Carto-apocrypholysis

The 1570 Hogenberg engraving of the 1535 Lyatskiy / Wied transcription¹ of Miechowita's “Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis Asiana et Europiana et de contentis in eis”² [Ku17][F18][N23], focused on the latter's eastern narrative periphery—here left nameless as the only ethno-political domain (sic!) within the map's field, and presented in a state of stark civilisational alienation and indefinition (extending amorphically between the idol of the Ugro-Finnic deity① Zarni An and the many Tartar Ordes② that emerged from the decomposition of the Golden Orde). Thus, it articulates the hegemonic geopolitical and historical manifesto of the House of Gedyminas—envisaged under the ægis of the I Republic, projected from Kyiv, the Mother of All Ruthenian Cities (purposefully placed in an a-topographical position③), and sealed by the lasting totemic presentation of the Battle of Orsha④ [F18]. Through Miechowita's imperial apology of Sigismundus I the Old, an implicit yet direct reference is established to the Jagiellons—regarded as heirs of Gedyminas, and hence as rightful intra-colonisers and gatherers of all Ruthenian Lands after the dissolution of the Golden Orde. The reference becomes intricately contextualised and modernised by the engraver's (?) choice of the symbolic content of the cartouche⑤, which opens an avenue to essential semiological associations with Aesopus' fable “The Owl and the Birds” (or possibly even with its important rendering due to Aesopus' avid reader Hieronymus Bosch³). It puts the Republic and its sovereign in the unique position of rare and precious first-hand knowledge of the nature of Tsarev Ulus [Hal82], i.e., of the Muscovite Khanate, and therefore also in the important rôle of a sentinel of the European œcumene. This decoding is amplified by the highly unusual semiological borrowing from Dürer, placed symmetrically relative to the cartouche with the owl-and-birds motif across the field of the map: the inimitable Bat⑥—the bearer of the title of Dürer's celebrated Melencolia I⁴. The sign can readily be traced back to the canonical work on the occult by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, “De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres”—well known to Dürer—in which the bat figures (alongside the owl) as an augural Saturnian being, sleeplessly vigilant and omen-bearing.
   The partisan status of the map in the contemporary ideological discourse regarding the rapidly transforming Eastern Periphery of the European œcumene is further emphasised by the presentation—manifestly normative and strategic/persuasive, and most certainly intentionally so in view of the unquestionably high geographical competence possessed by its makers (Lyatskiy, his nameless Lithuanian companions, and Hogenberg)—of the Great Novgorod⑦, depicted greater than ever, and–importantly–greater than Moscow, already in the 1535 prototype, and further enlarged by the artist-engraver in its remake in the fateful year 1570—the year of the city's annihilation by Ivan IV the Mad. The systematic and brutal manslaughter ordered and carried out by the savage kniaź between January and February of that year, following false accusations against the city's authorities of conspiring with the Republic against Muscovy, brought the long 'democratic' (veche) tradition of the rich merchant republic to a gory end—a fact which could not have left Hogenberg, known for his outspoken engagement against tyranny⁵, indifferent and detached.
   The map, first drawn—around 1535 [Bu36]—jointly by Ivan Vassilyevich Lyatskiy, the okolnichiy of the late khan-tsar Ivan IV the Mad (i.e., by a person responsible for, i.a., official travels of the khan-tsar and his diplomatic guests), and high commanders of the Lithuanian army [N23] with the help of Anton Wied and under the auspices of the wealthy Gdańsk bourgeoisie represented by Senator Johann Koppe, and subsequently re-engraved by one of the most accomplished cartographers and graphic artists of the Golden Age of Dutch Cartography, Frans Hogenberg on one of the then best European papers⁶ enjoyed a seemingly curious post-production fate: No sooner had it been (re-)published by Hogenberg than it... vanished altogether from the public view, without leaving a lasting imprint in the budding cartographic narrative of the region [Ba75]. Its apparent irrelevance was sealed by Ortelius's decision to publish—in his canonical and monumental Theatrum Orbis Terrarum—an alternative representation of the region, submitted by Anthony Jenkinson⁷, an English sailor and merchant endowed with an impressively rich imagination but a somewhat limited knowledge of the subject matter. Thus, on the face of it, the most knowledgeable cartographer of the epoch gave preference to an oneiric vision of a faraway country—and an important emerging market—produced by an adventureous traveller and self-made geographer (and an opportunistic admirer of the savage tyrant, whom he depicted as an exotic sage) over a detailed and professional cartographic description prepared by a highly competent insider (and a refugee, escaping the brutality of the same throne), and that in contrast to his own chief engraver—a person of great talent and experience—who deemed it worth his time and effort to re-engrave the other map with the best materials available 35 years subsequent to its creation, extending its range in the process, and dramatically enriching and deepening its semiological layer. This conundrum is readily elucidated by a tentative yet highly plausible identification of the map's agenda, and of the powerful professional client willing to pay for its production in a limited, possibly even semi-secret edition: The map was made for strictly military and trade purposes, and commissioned by the Republic at war with the Muscovite Khanate, vitally interested in gaining a tactical advantage over a numerically stronger adversary while securing or extending its trade contacts with the north-eastern region. This idea seems to be corroborated—at least in its military aspect—by a recent historical study [Ł17], in which the Lyatskiy / Wied Map is presented as the first map ever to be used by the Res-publican forces in modern warfare, and that in their confrontation with Muscovites in the course of the XVI century. In this context, it is worth noting that the map exhibits an unconventional orientation, pointing eastwards as if to indicate the direction of civilisational expansion—or of an army's advance.... Thus, in this very special cartographic text from a culturally laden spatio-temporal juncture, the various constitutive elements of the map as a cultural artefact with both abstract and practical dimensions, and as an expression of pouvoir-savoir become expressed clearly and harmoniously, and subordinated to the overarching geopolitical project.

