The Legends on the Yale Martellus Map
Using the 2014 multispectral images, I have been able to read many of the legends on the Yale Martellus map, and I present those legends, together with English translations and commentary, in the following pages. My purpose in studying the legends has been twofold: first, to gain a deeper understanding of the map itself, which is one of the most important and influential of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and yet is almost entirely unstudied, and, second, to explore the nature of the relationship between the Martellus map and Martin Waldseemuller's famous world map of 1507. As mentioned in my introductory remarks above, the general similarity between the Yale Martellus map and Waldseemuller's 1507 map has been noted previously, but the extent to which Waldseemuller might have used the Martellus map as a source for the details of his map had never been investigated.