I finally stopped trusting the 1650 Blaeu map of the Caspian Sea and I think the portolan charts were righter all along | Antique Map Puzzlers

Skyler Wood · 2026-10-01T01:45:05.044472+00:00

A guy at the map swap in Baltimore told me last month that the old portolan-style Caspian charts are basically junk compared to Nicolaes Visscher's 1680 version, and I just don't buy it. Looking at the actual coastline shapes, a 1375 Catalan atlas shows the sea's west side way closer to the real thing than the later Dutch maps, which kept copying Ptolemy's closed box shape for another 200 odd years. I get that the Dutch ones are prettier and have those nice sea monsters, but pretty isn't the same as accurate. Has anyone here actually overlaid a portolan Caspian against a satellite image, and did you get the same result?

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I finally stopped trusting the 1650 Blaeu map of the Caspian Sea and I think the portolan charts were righter all along | Antique Map Puzzlers - The Community Guide