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The Age of Encounters happened against the background of a great variety of European ideas about global geography and the wider world that derived from antiquity and the Middle Ages. A series of medieval texts consistently framed Europeans' understandings of the lands to which they traveled. These included the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the French theologian and cosmographer Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, the Italian humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s popular history Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum that described foreign lands, The Book of John Mandeville and The Letter of Prester John, both of which described the kingdoms and marvels of the East, and Marco Polo's Travels. These accounts and others that prepared the mental framework of European explorers described a seemingly boundless Asia characterized by lush vegetation, immense rivers, and countless verdant islands abounding in wealth and inhabited by both civilized peoples as well as cannibals and Amazons.³

An open page of the Natural History book written by Plinius Maior.

A 1499 edition of Pliny’s Natural History.

A schematic map from a 1483 edition of Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi that shows the pre-Columbian world. The right page shows the world with the placement of Europe, Africa, and Asia labeled. The left page shows latitude lines with no places delineated.

One man lies on his back and raises one large leg of his with a very large foot up with his hands. A women stands with one eye in her forehead and points to the man. A headless man walks with a face on his chest. Another man with the head of a wolf points his finger at the headless man.

An illustration from The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville that shows, from left to right, a one-footed man, a cyclops, a headless man, and a dog-headed man.

Prester John wears a crown and sits on a throne. He holds a scepter that has a cross shape at the top. Sea waves fall on the throne. In the distance are two tents.

Prester John, seated on a throne. Prester John was a mythical Christian king who was purported to reside in India.

In an open printed book, Columbus has made notes on the sides of the book.

Christopher Columbus’s copy of Marco Polo’s Travels, with his handwritten notes scribbled in the margins in Latin.

In these texts, India loomed especially large. For Europeans, India had long been a plural and unstable “imagined” place endlessly and flexibly invented and re-invented by Western observers. The works of a great variety of classical and late antique writers, including the likes of Herodotus, Pliny, Solinus, Strabo, and Diodorus, first established India’s character for European audiences. Later in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, European merchants and missionaries who traveled to the east, including Oderic of Pordenone, Marco Polo, Niccolò Conti, and (perhaps) John Mandeville, built upon these ancient accounts to develop a rich portrait of this part of the world.⁴

These accounts, layered over the centuries, depicted India as a vast, populous, urbanized and civilized region filled with seemingly endless marvels, luxury goods, and extraordinary and monstrous peoples.

For the ancient Roman geographer Ptolemy, India was a vast region of innumerable islands, as well as a land abundant in gold and “the best cinnamon,” inhabited by lions, tigers, elephants, parrots, men with tails, and cannibals that Ptolemy called manioli.⁵ India, in sum, was a place where European imaginations ran wild. As we will see, early modern European explorers would find many of these things in the lands to the west of the Atlantic and would use them to determine that they had reached the Indies of Asia.

³ See Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 18-19.

⁴ See Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume One, The Century of Discovery, 2 vols. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 1: 5-19, 59-64.

⁵ Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, trans. Edward Luther Stevenson (New York: The New York Public Library, 1932), 156-57.