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This finely engraved map by Matthäus Seutter presents the region between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga at a critical moment in the early eighteenth century. It centers on Saint Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as a new Russian capital on the Baltic, and illustrates the postwar border between Sweden and Russia as established by the Treaty of Nystad in 1721. Ingria, newly annexed to the Russian Empire, is shown in the south, while Swedish-controlled Karelia appears to the north.
A dramatic allegorical cartouche at upper left emphasizes the map’s political message. The imperial double-headed eagle presides over a scene of martial and commercial allegory. The cartouche visualizes the projection of Russian power into the Baltic and the emergence of Saint Petersburg as both a strategic and symbolic center.
The map shares important features with Homann’s Ingermanlandiae seu Ingriae novissima tabula, engraved in Nuremberg in 1734, but Seutter’s rendering is independently composed.
This map was issued in Seutter’s composite atlases from Augsburg and was later reprinted without changes to the plate under the imprint of Tobias Conrad Lotter. It helped define the way a German-speaking audience understood Russia’s expansion into the Baltic and remains a compelling artifact of imperial image-making in the age of Peter the Great.
Matthäus Seutter (1678-1757) was a prominent German mapmaker in the mid-eighteenth century. Initially apprenticed to a brewer, he trained as an engraver under Johann Baptist Homann in Nuremburg before setting up shop in his native Augsburg. In 1727 he was granted the title Imperial Geographer. His most famous work is Atlas Novus Sive Tabulae Geographicae, published in two volumes ca. 1730, although the majority of his maps are based on earlier work by other cartographers like the Homanns, Delisles, and de Fer.
Alternative spellings: Matthias Seutter, Mathaus Seutter, Matthaeus Seutter, Mattheus Seutter
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