Introduction
In the seventeenth century, the Society of Jesus emerged as a powerful force within the Catholic Church, charged both with consolidating the faith in Europe and converting souls abroad. As Jesuit missionaries spread across the globe, they did not merely observe the territories they encountered; they sought to describe, measure, and visualize the world itself.Footnote 1 Foremost in this effort were visual representations of the globe and of where to place its centre. The choice of the globe’s centre carried substantive implications: it signalled positions in cosmological theory, shaped cross-cultural negotiation, and bore spiritual and devotional weight. Graphic and astronomical media became central to this enterprise, serving at once as practical aids for navigation and administration, as devotional instruments that enacted Catholic universality, and as persuasive media aimed at securing the trust of patrons and publics across cultures.
This article argues that Jesuit world images, including maps, globes, astronomical tables, diagrams, and emblematic programmes, did not seek a single geodetic middle. Instead, they used a functional reference, here called the “Jesuit meridian,” to align depiction with institutional and devotional authority. The meridian is a declared or implied point of alignment, often Rome in administrative instruments, Christ or the IHS monogram in theological diagrams, and projection conventions in cartography, chosen to coordinate hours, jurisdictions, languages, and audiences. Taken together, these materials form a coherent repertoire produced in different settings for distinct publics. Tracing where prolific Jesuit writers and printers placed “centre” clarifies how universal claims were fashioned and circulated, and how scientific representation worked in concert with devotion and governance in the early modern world.
Such work formed part of a wider Jesuit practice that Markus Friedrich has described as knowledge compilation (Wissenskompilation): the practice of collecting heterogeneous observations and authorities, arranging them in stable textual and visual formats, and rendering them legible for multiple publics.Footnote 2 Jesuit writers recognized this challenge from within the order – how to arrange, categorize, and hierarchize information so that it served practical needs and devotional aims. For example, for Daniello Bartoli (1608–85), the Society’s principal historian, geography rather than chronology provided the organizing principle of narration; in programmatic notes on writing Jesuit history, he even urged authors to “break free of chronology” so that worldwide missions could be made intelligible.Footnote 3 Seen this way, locating the globe’s centre is not incidental but constitutive of how Jesuits made the world legible.
Understanding Jesuit logic matters because Jesuit writing circulated widely beyond the order. As prolific intermediaries, teachers, and producers of information, Jesuits helped shape how contemporaries thought about geography and cosmology. Their engagement with these fields has therefore generated substantial historiography. What earlier studies framed as a tension between scientific inquiry and religious vocation is now widely read as constitutive of the order’s mission: Jesuit science encompassed rigorous mathematical training, instrument-based observation, observatories, calendar reform, and sustained work in astronomy, physics, and cartography, often mobilized in mission contexts.Footnote 4
This reassessment aligns with broader histories of mapping that embed early modern cartography in circuits of global exchange, political imagination, and theological reasoning.Footnote 5 As Jerry Brotton has shown, even for a commercial cartographer like Gerard Mercator (1512–94), theological commitments and cosmographical method were intertwined and projected into his 1569 world map on the now-famous Mercator projection.Footnote 6 Jesuit world images carried similar tensions yet posed distinctive problems of audience and authority, as they addressed both European publics and extra-European courts.Footnote 7 At this intersection of scientific practice, missionary persuasion, and cross-regional publics, the question of the globe’s centre becomes a diagnostic device for how universality was claimed and made visible. This article contributes a cross-genre account of Jesuit visualization by treating centrality as a movable coordinating device, linking practical calculation with devotional and institutional claims in ways that can be compared across far-flung geographical and cultural settings.
Jesuit engagement with world geography answered, first and foremost, the demands of a global enterprise.Footnote 8 Reliable longitudes, dependable routes, and standardized ephemerides supported navigation and the movement of people and goods, while accurate geography improved communication and oversight across dispersed houses, colleges, and missions. The difficulty of determining longitude at sea was widely recognized in early modern Europe and prompted competing astronomical and mechanical schemes, underscoring that precision was a shared problem rather than a Jesuit peculiarity.Footnote 9 Yet, for the Jesuits, precision was not only pragmatic. Accurate timekeeping and geographical calculation were essential to keep overseas practice in step with the Gregorian (Roman) liturgical calendar: the correct timing of feasts, fasts, and offices was a matter of spiritual discipline and theological integrity.Footnote 10 For example, the Paraguayan Jesuit astronomer Buenaventura Suárez (1679–1750) in the 1740s published a set of ephemerides expressly used to date religious festivities and other celestial events, calculated and adjusted to local time.Footnote 11 Ensuring that local observance in distant missions matched that of the wider Catholic world reinforced communion with Rome and gave universal claims concrete form. Accordingly, Jesuit maps, tables, and diagrams functioned as coordinating instruments, joining practical calculation to devotional life and to the routines of governance.
Unlike the Gregorian calendar, which standardized the computation of liturgical time under a Roman rhythm, the placement of the globe’s centre in Jesuit world images was negotiable and locally adjustable. Across places and publics, the centre could be shifted to meet customary expectations or asserted to anchor universal claims.Footnote 12 As will be shown in this article, it operated as an instrument of persuasion and governance rather than a fixed standard: editions prepared for Chinese readers moved Asia to the middle and displaced Europe, while programmes addressed to European audiences presented the world with Rome and the Society at its symbolic pivot.
