# The Catalan Atlas > Abraham Cresques - c. 1375 (calendar computed from 1375, with 1376 and 1377 announced; in the Louvre library by 6 November 1380; Gallica gives 1370-1380) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/abraham-cresques/catalan-atlas-1375-bnf/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-11-09 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Abraham Cresques - **Date:** c. 1375 (calendar computed from 1375, with 1376 and 1377 announced; in the Louvre library by 6 November 1380; Gallica gives 1370-1380) - **Medium:** Pen and brush with opaque colours, burnished gold and burnished silver on parchment, pasted on wooden boards, in a Parisian calf binding of c. 1515 - **Dimensions:** Six double leaves; each folded half 645 x 250 mm (BnF), about 65 x 50 cm opened, about 65 x 300 cm across all six leaves - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** Majorcan, Crown of Aragon, fourteenth century - **Current location:** Bibliotheque nationale de France, Departement des Manuscrits, Paris - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary The Catalan Atlas, which the BnF's own web page calls the finest work to come from the Majorcan cartographic school, is six double parchment leaves painted in Majorca about 1375, attributed to the Jewish cartographer Cresques Abraham with his son Jafuda, and kept in the Bibliotheque nationale de France as Espagnol 30. Two leaves hold a cosmography, a tide table and a calendar with rules for bloodletting; four hold a sailing chart stretched from the Atlantic to China, with Musse Melly of Mali holding gold, Marco Polo's Asia and the end of the world at the eastern edge.It was in the Louvre library of Charles V by 6 November 1380, article 200 of Jean Blanchet's inventory, and stayed in the royal collections, valued at four livres in 1424. The gift of 1381 from Joan of Aragon that is often cited as its delivery concerns another map, on the BnF's reading, and no document records how this one reached Paris.This record separates what the inventories and archives document from what is argued: the attribution to Abraham, the share of his son, the commission and the sacred-history layout. There is no sale or auction to report, but a recorded gap of some 250 years in the provenance, a full open digitisation on Gallica and a handful of unsolved identifications. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1375-before 6 November 1380** Made at Palma de Majorca, attributed to Cresques Abraham with his son Jafuda `[disputed]` (origin) Majorca is given as the place of copy by the BnF and Gallica. The calendar is computed from 1375. Authorship is an argument from archive documents about Cresques Abraham, not from a signature; the BnF titles the work 'Abraham Cresques ?'. The commission, patron and recipient are not documented for this object. - **c. 1375-77-before 6 November 1380** Unknown route from Palma to Paris `[unknown]` (gap) Secondary writing names Joan of Aragon as donor and 1381 as the year of delivery. The BnF rejects the 1381 letters as evidence for this object, because the Atlas was already in Charles V's library. Estow, by contrast, reads the 1381 letters as its delivery. No document of the transfer has been found. - **by 6 November 1380-1380** Charles V, King of France (died 16 September 1380), Louvre library, in the keeping of Gilles Malet `[documented]` (acquisition) Article 200 of Jean Blanchet's recolement of 6 November 1380 (BnF Francais 2700, f. 11v), with the note 'Il y est'. The inventory does not date individual additions; arrival during the king's lifetime is the BnF's and Delisle's reading, and Delisle shows it was added after the 1373 inventory. Tastu places it in the lower chamber about 1378 without naming a document. - **1380-1424** Charles VI, King of France, Louvre library (keepers Gilles Malet, Antoine des Essars, Garnier de Saint-Yon) `[documented]` (succession) Described in the inventories of 1411 (Francais 2700 f. 63), 1413 (Francais 9430 f. 10) and 1424 (Mazarine 2030 f. 16). The 1424 entry gives a value of 4 livres parisis. Tastu dates the later inventories 1415, 1423 and 1425. - **1424-1425** English regent John, Duke of Bedford, buyer of the Louvre library `[unknown]` (sale) Bedford took possession of the library on 22 June 1425 and paid, per Delisle, 1,200 livres. No document found places the Atlas in Bedford's lot or among the books he sent away, and the BnF states only that it stood in the Louvre library until the library's dispersal. - **1425-c. 1515** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) Not