Tabula Europae IX.

Title

Tabula Europae IX.

Description

Trapezoidal map shows Romania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Dalmatia, Macedonia and partly Turkey.

ca. 1552

Artist

Ptolemy/Münster Sebastian (1489-1552)

Sebastian Münster (1488 – 1552) belongs tot he very important Comographers oft he Renaicance. He issued his first famous Cosmographia in 1544 with 24 double paged maps with German description of the world.It had numerous editions in different languages including Latin, French, Italian, English, and Czech. The last German edition was published in 1628, long after his death. The Cosmographia was one of the most successful and popular books of the 16th century. It passed through 24 editions in 100 years. This success was due to the notable woodcuts ,some by Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Deutsch, and David Kandel. It was most important in reviving geography in 16th-century Europe.His first geographic works were Germania descriptio (1530) and Mappa Europae (1536). In 1540 he published a Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia with illustrations. The 1550 edition contains cities, portraits, and costumes. These editions, printed in Germany, are the most valued of the Cosmographias. 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 the historical sense, Eastern Europe refers to Ukraine, the European part of Russia, Belarus and the Republic of Moldova. Occasionally, the Caucasian countries of Georgia, Armenia and, conditionally, Azerbaijan are also seen as part of Eastern Europe. By Christian Giordano and other scholars, one of the six historical regions of Europe is called "Eastern Europe." The Eastern European countries are historically and culturally largely influenced by the Orthodox Church (Islamic Azerbaijan excepted) and were - in contrast to the Ottoman-dominated Balkans - under the rule of the Russian Empire. Like the Balkan countries, the countries of Eastern Europe were for a long time backward agricultural states (cf.: Intermediate Europe) and had no or only a limited share in the social developments of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment of the Western world.