¹The prototype 1537 Lyatskiy / Wied Map from the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel.↩

²Elements of the peculiar Miechowitian eastern-Sarmatian imaginarium present in the map: The wolverine in an unmistakably Miechowitian physiological situation⑧, and the hunted walrus⑨ (both called by their Polish names). Also the Golden Hag on the banks of the river Ob①. ↩

³The Meisterstich “Het woud heeft oren, het veld heeft ogen” by Hieronymus Bosch—an artistic translation of Aesopus' fable.

Currents of the symbolic charge of Aesopus' thought circulated widely in the European semiosphere in the XVI century, as evidenced—importantly from the point of view of the present discourse—by their verbatim appearance (note the owl-and-birds motif below!) on royal tapestries acquired for the Wawel Castle by Sigismundus II Augustus (and largely inspired, i.a., by Bosch's œuvre through its Flemish makers and artists such as Cornelis Bos). ↩

⁴The Meisterstich “Melencolia I” by Albrecht Dürer. The symbolism of the work, and in particular the depiction of the bat, refers directly to the canonical text on the occult by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (who had been the first to identify and name the melancholy of type I—that of the scientific mind). ↩

⁵One of a series of engravings by Frans Hogenberg under the title “Spaanse Furie” documenting and condemning the brutal sackings of Dutch cities by Spanish Habsburg armies in the period 1572—1579, which accompanied a military intervention aimed at putting out the Dutch Revolt. ↩

⁶The watermark on the 1570 engraving, identifying the source of the paper used as the paper mill of Claude Denise from Troyes (one of the best in Europe at that time, regularly supplying, i.a., La Sorbonne), see: The Likhachev Catalogue, No. 3048. ↩

⁷The 1562 original of the Jenkinson Map from Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego. ↩

Literature

• Historical/Critical/Semiological discussion:
  • [A12:pp. 53—56]
  • [Ba75:pp. 64—68]
  • [Bu36]
  • [F18]
  • [Ku17]
  • [Ł17]
  • [N23]
  • [Sch13:pp. 151—163]
• Primary sources: —
• Catalogues: —

