Tabula VIII Asiae ( reverse)

Title

Tabula VIII Asiae ( reverse)

Description

Map shows Mongolia (Antique:Scythie ), Tartarien, Tibet and Indien.

ca. 1535

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

Part of Central Asia and lies between Russia in the north and the People's Republic of China in the south. The name Mongols may have arisen after the Tang Dynasty (7th to 10th centuries). In the 8th century Turkic people, especially the Uyghurs, took over, in the 10th century the Kitan survived the Liao dynasty, which lasted until 1125. In the 12th century, Temüdschin succeeded in uniting the Mongolian tribes, which had been destroyed among themselves, and formed a state from them. Around 1206 he became Genghis Khan as the leader of all Mongol rights. The traditional Mongolian laws interested in Genghis Khan Managemente law Jassa became solely about new laws that required those of the Mongol empire. Before his death, Genghis Khan had his empire in four khanates. His grandson Batu gained power over Central Asia and the Golden Horde there. Pol Uri gained power over Mongolia and Ögedei was betrayed with rule over China and East Asia. Ögedei Khan managed to continue to exempt the empire and change and belong to its territory. The last Grand Khan, all Mongolian political empires, war Timur Khan. As before the time of Genghis Khan stiffening the Mongolian borders of the central empire, the rulers of the Ming dynasty were moved to keep the state wall still outstanding and to own it. Partial fights between Mongolian tribes spurred on by China. As a result of a long war between the two, which refer to the Mongolian estates, the Oirates and the Chalcha, which belong to the Oirates from the new Mongolia. In Altan Khan's reign, Tibetan Buddhism began to become the state religion of the Mongols.