Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570): Ortelius and the First Atlas

The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or “Theatre of the World”, was published by Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp on 20 May 1570. It brought together maps of the whole known world, drawn to a common format, engraved in a consistent style and bound in a single volume with descriptive text. It is widely regarded as the first modern atlas, and it became one of the best-selling books of its age.

Background: maps before the atlas

By the mid-16th century printed maps were plentiful in Europe, but they came in every size and style. Wealthy buyers in Italy sometimes had dealers bind together a selection of separate maps to order, producing volumes now called Lafreri atlases after the Roman publisher Antonio Lafreri. These were assembled from sheets of different scales and makers and had no fixed contents.

Antwerp was then one of Europe’s greatest commercial cities and a leading centre of printing. Its merchants needed information about distant lands, and its scholars followed the new geographical knowledge flowing from Portuguese and Spanish voyages.

Abraham Ortelius

Ortelius was born in Antwerp on 14 April 1527 into a family of southern German origin. In 1547 he joined the city’s Guild of Saint Luke as an “illuminator of maps”, colouring printed maps by hand. He built a business trading in maps, books and antiquities, travelling to fairs in Frankfurt and elsewhere.

He became a friend of Gerardus Mercator, with whom he travelled in 1560, and he corresponded with scholars across Europe. According to an often repeated account, the idea for the Theatrum came from the merchant Gillis Hooftman, who wanted maps of a convenient size for studying trade routes and was frustrated by large rolled maps.

Making the Theatrum

Ortelius did not survey any land himself. Instead he gathered the best maps available from many authors, redrew them to a standard page size and had them engraved on copper, largely by Frans Hogenberg. The book was printed in Antwerp by Gilles Coppens de Diest, at Ortelius’s own expense.

The first edition contained 70 maps printed from 53 plates, beginning with a world map and maps of the continents and followed by regional maps. Each map had a description on its reverse. A remarkable feature was the Catalogus Auctorum, a list of the cartographers whose work Ortelius had used, which named 87 authors in the first edition. Crediting sources in this way was unusual at the time.

Success and later editions

The Theatrum was expensive but sold quickly. It was reprinted several times in its first year, and over the following decades it appeared in some 30 or more editions in Latin, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian and English, the English version following in 1606. The Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin, whose great printing house was among the most important in Europe, published editions from 1579.

Ortelius kept the work up to date with supplements called Additamenta, adding new and revised maps. From 1579 he also included the Parergon, a series of historical maps of the ancient world, reflecting his interest in classical history. In 1575 he was appointed geographer to King Philip II of Spain.

Ortelius lived through the troubles of the Dutch Revolt, including the Spanish Fury, the sack of Antwerp by mutinous Spanish troops in 1576. He died in Antwerp on 28 June 1598 and was buried in the abbey church of Saint Michael. Editions of the Theatrum continued until 1612.

Content and limits

The maps reflected both the progress and the gaps of 16th-century knowledge. Europe and the Mediterranean were drawn in some detail, while the Americas had a bulging western coast and a vast imagined southern continent, Terra Australis, filled the bottom of the world map. Asia east of India was based on sparse and sometimes outdated information.

In his geographical dictionary, Thesaurus Geographicus, Ortelius in 1596 suggested that the Americas had been “torn away” from Europe and Africa by earthquakes and floods. This is often mentioned as an early observation of the fit of the continents, centuries before the theory of continental drift.

Ortelius and Mercator

The Theatrum and the work of Gerardus Mercator are often compared. Mercator’s 1569 world map introduced a new projection for navigation, and his Atlas of 1595 gave the word “atlas” to books of maps. Ortelius, by contrast, was an editor and publisher rather than an original mathematician. The two men remained friends, and Mercator delayed parts of his own atlas, perhaps partly to avoid competing directly with the Theatrum.

Timeline

• 1527, 14 April: Abraham Ortelius is born in Antwerp.
• 1547: Ortelius joins the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a map colourer.
• 1570, 20 May: The first edition of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is published in Antwerp.
• 1573: The first Additamentum, a supplement of new maps, appears.
• 1575: Ortelius is appointed geographer to Philip II of Spain.
• 1579: Christophe Plantin begins publishing the Theatrum, and the Parergon of historical maps is added.
• 1598, 28 June: Ortelius dies in Antwerp.
• 1612: The last edition of the Theatrum is published.

Why it matters

The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum turned scattered maps into an organised, portable picture of the whole world, and its format of uniform maps with text and sources became the model for every atlas that followed. Building on earlier landmarks such as the Waldseemüller map, it made up-to-date geography available to merchants, scholars and rulers across Europe.