are described with a great semblance of exactness. We find there the same details as in those imaginary lands of the North Pole or the South Pole that were drawn with so much care in the atlases until the 18th century. So from the 14th century all sailors believed in the existence of the Antilia.
Antilia will disappear from the maps when the New World is discovered. If today this name still applies to an entire archipelago, it is the effect of pure geographical chance. Columbus, Oviedo, Acosta, Gomara and the first Spanish historians of America never speak of Antilia. The world maps added as usual to Ptolemy's editions do not mention it further. On the maps of Juan de la Cosa or Ribeira there is no trace of the name of the Antilles.
In the Italian collection of All the Islands of the World by Benedetto Bordone, in the Isolario by Porcacchi, in the Cosmography by André Thevet, in the Description of the Indies by Herrera, the name of the Antilles never appears.
The archipelago that bears this name today is referred to as Lucayes, Caribbean, or even Camercanes. No doubt Pierre Martyr d'Anghiera had already proposed this name in his Decades, and Amerigo Vespucci, the only time he cites Columbus, also speaks of Antilia, but, despite this double authority, the name of Antilles, still a whole century, must have been unknown. It was only from the 17th century that the great fame of the maps of Wytfliet and Ortelius, who, no doubt by memory of erudition, had revived this appellation, fixed forever on the maps of America.
The Antilia was therefore only a myth geographical, but in which we ceased to believe much more quickly than we had done for the island of Saint Brandan. Only, by a singular coincidence, no land today bears the name of the saint Irish, while the magnificent archipelago in the Mexican Sea has retained the name which was only definitively assigned to it long after its discovery. This myth, whatever its fortune, proves, once again, how deeply engraved in people's minds was the belief in the existence of islands or continents in the Atlantic Ocean.
