Catalan Atlas

Cartographers incorporated information from Marco's accounts into their maps.

The Catalan Atlas, one of the great maps of the medieval period, was influenced by his descriptions.

Maps gradually became more accurate because of the information he provided.

The world literally was redrawn based on what Marco Polo had seen and told.

The collapse of gold values in Cairo, the years of economic disruption that followed, the tales that spread from merchant to merchant and scholar to scholar across the trading networks of the medieval Mediterranean, would together forge an image of Mali and its ruler that outlasted the empire itself by centuries.

An image so vivid that it would eventually cross the Mediterranean into European cartographic imagination, rendering Mansa Musa on the famous Catalan Atlas drawn decades later as a crowned African king holding a golden orb, his realm marked as a place of fabulous and almost mythic wealth on maps consulted by explorers and monarchs who would, in time, begin looking toward Africa's western coast with an interest that Musa's Cairo sojourn had helped in some small but undeniable way to kindle.

The road east from Cairo carried the caravan across terrain that offered its own challenges, the Sinai Peninsula presenting a different character of desert than the Sahara had, rockier, more broken, threaded with the routes that generations of pilgrims had worn smooth on their way toward the holy cities.

Musa's retinue, now traveling under the additional protection and provisioning that Al-Nasir Muhammad's court had arranged, moved with somewhat lighter saddlebags than they had carried into Cairo.

In the workshops of Majorca, an island that in this era serves as one of the great centers of Mediterranean mapmaking, Jewish and Christian cartographers work at the meeting point of multiple worlds of knowledge, drawing on Arab geographical scholarship on the accounts of traders who have traveled the North African trade routes on the accumulated maritime knowledge of Mediterranean sailors who understand the coastlines of Europe and North Africa with increasing precision.

Among the most skilled of these mapmakers is a man named Abraham Cresques, a Jewish cartographer whose workshop produces some of the most sophisticated maps of the age.

In the thirteen seventies, commissioned for the French Crown, Cresques and his workshop produce what will come to be known as the Catalan Atlas, a map of extraordinary ambition, attempting to render not merely the familiar waters of the Mediterranean, but the whole known world, extending south into Africa with a level of detail unprecedented for a European map of that era.

And there, in the section depicting the vast territory south of the Sahara, the cartographers place a seated figure, a king, crowned, holding in his hand a golden orb, unmistakably intended to represent gold itself, the substance upon which the kingdom's fame rests.