Terra Brasilis, Atlas Miller

The Miller Atlas, also known as Lopo Homem-Reineis Atlas, is a richly illustrated Portuguese atlas dated from 1519, including a dozen charts. It is a joint work of the cartographers Lopo Homem, Pedro Reinel and Jorge Reinel, and illustrated by miniaturist António de Holanda. The regions represented are the North Atlantic Ocean, Northern Europe, the Azores Archipelago, Madagascar, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, China Sea, the Moluccas, Brazil and the Mediterranean Sea. It was acquired in 1897 for the National Library of France by the librarian Bénigne Emmanuel Clement Miller, hence the name Miller Atlas.

It stands out for details of the map 'Terra Brasilis', less than twenty years after the landing of Pedro Álvares Cabral. It is thought to have been an offering from King Manuel I of Portugal to Francis I of France. The charts included and its authoring raised great controversy among scholars, particularly a world map closed to the Pacific Ocean, which has been interpreted as an attempt to dissuade the circumnavigation that Ferdinand Magellan then prepared in Seville, in the court of Charles I of Spain.