in the library of Jean de Berry (the 5-livre mappamonde of 1413 and 1416 was already his). The BnF finds no support for E. Pognon's claim that it stood in the Blois library and reads the Blois items of 1518 and 1544 as Louis XII's seven-leaf atlas, Latin 4850. - **c. 1515-1622** Unknown, in Paris; rebound in the workshop attributed to Simon Vostre (Louis XII) `[disputed]` (rebinding) The white leather cover of Charles V's time was replaced by the present Parisian calf binding, which the BnF attributes to the Vostre workshop and dates to about 1515. The attribution is by tooling; the owner at the time is not named. The Atlas is not in Rigault's inventory of 1622. - **1682-1797** Bibliotheque du Roi, Paris `[documented]` (inventory) Number 6816 in Nicolas Clement's Regius catalogue of 1682, 'Anciennes cartes cosmographiques avec l'explication en catalan'. The number is not written on the volume. - **1797-present** Bibliotheque nationale (de France), Departement des Manuscrits, Espagnol 30 `[documented]` (custody) Repaired with the cipher BN and RF in 1797 or 1803 by the binder Durand or his son; marked by mistake as Supplement francais 1191 under the July Monarchy; Espagnol 119 in Morel-Fatio's inventory of 1892; now Espagnol 30. Binding restored in 1991; digitised in high definition in 2017. Modern geographers knew it from about 1803 (Tastu); first edition by Buchon and Tastu, 1839-1842. ## Exhibitions - L'age d'or des cartes marines. Quand l'Europe decouvrait le monde (the BnF entry lists the exhibition catalogue; whether the original was displayed is not stated), Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, 2012-2013 ## Literature - 1839-1842, Buchon, J. A. C. and Tastu, J., Notice d'un atlas en langue catalane, Notices et extraits des manuscrits, vol. XIV, part 2, pp. 1-152 (offprint Imprimerie royale, 1839) - 1891, Hamy, E.-T., Cresques lo Juheu, note sur un cartographe juif catalan de la fin du XIVe siecle, Bulletin de geographie historique et descriptive, pp. 218-222 - 1907, Delisle, L., Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, vol. 1, pp. 128-129 and 276-277 - 1975, El Atlas Catalan de Cresques Abraham, Barcelona, Diafora (facsimile with studies by Llompart, Moll, Riera and others) - 1977, Grosjean, G., Mapamundi. Der katalanische Weltatlas vom Jahre 1375, Dietikon-Zurich, Urs Graf (English edition 1978) - 2004, Estow, C., Mapping Central Europe: The Catalan Atlas and the European Imagination, Mediterranean Studies 13, pp. 1-16 - 2017, Liscak, V., Mapa mondi (Catalan Atlas of 1375), Majorcan cartographic school, and 14th century Asia, Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association 1 - 2020, Kogman-Appel, K., Catalan Maps and Jewish Books: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325-1387), Turnhout, Brepols ## Open questions - Who ordered the Atlas, for whom, and how did it reach Charles V's library before 6 November 1380? No contract, receipt or letter naming this object has been published; the letters of 5 November 1381 concern another map. - What became of the mappemonde that Joan of Aragon sent to Charles VI through Guillaume de Courcy in November 1381, and is it one of the surviving Cresques-group objects? - How was the work divided between Abraham and Jafuda, and which hand painted which leaf? The only documented work of Jafuda is a different mappa mundi, paid for in 1387. - Where was the Atlas between the 1424-25 sale of the Louvre library and the binding of about 1515, and who owned it? The BnF excludes the Berry and Blois sightings. - Who or what is the king of Organa: Kanem, Ouargla, Ife or Ghana, as four published readings hold? The BnF and the first editors leave it unidentified. - What did the 2018 pigment and materials analyses by the BnF laboratory (dossier RIL 2018-014) show, and do they bear on the date or the workshop? - Why do 1376 and 1377 appear beside 1375 in the calendar, and was the book finished in 1375 or later in the decade? Tastu argued for completion in 1376-77. - Was Jafuda Cresques the Mestre Jacome of Henry the Navigator's Portugal? Reparaz said yes in 1930; the BnF and recent literature say he was dead by 1410. - No insurance, declared or customs valuation of the Atlas was found, and the sources fetched do not say whether the original has been displayed since the 2012-13 exhibition listed in the BnF entry. ## Sources - [1] Bibliotheque nationale de France, Archives et manuscrits: catalogue entry for Espagnol 30, 'Abraham Cresques ? Atlas de cartes marines, dit [Atlas catalan]' (notice by Emmanuelle Vagnon and Marie-Pierre