This negotiability sits within older Christian practices of centring the earth. From the early Middle Ages onward, Latin Christendom oscillated between Rome and Jerusalem as rival foci: Rome as the remembered site of temporal authority, Jerusalem as the transhistorical locus of divine authority.Footnote 13 Later papal interventions inscribed a jurisdictional meridian on the map, a geopolitical instrument for apportioning the Catholic Iberian monarchies’ overseas claims: the bulls of 1493 set a line 100 leagues west of the Azores or Cape Verde, and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) shifted it to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, dividing extra-European spheres between Castile and Portugal.Footnote 14 The Jesuit meridian used here differs in kind: it names not a jurisdictional boundary but a representational device, a movable axis by which Jesuit world images aligned depictions of the globe with institutional and devotional claims. Unlike contemporary imperial or commercial cartographies that stabilized meridians to serve states and trade, Jesuit visualizations grounded centrality in the order’s intertwined commitments to scientific representation and devotional authority. Tracing how the centre was positioned across media and settings shows how Jesuits mediated local and universal claims and made authority visible.
Their representations of the globe varied, each carrying a different narrative and raising a central question: did Jesuits envision a specific geographic, cultural, or political centre, and how flexible were they in adapting that notion in intercultural settings? A further issue is how such centring related both to geographic frameworks – above all the spherical earth – and to a cosmology grounded in Catholic devotion. These questions direct attention to centrality as a tool rather than a datum: what follows traces how that axis was relocated, stabilized, or symbolically asserted to align representation with institutional and devotional authority.
To address these questions, the scope of “world map” is taken broadly. Alongside geographic projections, the analysis includes diagrams, tables, and emblematic programmes that organize the globe for readers. Viewed together, these world images make it possible to trace how centre and periphery are articulated across media and settings. They emerge from identifiable practices – compilation, editing, translation, re-engraving, republication – and were crafted for particular publics under specific constraints of format and circulation. This comparative frame lets symbolic centres be read alongside cartographic ones and clarifies how visual choices about the globe’s centre carried institutional and devotional meanings.
The investigation is anchored in two Jesuit traditions of representing the world. The first consists of world maps and geographical treatises produced in late Ming and early Qing China, with Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) as the foundational figure and later revisions by his successors. The second comprises emblematic and diagrammatic representations printed for European readers, especially in the works of Athanasius Kircher (1602–80). These corpora were tailored to different audiences and purposes; read together, they bracket a range of strategies and provide a controlled basis for comparison.
The sections that follow take them in turn: first Ricci and the Chinese mapping tradition, then Kircher’s Roman publications, before drawing out what the pairing reveals about centrality. The aim is not to derive a single Jesuit cartography, but to show how a flexible axis of centrality was made, circulated, and read across genres and audiences, and how that axis linked practical calculation to devotional and institutional claims.
Defining Centres in a Spherical World
Maps circulated widely across Jesuit networks and served administration, teaching, and devotion.Footnote 15 In mission settings they also functioned as diplomatic gifts and classroom tools, not merely as European imports.Footnote 16 In Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) China, Jesuits therefore produced maps locally: woodblock formats, Chinese captions, and familiar layout conventions made them legible to literati audiences. Collaboration with scholar-officials yielded a distinctive corpus of Sino-Jesuit cartography, rare elsewhere in the missions. As the following pages show, these works did more than “accommodate” Chinese expectations: by reworking orientation and paratext while preserving computational frameworks, they fashioned a shared visual language for describing the globe.
Visually, these maps recentred the sheet on China to meet literati conventions. The underlying framework, however, remained Ptolemaic – a spherical earth without a privileged terrestrial centre – so the adjustment was presentational rather than doctrinal. When discussion shifted from geographic placement to cultural centrality, Jesuit texts and teaching cultivated a rhetoric of twin centres, China and Europe, held in deliberate balance. As Qiong Zhang notes, the result was effectively a “fusion of two ethnocentrisms.”Footnote 17
Among Sino-Jesuit world maps, the Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖 (Complete Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World, 1602) is the canonical case (figure 1). Produced in Beijing with Chinese collaborators and issued as a large woodblock wall map with extensive explanatory panels, it is attributed to Matteo Ricci, the leading architect of the early China mission. Ricci had displayed and adapted world maps in China since the mid-1580s, but the 1602 edition drew the widest notice. Sponsored by Li Zhizao 李之藻 (1565–1630) and cut on woodblocks by Zhang Wentao 張文燾, it followed court permission for Jesuits to enter Beijing in 1601. Large and text-rich (six joined sheets, roughly 182 × 365 cm), the map circulated widely. It was soon reproduced and adapted in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean works, becoming a significant East Asian reference to a European-style image of the world.Footnote 18
Ricci’s Kunyu wanguo quantu, 1602. Credit: University of Minnesota.
Figure 1 Long description
The image shows Matteo Ricci’s 1602 Kunyu wanguo quantu, a Chinese-language world map. The map fills a wide rectangular frame and is oriented with north at the top. A graticule of horizontal and vertical lines organizes the map surface. The continents and oceans extend across the full width of the image, with landmasses distributed across the map and large oceanic spaces between them. East Asia and China appear prominently within the mapped world, while Europe, Africa, the Americas, and other regions are incorporated into the same global frame. Dense Chinese text appears throughout the map. Place names and labels are printed across land and sea, while larger blocks of explanatory text are set in rectangular panels along the borders and in open areas of the map, especially in the oceans and margins. Several decorative ships appear in the oceanic regions. The map also includes visible fold lines, indicating that the printed sheet was folded or preserved in sections. Together, the grid, annotations, cartouches, and global arrangement present the map as both a geographical representation and a textual-cosmographic object.
