Claudius Ptolemaeus; Giovanni Antonio Magini — Geographiae universae tum veteris, tum novae (1597)

according to Ptolemy and the older Greek geographers, which we commonly follow. The other is from a known and significant terminal point of the West, namely from the nearest shore of the Western Ocean, which stretches out beyond the Pillars of Hercules toward the South and North, and encompasses 30 degrees of latitude under one quasi-meridian. This beginning is indeed followed by Abulfeda, the distinguished Moorish geographer, along with almost all the Arabs. The difference between both beginnings is calculated as ten degrees, as the commentator Al-Farghani notes.

On the fifth chapter.

Ptolemy rightly admonishes the geographer in this chapter, when designating the limits of regions and provinces and imposing names upon particular places, to accept the true histories of more recent writers, rejecting those that are fabulous. This was done by him for no other reason than that we see continuous and significant changes and alterations occurring in those very regions, and also in cities, territories, and peoples; for cities and even the most flourishing kingdoms and empires die out, and even regions that were uncultivated and uninhabited are cultivated and inhabited in the succession of time. Moreover, known regions are explored better daily, and new regions and parts of the Earth become known anew. For after Ptolemy, apart from the fact that a significant change has occurred in empires, kingdoms, and domains, many very large parts of the world have also been detected and explored, as is evident to almost everyone.

On the sixth chapter.

Here Ptolemy places Marinus of Tyre before all other geographical writers who flourished up to that age, and he partly commends him and partly also carps at and reproves him. Indeed, because he committed many errors in the designation of the world, insofar as he used ancient histories poorly by accepting from them things that are less true and less worthy of belief. Furthermore, Marinus ineptly determines the length of the Earth and its width. So too, in describing regions, he assigned their boundaries ineptly, and finally, he was greatly hallucinating in teaching the designation of the world on a plane, as will appear from Ptolemy himself in the following chapters.

On the seventh chapter.

In this chapter, Ptolemy examines the reasons and foundations of Marinus, by which he strives to prove the longitude and latitude of the entire inhabited world. And first, indeed, he proposes what Marinus felt concerning the entire latitude of the inhabited Earth, saying that he defined the last limit of the northern latitude of the world in the parallel drawn through the island of Thule, which he says is distant from the Equinoctial Equator toward the North by 63 degrees. This is indeed confirmed by Ptolemy himself and is assumed as