Jehuda Cresques

Origins and early life

Jehuda Cresques — Jafudà, in the Catalan of his island — was born in Palma de Mallorca around 1360, the son of the Jewish cartographer Cresques Abraham, known to history as Abraham Cresques, who has his own fiche here, and of Setaddar; he was born and raised a Jew in the call, the Jewish quarter of Palma, and this fiche states plainly what happened in 1391: in the massacres that swept the Jewish quarters of Spain that summer, and reached Mallorca in August, he was baptized under duress as Jaume Ribes, the name under which the royal accounts of Aragon record him for the rest of his life.

Work and career

Before that he had worked in his father's workshop, the finest school of map-making in the Mediterranean, and is credited by most scholars with a share in the Catalan Atlas of 1375, the great world map that Peter IV of Aragon commissioned as a gift for the king of France and that shows, on six leaves of vellum, everything the fourteenth century knew of the earth from the Atlantic to China. The king called him 'lo jueu buscoler', the Jew who makes compasses, and after his father's death in 1387 he continued alone as master of maps and instruments to John I and Martin I, who protected him and ordered the officials of Mallorca to leave him in peace.

He moved to Barcelona in 1394 and worked there under the crown's protection. A Portuguese tradition, repeated for centuries, identified him with 'Mestre Jacome de Malhorca', the map-maker Prince Henry the Navigator brought to Sagres to teach the Portuguese, and made him the father of the Portuguese discoveries; this fiche says as plainly that modern historians consider the identification doubtful, and that the documents place him in Barcelona until about 1410, when he disappears from the record.