The 1613 Hessel Gerritsz engraving of Moscow—the first realistic representation of the capital of Muscovy from the time preceding the city's demolition by the occupying Res-publican forces in 1611 ⁸. This is a fairly faithful, if also inferior in its attention to architectural detail, remake of a prototype due to Szymon Jędraszewicz Śmiotański, an envoy (or spy) of Sigismundus III Vasa at the court of tsaritsa Maryna Mniszech and tsar Dimitriy I, and an official guest at their wedding in 1606 [A74]. The prototype had been drawn sometime between 1606 and 1608, during Śmiotański's incarceration in Moscow after the Shuyskiy Massacre, perpetrated in the wake of the wedding. It had subsequently been brought to the Nieśwież court of Kniaź Krzysztof Radvilla the “Orphan”, where it was rendered in the form of an artistic esquisse ⁹ by Tomasz Makowski in 1611. In the meantime, it became—according to Alexandrowicz—the basis for the Sigismundian plan of Moscow ¹⁰ engraved by Lucas Kilian in 1610, and through that intermediate representation it was transposed into Gerritsz's image [A84]. The latter was presented to the newly crowned young Muscovite khan-tsar [C59] Mikhail Fedorovitch Romanov and his boyars, and thus contributed to planting a perfect Res-publican propagandist time bomb at the very root of Muscovy's imperial narrative: Indeed, the pluralis in the official term «vstkh Moskovskikh gospodarstvakh» (which translates from Ruthenian as «all Muscovite states») in its title cartouche⑩ achieves a subtle yet unequivocal negation of the foundational δογμα of the Muscovite tsardom and westward conquest of 'all Ruthenian lands'—the unitarity of the Muscovite state (see: [Kh23] for historical evidence for the embedding of this rhetorical device in the propaganda arsenal of the Res-publican court in its ideological confrontation with Muscovy; the evidence echoes an earlier scholarly polemic between Muscovite historians: Anna L. Khoroshkevich and Karl O. Schmidt). The positive obverse of the deprecatory propagandist message was the reaffirmation of the I Republic as the rightful heir to Kyivan Rus' and the guardian of its cultural legacy and territorial patrimony, including the rogue Muscovite Khanate (see: the Lyatskiy / Wied Map).
   The definitely non-Muscovite, and possibly Res-publican origin of the engraving was also independently deduced by Denis A. Khotimsky from a paleographic analysis of the вязь (the ornamental Cyryllic lettering) of the title cartouche [Kh22], which revealed the presence of a couple of concealed polonisms in the text, an incongruence of the lettering's proportions with the strict (!) contemporary Muscovite standard, and the lack of any known replication of its idiosyncratic elements in common literary use in Moscow at the time of the plan's making, likewise suggestive of a Western hand.
   Of course, the documented existence of a material prototype—strikingly similar in its non-canonical form (see: the alignment with the Warszawa/Vilna—Moscow axis, towards Warszawa!) to the artefact in hand and diverging from the well-established tradition (see: Siegmund Freiherr von Herberstein's and Isaac A. Maßa's drawings below, conforming with the canonical NS orientation)—with a natural military/intelligence origin (hard to imitate or compete with in an epoch, in which—as recorded and emphasised by Isaac A. Maßa in his diaries from Muscovy—one would pay with one's head for a thwarted attempt to smuggle a plan out of the diligently guarded capital of the powerful khanate) in the portfolio of an active Res-publican propagandist with direct access to and a good professional relation with the accomplished Dutch engraver justifies a dispassionate, decisive slicing of the knot of the historical enigma with Occam’s razor, all the more so in the absence of any alternative material prototype—and in particular any Muscovite one—or its administrative trace outside the neatly tailored Muscovite historiographical narrative. On the other hand, Khotimsky's investigation forges a new line of epistemological attack against the grand lie about the Muscovite origin of Gerritsz's plan (the mythical Godunov Esquisse, 'sadly lost' without trace...), sustained for decades by dogmatic Muscovite scholars (such as Mikhail N. Tikhomirov or Sokrat A. Klepikov) as part of an effort to valorise local intellectual production and a desperate attempt to defend the notion of cultural continuity amid the collapse of political structures and the ensuing systemic turmoil during the Time of Troubles. The significance of this new approach is heightened by the pervasive reproduction of the lie and its nonchalant propagation commonly encountered—alas!—also among respected European historians (see, e.g., Günter G. Schilder's uncritical reiteration of Klepikov's feeble mental construct and astoundingly selective citations from Alexandrowicz's research, curiously missing its key conclusions, in [Sch13:p. 186]).
   When seen through the prism of the interpretative scheme elaborated above, and in conjunction with the discussion of the ideological dimension of the previous cartographic text, the present one acquires the status of a logical closure of the Res-publican Eastward Intra-Colonial Triptych, grounded in Miechowita's Treatise:

