Pomerania in the Medieval and Renaissance Cartography – from the Cottoniana to Eilhard Lubinus

The following paper deals with the question of the cartographical image of Pomerania. What I mean here are maps in the modern sense of the word, i.e. Graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world1. It is an important reservation because the line between graphic and non-graphic representations of the Earth’s surface in the Middle Ages was sometimes blurred, therefore the term mappamundi could mean either a cartographic image or a textual geographical description, and in some cases it functioned as an equivalent of the modern term “Geography”2. Consequently, there’s a tendency in the modern historiography to analyze both forms of the geographical descriptions together. However, the late medieval and early modern developments in the perception and re-constructing of the space led to distinguishing cartography as an autonomous, full-fledged discipline of knowledge, and to the general acceptance of the map in the modern sense as a basic form of presentation of the world’s surface. Most maps which will be examined in the paper were produced in this later period, so it seems justified to analyze only the “real” maps, although in a broader context of the geographical imaginations. The area under consideration is the historical Pomerania

The following paper deals with the question of the cartographical image of Pomerania. What I mean here are maps in the modern sense of the word, i.e. Graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world 1 . It is an important reservation because the line between graphic and non-graphic representations of the Earth's surface in the Middle Ages was sometimes blurred, therefore the term mappamundi could mean either a cartographic image or a textual geographical description, and in some cases it functioned as an equivalent of the modern term "Geography" 2 . Consequently, there's a tendency in the modern historiography to analyze both forms of the geographical descriptions together. However, the late medieval and early modern developments in the perception and re-constructing of the space led to distinguishing cartography as an autonomous, full-fledged discipline of knowledge, and to the general acceptance of the map in the modern sense as a basic form of presentation of the world's surface. Most maps which will be examined in the paper were produced in this later period, so it seems justified to analyze only the "real" maps, although in a broader context of the geographical imaginations. The area under consideration is the historical Pomerania and Pomerelia (Gdańsk Pomerania), as well as the lands which stretch along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, approximately between lower Recknitz in the west and lower Vistula in the east.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIC-SYMBOLIC CARTOGRAPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Scholars paid relatively little attention to the medieval and early modern cartographical image of the area South to the Baltic Sea so far, with the notable exception of the map by Eilhard Lubinus, the last and at the same time the most spectacular achievement in the Renaissance mapping of the region. There were, however, not only the modern historians of cartography who had not been interested in the medieval cartographical description of this region, but also the mapmakers of the time. Only a few medieval maps with the name of Pomerania appearing are known. An explanation of this situation is primarily the specificity of the then-dominating -and for a long time the only one existing -form of European maps, which can be described as "encyclopedic-symbolic". The aim of a mapmaker was to create a true image of the Earth's surface, but he had in mind a different kind of "truth" than the "truth" of the later "scientific" cartographers 3 . The map was to represent a deeper meaning of the world and its intrinsic order by bringing before a viewer's eyes the most significant places and events connected with the two main forces acting in this world: God, and the human. Thus, the map user could contemplate the Creator in His creation. The medieval mappaemundi was some kind of a visual encyclopedia "which would present the entire history and philosophy of the human race organized within a geographical framework" 4 . It presented a peculiar knowledge of the world as a physical-spiritual continuum of time and space, created by the Christian God, and being a lieu de memoire of the Christianitas 5 . The maps weren't, however, pure "religious symbols" without any direct link to the "real" world, as many 19 th and 20 th century historians assumed. The correctness of the lands' shape wasn't a crucial matter for the mapmakers and the map wasn't intended to be used as an aid. Nevertheless, it offered a general orientation in the spatial 3 About the understanding of the "truth" in the medieval cartography: A.D. von den Brincken, "Quod non vicietur pictura. Die Sorge um das rechte Bild in der Kartographie", in: A.D. von den Brincken, Studien zur Universalkartographie des Mittelalters (Göttingen 2008), 311-323. 4 E. Edson, The World Map 1300-1492. The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore 2007), 14f. 5 About the term lieu de memoire and its meaning: P. Nora, "From Lieux de memoire to Realms of Memory. Preface to the English-language edition", in: Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. P. Nora, Vol. 1 (New York 1996), xvii. text 7 . The most important premise for the permanent inclusion of the new peoples and countries in the imagined world of the Western European elites, was their belongingness to the Christianitas, and establishing of their own, stable political structures. Both levels of the geographical nomenclature existed simultaneously, so e.g. Pomerania was still regarded as a part of Germania, understood usually not as the medieval Holy Roman Empire, but as a timeless geographical region. This factor also contributed to the domination of the older names on the maps in favor of the newer ones. The situation began to change as late as in the 14 th century, in accordance with the growing tendency to understand the "truthfulness" of the world's image in texts and on maps in a more modern way: not as revealing of the timeless essence of the reality in line with the Ancients (including the Christian Ancients, i.e. the Church Fathers), but as a description of the physical world "here and now".
From this point of view it is understandable that the makers of the mappaemundi in the Early and High Middle Ages did not use the relatively young and less known names of Pomerania or the Pomeranians. Scholars generally agree that the idea of conceptualization the lands along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea as a separate territorial unit with a Slavic proper name "Pomorze", which means literally "a land by the sea", emerged for the first time at the end of the 10 th century, and reflected political changes in the area: the emergence of the local early state structures, and the northern expansion of the Piast rulers 8 . The name was attested for the first time in its ethnic form in the mid-11 th century, when the author of the "Annales Altahenses" (The Annals of Niederalteich) mentioned a group named Bomerani as the subjects of the Prince Zemuzil, a person not known from other sources 9 . Some thirty years later Adam of Bremen listed the Pomerani among the Slavic peoples in his influential description of Sclavania -the Slavdom, included in his chronicle "Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum" (Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg) 10 . In the second decade of the 12 th century, a territorial name Pomorania appeared also in a written source, in the chronicle of the so-called Gallus Anonymus 11 .
The basic association with the region south to the Baltic Sea in the early medieval western and northern Europe, was the fact that this area is inhabited by the Slavic peoples. The only thing which the anonymous author of the so-called "Old English Orosius" 12 could or wanted to write about the territory west of the lower Vistula, was its name Weondland -"the land of the Slavs" 13 . The same meaning bears the name Windland, which denoted the Pomeranian territory, with special regard to the famous Viking stronghold Jomsborg, in the Scandinavian and Islandic literature of the 11 th -13 th century 14 . The first inscription on a map also belongs to this northern geographical tradition, which could be roughly connected with the region in question. In the second quarter of the 11 th century in England a world map was produced, known in the historiography as the Anglo-Saxon Map, or the Cottoniana. Despite its atypical, rectangular shape, it belongs to the group of detailed mappaemundi, the same as the high-medieval Psalter Map, Ebstorf Map, or Hereford Map 15 . On the northern shore of the Ocean surrounding the inhabited world, east of Slesuic (Schleswig) and south to an island, which should probably represent Scandinavia and Iceland, the author placed an inscription Sclaui (the Slavs) 16 . It is to be remembered, however, that the connection of the Sclaui on the map with the region of Pomerania is only conjectural. The conception of space of the Cottoniana -and, indeed, of most other medieval encyclopedic-symbolic maps -isn't exact enough to superimpose the names from them on a modern map precisely. The Slavs mentioned by the mapmaker could also be the Polabian Slavs, or the western Slavs in general. This possibility is reinforced by the analogy to the other insular mappaemundi. The mid-13 th -century Psalter Map recto mentions explicitly the Sclauenia occidentalis (the land of the Western Slavs) 17 , a name which at that time denoted unambiguously the Slavic territories between Oder and Elbe. Richard of Haldingham, the presumable author of the Hereford Map (end of the 13 th century), mentioned the "Slavic peoples" (Sclauorum gent [es]) as the inhabitants of the post-antique Upper Germania, although the location of the legend on the map gives no clue as to which group of Slavs he had in mind 18 .
