Antillia

Antillia (or Antilia) is a legendary island which was reputed during the age of exploration to lie in the Atlantic Ocean far to the west of Portugal and Spain. The island went by various other names such as Isle of Seven Cities, Ilha das Sete Cidades (Portuguese), Septe Cidades, Sanbrandan (or St Brendan). Antillia was also connected at times with ancient legends including the Isles of the Blest and the Fortunate Islands. By the 16th century, the legend had developed into the Seven Cities of Gold, which were said to be fabulously wealthy and located somewhere on the mainland of America.

The origin of the name is uncertain. A variant of the name, Atullia, appeared on a 1367 chart by Franciscus Pizzigano. Although difficult to read, it has been translated as: "Here are statues which stand before the shores of Atullia (ante ripas Atulliae) and which have been set up for the safety of sailors; for beyond is the vile sea, which sailors cannot navigate," and a possible abbreviation mark over the 'A' was thought to suggest a better reading of Antullia. No island is mentioned and no island is shown on the chart.^[1] A theory which first emerged in the late eighteenth century^[2] fancifully connected it with Plato's Atlantis, but this has been dismissed by academics. Later writers have favoured a derivation from the Portuguese ante-ilha (i.e., the island out before or the island in front of) ^[3]. Alexander von Humboldt suggested an Arabic etymology from Jezirat al Tennyn ("Al-Tin"), or "Dragon's Isle". Historians Samuel Morison and G.R. Crone suggested that the name may have derived from Getulia, the classical name for the northwestern part of Africa^[4], and that the phrase on the 1367 chart actually read "ante ripas Getuliae" where in medieval times it was thought that there were islands where Hercules had set up columns warning that sailors had reached the boundaries of safe navigation, at the edge of the then known world.^[1]

Cartographical representation

Andea Bianco, 1436. Antillia at left

Antillia is first marked in the Pizzigano chart of 1424 together with its northerly companion, Satanazes ("Devil's Island"). It appears in virtually all of the known surviving Portolan charts of the Atlantic—notably those of the Genoese B. Beccario or Beccaria (1435), the Venetian Andrea Bianco (1436), and Grazioso Benincasa (1476 and 1482).^[5]. It is usually accompanied by the smaller and equally legendary islands of Royllo, St Atanagio, and Tanmar, the whole group often classified as insulae de novo repertae, "newly discovered islands".

On these maps, Antillia was typically depicted on a similar scale to Portugal's, lying around 200 miles west of the Azores. It was drawn as an almost perfect rectangle, its long axis running north-south, but with seven trefoil bays shared between the east and west coasts. Each city lay on a bay. The form of the island occasionally becomes more figurative than the semi-abstract representations of Bartolomeo de Pareto, Benincasa et al.; Bianco, for instance, shifts its orientation to northwest-southeast, transmutes generic bays into river mouths (including a large one on the northeastern coast), and elongates a southern tail into a cape with a small cluster of islets offshore.

Around the time of Spain's discovery of South America, Antillia dwindles substantially in size on Behaim's globe and later charts. Contrary to the earlier descriptions of the two island groups as distinct entities, a 16th century notion relegates Antillia to the island of Sao Miguel, the largest of the Azores, where a national park centring on two lakes still bears the name Sete Cidades.

Medieval beliefs and the Age of Discovery

Bartholomeo Pareto, 1455. Antilia at left

A Portuguese legend tells how the island was settled in the early eighth century in the face of the Moorish conquest of Iberia by the Archbishop of Porto, six other bishops and their parishioners to avoid the ensuing Moorish invasion. Each congregation founded a city, namely, Aira, Anhuib, Ansalli, Ansesseli, Ansodi, Ansolli and Con^[6], and once established burnt their caravell ships as a symbol of their autonomy. The reporting of this settlement comes courtesy of a young couple who eloped back to Europe on a rare trading ship^[7] and reported the seven cities as a model of agricultural, economic and cultural harmony. Centuries later, the island became known as a proto-utopian commonwealth, free from the disorders of less favoured states.

It should be noted that since these events predated the Kingdom of Portugal and the clergy's heritage marked a claim to significant strategical gains, Spain counterclaimed that the expedition was, in fact, theirs.^[8] One of the chief early descriptions of the heritage of Antillia is inscribed on the globe which the geographer Martin Behaim made at Nuremberg in 1492. Behaim relates the Catholic escape from the barbarians, though his date of 734 is probably a mistake for 714. The inscription adds that a Spanish vessel sighted the island in 1414, while a Portuguese crew claimed to have landed on Antillia in the 1430s.

