Bohemia

Title

Bohemia

Description

Map shows entire Bohemia in the Czech Republic with title cartouche and coat of arms.

ca. 1600

Artist

Bussemacher (1580-1613)

Johann Bussemacher (fl. c.1580 – 1613) was a German engraver and publisher. He issued and printed mainly maps from Matthias Quad (1557 – 1613) . From about 1587 until 1604 Matthias Quad lived in Cologne, where he worked as a copper engraver and writer of historico-geographical texts. For atlases, published from 1592 by Johann Bussemacher (worked about 1580-1613) in Cologne, he created many copper engravings as well as the texts in German.

Historical Description

Bohemia is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech lands in the present-day Czech Republic. In a broader meaning, Bohemia sometimes refers to the entire Czech territory, including Moravia and Czech Silesia, especially in a historical context, such as the Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by Bohemian kings. Bohemia was a duchy of Great Moravia, later an independent principality, a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire, and subsequently a part of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian Empire. After World War I and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state, Bohemia became a part of Czechoslovakia. Between 1938 and 1945, border regions with sizeable German-speaking minorities of all three Czech lands were joined to Nazi Germany as the Sudetenland.