For the first explicit appearance of the Pomeranians on a known map one had to wait well into the High Middle Ages, probably until the end of the 13 th century. According to the opinion currently dominating in the historiography, it was the time when a mappaemundi known as the Ebstorf Map came into being in the convent in Ebstorf (now in Lower Saxony, Germany) 19 . The map was destroyed during WW II, and now is known only from the pre-war copies and photographs. With a diameter of 356 cm, it was the largest noted medieval world map. Owing to its place of origin, the map presents a more detailed, although not always "correct" in our meaning of this word, image of the Central and Eastern Europe, compared to any other object of its kind. Unfortunately, as early as in the moment of unearthing in 1843, some parts of the map were already badly damaged. One of the destroyed areas covered the south-western shores of the Baltic Sea, and thus we are unable to establish what the cartographical image of Pomerania looked like, and what name (if any at all) the mapmaker ascribed to this region. There is, however, a longer, only partially readable legend containing the word Pomeranos (the Pomeranians) 20 . The legend was identified by the scholars as a citation from the Adam's of Bremen chronicle, where the inhabitants of Pomerania were listed erroneously among the neighbors of Moravians 21 . The only geographical feature, which could be connected to the country on the Ebstorf Map in its now-known form, was Oder River (Oldera, Odera), described in accordance with Adam of Bremen as flowing from the Moravian Mountains in the northern direction 22 . The name of the Oder appeared also on the Hereford Map in a distorted form Cidera, along with the Vistula (Fistula) 23

THE SEA CHARTS AND THE LATE MEDIEVAL "TRANSITIONAL" WORLD MAPS
It is not a coincidence that the new era in the history of the cartographical image of Pomerania began with the appearance and increasing popularity of a new type of maps -the sea or marine charts. The origins of the sea chart remain obscure. The oldest known example of the genre is the so-called Pisa Chart, made probably in Genoa in the last quarter of 13 th century, although written sources confirm that such charts had already been in use in the Southern Europe earlier, possibly as soon as in the 12 th century 24 . The concept of the space on the marine charts differed radically from the then-dominating encyclopedic-symbolic maps. The criteria of "truthfulness" of the cartographic image on the charts consisted of depiction of physically accurate geographical forms and representing the spatial relations between geographical objects in possibly the most accurate way. If any narratives influenced the cartographical image, it must have been predominately the utilitarian ones, related to trade and navigation. A sufficient reason for placing an object -a country, a city etc., on a map, was now its very existence. The sea charts belonged to a new model of cartography which could be described as a "mathematical" cartography for strict rules based on calculations and measurements had to be followed 25 . A transitional period begun when two paradigms in the perception of the geographical space coexisted together: the earlier model of the narrativized, subjectively perceived space, along with the newly introduced concept of the modern, measurable and objectivized space. This period lasted approximately from the early 14 th to the late 16 th century, and over the course of time the new model gradually displaced the older one in the mapmaking. At least until the mid-15 th century, however, both models were not perceived as excluding one another, but rather as complementary 26 . A kind of hybrid or "transitional" maps arose, which supplemented the new visual forms with elements of the traditional imaginations and narratives, like the Earthly Paradise etc. The visual determinants of the new cartographical image, like the rhumb lines, or later the grid of meridians and parallels, soon became "powerful rhetorical devices", which not always played a practical role in the process of the mapmaking, but sometimes were only supposed to convince the viewers about the credibility of the map and its maker 27 .
The earliest known sea charts depicted only the Mediterranean and the Black Seas. From the early 14 th century onwards, charts including the western and northern shores of Europe appeared. Relatively early, in the 1320s, a Venetian cartographer Pietro Vesconte used the cartographical convention of a sea chart to produce a world map for the first time. The map illustrated the treatise "Liber secretorum fidelium Crucis" (The Book of Secrets for the faithful to the Cross) by Marino Sanudo written ca. 1320, which was supposed to persuade the readers to organize a new crusade and to recover the Holy Land. There are known nine manuscript copies of the Sanudo's treatise which include the world map 28 . The outlook of the coastlines and the names slightly differ among individual copies, also in the Baltic region. In the northern part of Central Europe, the names Pomoria or prouincia Pomerania can be found. Thus, Vesconte's map marks a milestone not only in the history of the map design, but also in the history of the regional cartography of Pomerania, as it contains the earliest known case of the region's name appearing on a map. In most copies the name is situated correctly along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. One copyist, however, distorted the Central European space, so the names of Pomerania and Cracow (i.e. Kingdom of Poland) were moved deep into the hinterland and located south-east of the eastern end of the Baltic. The name's presence on the map is likely a result of personal experience of Marino Sanudo, who, during his voyages in search for the support of his crusading plans, visited the Baltic region, and the easternmost city he mentioned was Stettin, at that time the capital of the Duchy of the Pomerania-Stettin 29 .
The early Italian sea charts depicted only the coastlines and the places close to them, such as the coastal towns and cities, or the river mouths. The hinterland was left blank. The charts of such design were made continuously well into the Early Modern period, especially by the Italian makers. However, while Pietro Vesconte was creating his seachart-based world map, yet another development began. The charts from the Majorcan school of mapmaking became complete regional maps of Europe, and later of Asia and Africa, showing not only the coasts, but also the cities, rivers, mountains, and other features of the hinterland such as the rulers and their coats of arms. The Majorcan cartographers paid more attention to the aesthetical aspect of their works. The charts began to be highly decorated, and in some cases became true pieces of art 30 .
A striking feature of the late medieval sea charts of Europe is diversity in the outlook on the coastlines. In the Mediterranean Basin and around the Black Sea the coastlines were, from the very beginning, pictured in a very precise way, generally comparable with the modern cartography. In case of the Atlantic coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, France, British Isles, and Africa, a constant tendency for the amendment of the cartographical image is to recognize the simplified and almost symbolic shapes on the early charts, and upgrade them to the "Mediterranean" level of exactitude on later examples 31 . The situation changes radically in the Baltic Basin. The shape of the Baltic Sea had very little to do with what one can see on modern maps. Moreover, for a very long time there was no sign of progress. The Baltic on the early 14 th -century charts hardly differed from the same sea depicted on a chart two centuries later. This state of affairs could be explained primarily with the political and economic causes. In the High and Later Middle Ages the Baltic shipping was almost monopolized by the Hanseatic League. The local sailors managed well with the sailing on the relatively small and well known water body without charts. Symptomatic is, in this context, a remark on the world map by a 15 th century Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro. He noticed that "On this sea [i.e. the Baltic] one don't sails using a chart or a compass, but with a sounding-lead" 32 . It is highly possible that the lack of marine charts of the Baltic resulted from the conscious politic of the Hanse, which did not let foreign ships sail on its "own" waters, and thus prevented them from performing measurements necessary for the cartographical purposes. The Hanseates did not make their own charts because they had no need of them. An exact chart of the northern seas could be even regarded by them as a potentially dangerous object, for it could be stolen or secretly copied by their economic or political rivals 33 . The tradition of sailing according to oral instructions or written manuals, but without or with limited use of charts, persisted in the Baltic navigation even longer than the Hanseatic League itself, until the 18 th century 34 .
The standard image of the Baltic Sea and the adjacent regions of the medieval nautical cartography are to be seen already on the earliest known chart including this area, made by a Genoese priest Giovanni da Carignano ca. 1327 35 . Although the cartographer came from an Italian city, later his work provided a basis for the charts of the Majorcan school. All the most typical features of the Baltic and the Pomerania which can be found on the Carignano chart, had later been repeated by the Majorcan cartographers such as Angelino Dulcert, Abraham Cresques, and many others. They included a distinctive, deformed shape of the sea, an extremely simplified run of the coastline, as well as the presence of the Vistula (uandalus fluuius) and the Oder (odera). Carignano, a man of an extraordinary erudition, was also able to list a great number of place names from the area south to the Baltic, and on the legend Stetin was distinguished with a semi-circle, which indicated a large and important city. Among the country names on the chart lacked, however, the name of Pomerania 36 . Since the cartographer mentioned other country names in the region, e.g. Poland, Prussia, Rus', or Brandenburg March 37 , it confirms that the region's presence on the world map of Pietro Vesconte is to be explained rather by some personal experiences, than by its role played in the imaginative geography. A conspicuous feature of the Carignano chart and of other early sea charts, is the lack of the network of rhumb lines in the northern area, including the Baltic Basin. The contemporary cartographers used it to distinguish the uncharted waters and lands of the North from the better known, familiar Western and Southern Europe. For an educated person in 14 th century Genoa, Pomerania was in fact some kind of terra incognita, to an extent greater than Northern Africa or Central Asia were… The outlook of the Baltic Basin on subsequent Majorcan sea charts was decisively affected by two slightly later works of another Italian cartographer, Angelino Dulcert, or Dalorto. He probably came from Genoa, but was active in Majorca, where he made both his known charts, dated 1330 and 1339 38 . Dulcert continued the earlier custom of leaving Northern Europe out of the rhumb network, and keeping the contrast between the detailed and filled with place names coasts of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Atlantic on the one side, and the simplified, almost empty shores of the Baltic on the other, which is even more striking than in case of Carignano's chart. The shape of the Baltic on Dulcert's and on the following sea charts had been described by scholars as "a fish bladder", "a fish scale", or "a bludgeon" 39 . The southern shore of the sea documents a complete confusion of the makers (Dulcert and earlier Carignano), who did not have sufficient data to create a cartographic image comparable with that of other parts of Europe, and were even unable to order the possessed data properly. name of Pomerania did not appear again. The coastline runs on its Pomeranian stretch in the E-W direction from the Litefania (Lithuania?) to the elbingana (Elbing?), and then turns S on the earlier chart, or SE on the later one. It lacks gulfs, except for two oval "lakes", connected by a short "canal" with the sea: lacus nerie in the eastern part, and lacus alech west of it. They most likely represent the Curonian or Gdansk, and the Stettin Bay respectively. The sparse city names on the Baltic coast include turon (?possibly either Torun moved erroneously to the seashore, or the misunderstood name of the Curonian Spit), Gdansk (godansec), Elbląg/Elbing (elbingo, elbingana), Słupsk/ Stolp (scolpe), Anklam (?-alleth) 40 , and Szczecin/Stettin (stetin). Their localization in relation to one another confirms the cartographer's lack of orientation in the depicted space. Compared to the rest of the East-Central European hinterland, the area in question was flattened and moved to the west, so that e.g. Prague was situated further east than Gdansk. As for the rivers, only the largest ones were marked: the Oder and the Vistula, which there bears a name fluvius vandalus (Vandal River). Remarkably, its run is showed more correctly on the earlier map, while on the later one the river runs SW to NE, instead of SE to NW. The cartographic image of what could represent the unnamed Pomerania on the later Dulcert chart, is complemented with a name Vandalia, located in a blank space between the Vandal/Vistula, the lacus nerie, and the city of turon. It is unlikely to determine which country Dulcert had in mind in that case. A comparison with written sources indicates that there are three possibilities coming into play here: Poland, today's Eastern Germany, or Pomerania. The most probable option seems to be the first one, because it is attested in a contemporary written source, an anonymous geographical treatise known in historiography as "Descriptio Europae Orientalis" (Description of the Eastern Europe), together with the name of the Vandal River 41 , while the name of Poland does not appear on the chart. A Pomeranian context of the name Vandalia could be intriguing, because it would be the earliest case of a phenomenon which later played an important role in the self-conscious of the Pomeranian elites: a takeover of the Polish tradition, in which the name of the Vandals was understood as a specific denomination of the "Poles-as-Slavs", and its reshaping in order to prove that only the Pomeranians are the "true" Vandals, and in that way they are the "first" and most important among other Vandals-Slavs. The theory about the Vandalian identity and origin of the Pomeranians was recorded for the first time in the so-called "Protocollum" (The Protocol) written by Augustin of Stargard shortly after the chart came into being, in the years 1342-1347 42 . What distinguishes Augustin's version from that of Dulcert, is, however, the lack of the choronym "Vandalia". He wrote exclusively about the Vandals-Pomeranians.
