As we have seen, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the idea of an oikoumene distinct from the whole world still permeated geographical interpretation, the majority of scholars who responded to the new discoveries were immersed in the humanist idea that the Greek and Roman writers held the keys to knowledge of the world. Many of the classical writings had been preserved in the Byzantine world, but had only reached western Europe in the fifteenth century, not long before the Portuguese and the Spanish began opening up the world to European eyes. Simultaneous with the drive for geographical discovery was the eager searching for lost classical texts that characterised the fifteenth and sixteenth century renaissance. These ancient texts, newly coming to light again, had ‘the crisp immediacy of new books’. In Italy, at the forefront of the new interest in the studiae humanitatis, geography came to be considered an important area of study, to such an extent that in 1469, when Battista Guarini was composing his school syllabus in his De ordine docendi et discendi, he declared that all students should read the Roman geographers Pomponius Mela and Solinus, and the Greek geographer and astronomer Ptolemy in order to learn about geography and astrology, and that older students should read the Latin works of Aulus Gellius, Macrobius and Pliny the elder, all of which contain lengthy geographical references. Some, such as the newly rediscovered geographical works of Strabo and Ptolemy, had an obvious relevance for humanist writers seeking to explain the shape and nature of the physical world, but others such as the philosophical writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists had a more surprising influence. This chapter argues that the humanist-trained geographical writers’ and travellers’ search for validation in the classical authorities was so great that the early-modern authors revived classical geographical opinions from every genre of writing in order to develop their new concept of global human geography. In the process, the humanist geographers revolutionised the idea of who formed the key ancient authorities on geography.

The quest for geographical understanding, combined with the Renaissance revival of forgotten classical texts, and the rigour of Renaissance humanist training, meant that the sixteenth-century humanist geographers sought authority in Greek and Roman writings which were far outside the traditional corpus of classical works which had done much to create the ancient and medieval idea of a bounded oikoumene.