Extremely Rare Adaptation of the 1537 Mercator Wall Map of the Holy Land.
Not in Laor or Nebenzahl. Only One Other Example Traced.
A rare and previously unrecorded Lutheran adaptation of Mercator’s 1537 map of the Holy Land, conceived as a visual aid to Reformation-era Scripture study. Only two examples are known to survive, this and one held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.
The map presents an unusual north-by-northwest view of biblical Palestine, closely copying the upper portion of Mercator’s six-sheet wall map but in a greatly reduced format. It preserves Mercator’s characteristic angled graticule, resulting in an orientation with the Mediterranean running across the top and the Jordan River rendered as a bold horizontal feature. The map features a keyed legend to biblical sites, distinguishing metropolises, cathedral cities, places belonging to the Tribe of Ephraim, places belonging to the Tribe of Simeon, and cities of the Philistines.
A Lutheran Adaptation of the Mercator Map
The legend is a window onto the pedagogical and confessional aims of the print. Each class of symbol was chosen to anchor a particular strand of biblical history that a Lutheran teacher wanted pupils to follow on the page while reading Scripture.
Metropolises and cathedral (sacerdotal) cities point the viewer to the post-apostolic organisation of the Church. In Lutheran thought, the early episcopal sees embodied a purer, pre-papal Christianity; marking them on the map invited students to imagine an uncorrupted ecclesia that could serve as a model for Reform.
Sites belonging to the tribes of Ephraim and Simeon draw the eye to two sharply contrasted episodes in Israelite narrative. Ephraim, Joseph’s favored son, occupied the fertile hill-country that became the political and cultic heart of the Northern Kingdom (Shiloh, Bethel, Samaria). Simeon, by contrast, was dispersed in the arid south and largely absorbed by Judah. Setting the two side by side illustrated a recurrent Reformation sermon theme: God’s covenant promises stand, yet human fidelity may wax and wane from tribe to tribe and age to age.
Finally, the Philistine cities supply an ever-present foil. For sixteenth-century Protestants, the Philistines were a ready emblem of the hostile “world” against which the faithful must contend; locating their towns in a distinct symbol class put the conflict quite literally on the map and sharpened the typological contrast between the people of God and their perennial adversaries.
Together, these five categories turn the geography into a layered study aid. They give students fixed visual cues for (1) the institutional Church, (2) covenant land allotment and its fortunes, and (3) the outward foes of Israel - three narrative threads that a Lutheran schoolmaster could weave through lessons on both Old and New Testaments while the map lay open beside the Bible.
The map was prepared by Albertus Lyttichius Joachimius, a Joachimsthal schoolmaster and early Lutheran pedagogue, and dedicated to Paulus Röhling (actually written "Dom. Pauli Rhoeling"), probably a son of Hans Rohling. The engraving was carried out by Wolf Meyerpeck, an important early copper engraver working in Leipzig. It should be noted that Leipzig was in close communication with the nearby Bohemian Ore Region of Jáchymov. The publication reflects the collaboration of an educated Protestant elite that included printers, theologians, and civic patrons dedicated to equipping schools and lay readers with didactic visual material rooted in Scripture.
The map’s biblical geography derives ultimately from Jacob Ziegler’s 1532 Terrae sanctae descriptio, mediated through Mercator, but altered here in content and emphasis. Toponyms are primarily (exclusively?) in Latin not the vernacular one might expect for a Protestant Bible, though Latin was the standard for maps of the time.
BSB Example
The Munich example preserves a letterpress text beneath the map, a four-column German poem by Lyttichius titled Von verenderung des gelobten Landes, tracing sacred history from the Creation to the Turkish dominion of Palestine. Its final stanza reaffirms the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith: “Der Glaub durch Christum allein weis.” Though absent from this impression, the existence of the poem confirms the map’s use as a Protestant teaching device, pairing salvation history with geographical consciousness.
Rarity
Not listed in Nebenzahl or Laor. A rare and historically significant artifact of the early Protestant use of maps as instructional tools in the context of Bible reading and confessional education.