Laffitte, updated by Veronique de Becdelievre, July 2018). Primary institutional catalogue: shelfmarks, physical description, binding, inventories of 1380, 1411, 1413 and 1424, documents on Cresques Abraham, bibliography. - [2] Gallica / BnF OAI-PMH record for the digitised Espagnol 30 (title, date 1370-1380, rights 'domaine public', high-definition digitisation 2017, Gallica corpus RegiaCharlesV, contributors). - [3] Gallica IIIF presentation manifest for Espagnol 30 (18 canvases: upper board, 16 views, lower board; shelfmark, creator, place of copy). - [4] BnF Enluminures, 'The Catalan Atlas' (English-language page, Internet Archive capture of 6 February 2008): description of leaves, orientation, wind rose, contents of the Asian leaves. - [5] BnF exhibition site 'Le Ciel et la Terre: l'Atlas catalan' (Internet Archive capture of 13 August 2024; only the page title and the site's meta description were readable, the content pages are frames and image maps). - [6] Leopold Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, vol. 1 (Paris: H. Champion, 1907): the inventories of 1373-1424, the keeper Gilles Malet, the appraisal of 1424, the Apercu sommaire of the library, catalogue entry LXXIV (Atlas catalan). Full text via the Internet Archive. - [7] J. A. C. Buchon and J. Tastu, 'Notice d'un atlas en langue catalane, manuscrit de l'an 1375, conserve parmi les manuscrits de la Bibliotheque royale sous le numero 6816' (Imprimerie royale, Paris; offprint dated 1839 from Notices et extraits des manuscrits, vol. XIV part 2). First scholarly edition: transcription, French translation, notes. Scan on Wikimedia Commons. - [8] Clara Estow, 'Mapping Central Europe: The Catalan Atlas and the European Imagination', Mediterranean Studies 13 (2004), pp. 1-16 (footnotes 5, 7, 8, 15 on the documents of 1373, 1379 and 1381). PDF hosted by Yale's Iberian Connections project. - [9] Vladimir Liscak, 'Mapa mondi (Catalan Atlas of 1375), Majorcan cartographic school, and 14th century Asia', Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association 1 (2017), peer reviewed, CC BY 4.0. Summarises Grosjean 1977, Galera i Monegal 2016 and others. - [10] Tony Campbell, 'Anonymous works and the question of their attribution to individual chartmakers or to their supposed workshops' (Map History / History of Cartography, mounted 7 March 2011, with later dated corrections): the Cresques group, Viladestes's apprenticeship, the Catalan-Estense map. - [11] The Cresques Project, 'Catalan Atlas Legends: Panel III' (English translations of the legends, based on the 1975 Diafora facsimile; Atlantic, north-west Europe, West Africa). - [12] The Cresques Project, 'Catalan Atlas Legends: Panel IV' (Europe east, Near East, Nubia, Sinai). - [13] The Cresques Project, 'Catalan Atlas Legends: Panel V' (Persia, Arabia, Golden Horde, India). - [14] The Cresques Project, 'Catalan Atlas Legends: Panel VI' (Central Asia, Cathay, Gog and Magog, the eastern seas). - [15] Brepols publisher page for Katrin Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps and Jewish Books: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325-1387) (Turnhout, 2020), with abstract and review excerpts. - [16] Encyclopaedia Judaica entry 'Cresques, Abraham' (reproduced at encyclopedia.com). Tertiary reference work; older scholarship. - [17] Wikipedia, 'Catalan Atlas' (English). Tertiary source, used only for the Organa and Mansa Musa literature it cites (Obayemi 1980, Blier 2012, Falchetta 2006, Collet 2022) and flagged for replacement with those publications. - [18] Wikipedia, 'Atlas catalan' (French). Tertiary source, used for the text of Joan of Aragon's letter of 5 November 1381 as printed by Hamy (1891) and Rubio i Lluch; flagged for replacement with Hamy and Rubio i Lluch. - [19] Wikipedia, 'Abraham Cresques' (English). Tertiary source, used for the list of charts grouped with the Atlas and the Kogman-Appel reference. - [20] Wikipedia, 'Jehuda Cresques' (English). Tertiary source, used for the Mestre Jacome identification and its critics. - [21] Wikipedia, 'Mansa Musa' (English). Tertiary source, used for his reign dates, the pilgrimage of 1324-25 and the discussion of his wealth. - [22] Wikipedia, 'Charles V of France' (English). Tertiary source, used for the date of his death (16 September 1380). - [23] Wikimedia Commons file page 'Catalan Atlas BNF, sheet 6.jpg' (Gallica source btv1b55002481n, PD-Art; the Commons 'sheet' numbers follow Gallica's views and are not the leaf numbers used by the BnF catalogue). --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.