• The Geopolitical/Cultural Manifesto: The Lyatskiy / Wied ideological projection (and a preliminary military realisation) of Miechowita's vision between 1535 and 1570;
• The Territorial Execution: The Strubicz résumé of the military endeavour and literary propaganda ¹¹ of the Livonian War, reproduced as Mercator's ¹² Russia cum confinijs and Livonia (1595), and as Hondius' ¹³ Moscovia (1607) [N19].
• The Administrative Crowning: The Jędraszewicz–Śmiotański / Makowski gloriette focusing the reader's attention on the severed caput of the subjugated khanate (recall: the capture and deposition of the Muscovite khan-tsar, the incarceration of his family, the humiliating defeat and subsequent placement in captivity of the highest-ranking military commanders and the patriarch of the Muscovite church; finally, the seizure and destruction of Moscow), and its Res-publican prosthetic replacement, loyal to the victorious centre of power (recall: the enthronement of Vladislaus Vasa as tsar, the garrisoning of the Muscovite Qirim-le Grad)—symbolically clasped in Kilian's heraldic resignification of the original plan through the introduction of the domineering (royal) Res-publican coat of arms (an image soon to be popularised by Braun and Hogenberg ¹⁴).

Semiologically potent as revealed by the interpretation advanced above, the Res-publican image of Moscow simultaneously marks a turning point in the very narrative that it co-delineates: There has been no natural continuation of the Triptych, the Republic has not transcended its hitherto status relative to the neighbouring khanate, Muscovy has not been colonised and returned to the Kyivan patrimony; within a half-century from the moment of the publication of the Jędraszewicz–Śmiotański / Makowski Plan, the spearhead of expansion lost its edge, and was forced to turn around. One would, however, be mistaken to assume naïvely that the chapter of regional and global history it had filled with rich symbolism has since been closed... When forcibly inscribed into a definition of group identity—thus polluted and impoverished, yet at the same time rendered functional and conveniently manœuvrable—the memory of humiliation and injury endures alongside the group it helped bring into being ¹⁵.

⁸The seizure of Moscow, which came soon after Stanisław Żółkiewski's (the Field Hetman of the Crown) spectacular victory over Muscovite forces in the Battle of Kłuszyno on July the 4th, 1610, led to the enthronement of Prince Vladislaus Vasa as tsar of Muscovy (a title that he oficially renounced only a quarter of a century later), sealed by the Shuyskiy Tribute before Sigismundus III Vasa and Vladislaus Vasa,

(shown here on a XIX-century bartynotype of a reproduction of one of the two magnificent paintings by Tommaso Dolabella—originally made for the king in commemoration of his triumph—which was engraved by... none other than Tomasz Makowski—see: the Strubicz / Makowski Map below), and a two-year occupation of the city by Res-publican forces from September the 21st, 1610 until October the 26th, 1612. In that time, Muscovites made several failed attempts to recapture the city. One of them, which began on March the 29th, 1611 was crushed with exceptional brutality, leading to the deaths of many thousands of the city’s inhabitants and the complete destruction by fire of most of its buildings.↩

⁹The Makowski esquisse from 1611

depicting the city before its destruction by fire on March the 31st, 1611, as documented by the flamboyant (sic!) cartouche (see: above). The author had, at that time and also later, a direct and good professional relation with the accomplished Dutch engraver Hessel Gerritsz (reflected in the latter's other works), as they were both involved in the bold Radvilla project of the charting of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Note the peculiar non-standard orientation of the map, replicated in subsequent cartographic representations of the city, but different, i.a., from that on Isaac A. Maßa's dessin d'enfant

often quoted as the source of XVII-century depictions of the city, let alone Siegmund Freiherr von Herberstein's fantastic/standardised vision from 1549 (also canonically oriented).↩

