Satanazes
Encyclopedia
The island of Satanazes (also called the island of Devils, or of the Hand of Satan or of St. Athanasius) is a legendary island
Phantom island
Phantom islands are islands that were believed to exist, and appeared on maps for a period of time during recorded history, but were later removed after they were proved to be nonexistent...

 once thought to be located in the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...

, and depicted on many 15th C. maps.

Cartographic depiction

In 15th C. portolan chart
Portolan chart
Portolan charts are navigational maps based on realistic descriptions of harbours and coasts. They were first made in the 14th century in Italy, Portugal and Spain...

s, the island of Satanazes is depicted as lying out in the north Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...

, due west of the Azores
Azores
The Archipelago of the Azores is composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is located about west from Lisbon and about east from the east coast of North America. The islands, and their economic exclusion zone, form the Autonomous Region of the...

 and Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

, and just north of the legendary island of Antillia
Antillia
Antillia is a legendary island that was reputed, during the 15th century age of exploration, to lie in the Atlantic Ocean, far to the west of Portugal and Spain...

.

The island was first depicted in the 1424 Pizzigano Map
Pizzigano Map
The Pizzigano Map is a portolan chart dated to 1424 and attributed to the 15th C. Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano...

. It is drawn as a large, blue rectangular island, indented with bays and five or six settlements, with the inscription ista ixolla dixemo satanazes, which has been translated as "this is the island called of the devils".

In his 1424 chart, Zuane Pizzigano placed Satanazes some sixty leagues north of the large Antillia
Antillia
Antillia is a legendary island that was reputed, during the 15th century age of exploration, to lie in the Atlantic Ocean, far to the west of Portugal and Spain...

 island. Pizzigano capped Satanazes with a little umbrella-shaped island he labels Saya (which later cartographers will call Tanmar or Danmar). These three islands, plus Ymana
Royllo
Royllo , is a legendary island that was once thought to be located in the Atlantic Ocean. Probably identical with the island originally called Ymana in the 1424 Pizzigano Map. The island is usually depicted in many 15th C. maps as a small island located slightly to the west of the much larger...

 (later called Royllo, a little companion west of Antillia), will be collectively drawn together in many later 15th C. maps, with the same relative size, position and shape Pizzigano gave them, and known collectively as the "Antillia group" or (to use Bianco's label) the insulae de novo rep(er)te ("islands newly reported").

In Grazioso Benincasa's 1463 atlas, the settlements on Satanazes island are named Araialis, Cansillia, Duchal, Jmada, Nam and Saluaga.

Cartographic appearances of Satanazes:
  • 1424 Pizzigano map
    Pizzigano Map
    The Pizzigano Map is a portolan chart dated to 1424 and attributed to the 15th C. Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano...

     as ista ixolla dixemo satanazes
  • 1435 map of Battista Beccario
    Battista Beccario
    Battista Beccario, also known as Baptista Beccharius , was a 15th Century Genoese cartographer.Virtually nothing is known of his life...

     of Genoa
    Genoa
    Genoa |Ligurian]] Zena ; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria....

     as Satanagio
  • 1436 map of Andrea Bianco of Venice
    Venice
    Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

     as Ya de la man satanaxio
  • 1463, 1470 and 1482 maps of Grazioso Benincasa of Ancona
    Ancona
    Ancona is a city and a seaport in the Marche region, in central Italy, with a population of 101,909 . Ancona is the capital of the province of Ancona and of the region....

     as Saluaga/Salvaga (u and v are equivalent)
  • 1460s anonymous Weimar map
    Weimar map
    The Weimar map is an anonymous 15th C. Italian portolan chart, held by the Grand Ducal Library of Weimar. Although frequently dated as 1424, most historians believe it was probably composed a half-century later. The author is unknown, although said to be a member of the Freducci family of...

     (attrib. to Conte di Ottomano Freducci of Ancona) as Salvagio.
  • 1480 and 1489 maps of Pedro Roselli of Majorca as Salvatga
  • 1480 and 1489 maps of Albino de Canepa of Venice as Salvagia
  • 1487 map of anonymous Majorcan cartographer as Salvaja
  • 1493 Laon globe as Salirosa


Significantly, the island of Satanazes is omitted on the maps of Bartolomeo Pareto (1455), Cristoforo Soligo (c.1475) Grazioso's son Andrea Benincasa (1476) and the Nuremberg globe of Martin Behaim
Martin Behaim
Martin Behaim , was a German mariner, artist, cosmographer, astronomer, philosopher, geographer and explorer in service to the King of Portugal.-Biography:The Behaim family had immigrated to Nuremberg because of religious persecution around...

 (1492), even though they all include Antillia
Antillia
Antillia is a legendary island that was reputed, during the 15th century age of exploration, to lie in the Atlantic Ocean, far to the west of Portugal and Spain...

 and some retain Saya/Tanmar.

Satanazes disappears on practically all maps after Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...

's voyages of the 1490s. It was possibly transplanted (in smaller form) to the Isle of Demons
Isle of Demons
The Isle of Demons is a legendary land once believed to exist near Newfoundland. It was generally shown as two islands. It began appearing on maps in the beginning of the 16th century, and disappeared in the mid-17th century....

