In Notitiam Ecclesiasticam Africae Tabula Geographica

Title

In Notitiam Ecclesiasticam Africae Tabula Geographica

Description

Map shows Marocco, Algeria and Tunesia with Spain, Balear Islands, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily.

dated 1700

Artist

L´Isle, de /Covens & Mortier (1675-1726)

Guillaume De L´isle (1675- 1726) Paris, was a French cartographer known for his popular and accurate maps of Europe and the newly explored Americas and Africa. De L´isle was admitted into the French Académie Royale des Sciences, an institution financed by the French state. After that date, he signed his maps with the title of “Géographe de l’Académie”. Five years later, he moved to the Quai de l’Horloge in Paris, a true publishing hub where his business prospered. De L´isle’s ascension through the ranks culminated in 1718 when he received the title of Premier Géographe du Roi. His new office consisted in teaching geography to the Dauphin, King Louis XIV’s son, a task for which he received a salary. De L´sle’s reputation as a man of science probably helped .This supports the claim of the historian Mary Sponberg Pedley, who says “once authority was established, a geographer’s name might retain enough value to support two or three generations of mapmakers”. In De L´isle’s case, it could be said that his accomplishments surpassed his father’s. Up to that point, he had drawn maps not only of European countries, such as Italy, Spain, Germany, Great Britain, Poland, and regions such as the Duchy of Burgundy, but he had also contributed to the empire’s claims to recently explored continents of Africa and the Americas. Like many cartographers of these days, De L´isle did not travel with the explorers and elaborated the maps mostly in his office. The quality of his maps depended on a solid network that would provide him first-hand information. Given the family’s reputation and his own, De L´isle had access to fairly recent accounts of travellers who were coming back from the New World, which gave him an advantage over his competitors. Being a member of the Académie, he was also aware of recent discoveries, especially in astronomy and measurement. When he could not confirm the accuracy of his source, he would indicate it clearly on his maps. For instance, his Carte de la Louisiane shows a river that the baron of Lahontan claimed he discovered, but no one else could validate it, so Delisle warned the viewer that its actual existence was in doubt. De L´isle 's search for exactitude and intellectual honesty entangled him in a legal dispute in 1700 with Jean-Baptiste Nolin, a fellow cartographer. Noticing Nolin had used details that were considered original from his Map of the World, De L´isle dragged Nolin in court to prove his plagiarism. In the end, Delisle managed to convince the jury of scientists that Nolin only knew the old methods of cartography and therefore that he had stolen the information from his manuscript. Nolin's maps were confiscated and he was forced to pay the court costs.The scientificity of the work produced by the De L´isle family contrasted with the workshop of Sanson. While Sanson knowingly published outdated facts and mistakes, De L´isle strived to present up-to-date knowledge.

Historical Description

North Africa in the broader geographical sense is the area of the continent of Africa that includes the Sahara and the coastal strip to the north, west and east of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Red Sea. Religiously, North Africa is mainly characterized by Islam, ethnically by Berbers, Moors and Arabs, in the southernmost area also Nubians, Amhars and Black Africans. The core states of North Africa include Morocco with the Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia (small Maghreb), Libya (Greater Maghreb), Egypt and Sudan. Especially during the ongoing desert phase, contacts between North and sub-Saharan Africa were therefore limited almost exclusively to trade along the east and west coasts of the continent and to certain routes where there were sufficient water points, due to the difficulties of crossing the world's largest sandy desert. At the same time, this meant ethnic separation, and although North African culture has both African and Middle Eastern roots, with the Berbers possibly even European. With antiquity in the narrower sense, the interests of the Mediterranean peoples, which had previously been focused primarily on Egypt and the Near East in terms of power politics, gradually changed. As so often in history, it was trade that paved new paths; and the first people to devote themselves entirely to Mediterranean trade, even to the neglect of their own state structures, were the Phoenicians, but the place in North Africa where territorial state structures did develop, at least to some extent, was Carthage. In the period between the destruction of Carthage and Rome taking control of the Maghreb, there was a brief flourishing of local kingdoms. Two largely sedentary ethnic groups, the Moors and Numidians, were of particular importance. After the victory over Carthage, Roman culture and, above all, Roman administration spread relatively quickly from east to west along the Atlas mountain ranges across the new territories in North Africa. The North African provinces quickly became economically central to the Roman Empire, and between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, Rome's survival actually depended on grain and olive supplies from there, as the climate in North Africa at that time was wetter than it is today. When the Romans took power in the Mediterranean, a development came to an end in the course of which North Africa in particular finally became part of the Mediterranean world.