Abstract
The globalization born with the geographical discoveries, with the openness of the European world to new spaces, had some specific characteristics. They can be found both in cartography and in the philosophical reflection. In this relationship and in its consequences, a very important role was given by the protestant Reformation, able to give a very strong stimulus to the centrifugal movements, both ideal and factual, started with the Columbus discovery. In cartography the divine elements – present before in the catholic-medieval maps – were lost, as the result of the geographical discoveries and of the born of the realism within the Reformed vision and of the iconoclasty. The elements can be seen as parts of what in this article will be included in the formula of the cartographic secularization, parallel to the new «global linear thinking»