, between Newfoundland and Greenland, e.g. the 1508 map of Johannes Ruysch
Johannes Ruysch
Johannes Ruysch , a.k.a. Johann Ruijsch or Giovanni Ruisch was an explorer, cartographer, astronomer, manuscript illustrator and painter from the Low Countries who produced a famous map of the world: the second oldest known printed representation of the New World...

.

Etymology and Legend

According to Cortesão, Pizzigano's 'Satanazes' is Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 for "satans" or "devils", Beccaria's 'Satanagio' is the same word in Ligurian dialect and Bianco's 'Satanaxio' the same in Venetian
Venetian language
Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as a native language by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia...

. The island disappears from maps after 1436, and reappears only in 1462 when Benincasa switches it to Salvaga, meaning 'savage' - possibly a misreading, more probably a deliberate adjustment by Benincasa to avoid using the profanity
Profanity
Profanity is a show of disrespect, or a desecration or debasement of someone or something. Profanity can take the form of words, expressions, gestures, or other social behaviors that are socially constructed or interpreted as insulting, rude, vulgar, obscene, desecrating, or other forms.The...

 of "devil". The Laon globe's 'Salirosa' is an apparent mis-transcription of 'Salvaga'.

Historians have conjectured the "Devils" of Satanazes might be a reference to the Skraelings (indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

 of Greenland
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

 and Vinland
Vinland
Vinland was the name given to an area of North America by the Norsemen, about the year 1000 CE.There is a consensus among scholars that the Vikings reached North America approximately five centuries prior to the voyages of Christopher Columbus...

) reported in the Norse
Norsemen
Norsemen is used to refer to the group of people as a whole who spoke what is now called the Old Norse language belonging to the North Germanic branch of Indo-European languages, especially Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish and Danish in their earlier forms.The meaning of Norseman was "people...

 sagas, notably the Grœnlendinga saga
Grœnlendinga saga
The Grœnlendinga saga is an Icelandic saga. Along with Eiríks saga rauða it is one of the two main literary sources of information for the Norse exploration of North America. It relates the colonization of Greenland by Erik the Red and his followers...

 and the saga of Erik the Red, which began to filter south around this time. Pizzigano may have constructed Satanazes island to capture their rough geographic location.

The possible connection between the Satanazes and the Skraelings was first proposed by Nordenskiöld (1889), his attention drawn by an inscription on some islands between Newfoundland and Greenland in the 1508 map of Johannes Ruysch
Johannes Ruysch
Johannes Ruysch , a.k.a. Johann Ruijsch or Giovanni Ruisch was an explorer, cartographer, astronomer, manuscript illustrator and painter from the Low Countries who produced a famous map of the world: the second oldest known printed representation of the New World...

, which notes how 'devils' located there attacked sailors (See Isle of Demons
Isle of Demons
The Isle of Demons is a legendary land once believed to exist near Newfoundland. It was generally shown as two islands. It began appearing on maps in the beginning of the 16th century, and disappeared in the mid-17th century....

). The connection need not require direct knowledge of the Norse sagas themselves, e.g. Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen was a Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In his youth a champion skier and ice skater, he led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, and won international fame after reaching a...

 has drawn attention to how Norse encounters with North American 'demons' were adopted in Irish immram
Immram
An immram is a class of Old Irish tales concerning a hero's sea journey to the Otherworld . Written in the Christian era and essentially Christian in aspect, they preserve elements of Irish mythology....

a,. Given the tendency of the legends of Atlantic seafarers - Norse, Irish, Arab and Iberian - to move quickly and cross-fertilize each other, the news of an Isle of Devils out in the North Atlantic may have arrived to Italian cartographers via several channels.

Georg Hassel
Georg Hassel
Johann Georg Heinrich Hassel was a German geographer and statistician. He was an influential figure in the early 19th century and published several large books of geography and statistics....

 conjectured that, by their size and shape, the large islands of Satanazes and Antillia may represent the coasts of North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 and South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...

 respectively, thus making it a possible testament of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
Theories of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact are those theories that propose interaction between indigenous peoples of the Americas who settled the Americas before 10,000 BC, and peoples of other continents , which occurred before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492.Many...

. Babcock conjectures the representation might be of the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

, that Satanazes represents Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

 (and Antillia Cuba, Roylla Jamaica and Tanmar the Bahamas)
Andrea Bianco's 1436 long label Ya de la man santanaxio provoked Vicenzo Formaleoni (1783) to read it as the isle of "the Hand of Satan", an alternative name for Satanazes still found in some sources. Formaleoni proposed it might be connected to a legend from India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, about a giant hand that arose each day from the sea and carried off the inhabitants into the ocean. This legend is told in the Perigrinaggio di tre giovani (The Three Princes of Serendip
The Three Princes of Serendip
The Three Princes of Serendip is the English version of the Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo published by Michele Tramezzino in Venice in 1557. Tramezzino claimed to have heard the story from one Christophero Armeno who had translated the Persian fairy tale into Italian...

