Fictive Travel and Mapmaking in Fourteenth-Century Iberia

In this essay I discuss the itineraries recounted in an anonymous Castilian text from the fourteenth century entitled ‘The Book of Knowledge of all Kingdoms’. Earlier scholarship tended to date the volume to the end of the century. The text, written in the form of a fictive travel report, describes the entire known world from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to China in the east. The portrayal of each kingdom is accompanied by an image of its flag, which often displays its coat of arms. The text has frequently been analyzed in conjunction with portolan charts, which indicates that some of the included information, especially place names and the design of the flags, owes a great debt to such charts. Specifically, scholars have suggested the so-called Catalan mappamundi in Paris (1375) or a similar world map as an optional source for the ‘Book of Knowledge’. The present essay scrutinizes the travel routes described in the book in an attempt to understand how the author imagined and planned his journeys. Observations about these itineraries reveal that only those routes that crossed Europe could be envisioned with the help of a map, whereas no such visual aid was available for the section on Asia. This not only indicates that the ‘Book of Knowledge’ predates the Catalan mappamundi and any similar hypothetical project, but also demonstrates how a medieval author of a fictive travel report approached varied sources that could be mined for bits of geographic information.