Ricci’s world map became a key milestone in the early-modern dialogue between China and Europe. For Chinese literati, it served as a didactic device, introducing the latitude–longitude grid, spherical projection, and oceanic continuity; it pictured five continents and labelled regions and polities, some preserving Western endonyms in Chinese transcription.Footnote 19 At the same time, it absorbed Chinese conventions – woodblock format, vertical reading order, gazetteer-style panel essays, and familiar toponyms – and relayed them back to Europe through copies and descriptions.Footnote 20 The exchange ran both ways: Chinese expectations shaped how the globe was pictured, even as a European frame organized measurement and comparison.Footnote 21
Scholars have returned to Ricci’s map above all because, despite its European techniques, it places China at the visual centre. That reorientation has been read not as simple concession but as evidence of negotiated exchange between literati conventions and European cosmography.Footnote 22 As Eugenio Menegon notes, the map’s China-centred layout remains “a challenge to Eurocentrism and a reminder of Sinocentrism,” prompting reflection on both the limits and the ambition of this early Sino-Jesuit cartographic experiment.Footnote 23
Ricci initially displayed in his residence a copy of a world map by Abraham Ortelius (1527–98), arranged in a recognizably Eurocentric frame.Footnote 24 Advised by Chinese interlocutors, and aware that such a layout might be rejected, he began producing Chinese-language maps and experimenting with format and presentation. In Zhaoqing (1584) he supervised a woodblock world map with local officials (often identified in later catalogues as Yudi shanhai quantu 輿地山海全圖); a stele version (Shanhai yudi tu 山海輿地圖, 1596) is also recorded; and in Nanjing (1600) a revised map was engraved by Wu Zhongming 吳中明. Although no copies of these pre-1602 versions survive, contemporary notices and small-scale reproductions in Chinese books indicate that Ricci was already adapting projection frames and legend panels to Chinese reading conventions and shifting the visual field toward China while retaining European reference frameworks for calculation.Footnote 25 The 1602 Kunyu wanguo quantu consolidated this approach and was followed by further Beijing reissues (1603, 1608, 1609).
Ricci referred to the Chinese notion of centrality in his own account, noticing how “in Chinese books, the country is called Ciunquo [i.e., Zhongguo 中國], meaning ‘kingdom in the middle.’”Footnote 26 Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), who carried Ricci’s papers to Europe and published an edited Latin version in 1615, added: “Because of this idea, when the Chinese first looked at our geographical charts, they were surprised to see their kingdom not in the centre but at the far east. Therefore, when Father Matteo Ricci made a world map with Chinese names, he arranged it so that China would appear in the middle.”Footnote 27
A persistent shorthand, already voiced by the Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671) in 1651 and echoed in later narratives, claimed that Ricci put China at the exact centre of his map. Critical modern editors from Pasquale d’Elia onward have cautioned that Ricci’s wording does not assert an exact geographic centre: the Kunyu wanguo quantu and some of its previous versions reweight the composition toward China while visually diminishing Europe at the left margin.Footnote 28
The map was, on balance, more provocative than accommodating. It unsettled established assumptions in Chinese geography and cosmology by scaling China within a global frame and by teaching a spherical earth, at odds with the long-standing concept of tianyuan difang 天圓地方 (heaven is round; earth is square). Ricci translated these claims into a Chinese idiom, reusing the familiar “yolk in the egg” simile – employed by Zhang Heng 張衡 (78–139) to describe the spherical heavens – but extending it to the earth itself.Footnote 29 In the preface to the 1602 map he wrote: “The earth and the sea are both spherical. Together they form a single globe, situated at the centre of celestial spheres, like the yolk in a hen’s egg which is surrounded by the white. Those who said that the earth is square were referring to the earth’s fixed and immobile nature and not its [physical form].”Footnote 30
Ricci adhered not only to Ptolemaic cosmology but also to its geographic conventions. While he shifted the pictorial emphasis toward China, the longitude scale preserves a European reference: zero degrees at the Ferro meridian, marked on the left margin and visible in the northern-hemisphere polar inset at the upper left (figure 2).Footnote 31 On the 1602 impression, the central vertical lies in the western Pacific, east of China, so visual emphasis and computational zero are deliberately separated.
Detail, northern-hemisphere polar inset in Ricci’s Kunyu wanguo quantu, 1602. Credit: University of Minnesota.
Figure 2 Long description
The image shows a detail from the upper-left area of Matteo Ricci’s 1602 Chinese-language world map, Kunyu wanguo quantu. At the center of the detail is a circular map organized around the Arctic or North Pole. The circular map is structured by straight radial lines extending outward from the center and by multiple concentric rings, creating a polar gridded framework. Landmasses are drawn around the central polar region and across the surrounding rings, with coastlines and regional outlines distributed within the circular projection. Chinese characters appear throughout the circular map, marking places and regions within the gridded space. Around the outer circumference are regularly spaced marks and small characters, indicating a measured circular frame. Additional blocks of Chinese explanatory text appear outside the circle, especially along the right side and lower edge of the detail. A diagonal rectangular strip containing Chinese text crosses the lower-right corner outside the main circular map. The image therefore presents a polar view of the world as part of Ricci’s larger cartographic and cosmographic apparatus, combining geographic outlines, coordinate structure, and textual explanation.
European mapmakers of the period did not agree on a single prime meridian. After reports of a line of no magnetic declination in the Atlantic, explorers and cosmographers searched, unsuccessfully, for a “natural” zero.Footnote 32 Many retained the Canaries, and specifically Ferro – long treated as Europe’s western edge; others preferred Cape Verde or the Azores, and some used the Tordesillas Treaty line as reference.Footnote 33 Ricci’s decision to keep a European-convention prime meridian in the Atlantic reflects both his sources and his aims: a fixed reference simplified comparison with ephemerides, tables, and other Jesuit maps, even as the visual field moved to meet Chinese expectations. In effect, pictorial centring and computational framing ran on separate tracks: China toward the middle of the sheet; the zero meridian at the margin.
