LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

Similar and Differing – Mapping the Lower Danube... 605
hungary, transsylvania, poland many decades before. the first regional
descriptions were at their time appreciated as ‘modern’ Cosmographies,
and to each regional description – if possible – a map was added. 14 the
new genre persisted to flourish for well over one hundred years, having
started as a special sort of ‘Court-historiography’ practised by scientists
on a sovereign’s command. It came up in Vienna, and developed mainly
under the reigns of Ferdinand I st , Maximilian II nd and rudolph II nd serving
multifunctional purposes. Among them were territorial exploration and
expansion, military objectives 15 , and not least, sheer curiosity. Consequently,
regional and over-view maps were asked for and began to be delineated by
special craftsmen in modern printing offices – the future cartographers.
Maps presenting Central europe, the lower Danube region, the regions
bordering on the ottoman empire achieved great circulation, and among
the oldest ones are maps of hungary, transylvania (by lazarus-tannstetter
1528, lacius 1552/56, etc.), poland, and even Valachia and Moldavia. yet,
the latter received no regional map, remaining an inadequate appendix in
the east as Cantemir himself remarked disdainfully. the rendering of names
and positioning of places, rivers, mountains remained rather inappropriate
with the over-view maps, especially regarding less known boarder regions
of europe in the north and east. 16
14 An imaginary line could be drawn from the early German Cosmographies of e.g.
Sebastian Münster: Cosmographia. Beschreibung aller Lender (many editions since the
Basel 1540 one, till 1578) to e.g. Johan Blaeu: Le Grand Atlas ou Cosmographie Blaviane.
Amsterdam 1663 (Facsimile as Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Amsterdam 1967) to envisage
the persistance of the new genre.
15 STROHMEYER, Arno: Geschichtsbilder und Kulturtransfer. Die
hofhistoriographie in Wien im zeitalter des humanismus als rezipient und Multiplikator.
In: Metropolen und Kulturtransfer im 15,/16. Jahrhundert. prag – Krakau – Danzig –
Wien. ed. lAnGer, Andrea – MICHELS, Georg. Stuttgart 2001, 65-84, here 87 f., 68, 72;
BRUNNER, Kurt: Gedruckte Regionalkarten des 17./16. Jahrhunderts. Budapest 2006.
16 See e.g. as a very brief selection: Johannes honterus’s map of “Dacia” from his
Rudimenta Cosmographica. Kronstadt [Braşov] 1542 in Appendix no 7; de jode’s map
of the lower Danube from 1578 (Appendix n o 8) and roughly the same region, printed
ca. 70 years later in BLAEU’s collection of 1663: le Grand Atlas ou Cosmographie
Blaviane. Second volume de la Geographie Blaviane, Sixieme livre de l’europe: Dace,
where Valaquie (map n o 41, p. 9-10) and Moldavie et Bassarabie (p. 11-13) get the
same sort of regional description, but the overview regional map titled Walachia, Servia
Bvlgaria, Romania (map n o 44, pp 9v and 10r) taken from Mercator is totally inadequate.
equally “absurd and wrong” (Cantemir) are older maps of the same region by Gottfried
Jacob haupt, Gerard and leonard Valck, or Johann Matthias haas assembled in Johann
Baptist HOMANN’s Atlas Germaniae Specuialis (maps n o 132, 133, 140, 141). nürnberg
1716/24, 1731, 1735, an extract from his Atlas Novus (maps n o 52, 61). nürnberg 1738.