Commissioning and Use of Charts Made in Majorca c.1400: New Evidence from a Tuscan Merchant's Archive

The Datini Archive in Prato, Italy, a remarkable collection of a late fourteenth-early fifteenth century merchant's business correspondence, includes a number of orders for charts from Majorca, one of the major chart-making centres in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The letters give information on prices, the length of time it took to make a chart, and its destination. The archive also contains unpublished information on how the charts were packed and transported. From these sources we conclude that the charts appear to have served not only to prepare business trips, but also to embody the memory of these trips.