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First state of Munster's Ptolemaic map of part of the Ukraine and the region between the Black and Caspian Seas.
Tabula Asiae II is a mid-sixteenth-century printing of one of Claudius Ptolemy’s ancient maps. It shows the lands north of the Black Sea and around the Caspian Sea as people in the Roman Empire imagined them almost 2,000 years ago. Ptolemy used a trapezoid-shaped frame and listed the positions of places with numbers.
The Sea of Azov is called the Palus Maeotis, the Black Sea is the Pontus Euxinus, and the Don and Volga Rivers appear as the Tanais and Rha. South of the steppe, the jagged brown range marks the Caucasus, sheltering the ancient lands of Colchis, Iberia, and Albania—places now in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Other names such as the Amazons and Hyperboreans come from Greek myths rather than real peoples, but they show how geographers blended fact and legend.
Ancient names and the places they point to today
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Sarmatia Asiatica — southern Russia and eastern Ukraine
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Palus Maeotis — Sea of Azov (between Russia and Ukraine)
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Taurica Chersonesus — Crimea
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Pontus Euxinus — Black Sea coast of Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, and Türkiye
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Rha River — Volga River, ending near Astrakhan
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Tanais River — Don River, reaching the Sea of Azov
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Colchis — western Georgia
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Albania (Caucasian) — most of Azerbaijan north of the Kura River
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Hyrcanian Sea — western Caspian coast of Dagestan and Azerbaijan
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Rhipaean / Hyperborean Mountains — a mythical version of the Urals
The map’s frame, if laid over a modern atlas, would cover a broad slice of the Pontic–Caspian region. West to east it runs from the Crimea and lower Dnieper, across the Don steppe, to the lower Volga and north-west corner of the Caspian. North to south it spans latitudes about 47° N to 63° N, though the northern part is only roughly drawn. The two main rivers—the Don marking “Europe” and the Volga marking “Asia”—structure the whole picture.
Modern countries included in the map area
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Ukraine — Crimea, shores of the Sea of Azov, much of the Donbas steppe
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Russia — Krasnodar, Stavropol, Rostov, Volgograd, Astrakhan, and parts of the North Caucasus
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Georgia — lowlands along the Black Sea once called Colchis
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Azerbaijan — western Caspian shore once called Albania
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Kazakhstan (small corner) — a bit of the lower Volga delta
Münster's 1540 Geographia deserves a number of superlatives. First, it established the convention that a world atlas should include world and continental maps. To that end, it was the first atlas to include specific maps of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This change was in no small part influenced by the first circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan in 1522. The Geographia was the first printed work to render latitude and longitude in their now-standard degree-minute-second form. And it was the book that ushered in a series of "modern"-style world atlases culminating in the 1570 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius.
Sebastian Münster (1488-1552) was a cosmographer and professor of Hebrew who taught at Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Basel. He settled in the latter in 1529 and died there, of plague, in 1552. Münster made himself the center of a large network of scholars from whom he obtained geographic descriptions, maps, and directions.
As a young man, Münster joined the Franciscan order, in which he became a priest. He then studied geography at Tübingen, graduating in 1518. He moved to Basel, where he published a Hebrew grammar, one of the first books in Hebrew published in Germany. In 1521 Münster moved again, to Heidelberg, where he continued to publish Hebrew texts and the first German-produced books in Aramaic. After converting to Protestantism in 1529, he took over the chair of Hebrew at Basel, where he published his main Hebrew work, a two-volume Old Testament with a Latin translation.
Münster published his first known map, a map of Germany, in 1525. Three years later, he released a treatise on sundials. In 1540, he published Geographia universalis vetus et nova, an updated edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia. In addition to the Ptolemaic maps, Münster added 21 modern maps. One of Münster’s innovations was to include one map for each continent, a concept that would influence Ortelius and other early atlas makers. The Geographia was reprinted in 1542, 1545, and 1552.
He is best known for his Cosmographia universalis, first published in 1544 and released in at least 35 editions by 1628. It was the first German-language description of the world and contained 471 woodcuts and 26 maps over six volumes. Many of the maps were taken from the Geographia and modified over time. The Cosmographia was widely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The text, woodcuts, and maps all influenced geographical thought for generations.
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