Dulcert's Vandalia remained a rare appearance in the late-medieval maritime cartography. The name would emerge only from time to time, e.g. on an unsigned chart presenting a simplified copy of the chart form 1339, and according to some historians came from Dulcert's own hand 43 . The name Avandalia, in an unambiguous meaning of Poland, appeared also in the "Libro del conoscimiento de todos los reynos y tierras y señorios" (The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms, and Countries) written in the mid-14 th century Castile. The text is a description of the known world in the then-popular manner of a (fictive) travel relation, composed mainly on a base of the Majorcan sea charts and/or a written instruction for the mapmakers 44 . In his work, the anonymous author mentioned some place names which can be connected with Pomerania, but the country itself seemingly did not exist on his mental map as a separate territorial unit with a distinctive name, and his image of the whole Central European region looks rather dimly, subsumed under the general name of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and some other regions, like the above-mentioned Avandalia. Among the Pomeranian names in the "Libro del conoscimiento" are the cities of grisualdiz (Greifswald) by the lake alechon (probably the Stettin Bay), corueric (Kołobrzeg), escorpe (Słupsk?), and dançicha (Gdańsk) with the mouth of the river Turonie 45 . In the last case, the author probably confused the city name of Torun with the adjacent Vistula River based on a source map.
Apart from the name of Vandalia, most of the features of Dulcert's image of the Baltic Basin were taken over by the later cartographers, and appeared repeatedly on the sea charts well until the 16 th century, as well as on some late medieval "transitional" world maps 46 . They all contain the same or similar set of data, including city names of Gdansk (Godansec/Dancicha), Anklam (Alech) etc., the mouth of Vistula (fluvius vandalicus), and the two circular or oval lakes/bays. More detailed was the image of the Western Pomerania, of which a specific feature was the course of the coast, usually pOMERANIA IN THE MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE CARTOGRApHy… going in the direction NEN-SWS. There also exist sea charts, on which the whole southern shore of the Baltic was left blank, and the coastal line was reduced to an almost direct line. The charts sometimes prove the confusion of their makers. On the so-called Miltenberg chart, dated back to the second half of the 14 th century and preserved in a 19 th -century copy, the Vistula disembogues east of the Curonian Bay. This mistake generated yet another confusion, because Godances and Dancicha became two separate cities, one of which was situated west of the bay, and the second one east of it, by the Vistula's mouth. Paradoxically, in this situation both locations were correct in their own way 47 .
Other misunderstandings further influenced the concept of space on the map of Europe in the "most ambitious and luxurious cartographic production of the 14 th century" 48 , the Catalan Atlas, prepared in the 1370s by a Majorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques for the king of France. The number of locations on the southern shore of the Baltic is relatively large. It includes Elbląg (Albinga), and Kołobrzeg (Colberg), but Cresques duplicated the city of Stettin, as the name appeared twice on both sides of the Oder's mouth. The lands of Prussia (prutenia) and Courland (curonia) were labelled as "additional" cities on the map 49 . The lack of knowledge about Prussia was, however, an exception. Generally speaking, in the Late Middle Ages Prussia seemed much more known to the western Europeans, including the cartographers, than the adjacent Pomerania. In the western imaginative geography, the exposed place of (Teutonic) Prussia, recognizable also in the geographical texts of the time, i.a. in the enormously popular "Book of Sir John Mandeville" from the mid-14 th century, was certainly down to the influence of the region's popularity among the members of the chivalry, who readily visited the Teutonic Order State looking for glory of a crusader in fights against local "infidels" 50 . The contrast between the elaborate, "crusading" image of Prussia, and the extremely simplified image of Pomerania, is striking on a large, copperplate engraved world map known as the Borgia Map. The map was likely created in southern Germany in the first half of the 15 th century. Most of the Central European space is occupied by a depiction of the fight between Christians and the "pagans" in Prussia, supplemented with an appropriate inscription, and certain city vignettes. In 1367, two Venetian cartographers, brothers Domenico and Francisco Pizzigano, made a large (138 x 92 cm) sea chart. The chart is notable for its innovative features including the depictions of the real and imaginary islands on the Atlantic, or the "River of Gold" in Africa. A less known innovation of the chart is an inscription pomerania in a rubric, located south to the Baltic Sea. It is the earliest known use of this name on a maritime chart. The world map of Pietro Vesconte provided a source for the Pizzigano brothers, as the choronym Sclauia, located S-W from the Pomerania, indicates. The name of the land of Slavs is extremely rare to encounter in the medieval cartography, but it appeared on Vesconte's map in a similar location. Apart from the region's name and the name of Vandalia placed further in the inland, other features of its image on the Pizziganos' chart remained the same as on other sea charts. From the late 14 th century onwards, the name of Pomerania came into use in the nautical and universal cartography, but did not become a common feature. It had not been used by most late medieval chart and map makers who depicted the Baltic Basin and Central Europe, either from lack of space, lack of sufficient knowledge, or because they were probably not convinced that the name is important enough to be included in the world's image.
The most successful late medieval attempt to integrate Central Europe into the cartographical image of the whole human world is provided by the world map of the Venetian geographer, Camaldolese monk Fra Mauro, presumably completed in 1459. Fra Mauro's work has been highly prized by historians for its accuracy and veracity, for making use of a plethora of different written and cartographical sources as well as oral traditions, and for an effective integrating of the three late medieval cartographic traditions: the encyclopedic-symbolic, the nautical, and the Ptolemaic, in one work 52 . The decorative outlook of the map foretells the new, Renaissance trends in cartography. In order to achieve an impression of a complete and unified vision of the world which echoed the tradition of the encyclopedic-symbolic cartography, Fra Mauro created a fiction of exactitude by shaping the coastlines of the less known areas of Eastern Asia, Africa, and Northern Europe, so that they resemble the professionally measured and mapped shores of the Mediterranean and Western Europe. Only the presence of a series of deep circular bays in the coastlines of the southern, eastern, and northern seas marks their hypothetical character in the cartographical language of the Venetian monk. In this respect, Pomerania became fully "Europeanized". The southern shores of the Baltic Sea (named Sinus Germanicus -German Gulf) have an equated outlook without the symbolic bays. The difference between them and the southern parts of Europe, so typical for the earlier nautical charts, disappeared. To the author, Pomerania belonged in the known and recognized world. The country bears on the map its own name: P[rovincia] pome[n]rania 53 . The cartographer regarded it, however, as one of the countries of "lesser importance": its name was inscribed with smaller letters in blue, while the names of adjacent Poland (Polana) and Prussia were inscribed with large letters in gold. Along the Eastern and Western Pomeranian coast Fra Mauro located some cities, identity of which, in some cases, has to remain a guess: , and Sondes (Stralsund?), complemented with two names located further in the inland, by the Oder's mouth: P[rovincia] volgasta (the province of Wolgast), and Steuna (Stettin) 54 . Noteworthy and difficult to explain is the omission of such important centers as Kołobrzeg and Kamień Pomorski. Furthermore, remarkable is the elaborate shape of the Oder's mouth along with the Stettin Bay, different from both the standard circular lacus Alech of the medieval maritime cartography, and from its outlook on the Ptolemaic maps of the time.
