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Jean de Beaurain’s large chart of Menorca, engraved in Paris during the opening phase of the Seven Years’ War, translates recent French reconnaissance into a work of courtly propaganda. At a glance the viewer sees an island surrounded by a field of rhumb-lines, its interior divided by dashed lines into the five términos inherited from Aragonese rule.
The map’s political message is carried by the long French text that fills the upper left quadrant. In measured prose Beaurain moves from Ciutadella round the north-west capes before dwelling at length on Port Mahon and the artillery of Fort St-Philippe, the very positions the duc de Richelieu’s expedition would overwhelm in June that year. A shrewd, last-minute addition draws a line under that narrative: a single cramped sentence recalls that “on 28 September 1708 the English, taking advantage of the Archduke of Austria’s pretensions to the crown of Spain, seized the Island of Minorca and Fort St-Philippe, and have held it until the present, 1756.” The smaller letter-bodies and tightened line spacing betray a compositor’s late insertion, ensuring Louis XV and his ministers were reminded that British possession was a recent (and, by implication, anomalous) episode now about to be reversed.
In the lower right corner, a luxuriant late-Baroque cartouche, engraved by Pierre-Philippe Choffard, gathers scrollwork, acanthus leaves, and a heap of martial trophies around a tablet that bears the dedication to Louis XV. Above the tablet, a crowned globe is emblazoned with the triple fleur-de-lis, asserting Bourbon dominion.
Beaurain adapts the visual language of a sea-chart: long radiating sights converge on a compass rose south-west of Mahon, with the dangerous channel between Menorca and Mallorca off to the west. The terrestrial cartography depicts networks of roads, hamlets, mills and vineyards rendered with pictorial quality. By wedding hydrographic geometry to terrestrial detail, the map argues that Menorca, known for its strategic harbor, offers arable wealth and administrative coherence worthy of permanent annexation.
![Asiae, Quae Vulgò Minor Dicitur, et Syriae tabula geographica, quantum per subsidia licuit elaborata, opere, si quod aliud in antiqua geographia, arduo. Quam tabulam clariss. Dom. Comes de Caylus in aere incidi curavit. [Asia, commonly called the Lesser, and Syria, a geographic map, as much as it was possible to elaborate with the aids, a work, if any in ancient geography, arduous. This map the most illustrious Lord Count of Caylus had carved in copper.]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/100258.jpg)