1588 Munster Woodcut View of Scandinavia, the North Atlantic, and Arctic Regions

This is an attractive woodcut map of Scandinavia and the north parts of the European world, added to Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia in 1588. It replaced the by now obsolete map based on the work of Olaus Magnus similar, albeit smaller and simpler, woodcut which had appeared in the work from 1544 to 1578. Sebastian Petri, who had inherited the publishing rights of Münster's masterpiece from his father, knew that its maps were no longer state of the art. In order to keep the book current, he ordered the production of a new set of woodcut maps based on the maps of Antwerp publisher Abraham Ortelius, and a selection of new city views derived from those of Braun and Hogenberg. The present map, though retaining the title of the earlier Münster map, is an artful copy on wood of Ortelius' copperplate Septentrionalium Regionum Desrip. Being a woodcut, the Münster/ Petri map presents very differently from its copperplate source. It also includes a brief descriptive text not present on the Ortelius: 'Sweden is rich in mines, fish, cattle, game, and grain. The Royal Court of Stockholm lies, like Venice in a lake: stockfish are brought to Norway.'

The Source

Ortelius' 1570 map of Scandinavia and the Arctic was and is one of his most fascinating maps; during the Age of Discovery, these north parts of the world represented regions as remote and unfamiliar as the coasts of America, Africa, and Asia. The map covers the northern regions from the English Channel to the just south of the North Pole and from America to Russia, including England, Scandinavia, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as parts of America (Estotiland), the apocryphal island of Frisland, and Mercator's speculative Arctic islands.

Ortelius's Sources

Just as Münster was before him, Ortelius was an apt compiler and editor, synthesizing the best sources that he could locate. As Münster did, Ortelius drew upon the 1539 Olaus Magnus Carta marina for the general forms of Scandinavia and Iceland. Ortelius' map, however, had a broader scope and tapped sources not available during Münster's lifetime. Nicolo Zeno's 1561 Septentrionalium Partium Nova Tabula provided images of Estotiland, Iceland, Greenland, Icaria, and Frisland; Anthony Jenkinson's 1562 map of Russia, and Gerard Mercator's world maps of 1564 and 1569 for the high Arctic inform those coasts both on Ortelius' original, and this map produced for Petri.

Zeno's Spurious yet Tenacious Geography

This is one of the few maps to depict Estotiland and Droegeo, both drawn from the narrative of the Zeno brothers, supposedly written in the 14th century, before Columbus, but actually published in 1561 as a deliberate fraud by the Venetian merchant and statesman Nicolo Zeno. Most subsequent cartographers associated Estotiland with Labrador based upon Zeno's description,

… the fishing vessel 'Frise' was blown westward by a storm, and arrived at a land named 'Estotiland,' whose inhabitants traded with 'Engroenelandt.' This country, 'Estotiland,' was very fertile, and had mountains inland. The king of this country possessed books written in Latin, which he did not understand. The language that he spoke and his subjects shared no similarity to that of the Vikings. The king of Estotiland, seeing that his guests sailed safely with the aid of an instrument (the compass), persuaded them to make a maritime expedition to another land to the south called 'Drogeo.'

Also prominent are Zeno's imaginary islands of Icaria and Frisland. As with Estotiland, Zeno credited his 14th century predecessors with the discovery of these mysterious islands which appeared first on his own 1561 map, and which were eagerly copied by later mapmakers thirsty for geographical data on this remote part of the world. Despite Zeno's work being a fraudulent Venetian attempt to co-opt the achievements of the Genoese Christopher Columbus, it remained influential in the 16th and 17th centuries absent better cartographic reconnaissance of the North Atlantic. Not only Ortelius, but his competitor De Jode, and the Dutch mapmakers of the early 17th century embraced the Zeno geography.

Mercator's Arctic Islands

This remains one of the earliest maps to illustrate Gerard Mercator's speculative Arctic Islands. When Mercator published his great wall map introducing the famous Mercator Projection in 1569, he recognized the essential problem with his map was that it massively distorted the polar regions. To rectify this, he included a polar projection as in inset on the map. It was this small projection, later refined in his 1595 Arctic map, that introduced Mercator's idea of four arctic islands surrounding an open Arctic Sea, at the center of which was a great whirlpool. Two of those islands are visible here, one unnamed, and the other just north of Norway, labeled Pigmei hic habitant, for Mercator's assertion that it was the home of a race of female pygmies. The channel between the islands, possibly Mercator's interpretation of Davis Strait, was described as having violent currents. Variants on Mercator's Arctic islands continued to appear in various forms well into the 17th century, until the discoveries of Spitzbergen and other factual Arctic islands began to intrude upon the speculation. The islands disappeared entirely in Hondius's 1636 Arctic map Poli Arctici et Circumiacentium Terrarum Descriptio Novissima. So as derivative as the Petri/Münster map may have been, it remained representative of the best geographical knowledge of the north parts of the world well into the seventeenth century.

Publication History and Census

This map was among the newly-produced woodcut maps added to the German edition of Cosmographia in 1588 by Sebastian Petri, who had inherited the print shop from his father Heinrich Petri. It remained in the subsequent editions without material change. The present example conforms typographically to the map found in the 1588 German edition of the book. The German and Latin editions of Cosmographia are well represented in institutional collections. Various editions of the separate map are listed in OCLC by six libraries. The map appears on the market from time to time.