A map of Bohemia of the time of the thirty year's war

Abstract

The third map of Bohemia, following chronologically upon the maps of Nicolaus Claudianus (I5i8) (1) and John Criginger (I568) (2, had the fate of being used for strategical purposes by the hostile parties in the Thirty Years' War. It is the map of Paulus Aretinus of Ehrenfeld, first published in I6i9. It is a general map showing the geographically well defined region of the whole of Bohemia, so that for the purposes of warfare it could help only in large movements of troops. But in the historical development of the cartographic representation of Bohemia its contents show a distinct progress when compared with the two preceding maps. After the rough woodcut of Claudianus which represented Bohemia on a scale of about I: 637.ooo and the engraving of Criginger on the scale of I 683.ooo, Aretin gave his map the much larger scale of I 504.ooo. The map differed therefore from the size used at that time in atlases, and its copies in foreign atlases could give only a selection from its contents, reduced in size and scale. As it was used in the Thirty Years' War and as a number of reprints of this map were taken abroad by Czech exiles as a souvenir of their country, the map of Aretinus is to-day very rare. Since for a whole century, until the publication of the maps by Vogt (I 712) and Muller (1720) (3), it remained the only original map of Bohemia, it holds a pi ominent place in the development of Bohemian cartography and is also an important document in Bohemian history.