The Behaim Globe (Erdapfel)

A 51-centimetre painted sphere finished in Nuremberg in the winter of 1492, the Erdapfel is the oldest terrestrial globe to survive anywhere. It was made by a named team of craftsmen working from a design supplied by the merchant-patrician Martin Behaim, who had spent the preceding six years in Portugal and at its Atlantic outpost of Faial claiming, on evidence that a century of scholarship has largely failed to confirm, a place at the elbow of King John II.

Because the globe was finished the same year Columbus sailed and before any word of his landfall reached Europe, it shows an Atlantic that runs directly into an oversized Asia, with no Americas at all. It has been read ever since as a snapshot of the exact moment the old geography ran out, and it has just as often been mistaken for something Columbus consulted, which the surviving chronology makes impossible.

Bought for the city that made it in 1937 in a transaction jointly financed by the mayor and the German head of state, and rarely if ever removed from its case since, it has been examined, restored, darkened by an old varnish, digitally scanned twice, and in 2023 inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

What it is

The Erdapfel is a sphere 51 centimetres in diameter, standing 133 centimetres tall on its wrought-iron mount. Its core is two clay hemispheres used as a casting mould; over that core its makers laminated layers of linen, then pasted on parchment and paper gores painted in tempera, then split the finished ball in two and rejoined it. A brass horizon ring, engraved and punched with the signs of the zodiac, was added to the stand around 1510, after the globe itself was finished.

Painted onto its surface are roughly 2,000 place names, about 200 pictorial symbols and miniatures showing rulers, cities, ships and animals, and more than fifty written legends describing regions, resources and sea routes. It is, in effect, an encyclopaedia of what a well-connected Nuremberg merchant believed about the shape and contents of the earth in the winter before Columbus returned.

Who actually made it

The name attached to the globe is Behaim's, and it was Behaim who supplied its geography and directed its content. He did not build it. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum's own object catalogue, drawing on the city's contemporary records, names the actual craftsmen: Hans Glockengiesser, a bell-founder, cast the clay hemispheres that gave the sphere its shape; Ruprecht Kolberger applied the linen, parchment and paper layers over that core; Georg Glockendon the Elder, a Nuremberg illuminator and printer, painted the finished gores; and Petrus Gagenhart is credited with lettering the inscriptions.

The same catalogue entry records that Glockendon's wife also painted on the globe, without giving her name. She is not the only such figure in the workshop record of this object: Glockendon's own later fame rests on sons who took over his business, Albrecht and Nikolaus Glockendon, while the woman who worked beside him at the globe itself is identified only by her relationship to him. The globe most people have heard of by one name was made by at least five people, only one of whom is generally credited.

The world it shows

The globe's cartography draws on Ptolemy's second-century Geography for its overall frame, on Marco Polo's account for its land distances across Asia, and on contemporary Portuguese portolan information for the African and Atlantic coastlines, including detail that reflects Bartolomeu Dias's 1488 rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. It also follows the Florentine cartographer Henricus Martellus in giving the region east of the Malay peninsula an invented, oversized landmass, and it places the island of Cipangu, meaning Japan, far south of its true position and greatly enlarged, in the tradition that had grown up around Marco Polo's account of it.

Applying Marco Polo's land distances to Ptolemy's underestimate of the earth's circumference produces the same error that pushed Asia far enough east, and the Atlantic far enough narrow, to make a westward crossing look shorter than it is. Behaim was not alone in reaching that figure: the same combination of Ptolemy and Polo is the one usually credited with encouraging Columbus, independently and by the same route, to think the crossing was survivable. The two men were not comparing notes. They had read the same books.

The globe's inscriptions also carry the standard furniture of late medieval geography: legendary islands such as Saint Brendan's, and notes on the distant peoples believed to inhabit the edges of the known world, a stock of material Behaim would have drawn from Marco Polo and from Sir John Mandeville's widely circulated Travels rather than from anything he saw. Reading the globe's more fantastic notations as reportage mistakes what they are: an inherited literary geography, copied onto a genuinely novel object.