The late medieval and early modern maritime cartography remained largely uninfluenced by the great achievement of Fra Mauro and the rapid development of the post-Ptolemaic regional maps. The traditional image of the Baltic Basin, rooted in the charts of Angelino Dulcert, which, in its oversimplification, contrasted sharply with the rest of the world, is to be found on the charts designed as late as in the second half of the 16 th century. An example may be a Venetian chart of Georgio Sideri dated back to 1565, where the prouincia Pomerania is a completely empty space with an almost straight coastline and two circular, "Dulcertian" bays 55 . Modifications of this conventional image have probably usually had pure esthetical grounds, like on an anonymous, early 16 th century nautical chart from the Lusitanian school, known as the Dijon portolan 56 . Its author amplified the straight coastline with a series of small bays, partially connected with unnamed rivers, which has little to do with real knowledge, but represents only an attempt of diminishing the visual contrast between the areas west and east of Jutland.
The breakthrough in the nautical cartography of the Baltic Basin was connected to the merchant aspirations of the Netherlands. The Dutch cartographers designed sea charts of the Baltic at least partly basing on the experiences gathered by their sailors, which resulted in a more exact image of its coastlines and the adjacent regions. Those new sea charts had in fact more in common with the tradition of the Renaissance regional cartography, than with the Late Medieval nautical charts, also from the visual 53 P. Falchetta, Fra Mauro's World Map, 661. 54  point of view. The difference to the earlier charts is already recognizable on the first chart from that group, the wood engraved "Caerte van Oostland" (the chart of the Eastern lands) by Cornelis Anthonisz (Anthoniszoon), first published in 1543 57 . Despite some mistakes, like the rotation of the coast west to Gdansk counterclockwise by 45 degrees, which caused a radical shortening of the map's longitudinal extension, or situating the Rügen in the place of the Usedom or Wollin Islands, the chart brought on a new quality in the nautical mapmaking of Pomerania, especially when it comes to the Bay of Gdansk, and the Hel Peninsula. Another milestone in the formation of the image of Pomerania in Dutch nautical cartography, was the sea atlas "Spiegel de Zeewaerdt" (Mirror of the navigation) composed by a sailor and cartographer Lucas Janosz Waghenaer, published in two tomes in 1584 and 1585. The image of the southern Baltic shores was divided into three subsequent maps, which displayed the following segments: form Rügen to Kołobrzeg, from Kołobrzeg to Rozewie, the Bay of Gdansk and the Curonian Bay. The correctness and exactitude of the presented land increased radically. Not only the shores and locations were depicted, but also the characteristic elements of the topography, which could be useful from the sailor's perspective, such as the deep points, cliffs, hills, fields, and orchards visible from the sea 58 . The work of Waghenaer enjoyed a significant popularity, and his maps had influenced the cartographical image of the Baltic until the 18 th century.

THE PTOLEMAIC MAPS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE REGIONAL CARTOGRAPHY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
In 1397, a copy of the geographical treatise known as "Geography" and written by an Alexandrian scholar Claudius Ptolemy in the 2 nd century A.D., was transported to Florence from Constantinople 59 . Shortly thereafter, "Geography" was translated from Greek into Latin. The work enjoyed an enormous popularity among the late medieval scholars and humanists, although different groups of recipients appreciated its different aspects: the previous as a source of scientific data, the latter as a monument of their beloved antiquity. Due to the authority of Ptolemy, who was already known among the West European scholars as the author of influential handbooks of astronomy and astrology, "Geography" stimulated and accelerated the increasingly observable efforts to create a cartographic image based on the mathematical and astronomical calculations, and enhanced the development of regional cartography. "Geography" is in fact an instruction for mapmakers to produce complete and correct maps. In order to do that, its author proposed an innovative solution -the use of a geographical projection. The work contains an explanation of the principles of the geographical projections, a gazetteer of ca. 8000 coordinates for all the places and geographical features mentioned in the work, and (not always) a set of maps 60 . The area, which, centuries after Ptolemy, got the name Pomerania, was placed in the known Ptolemaic atlases on the map quarta Europae of the Great Germania. The maps designed according to original instructions of Ptolemy could not present an exact and correct image of the region, as they were based on the state of knowledge of Alexandrian scholars from the late antiquity, for whom the Baltic Basin was a part of the unknown and hostile barbarian North 61 . On the oldest extant Ptolemaic maps, e.g. in the manuscript BJ 7805 from the collection of the Cracow Jagiellonian Library, the southern coastline of the "Germanic Ocean" has a form of an almost straight line, whereas the hinterland is filled with hardly identifiable names of towns, tribes, and rivers, the only attributable one is the Vistula.
Not much time had passed until the inconsistency between the Ptolemaic image of Europe and the observable geographical reality was recognized. As a result, a new category of maps emerged: the so-called tabulae modernae (modern maps). They were regional maps designed according to the actual state of knowledge, which either updated the image of the areas already present in the original Ptolemaic atlas, or represented territories not included there. Claudius Clavus, a geographer of Danish origin, active in the papal court in Rome, designed in 1427 the first known "modern map" which was meant to supplement a copy of "Geography" made for Cardinal Guillame Fillastre. The map depicts the Scandinavian Peninsula and the Baltic Sea, it is also the first map of Pomerania made (theoretically) in a cartographic projection. The outlook of the area south of the Baltic Sea on Clavus' map is very simplified and distorted, representing more the cartography of meanings, than of measure. The coast of the unnamed Western Pomerania was disproportionately extended in comparison to the extremely shortened section placed east to it, between two unnamed rivers or bays. The short section was captioned Pomaria, which indicates that it should represent the area between the Oder and Vistula, and the rivers/bays are analogues of the lacus nerie and lacus alech of the nautical charts. The small Pomerania seems to be, however, the only part of the southern Baltic region, which was positively, or at least neutrally, valued by the cartographer. Instead of typical choronyms, the adjacent areas were provided with emotionally-loaded inscriptions: Slauorum regio insidiatrix (the robbery land of Slavs) to the left, and a word-play Peruersa Prutenorum nacio uelut nocio (the perverse nation, or rather problem, of Pruthenians) to the right 62 . The latter certainly echoes the crusading perspective in the perception of Prussia and its native inhabitants, while the first is presumably explicable with some personal experiences, and/or with the then-widespread stereotypes about the Slavs, expressed e.g. in popular texts about the nationum proprietates 63 . The question about the cause for the lack of similar negative comment about Pomeranians has to be left unanswered. It could have resulted from a more positive attitude towards them, or simply by a lack of space on the map. The map of Claudius Clavus did not influence the way of presentation of Pomerania on later Ptolemaic "modern maps". Not all of their makers, after all, had a clear notion of where the country named Pomerania could lie. An anonymous maker of a Ptolemaic world map, the so-called Zeitz Map (ca. 1470), located the inscription litus pomeranie (the coast of Pomerania) east of the Vistula's mouth 64 , so for him the country began where the historical Pomerania, the one contemporary to him ended.
It was suggested, that Claudius Clavus and Cardinal Fillastre contributed in a way to the making of a lost map from the early 15 th century, which plays an important role in the history of the cartography of Pomerania. The map in question was presented in 1421 by the Polish envoys to Pope Martin V, who was supposed to resolve the conflict between Poland and the Teutonic Order State. According to an account of a Teutonic general procurator Johann Tiergard, during the trial the Polish delegation presented ein gemolit tuch inr gleichnisse einer mappe mundi (a painted cloth similar to a mappamundi) 65 . With the map, the Poles tried to convince the head of the Church, that the contentious areas of the Chełmno Land and Pomerelia lie within the Polish borders, while later the Teutonic knights used the same map to show their own interpretation of the territorial extent of the Teutonic Order State. The lost artifact has for a long time aroused an understandable interest among researchers.
The mentioned event has been praised not only as the beginning of the Polish regional cartography, but also as a landmark in the history of diplomacy: the earliest known case, when a map was used to solve a conflict between two states 66 . Most historians overlooked, however, two earlier mentions in the sources which could possibly also relate to similar situations. According to the protocol of the 1413 trial, the procurator of the King of Poland presented to the papal judge quandam cartham continentem grenicies regni Polonie circa illam partem, que vocatur Naklensis (a chart, containing the borders of the Kingdom of Poland in their part, which is called 'of Nakło') 67 . The problem is, that the Latin word cart(h)a could denote either a cartographical image 68 , or a piece of parchment or paper with a text written on it. The second option seems to be more likely, as the above mentioned information in the protocol's text is followed by an extensive and extremely detailed verbal description of the Polish-Pomeranian border close to Nakło, which could be possibly taken over from the cartha.
