Background
Fra Mauro was born around 1400. His exact place and date of birth are unknown.
Fra Mauro was a monk of the Camaldolese order.
A medal in honor of Fra Mauro, "an incomparable cosmographer", produced soon after his death, probably by the artist Giovanni Boldù.
cartographer geographer merchant monk Soldier
Fra Mauro was born around 1400. His exact place and date of birth are unknown.
There is no information on what kind of education Fra Mauro received other than that many of his knowledge in geography he gained through his travels.
Of Fra Mauro's life very little is known other than that he traveled extensively as a merchant and a soldier. He was familiar with the Middle East. He worked at San Michele from about 1443 until his death and that his fame as a mapmaker spread as far as Portugal. He probability was the head of a cartographic workshop in the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele di Murano, in the lagoon of Venice. There are records of payments made by the king of Portugal to the monastery in the late 1450s, and a statement on the map reads: “I have copies of maps made by the Portuguese.”
The world map now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice is the sole surviving work that can be positively identified as Fra Mauro’s. Drawn on vellum, the circular map is 1.96 meters in diameter, and its quadrangular frame measures 2.23 meters on each side. The mapmaker’s colors are well preserved, and legends both on the map and in the corners outside its circular outline are fully legible. The map is oriented to the south on the top; a legend on the back states that is was completed on 26 August 1460, which would indicate that the last touches were added after Fra Mauro’s death in the previous year.
Fra Mauro’s map represents an encyclopedic storehouse of contemporary geographic and cosmographic information. It is limited to Europe, Asia, and part of Africa and shows Iceland and the Canary Islands to the west. It includes the first mention of “Zimpagu” (Japan) on any European map; it extends to the Urals in the north, and its southern limit is probably at the latitude of Madagascar. The mapmaker and his assistants used a variety of sources: medieval navigation charts of European origin; the accounts of travelers, especially Marco Polo and the fifteenth-century Venetian merchant and traveler Niccolò de’ Conti; Arabic sailing directions and travel accounts; and, possibly, information obtained from Ethiopian delegates to the council of Florence (1438-1445).
Fra Mauro was a monk of the Camaldolese order.
it is not known whether Fra Mauro was ever married or had any children before joining the order.