The mapmakers engaged in universal cartography in the fifteenth century were often learned humanists who provided subtle interpretations of highly diverse sources, ranging from classical Greek and Latin authors to written and oral accounts by merchants, travelers, diplomats, and ship pilots, as well as graphic sources consisting of nautical and Ptolemaic maps. Universal cartography thus developed primarily from careful textual analysis and comparison of geographic information rather than from the measurement of distances, typically expressed in days of travel or miles. This explains why it was in a small humanist school—the Gymnasium Vosagensis, founded in the early sixteenth century at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in Lorraine—that the cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470-ca. 1520) and the humanist and poet Matthias Ringmann (1482-1511) completed the Cosmographiae introductio and the large expanded Ptolemaic map known as Universalis Cosmographia in 1507. These works were intended to pave the way for a new edition of Ptolemy's Geography, which would correct the Latin translation by Giacomo da Scarperia (Jacobus Angelus) (ca. 1360-1410 or 1411) in the previous century, but also incorporate the latest geographic discoveries achieved under the aegis of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns beyond the Ptolemaic oikumene (inhabited world).