16th-Century Terrestrial Globe

Timeline

1. c. 1581–1584Antwerp · FlandersCraftsmen made hollow spheres from layered papier-mâché or wood, wetting twelve to several dozen pre-etched or printed map gores and pasting them onto the sphere, then sanding and lacquering the seams. Early in the 1580s Antwerp workshops could produce globes ranging from twenty centimeters to over a meter in diameter, fitted with brass meridian and horizon rings.
2. c. 1584–1587Duisburg · WestphaliaGerardus Mercator's cylindrical projection and Atlas format profoundly influenced globe map design in the 1580s; coastlines of the New World, the Strait of Magellan, and Pacific islands were progressively marked. The globe became a teaching and display tool for converting flat sea charts into three-dimensional spatial understanding.
3. c. 1587–1590Amsterdam · Dutch RepublicCourts of Spain, France, and the German states, as well as Jesuit colleges, commissioned globes to display global missionary and trade networks. Late in the 1580s workshops in northern Protestant cities rose, laying the foundation for the Dutch globe industry that would dominate global cartography in the seventeenth century.