Topic: Le miroir du monde (1598)

[sdog]

An interesting set of maps i found,  here's what i posted on g+:



A little early for railway companies...
I still assume most of you are rather interested in maps, in particular historic ones. Here are 400 year old detailed maps of large parts of europe, in a high-res scan.


http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/desbillons/atlas.html




The map of Britiain is interesting, some names are writting in french (Neucastel), while other cities are shown with danish names. (Eamborg)


Worchester seems as large as London on this map. The selection of cities is also interesting, or rather the cities missing (Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield) telling something about the industrial revolution or other changes (where is Norwich? the largest city in 11th century)

[IgorEliezer]

Yeah, cities change a lot. I mean, a city can be a giant metropolis in a century and then it becomes a small village in the other century. A good example is Roma: it had 2,000,000 inhabitants in 100 AD (late 1st century) and shrank into a small 25,000-inhabitant town during XV century. As far as I know, Roma is now a village (hope Fabio read this )

[Ters]

I see that they were very creative with rivers, at least on some maps. While lakes with two outlets do exists, I don't think they're as common as these maps suggest. Some rivers connect to the ocean in both ends, and I don't think all of them are canals.

[sdog]

on some maps the rivers form a close network, perhaps the interest was more on waterways?

[An_dz]

Old maps have those inconsistencies, but that's because they omitted stuff and some areas they guessed, and imagine draw it all just with your eyes.

Another thing really peculiar on those times are that maps could be very different, it just depends what country made it.

[sdog]

We have more standardized maps now, we are so used to mercator projections, that we forgot the old standards. (eg road maps not true to the north, with true distances for roads only.)

Speaking of Mercator, the book was printed 4 years after his death.

Europe was also fairly well known, omissions are likely not due to lack of knowledge but rather lack of significance to their customers (dutch traders?).

They als seem to have moved places further appart, if their representation would merge on the maps. (Spandau to Potsdam 15 km)
[btw Hannover is missing, Braunschweig is there :-), the duke of braunschweig moved to Hannover 50 years after the map was published.]

In the germania map they have used different scales for different areas.