The commission

Behaim returned to Nuremberg in 1490 after six years in Portugal and the Azores. Members of the city council financed the globe's construction, beginning that year and finishing the sphere itself in 1492, with the stand's horizon ring added around 1510. It was made for the city, not for Behaim personally, and it was installed in a reception room of Nuremberg's town hall, where it remained on public view for over a century.

Nuremberg in this period was a trading city with direct commercial and intellectual ties to Portugal's Atlantic and African expansion, and a council-financed globe of the known world served that interest directly: it was a piece of civic self-presentation, advertising the city's access to the newest geographical intelligence coming out of Lisbon, as much as it was a scientific object.

Behaim's Portugal years: what is documented

Behaim moved to Lisbon in 1484 after a decade as a cloth merchant's apprentice and factor in Mechelen and Antwerp. What is documented from an archival memorandum is a genuine knighting ceremony performed by King John II at Alcacovas on 18 February 1485. What is not documented, on the most thorough search of the surviving record, is most of what Behaim and his early biographers subsequently built on top of that fact.

He is not mentioned by name in any surviving Portuguese source from his own lifetime. The sole authority for his claimed appointment to King John's council of navigational experts, the so-called Junta dos Mathematicos, is a single sentence written more than fifty years later by the historian Joao de Barros, who records that the king referred a technical question to Master Rodrigo, Master Josepe, and one Martin of Bohemia, who boasted of having been a pupil of the astronomer known as Regiomontanus. Every later biographer who placed Behaim on that council did so by copying Barros, not by finding independent confirmation.

Ravenstein's verdict, and the case against it

The scholar who examined this claim most exhaustively is E.G. Ravenstein, whose 1908 biography remains the foundational English-language study of Behaim. Ravenstein searched the Nuremberg family archive and the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon and found the documentary record for Behaim's Portuguese career, in his own words, very fragmentary; he found no corroboration for the Junta membership beyond Barros, and no evidence that any of Behaim's contemporaries at the Portuguese court regarded him as the scientific authority his later reputation assumed.

Ravenstein went further, using the globe itself as evidence against its maker's competence. He points out that Behaim's own globe places the mouth of the Congo at 24 degrees south, when its true latitude is close to 6 degrees south, an error he treats as incompatible with real skill in the navigational astronomy Behaim claimed to have taught the Portuguese. Of Behaim's own account of having studied under Regiomontanus, Ravenstein writes plainly: "We doubt, however, whether Behaim was justified when he spoke of himself as a 'disciple' of the great master." He allows that even if some instruction took place, Behaim, on the evidence of his own subsequent work, profited little from it.

Ravenstein does accept the 1485 knighthood as real, while dismantling a further claim built on top of it: that Behaim was received into the Order of Christ, the crusading order that also controlled Portugal's overseas exploration. He notes that no portrait of Behaim shows the order's gold-and-red enamel cross, and that Order of Christ knights in 1485 were still bound by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, a condition incompatible with the marriage Behaim contracted the following year. The archival memorandum documents an ordinary knighthood. It does not document membership of the order, and no other source fills the gap.

Modern reference accounts of Behaim, including the profile compiled by the historian of exploration John Noble Wilford, treat the pattern the same way: not as isolated errors but as a man who, arriving at a foreign court with no scientific credentials to speak of, appears to have overstated or invented a technical role for himself, and whose later biographers then took that self-presentation at face value for four centuries.

The African voyage, and other unverified claims

Behaim also claimed to have sailed on Diogo Cao's expedition down the West African coast around 1485 to 1486. Cartographic inaccuracies along that stretch of the globe's African coastline are cited by modern scholarship as evidence against his having travelled it himself; a more likely candidate, on the surviving evidence, is a separate Guinea trading voyage led by Joao Afonso de Aveiro. Behaim later claimed to have discovered the Antilles before Columbus, a claim no historian now defends. Taken together, the documented record supports a merchant of Nuremberg who married well into the governing family of a Portuguese Atlantic island, was knighted once by the king, and returned home to direct a globe project; it does not support the navigator-scientist he presented himself as.

Marriage, and the return home

In 1486 Behaim married Joana de Macedo, daughter of Jobst van Huerter, the governor of the Azorean island of Faial, and the couple settled there. He returned to Nuremberg in 1490, apparently to settle family business, and stayed to direct the globe commission before going back to Portugal, where he died on 29 July 1507 in the hospice of Saint Bartholomew in Lisbon while there on business. He never lived in Nuremberg again after the globe was finished, and the object that carries his name and made him famous in his own city was, for the rest of his life, a possession of a city he no longer lived in.

