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A fine early 17th-century miniature map of Peru, from Petrus Bertius’s Tabularum Geographicarum Contractarum.
The map presents the viceroyalty of Peru in a compact format, oriented with east at the top and extending from the Pacific coastline inland toward the Andes and the Amazonian interior. The geographic depiction follows late 16th-century Spanish sources, showing an array of settlements, rivers, and mountain ranges in schematic fashion. Major cities, such as Lima (here labeled "Ciudad de los Reyes"), Cusco, Quito, and Trujillo, are indicated with pictorial town symbols, while prominent rivers, including the Amazon, are rendered as bold, linear features. The Andes are represented by repetitive mountain ranges stretching across the territory.
The title appears in a decorative cartouche at lower right, accompanied by a scale bar labeled “Milliaria Germanica.” The cartographic style, with dense place naming and decorative embellishment, reflects the visual idiom of Hondius and the Flemish engraving tradition.
Petrus Bertius was a Flemish historian, theologian, geographer, and cartographer. Known in Dutch as Peter de Bert, Bertius was born in Beveren. His father was a Protestant preacher and his family fled to London around 1568. The young Bertius only returned to the Low Countries in 1577, to attend the University of Leiden. A bright pupil, Bertius worked as a tutor and was named subregent of the Leiden Statencollege in 1593. He ascended to the position of regent in 1606, upon the death of the former regent, who was also Bertius’ father-in-law. However, due to his radical religious views, he eventually lost his teaching position and was forbidden from offering private lessons.
His brothers-in-law were Jodocus Hondius and Pieter van den Keere, who were both prominent cartographers. Bertius began his own cartographic publishing in 1600 when he released a Latin edition of Barent Langenes’ miniature atlas Caert Thresoor (1598). He published another miniature atlas that first appeared in 1616.
By 1618, Bertius was named cosmographer to Louis XIII. He converted to Catholicism and took up a position as professor of rhetoric at the Collège de Boncourt (University of Paris). In 1622, Louis XIII created a chart of mathematics specifically for Bertius and named him his royal historian. He died in Paris in 1629.
![[ Peru ] Le Perou et les cours de la Riviere Amazone depuis ses sources jusques a la Mer. . . . 1656](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/113491.jpg)
