Old Russian maps of the 17th, early 18th century

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Today we will talk about old Russian maps. The post will be short. Simply because they, in general, are, in fact, simply not there. I have seen thousands, if not tens of thousands, of foreign maps from this period. The stranger is the situation with our cards.

The first Russian atlas that is in the public domain is Kirilov's Atlas, created between 1724 and 1737. (Download link) The atlas is not complete, unfortunately, there are not maps of all regions and localities of our country. But this is essentially the beginning of Russian cartography, as strange as it sounds.

There is really the so-called Drawing Book of Siberia (1699-1701), Remezov. (Download link) As well as the "Chorographic Book of Siberia" (1697-1711). Here are just their dating and the relevance of reality, I personally raise a lot of questions. For example, I give a map of Perm the Great from the Drawing Book. All pictures are clickable up to large sizes.

These are the cards that children in grade 1 draw. The north is here on the right (but this is very conditional). In general, in his works, Remezov clearly did not bother with the orientation of his "maps" to the cardinal points. From map to map, they are constantly jumping on the sides of the sheet. Such concepts as scale, proportion are absent from the word at all. At the same time, in the West, maps are already being created that are almost close in accuracy to modern ones.

A palexy user quoted me an excerpt:

I have a map of D. G. Messeshmidt of 1721 (a section of the Ob tributaries of the Tom and Ini) which almost completely copies the map Remezova … The date of Messerschmidt's expedition is indisputable since the documents on it were piled up, but here is an excerpt from the diary given by Nevlyanskaya: “Captain Tabbert went today with the cornet Iorist to one artist named Remezov, where he saw a map of Tomsk district painted with oil paints; he skimmed through it, but found nothing in it that would be portrayed correctly . (Novlyanskaya M. G. Philip Johann Stralenberg. M.; L., 1966. S. 36.).

Well, finally, on this map there are no cities I discovered, Velikaya Perm and Vyatka. Hundreds of foreign cards have them, but Remezov does not. Peter the Great included these two cities in the newly created Siberian Province in 1708. They are mentioned in the Reports and Senate sentences of that time. But in fairness, I must say that it was on this map that I found the Molozhek River, on which Old Perm stood.

There is such a drawing of the Siberian land, drawn up in 1667 under the leadership of the Tobolsk governor, stolnik Pyotr Ivanovich Godunov. From the service drawing book of S. U. Remezov (Manuscript Department of the State Public Library named after M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Hermitage Collection, No. 237, sheet 31, spread).

The north is down here. Of course, they got excited about Remezov's drawing book. As I already wrote, there was no orientation to the cardinal points at all.

And one more version of the same card:

There is a more (I wanted to write a perfect one, but this is not so) detailed version of this map on the net. It is also attributed to Remezov. If you look from the point of view of the absence of any scales and proportions, then yes, Remezov agrees. But the clear presence of the cardinal points suggests otherwise.

While looking for materials on the city of Perm the Great, I came across a small fragment of a map from the server of the Ural State University, which is designated as - Map of Perm the Great. XVI century Reproduction.

Again, the North is down here. And the city of Perm is. There he is, under the word "Cheremis". Unfortunately, we could not get the whole map. And from where they dug it there and did not find it.

I saw several more similar cards on the network, but they are too cloudy and terribly primitive. Therefore, I did not even bother to save them.

Now comes the fun part.

Here it is in full size:

Do you feel the difference? Heaven and Earth with Remezov's drawings. Even the parallels are correct. Unfortunately, the resolution of the map is not very high and many small inscriptions are not visible at all. But you can learn something.

Belgorod Horde on the territory of modern Odessa region of Ukraine:

Little Tartaria (exactly what Tartaria) in the Black Sea steppes.

And to the right of it, separated by a border, is an area called the Yurts of the Don Cossacks. Moreover, it stretches right up to the Volga, most likely.

By the way, I will give a part of one map of 1614 from my post: The cities of Great Perm, Vyatka, Ryazan and Troy on the map of 1614.

Those. a hundred years earlier, these two areas were a single state. And it was from his "Tatar yoke" that Tsar Ivan the Terrible got rid of.

By the way, the Cossacks used to be called the Tatars. I have a small post on this. There, at the end, it is directly written that the Little Russian Cossacks live on the lands where the Tatar Cossacks used to live. Or maybe they were their descendants. Who knows.

That's all.

And finally, the Book: Ancient Russian Hydrography: Containing a description of the Moscow state of rivers, channels, lakes, wells, and what cities and tracts are along them and at what distance. - St. Petersburg: Published by Nikolai Novikov: [Type. Acad. Sciences], 1773. Now it is better known under the title "The Book of the Big Drawing. This is the same map of the 16th, early 17th century, only handwritten. Actually, it is possible that Remezov drew his drawings exactly from such texts."

