The Abraham Ortelius edition of Martin Helwig's seminal map of Silesia.
Important regional map of Silesia, from Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas of the World.
Shows the region from Olomunz and Crackaw in the south to Krossen and Syratz and Kails in the North, centered on Breslaw and Oppelen. Prague also appears at the bottom of the map.
The map is based upon an extremely rare map by Martin Helwig (1516-1574). Helwig was a trained mathematician, classical linguist and geographer, who became the Rector of St. Maria Magdalena School in Breslau (now Wrocław, in Poland), in 1552. Helwig produced the first woodcut map of Silesia made on the basis of locally collected surveys and data which he published in 1561, under the title Silesiae Typus. Helwig dedicated the map to Nicolaus II. Rehdiger, a wealthy Silesian merchant, banker, philanthropist, governor and patron of the principality of Breslau (Wrocław), who sponsored the map. Martin Helwig's map went on to receive acclaim in a public writing by Caspar Peucer, an eminent German scholar at the University of Wittenberg, ultimately receiving the notice of Ortelius, who incorporated the map into the Theatrum.
This map appeared until 1592 and from 1595 was replaced by Ortelius in an updated map of Silesia.
1573L(B)32 (40 copies printed) (last line, centred like 2 lines above it, in cursive script like the entire text: "describit,vt eius absolutam historiam studiosus hinc petere posse videatur."; full stop after the title on the line formed by extending the horizontal stroke in the middle of capital A.),
Abraham Ortelius is perhaps the best known and most frequently collected of all sixteenth-century mapmakers. Ortelius started his career as a map colorist. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp guild of St Luke as afsetter van Karten. His early career was as a business man, and most of his journeys before 1560, were for commercial purposes. In 1560, while traveling with Gerard Mercator to Trier, Lorraine, and Poitiers, he seems to have been attracted, largely by Mercator’s influence, towards a career as a scientific geographer. From that point forward, he devoted himself to the compilation of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), which would become the first modern atlas.
In 1564 he completed his “mappemonde", an eight-sheet map of the world. The only extant copy of this great map is in the library of the University of Basel. Ortelius also published a map of Egypt in 1565, a plan of Brittenburg Castle on the coast of the Netherlands, and a map of Asia, prior to 1570.
On May 20, 1570, Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum first appeared in an edition of 70 maps. By the time of his death in 1598, a total of 25 editions were published including editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Dutch. Later editions would also be issued in Spanish and English by Ortelius’ successors, Vrients and Plantin, the former adding a number of maps to the atlas, the final edition of which was issued in 1612. Most of the maps in Ortelius' Theatrum were drawn from the works of a number of other mapmakers from around the world; a list of 87 authors is given by Ortelius himself
In 1573, Ortelius published seventeen supplementary maps under the title of Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum. In 1575 he was appointed geographer to the king of Spain, Philip II, on the recommendation of Arias Montanus, who vouched for his orthodoxy (his family, as early as 1535, had fallen under suspicion of Protestantism). In 1578 he laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography with his Synonymia geographica (issued by the Plantin press at Antwerp and republished as Thesaurus geographicus in 1596). In 1584 he issued his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). Late in life, he also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table (1598).