The territory on the map is divided politically by the use of color. The colors are most prevalent along the borders between regions, forming thick lines in order to distinguish between said regions. The interior of each region is a much lighter shade of the color that appears on its borders. The most prominent color that appears is yellow, with it serving to delineate the political territory of the Duchy of Prussia as it existed in the late 16th to early 17th century. Along with color, larger regions of the map are separated through italic labels, which are consistent in size and type across the map. In the top right of the map, for instance, the region in green is labeled ‘Samogitiæ Pars.’ On the eastern edge of the map, with pink borders in the larger region labeled ‘Lituaniae Pars.’ This corresponds with the location of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a kingdom which Prussia was a vassal of at the time.

Zooming in on some of the smaller pictorial details of the map, some cities are depicted as small hollow circles each with a label naming the cities. Other cities are depicted with small illustrations of towers and castles. It is unclear from any description whether the cities illustrated with towers and castles are more important than the cities with hollow circles. There is also natural geography on the map that fills much of the actual space: mountains are brown and mostly triangular shaped, rivers are blue and squiggly lines varying in degrees of thickness, forests are in green with small illustrations of trees, and lakes are circular shaped and a richer shade of blue than the ocean.

This map of Prussia was created by Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) and published posthumously by Jodocus Hondius in the 1611 version of Mercator’s Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes. Mercator was a 16th century cosmographer who introduced the Mercator projection, a way of mapping the world that we still use today. Mercator also worked extensively on collecting and compiling maps for books, such as his Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura, which was first published in 1595. Notably, this would be the first book of maps to have the word ‘atlas’ in its title, and would serve as the inspiration and model for many future atlases going forward. Gerard Mercator died in 1594 and his son Rumold Mercator took over the publishing of his father’s works until his own death in 1599. At this point, there were no members of Mercator’s family left who wanted to continue his work, and they sold his collection to other cartographers. The collection eventually found its way into the hands of Jodocus Hondius, a Dutch and Flemish engraver and cartographer, who updated the atlas in 1611 and added new maps previously in Mercator’s collection, such as this one of Prussia.

Many of the atlases that were published during this period at the end of the 16th to 17th centuries were unique from previous medieval maps in the fact that they emphasized political boundaries and a division of territory. Previously, maps had mainly focused on natural geography, with mountains and rivers taking up much of the space instead of arbitrary borders. This map of Prussia is interesting, then, with how it includes both natural geography and political borders. Given that this was still relatively early in the tradition of depicting political borders in color (some of the first maps we see with colored political borders are in the 1570 Ortelius atlas), the map can be interpreted as being representative of a transitional period in mapping between a medieval world where borders were less important and the early modern era where they were far more important in the European psyche.

In addition, it is important to note in any study and usage of this map that it is making a political statement in where it draws the borders and how it labels the regions. Looking at other maps of Prussia and the area around Brandenburg in our “Mapping the World Before Mercator (2023)” collection will reveal that there are differences in how the borders are being represented. Further analysis of why the borders are drawn where they are is only possible if we ask questions like who the mapmaker is and what perspective they are coming from. 

(Nicholas Spezia-Shwiff '24) (Hali'a Buchal '25)

The six illustrations (“rotarum”) are illuminated in red, yellow, and blue ink. They include a 12-month calendar, a depiction of the cosmos, and diagrams of the seasons and climate zones. In the cosmological diagram, the Earth– a flat circle labeled “Terra”--  is shown to be at the center of the universe, surrounded by the Sun, Moon, and various planets, which move around the earth in circular orbits of increasing size. In the seasonal diagram, a circle representing the year is divided into labeled sections by a series of overlapping arcs. 

The five climate zones are represented by five circles within the larger circle of the earth. The earth is oriented northeast and labeled with the cardinal directions.  The zones, labeled “first” to “fifth", begin in the north and continue clockwise around the world: the first and fifth zones are cold and uninhabitable, the second and fourth zones are habitable, and the third zone is hot and uninhabitable. These climate zones touch at the edges, but do not overlap. The space in the center of the diagram is left blank.

De natura rerum was created by Saint Isidore of Seville, an author from Visigothic Spain. Isidore is most famous for his Etymologies, an encyclopedia of knowledge from the ancient world. He is also known for popularizing the circular representation of the world that is shown in De natura rerum. Isidore dedicated De natura rerum to Sisebut, a Visigothic king who ruled from 612 to 620 and is thought to have commissioned the book from Isidore. A poem about astronomy composed by Sisebut is included at the end of the manuscript. (Clara Fields 2027)