Tabula Asiae IIII.

Title

Tabula Asiae IIII.

Description

Map shows Cyprus with Western Asia and two tentstaffagen.

ca. 1564

Artist

Ruscelli (1518-1566)

Girolamo Ruscelli (1518-1566) was an Italian polymath, humanist, editor, and cartographer active in Venice during the early 16th century. Ruscelli is best known for his important revision of Ptolemy's Geographia, which was published post humously in 1574. It is generally assumed that Alexius Pedemontanus was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli. In a later work, Ruscelli reported that the Secreti contained the experimental results of an ‘Academy of Secrets’ that he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli’s academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an ‘Accademia dei Secreti’ in Naples in the 1560s.

Historical Description

Since the Bronze Age, Cyprus has supplied the eastern Mediterranean with copper. In the late Bronze Age, trading cities such as Enkomi arose on Cyprus, which were in close contact with the Levant. To the Hittites and Ugarites, Cyprus (or part of the island) was known as Alašija. In 332 BC the kings of Cyprus passed to Alexander the Great and Cyprus was incorporated into his empire. In 1191, the English King Richard the Lionheart, who helped lead the Third Crusade, conquered the island. Ottoman rule lasted from 1571 to 1878. In 1878, the Ottoman Empire leased the island to Britain in return for support against an advance by the Russians in the Russo-Ottoman War (1877-1878). Efforts by Greek Cypriots to unify Cyprus with Greece led to an uprising in 1931. In 1960 Cyprus became independent as a result of the Zurich and London Agreements between Britain, Greece, and Turkey.