Destombes, Marcel. 1937. “Lopo Homem’s Atlas of 1519.” The Geographical Journal 90 (5): 460. https://doi.org/10.2307/1787974.
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. “Maps and Exploration in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” In The History of Cartography, vol. 3, part 1, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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)
]]>Fear, Andrew. Putting the Pieces Back Together: Isidore and De Natura Rerum. In Isidore of Seville and his Reception in the Early Middle Ages. Edited by Jamie Wood and Andrew Fear. Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
Isidore, Calvin B Kendall, and Faith Wallis. On the Nature of Things. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Woodward, David. Medieval Mappaemundi. In The History of Cartography vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, 286-370. Edited by J. B. Harley, David Woodward. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. https://press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V1/Volume1.html
Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Manuscript - Reg.lat.255.
Astengo, Corradino. “The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean.” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, part 1, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
]]>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)
]]>Egmond, Marco van. “The 'Atlas' by Mercator and Hondius.” Utrecht University, April 25, 2022. https://www.uu.nl/en/special-collections/collections/maps-and-atlases/world-maps-and-atlases/the-atlas-by-mercator-and-hondius.
Harley, J. B., David Woodward, Mark S. Monmonier, and Mary Sponberg Pedley. The History of Cartography. Edited by J. B. (John Brian) Harley, David Woodward, Mark S. Monmonier, and Mary Sponberg Pedley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Kagan, Richard L., and Benjamin Schmidt. “Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography.” History of Cartography, vol. 3. https://press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V3_Pt1/Volume3_Part1.html.
Lukosevicius, Viktoras. “Lithuania Minor and Prussia on the Old Maps (1525-1808).” Geodesy and Cartography (Vilnius) 39, no. 1 (2013): 23–39. https://doi.org/10.3846/20296991.2013.786872.
Taylor, Andrew. The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionized Geography. New York, NY: Walker & Co., 2004.
Like many city views, the main urban area is shown as a bird’s eye view. From above the ground, we see that the city is located on a mountain, with the higher points of the mountain located on the back of the landscape. This creates the effect of going down the mountain as the eyes of the observer travel down the page. On the back of the landscape, the map has the first and smallest city, it is walled, and its only distinctive feature is a church that is also the tallest building of this city. To the right, on a slightly taller rock formation, there is another city built by a river that flows downhill all the way down to the bottom edge of the map. This city is also small in size, and it has no notable features.
Downhill and to the left of the city, below the biggest rock formation of the map, there is the biggest city of the map. This city consists of a collection of towers and houses, and like the rest of the cities in the map, it seems to be walled, creating a distinction between nature and city. This city is also built by the previously mentioned river. At the bottom of the page, there is a fourth, medium-sized city, also built by the river, and also walled. To the right of this city, there is a group of trees that indicate a forest.
As mentioned before, this map comes from the Nuremberg Chronicle, which was written by Hartmann Schedel. The Nuremberg Chronicle was a fifteenth century book, commissioned by Nuremberg merchants Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister. The book described the universal history of the Christian world. It was written by humanist and physician Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514) and published by Anton Koberger in 1493. It was first ordered to be published in Latin with an order for German text following about a year later. It was somewhat of a “best-seller” at the time, with over 2,500 copies printed.
The chronicle is notable because of its inclusion of printed images alongside or embedded within the text, something virtually unheard of before. All images are created from woodcuts, images carved into a block of wood in negative and then covered with ink and then stamped onto the page. Woodcuts were made in the workshops of Michael Wolgemut, Wilhelm Pleydewurff, and Hieronymus Münzer. Some editions of the Nuremberg Chronicle had their plates hand colored by local German artists.
(Louisa Grader '24), (Alejandro González A '24)
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