Universelle Liure II, Description de l´Apouille. Item du commen cement du Royaulme de Neaples….

Title

Universelle Liure II, Description de l´Apouille. Item du commen cement du Royaulme de Neaples….

Map shows total south Italy with Naples, on reverse shows a coat of arm.

ca. 1550

Artist

Münster (1489-1552)

Sebastian Münster (1489–1552) was a leading Renaissance cosmographer. His most famous work, the Cosmographia (1544), was a comprehensive description of the world with 24 maps, based on research dating back to 1528. Continuously revised, the 1550 edition already included many new maps. It was the first scientific yet accessible world description published in German, illustrated with numerous woodcuts by artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger. Between 1544 and 1650, the Cosmographia appeared in 46 editions (27 in German) and was translated into several languages. Münster’s work combined the knowledge of scholars, artists, and travelers and remained influential long after his death.

Historical Description

Southern Italy consists of today's Italian regions that belonged to the Kingdom of Sicily before the unification of Italy in 1861. These are the regions of Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. The Romans used to call the area of Sicily and coastal Southern Italy Magna Graecia ("Great Greece"), since it was so densely inhabited by the Greeks; the ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia and Calabria—Strabo being the most prominent advocate of the wider definitions. With this colonisation, Greek culture was exported to Italy, in its dialects of the Ancient Greek language, its religious rites and its traditions of the independent polis. An original Hellenic civilization soon developed, later interacting with the native Italic and Latin civilisations. The most important cultural transplant was the Chalcidean/Cumaean variety of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted by the Etruscans; the Old Italic alphabet subsequently evolved into the Latin alphabet, which became the most widely used alphabet in the world. In 1442 Alfonso V conquered the Kingdom of Naples and united Sicily and Naples as dependencies of the Crown of Aragon. When he died in 1458, the kingdom was again separated and Naples was inherited by Ferrante, Alfonso's illegitimate son. When Ferrante died in 1494, Charles VIII invaded Italy from France and used Angevin's claim to the throne of Naples, inherited by his father in 1481 after the death of King René's nephew, as an excuse to start the Italian wars. A point of contention between France and Spain for the next several decades, but French efforts to gain control of it weakened over the decades and Spanish control was never really compromised. The French finally gave up their claims to the kingdom through the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. With the Treaty of London (1557) the new client state of the so-called Presidi ("State of Garrisons") was founded and directly ruled by Spain as part of the Kingdom of Naples. After the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th century, possession of the kingdom again changed hands. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Naples was given to Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor.