Capitanate ou Mesapiae et Iapygiae

Title

Capitanate ou Mesapiae et Iapygiae

Description

Splendid map showing the province of Foggia in the region of Apulia. Furthermore a title cartouche and a cartouche with the coat of arms of Capitanata, a compass rose and two sailing ships. (Capitanata, created by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, corresponds to the Daunia of antiquity and the modern province of Foggia).

ca. 1690

Artist

Mortier/ Blaeu, W. (1661-1711)

Pieter Mortier (1661–1711) was an 18th-century mapmaker and engraver from the Northern Netherlands. Mortier had a partnership with Johannes Covens I (1697-1774) and founded the map publishing company Covens & Mortier (1721-1866). Mortier, being French himself, had easy access to French cartographers such as De L'Isle, Sanson, Jaillot, de Fer and De Wit. Consequently, much of Mortier's business was built upon leveraging the sophisticated Dutch printing establishment to issue embellished high quality editions of previously contemporary French maps. In the greater context of global cartography, this was a significant advantage as most Dutch map publishes had, at this point, fallen into the miasma of reprinting their own outdated works. By contrast, the cartographers of France were producing the most accurate and up to date charts anywhere. Mortier's cartographic work culminated in the magnificent nautical atlas, Le Neptune Francois. Upon Pierre's death in 1711 this business was inherited by his widow. In 1721 his son Cornelius Mortier took over the day to day operation of the firm. Cornelius partnered with his brother-in-law Jean Covens to form one of history's great cartographic partnerships - Covens and Mortier - which continued to publish maps and atlases until about 1866.

Historical Description

Southern Italy consists of today's Italian regions that belonged to the Kingdom of Sicily before the unification of Italy in 1861. These are the regions of Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. The Romans used to call the area of Sicily and coastal Southern Italy Magna Graecia ("Great Greece"), since it was so densely inhabited by the Greeks; the ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia and Calabria—Strabo being the most prominent advocate of the wider definitions. With this colonisation, Greek culture was exported to Italy, in its dialects of the Ancient Greek language, its religious rites and its traditions of the independent polis. An original Hellenic civilization soon developed, later interacting with the native Italic and Latin civilisations. The most important cultural transplant was the Chalcidean/Cumaean variety of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted by the Etruscans; the Old Italic alphabet subsequently evolved into the Latin alphabet, which became the most widely used alphabet in the world. In 1442 Alfonso V conquered the Kingdom of Naples and united Sicily and Naples as dependencies of the Crown of Aragon. When he died in 1458, the kingdom was again separated and Naples was inherited by Ferrante, Alfonso's illegitimate son. When Ferrante died in 1494, Charles VIII invaded Italy from France and used Angevin's claim to the throne of Naples, inherited by his father in 1481 after the death of King René's nephew, as an excuse to start the Italian wars. A point of contention between France and Spain for the next several decades, but French efforts to gain control of it weakened over the decades and Spanish control was never really compromised. The French finally gave up their claims to the kingdom through the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. With the Treaty of London (1557) the new client state of the so-called Presidi ("State of Garrisons") was founded and directly ruled by Spain as part of the Kingdom of Naples. After the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th century, possession of the kingdom again changed hands. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Naples was given to Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor.