POMERANIA POLAND & GERMANY 1568 MÜNSTER UNUSUAL ANTIQUE MAP FRENCH EDITION

La table dy Pays de Pomeran, selon les principautes, les villes les plus excellentes, les bourgades & chasteaux d'icelle.
 

Description: Striking and highly detailed unusual 1568 Sebastian Münster's original woodcut map of Pomerania. Covers modern-days Poland & Germany. The map shows cities, towns, rivers, lakes, reliefs, forests and islands. French text on the verso. Nine Armorials across the top adorns the map. French text on the retco & on the verso.

Pomerania (Polish: Pomorze; German: Pommern; Kashubian: Pòmòrskô; Swedish: Pommern) is a historical region on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea in Central Europe, split between Poland and Germany. The central and eastern part belongs to the West Pomeranian, Pomeranian and Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodeships of Poland, while the western part belongs to the German states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg.
 
Pomerania's historical border in the west is the Mecklenburg-Western Pomeranian border Urstromtal, which now constitutes the border between the Mecklenburgian and Pomeranian part of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, while it is bounded by the Vistula River in the east. The easternmost part of Pomerania is alternatively known as Pomerelia, consisting of four sub-regions: Kashubia inhabited by ethnic Kashubians, Kociewie, Tuchola Forest and Chełmno Land.
 
Pomerania has a relatively low population density, with its largest cities being Gdańsk and Szczecin. Outside its urban areas, it is characterized by farmland, dotted with numerous lakes, forests, and small towns. In the west of Pomerania lie several islands, the largest of which are Rügen, the largest island in Germany; Usedom/Uznam, and Wolin, the largest island in Poland. The region has a rich and complicated political and demographic history at the intersection of several cultures.
 
The sheet comes from the 1568 French Edition of Sebastian Münster's "Cosmographia".
 
The Cosmographia ("Cosmography") by Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) from 1544 is the earliest German-language description of the world.
 
It had numerous editions in different languages including Latin, French (translated by François de Belleforest), Italian, English, and Czech. The last German edition was published in 1628, long after his death. The Cosmographia was one of the most successful and popular books of the 16th century. It passed through 24 editions in 100 years. This success was due to the notable woodcuts (some by Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, and David Kandel). It was most important in reviving geography in 16th-century Europe. Among the notable maps within Cosmographia is the map "Tabula novarum insularum", which is credited as the first map to show the American continents as geographically discrete.
 
His earlier geographic works were Germania descriptio (1530) and Mappa Europae (1536). In 1540, he published a Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia with illustrations.
 
Editions:
 
German 1544, 1546, 1548, 1550, 1553, 1556, 1558, 1561, 1564, 1567, 1569, 1572, 1574, 1578, 1588, 1592, 1598, 1614, 1628
Latin 1550, 1552, 1554, 1559, 1572
French 1552, 1556, 1560, 1565, 1568, 1575
Italian 1558, 1575
Czech 1554. 

Date: 1568 ( undated )

Dimension:  Map size approx.: cm 37,9 x 16,5  === Paper size approx.: cm 38,8 x 31,6

Condition: Very strong and dark impression on good paper. Paper with chains. Map uncolored. Wide top and lower margins. Small lateral margins. Small foxing and browning. Map folded. Conditions are as you can see in the images.

Mapmaker: Sebastian Münster was born in Nierder-Ingelheim, near Mainz on 20th January 1488, the son of Andreas Münster. In 1505, he joined the Franciscan Order, and four years later was sent to the monastery of St. Katherina in Rufach. There he studied under Konrad Pelikan, who was to have great influence over the young man in the next five years. Pelikan was a teacher of Hebrew, Greek, mathematics and cosmography.
 
In 1529 Munster settled in Basle, where he was to spend the rest of his life. In 1540, Munster's edition of Ptolemy appeared, illustrated with 48 woodcut maps, the standard Ptolemaic corpus supplemented by a number of new maps, of great significance for the mapping of Europe.
 
Having completed the Geographia, Munster returned to his pet project, the description of Germany. In 1544, he published the first edition of the Cosmographia, a summary both of Munster's own geographical researches and those of his many correspondents. The Cosmographia, with its later expanded editions, was as close as Munster would come to fulfilling the vision of 1528.