A closely related Catholic experiment, by a Dominican rather than a Jesuit, came from Juan Cobo (ca. 1546–92) in Manila. In his Bian zhengjiao zhenchuan shilu 辨正教 真传实录 (Apology for the True Religion, 1593), Cobo inserted a Pacific-world image that rejects the Chinese square-earth schema and argues a round earth, but he does so through a Macrobian template (globe in profile divided into five climatic zones) rather than the Ortelius–Mercator lineage that informed Jesuit wall maps. The sheet carries a latitude scale and a few toponyms (e.g., Mexico, Japan, China, Malacca, Luzon), sets south at the top, and pointedly omits longitudes and any prime meridian, thus sidestepping the European hunt for a “natural” zero.Footnote 34
Whether Cobo saw Ricci’s early Chinese maps is unclear, but he was operating in the same late-sixteenth-century Manila-Macao-China information corridor and appears cognate with Jesuit aims: speak in Chinese to a Sinosphere readership, present a round world, and place China visually toward the middle as a presentational choice rather than a geodetic claim. Yet the contrast is instructive: Cobo’s approach mobilized a moral-climatic diagram to frame a Sinophone argument for Christian civility, while Ricci’s approach leaned on projection-driven cartography with extensive textual panels, integrating Chinese nomenclature and computational comparability with European ephemerides.
Jesuit world mapping in China continued well after Ricci’s death in 1610. Francesco Sambiasi (1582–1649), Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88) developed projects that explicitly engaged the Kunyu wanguo quantu.Footnote 35 Most influential was Aleni, who in the early 1620s produced a reduced world map, Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖 (Complete Map of the Ten-Thousand Countries), and in 1623 embedded it in his widely read geographical treatise, Zhifang waiji 職方外紀 (Description of the Lands Not Listed in the Imperial Registry). Compact in format (c. 49 × 24 cm) and carried by print rather than as a monumental wall map, Aleni’s version travelled easily through late-Ming networks, extending the reach of the Sino-Jesuit world picture beyond elite display to classroom and book culture.
Over the following years Giulio Aleni returned to his reduced world map in a series of essays. In his Xifang dawen 西方答問 (Questions and Answers about the West, 1637), a short dialogue with a Chinese interlocutor, he revisits China’s central placement and makes the pedagogical point that on a sphere any point can be pictured centrally.Footnote 36 Disputes over centre and periphery are matters of convention, not of nature – they reflect representational choices, not features of the earth itself. Asked, “Some say that China constitutes the exact centre of the world; I wonder whether this is so or not,” Aleni replies:
A thing must have sides before it can have a centre; if it has no sides, how can you locate its centre? The great earth is, actually, a spherical body; there is no point (on its surface) that cannot be considered a centre. Besides, people dwell in all eight directions, and all of them think of their own country as the centre, and of all the other countries as lying outside. If we speak of the centre of the world, that would be directly under the (celestial) equator, where the north and south polar stars are exactly on the horizon.Footnote 37
Elsewhere in Xifang dawen, the interlocutor returns to centrality via the name Zhonghua 中華 (Central Civilization).Footnote 38 Aleni draws a distinction between cultural and geographical centre: Zhonghua signals precedence in letters, music, and custom, not a natural terrestrial middle. As the dialogue shifts from geography to semantics, his tone turns cautious; he situates China’s centrality within an Asian frame and leaves Europe unnamed. The strategy matches Jesuit presentation more broadly in China: maps could adopt a local expectation by placing Europe at the visual periphery, while prefaces, captions, and classroom exposition worked to establish Europe as an equivalent centre in scholarly and religious terms.
While Aleni, and Sambiasi after him, stayed close to Ricci’s wall-map program, Ferdinand Verbiest introduced in 1674 a somewhat different depiction of the world in his Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖 (The Complete Map of the World). The map (figure 3) recast the world as paired hemispheres, adopting a format current in Europe since Rumold Mercator’s (1541–99) double-hemisphere map (1587) and widely used by Dutch atlas makers.Footnote 39 This hemispheric scheme (commonly stereographic) foregrounded the globe’s geometry rather than a single rectangular field. Verbiest marked zero degrees through Beijing, offering readers a local reference meridian as the visual cue, yet the hemispheric design withheld any natural “centre” of the terrestrial surface: authority was signalled by the meridian, not by occupying the middle of a sheet. In this way, despite departing from Ptolemaic geography, he aligned local address with universal computability, adjusting the reference for his audience while insisting on a global, spherical framework.Footnote 40
Verbiest’s Kunyu quantu, 1674. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 3 Long description
The image shows Ferdinand Verbiest’s 1674 Kunyu quantu, a Chinese-language double-hemisphere world map. Two large circular hemispheres dominate the center of the composition. The left hemisphere shows Europe, Africa, Asia, and surrounding seas, while the right hemisphere shows the Americas and the Pacific and Atlantic regions. Both hemispheres are overlaid with graticule lines and contain dense Chinese labels and annotations. The map combines geographic representation with extensive textual explanation. Large blocks of Chinese text appear within and around the hemispheres, including oval cartouches placed above and below the circular maps. Additional framed text panels run vertically along both outer sides of the image, forming a broad textual border around the mapped world. Decorative and didactic imagery appears within the map, including ships, animals, and sea creatures placed in oceanic and southern regions. The sheet is divided by visible vertical fold or panel lines, emphasizing that the printed map was produced and preserved in multiple sections. Overall, the image presents the world through a double-hemisphere cartographic structure embedded in a dense Chinese explanatory and cosmographic apparatus.
