Martin Behaim

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Behaim, a German cloth merchant from Nuremberg, built the oldest globe known to exist in 1492, the very year Christopher Columbus set sail for what he believed was Asia. That coincidence is remarkable enough. But the story of how a textile trader ended up shaping Europe's picture of the world, and why so much of what people believed about him turned out to be wrong, is the more compelling mystery.

  Behaim spent his life moving between cloth fairs in Flanders, the royal court of Portugal's King John II, a volcanic island in the Azores, and finally back to Nuremberg, where city councilors funded the creation of a sphere covered in more than two thousand place names. Historians have spent centuries untangling what Behaim actually did from what he and his admirers claimed. The gap between those two things is wider than most expect.

  How did a man with no confirmed scientific training become an adviser to a king? Did he ever cross paths with Columbus? And what does a papier-mache ball fashioned in the 1490s actually tell us about what Europeans thought they knew of the world? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. From Nuremberg to Flanders

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  Behaim was born on the 6th of October 1459, the oldest son of Martin Behaim and Agnes Schopper. His father was a merchant who traded across Europe, including to Venice, and was elected a senator of Nuremberg in 1461. Growing up in a prosperous household in one of Germany's most important commercial cities, the younger Martin almost certainly attended one of the city's better grammar schools.

  When his father died in 1474, Martin was fifteen years old. His uncle Leonhard made a practical decision: he sent the boy to Mechelen, in Flanders, to learn the cloth trade from the inside. There Behaim joined the business of Jorius van Dorpp, a vendor of clothing. By 1477 he was traveling to Antwerp with van Dorpp, watching goods change hands between merchants from across Europe.

  Later that same year Behaim attended the Frankfurt fair alongside Bartels von Eyb, a family friend, widening his network further. Writing to his uncle in 1478, he made his ambitions plain: he wanted to move to Antwerp, which was already one of the leading centers of the cloth trade in Europe. He made that move the following year, joining the cloth dye house of Fritz Heberlein, a fellow Nuremberger.

  Behaim's early years were entirely defined by the rhythms of European commerce. There was as yet no hint of globes or royal courts. What these years gave him was fluency in the networks of merchants, financiers, and traders who connected the cities of the north, a fluency that would serve him well when he made the most unexpected move of his life: south to Portugal.

• 3. Lisbon and the Court of John II

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  In 1484 Behaim arrived in Lisbon and set himself up in a city that was, at that moment, the operational center of European maritime expansion. Lisbon was the hub of a trade network drawing in spices, gold, and slaves from Africa, and Behaim's motive for the move was almost certainly commercial rather than scientific.

  He found favor quickly at the court of King John II, where he supposedly advised on navigation and astronomy. On the 18th of February 1485, John II knighted Behaim, presumably for those advisory contributions, though no record survives detailing exactly what he did to earn the honor. What is clear is that later claims about his scientific influence were substantially overstated.

  Historians examining the record have found no evidence that Behaim made meaningful contributions to Portuguese navigation. Claims that he introduced celestial navigation techniques or new instruments to Portuguese mariners fall apart on inspection: those methods and instruments were already in use before Behaim arrived. He may, however, have served as an importer of scientific instruments manufactured in Nuremberg, which was then producing some of the finest such tools in Europe.

  Around 1485, Behaim participated in a voyage to the coast of West Africa. The precise details remain disputed. He is sometimes said to have sailed with the explorer Diogo Cão on his second expedition, but historians consider that unlikely. The voyage led by João Afonso de Aveiro, a trading run to Guinea, is the more probable candidate.

  In 1486 Behaim married Joana de Macedo. Her father, Josse van Huerter, was Captain-donatário of the Portuguese island of Faial in the Azores and the leader of its Flemish settler community. After the wedding, Behaim took up residence on Faial, an island of Flemish origin far out in the Atlantic, where he would spend much of the rest of his life.

• 4. Building the Erdapfel

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  In 1490 Behaim returned to Nuremberg to resolve a dispute over a will. He stayed three years and used the time to accomplish the thing for which he is now remembered. He persuaded leading members of the city council to pay for the construction of a terrestrial globe under his direction.

