Review: The art of Jesuit mapmaking
(iStock)Writers and historians who study the Jesuits have an unusual problem: too much information. The Society of Jesus was arguably the world’s first global nonprofit organization, with a geographic footprint that spanned six continents and a portfolio of activity that included everything from empire-building to education, poetry to paleontology. As early as 400 years ago, the Jesuits also had what amounted to a worldwide postal system. They meticulously documented their work, leaving behind a long paper trail of letters, maps and other correspondence to their superiors in Rome. It was as if they recognized their own historical significance and were determined to record it for posterity.
All of this makes writing a “history of the Jesuits” as daunting as writing a “history of music” or a “history of warfare.” With records scattered across hundreds of libraries thousands of miles apart, where does a well-meaning historian even begin? Even the most ambitious authors, like John O’Malley, S.J., and Gerald McKevitt, S.J., have often limited their studies of the Jesuits to a specific time, place or theme.
We can now add a new author to that list: Mirela Altic, who has given the world the first comprehensive study of Jesuit mapmaking in the Americas. Encounters in the New World tells the story of Jesuit cartography during the Age of Exploration—when Jesuit missionaries played a crucial role as conduits among cultures, becoming bridges that allowed knowledge to flow between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. Combining European mathematical techniques with the knowledge of the peoples they evangelized, Jesuits produced the first modern maps of many parts of Mexico, South America, the Great Lakes and Canada.
Combining European mathematical techniques with the knowledge of the peoples they evangelized, Jesuits produced the first modern maps of many parts of Mexico, South America, the Great Lakes and Canada.
Simply collecting all of this information in one place is an accomplishment. The original copies of the maps reproduced here are stored in dozens of different locations across Europe and the Americas. Identifying the links between documents that have collected dust for centuries in Madrid, Mexico City and Montreal is like putting together a puzzle after the pieces have been scattered across the world. Altic brings a wealth of knowledge about cartography and explores the techniques as well as the motivations—political, religious and beyond—of its Jesuit authors.
In the process, Altic draws attention to the fact that maps—particularly in their 17th-century form—were simultaneously art and artifact. Mapmaking was both an art and a science, with all the shortcomings of both fields. Like art, it was subjective, as when Jesuit mapmakers drew special attention to places where one of their own had been martyred or misjudged the reliability of local legends about places they had never seen firsthand. Like science, mapmaking was prone to petty disputes about authorship and closed-mindedness to different methodologies. Each map is a reflection of the person who drew it, designed for purposes as innocent as finding one’s way home or as opportunistic as finding gold and silver deposits.
The stories collected here also show that while the Jesuits were agents of colonization, their separate organizational structure and religious goals sometimes set them apart from European governments. The marriages between church and state in the Portuguese, Spanish and French empires were matters of convenience at times. Some Jesuits acted as representatives of the crown, commanded small armies and expanded their country’s territory; others were genuinely interested in the salvation of souls. The maps they produced reflect this, whether they highlighted the locations of Indigenous villages that needed access to the sacraments or drew attention to rivers and lakes that could be used as trade routes.
Encounters in the New World shows how inseparable the Jesuit experience has been from the story and fate of the Americas.
Often, Jesuit priests were left to explore regions of the Americas that had little obvious commercial value to secular authorities. Jesuits drew many of the first maps of Baja California, Chile, Patagonia and Paraguay. By learning the language of the native peoples and building missions among them, the Jesuits expanded European knowledge of places that held little interest to merchants and traders. When some of those regions, like the large Jesuit missions (reducciones) in Paraguay, began to generate profits, governments often stepped in to suppress the Jesuits and collect taxes and resources for themselves.
Encounters in the New World shows how inseparable the Jesuit experience has been from the story and fate of the Americas. It is a reminder that some large and important cities like São Paulo in Brazil were built atop Jesuit missions. It is also a reminder of how diverse the Jesuits were. Although the empires they served were Spanish, Portuguese or French, individual Jesuit priests came from cultures across Europe. Altic introduces us to the Hungarian-Croatian astronomer Ignatius Szentmártonyi and the Italian mathematician Giovanni Brunelli, who mapped the Amazon in service to Portugal, as well as Slovak-born János Szluha, who did the same for Spain. One of the most famous cartographers in the Spanish Empire was Eusebio Kino, who hailed from the Alpine regions straddling Italy and Germany.
Almost all maps described in the text are depicted in illustrations. It is sometimes unclear which illustration corresponds to which description. Black-and-white images are embedded on the relevant pages, but nearly 50 color maps are reproduced on plates that appear dozens of pages before or after they are mentioned in the text. It would have been helpful to point readers to “Plate 10” or “Plate 20” when appropriate, but that feature is surprisingly absent.
To fully appreciate the story Altic tells, it helps to have a deep familiarity with the geography of Latin America. Otherwise the long lists of city names, river names and physical features can seem hollow. Those who lack a mental map of the small towns of Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela should read this book with a modern-day atlas handy—or, at least, with access to the internet.
For North American readers, the most relatable chapters may be those about the Jesuit exploration of New France, including Jacques Marquette’s mapping of the Mississippi in 1673 and Claude Allouez’s mapping of Lake Superior in 1665. Altic also offers a reminder that Spanish Jesuits first arrived in Florida in 1566. Although their Florida missions were small, short-lived and relatively inconsequential, they predated the first English-speaking Jesuit missions in Maryland by nearly 70 years.
Unfortunately, the North American section of the book is short (only 10 percent of the total) and ends with the expulsion of the French from Canada after the French and Indian War. It does not explore the role Jesuits like Pierre DeSmet and Nicholas Point played in mapping the U.S. frontier in the 19th century.
In any history of the Jesuits, authors must make choices about what to omit and where to begin and end the story. Altic limits her scope to the colonial era, but as is often the case with the Jesuits, even that limited scope yields an enormous amount of information. Fortunately, most of the story is now in one place in Altic’s volume.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “A Map of the World,” in the January 2024, issue.
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