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Description

Exceptional Original Color

Finely colored example of Antoine du Chaffat's exceedingly rare map of the Siege of Ochakov, published in Augsburg.

The plan includes a detailed treatment of the fortifications and 7 item key in French and German locating strategic points.

In the 18th Century, Ochakov was viewed as a strategic point for control of the Black Sea.  At the time of the Siege, Ochakov was the capital of the Ottoman Ozi Province, with the fortress located at the mouth of Dnieper, on the banks of the Dnieper-Bug Estuary.

The Siege of Ochakov (1737) occurred during the Austro-Russian–Turkish War (1735–39).  The siege resulted in the capture of the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov, by the Russian army, under Burkhard Christoph von Münnich siege of Ochakov.

The French mapmaker Antoine du Chaffat served from 1734 to 1750 as military cartographer in the service of Bavaria.

Ochakov

In the 7th and 6th centuries BC, Greek colonists founded the commercial colony town at the current location of Ochakov Alektor became a Roman colony in the 1st Century BC.  

During the Middle Ages the place was called Vozia by Romanians, part of the Moldavian Brodnici rule. It fell under Tatar domination in the time of the Mongol invasion of Europe.

Alexandru cel Bun (Alexander I, the Good), ruler of Moldavia (r. 1400–1432), and his ally Vitovt or Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1392–1430), freed the Vozia territory and a fortress was built again close to Alektor's ruins.  In the 14th century the Senarega brothers, Genovese merchants and warriors, had settled a castle at the place called Lerici, very close to Vozia city. It was a good point for commerce with Romanians and Tatars, but the Senarega family's interference in Moldavia's internal affairs made the Moldavians from Cetatea Albă (today's Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi) take the castle from them in 1455.

In 1492, Crimean Tatars took Vozia from the Moldavians and named it Özü-Cale.  At that time, the city was also referred to as Kara-Kerman ("Black city") as an opposite to Cetatea Albă ("White City", hence the synonymous naming as Ak-Kerman), also taken by the Tatars and Turkish army from their once Moldavian rulers.

In 1493, the fortress was taken by the Moldavian's cossacks of Bohdan Gliński. Due to its strategic location the fortress was a site of contest for a long time between Moldavia, Moldavia's ally Zaporizhian Sich, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman Empire.

At a later date it became the center of an Ottoman sanjak which included Khajidereh (today Ovidiopol), Khadjibey (Odessa), and Dubossary, as well as some 150 villages, and Silistra Province, sometimes called Özi Province, to which it belonged. Khadjibey later became a sanjak center of its own.

In 1600 Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave), Prince of Wallachia, took control of the city for a short time. In this period,  Lawrin Piaczeczynski, secretary of the Polish king Sigismund III Vasa, traveling with a diplomatic mission to Gazi Ghirai Khan, traversing the region of Cetatea Albă (Ak-Kerman) and the Vozia or Oceakov region, found only "Moldavian villages under the Tatar Khan's domination, ruled in his name by Nazyl Aga" ("sate moldoveneşti pe care le ţine hanul tătărăsc şi pe care le guvernează în numele lui sluga lui Nazyl aga")[2] Similar notes were made by Giovanni Botero (1540–1617) in Relazioni universali (Venice 1591); Gian Lorenzo d'Anania in L'Universale fabbrica del Mondo, ovvero Cosmografia (Napoli 1573, Venice 1596 etc.) and Giovanni Antonio Magini (1555–1617), from Padova, în Geographie universae (Venice 1596).'

During the Russo-Turkish War (1735–1739), the Russian Empire, viewing the Ottoman fortress as the key for obtaining control of the Black Sea littoral, besieged it in 1737. Russian troops commanded by Marshal von Münnich took the fortress by storm (July 1737), but the following year Russia abandoned it, restoring it to Turkey in 1739. The 1737 siege became famous as the background to one of the tales of the fictional Baron Munchausen.

Rarity

The map is exceedingly rare.  We locate only the example in the National Library of Poland, Biblioteka Narodowa.