By the way, there is an interesting passage in the preface:

This was exactly the same situation with us with maps. They just weren't there. More precisely, probably all the same were. But either they were destroyed, or they lie deep deep in the archives. Simply because there is a completely different history of Russia. Where were, re-discovered by me, the cities of Great Perm, Vyatka, Rezan. By the way, the latter did appear on the maps of the mid-18th century, but this did not prevent modern historians from stubbornly repeating that it did not exist.

Yesterday I was told that as many as 10,000 old maps are kept in the archives of the RAS Library. I do not yet know exactly what kind of maps they are, ours or foreign and of what centuries, but I really hope that there will be Russian old maps of the 16-17th and early 18th centuries. My friends are now trying to scan all this and put it on the network. God grant that they would succeed. And then we will learn a little more truth about the history of that time.

Today we will look at two Russian maps of the early 18th century from the archives of the Russian National Library. Although the word "let's see" is very arbitrary here. I have a very strong desire to put the entire leadership of this library against the wall and shoot them with a large-caliber machine gun. They are laborers, not scientists.

Let's see first Map of the hemispheres of 1713, published in the Civil Printing House of V. O. Kipriyanova … The card is large and the resolution of the picture, on the contrary, is small. Therefore, it is fashionable to watch only very large records. On click, it will open in a higher resolution. But something can be pulled out of it. Pay attention to Antarctica. She's gone. I somehow specifically looked at such atlases of Western cartographers. Antarctica is not there either until the beginning of the 19th century, when our sailors discovered it. Therefore, if you see an old map where Antarctica is present, then you should know that it was made in the second half of the 19th century. Or later.

I would like to draw your attention to the high degree of skill of the then Russian cartographers. In the first part, I cited Remezov's Atlas. And I repeat my thought - these are not maps, but children's drawings at the elementary school level.

And one more map by the same author: The geographic globe, that is to say, the land-descriptive one, identifies the four parts of the earth, Africa, Asia, America, and Europe, inhabited below, and will envelop us from everywhere. By command in the civil printing house of the Lord's Summer: 1707. In the reigning City of Moscow, by the Vain of Vasily Kiprianov. Under the direction of His Excellency Mr. Lieutenant General Jacob Willimovich Bruce.

You can more or less consider it here at this link. But after that I want to strangle the local programmers with my bare hands, for a long time. You can't drag the entire map out of there, so I took a few screenshots from there. And on them we are waiting for several interesting discoveries. Namely, the word - "Sarmat" right under the letter M of the word Moscow. And above it is visible Ocean Sarmatian.

Here is another excerpt. The Scythian was also added to the Sarmatian Ocean. To the right of the name "M. Moskovskoe". I did not understand what it means. The word TARTARIA is written in big letters. Through "r". Slightly above the beginning of this word, the names Scythia are visible. But above the letter "I" in the word "Siberia" the river "Tatar" is visible. Above the word "MOSCOW" it seems to be written -Sarmatia. Again, why is Russia or Rus not written? But what the word "Asinsky" means is not clear.

Oh, it was not in vain that Lomonosov wrote in his book:. A short Russian chronicler with a genealogy, St. Petersburg: Under the Imp. Acad. Sciences, 1760.

And lastly, Description of Europe. The truth is very poorly visible. Gaul is written instead of France. There is also some kind of Dacia. Poland is written without a soft sign. At the very end, it seems, it is written to Ellad. For information, we then called modern Turkey Greece. But Russia is here. And she, as I understand it, is in European Moscow and Tartary, as well as the Turks. Or are these separate states on the continent?

There is a very interesting line in the description:

Drawings: over the hemispheres, the coat of arms of the Russian Empire against the background of an ermine mantle supported by archangels with swords in their hands; framed by the mantle figures of Mars, Apollo, banners and other military paraphernalia

And here they are. And this is far from an isolated case. By the names of the Greek gods, we then called ships and even on the coats of arms of the cities were the ancient Greek gods. And all this is very good to go to my investigation about the statues of the ancient world, which we called simply the Golden Woman.

If someone can pull out the whole card from here in more or less good resolution, I will be very grateful.

Supplement: The world is not without kind people and thanks to a respected

prostoyoleg we can see the whole map with you. The truth is in the same not very high resolution.

The Russian National Library, St. Petersburg, is slowly digitizing its funds, and even puts them on public display. That's where I saw such a thing as: A. Zubov. A new and reliable map of all Europe = Europe / Gryd. Alexey Zubov. [and] P. Picard. - Moscow: Armory, P. Picart's Workshop, [1720-1721, 1760-1770]. The link allows you to watch everything online.

Link to download the atlas in pdf format.

And these are separate files.

The midnight ocean is cool.

Strange, yes, the Adriatic Sea or the Western Ocean?

And here is Ocean Devkalisky. In general, before the sea and the ocean were called, as it seems to me, slightly different types of water area.

The National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, is slowly digitizing its collections and even putting them out for everyone to see.

