1718 De l'Isle map of Scandinavia and the Swedish Empire

This is Guillaume de l'Isle's magnificent 1706 two-sheet map of Scandinavia, highlighting the empire of King Charles XII of Sweden. It captures the Kingdom of Sweden during the last reign of its 'Age of Greatness' at the height of the Great Northern War (1700 - 1721). The map further illustrates the degree to which early cartographers struggled to keep pace with evolving political events. The image above is a composite, but the map is in two separate sheets - as apparent in the subsequent photos.

Scope

The map comprises all of modern Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and western Finland. The southern sheet in particular includes Estonia, Livonia, and Lithuania, extending as far south as to include part of Poland and the Duchy of Prussia. The opening of the Nieve River shows the cities of Noteburg and Nyskanz, but St. Petersburg does not appear. The upper sheet reaches as far south as 62º north, and the southern sheet reaches as far north as 64º, allowing overlap should the two sheets be joined. The lack of a finished map border to the top of the southern sheet suggests that the two were designed for such joining (we see a joined example in the Bibliothèque Nationale, with the join at 64º) although evidently, colorists did not always get that memo.

Great Northern War (1700 - 1721)

The map is prominently dedicated to King Charles XII of Sweden 'the very powerful and very invincible Prince Charles XII King of Sweden, Gots and Vandals,' which serves to indicate the speed with which world events could overtake the best efforts of cartographers to record them. When this map was engraved, Sweden's war with Russia and her allies - the Great Northern War - had been underway for six years. Russia invaded Swedish-held Livonia and Estonia, but Charles' counterattack at the 1700 Battle of Narva led to a shocking Russian defeat. Rather than pressing the Russians, Charles instead moved against neutral Poland-Lithuania, swiftly defeating the Polish king Augustus II and his Saxon allies at the 1702 Battle of Kliszow. He replaced Augustus as king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the puppet Stanisław Leszczyński. The map's detail reflects the state of affairs at this high point in Charles' reign, but misses an important development: in 1703 Russian forces penetrated Ingria, and established the new city of Saint Petersburg - these incursions are not shown here.

Things were never again as good for Sweden. In 1707, Charles invaded Russia and gained another victory at the Battle of Holowczyn, but the necessity of leaving significant forces in defensive roles sapped the strength he could direct eastward. Instead of moving to take Saint Petersburg, Charles pushed towards Moscow, and everything began to go wrong. By the time he arrived at the siege of Poltava in July 1709, Charles had been wounded, with a third of his infantry dead and no supply train. His broken army was unable to move the fortified, modern Russian army defending the city. 'The very powerful and very invincible Prince Charles XII' escaped to the Ottoman Empire with a small entourage, and the rest of his army surrendered days later.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved by Henri Liébaux for Guillaume De l'Isle. The first state of the map was issued in 1706 with both De l'Isle's imprint and that of Amsterdam printer Louis Renard. That partnership was short-lived, as a second state has the date intact but Renard's imprint burnished out. A newly-engraved Amsterdam edition of the map, printed by Pieter Schenk and dated 1708, appears to explain the removal of Renard from the picture. In the present example, the date is removed but De l'Isle's is named 'Premier Geographe du Roy', suggesting a date of c. 1718. De l'Isle's heirs, Buache and Dezauche, later reprinted the map under their own imprints, in 1745 and 1780, respectively. A 1742 Covens and Mortier edition was completely re-engraved to new plates with very different geography, especially in the southern plate. We see three examples of this state listed in OCLC.