Tabula III Asiae

Title

Tabula III Asiae

Description

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

334 BC Alexander the Great began his campaign against the Persians and conquered Persia in a few years. His goal was to permanently consolidate the rule of the Hellenes by merging cultures (mass wedding of Susa, own marriage to the daughter of Darius III). However, he could not finish his work, because he was 323 BC. Died of fever in Babylon. Armenia also came under Hellenistic influence, but it was not conquered. By 700, the Arab tribes managed to establish permanent rule in the country. They put down revolts of the Armenian nobility. Within the nobility, the leading family changed during this time: The Bagratids (Bagratuni) took over from the Mamikonjan and were able to extend their rule to parts of Georgia. As a result, in 1080 Armenian refugees founded an independent principality of Little Armenia under the Rubenids in Cilicia. These allied with the crusaders against the Byzantines and Turks. In 1342 the kingdom fell to the Catholic House of Lusignan of Cyprus, but soon came to the Egyptian Mamluks and then to the Ottoman Empire. Under the rule of the Ottomans, the Armenians enjoyed a certain formal autonomy according to the Millet system. When the Ottoman Empire began to decline from around 1800, parts of the Armenians saw Russia as a major Christian power as a protective power that should enable them to gain independence following the example of the Christian Balkan peoples. After the ninth Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) in the context of the Balkan crisis, the Ottoman Empire had to cede further parts of Eastern Armenia and the provinces of Kars and Ardahan to Russia in the Peace of San Stefano.