Inventio Fortunata

The book is said to be a travelogue written by a 14th-century Franciscan (Minorite) 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 (Edward III).

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 cartographer Gerardus Mercator to the English astronomer John Dee dated April 20, 1577, now located in the British Library.

Cnoyen's account (originally in his own language; translations here based on Eva Taylor's version[1]) 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.

[2] Nicholas was alive at the right time (very roughly – he is quite likely to have been a child in 1360), 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.

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.