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Map historians have long thought that their field of study has an exceptional origin, springing into life fully-fledged in Paris in the 1840s when the Frenchman Edme-François Jomard and the Portuguese visconde de Santarém created large collections of facsimiles of medieval and Renaissance maps and then squabbled over credit for creating the ‘history of cartography’. This essay revises the story by adducing three earlier and much smaller collections by the Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, the Spaniard Ramón de la Sagra, and the French couple Xavier and Adèle Hommaire de Hell. The existence of these collections has hitherto been obscured by common bibliographical practices. This essay analyses the structure and design of all these facsimile collections and reads them in concert with their accompanying texts to reveal the emergence in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s of a scholarly concern for the comparative study of early maps. Together, these scholars wove existing threads of scholarship in the history of geography and discovery into a new field of study. The history of cartography thus possesses a communal and Western European rather than an idiosyncratic and national origin.
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