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Globus Jagellonicus


The Globus Jagellonicus or Jagiellonian globe, probably made in northern Italy or the south of France and dated to around 1510, is by some considered to be the oldest existing globe to show the Americas. It bears a striking resemblance to the Hunt–Lenox Globe, also tentatively dated to 1510 which is the second or third oldest known terrestrial globe, after the Erdapfel of Martin Behaim, made in Nuremberg in 1492, the year before Columbus' discovery became known in March 1493, and thus without the new continents. Globes made by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 already showed America.

The globus belonged to the medieval Cracow Academy which was in 1817 renamed the Jagiellonian University; it is featured on display at the Collegium Maius Museum. It was rediscovered in the early 1870s and described as Globus Jagellonicus in 1900 by Prof. Tadeusz Estreicher in the Transactions of the Cracow Academy of Sciences for that year. At the time, when no Polish state existed for about a century, Prof. Estreicher points out that this globe indicating recent geographical discoveries, possessed by the Cracow Academy since 1510, throws special light on the interest taken by Polish scholars of that time.

The gilded copper globe is considered the earliest existing globe to indicate any part of the New World and the first to delineate the South American continent. It is also the oldest globe on which the continent of America is shown to be distinct from that of Asia. It uses the name "America", which had been introduced in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller in his Universalis Cosmographia, though for a continent located to the south of India. A replica of the globe is on display in the Polish Nationality Room at the University of Pittsburgh


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