) first published in Venice in 1557 by Michele Tramezzino (alleged to be a translation from the Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

 of a certain Christopher of Armenia, Christoforo Armeno). The story might have been circulating earlier among Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...

 seafarers, traced in Irish immram
Immram
An immram is a class of Old Irish tales concerning a hero's sea journey to the Otherworld . Written in the Christian era and essentially Christian in aspect, they preserve elements of Irish mythology....

a and Arab tales, about a giant hand in the Sea of Darkness that plucked sailors and sometimes entire boats, and dragged them to the bottom of the ocean. Gaffarel suggests this might be a reference to the iceberg
Iceberg
An iceberg is a large piece of ice from freshwater that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice...

s of the North Atlantic ocean.

The Marquis d'Avezac (1845) launched yet another theory, reading 'satanaxio' as S. Atanaxio, i.e. the island of St. Athanasius. D'Avezac also makes the credible argument that the de la man satanaxio in Bianco's label is actually referencing two separate islands, Satanazes and Delaman, probably the nearby Danmar or Tanmar of other maps, believed to be a reference to the legendary Isle of Mam (Babcock proposed an alternate reading of Delaman/Danmar/Tanmar as I la Mar, or "Island of the Sea".)

The discovery of the 1424 Pizzigano map in the 20th Century, with its Satanazes clearly indicated, has allowed modern historians to set aside the old Hand of Satan/St. Athanasius theories, and embrace the Isle of Devils reading.

Despite all these conjectures, there is little agreement. Unlike its southern counterpart Antillia
Antillia
Antillia is a legendary island that was reputed, during the 15th century age of exploration, to lie in the Atlantic Ocean, far to the west of Portugal and Spain...

 (which seems rather solidly connected to the Iberian
Iberian Peninsula
The Iberian Peninsula , sometimes called Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes the modern-day sovereign states of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, as well as the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar...

 legend of the Seven Cities), Satanazes has been characterized as a legendary island in need of a legend.

Sources

  • Christoforo Armeno (1557) Perigrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo as translated into Italian and published by Michele Tramezzino, Venice. (Eng. trans. as "The Three Princes of Serendip)

  • Babcock, W.H. (1922) Legendary islands of the Atlantic: a study in medieval geography New York: American Geographical Society. online

  • Buache, Jean-Nicholas (1806) "Recherches sur l'île Antillia et sur l'époque de la découverte de l'AmériqueMémoires de l'Institut des Sciences, Lettres et Arts, Vol. 6, Paris: Baudoin, p.1-29

  • Cortesão, Armando (1953) "The North Atlantic Nautical Chart of 1424" Imago Mundi, Vol. 10. JSTOR

  • Cortesão, Armando (1954) The Nautical Chart of 1424 and the Early Discovery and Cartographical Representation of America. Coimbra and Minneapolis. (Portuguese trans. "A Carta Nautica de 1424", published in 1975, Esparsos, Coimbra. vol. 3)

  • Cortesão, Armando (1970) "Pizzigano's Chart of 1424", Revista da Universidade de Coimbra, Vol. 24 (offprint),

  • D'Avezac, M.A.P. Marquis (1845) Les îles fantastiques de l'océan occidental au moyen âge: fragment inédit d'une histoire des îles de l'Afrique. Paris: Fain & Thunot. online

  • Formaleoni, Vicenzio (1783) Saggio sulla Nautica antica de' Veneziani, con una illustrazione d'alcune carte idrografiche antiché della Biblioteca di S. Marco, che dimonstrano l'isole Antille prima della scoperta di Cristoforo Colombo. Venice. online

  • Gaffarel, Paul (1882) "L'île des Sept Cités et l'île Antilia", Congresso Internacional de Americanistas, Actas de la Cuara Reunión, Madrid, Madrid: Fortanet, vol. 1, p.198

  • Georg Hassel
    Georg Hassel
    Johann Georg Heinrich Hassel was a German geographer and statistician. He was an influential figure in the early 19th century and published several large books of geography and statistics....

     (1822) "America - Einleitung" in Caspari, et al. editors, Vollständiges Handbuch der neuesten Erdbeschreibung, Weimar: Geographischen Instituts. vol. 1 - p.6

  • Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1899) Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic. New York: Macmillan.online

  • Alexander von Humboldt
    Alexander von Humboldt
    Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt was a German naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt...

     (1837) Examen critique de l'histoire de la géographie du nouveau continent et des progrès de l'astronomie nautique aux quinzième et seizième siècles, Paris: Gide, vol. II.

  • Morison, S.E. (1971) The European Discovery of America: The northern voyages, A.D. 500-1600. Oxford University Press.

  • Fridtjof Nansen
    Fridtjof Nansen
    Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen was a Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In his youth a champion skier and ice skater, he led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, and won international fame after reaching a...

    (1911) In Northern Mists; Arctic exploration in early times. New York: F.A. Stokes. vol. 1, vol. 2

  • Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik (1889) Facsimile Atlas to the Early History of Cartography: with reproductions of the most important maps printed in the XV and XVI centuries, Stockholm: Norstedt.

  • Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik (1897) Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing Directions, tr. Frances A. Bather, Stockholm: Norstedt.
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