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Description
Scarce early map of Crete, from De Belleforest's Cosmographie.
In 1544, the scholar and geographer Sebastian Munster published his Cosmographia, one of the most important an influential works of its type in the16th century In 1575, the Paris publisher Francois de Belleforest issued a French edition of the work which included this fine woodblock map of Cyprus
Rather than reproducing Munster's map, Belleforest compiled an entirely new map on a much larger scale, based in part on a map of 1535 attributed to Giovanni Domenico Zorzi. Below the map is a lengthy description of Crete, which continues on the verso of the map.
The map is quite rare on the market. We locate only a single example1.
Reference
Ch. Zacharakis,A catalogue of printed maps of Greece 1477- 1800, Athens 1992, 155. A. & J. Stylianou, History of the Cartography of Cyprus, Nicosia, 1980, 76. A. Skoutari (ed.), Sweet Land of Cyprus, Athens, 2003, 33.