1674 Bouttats Map of Crete after Boschini

This elegantly engraved, scarce 1674 map of Crete was engraved in Vienna by Gaspar Bouttats after the 1651 map of Marco Boschini. The map captures the island at a crucial historic moment during the Cretan War (1645 - 1669), when the fate of Europe revolved around Crete.

The State of the Art

In following Boschini, the map shares the lineage of Francesco Basilicata, who, between 1610 and 1640, produced the state-of-the-art firsthand mapping of the island. Bouttats produced this, among an array of other maps, for the history of the reign (to date) of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (1640 - 1705) written by Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato (1606 - 1678). During this period, Crete was the central feature of the long war between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. The concern of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire was that should peace be found between the two belligerents, the Ottoman Empire would then be free to concentrate on Hungary and Transylvania, where Leopold had enjoyed success against the Ottomans. The war's outcome was of deep concern to the powers of Europe, who had long feared Ottoman and Islamic incursion.

In the words of historian Elizabeth Clutton,

At that time, the attention not only of Venice but of the whole of Christian Europe was focused upon the fate of Crete. It was the perfect moment for a patriotic Venetian to affirm the greatness of Venice in her struggle against la potenza vastissima Othomana and, at the same time, to launch a money-making venture by publishing a volume containing maps, plans and drawings of Crete.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved by Bouttats for inclusion in the 1674 third volume of Galeazzo Gualdo Priorarto's Historia di Leopoldo Cesare. The history is well represented in institutional collections, but we see only one example of the separate map in OCLC, held by Princeton University.