Who was Matthäus/Martin Brazl?

Anyone who’s spent the time to follow citations back through the literature knows the game of academic “post office.” When they don’t take care, scholars subtly shift meaning. Statements slowly mutate as they pass from work to work, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. Facts morph, conjecture can become certainty.

Here’s an example I ran into last November. (I just re-encountered my file of notes while cleaning up notes-to-self about the current project, so I thought I’d write it up.) I found, in reading a short, summary account of the history of geography by Philippe François de Le Renaudière, secretary general of the newly formed Société de géographie (founded 1820), a long list of map and chart makers from the thirteenth through fifteenth century whose works, La Renaudière thought, would shed light on medieval and early renaissance travels by Europeans into Asia. 1828 was still relatively early in the history of discoveries, and I was impressed by the number of map makers that Le Renaudière cited:

C’est en réunissant leurs découvertes partielles et leurs différens itinéraires, que les géographes de ces diverses époques essayèrent de tracer l’ensemble de la terre. C’est à l’aide de ces matériaux incomplets que les Martin Sanudo, les Pietro Visconti, les frères Pizigani, les Giroldis, les Pareto, les Bianco, les Bedrazio, les Benincasa, les Martin Brazl, les F. Mauro, les auteurs de la Carte des voyages des frères Zeni et de Marco Polo, et quelques autres géographes dont les noms sont inconnus, dessinent ces cartes grossières, sur lesquelles on trouve réunies et les indications récentes et les idées des anciens, dénaturées par l’ignorance et accommodées au besoin de remplir des lacunes ou de servir des hypothèses bizarres. (La Renaudière 1828, 42–43)

It was by bringing together the partial discoveries and the different routes [of early travelers] that geographers of these various eras attempted to trace the whole of the earth. It was with the help of these incomplete materials that Martin Sanudo, Pietro Visconti, the Pizigani brothers, the Giroldis, Pareto, Bianco, Bedrazio, Benincasa, Martin Brazl, Fra Mauro, the authors of the map of the voyages of the Zeni brothers and of Marco Polo, and several other geographers whose names are unknown drew those rough maps, combining the recently acquired information with ancient ideas [of geography] that had been distorted by ignorance and altered to fill in gaps [in knowledge] or in service to bizarre assumptions.

Many of the map makers in this list can be readily identified from Tony Campbell’s (1986) census of early charts (also Campbell 1987). Martin Sanudo was Marino Sanudo and Pietro Vesconti and the Benincasas are well known to modern scholars.

But who were “Bedrazio” and “Martin Brazl”?

Bedrazio: according to William Babcock (1920, 114; 1922, 151), this was a spelling used by Alexander von Humboldt in 1837 for the last name of the chart maker Battista Beccaria. However, given that La Renaudière wrote almost a decade before Humboldt published, and four or five years before Humboldt was writing, it is likely that the misreading was made by an earlier scholar. [Google also revealed a recent study which carried the misreading forwards, to give “Bedario (or Bedrazio)” instead of the correct Beccaria (Levin Rojo 2014, chap. 4, at note 64).]

Martin Brazl: I initially found this name in the first volume of Conrad Malte-Brun’s Précis de la géographie universelle (1810), as well as almost all of the other names given by La Renaudière. (But not Bedrazio; still don’t know the source for that spelling.) I should have known! Malte-Brun is rapidly emerging as the crucial figure in conceptualizing the birth of modern cartography and the history of discoveries. Much more needs to be done with his archive! In particular, his Précis includes a great deal of commentary on specific early maps and their contributions to understanding the history of geography as the history of discoveries. La Renaudière’s essay, it turns out, was a synopsis of Malte-Brun’s extensive history. In the earlier work I found the statement:

Tous ces indices obscurs pourront être renforcés par quelques cartes encore ensevelies dans la poussière des bibliothèques, telles que celles qu’avait composées, en 1471, Graciosus Benincosa d’Ancône (3), ou celles qu’avait tracées, en 1486, Martin Brazl, allemand (4). (Malte-Brun 1810, 428)

All these obscure clues can be reinforced by a few maps still buried in the dust of libraries, such as those which had been composed in 1471 by Grazioso Benincosa of Ancona (3), or those which had been drawn in 1486 by Martin Brazl, German (4).

Malte Brun’s note 4 simply stated, “Hist. du chevalier Behaim, p. 12.”

