When Tommaso Giunti declared in his introduction to Ramusio's Navigazioni e viaggi that all parts of the globe were ‘marvellously inhabited’, he demonstrated the true amazement of Europeans at this idea. Although by the end of the sixteenth century, most people came to believe that humans were the lords of an entire world created by God for mankind, this was a change that occurred over the course of the century. Throughout much of this period the continuing emphasis on monstrous races dwelling in liminal regions of the world undermined the idea of a coinciding globe and oikoumene. Europeans knew neither the topography of all the lands that were now believed to be part of the oikoumene, nor the characteristics of their inhabitants. While there were a few European forays into the interior of Africa, Asia and the Americas, these were insufficient to provide much information about these lands and their inhabitants. As a result, European cultural geography of the period was still marked by a sense of centre and periphery which had been one of the marked features of the classical geography of the oikoumene. There was a European norm at the heart of the world, and zones of inhabitation surrounding this, so that in the regions furthest from Europe all was monstrous and abnormal.

These realms of marvels and monstrous peoples acted as a means of managing space, of distinguishing the known from the unknown, enabling Europeans to maintain mental control of their expanding geographical horizons. One of the functions of the monstrous was to repel the traveller's wonder and curiosity. As Frank Lestringant has pointed out, the monstrous peoples lived in areas of unverifiable knowledge where nothing marked the distinctions between true and false, between possible and impossible. These monstrous and exotic regions, on some level undermined the concept of an oikoumene which coincided with the sphere, effectively continuing to separate the habitable regions from the world beyond. It was only when the monstrous races began largely to disappear from the mainstream geographical space that the oikoumene and the world could truly be thought to coincide, and the whole world be accepted as made for human domination.