Urbano Monte finished this in 1587. Sixty sheets, drawn by hand in Milan, which assembled into a single disc just over ten feet across — very probably the largest world map anyone made in the sixteenth century. Monte left instructions with it: the sheets were to be mounted on a wooden panel “so that it could be revolved around a central pivot or pin through the north pole.” Nobody could do that for four hundred and thirty years. You can do it here.

There are no places marked on this map, and that is deliberate. Monte drew the world as it was known, as it was reported to him, and — where he had neither — as he had been told it might be. There is a speculative southern continent, there are unicorns in Siberia, and there are coastlines drawn from hearsay. To pin our four hundred and ninety-three places onto it, we would have to stretch his geography until it matched a modern one, which would damage the drawing exactly where he was least certain and least accurate. So the working map keeps the pins, and Monte keeps his own proportions. What you are looking at is not where things are. It is how much of the world one careful man could account for, and how confidently he drew the rest.

Urbano Monte, Tavola 1–60, Milan, 1587. The sixty sheets were digitally assembled into the single map Monte intended by the David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford University Libraries. The original work is in the public domain.