Behaim's globe, Nuremberg 1492
Martin Behaim was a Nuremberg merchant who spent several years in Portugal in the 1480s, where he moved among the pilots and astronomers who worked for the crown. When he came home, the city council commissioned him to make a globe. He finished it in 1492, and it is now the oldest terrestrial globe known to survive.
The globe is about half a metre across and was built up in layers over a mould. The map on its surface was painted by Georg Glockendon, an illuminator, from Behaim's drawings. Behaim called it an Erdapfel, an earth apple, and the name stuck.
What it shows
Behaim's geography follows Ptolemy and Marco Polo, with Portuguese additions along the coast of Africa. Between Europe and Asia he left a single open ocean, with the island of Cipangu, Japan, well out in the middle of it. The globe was finished before news of Columbus's voyage could reach Nuremberg, so there is no America on it.
The Atlantic is too narrow and Asia too wide, errors that many scholars of the time shared and that helped make a westward route to Asia look short. The globe is kept in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.