Even before Verbiest, a Beijing-referenced zero appeared in a Jesuit work printed in Europe. In Novus atlas Sinensis (A New Atlas of China, Amsterdam, 1655), the China missionary Martino Martini (1614–61) issued with the Amsterdam mapmaker Joan Blaeu (1596–1673) a suite of general and provincial maps of the Qing Empire.Footnote 41 On these China plates, the longitude scales are computed from a local zero at Beijing, while the atlas simultaneously retains its European house meridian in the programme as a whole (figure 4). In practice, positions could be read both from Beijing zero degrees and, as the same locations, in degrees east of the European prime used elsewhere in Blaeu’s atlases.Footnote 42 This two-track notation teaches translation between Chinese and European frames and makes the China suite interoperable with the rest of the atlas. As the first substantial European atlas devoted to China, the Novus atlas Sinensis thus offers an early printed example of deliberate cross-referencing of meridians for different publics.
Detail, “Imperii Sinarum nova descriptio” in Martini’s Novus atlas Sinensis 1655. Credit: Library of Congress.
Figure 4 Long description
The image shows a detail from Martino Martini’s Imperii Sinarum nova descriptio, published in the 1655 Novus atlas Sinensis. The map presents the Chinese empire and neighboring regions within a gridded geographic frame. China occupies the central part of the image, divided by colored boundary lines into provinces and regions. Rivers, coastlines, mountain ranges, and settlements are marked throughout the map. Surrounding areas are labeled in Latin, including Tibet to the west, Tartary to the north, Korea to the east, Japan further east, Ieso/Yezo in the upper right, and Taiwan/Formosa near the lower left. In the upper left is an elaborate title cartouche reading “Imperii Sinarum nova descriptio.” The cartouche is decorated with human figures, fruit, plants, and ornamental scrollwork. The map uses latitude and longitude lines, with numbers marked along the frame, and includes shaded mountain symbols and colored outlines to differentiate regions. The detail situates the Chinese empire within a broader East Asian and Inner Asian regional geography, rather than presenting China in isolation.
As the next section shows, Jesuit visualizations of the world produced in Europe often shifted from geographic mapping to emblematic and diagrammatic programmes designed to convey religious, historical, and political arguments in which centrality bore explicit symbolic weight.
Beyond Cartography: Jesuit Representations of the World in Europe
The Society of Jesus did not try to rival Europe’s commercial mapmakers.Footnote 43 Outside China they seldom issued stand-alone atlases or globes; their world images appear inside encyclopaedic books, emblem series, and time-and-space instruments produced above all in Rome. In China, Jesuits co-produced geographic world maps with local collaborators. In Europe, most clearly in the publications of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, the “world” is rendered through compilatory diagrams, emblems, and chrono-geographic devices that organize knowledge rather than chart terrain. Read alongside the China material, these European images reveal a different kind of meridian: not the geometric centre of a projection, but a coordinating reference that the Society anchors in Rome to align hours, jurisdictions, patrons, and memory.
These European world images speak in a universalist, providential idiom. Titles, captions, and mottoes often invoke scriptural topoi (for example, the sun-to-sun arc of Malachi 1:11 and Psalm 113:3) to cast the globe as a theatre of mission. They are more than pious decoration: as working instruments, they synchronize time across missions, situate authority within the Society, and address specific publics in Rome’s print world. The analysis that follows reads them functionally without presuming a propagandistic purpose, treating them as commemorative or administrative tools that coordinate people, time, and authority; at the same time, they register the political, scientific, and spiritual frameworks that prevailed within the Society.
In Europe, as in the China-produced maps, when Jesuit visuals hew to geographic conventions, a single “world centre” is structurally beside the point. The centennial Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu (Representation of the First Century of the Society of Jesus, 1640) includes paired double-hemisphere globes whose stereographic format disperses attention across two halves of the earth.Footnote 44 Rather than locating an epicentre, these plates stage omnipresence: the missions appear everywhere at once, a rhetoric of reach that suits the book’s commemorative program.
One of the Imago world maps bears the caption “The Society of Jesus spread all over the world according to the prophecy of Malachi” (Societas Iesu toto orbe diffusa implet prophetiam Malachiae), invoking Malachi 1:11, a verse the Society favoured to frame its missionary vision: “From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles” (Ab ortu solis usque ad occasum magnum est nomen meum in gentibus).Footnote 45 Yet the image withholds any terrestrial point of origin; the caption provides a scriptural and temporal horizon for reading the Society’s presence, east to west and day to day, without positing a geographic meridian. This accords with the Imago’s vision of Jesuit reach. By contrast, other Jesuit publications pose more pointed questions about authority, hierarchy, and the alignment of times and jurisdictions – about a functional centre. Those questions emerge most concretely in Rome, where Jesuit writers and designers develop instruments that make such ordering explicit.
If the Imago frames omnipresence, certain European Jesuit prints – especially those made in Rome – name a point of alignment. Here “centre” marks the reference used to synchronize hours, rank jurisdictions, and address patrons; it is tied to specific instruments and occasions, not a general rule.Footnote 46 This logic is clearest in the publications of Athanasius Kircher, perhaps the most famous Jesuit writer of the seventeenth century. For contemporaries, Kircher was an enigmatic figure: wide-ranging and occasionally prescient in matters of science, yet deeply attached to the arcane, to textual authority, and to scholastic tradition.Footnote 47 After arriving in Rome in 1633, fleeing the Thirty Years’ War, he spent the rest of his career there, moving rarely beyond the city and producing more than thirty lavishly illustrated volumes.Footnote 48 Rather than competing with commercial cartography, he folded representations of the world into books whose devices (trees, rosettes, and related plates) order knowledge in rhythm with the city’s ritual calendar. In these artefacts, Rome functions as the prime meridian – the reference that aligns Jesuit time and hierarchy – without implying a single method across other venues.