In a later version of the legend, the bishops fled from Mérida, Spain, when Moors attacked it around the year 1150.

With this legend underpinning growing reports of a bountiful civilisation midway between Europe and Cipangu, or Japan^[9], the quest to discover the Seven Cities attracted significant attention. However, by the last decade of the 15th century, the Portuguese state's official sponsorship of such exploratory voyages had ended^[10], and in 1492, under the Spanish flag of Ferdinand and Isabella, Christopher Columbus set out on his historic journey to Asia, citing the island as the perfect halfway house by the authority of Paul Toscanelli^[11]. Columbus had supposedly gained charts and descriptions from a Spanish navigator, who had "sojourned... and died also" at Columbus's home in Madeira, after having made landfall on Antillia.^[12]

Later influence

Others following d'Anghiera suggested contenders in the West Indies for Antillia's heritage (most often either Puerto Rico or Trinidad), and as a result the Caribbean islands became known as the Antilles. As European explorations continued in the Americas, maps reduced the scale of the island Antillia, tending to place it mid-Atlantic, whereas the Seven Cities were attributed to mainland Central or North America, as the various European powers vied for territory in the New World.

In the 16th century, the Spanish in New Spain (now Mexico) began to hear rumors of "Seven Cities of Gold" called "Cibola" located across the desert, hundreds of miles to the north. These rumors were largely caused by reports given by the four shipwrecked survivors of the failed Narváez expedition, which included Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and an African slave named Esteban Dorantes, or Estevanico. Eventually returning to New Spain, the adventurers said they had heard stories from natives about cities with great and limitless riches. However, when conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado finally arrived at Cibola in 1540, he discovered that the stories were lies and that there were in fact no treasures as the friar had described—only adobe pueblos.

While among the pueblos, Coronado heard an additional rumor from a native he called "the Turk" that there was a city with plenty of gold called Quivira located on the other side of the great plains. However, when at last he reached this place (variously conjectured to be in modern Kansas, Nebraska or Missouri), he found little more than teepees.

7 Cities of Gold in popular culture

• The 1984 video game Seven Cities of Gold, dramatizing the Spanish conquest of the Americas, takes its name from this legend.
• The historical novel Texas by James A. Michener begins with a search for the seven cities.
• In the skit "Temporarily Humbolt County" from the classic Firesign Theater comedy album "Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him", a tourist asks a native American, "What about the seven cities of gold, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas.....?"
• In Civilization Revolution for both the the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo DS, players can go on a quest to find the Seven Cities of Gold. The player who finds the Seven Cities of Gold receives 200 gold pieces to spend on building cities, military units, settlers (people that found new cities), or roads.
• The 1986 cartoon-serial The Mysterious Cities of Gold is heavily based on the legend.
• The movie sequel National Treasure 2 mentions the Seven Cities of Cibola as its treasure.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Antillia

• El Dorado
• City of the Caesars (Ciudad de los Césares)
• Quivira and Cíbola
• Sierra del Plata

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Crone, G. R. "The Origin of the Name Antillia" The Geographical Journal, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Mar., 1938), pp. 260-262
2. ^ Vicenzio Formaleoni, "Essai sur la marine ancienne des Vénetiens", 1788
3. ^ William H. Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, 1922
4. ^ quotation from Samuel Morison found in Diffie, Bailie Wallys; Winius, George Davison Foundations of the Portuguese empire, 1415-1580 University of Minnesota Press (25 Nov 1977) ISBN 978-0816607822 p.441 [1]
5. ^ See also- Bartolomeo de Pareto, 1455; Petrus Roselli, 1468, held by the Hispanic Society of America; attr. Toscanelli, 1474: original is lost, but a copy survives in Columbus's notes
6. ^ Pizzigano map, 1424
7. ^ For a modern recantation of the various early sources, see Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic, Thomas Wentworth-Higginson, 1899.
8. ^ Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic, Thomas Wentworth-Higginson, 1989.
9. ^ Paul Toscanelli's 1474 letter to the Spanish Court, 'Toscanelli and Columbus', H. Vignaud, 1902
10. ^ RA Skelton, "Explorers' Maps: Chapters in the Cartographic Record of Geographical Discovery" http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=61480298
11. ^ Paul Toscanelli's 1474 letter to the Spanish Court, RA Skelton, "Explorers' Maps: Chapters in the Cartographic Record of Geographical Discovery"
12. ^ Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, 1511-25 http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12425

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.