Europae tabula secunda continet Hispaniam…

Title

Europae tabula secunda continet Hispaniam…

Description

Map shows in trapezoidal form the Iberian Peninsula with Spain, Portugal and the Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza). From the atlas "Geographie opus novissima traductione e gricorum archetypis". Reverse with Latin text. Watermark on the left, at the outer margin.

ca. 1541

Artist

Ptolemy/ Fries (1490-1531)

Lorenz (Laurent) Fries was born in Alsace in 1490 or thereabouts, describing himself on one occasion as from Colmar, one of the towns of the region. He studied medicine at university, or rather at universities, as he seems to have had a peripatetic education, apparently spending time at the universities of Pavia, Piacenza, Montpellier and Vienna. Having successfully completed his education, Fries established himself as a physician, at a succession of places in the Alsace region, with a short spell in Switzerland, before settling in Strasbourg, in about 1519. By this time, he had established a reputation as a writer on medical topics, with several publications already to his credit. Indeed, it was thus that Fries met the Strasbourg printer and publisher Johann Grüninger, an associate of the St. Die group of scholars formed by, among others, Walter Lud, Martin Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller. Gruninger was responsible for printing several of the maps prepared by Waldseemuller, and for supervising the cutting of the maps for the 1513 edition of Ptolemy, edited by the group. This meeting was to introduce a important digression into Fries' life, and for the next five years, from about 1520 to about 1525, he worked in some capacity as a cartographic editor with Gruninger, exploiting the corpus of material that Waldseemuller had created. The first edition of Ptolemy's Geographia editet by Fries was published in Strasbourg in 1522, with maps that were copied and re-engraved from those of Martin Waldseemüller of the 1520 edition of Ptolemy and text edited by Pirckheimer. In 1525 a second edition was printed in Strasbourg. At the death of Fries and Gruninger, the plates were purchased by the brother Melchior and Gaspar Treschel, who printed a thord edition in Lyon in 1535. For the text, the two editors used the supervision of Michael Servetus, who editet Pirckheimer's text. Finally, in 1541, Gaspare Treechsel published in Vienne, in the Dauphine, this fourth edition, again with Servetus' text. in this edition, compared to the first edition of Strasbourg in 1522, the text underwent numerous changes, corrections and additions, but the wood-Blocks were not changed. Claudius Ptolemy ( arround 100- 160 a.C.) Geographia, gives a list of geographic coordinates of spherical longitude and latitude of almost ten thousand point locations on the earth surface, as they were known at his times. The list is organized in Tabulae which cor- respond to specific regions of the three known continents at that time, Africa, Asia and Europe. Research on Ptolemy’s Geographia has started at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in the eighties, focused mainly, but not exclusively, on data re- lated to territories which are now under the sovereignty of the modern Greek state. The World of Ptolemy is classified in Regions, since each Chapter is referred to one of them, giving by this way the concept of Atlas as it is understood today.

Historical Description

In prehistoric and prehistoric times, Iberians, Celts and Basques settled on the Iberian peninsula named after the former. In the 11th century BC The Phoenicians settled on the south coast; the most famous of their colonies was Cadiz. The name Spain is derived from the Roman name Hispania (from Phoenician ishapan "land of the rock hyrax". In the early 8th century, the Moors destroyed the Visigoth Empire and conquered the entire Iberian Peninsula. Their centuries of rule shaped the country. The Arabic heritage was reflected in both the architecture and the language. However, the Moors were unable to establish themselves permanently in the northern outskirts of the peninsula. From there the "Reconquest" (Reconquista) started. In this process, which spanned several centuries (722–1492) and was not continuous, the Muslim empires were gradually pushed back by the Christian empires until the fall of Granada in 1492, the last Moorish state structure on the peninsula also disappeared. In the 15th century, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united. Aragon was an important maritime power in the Mediterranean at that time. The Spanish colonial empire extended around 1600 across large parts of South and Central America, the southern part of today's USA and the Philippines. As the English and French also intensified their colonial efforts, Spain gradually lost its supremacy. The liberation wars of the American states, particularly the Mexican and South American wars of independence in the early 19th century, brought independence to most of the colonies. In 1898, the last major properties were lost to the United States during the Spanish-American War, which meant the end of the colonial empire. The African colonies that followed later (Spanish-Morocco, Spanish-Sahara and Equatorial Guinea) finally became independent in the 20th century.