Seven years later, on 6 January 1420, Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg issued in Wrocław a verdict as an arbitrator between Poland and the Teutonic Order. Later, an extensive "Justification" of this verdict was written. According to its text, both delegations supported their claims with some descriptions and "images/ paintings" (picturae) presented to the Emperor the day before the arbitration's end 69 . The context of the word picturae indicates here quite clearly that the author had cartographical images (i.e. maps) in mind 70 . Thus, the "date of birth" of the Polish cartography has to be brought forward for at least one year. Unfortunately, we are unable to solve the dilemma of whether the supposed Polish map or maps presented during the Wrocław arbitration was identical with the map presented following year to the Pope, or represented an earlier stage in the development of the cartographical image of the Polish-Pomeranian borderland and maybe provided a basis for the later, more sophisticated map.
Most of the Polish historians generally agree that the 1421 map had to be prepared purposely before the trial, simply because no earlier map of the controversial area made with sufficient accuracy existed. As we see, it isn't true, but the above mentioned statement and the following considerations can be true, however, if we relate them to the map from Wrocław. The researchers differed in their assessment of the circumstances 67 Lites ac res gestae, T. 2, 310. 70 Of course, one can't exclude completely the possibility, that the picturae mentioned in the "Justification" had nothing to do with cartography. They could be paintings of some kind, e.g. portraits of the ancient Polish kings who ruled over Pomerelia, presented by the Polish delegation to Sigismund in order to make its claims more impressive and persuasive. However, the designation of maps as "paintings" was quite popular in the Late Medieval and Early Modern period. As late as in 1540s Stanisław Łaski wrote. that a wise military commander should possess "painted countries" (malowane krainy) in order to launch a successful campaign, K. Łopatecki, "Wykorzystanie map", 516.
in which the lost artifact came into being 71 . Split were also the opinions about its outlook. The map should be either a presentation of the whole Poland and the Teutonic Order State, made in color, "carefully and magnificent, and […] in large format" 72 , or a crude sketch of the Gdansk Pomerania. All these opinions were nothing but guesses, which had more to do with the intuitive presumptions of the historians, than with the historical reality. The sole facts we can extract from our source is the very existence of the map, and that it showed the location of some Teutonic castles in the controversial area. The phrase "a painted cloth", and the comparison to a mappamundi can suggest a detailed piece of cartography in color, but the first one could also be only a loan translation from Latin, where the primary meaning of the word mappa was "a piece of cloth". Thus, Tiergardt could have in mind any graphic spatial presentation, even a sketch made on a piece of paper or parchment during the hearing in the Papal Court or shortly before. A few years earlier, the Teutonic procurator Peter of Wormditt made use of a similar picture. In 1413, he sketched from memory a small map of Livonia during a meeting with the pope to explain to the head of the Church the location of the Dorpat bishopric 73 . According to a theory of Bożena Strzelecka, recently repeated by Evelyn Edson, the very idea of using a map during the Polish-Teutonic trial, or maybe the person ordering of it, was inspired by the above-mentioned Cardinal Fillastre, who was a papal commissar during the trial of 1420-1421 74 . He was known from his pro-Polish attitude, and from his interests in geography and mapmaking. Moreover, he knew a potential executor of the map, one with sufficient cartographic skills and the knowledge about the Baltic Basin: Claudius Clavus 75 . Certainly the map in question, no matter if it was prepared for the trial in Rome, or for the Emperor's arbitration, did not provide the basis for the known "modern map" of Northern Europe, because the controversial area was depicted on it with too small accuracy. Nevertheless, Clavus could have prepared a different map on the commission of Fillastre, later lost, and therefore not utilized 71 E.g.: F. Bujak, Studja geograficzno-historyczne (Kraków 1925), 107: the map was produced in Poland on a base of some not specified itineraries; B. Strzelecka, "Ze studiów nad geografią i kartografią XV w.", Czasopismo Geograficzne 30 (1959), 313f: the map designed and produced in Italy using materials of the papal court; K. Buczek, Dzieje kartografii polskiej od XV do XVIII wieku: zarys analityczno--syntetyczny (Wrocław 1963) during the preparation of the known one. Of course, the cartographer had to use data provided by the Poles, and some of them could have a form of maps similar to the earliest preserved pieces of the Polish regional cartography, which came into being half a century later. By chance (or not), those maps -the maps of Gdansk Pomerania, and of the Teutonic Pruthenia from the so-called Sędziwój Codex, depict the same territory as the lost map or maps of 1420 and 1421. The manuscript codex of the professor of Cracow Academy Sędziwój of Czechło, includes a collection of different historical and geographical texts, and among materials concerning the Thirteen Years' War, the mentioned maps are placed (pp. 636-637) 76 . They are crude sketches, consisting primarily of toponyms arranged on the page according to their spatial location, and supplemented with rivers marked with double wavy lines. A similar wavy line demarcates the sea shore. The first map (21 x 30 cm) consists of 74 place names spread across the area of Gdansk Pomerania, Warmia (Ermland), Chełmno and Michałów Lands. It ends on Słupia River in the west, and on Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) in the south. In the left lower corner of page 636 the author placed a separate section presenting the western part of Gdansk Pomerania with Lębork, Bytów, and Łeba, which did not fit onto the page in the right place. The second map (21 x 13,5 cm) shows the area of Teutonic Pruthenia east of Łyna (Alle) River, ending in Königsberg (Krolowgrod) in the north, and Neman River in the east.
Scholars recognized the relative accuracy of the maps. Of course, it is a level of accuracy achievable to a person who knew the depicted area from his own experience, and recreated it from memory without any special measurements. In the words of Bolesław Olszewicz, "a word cannot be said about strict conceptualization of the proportion between the maps' area, and the distances on them on the one hand, and the real area and distances on the other" 77 . The maps seem to present an example of the utilitarian cartography, made for the ad hoc purposes. Nevertheless, it has to be left unanswered what were these purposes, and who was the mapmaker. Joachim Lelewel, and later Wojciech Kętrzyński, Bolesław Olszewicz and others after them, had seen the mapmaker in the person of the chronicler and city writer from Gdansk, Johann Lindau 78 . Władysław Kowalenko tended to ascribe the making, or at least the copying of the maps, to Sędziwój himself 79 . Bożena Modelska-Strzelecka came to a conclusion, that the maps' author was no other than the chronicler Jan Długosz 80 . In contrast, there has been a general agreement among the scholars that the execution of the maps was in some way connected with the Thirteen Years' War, as the manuscript context indicates. However, F. Bujak was of opinion that they were designed at the beginning of the war 81 , while B. Olszewicz, W. Kowalenko and J. Wiesiołowski linked them to the peace negotiations between the Poles and the Teutonic Order at the war's end. Kowalenko pointed at the convergence of the Polish forms of the place names used on the map of Gdansk Pomerania with the Polish reasoning during the negotiations, as described by Długosz, according to whom the Polish adherence of the mentioned area was the most important argument in favor of its incorporation to the Crown of Poland 82 . Kowalenko's argument is, however, questionable, because the Polish forms of the place names were an obvious choice for a Polish speaking mapmaker, and it is unnecessary to link them with any special political events. According to B. Modelska-Strzelecka, the influence of the maps from the codex of Sędziwój is recognizable in the 16 th century cartography of the eastern parts of Pomerania and adjacent territories, especially on the maps by Olaus Magnus (1532) and Heinrich Zell (1542)  In the second half of the 15 th century, the invention of print found application also in the area of cartography. Among the incunable maps were both traditional, encyclopedic-symbolical maps, and the products of the Ptolemaic cartography: original maps from "Geography", and the tabulae modernae. A point of reference for the early printed maps of Central-Eastern Europe was the work of Ptolemy. Most of these maps came to existence as the Ptolemaic tabulae modernae, or as derivatives of them. Regarded as an archetype of all the later maps is a lost map of Central Europe from the mid-15 th century, prepared by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, one of the most prominent 80 A. Krawczyk theologians and nature philosophers of his time. Some specific toponyms on the later Cusanus-based maps indicate that the Cardinal made use of certain data received from a Pole, probably Jan Długosz 85 . Individual known variants of Cusanus' lost map differ in the level of exactitude and in the number of details. Their common distinctive feature is the "flattened" Baltic Sea without the northern turn in its eastern part, similar to the early sea charts. In consequence, the coasts of Pomerania and of southern Livonia were placed on almost the same latitude. The name of Pomerania is to be found on most variants of the map, located between the Vistula and Oder, which were disproportionately brought together, like on the map of Claudius Clavus. There is a possibility that the distortion of the coast line results from the presentation of the Bay of Gdansk' area in a different scale than the western part of the Pomeranian coast 86 . It would be a similar situation as in the case of the medieval maritime charts, where the Black Sea was disproportionately large in comparison to the Mediterranean Sea, probably due to the juxtaposition of two separate charts in different scales on an early stage of development of the sea charts in their known form. On the map by Francesco Roselli from the beginning of the 16 th century the caption POMERIA is repeated twice east of Gdansk, on both sides of the unnamed Curonian Bay. It seems likely, that it is a result of the mapmaker's mistake -confusing Stettin Bay with Curonian Bay. The mistake is, however, significant, as it demonstrates that on the mental map of an Italian cartographer of the time, the name Pomerania was associated with the southern part of the Baltic Basin in general, and not with a specific set of data, like the place names, or rivers. The location of the region in the imaginative geography of the southern European intellectuals had not been fully established yet.