¹⁰The Sigismundian plan of Moscow, engraved for Sigismundus III Vasa by Lucas Kilian in Augsburg in 1610,

the direct predecessor of the Gerritsz plan.↩

¹¹See, e.g.: Jan Kochanowski's panegyric „Jezda do Moskwy [...]”, focused on Krzysztof Radvilla's exploits during the Pskovian Campaign of Stephanus Báthory.↩

¹²The 1595 Mercator maps of Ruthenia Magna (or Russia, not to be confused with today's denotation—a result of a grand historical appropriation of unprecedented geographic proportions by the former Muscovite Khanate; an interesting and comprehensive discussion of the intricacies of the toponym's fate, embedded in the cartographic context, can be found in [F23])

and Livonia,

based largely on the military maps of the I Republic from the period of the Livonian War of 1558—1583. The maps had been drawn under the supervision of the royal cartographer Maciej Strubicz. Note, in particular, the curious inset in the bottom right corner of the former map (titled separately as Russiæ Pars Amplificata), apparently showing the proverbial middle of nowhere, and in fact providing a cartographic transcript of Jan Kochanowski's panegyric „Jezda do Moskwy [...]” (see: above), as demonstrated convincingly in [N19].↩

¹³The 1607 faithful cartographic transcript of Jan Kochanowski's „Jezda do Moskwy [...]” by Hondius: Moscovia [N19].↩

¹⁴The 1617 Braun—Hogenberg presentation of the Res-publican Moscovia Urbs Metropolis Totius Russia Albae in their celebrated Civitatus Orbis Theatrum.↩

¹⁵The Muscovite authorities never cured themselves of the sickly and vile obsession to remove completely and permanently from the Res-publican collective consciousness the image of the defeated and humiliated tsar. Throughout the entire XVII century, they stubbornly—on various diplomatic ocassions— pressed the demand that the commemorative traces of the events of 1610—perceived as offensive to Muscovite pride—be withdrawn from the official and public semiosphere of the Republic and that all material evidence of the imprisonment of the tsar’s family in its capital be erased. In particular, they requested that Dolabella’s paintings of the Shuyskiy Tribute be removed from the walls of the Royal Castle and handed over to them, and that the Muscovite Chapel in Warszawa, the burial place of the family of the dethroned tsar

(Sacellum Moscovitarum, the third marked building from the left on the 1656 engraving by Erik Jönsson Dahlbergh), be demolished. Their efforts were eventually crowned first by a forced acquisition or a blatant looting of Dolabella’s paintings at the beginning of the XVIII century (it is not certain which of the two took place), and later by the devastation of the original architecture of the Staszic Palace (on whose grounds fragments of the Chapel had allegedly been discovered) and its premeditated reconstruction in a crude Muscovite style. Rediscovered once again among the old buildings of Warszawa in the interbellum period 1918—1939, the structure was prepared for symbolic reconstruction—an undertaking, however, prevented by the outbreak of the war. After the war, the ruins identified as the remains of the Muscovite Chapel were dismantled by an administrative decision of the communist authorities of the People's Republic of Poland, a puppet state of the Soviet Union—the post-(bolshevik-)revolution reincarnation of the imperial Muscovite spirit, as late as 1954. Half a century later, in 2004, the Russian Federation—the cultural chimæra which amalgamated the seemingly incongruent heritage of the Soviet Union with that of the Muscovite Khanate-Tsarate—replaced—at the initiative of Vladimir Surkov (!), one of the leading ideologues associated with Moscow’s neo-imperial policy— the main gosudarstvienniy prazdnik (i.e., a state holiday) of the former (The Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution, instituted by khan-gensek Yossif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvilli “Stalin” in 1927, and celebrated officially until 1990) with a new-old holiday of the latter (The Day of Moscow’s Liberation from Polish Invaders, first instituted by khan-tsar Mikhail Fedorovitch Romanov in 1613, and celebrated until 1917)—The Day of National Unity, commemorating the 1612 liberation of Moscow from the Polish–Lithuanian occupants...↩

