Chief among these relationships was his friendship with Gerardus Mercator. As part of these travels, he formed strong contacts with other European cartographers who influenced his career path away from engraving and towards scientific cartography. Ortelius travelled extensively within Europe, with recorded visits to the Seventeen Provinces (now the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern France and Luxembourg), France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and the UK. Abraham Ortelius, 1579, Wikimedia Commons It is fitting that his interests covered not only the revolutions in the scientific geography of which he was a primary innovator but also historical geography: his early works include detailed maps of ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire. Interestingly, Ortelius may also be the first person in history to have formally presented the basic theory of continental drift in his discussion of the ‘matching’ coastlines of Africa, Europe, and South America. Over his lifetime he worked as an engraver, geographer, cartographer and book trader but he is most well known as the creator of the first world atlas – the first edition of which was published in 1570. Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598)įrom Antwerp, Brussels, Ortelius was part of the world-renowned Dutch-Flemish school of cartographers. These were the first attempts at mapping the known world in its entirety which demonstrate a balance between striving for accurate cartography and presenting the wondrous elements of the distant world. In St John’s College Library’s Special Collections there are four copies of Ortelius’s world atlases.
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