The image of Pomerania on the previously mentioned maps is devoid of details and reduced to partially distorted names of the main cities. More Pomeranian cities and towns, although in some cases with unidentifiable names, appeared on a copperplate engraved map from 1491, known as the Eichstätt map, or Cusanus' map type B, ascribed to the renowned cartographer Nicolaus Germanus by some historians 87 . It was likely the longitudinal "squeezing" of the area between the Oder and Vistula, and a lack of space connected with them, which caused the placement of the inscription POMERANIA deep in the inland, south of PRVSSIA. Another specific feature of the map, is the Stettin Bay with wide connection to the open sea, described as MARE 85 K. Buczek,Dzieje kartografii,[17][18][19][20][21] Such a suppostition was made by J. Szeliga, "Zarys rozwoju kartografii", 18.

RECES[SUM]
(a recessed sea). On the eastern end of the region, the Bay of Gdansk was radically reduced, and the Vistula Spit was enlarged, becoming an island named INSU-LA NERE, which could be translated as "The Island of [Frische] Nehrung". The earliest known "Cusanus'" map of the so-called type A is a manuscript map of Heinrich Martellus from the end of the 15 th century 88 . The map is less detailed and devoid of the cartographic grid. Martellus outlined the southern coastline of the Baltic Sea in a slightly different way than it was done on the Eichstätt map, and omitted a line of hills which extended along the coast, as well as the island in the Bay of Gdansk/ Vistula Bay. The vignette with the name of Pomerania (POMARIA) was located more precisely, closer to the sea. The names of the cities and towns are the same on both versions of the map. The name of Pomerania had not yet appeared on the Ptolemaic "modern map" of the Baltic Basin, prepared and signed by Nicolaus Germanus, and published for the first time in Leinhart Holle's edition of Ptolemy's "Geographia" (Ulm 1482) 89 . The longitudinal extension of the unnamed land was drastically reduced in the manner of Claudius Clavus. The only place names are Gdansk (Dantzig) and Stettin (Stetin), located correctly by the Vistula and unnamed Oder River. The outlook of its coastline is of a mere conventional character and has almost nothing to with the reality, although the cartographer marked a small peninsula north of Gdansk, which could possibly represent Hel, if it doesn't appear there only by chance.
For many European, and especially Central European readers, the first opportunity to locate Pomerania on a map, was provided by a simplified, wood engraved version of the Cusanus' map type A, prepared by Hieronymus Münster for the illustrated "Liber Chronicarum" of Hartmann Schedel -one of the most ambitious editorial enterprises of the incunabel era, published in Nuremberg in 1493. Interestingly, the inscription POMERN was one of the few names in German form among generally Latin nomenclature of the map. Other German land name forms on the map are concentrated in its northern part, mainly in Scandinavia, which could indicate that in the imagined world of Nuremberg humanists of the late 15 th century the region belonged to the "wild" North, contrary to the other countries on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, whose Latin names confirmed their affiliation with the "normal", "civilized" world 90 . The toponymy of the area in question is reduced to the most important cities: 88

THE RENAISSANCE CARTOGRAPHY
The new developments in the late medieval European cartography culminated in the late 15 th and early 16 th century. The growing popularity of printed maps contributed greatly to a change in the ways of conceptualizing the space by the Europeans. The basic form of presentation of geographical space became now a visual, cartographical image, which superseded a verbal (oral or written) description typical for the earlier period. Maps of the whole world and of separate countries and regions abounded, representing a new type of map -the Renaissance map. Those new maps represent, in fact, a synthesis of all the earlier branches of cartography: the encyclopedic-symbolical, the maritime, and the Ptolemaic, with the preponderance of the last one. The persons ordering the maps, and the executors, usually paid much greater attention to the esthetical value. The map or chart was now supposed to present not only geographical content and/or narratives about the past, present, and future, which endow sense and identity to its users, but also manifest spiritual or political pretensions. All those purposes remained valid, especially the last one. Yet, one of the most important aims of a map was now bringing pleasure to the spectator's eyes. Pieces of cartography sometimes became pieces of art. Increasingly widespread became also the utilitarian role of the map. Compared to the previous era, maps and charts were intended to be useful in a modern sense of the word 91 , and were more and more frequently used in a variety of situations such as a war and a travel, or in planning of both. One of the first utilitarian maps of the new kind, was the wood engraving road map, known as the "Romweg-Karte" (The map of the roads leading to Rome), prepared by a Nuremberg cartographer Erhard Etzlaub on the occasion of the Holy Year 1500. This first road map of Germany was created for pilgrims traveling to Rome, and accordingly presented primarily the roads which could be used by them. One year later, a second, improved edition of the map appeared. Etzlaub enlarged it, extended its coverage, and made it more precise by adding other roads 92 . Both versions of the map included the territory of Pomerania (POMERN). For the first time the cartographical image of Pomerania consisted not only of towns, the sea shore, and main rivers. On the map from 1500, the main towns and cities of the province were connected with a road, which in turn connects them with the rest of the road network of the Holy Roman Empire, and subsequently with Rome. Thus, the province was symbolically integrated by the cartographer within the German, Christian, civilized world. The map's content can in a way be considered as a symbolical demonstration of the dominance of Germans' civilization over their eastern neighbors, marked with the lack of roads on the territory of the bordering Kingdom of Poland, with exception of a short section form Krakow to the border of Bohemia 93 . The Pomeranian road to Rome ran from Gdansk (Dantzik), through Lębork (lewenborg), Słupsk (stolpe), Koszalin? (kosselm), Goleniów? (gollnaü), and Szczecin (Stetin), and further S-W via Berlin. On the map, among other significant places, one can find a Marian sanctuary Chełmska Góra (Golnberg Maria), the bishop seat in Kamień Pomorski (Camyn), and the island of Wollin (Iulyn). Equally remarkable is the name "Pomeranian Sea" (Das pomerish mer), ascribed by Etzlaub to a section of the Baltic Sea located off the shore of Pomerania. The exceptionally detailed and correct image of Pomerania on the "Romweg-Karte", was modified on its later version. The outlook of the coast of the "Pomeranian Sea" became more fitting near Gdansk. A second road from this city, leading along Vistula River up to Torun, and further bifurcating towards Cracow and Poznan, was added. Therefore, the original contrast between the road-full Reich and a road-less Poland was partially reduced. The three above-mentioned additional Pomeranian locations disappeared from the map, and the run of the main road was corrected.
The road map of Erhard Etzlaub visually integrated the early modern Pomerania within the Holy Roman Empire. A quarter of century later another one of the later lost maps in the history of the Pomeranian cartography came into existence. Contrastively, it presented the province as a part of the Poland-dominated Central-Eastern Europe. The author of the wood engraving map, published in 1526 by the Cracow printer Florian Ungler, was Bernard Wapowski, "the father of the Polish cartography" 94 . A "modern map" by Marco Beneventano is considered Wapowski's first attempt in amendment of the cartographical image of Central Europe, and was included in the edition of Ptolemy's "Geography" printed in Rome in 1507. The theory about Wapowski's influence on the map's outlook is based on the presence of two seemingly insignificant locations: Wapowice (Vapovicze) and Radochonice (Radochoniza), which were respectively the main manor of cartographer's family and his place of birth 95 . Apart from this, numerous place names appear in their Polish forms, an occurrence untypical for a map made in Italy. The map from the 1507 Ptolemy's "Geography" is based on Nicholas of Cusa's prototype, but in comparison to its other known version the number of marked locations increased, their longitudes and latitudes are more precise, and the outlook of the Baltic coast is slightly amended. An inscription POME-RANIA is divided in half by the Szczecin Bay, which indicates a more political than geographical understanding of the name, because its location reflects the actual contemporary coverage of the Duchy of Pomerania. The cartographical image of Pomerania is less detailed than that of the rest of Poland 96 . It may reflect its lesser significance in the mental geography of Wapowski, at least possibly during the Italian period of his life or earlier, when he collected the data he put to use in the creation of the Ptolemaic "modern map".
After coming back to Poland, Wapowski continued his cartographical activities. On October 18, 1526 the King of Poland Sigismund I issued a privilege for Florian Ungler, allowing him to print three maps composed by Wapowski. One of them was supposed to depict Poland (i.e. the Kingdom of Poland), Mazovia, and the Balkans, the second one Pruthenia, Pomerania, Samogitia, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The third one was meant to be a general map of Central-Eastern Europe, which comprised all the enumerated lands 97 . The maps by Wapowski were highly unfortunate. During the great fire of Cracow, two years after they came into print, the wooden plates burned down with the rest of the unsold exemplars of maps. Their fragments were unearthed by chance in 1932 in the Central Archives of Historical Records (AGAD) in Warsaw, in the bindings of the acts of the salt mine in Bochnia. Twelve years later they were burned too, during the Warsaw Uprising. Earlier, in 1939, Germans destroyed the print of the map's critical edition. Only a few exemplars survived, and the copies made basing on them are now the only source of our knowledge about the exact outlook of Wapowski's achievement.
