Jovan Grant Timeline

Medieval map makers create maps that reflect their religious beliefs of the universe.

The compass is an instrument that is used to determine the directions relative to Earth's magnetic fields.Early compasses had an octagonal shape with a magnetic needle trough the middle that helped react with the Earth's magnetic fields to show physical direction. Europe adopted the idea of the compass from China who invented it 300 years prior.

The Christian World fears that the advancing of the Mongols are actually armies of Gog and Magog. Gog and Magog will take part in the final battle between good and evil before the end of the world. Magog is the grandson of Noah and Gog was the leader of a great army that would attack the land of Israel.

Roger Bacon writes about the importance to understand the actually view of the physical world.

Around 3000 Planudes, a Byzantine scholar, finds a copy of the Ptolemy's book which contained Geography. Although the book they found contained no actually copies of maps from Ptolemy's himself, they were able to use his clculation of longitude and latitude to recreate what they thought the map looked like.

Manuel Chrysoloras was a fluent greek speaker and was invited to Florence to teach grammar and literature.Chrysoloras remained only a few years in Florence, from 1397 to 1400, teaching Greek, starting with the rudiments. He moved on to teach in Bologna and later in Venice and Rome. Later on in his life Chrysoloras translated the works of Homer and Plato's Republic into Latin. HE died in 1415.

Henry gained appointment as the governor of the very rich Order of Christ, the Portuguese successor to the Knights Templar, which had its headquarters at Tomar. Henry would hold this position for the remainder of his life, and the order was an important source of funds for Henry's ambitious plans, especially his persistent attempts to conquer the Canary Islands, which the Portuguese had claimed to have discovered before the year 1346. Although Henry never traveled, his people's primary exploration goal was to explore the western coast of Africa to locate a route to Asia. that's when the caravel came into play. The caravel was developed at Sagres.

The Ptolemy's Geography finally gets to Europe. Now the Europeans have a better sense of the physical view of the world. Chrysoloras who was a Byzantine scholar fled to Florence bringing a copy of the the map work of Planude. Chrysoloras was originally fled to Florence to teach Greek.

In this three year span Angeli had Ptolemy's Geography translated into Latin. The translation was completed in 1406 by a student of Chrysoloras named Jacopo d'Angelo. The copy quickly spread throughout Europe.

By mid 1400 a new physical view/ representation of the world is created. It was far more precise than before but it was also still incorrect. Based on his view of the map the world was way to small and Asia was to big. This caused some confusing for travelers because when travelers thought they were turning the corner of Portugal they were expecting to just end up in Asia. Turns out they were very wrong and showed that Asia wasn't as big as Ptolemy thought. At the time Europeans maps were dominated by religious views. They created a T-O maps. In this map format, Jerusalem was depicted at the center and east was oriented toward the map top. Viking explorations in the North Atlantic gradually were incorporated into the world view beginning in the 12th century.