This planisphere is one of the few examples of print maps based on medieval portolan examples and derived from Vesconte. Similar to other twelfth-century world maps, it is circular and centred on Jerusalem. The ocean surrounds the whole of the known world, the outer parts of which show uncertainty and conjecture. 

The Sunderland Collection

In the fourteenth century, Pietro Vesconte drew five maps to accompany a treatise by Marino Sanuto the Elder titled ‘Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis’, ('Book of the Secrets of Those Faithful of the Cross'), which was intended to inspire a revival in the Crusades. In 1611, the treatise and its maps were republished by Jacques Bongars (1554–1612), a historian and enthusiast of Crusades literature.

This map was included in the ‘History of the Crusades’ by Jacques Bongars, a French scholar and diplomat who collected contemporaneous accounts of the Christian crusades of the Middle Ages. Part one of Bongars's work is a history of the First Crusade by Guibert de Nogent (died c.1124) titled 'Gesta Dei per Francos' ('Acts of God through the Franks') which is based on an anonymous eyewitness account called ‘Gesta Francorum’ ('Deeds of the Franks'). Part Two contains supplemental materials copied largely from Sanuto's 'Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross' (c.1300–1321).

The first printed example of Pietro Vesconte's portolan map of the world. Similar to world maps from the twelfth-century, it is circular, oriented East at the top, and centred on Jerusalem. The ocean surrounds the whole of the known world, the outer parts of which show uncertainty and conjecture.

Vesconte's World Map, from Bongars's 'History of the Crusades'