Charting names at sea: Nautical charts, toponymic transmission and the historical production of Adriatic space, 1300–1824

Nautical charts did not merely record the geographical names of Adriatic coasts and islands: they selected, ranked and transmitted them. This article asks how that process worked between the fourteenth century and the early nineteenth. The corpus comprises fifty-seven charts on which the Adriatic occupies the entire map field, from Vesconte’s chart of 1318 to the Carta di cabotaggio del Mare Adriatico (1822–1824), with seven further documents examined for comparison. Combining historical geography, the history of cartography and onomastics, it treats each name as a situated cartographic sign with a linguistic form, a graphic rank and a line of descent, and concentrates on the eastern Adriatic, whose islands and inlets supplied the waypoints of cabotage. Three conclusions follow: the Adriatic toponymic canon is a functional residue of cabotage rather than of settlement hierarchy; Venetian and Italianate forms spread through workshop copying, navigational convention and commercial circulation rather than political predominance alone; and hydrographic survey altered the scale, setting and method of naming rather than its epistemology.