Neapolis Regnum quo continentur Aprutium Ulterius et Citerius,..

Title

Neapolis Regnum quo continentur Aprutium Ulterius et Citerius,..

Description

Map of the Kingdom of Naples with two magnificent cartouches. Upper title cartouche with 12 coats of arms of the regions. The lower cartouche shows the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Naples, three mile markers, two putti and Mount Vesuvius.

ca. 1730

Artist

Seutter

Matthias Seutter (1678- 1757) Augsburg was the son of a goldsmith in Augsburg. In 1697, Seutter began his studies in Nuremberg and subsequently worked in the publishing house of Jeremias Wolff in Augsburg. In 1710, he established his own publishing house and print shop. The Seutter publishing house produced a great number of maps, atlases, and globes. However, very few original maps were printed there, as Augsburg at that time had no university and no connection to the fields of mathematics or the natural sciences. Seutter therefore copied the work of other cartographers, making his own engravings based on their models. Over 500 maps were produced in his studio. Seutter's most well-known works are the 1725 "Geographical Atlas or an Accurate Depiction of the Whole World" ("Atlas Geographicus oder Accurate Vorstellung der ganzen Welt") with 46 maps, the 1734 "Large Atlas" ("Grosser Atlas") with 131 maps, and the 1744 pocket atlas "Small Atlas" ("Atlas minor") with 64 maps. Matthäus Seutter died in 1757. Seutter's son Albrecht Karl, his son-in-law Conrad Tobias Lotter, and his business partner Johann Michael Probst ran the printing business for five more years.

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.