When Columbus claimed to have discovered “a new heaven and a new earth,” he underscored his belief that he had, by bringing the Gospel to the heathen in previously unknown lands, hastened the arrival of the End Times. Columbus’s desire for the End of History was one thread in a vast tapestry of apocalyptic currents that would reshape the understanding of the globe in the early modern period. In this paper I explore Christian – Catholic and Protestant – as well as Jewish and Islamic “apocalyptic cartographies,” with particular attention to Columbus (1451-1506), the Jewish physician and historian Joachim ha-Kohen (1496-1575), the Flemish cartographer and Familist Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), and the Moroccan ambassador Ahmad Ibn Qasim al-Hajarï (c. 1570-c. 1640). Each was fascinated by the question of the extent of the “inhabitable earth” and each was convinced on the basis of the new discoveries that his own faith, in this age of expanding horizons, would emerge as the final religion under which all humanity would live in peace. The goal of the paper is to demonstrate that providentialism played a major role in the remaking of the understanding of the globe in the early modern world. As I will show, the “conquest” of the globe relied on a mastery of space but also of time. Columbus, ha-Kohen, Ortelius, and al-Hajarï each drew on their varied scriptural traditions as well as upon sundry prophecies and astrological texts with the same rigor that they investigated matters of latitude and longitude. In this sense, the making of the modern globe was vibrant with fantasies of imperial power and world peace. To navigate the oceans, therefore, was not merely about finding new lands, it was also about bringing about the End of History.
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