Belgium buys oldest map of the Netherlands, when were Spanish territory
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The Royal Belgium library has acquired the oldest printed map of the Netherlands that is known, which dates back to the time when these territories were part of the Empire of the Spanish monarch Philip II and Immortalizes the Spanish fleet together to ports in Flanders.
This Pearl is part of a larger work, the second edition of a universal story about the Dutch world entitled Dessie Court cronikel and signed by Cornelis van Hoorn, whose 18 sheets printed and coloured by hand were published in 1586 in an atlas.
One of the pages of the Chronicle, which alone is preserved a copy, hid inside a map not leading to a buried chest that was itself a treasure: a copy of a lost fragment of the famous letter from the Netherlands of Jan Van Horne.
“Found it by chance, the map was capped by another blade and was not visible,” explained curator of maps and atlases in the library of the University of Utrecht (the Netherlands) under van Egmond, responsible for the discovery.
One of the pages of the of is cutting cronikel had been printed on the reverse of the letter, a very common practice at that time due to the high price of the paper, which probably did not reach the 30,000 euros which has disbursed the Belgian Royal Library to do with this piece of its roots.
“We could see that an image below, had so we look at the page in a window behind and discovered that there was a map dating from 1557,” explains van Egmond, who led the restoration work to recover the fragment.
Worthy of an engraving of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the image depicts the territories of the southern Netherlands, the current Belgium, and its flourishing cities as “Brugghe” (Bruges), “Bruessel” (Brussels), “Ostend”, “Dinant” or “Namen” (Namur).
Another of the cities that you can see is “Ghent” (Ghent), in which 57 years before the printing of the map was born Charles I of Spain and Germany V, the King who joined under his throne the crowns of Navarre and Castile, Aragon and the vast territories of the Holy Roman Empire.
Among all illustrations sharp roofs Casitas, sinuous rivers and forests that dot the map is a very particular, of a majestic sailing ships that cross the waters of the North Sea on its way to the port, under a banner that reads the fleet Spanish.
Van Egmond believes that it might be the return of Charles to Spain in 1556, where he died two years later retired from imperial in the placid monastery of Yuste (Cáceres) life, or the arrival a year before his son, Philip II, to Flanders to become ruler of the Netherlands. As a memento of that troubled time, the map was discovered in the Dutch city of Breda, scene of bloody clashes between the Spanish and Dutch forces which briefly fell into the hands of Philip II in 1581.
Breda, symbol of the obsession of the House of Austria to maintain its hegemony in Europe, surrendered once again to the Spanish in 1625, image that would be recorded in the retina of the story with the brush of Velázquez. The map still holds one curiosity: is drawn “in reverse”-i.e. with the North down and South above–, almost an irony in the eyes of the modern European observer.
