Sarmatia Asie.

Title

Sarmatia Asie.

Map shows the Caucasus with Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and partly Russia. The reverse shows a figure.

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

Armenia is one of the oldest countries in the world, with a rich and complex history that dates back several millennia. As early as the 7th century, Christian Byzantines and Muslim Arabs competed for control of the region. In 1045, the Byzantines ended the Armenian kingdom by occupying Ani. In 1064, the Seljuks conquered Armenia, followed by the Mongols in the 13th century. In 1555, the country was divided between Persia and the Ottoman Empire, and again in 1639, when the Safavids gained control of roughly what is today the modern Armenian state, while the Turks retained the larger western part. In the Russo-Persian War, Persia lost the province of Armenia to the Russian Empire in 1828. During World War I, countless Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were systematically exterminated during the Armenian Genocide, and the Armenian settlement area shrank significantly. Since then, the territory of the Republic of Armenia comprises only the northeastern part of what was once a much larger Armenian homeland—a region that, throughout its eventful history, rarely formed a unified state. The border between Turkey and the Russian sphere of influence was established in 1922. The Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of the Soviet Union, gained independence in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR. The areas west of modern Armenia remained lost to the Armenian state.