Martin WALDSEEMÜLLER

Martin Waldseemüller was born around 1470 in Wolfenweiler near Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and died on March 16, 1520, in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France. He was the son of a cooper, though little is known otherwise about his family background and early education. He enrolled at the University of Freiburg in 1490, where he studied theology, mathematics, and geography. Following his studies, he moved to Saint-Dié, where he was ordained a priest and joined the Gymnasium Vosagense, a scholarly circle dedicated to humanism and geography.

Waldseemüller holds exceptional importance in the history of cartography for creating the first map to depict the Western Hemisphere as a separate landmass and formally name it “America”. Collaborating with the scholar Matthias Ringmann and backed by the printing patronage of Walter Lud, Waldseemüller integrated the recent voyages of Amerigo Vespucci into traditional Ptolemaic geography. His 1507 world map, Universalis Cosmographia, was an innovative 12-panel woodcut print that utilised a modified Ptolemaic conic projection and separated the American continent from Asia by a distinct western ocean. He also introduced the concept of the “globe gore” – printed, segment-shaped maps intended to be cut out and pasted onto a solid sphere to form a pocket globe. His masterworks include the 1507 Universalis Cosmographia wall map, the accompanying text Cosmographiae Introductio, the 1513 Strasbourg edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (featuring 20 modern maps), and the 1516 Carta Marina.

Waldseemüller is permanently remembered as the pioneering cartographer who geographically codified the New World and gave the American continent its name.