Gasconia (Gascogne, Gascony)

Key Properties

Edition: First edition, Dutch text, 1598

Map: 'Gasconia', title in a cartouche upper right, with a scale beneath it

Position: p. 99 (signature G2), headed 'Gascogne'

Text: verso p. 100, the beginning of the Beschryvinghe van Gascoigne

Format: Copperplate engraving on a leaf of the oblong octavo atlas

Colouring: Uncoloured

Collation & Technical Description

One leaf from the Caert-Thresoor: the map on p. 99 (G2), headed 'Gascogne', and on the verso, p. 100, the opening of the Dutch description of Gascony. The map shows Gascony with its coastline, principal towns and terrain and the neighbouring regions, the cartouche 'Gasconia' upper right with a scale beneath it.

Condition

Good. Some damage to the margins; slight discolouration.

References & Bibliography

Van der Krogt, Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici, III, 341:01 (the atlas). Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, II, p. 254, Lan 1. Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica, VII, 16.1. Burger, Het Caert-Thresoor (1930). King, Miniature Antique Maps (1996).

Description

A small map of Gascony from the first edition of Barent Langenes's Caert-Thresoor, the first Dutch pocket atlas, Middelburg 1598, with the opening of the Dutch description of Gascony on the verso.

The map covers the south-west of France between the Atlantic coast, the Garonne and the Pyrenees, with the neighbouring regions marked around it.

The Caert-Thresoor was the first Dutch pocket atlas: small copperplate maps by Pieter van den Keere (Petrus Kaerius) and Jodocus Hondius, each with a description of the country in Dutch, in an oblong octavo meant to be cheaper and handier than the great folio atlases of Ortelius and Mercator. It appeared in 1598, a year after the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies had returned, and it brought the geography of the whole known world within reach of a wider public. The plates proved durable: Petrus Bertius reused them for the Latin Tabularum geographicarum contractarum from 1600 and a French edition followed in 1602, so that the Dutch text of 1598 is the first and earliest form in which these maps were issued.

Historical Significance

Gascony and the neighbouring Béarn were the home ground of Henry of Navarre, who had become Henry IV of France in 1589. In 1598, the year of the Caert-Thresoor, he ended the Wars of Religion with the Edict of Nantes.

Provenance

Available on request.

From our Journal

Langenes's France, 1598: Fourteen Provinces from the First Dutch Pocket Atlas