Beschreibung:

Maps--The Islamic world LARGE COLLECTION OF MAPS DEVOTED TO THE NORTH AFRICAN LITTORAL FROM MOROCCO TO THE RED SEA. [15TH-19TH CENTURY], 115 ENGRAVED MAPS, VARIOUS SIZES (FROM FOLIO AND MINIATURE ATLASES), MANY HAND-COLOURED, A FEW MINOR DEFECTS A MAGNIFICENT COLLECTION OF NEARLY ALL THE MAJOR EUROPEAN PRINTED MAPS OF THE REGION, COVERING FIVE CENTURIES OF CARTOGRAPHY. The collection has been assembled over twenty years by Gerhard Lerchbaumer, a minister at the permanent representation of Austria to the EU in Brussels, and is one of the most extensive in private hands, and includes some of the greatest names in the history of western printed cartography. The earliest printed map in the collection is derived from Ptolemy’s Geographia. This was first compiled in c.150 A.D., but the invention of printing in the fifteenth century enabled his work to be used to create the first printed maps of the region. The Lerchbaumer collection boasts examples from the Rome (1478), Ulm (1482), Venice (1511) and Waldseemuller (1513) editions of Ptolemy. Following the Arabic conquest of North Africa in the eleventh century, information on the region increased steadily; Arabic Geographers Ibn Haulak, Mohamed Idrisi, Ibn Battuta, and later Leo Africanus (Hassan Ibn Mohammed Al-Wazza) travelled in and described these countries, and Europeans incorporated this data into their mapping of Africa. The Mediterranean had long been a mercantile highway; European merchants from Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Marseilles had close contacts with the markets in Fez, Algiers, Tunis and Egypt even before the Portuguese and Spanish began the exploration and colonization of Africa. The Arabic settlement also brought war; the Berbers (who give their name to “Barbary”) were notorious pirates, heavily involved the slave trade, who harassed shipping in the region, and were ultimately suppressed by the European powers. An area of such importance to Europe as a whole demanded increasingly accurate cartography; accordingly, evolving European knowledge of the region is represented in the work of successive generations of great cartographers such as Gastaldi, Munster, Ortelius, De Jode, Mercator, Blaeu, Hondius, Jansson, Sanson, Browne, Moll, Quad, Jaillot, De Fer, Duval, Homann, Van der Aa and many others. The Lerchbaumer collection is therefore an unrivalled and fascinating chance to see the cartographical development of this area of beauty, danger, and opportunity. For a fuller listing of maps see catalogue note