Literature

• Historical/Critical/Semiological discussion:
  • [A74]
  • [A84]
  • [A12:pp. 183—186]
  • [AŁS13:pp. 20—21]
  • [C59]
  • [Kh22]
  • [Kh23]
  • [Sch13:pp. 186—194] (an erroneous identification of the plan's prototype)
• Primary sources: —
• Catalogues: —

The 1631-38 state ¹⁶ of Hessel Gerritsz's 1613 engraving based on cartographic materials prepared and gathered, in the last decade of the XVI century ¹⁷, by Maciej Strubicz, the court cartographer of Sigismundus II Augustus and Stephanus Báthory, and by Tomasz Makowski, a talented graphic artist appointed at the court of Kniaź Krzysztof Radvilla the “Orphan”. The map establishes Nieśwież—the culturally vibrant courtly milieu of the Radvilla Family, where it was drawn—as an umbilicus mundi⑪. It is rather spectacularly focused on the Grand Duchy, and—at the same time—ostentatiously dismissive of the cultural substance of the post-Lublin-Union (!) Crown. As such, it enters into a rather bemusing frictional dialogue with the 1562 Grodziecki map of the I Republic ¹⁸, in which the mirror-symmetric cultural-political logic had been articulated. The map also exhibits—in a most clear-cut, amply documented and hence convincing manner—the fundamental ontological difference between the two state borders of the I Republic in the latitudinal direction: the Western limen, and the Eastern limes. The latter, separating the Republic from Imperium Chami, i.e., the Orde, is lined up with numerous representations of battles with Muscovites and Tatars⑫⑬⑭⑮, fought by Sigismundus I the Old, Sigismundus II Augustus and Stephanus Báthory, and—i.a.—portrays very vividly and evocatively the devastation of Ivan IV the Mad's fortresses in the Principality of Polotsk—such as, e.g., the Krasne Castle ¹⁹⑫—seized and destroyed by Res-publican forces on their way towards Polotsk in the course of the victorious Báthorian campaign of 1579. The campaign had played the rôle of the factual substrate for the first regional atlas of the I Republic—the Pachołowiecki Atlas, engraved by Giovanni Battista Cavalieri and distributed—as part of a wider propagandist action—in Rome, right under the pope's nose, and in the rest of Europe in 1580 [NŁF25].
   The map is the first official text ever to use the denotation «Ukraina»⑯ in the Western (Latin) semiosphere²⁰. It also features a very detailed account—both verbal⑰ and cartographic—of the Zaporizhian Sitch⑱, with its many Cossack island settlements southwards of the Porohy⑲.

¹⁶According to the Adamovitch dating [Ad22].↩

¹⁷See: [A12:pp. 71—122].↩

¹⁸The first (1570) state of the Ortelius' engraving of the canonical map of the I Republic drawn by Wacław Grodziecki during his academic sojourn in Leipzig. The astoundingly precise and beautifully detailed cartographic text defined the image of the Republic in the European semiosphere for the next ca. 100 years, replacing the previous standard candle by Bernard Wapowski, which had... burned quite literally in the Great Fire of Kraków in 1528.↩

¹⁹The majestic Krasne Castle—in reality, a primitive Muscovite stronghold with ca. 100 m-long wood-and-clay ramparts—sitting at the junction of and thus controlling the logistical routes of the invading Res-publican army and of the pivotal (and more powerful) Muscovite Susza Castle, which was paralysed by the capture of Krasne on July the 31st, 1579, and subsequently surrendered on October the 6th, 1579.