Kircher’s most explicit ordering device is a diagram (figure 5) titled “Horoscopium Catholicum Societatis Iesu” (Catholic Horoscope of the Society of Jesus) first published in Ars magna lucis et umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 1646).Footnote 49 Here “horoscope” is taken in its literal sense: an hour-indicator, and “catholicum” signals both universality and a Catholic audience. Cast as a branching olive tree, the plate lists Jesuit houses and missions while aligning their local times to noon in Rome; the graphic thus binds geography to administration (assistancies, jurisdictions) through synchronized hours. As Marcelo Aranda has noted, although the image is non-cartographic in form, it functions like a map by plotting relations across space and time.Footnote 50 In this reading, the “centre” it performs is operational: Rome is the reference meridian against which the Society’s global enterprise is coordinated.
“Horoscopium Catholicum Societatis Iesu” in Kircher’s Ars Magna lucis et umbrae, 1646. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Figure 5 Long description
The image shows Athanasius Kircher’s Horoscopium Catholicum Societatis Iesu of 1646. The composition is organized as a large tree whose trunk rises from Rome at the bottom center and branches upward and outward into labeled Jesuit provinces, missions, and regions. The trunk forms the central vertical axis of the image, while the branches and leaves carry many place names and institutional labels, including European provinces as well as extra-European mission fields such as Brazil, Japan, Canada, Tibet, Ethiopia, Chile, Paraguay, and other regions. At the base of the tree, a seated Jesuit figure appears near the label “Roma,” marking Rome as the root and organizing center of the Society. The branches extend from this Roman center into a wide global network. At the top, the title Horoscopium Catholicum Societatis Iesu appears across the composition, with a radiant emblem above the highest branches. The image is framed by several geometric panels containing radiating lines like sundial or hour-line diagrams. These panels include IHS emblems and small devotional figures in clouds, linking the institutional tree to light, time, and sacred orientation. The diagram combines several visual systems at once: a genealogical or institutional tree, a global map of Jesuit provinces and missions, and a horological structure based on radiating lines and measured time. Its dense labels and symmetrical branching pattern present the Society of Jesus as a worldwide body organized from Rome and extended across multiple continents.
The plate stages a global celebration. Its olive-tree motif is keyed by the phrase sicut oliva fructifera in domo Dei (“like a thriving olive tree in the house of the lord”), and the multilingual line from Psalm 113:3 reprises Malachi’s east-to-west horizon. Framed within Ars magna, a book about light and optics, the imagery also invites a spiritual reading: mission appears as the diffusion of light across the day – faith radiating from sunrise to sunset. In this commemorative setting, the cues point to an internal audience and a self-affirming rhetoric of mission. Honorific intent is clear; an outward persuasive role is much harder to document, and beyond the 1671 reissue, direct reception evidence is scant. The Horoscopium is best read as a Roman instrument that couples timekeeping to institutional memory: an identity device that orders the Society’s global presence around a Roman meridian.
The sheet combines both Baroque spectacle and practical use. Kircher spells out its operation: place the plate in direct light, align it to the stated reference, set small pins at the marked points, and read the hour by the moving shadow. As an emblem, the branching canopy echoes the IHS monogram, folding the Society’s name into a figure of growth.Footnote 51 What it depicts is administration in time: distant houses marking the same hours, submitting to the same hierarchy, and operating within a shared jurisdictional map. Rome functions as the reference point – the meridian and the chain of command – that aligns and legitimizes those concurrent activities.
The choice of a tree rather than a spherical projection changes what “centre” can mean. Spherical maps, like the China plates, disperse any single epicentre; the tree, by contrast, is an ordering diagram that makes hierarchy and dependence visible. In this sheet the locus of coordination sits at the trunk and root junction, where Rome appears as the reference from which branches radiate and are read for time. The adjacent vignette of founding figure Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) in prayer reinforces the institutional reading without turning it into a universal rule: in this emblematic instrument, Rome functions as the coordinating node by which the Society’s global hours and jurisdictions are aligned.
Read administratively, the branches visualize the five Jesuit assistancies (Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian) and bring dispersed sites into operational proximity.Footnote 52 The arcs above place-names mark local hours as offsets from noon in Rome, so Granada, Mexico, and Manila can be “read” together because they belong to the same assistancy rather than because they are geographically close. The effect is an ordering of governance and time, not of space. Notably, Iberian crowns appear in the network but do not occupy the graphic’s coordinating locus; that role is reserved for the Roman trunk where hours and jurisdictions are synchronized.
The central vertical axis from the trunk foregrounds the Italian and German assistancies, visually tying the Roman headquarters to Habsburg lands. The two-headed eagle crowning the canopy signals imperial protection, and the dedicatory setting makes Ferdinand III, the Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1637–57) legible as a principal patron of Kircher and the Society. This is not a general political statement; it’s a targeted dedication that maps the Society’s hierarchy onto the emperor’s active patronage.
