Tabula III Asiae

Title

Tabula III Asiae

Map shows the Caucasus with the Caspian and Black Seas, on the reverse a view of the country and its people with description and ornamental decorations.

ca. 1530

Artist

Ptolemy/ Fries (1490-1531)

Lorenz (Laurent) Fries was born in Alsace in 1490 or thereabouts, describing himself on one occasion as from Colmar, one of the towns of the region. He studied medicine at university, or rather at universities, as he seems to have had a peripatetic education, apparently spending time at the universities of Pavia, Piacenza, Montpellier and Vienna. Having successfully completed his education, Fries established himself as a physician, at a succession of places in the Alsace region, with a short spell in Switzerland, before settling in Strasbourg, in about 1519. By this time, he had established a reputation as a writer on medical topics, with several publications already to his credit. Indeed, it was thus that Fries met the Strasbourg printer and publisher Johann Grüninger, an associate of the St. Die group of scholars formed by, among others, Walter Lud, Martin Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller. Gruninger was responsible for printing several of the maps prepared by Waldseemuller, and for supervising the cutting of the maps for the 1513 edition of Ptolemy, edited by the group. This meeting was to introduce a important digression into Fries' life, and for the next five years, from about 1520 to about 1525, he worked in some capacity as a cartographic editor with Gruninger, exploiting the corpus of material that Waldseemuller had created. 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

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.