In the town hall, then the family, then almost to America

The globe stood in the reception rooms of Nuremberg's town hall from its completion until the early seventeenth century, when custody passed to the Behaim family. The family's stewardship was imperfect: sources describing the object's condition attribute at least one dent to inadequate storage during this period, and the globe was displayed privately rather than in a controlled setting for roughly three hundred years.

In 1927 the family moved to sell the globe to a buyer in America. It was placed on Germany's list of nationally valuable cultural property in 1929, a listing that functioned, in effect, as an export bar and gave the city and the museum time to negotiate. The globe itself had already gone to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum on loan, in either 1906 or 1907 depending on the source consulted; the purchase that finally transferred ownership was completed in 1937.

That purchase deserves to be stated plainly rather than passed over. The price was raised jointly by Nuremberg's mayor at the time, Willy Liebel, and Adolf Hitler, then head of the German state, and the globe was presented to the museum as a result. The object's transfer into public, institutional custody, where it has remained since, took place through a Nazi-era transaction, four years into the regime and two years before the war. No source consulted here records the sum paid.

Condition, and what restoration did to it

The globe's painted surface has darkened substantially, most likely from a coat of linseed-oil varnish applied in the nineteenth century, and it has been restored more than once in the twentieth century, including further work in the 1930s. Those interventions have not been kind: retouching and varnish have obscured original text and imagery in places, and the laminated surface of the southern hemisphere has warped over time. The object is now treated as light-sensitive and fragile, kept under controlled display conditions, and is not a thing the museum removes from its case for casual inspection.

Two separate digitisation efforts have been made to recover and preserve what the surface still shows without further physical handling: the globe travelled to the Vienna University of Technology in 1992 for high-resolution scanning under the Behaim Digital Globe Project, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum began a second digitisation in 2011, since built out into a public research portal jointly run with the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg that catalogues the globe's roughly 2,000 place names and around 110 to 200 miniatures, sources differing on the exact count, with stable citation links for scholars.

The Columbus myth, and what actually happened

The Erdapfel is regularly mistaken for something Columbus consulted, or something that showed him a route to Asia. Neither claim survives contact with the calendar. Columbus sailed from Spain in August 1492; the globe was still being painted and lettered in Nuremberg into 1493 and 1494, and did not return to Spain until March 1493 with news of his landfall, after which the Americas were simply left off a globe already largely finished. There is no route by which Behaim's physical object could have reached Columbus before his first voyage, and Columbus never mentions Behaim in any surviving letter or log.

What the two men shared was not contact but a common intellectual inheritance: both combined Marco Polo's land distances with Ptolemy's undersized earth to conclude that Asia lay within reach of a westward crossing, most likely transmitted through the same current of geographical opinion associated with the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli, whose proposal for a short Atlantic route had reached the Portuguese court by 1474. Behaim's globe and Columbus's voyage are two separate expressions of the same error, arrived at along parallel lines, not one inspiring the other. As early as 1778 the Nuremberg antiquarian Christoph Gottlieb von Murr made a facsimile of the globe expressly to demonstrate this, arguing that the object itself, correctly read, disproves any claim that Behaim guided or anticipated Columbus.

Public memory, and the present day

In the nineteenth century the Nuremberg librarian Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany promoted a reading of Behaim as a key figure behind Portugal's navigational success, a reading that fit comfortably with a nationalist appetite for a German contribution to the age of discovery. Modern scholarship, following Ravenstein, treats that reading as considerably overstated; the globe's real historical weight rests on what it documents about European geographical belief on the eve of 1492, not on any special expertise of its credited maker.

The globe was included in UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2023, nominated by Germany in 2018, recognised there as the outstanding compendium it is of both the closing medieval world picture and the first stirrings of the new one. It remains on permanent display at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, the only public presentation the fragile original object receives; what scholars now work from for close study is chiefly the two digital surrogates the museum and its partners have built, rather than the darkened, restoration-scarred surface itself.