The Croatian Islands on maps in André Thevet's Le Grand Insulaire et Pilotage

Abstract

The French royal cosmographer André Thevet wrote many works, including Le Grand Insulaire et Pilotage. The second volume of this work (a navigation manual), prepared in manuscript form in 1586, describes the Croatian coast and islands and includes maps of Krk, Pag, Ugljan with Pašman, Čiovo, Brač, Hvar, and Korčula. These achievements are completely unknown in Croatian scientific literature. The subject of this paper is Thevet’s maps showing the Croatian islands. Their geographical content is compared to maps published in the second half of the 16th century in isolarios by Giovanni Francesco Camocio (1571), Antonio Millo (1582), and Giuseppe Rosaccio (1598). The study shows that Thevet’s maps were completely different from those produced by his contemporaries, especially in terms of the contours of island coastlines and depicted geographical features. Thevet’s maps were a reflection of the author’s personal competence, primarily his knowledge of geography and methods of spatial data collection, processing and cartographic visualisation, and are also a vivid testimony to French insight into the geography of the eastern Adriatic coast during the Renaissance.