Das Fünffte Buch

Title

Das Fünffte Buch

Map shows Arabia, persia, Kaukasus and the Red sea

ca. 1550

Artist

Münster (1489-1552)

Sebastian Münster (1489–1552) was a leading Renaissance cosmographer. His most famous work, the Cosmographia (1544), was a comprehensive description of the world with 24 maps, based on research dating back to 1528. Continuously revised, the 1550 edition already included many new maps. It was the first scientific yet accessible world description published in German, illustrated with numerous woodcuts by artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger. Between 1544 and 1650, the Cosmographia appeared in 46 editions (27 in German) and was translated into several languages. Münster’s work combined the knowledge of scholars, artists, and travelers and remained influential long after his death.

Historical Description

Arabia, an early empire on the largely uninhabitable Arabian Peninsula, was the legendary Saba in the south, which at times ruled all of southwest Arabia and had colonies in Eritrea and Tanzania. In the seventh century, Islam became the dominant religion on the peninsula. The Islamic prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and began preaching in the city in 610, but immigrated to Medina in 622. Mohammed founded a new unified polity on the Arabian Peninsula which, under the subsequent caliphates of Rashidun and Umayyads, experienced a century of rapid expansion of Arab power far beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a vast Muslim Arab Empire with an expanding sphere of influence from the northwest Indian subcontinent across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, South Italy and the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees. Despite its spiritual significance, Arabia soon became politically a fringe region of the Islamic world, with the main medieval Islamic states located at different times in cities as distant as Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. However, from the 10th century (and indeed until the 20th century) the Hashemite Sharifs of Mecca retained a state in the most developed part of the region, the Hejaz. Their domain originally included only the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, but was extended to the rest of the Hejaz in the 13th century. Although the Sharifs in the Hejaz exercised largely independent authority, they were usually subject to the suzerainty of one of the great Islamic empires of the time. In the Middle Ages, this included the Abbasids of Baghdad and the Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks of Egypt.