Inventio Fortunata, "Fortunate, or fortune-making, discovery", is a lost book, probably dating from the 14th century, containing a description of the North Pole as a magnetic island surrounded by a giant whirlpool and four continents. No direct extracts from the document have been discovered, but its influence on the Western idea of the geography of the Arctic region persisted for several centuries.
The story of the ''Inventio''
The book is said to be a travelogue written by a 14th-century Franciscan friar from Oxford who travelled the North Atlantic region in the early 1360s, making some half-a-dozen journeys conducting business on behalf of the King of England. He described what he found on his first journey to the islands beyond 54 degrees north in a book, Inventio Fortunata, which he presented to the King. Unfortunately, by the time Atlantic explorers were seeking information in the 1490s, the Inventiohad gone missing, and was only known through a summary in a second text, the Itinerarium, written by a Brabantian traveller from 's-Hertogenbosch named Jacobus Cnoyen. As will be discussed below, Cnoyen's summary was the basis for the depiction of the Arctic region on many maps, one of the earliest being Martin Behaim's 1492 globe. By the late 16th century, even Cnoyen's text was missing, so most of what we know of the contents of the Inventio Fortunata, other than its use on maps, is found in a letter from the Flemish cartographerGerardus Mercator to the English astronomer John Dee dated April 20, 1577, now located in the British Museum. Cnoyen's information came in a very round-about way. In 1364, a priest from one of the Atlantic islands had returned to Norway, bringing with him an astrolabe which he had received from the visitingFranciscanfriar, in exchange for a religious book. He made a detailed report to the King of Norway. Copies still survive of a social and geographical description of Greenland by a local church official named Ivar Bardarson, who turns up in Norwegian records in 1364, so this much of Cnoyen's story tallies well with reality. Cnoyen seems to have obtained his information from Norwegian sources some time later, neither he nor the priest having actually seen the Inventio. Cnoyen's account mixes probable fact with what may have been his own attempts to research the background, stating that Greenland was first settled at the orders of King Arthur, whose army supposedly conquered the North Atlantic islands. He also refers to the "indrawing seas"- currents which drew ships northward, so that: Of the visiting Franciscan, Cnoyen summarised the priest's report thus: In reality, the "book" may have been a detailed report, intended mainly to highlight the commercial possibilities offered by the North Atlantic following the decline of Norwegian interest in its colonies.
Authorship
Mercator's contemporary, the 16th-century English historian Richard Hakluyt, identifies the author of the Inventio as Nicholas of Lynn. Hakluyt apparently arrived at this conclusion because of Geoffrey Chaucer's mention of Nicholas in his Treatise on the Astrolabe. Hakluyt did not himself, of course, have a copy of the Inventio. Nicholas was alive at the right time, and had the right skills, but he was a Carmelite friar, not a Franciscan, and no earlier biographer indicates that he spent years travelling back and forth across the Atlantic on government business. There is another possible candidate, about whom, unfortunately, almost nothing is known. According to early 16th century literary historian John Bale, an Irishman named Hugh, who was a Franciscan, travelled widely in the 14th century, and wrote "a certain journey in one volume" -- but again, whether or not this was the Inventio, no copy of it is known.
Influence on maps
The concept of the pole as a magnetic mountain goes back at least to Roman times, but the author of Inventio Fortunata added other features to the picture as well as measurements. Whether or not the Inventio is the source of the medieval concept of the North Pole as a magnetic mountain surrounded by a circular continent divided by four powerful rivers, maps as early as Martin Behaim's 1492 globe depict the region in this way. Johannes Ruysch's Universalior cogniti orbis tabula from 1508, features a marginal note mentioning the Inventio Fortunata: Gerardus Mercator's world map of 1569 reflects his reading of Cnoyen's Itinerarium. It also features a marginal note alluding to the Franciscan's "discovery", but not to the book itself, which he never saw: The Arctic map inset on Mercator's 1569 world map was the prototype for the influential and widely circulated Septentrionalium Terrarum of 1595, posthumously published by his son, and the maps in Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570. Both show the same configuration of the arctic regions as the 1569 map. In his letter to Dee, Mercator further quotes Cnoyen's description of the Northern regions: The persistence of this idea of the geography of the far north persisted throughout the 16th and 17th century. This is probably due to the influence of Ruysch, Mercator, and Ortelius. Maps were only revised when the region was explored and mapmakers obtained knowledge of the true geography of the Arctic. More interesting to modern researchers are the people the friar encountered, "pygmies" who may well be identical with the Skraelings referred to in old Norse texts about Greenland, predecessors of the modern Inuit.
In 1956 a letter referring to the existence of the book was found in the Archivo General de Simancas from the English merchant John Day to "The Most Magnificent And Most Worthy Lord - The Lord Grand Admiral". In the letter, written in either December 1497 or January 1498, John Day says,