Patronage, however, was not fixed. In the 1671 reissue of Ars magna printed in Amsterdam by Janssonius van Waesberge (1616–81), the dedication shifts to Johann Friedrich von Waldstein (1642–94), the future archbishop of Prague. In the Horoscopium, the Habsburg arms disappear, but the Roman time reference remains. Rome still anchors the tree as the point from which local offsets are read. Beneath it Kircher adds a rosette with twenty-four petals (indicating countries and cities), a device for converting local hours against a single reference (figure 6). Rome thus continues to function as the Society’s operational meridian for global timekeeping, even as external sponsors and print venues change.Footnote 53
Detail, “Horoscopium Catholicum Societatis Iesu”, in Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 1671. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 6 Long description
The image shows a circular detail from the 1671 version of Athanasius Kircher’s Horoscopium Catholicum. The diagram is organized as a wheel. At the center is a small rosette, from which narrow wedge-shaped compartments radiate outward toward an outer circular frame. Each compartment contains Latin place names or regional labels, including Rome, Goa, Lima, Paraguay, Brazil, Japan, Tibet, Canada, Mexico, and other Jesuit provinces, cities, and mission regions. Around the outer edge of the circle is a ring divided into twelve sections, marked with Roman numerals I through XII. These numerals give the wheel a horological structure, linking the geographical labels inside the circle to a system of hours. The place names are arranged radially, so that the diagram reads both as a circular time device and as a compressed map of Jesuit institutional geography. Surrounding fragments of Latin text from the printed page are visible outside the wheel. The detail therefore presents the Jesuit world through a circular arrangement of places, provinces, and missions organized by the logic of time, with Rome included among the named locations in the lower part of the wheel.
Kircher’s rosette predates the Horoscopium Catholicum. A twenty-four-petal time-converter appears already in Magnes sive de arte magnetica (The Magnet, or the Magnetic Art, 1641) under the title “Horoscopium universale magneticum quo spectare licet quota ubilibet hora per orbem” (Universal Magnetic Horoscope, by which one may see the hour anywhere in the world). It reappears in Ars magna lucis et umbrae, paired with a Northern Hemisphere “Horoscopium geographicum sciatericum” (Geographic Sundial Horoscope).Footnote 54 Both sheets are practical tools for reading local time by shadow, but they enact different reference logics. The geographic sundial follows learned convention (a Ptolemaic/Ferro-Canaries prime with a separate noon point on the sphere), presenting a centreless globe whose zero meridian is scholarly rather than institutional. The rosette, by contrast, names Rome as the reference and converts all other hours as offsets from the Roman meridian – an internal, operational alignment rather than a geographic claim about the earth.
Kircher’s own instruction is explicit: “When the sun shines and the sundial is positioned, apply the Roman meridian beneath the shadow of the stylus, and the hourly ring will indicate what time it is in all places.”Footnote 55 The imperative underscores use; this is a conversion device that synchronizes dispersed houses to a single administrative noon. Placed side by side, the sheets clarify the Jesuit distinction at issue. In geographic discourse, projection presumes no privileged terrestrial point; in symbolic or administrative discourse, a functional meridian can be designated to coordinate people, hours, and authority. In Kircher’s Roman books that meridian is typically Rome, not as a timeless essence, but as a working reference chosen for the occasion, the audience, and the institution.
Kircher also issued a conventional world map – his landmark chart of ocean currents (figure 7) – published in Mundus subterraneus (The Subterranean World, 1665).Footnote 56 This map follows contemporary cartographic practice in projection and adopts a prime meridian at the Canaries/Ferro, close to the Ricci-era convention. Set beside the tree and the rosette, the categories stay clear: when Kircher works as a geographer, “centre” is governed by projection and scholarly convention; when he compiles institutional instruments, Rome is named as the coordinating reference.
“Tabula geographico-hydrographica” in Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus, 1665. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 7 Long description
The image shows Athanasius Kircher’s 1665 Tabula geographico-hydrographica, a rectangular world map concerned with the movement and structure of the world’s oceans. The title at the top identifies the map as showing ocean motion, currents, abysses, and volcanic mountains across the globe. The map is framed by latitude and longitude markings and presents the world in a continuous rectangular projection. The continents and large landmasses are labeled in Latin, including Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America, and Terra Australis Incognita along the bottom. Major seas and oceans are also labeled, including the Atlantic, the Pacific or “Mare del Zur,” and other oceanic regions. The oceans are filled with dense engraved linework that forms broad flowing patterns, indicating the movement of currents across and between ocean basins. Small symbols and marks appear across the map to indicate abysses and volcanic mountains, as explained in the title area. Some volcanic mountains are drawn on land and near coasts, while circular or lettered marks appear in the seas. Rivers, coastlines, islands, and mountain forms are also included. The map presents the globe as an interconnected hydrographic and subterranean system, linking oceans, currents, abysses, landmasses, and volcanic activity within a single global frame.
Rome was not just a Catholic crossroads; for the Jesuits it was the nerve centre that anchored their institutional geography. It was the seat of the Superior General, the Society’s executive centre, and of the curial offices that coordinated personnel, correspondence, permissions, and finance across assistancies and provinces. The city also housed the Collegio Romano, the flagship teaching and research institution where Jesuits trained (including many future missionaries) and where Kircher held the mathematics chair. Around these nodes, a dense ritual and commemorative calendar (feast days, jubilees, canonizations) structured time, while Rome’s printers and engravers supplied a steady stream of programmatic volumes and images. Kircher’s devices are calibrated to those circuits: they couple timekeeping to institutional memory and are best read as Roman tools for internal coordination and commemoration, not as claims that the globe itself possesses a fixed Catholic centre.
A different mode of ordering appears in Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (The Egyptian Oedipus, 1652–54), where a sunflower diagram titled “Speculum Cabalae mysticae” (Mirror of the Mystical Kabbalah) arrays seventy-two divine names across languages to stage a linguistic world (figure 8).Footnote 57 In Kabbalistic traditions the number carries theurgical and magical weight;Footnote 58 Kircher reframes it as a universal catalogue by mapping names to the seventy-two “nations” that symbolically comprise humanity. The list reaches well beyond the classical world to peoples and places of early modern expansion – Mexico, California, Canada, the Philippines, Japan, Ethiopia – so that salvation history can be read across tongues rather than confined to a single sacred geography.Footnote 59 In this display, “centre” is not a place on the sphere but a node of meaning that organizes languages toward revelation.
