With this statement, inscribed on his huge (1.96 m diameter) mid-fifteenth-century world map, the famous Venetian mapmaker Fra Mauro accepts that he cannot measure the earth based on the experience available to him. Although he acknowledges that a great deal of experience had already been accumulated by practical navigation to both the southern and northern reaches of the globe, all of this has not, in his view, provided enough information to compass its entirety. Consequently, Fra Mauro constructs a quite traditional circular mappa mundi (medieval world map) which is by far the richest we have, and absolutely up-to-date in terms of content. For us, Fra Mauro's creation represents the challenges of mapping the new knowledge available to Latin Europeans around 1500 and, at the same time, their awareness that they did not know enough.

What could people like Fra Mauro actually know about the North, more specifically about the North Atlantic—and what are we, today, not supposed to expect them to have known? In this article, I will pursue the Latin Europeans’ perspective on new geographical information available to them in the decades around 1500. Taking the “global” in “the Global North” literally, I specifically examine contemporary knowledge about the Northern Atlantic between Europe and whatever lay on the other side, as derived from Scandinavian sources and into the older schools of Latin European mapmaking.

This is a big topic and it will become even bigger through the perspective I employ and explain below.