CHAPTER VIII 



MERCATOR, ORTELIUS AND THEIR 

 SUCCESSORS 



With the progress of exploration and the growing demand for 

 topographical maps by travellers, statesmen, merchants and 

 antiquarians, numbers of maps, large and small, flowed from 

 the presses as the sixteenth century advanced. To the teachers 

 of cosmography at the universities — or failing them, the pub- 

 lishers and their assistants — largely fell the task of co- 

 ordinating and generalizing this varied material. This could 

 be done by revising the world maps of earlier decades, which 

 often appeared in many sheets, and were susceptible to 

 damage or destruction, as the few copies of them which have 

 survived testify. The varying sizes, too, of the smaller maps 

 of continents, countries, provinces and counties made them 

 awkward to preserve conveniently in bound volumes. 



In the early years of the century, the only approach to a 

 modem atlas as known today was the Waldseemiiller edition 

 of Ptolemy, with its twenty 'tabule novae'. The 'Cosmo- 

 graphia' of Sebastian Miinster, Basel, 1550, contained what 

 may be regarded as an atlas supplement of rather crude wood- 

 cut maps, some deriving ultimately from Waldseemiiller, but 

 others of special regions supplied by his friends. In Italy it had 

 become the practice to bind up some of the finely engraved 

 maps published at Venice and Rome to suit the tastes of 

 individual collectors. The map engraver and publisher, 

 Antoine Lafreri, established at Rome, had issued an engraved 

 general title page for such volumes — 'Geografia: tavole moderne 

 di geografia de la maggior parte del mondo', 1560-70. These 

 so-called Lafreri atlases sometimes included reduced copies of 

 large maps, which are otherwise unknown or extremely rar6. 

 An important example is Olaus Magnus' * Carta marina' of 

 1539, a map of the countries of northern Europe which was 

 republished on a smaller scale by Lafreri in 1572. But it was 



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