In 1459, a seven-foot diameter map of the world was completed by a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro. His astonishing mappamundi is the oldest and most complete Medieval map to survive into modernity, and Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small contends that its existence took map-making from a religious and myth-based practice to a secular science. Fra Mauro's map showed that a ship could circumnavigate Africa, and that the Indian "Sea" was an ocean—two realizations that helped international trade to expand across the globe.