  A team of artisans and craftsmen did the physical work. Georg Glockendon was the artist responsible for the actual map drawings, working from specifications that Behaim supplied. The globe's structure was practical and ingenious: a ball about 21 inches (51 cm) in diameter made from a type of papier-mache, coated with gypsum, and set on a wooden tripod held in place by a pair of iron hoops. Glockendon painted his drawings onto strips of parchment, which were then pasted onto the sphere in sections.

  What went onto the surface was dense with information. More than two thousand place names, one hundred pictorial illustrations, forty-eight banners, fifteen coats of arms, and more than fifty lengthy legends covered the globe. Many of the notations described fabulous monsters believed to inhabit distant lands, alongside notes on plants, animals, trade routes, explorations, and the travels of figures like Marco Polo.

  The geography underlying all this detail rested chiefly on Ptolemy, the second-century Greek geographer. Additional material came from Marco Polo, the medieval traveler John Mandeville, and the Portuguese explorer Diogo Gomes. Strikingly, the globe was notably short on current Portuguese geographic data, information that should have been available to Behaim given his time in Lisbon. It also carried numerous errors that did not reflect what navigators and geographers of the time actually knew.

  The townspeople of Nuremberg gave the finished object a name that has stuck: Erdapfel, meaning earth apple. It was first housed in the city's hall. Behaim returned to Faial in 1493, traveling via Flanders and Lisbon, and stayed on the island until 1506.

• 5. The Myth and the Record

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  By the twentieth century, historians had begun to scrutinize the claims made about Behaim's life and found many of them wanting. The most dramatic assertion came from historian Johann Christoph Wagenseil, writing in 1682, who claimed that Behaim had discovered America before Columbus. Other writers argued that Behaim at least gave Columbus the idea of sailing west. No evidence supports either claim. While it is possible the two men encountered each other in Lisbon, neither one ever mentioned such a meeting in any surviving document.

  Behaim claimed to have studied under Regiomontanus, the celebrated Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who was a neighbor in Nuremberg during Behaim's childhood. Historians have found no evidence the two ever worked together. Behaim left behind no scientific writings and no record of formal scientific training to support the image of him as a mathematician or astronomer.

  The African voyage has generated its own set of disputed claims. Behaim himself left a confused account of his 1485 journey, and some biographers took this as evidence he had sailed with Diogo Cão. When historians checked the dates, they did not match, and no independent corroboration exists for that specific claim.

  Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian writer who sailed with Ferdinand Magellan, alleged that Magellan had knowledge of a passage to the Southern Sea derived from a map by Behaim. Historians now doubt that Behaim had direct knowledge of such a passage. He may have drawn mysterious, unnamed passages on his globe, which Magellan then interpreted as pointing toward the strait he eventually found and that now bears his name.

  What emerges from the critical record is a man of genuine commercial energy and cosmopolitan connections, but not the scientific hero his early admirers constructed. That distinction matters, and it shapes how we read the Erdapfel itself.

• 6. A Globe Out of Time

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  Behaim died on the 29th of July 1507 in the hospice of Saint Bartholomew in Lisbon, while there on business. By that point the world the Erdapfel depicted had already been overtaken by events. Columbus had returned from the Americas. Vasco da Gama had reached India by sea. The picture of the planet on that papier-mache sphere was obsolete almost from the moment it was completed.

  The globe itself had a difficult afterlife. In the seventeenth century the Behaim family took possession of it from the city hall where it had originally been kept. Two restorations followed, one in 1823 and another in 1847, and both were done poorly enough to corrupt many of the original place names and labels. The German National Museum in Nuremberg eventually took custody of the object, which is now generally known as the Nuremberg Terrestrial Globe.

  What makes the Erdapfel genuinely significant is not its accuracy but its timing and its survival. No older globe is known to exist anywhere. Completed on the eve of Europe's encounter with the Americas, it functions as a snapshot of the geographic imagination of the educated European world in 1492, before the picture shattered and had to be rebuilt. The absence of the continents that Columbus was about to stumble upon is, in retrospect, the most eloquent feature on its surface.