Notably, Jan Zamoyski, the Grand Chancellor of the Crown and counsellor to Stephanus Báthory at the time of the Polotsk Campaign, rejoiced enthusiastically at the capture of the Krasne Castle in his letter to Nuncio Caligari on August the 4th, 1579, see: [Zam1579].↩

²⁰Needless to say, the denotation had appeared much earlier in the Eastern (Cyryllic) semiosphere, to wit: in Київський літопис (the Kyivan Litopys), published in Kyiv in 1187. And no, there is no reason to despair—as Muscovite propagandists do—over the opening «O» in the Cyryllic «Оукраїна» (allegedly—and falsely—identifying Ukraine with the Muscovite «Okraina», as seen in Isaac A. Maßa's (counter-)map, engraved by Jan Janszoon in 1636,

a safe distance away from Ukraine across the contested territory of the Principality of Novogrod Severskiy—just as there is no reason to despair over the opening «O» in the Greek «Οὐρανία»—if one understands the source of the code introduced by Cyril and Methodius in an attempt to grapple with the Eastern Slavic languages...↩

Literature

• Historical/Critical/Semiological discussion:
  • [Ad22]
  • [AŁS13:pp. 252—257]
  • [Bu63:pp. 47—51]
  • [NŁF25]
  • [Sch13:pp. 195—218]
• Primary sources: —
• Catalogues: [Niew02-II:K89/1], [vdK00-II:1730/I:2A/2:022,131,132,101,111-12,121,113]

Staphanus Báthory at Pskov (alongside Jan Zamoyski, Stanisław Żółkiewski et al.)

...TO BE CONTINUED, USQUE AD FINEM...

Acknowledgements

The Author's quest of the rich cartographic residue of the I Republic would not be possible—in any one of its many dimensions— if it were not for the unwavering and unlimited spiritual and material support from the Hallay–Suszek Family, grounded in a profound understanding of the intellectual value of a study thus oriented. In particular, the active rôle of Jadwiga Suszek, the Author's Mother, and Her dedication to the cause has always been critical for the constant evolution and financial security of the research.

The Author also expresses his deepest gratitude to and cordial sympathy for Barry L. Ruderman who—through his multifarious support, driven invariably by a shared passion and comprehension of maps, and the kind of sensitivity that distinguishes Map Readers among collectors and antiquarians alike—has contributed decisively to the creation of unique conditions under which the study of cartographic texts about the Republic and its wide œcumene could become not merely an intellectual pursuit, but a direct experience, and hence also a genuine delight to the mind and spirit.

He is indebted to Grzegorz Franczak and Tomasz Kempa for kindly and generously sharing with Him their expert knowledge—and even some unpublished findings (G.F.)—about the Res-publican ghost-mapping of the Eastern Periphery. Denis A. Khotimsky's perseverence, originality and methodological versatility in grappling with the Grand Muscovite Carto-Historical Lie in the context of the early mapping of Muscovy is recognised with distinction, and his willingness to share his many and various insights is greatly appreciated. The Author also acknowledges numerous interesting exchanges with Stefano Bifolco, Filip Devroe, and Clemens Paulusch about the cartographic heritage of the Republic and its current distribution on the global antiquarian market, as well as the intricacies of the cartographic craftsmanship of the Golden Age.

Very special tribute is owed to Michał Wojcieszczuk, whose engagement in this carto-apocrypholytic undertaking transcends the ordinary bounds of shared cultural and scholarly curiosity, the comradeship of struggle for historical truth against historical falsehood, and a singular affection for the cartographic idiom. And while no less is to be expected of a Person, for whom—as for the Author, and not without an intimate and well-documented causal link—the complex semiology of the space so provocatively dubbed public has—along the intersection of the respective knotted worldlines—become much more than an abstract, neatly axiomatised concept, the convincing transit from the obvious propensity to the much less obvious actuality renders the Author deeply grateful.

Literature

References point to and are to be consulted with the Carto-bibliography.

Sources of the imagery

The Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection and Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc., The David Rumsey Map Collection, Polona (Biblioteka Narodowa), Gallica (La Bibliothèque Nationale de France), A.E. Nordenskiöldin kokoelma (Suomen Kansalliskirjasto), Wikipedia.

Disclaimer

This site is currently under construction, and its content—while already thought-provoking—is far from the envisaged state of completion, which shall, one day, provide—it is hoped—a foundation for more abstract, global inferences.