ANTILIA or ANTILLA or Island of the Seven Cities (Portuguese Isla das Sete Cidades), a legendary island in the At lantic ocean. The oldest etymology (1455) connects it with Plato's Atlantis (q.v.), others with Latin anterior (i.e., the island that is reached "before" Cipango), or with the Jezirat al Tennyn, "Drag on's Isle," of Arab geographers. Antilia is marked in an anony mous map, dated 1424, in the grand-ducal library at Weimar; in the maps of the Genoese B. Beccario (1435), and of the Venetian Andrea Bianco (1436), and again in 1455 and 1476. In most of these it is accompanied by smaller insular de novo repertae, "newly discovered islands," Royllo, St. Atanagio and Tanmar. The Flor entine Paul Toscanelli, in letters to Columbus and the Portuguese court (1474), takes Antilia as the principal landmark for meas uring the distance between Lisbon and the Island of Cipango or Zipangu (Japan). On the globe made at Nuremberg in 1492 (see MAP : History) the geographer Martin Behaim relates that in a misprint for 714—after the Moors had con quered Spain and Portugal, the island of Antilia or "Septe Cidade" was colonized by Christian refugees under the archbishop of Oporto and six bishops, and that a Spanish vessel sighted the island in 1414. In older Portuguese tradition each leader founded and ruled a city, free from the disorders of less Utopian states. Later Portuguese tradition localized Antilia in the largest of the Azores, St. Michael's. This legend may commemorate some im perfectly recorded discovery or may embody the idea of a west ern elysium like the Isles of the Blest, or Fortunate Islands. ANTILLES, a term of obscure origin, now employed, espe cially by foreign writers, as synonymous with "West India Islands." It dates traditionally from a period anterior to the discovery of the New World by European navigators, being the name assigned to semi-mythical lands indicated in mediaeval charts sometimes as an archipelago, sometimes as a continent of varying size, uncertainly located in mid-ocean between the Cana ries and India. It came to be identified with the lands discovered by Columbus. When these were found to consist of a vast archipelago, Antilia assumed its present plural form Antilles, which was applied to this whole group.
A distinction is made between the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti-San Domingo and Porto Rico) and the Lesser Antilles, comprising the rest of the islands.