Vesconte map middle east (1 Ergebnisse)
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Excellent. Some creasing at folds, else a fine example with a bold strike. Size 10.25 x 12.5 Inches. This is the earliest printed iteration of Pietro Vesconte's 1611 portolan map of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Lower Nile, the Arabian Peninsula, and Mesopotamia. While not committed to print until this 1611 edition by Jacques B…ongars, the map is the work of the 14th-century Venetian cartographer Vesconte, who produced it c. 1320 to promote Marino Sanudo's proposed crusade. As such, it is one of the earliest surviving maps to support a specific military effort. Reading the Map This printed map is a faithful copy of a 14th-century manuscript and thus pre-dates the European rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geographia . Consequently, the map lacks Ptolemy's precision, systematic scale, or conventions of orientation. The map is oriented to the east with the eastern Mediterranean, indicated with hachured waves, at the bottom just left of center. The eastern tip of the Crete appears at the base along with the archipelago, including Scarpanto and Rhodes. The map follows the coast of Asia Minor, listing the locations in the manner of a Portolan. A very large Cyprus is depicted south of Asia Minor. Note the orientation of the place names on the island, suggesting a direction of travel from east to west, as distinct from the place names elsewhere leading towards the Holy Land. Beyond Cyprus, place names along the coasts of Lebanon and Palestine are also rotated to facilitate travel. Both within the Holy Land and on the Egyptian coastlines, major cities and fortifications are shown pictorially. The Mediterranean commands the lower left corner, which abandons scale in order to place the region in a broader scope. The lower right depicts Egypt. The Nile Delta and the Mediterranean coast approaching Alexandria share the portolan-esque quality of the rest of the Mediterranean chart, but points south depict details in a much more schematic, mappamundi-like manner, showing Egypt's western fortifications as well as its castles along the Nile. The upper left describes Mesopotamia: the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the city of Babylon, and the distant lands of Assyria and Persia. The rivers reach southwards towards the Persian Gulf. The Red Sea is named, revealing a drastically minimized Arabian Peninsula featuring the Church of Saint Catherine upon Mount Sinai, a short distance from Mecca. The waters beyond - a drastically foreshortened Indian Ocean - show an array of islands whose names (Nebile, Celtales, and so on) are drawn from the Travels of Marco Polo. One of the Earliest Military Maps Despite the wild distortions of the southern and eastern portions of the map, the Mediterranean areas were, firstly, based on the best techniques of charting available in the 14th century. The purpose of the map was to convince the leaders of Western Europe - Pope John XXII and King Charles IV of France in particular - of the practicality of a new crusade to Capture the Holy Land. It appeared in the Venetian diplomat Marino Sanudo's Liber secretorum fidelium crucis (Book of Secrets for True Crusaders), which detailed his proposed effort to take the Holy Land for the Christian West. Publication History and Census This printed edition of the map appeared in Jacques Bongars' 1611 Gesta Dei per Francos, sive Orientalium expeditionum, et regni Francorum Hierosolimitani historia which collected in one volume the surviving medieval texts pertaining to France's role in the crusades. As such, it presented in print for the first time the full complement of Vesconte's maps. (The map specifically of the Holy Land, dubbed the Sanuto-Vesconte map, found its way into several of the printed editions of Ptolemy's Geographia , but the other maps such as this remained neglected.) The book, while well-represented in institutional collections, was printed in a single edition, and its maps are rare on the market. One example of the separate map is listed in OCLC. References: OCLC 87504062.