The relatively crudely executed maps by Wapowski were not a great achievement in terms of their esthetical value, but have been highly praised by scholars because of their extraordinary exactitude, in the measure of time, of course 98 . Unfortunately, none of their known fragments belongs to the map of Pomerania. The known sheet of the map of Poland contains, however, a southern part of the region, reaching the latitude of Starogard Gdański (Stargart) and Białogard (Belgrot) in the north, and extending from Sztum (Stum) and Kwidzyń (Quidzin) in the east to Drahim (Draym) and Białogard in the west. The cartographer marked a large number of locations, a detailed river network, and even the main forests, especially the Noteć Forest. The seats of bishops and of the archbishop were marked with their respective signs of power. The towns and cities were labeled with small buildings, which differ between individual cases. Certainly, in that way the location's size was marked, but it is hard to determine whether there was some deliberate reasoning behind the choice of a specific vignette for a town, or not.
The maps which Bernard Wapowski composed on his own as well as together with Marco Beneventano, were, nonetheless, known and acknowledged among the European cartographers of the time. The last one of them likely influenced e.g. the 1513 "Tabula moderna Sarmatie Eur[opeane]" by the famous Alsatian cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, where the image of Eastern Pomerania is, however, extremely simplified 99 . More detail of the region is to be found on the second of his "modern maps" of Central and Eastern Europe: "Tabula moderna Germanie", the main source for which provided the second redaction of the Erhard Etzlaub's road map. The cartographer also used the map of Beneventano/Wapowski, but its influence is noticeable mostly on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland 100 . With the inscription PO-ME-RIA-NA Waldseemüller denotes the whole territory between the Vistula and lower Spree, which erroneously disembogues to the sea on said map. Noteworthy is the unusual form of the land's name, probably caused by a conflation of two variants: "Pomeria" from the later maps by Cusanus, and the more appropriate "Pomerania". The map's author repeated most of Etzlaub's Pomeranian place names and redrew his outlook of the coastline, including the connection of Wollin Island with the mainland in the west. An even more exact copy of Etzlaub's image of Pomerania is contained in the "Carta itineraria Europae" (The road map of Europe) prepared by Waldessemüler in 1520, which depicts not only the locations, but also the roads between them. The location of Pomerania on two different "modern maps" by Waldeseemüller reflects a general problem of Ptolemy-influenced imaginative geography of European humanistic elites in the late 15 th and early 16 th century: an ambivalent status of the territory between the Vistula and the Oder. According to the Alexandrian geographer both belonged to Germania Magna, but on the other hand there was a strong tendency to conceptualize them as a part of Sarmatia, because Poland, which partially extended between those rivers, was increasingly often identified with the ancient land of Sarmatians 101 . This ambivalence affected primarily the image of Poland and its inhabitants, but simultaneously, to a limited degree, of its northern neighbor, Pomerania.
Scholars have found traces of Wapowski's achievements also on other maps. One of them is a masterpiece of the Renaissance cartography of the European North, the "Carta marina et Descriptio septentrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum" (A marine map and Description of the northern lands and of their marvels) by the Swedish catholic ecclesiastic and cartographer Olaus Magnus. Printed in Venice in 1539, the richly decorated map of the Baltic Sea and the Scandinavian Peninsula gives us an insight into what the area of Pomerania on the map by Wapowski could look like. It was suggested that the map's author received his information about the lands south to the Baltic in Poland, where he spent some time in exile after the victory of the Reformation in Sweden. His informer there could have probably been Wapowski himself, or an erudite and a connoisseur of geography, bishop of Chełmno, Johannes Dantiscus 102 . In fact, the map by Olaus Magnus begins in the south, where the known fragment of Wapowski's map of Poland ends in the north. In the map's concept of space, the name of Pomerania was connected with the western part of the Duchy of Pomerania, located on the left bank of the Oder. At least in this area the cartographer placed the legend POMERANIA DVCATVS, although it could be only a matter of finding an empty space on the map, large enough to put the country's name in. The settlement and the river network on the Pomeranian area, as well as the coastline, were depicted on a relatively high level of detail, including lighthouses. It is, however, to be remembered, that the seeming exactitude of the coasts, not only on the map by Olaus Magnus but on the most Renaissance maps as well, is only a purposely created impression, which has little to do with the later cartography of measurement, and is in fact almost as conjectural as on the medieval mappaemundi. Their run was usually based on a guess, or copying an earlier piece of cartography, and only in rare cases the source of information for the mapmaker was provided from an oral relation of a sailor, or by other traveler, as well as an astronomical measurement. The Olaus Magnus' map was, however, the first known map, which presented the correct shape of the Baltic Sea with its main, north-eastern axis 103 . Its unique feature is the demarcation of the freezing zones of the sea, located also along the coast of Pomerania, beginning approximately in Rostock in the west. It can be regarded as an original attempt to document the contemporary climate changes; they were leading to gradual expansion of the freezing zones on the Baltic Sea, which turned its waters into mare congelatum (a frozen sea) or mare concretum (a hardened sea) which in the ancient and the medieval tradition was sometimes mentioned as one of the incredible marvels of the North.
As far as we can deduct from the later maps, Wapowski's image of Central-Eastern Europe had influenced forms of its cartographical visualization for a century. Gradually, however, the new image superseded the earlier cartographical tradition rooted in the map of Nicholas of Cusa. The influence of Cusanus' map is noticeable in works produced at least until mid-16 th century. Among its later versions, which show most of its distinctive features, was e.g. a woodcut map of the Venetian engraver, publisher, and cartographer Giovanni Andrea Vavassore, dated ca. 1530 104 . It differs from the early redactions of the map type B mainly in the more corrupted names, eg. Pomeria instead of Pomerania (a typical form in the cartography of the time), more conventional outlook of the coastline, and a large island located in the mouth of the mare reces [sum] (i.e. Stettin Bay). Among the mid-16 th century "Wapowski-based" maps of Europe with the most detailed and cartographically correct image of Pomerania, was the 1555 map of the German cartographer and instrument maker Caspar Vopel (Vopelius), later published twice by Bernard van der Putte 105 .
Among other highly important maps which influenced the cartographical image of Pomerania, was the map of Poland, by Wacław Grodecki. Made likely in 1557 during his study in Leipzig, it was anonymously published for the first time on wood engraved plates in 1562 in Basel 106 . In his work, Grodecki probably used the maps by B. Wapowski, M. Waldseemüller, H. Zell, S. Porębski, some written sources, and astronomical measurements 107 . Later, his map of Polonia provided a source for other Polish and West European maps, i.a. the map from the world atlas "Theatrum orbis terrarum" (The theatre of the globe) by Abraham Ortelius, published for the first time in 1573. The Brabantian cartographer collected the best maps known to him, and after certain modifications put them together, creating one of the most popular and valued sources of cartographical knowledge for at least half of a century. The following editions had been corrected and enlarged by Ortelius until his death in 1598, but each of them contained the original map mentioned here. Due to the coverage of Grodecki's map, it presented only the eastern part of the Duchy of Pomerania on the right bank of the Oder. The scholars pointed out that there are three areas discernible on the map, each on different level of accuracy. The image of Pomerania belongs to the intermediate one, with location errors of ca. 20-100 km 108 . Its untypical feature was the use of a mixture of German, Latin, and Polish forms of place names 109 .
In the 16 th -century cartography, Pomerania appeared to be a region too small and/ or too insignificant to be marked on the maps of the world, but important enough to appear on the majority of general maps of Europe, and on the regional maps of Central, Eastern, or Northern Europe. A typical cartographical image of Pomerania consisted of its name, usually in Latin or German, the two main rivers -the lower Oder and Vistula, and of the main cities, including Stettin, Słupsk/Stolp, Kammin/Kamień Pomorski, and Wolgast, as well as Gdansk in the Pomerelia. Sometimes the Bays of Stettin and of Gdansk are to be seen, the first one usually presented with an open mouth of the Oder, and without the islands of Wollin and Usedom. It is not clear in all cases, whether the mapmaker knew for sure which area exactly should the name of Pomerania be connected with, as well as that it is to be placed somewhere south to the Baltic Sea. The map of the North by Abraham Ortelius, partially based on the Olaus Magnus' "Carta Marina", provides an example, where an inscription Pomeraniae pars (a part of Pomerania), located quite deep in the inland, indicates that there exists a further part of the region outside the map, although in fact it contains not only the whole Pomerania, but also northern, unnamed Poland. On the other hand, however, in case of other maps in Ortelius' atlas, e.g. the map of Europe (1572), the inscription POMERN is located correctly. The location of the region's name (or even its omission) could have derived, in individual cases, from a confluence of different factors, which not necessarily reflected the cartographer's actual mental geography. The availability of sources, the amount of place on the map, the technical issues connected with the production process of the wood engraved plates or copperplates, etc., could have been among them.

