The idea of Africa within myth and reality : cosmographic discourse and cartographic science in the late Middle Ages and early modern Europe

Abstract

The existence of Africa was widely appreciated in southern Europe since Antiquity. Its proximity to the coasts of Greece and Italy on the one hand, and the wide-ranging expansion of the Roman Empire on the other, had indeed revealed the existence of African territories on the other side of the mare nostrum. From the earliest times then, the southern shores of the Mediterranean were easily integrated into the classical ecumene, defined as a mental continuum of inhabitable space not fragmented into continents. No independent idea of Africa could thus arise in Classical Antiquity, nor did it appear in the Middle Ages. As shall be argued throughout this work, it is not until the Renaissance that the idea of Africa finally emerged.