… «a dues jornades de Bruges». La legenda dei tres Reys fort savis nell’Atlante catalano (Paris, BnF, esp. 30)

Anna Radaelli’s essay focuses on a masterpiece of fourteenth-century Mallorcan mapmaking, the so-called Catalan Atlas, made by the Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques in 1375 and presented to Charles V of France by John I of Aragon. The Catalan Atlas is a portolan containing visual representations and verbal descriptions of historical and ethnographic phenomena across the known world. While portolan texts were usually written in Latin, fourteenth-century Mallorcan production flourished around 1336-1410, and adopted Catalan. As Radelli points out, this vernacular tradition documents the achievements of Catalan as a supralocal language: it was used by the international merchant class and spread to the commercial centres of Europe and the Mediterranean. Radaelli quotes Gaunt to this effect: Catalan was a «vernacular language of the translation zone, the contact zone, the language that inhabits the space in between, a space that by its very nature is mobile and in flux». The essay explores the textual and cultural genesis of the Catalan Atlas by contextualising this artefact within the European cartographic tradition and analysing its complex relationship with other texts, notably Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde and the Itinerarium Brugense.