P. Picart of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania drawing / By the decree of his most sovereign imperial majesty, Peter Picart worked in Moscow; [Cartouche eng. A. Shkhonebek]. - Moscow: Armory, [1705]. But the map itself was accurately drawn much earlier. Kiev on it is still part of Lithuania, whereas according to the official history it became part of the Moscow state in 1667. Moreover, I have a strong feeling that in Moscow it was only engraved and created in the same principality of Lithuania, in the middle of the 17th century.

Opens on click in high resolution.

There are a lot of unknown toponyms. Crimea is written here as Tartaria. As on the Russian map of the end of the 17th century from my main post. And only in the 18th century Tartaria began to be called Tartary. Pay attention to Crimea, except for Kafa and Perekop, not a single familiar name. the sea turns out to be formerly called the Eastern Lake.

Notice how Koenigsberg is called on this map. I went to Wiki and found an amazing text there:

Under the name of Korolevts (Korolevs) or Korolevits, the castle and the area around it have been mentioned for a long time, starting from the XIII century, in various Russian sources: chronicles, books, atlases [7] [5]. In Russia, this name was widely used before Peter I and, occasionally, in a later period [8], up to the beginning of the XX century [9], including in fiction, for example, in the texts of M. Saltykov-Shchedrin [10] [eleven]. However, after Peter I and before the renaming in 1946, the Russians used the German version more often.

Heh, it was not in vain that I argued in my investigation that Prussia was a Slavic land, the homeland of the Romanovs and Rurik with the Varangians and the Germans that the Slavs lived there.

In general, if you study and compare the map with the official history, then there will be more than a dozen pages of list of non-connections. Well, this is a trivial matter for our history.

There was such a city as Byzantium. Here is its plan

The plan of Constantinople or the Tsar City like the formerly popularized Byzantium, anciently Vigos was conquered by Muhammad the second of the Lord's summer 1453 in the month of May on the 29th day] / [Drawn by Prince Dimitri Cantemir]; Grydor. Alexy Zubov in San [kt] P [eter] burg. - St. Petersburg: [Petersburg Printing House], [1720].

You can download it in large size from here.

This small addition to my investigation into the disappearance of the city of Rezan.

I stopped by the Library of France the other day; I have such a habit of running around libraries. And there is a whole section dedicated to Russian maps. The French were not too lazy and sorted them all. Even the plans of Konigsberg are. Well, and Ukraine, of course. And there are several dozen maps of various localities of Russia, drawn, judging by the titles, in 1724-1729 by our cartographers. True in English. Well, that's okay. The main thing here is that until now, one of the earliest maps of areas, were considered the maps of Kirilov, 1722-1731. They are there, by the way, too, partly. there is. And here is a completely new cartographic material that has not yet been seen by anyone. And there I found the town of Staraya Rezan.

The north is here on the left, which is, by the way, one of the signs, as I understand it, of maps of the 17th century. Already at 18 it became a rule to orient maps of specific areas to the north. And before that, cartographers drew them, as it is more convenient for whom. The most vivid example is Remizov's maps. There, the north "walks" in a circle just chaotically. You will break your brains until you understand what and how is drawn on a particular map. In general, Russian maps of the 17th century, for the most part, are oriented to the south. Like a map of Siberia and the Far East by the same Remezov. At least he is credited with this card.

As for Europe, I will give an example from my old posts - Cities of France in 1638. There, the north is also not static. But already on the Paris plan of 1720, everything settled down and took the modern framework.

I have a very reasonable suspicion that all the maps that we now know were made not earlier than the end of the 17th century. True, according to the old originals, which by that time were simply dilapidated and worn out. Well, some of course were simply forged in the 18th century. 19th centuries. This can be seen from the correct proportions and contours of the terrain. When you look at Russian maps, pay attention to two things. The Caspian should be round and not elongated. And in the Crimea, the Kerch region should be, as it were, chopped off and not stretched to the left, as it is now.

Well, back to the city of Rezan.

Map; Partie du cours de l'Occa 1724-1729.

As I wrote above, north is on the left.

So we see the cities of Kolomna and Kashira. Further along the Oka river, the city of Pereslavl-R I amZanskaya. And behind him is Old R etake Please note that the old name contains the letter "e". Somewhere before the beginning of the 18th century, we almost did not have the letter "I". Therefore, there was, among other things, Eroslavl.

The town of Staraya Rezanj has a complicated history. At first it was destroyed at the end of the 16th century by the Tatars, then it existed, along with the new Rezany, as a small village. But already at the beginning of the 18th century it expanded to a city. Pay attention to the city icon and a footnote to the map. In this form it existed somewhere until the middle of the 18th century and then disappeared again. The authorities announced that it was destroyed by Batu in the 13th century, and in this format it still exists as an archaeological monument. But there you can still see pieces of 18th century temples.

And in 1781, Catherine II renamed Pereslavl-Ryazan into simply Ryazan, which still exists today. Thanks to her for that. Otherwise, the toponym could have gone into history almost without a trace, like the city of Bulgar and Bulgaria. And then Batu, he is like Shurik, you can blame everything on him.