Miller Atlas

"Terra Brasilis" by Pedro Reinel and Lopo Homem, Miller Atlas, French National Library in Paris

The Miller Atlas also known as Lopo Homem-Reineis Atlas is a Portuguese richly illustrated atlas dated from 1519, including a dozen charts. It is joint work of cartographers Lopo Homem, Pedro Reinel and Jorge Reinel illustrated by miniaturist António de Holanda.

The regions represented are the North Atlantic Ocean, Northern Europe, the Azores Archipelago, Madagascar, Indian Ocean, Indonesia, China Sea, the Moluccas, Brazil and the Mediterranean Sea. It was acquired in 1897 by the National Library of France to the librarian Bénigne Emmanuel Clement Miller, hence the name Atlas Miller.

It stands out for details of the map Terra Brasilis less than twenty years after the landing of Pedro Alvares Cabral. And it is thought to have been an offer from King Manuel I of Portugal to Francis I of France. The charts included and its authoring raised great controversy among scholars. Particularly a world map enclosed to the Pacific Ocean, which has been interpreted as an attempt to dissuade the circumnavigation that Magellan then prepared in Seville, in the court of Charles I of Spain.

Its title page bears a later inscription with the arms of Catherine de Medici with the text "Hec est universi orbis ad hanc usqz diem cogniti / tabula quam ego Lupus homo Cosmographus / in clarissima Ulisipone civitate Anno domini nostri / Millessimo quigentessimo decimo nono jussu / Emanuelis incliti lusitanie Regis collatis pluribs / aliis tam vetustorum qz recentiorum tabulis mag / na industria et dilligenti labore depinxi."^[1]

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