The note cites Christoph Gottlieb von Murr’s biography of Martin Behaim (Murr 1778, esp. 12), which was translated into French (Murr 1787, esp. 326; 1803, esp. 9). In his introduction, Murr quoted a note added in 1448 to a manuscript collection of travel accounts:

In einem Bande von des Marco Polo, S. Brandans, Mandevilla, Ulrichs von Friaul, und Hanns Schildpergers geschriebenen Reisebeschreibungen auf hiesiger Stadt bibliothek (Cat. Bibl. Solg. I, n. 34) meldet vorne der Besitzer Matthäus Brazl, kurbayerischer Rentmeister, 1488 unter andern dieses: “Und ich hab di genennten puecher darumb ersamlet und zumsamen verfuegt, durch ein vast amstige auch kostliche Mappa, di ich mir hab lassen machen mit gar grossem und sunderm Viens, umb des willen. …” (Murr 1778, 12)

In a volume of travel accounts written by Marco Polo, Saint. Brendan, Mandeville, Ulrich von Friaul, and Hanns Schildperger, at the local city [Nuremberg] library (Cat. Bibl. Solg. I, n. 34), the owner Matthäus Brazl, rent collector for the elector of Bavaria, wrote in 1488 this note, among others: “And I collected the above mentioned books and put them together, because of a vastly official[?] and also expensive world map, which I had had made with great and special care. …”

The map itself was unknown to Murr and his contemporaries, but it did not stop others from writing about Matthäus Brazl and the large map he had made (rather than commissioned) (e.g., Sprengel 1792, 229–30).

The rent collector Matthäus [Matthew] Brazl became, in French translation, Matthieu (Murr 1787, 326) and then Martin (Murr 1803, 9). From Murr, the reference passed to Malte-Brun; Malte-Brun’s history of geography was copied extensively in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, and Martin Brazl with it. Brazl ends up as a map maker in the same breath as Fra Mauro, Marino Sanudo, and others whose works were actually known and studied. At some point in the middle of the nineteenth century, Brazl fell out of map historical accounts because, I presume, he could not be associated with any surviving map.

The presence of Brazl in the works of Malte-Brun, La Renaudière, and others stands as a testament to the tensions within historical practice in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Murr was a Nuremberg lawyer and local historian, very much in the vein of the antiquaries who celebrated the history and character of particular places. Antiquaries were avid collectors and reproducers of relics and manuscripts; by 1800 they were becoming archaeologists and museum curators, librarians and dealers. At the same time, the practice of history was becoming increasingly grounded in empirical sources. (Murr also discussed over several pages the work of William Robertson, the Scottish minister and teacher who, with Edward Gibbon, was a leading proponent of fact-based rather than literary history.) In this period of intellectual flux, scholars had yet to acquire any sophistication in their use of sources. So, Murr presented some archival evidence, transcribing a quotation from 1448, from a manuscript in a local library; others then copied that evidence. In the process, the evidence was simplified and its significance reconstrued, until Brazl’s name is turned into a rather hollow pointer that would be repeated until, finally, the larger corpus of map historical evidence accumulated sufficiently for historians to finally see the emptiness of the reference and drop it.

Note

My cover image is of Murr’s (1778) facsimile/reprojection of Martin Behaim’s globe.

References

Babcock, William H. 1920. “Antillia and the Antilles.” Geographical Review 9, no. 2: 109–24.

———. 1922. Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study in Medieval Geography. American Geographical Society, Research Series 8. New York: American Geographical Society.

Campbell, Tony. 1986. “Census of Pre-Sixteenth-Century Portolan Charts.” Imago Mundi 38: 67–94.

———. 1987. “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500.” In Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by J. B. Harley, and David Woodward, 371–463. Vol. 1 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

La Renaudière, Phillipe François de. 1828. Histoire abrégée de l’origine et des progrès de la géographie. Paris: Decourchant.

Levin Rojo, Danna A. 2014. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Malte-Brun, Conrad. 1810. “Histoire de la géographie.” In volume 1 of his Précis de la géographie universelle, ou description de toutes les parties du monde, sur un plan nouveau d’après les grandes divisions naturelles du globe, 1: 11–526. Paris: Fr. Buisson and Aimé-André.

Murr, Christoph Gottlieb von. 1778. Diplomatische Geschichte des portugesischen berühmten Ritters Martin Behaims. Nuremberg: Johann Eberhard Zeh.

———. 1787. “Notice sur le chevalier Martin Behaim, célèbre navigateur portugais, avec la description de son globe terrestre.” Receuil des pièces intéressantes concernant les antiquités, les beaux-srts, les belles-lettres et la philosophie 1: 317–63.

——— (Murr, Christophe Theophile de). 1802. Histoire diplomatique du chevalier portugais Martin Behaim de Nuremberg, avec la description de son globe terrestre. Translated by Hendrik J. Jansen. 3rd ed. Strasbourg and Paris: Treuttel and Würtz.

Sprengel, Matthias Christian. 1792. Geschichte der wichtigsten geographischen entdeckungen bis zur ankunft der Portugiesen in Japan 1542. 2nd ed. Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke.