Ptolemy's Geography Translated into Latin

1406

Jacopo d'Angelo completed a Latin translation of Claudius Ptolemy's second-century Geography in Florence, reintroducing coordinate-based mapping to Western scholars for the first time in a millennium. The text taught European cartographers to think of the earth as a measurable grid of latitude and longitude. Within a century, that same grid would be used to divide continents Europeans had not yet visited between rival colonial powers.