Detail, “Speculum Cabalae mysticae” in Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652–54. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 8 Long description
The image shows a detail from the “Speculum Cabalae Mysticae” in Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus. The composition is organized around a central Christ-like figure standing within a star-shaped form. Around the figure are Hebrew words and symbols, including the divine name in Hebrew characters below the figure. The central star is surrounded by multiple concentric rings divided into narrow radial compartments. Each ring contains a different layer of text. Some compartments contain Hebrew letters or numerals; others contain Latin labels, place names, ethnonyms, languages, or divine names in several languages. In the outer rings, examples include names for God such as Deus, Dios, Dieu, Gott, and God, alongside labels for peoples or languages such as Latini, Graeci, Hispani, Itali, Galli, Germani, Poloni, Mosci, and others. Other compartments contain names of regions and peoples, including Arabs, Syrians, Chaldaeans, Egyptians, Persians, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, and Canadians. The outer edge of the diagram is formed by a numbered circular band, with alternating dark triangular rays and lighter wavy rays extending outward. The arrangement gives the image the appearance of a radiating wheel or sunburst. The diagram brings together Hebrew, Latin, and other linguistic materials in a layered circular structure, presenting sacred names, peoples, languages, and regions as part of a universalizing cabalistic and comparative system.
At the core, a medallion shows Jesus above the Society’s IHS monogram, deliberately so: the device names both Christ and the Jesuits by design, echoing the order’s very title and its programmatic self-association with Jesus. Kircher forms the middle horizontal stroke of the H from the pentagrammaton (Yahshuah, יהשוה) and sets four Hebrew biblical phrases within the remaining open-face strokes of I-H-S, signifying divine names.Footnote 60 The visual grammar binds Christology, the Jesuit emblem, and biblical language into a single focal point for reading the world.
This differs from the tree and the rosette in both device and aim. The tree (Horoscopium Catholicum) orders hours and ranks, naming Rome as the reference for synchronizing Jesuit time and hierarchy. The rosette converts local hours against a single Roman noon, operationalizing coordination across houses and missions. The sunflower orders languages and revelation, recentring meaning on Christ – and, by the same sign, on the Society of Jesus as an instrument of salvation – across both the old, well-known nations and the newly encountered places and tongues. All three move beyond cartography by turning the “world” into a clock, a converter, or a list, and each chooses a centre for what it must coordinate – time, jurisdiction, or language – rather than for where it sits on the globe.
Set against Kircher’s conventional world chart of ocean currents, which follows projection norms and a Ferro/Canaries prime close to Ricci’s convention, the contrast remains clear: when Jesuits work as geographers, “centre” follows projection and scholarly convention and is largely beside the point; when they work with compilatory, administrative, or theological instruments, “centre” is declared and functional, whether through Rome for time and governance, or Christ with Hebrew as scriptural pivot, for language and revelation.
Conclusion
In the seventeenth century, as Europeans and non-Europeans grappled with an expanding world of routes, reports, and regimes of knowledge, “centre” functioned less as a fixed location than as a way to make the world intelligible. Exact reference lines – a prime meridian or fixed zero – were sometimes required for navigation, ephemerides, and computation. Yet Jesuit publications offer a focused case of another approach: choosing a reference that coordinates space, time, and meaning through images and instruments rather than insisting on a single middle of the earth.
This article has traced how Jesuit media recast “centre” from cartographic point to coordinating device. Instead of one geodetic middle, authors selected points of alignment suited to what their images needed to coordinate: hours, jurisdictions, languages, devotion. This may be termed the Jesuit meridian: a declared or implied reference that renders dispersed action commensurable across space and time.
Jesuit teaching operated within a Ptolemaic cosmology that emphasized a spherical earth without fixing a terrestrial centre. That openness permitted strategic choices about where a centre should appear. In China, cartographic centres could be shifted toward Asia to meet local conventions without relinquishing universal claims, reflecting confidence that scientific cosmology and Christian universalism could coexist. In Europe, non-geographic programmes foregrounded symbolic centrality, aligning the order of the world with institutional and devotional authority and, at times, identifying the Society itself – by association with Rome, by linguistic programmes, or by Christological imagery – as focal.
Read across venues and genres, three patterns emerge. In projection-driven cartography (the China maps), centre follows mapping convention and can shift on the sheet without claiming a “natural” middle. In Roman administrative instruments (Kircher’s tree and rosette), centre is named as Rome to synchronize timekeeping and rank. In theological-linguistic diagrams (the sunflower), the focal point is Christ and the IHS monogram, with Hebrew as a scriptural key. Each medium coordinates something different: translation between publics, governance in time, or meaning across tongues.
Two implications follow. First, this clarifies how Jesuit universality operated: the order could appear everywhere at once without fastening the world to one spot because it relied on references that made distant houses, hours, and languages work together. Second, it underscores plurality within the order: workshops and authors solved different problems for different publics, so answers to the “world centre” question vary by purpose and medium. “Jesuit meridian” names that fluid practice of choosing, not presuming, a centre.
Seen together, these world images treat centrality as context-made – by medium, audience, and occasion. None claims a timeless universal middle; each installs a practical one. Jesuit universality thus appears not as a single fixed centre but as the skilled coordination of space, time, and meaning: a cartographic centre when maps require it, a Roman reference when institutions must align, and – in Kircher’s sunflower – a Christological focus that organizes names and languages. The point is not one rule, but centres that hold for their moment.
Acknowledgements
This work originated at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at Ben-Gurion University and was supported, at a later stage, by the Department of History at Harvard University and the Mandel Scholion Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and to Oded Rabinovitch for commenting on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to librarian Mark Mir and to the staff of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at Boston College for their help throughout this research.
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