Persici vel Sophorum Regni Typus

Title

Persici vel Sophorum Regni Typus

Description

Detailed and decorative map of the Persian Empire.

ca. 1595

Artist

Mercator (1512-1594)

Gerardus Mercator (1512 - 1594). He was a cartographer, philosopher and mathematician. He is best known for his work in cartography, in particular the world map of 1569 based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing as straight lines. He is renowned to the present day as the cartographer who created a world map based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing as straight lines. In his own day he was the world's most famous geographer but in addition he had interests in theology, philosophy, history, mathematics and magnetism as well as being an accomplished engraver, calligrapher and maker of globes and scientific instruments. He wrote few books but much of his knowledge is to be found in the copious legends on his wall maps and the prefaces that he composed for his atlas ,the first in which the term "atlas" appears and the sections within it.

Historical Description

The ancient empire of the Persians is referred to as the Persian Empire or Persian Empire, which at times extended from Thrace to north-west India and Egypt. It existed in different dimensions from about 550 to 330 BC. AD (Old Persian Empire of the Achaemenids) and from approx. 224 to 651 AD (New Persian Empire of the Sassanids). This name is a foreign name, as the native name has always been a variant of the term Iran. By the 1500s, Ismail I of Ardabil established the Safavid Empire,with his capital at Tabriz. Beginning with Azerbaijan, he subsequently extended his authority over all of the Iranian territories, and established an intermittent Iranian hegemony over the vast relative regions, reasserting the Iranian identity within large parts of Greater Iran. Iran was predominantly Sunni, but Ismail instigated a forced conversion to the Shia branch of Islam, spreading throughout the Safavid territories in the Caucasus, Iran, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia. As a result, modern-day Iran is the only official Shia nation of the world, with it holding an absolute majority in Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, having there the first and the second highest number of Shia inhabitants by population percentage in the world. Meanwhile, the centuries-long geopolitical and ideological rivalry between Safavid Iran and the neighboring Ottoman Empire led to numerous Ottoman–Iranian wars. The Safavid era peaked in the reign of Abbas I (1587–1629), surpassing their Turkish archrivals in strength, and making Iran a leading science and art hub in western Eurasia. The Safavid era saw the start of mass integration from Caucasian populations into new layers of the society of Iran, as well as mass resettlement of them within the heartlands of Iran, playing a pivotal role in the history of Iran for centuries onwards. Following a gradual decline in the late 1600s and the early 1700s, which was caused by internal conflicts, the continuous wars with the Ottomans, and the foreign interference (most notably the Russian interference), the Safavid rule was ended by the Pashtun rebels who besieged Isfahan and defeated Sultan Husayn in 1722. In 1729, Nader Shah, a chieftain and military genius from Khorasan, successfully drove out and conquered the Pashtun invaders. He subsequently took back the annexed Caucasian territories which were divided among the Ottoman and Russian authorities by the ongoing chaos in Iran. During the reign of Nader Shah, Iran reached its greatest extent since the Sasanian Empire, reestablishing the Iranian hegemony all over the Caucasus, as well as other major parts of the west and central Asia, and briefly possessing what was arguably the most powerful empire at the time.