DUCHY OF POMERANIA AS AN INDEPENDENT THEME IN THE RENAISSANCE CARTOGRAPHY
For a long time, the role played by the independent Pomerania and its rulers from the House of Griffins, as well as by the Teutonic and Polish Pomerelia in the North-and Central European affairs of the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, did not translate into the region's more important role in European imaginative geography. During the 16 th century, the region's name had become, though, an integral part of the cartographical image of Europe. It appeared on the general maps of Europe and regional maps of Poland, Germany, or (in the post-Ptolemaic nomenclature of the time) Germania, and Sarmatia. However, one would have to wait until the mid-1540s, when Pomerania was finally being treated as a separate territorial unit deserving a description of its own in text and on a map within general descriptions of the whole world. It was one of the most renowned humanist scholars of the time, the geographer, cartographer and Hebraist, Sebastian Münster, who, in his "Cosmographia", included a chapter about Pomerania, illustrated with a map.
Münster's first work in geography was a 1540 edition of Ptolemy's "Geography" improved with his own "modern maps", among which, however, not one presented the territory on the southern Baltic shore. The Ptolemy of Münster was followed by his own treatise, "Cosmographia", published initially in the German language in 1544 110 . Until the beginning of the 17 th century the work had had 35 editions in the original version, as well as in other languages, like Latin, French, Italian, English, and Czech. It became one of the most popular and influential geographical works of the late 16 th century all over Europe. Münster's opus magnum is regarded as an apogee of the tradition of Early Modern descriptive geography 111 . It belonged to the genre of Renaissance cosmography in its specific, German variant, rooted in the Medieval encyclopedic writings of the type called imago mundi, aimed at providing an exhaustive image of the known world, including not only a geographical description in its strict sense, but also historical, political, religious and "ethnographical" information, with a strong "Germanocentric" tendency.
Münster divided his work into six books, the third of which is devoted to Germania, understood in the German-humanistic manner of time not as the ancient, Ptolemaic region, or the Holy Roman Empire, but as the southern Baltic lands. One of the described provinces was the Landt Pomern/Regio Pomeraniae. The description for Münster was provided by a leading Pomeranian Lutheran scholar, Petrus Artopoeus (Peter Becker) 112 . It contained a general outlook of the province's history, description of the main cities including the legendary Vineta, a genealogy of the Griffin House, a description of the Rügen Island, and information about the confessional affairs in the province. All this was supplemented with the above-mentioned first separate map of 110 About the Renaissance genre of cosmography in general, and the German Renaissance "geographhistorians" cf. the region, also ascribed to Artopoeus, in a scale estimated in ca. 1:1000000 113 . Contrary to some other maps in "Cosmographia", e.g. that of Poland, the "Tabula Pomeraniae secundum omnes principatus & insigniores ciuitates, oppida & arces eius" (The map of Pomerania, according to its duchies, and the more important cities, towns, as well as castles) had a large, two-page format. It is hard to determine, which factor contributed to this choice: the region's importance on Münster's mental map of Europe, a desire to present a less known territory to the readers, or simply its elongated shape. The verbal and cartographical descriptions of Pomerania in "Cosmographia" were prepared with an active participation of the local elites, including the royals: the duke of Pomerania-Stettin, Barnim XI, and of Pomerania-Wolgast, Philip I. The official nature of the collected resources was emphasized by their delivery to the Münster's studio in Basel by Philip's chancellor Jakob von Zitzewitz himself 114 . The geography of Pomerania in "Cosmographia" is also geography of power. A dominating element of the map is a decorative line of the coats of arms at the top. For the first time in the cartography of the region, its political borders were marked. Pomerania was not presented as a homogenous territorial unit, but as a whole, consisting of distinctive, although not clearly separated parts, named among which were: Upper Pomerania (Ober Pomern) in the west, Lower Pomerania (Vnder Pomern) in the east, Casubia, Vandalia, the Duchies of Stettin (Hertzogthum Stetin) and of Wolgast, as well as the islands of Usedom and Rügen. Due to its different political affiliation, Pomerelia was left outside the marked borders of Pomerania and only partially presented on the map, but nevertheless deserved information about both its former and present political status in a colophon inserted in the right lower corner. The content of the map is generally consistent with the accompanying text, including the sunken city of Vineta, which appeared on a map for the first time. The city was located in the sea near Usedom, according to the then-dominating Pomeranian tradition, for the first time written down by Augustin of Stargard in the 14 th century, and repeated in Münster's time by Thomas Kantzow 115 . The settlement network is represented with 77 cities and towns, and the natural landscape by the rivers, lakes, hills, and coastal dunes "in form of a caterpillar" 116 , as well as randomly placed trees. An inscription Mare Pomeraniae (The Sea of Pomerania) placed over the coastline can be regarded as an additional persuasive element on the map, which was meant to emphasize the maritime aspect of the Griffins' reign -a significant question for receivers from the era, when "ruling the waves" played such an important role in politics and economy.
Due to immense popularity of Münster's work, Petrus Artopoeus' map influenced the region's perception in the European imaginative geography, and because it was the only one cartographical description of Pomerania for a long time, it was later used in yet another influential work -the atlas by Abraham Ortelius. Ortelius' atlas was prepared in the form of copper printing plates, which positively affected the clarity of the original wood engraving map of Pomerania. The authors of the previous maps, including Artopoeus/Münster, treated this country as a part of large, post-Ptolemaic regions of Sarmatia or Germania. Ortelius, as the first cartographer, put it into a context of another tradition, giving the map the title "Pomeraniae, Wandalicae regionis typ[us]" (The image of Pomerania, a region of Vandals). In the Middle Ages, the name of the late antique people of Vandals was generally used as an "additional" designation of Slavs in general, or of the Polabian Slavs. From the 13 th century onwards, Polish intellectuals had used it as a means to express the Slavic aspect of the Poles' own identity. As mentioned above, in the following century, the Vandalic tradition was adapted by Augustin of Stargard in order to demonstrate the dominance of the Pomeranians as the only "true" Vandals among other Slavs. The Pomeranian-Vandalic tradition was further developed by humanists, and became an integral part of the elites of the Duchies of Pomerania. Thus, Ortelius, even more than his predecessor, accented the independence of Pomerania, if not in the real world, then in the world of imaginations. The image of Pomerania on the map from Ortelius' atlas did not differ much from its reference. The most visible difference was the name of the "Pomeranian Sea" replaced by a more common form "Baltic Sea" (Balticum mare). The place names, the rivers' course, and the outlook of the coastline remained generally unchanged; the information about Pomerelia was retained too.
The Artopoeus' map in its Ortelius' version was also used by an author of another late-16 th century atlas titled "Theatri orbis terrarum enchiridion" (A handbook to the theatre of the globe), an Antverpian engraver Philipp Galle (1585). The atlas by Galle was a smaller, simplified, and cheaper version of the work of Ortelius, with the copperplate maps supplemented by Latin descriptions in verse composed by Hugo Favolius. Galle's map of Germania confirms that despite marking the Pomeranian borders on the Artopoeus/Ortelius map, the region's location and extent were not an unambiguous question at that time. The large inscription Po-me-ran-ia is scattered all over a large area, including not only the proper Pomerania, but also the northern part of Greater Poland, with a south-eastern ending near Pyzdry. The map of Pomerania kept most features of the earlier versions, although a condensation of the place names as a result of its smaller dimensions made them less legible and less accurately located. Galle cut the original map west of Usedom, probably in order to fit it onto the page.
The explanation provided in the accompanying description states, that the country's borders are the Vistula and the Oder 117 . Hence, the understanding of the name Pomerania was changed from political to a purely geographical one.
At the beginning of the 17 th century it became increasingly evident, that the map of Artopoeus/Münster/Ortelius did not stand up to the current standards in cartography, while an appropriately exact and correct map of a country was then regarded not only as an important instrument of a good and modern government, but also as a necessary element of the inner and external propaganda of the Prince. Philip II, Duke of Pomerania-Stettin, a man of extraordinary erudition, highly interested in art and science, was among the people who realized this situation. He commissioned several pieces of art, and founded the Pomeranian art cabinet 118 . The need for a new cartographical representation of the Duchy was all the more urgent, that other Central European countries had already disposed of large, multi-sheet, highly detailed and decorative maps. In 1610, Philip II commissioned a new, ultimate presentation of Pomerania under the title "Pomeranographia" or "Balthus Pomeranicus", which was to be a compendium of knowledge about the country's geography, history, nobility, and reigning house, in four books, illustrated with a map 119 . The Duke's counsellor Jürgen Valentin von Winther became the person in charge of preparing the book, and the mapmaking was contracted out to a professor of philology from Rostock, Eilert Lübben, better known under a Latinized form of his name, Eilhardus Lubinus. Von Winther did not manage to finish the work before his death in 1623, and the "Pomeranographia" has never appeared in print and has gone missing. The map by Lubinus grew over the course of time, and finally became an autonomous, large, highly detailed and richly decorated artifact, praised by the scholars as a masterpiece, which "upstaged the greatest achievements of cartography in the neighboring regions, and for decades was the most significant and the most beautiful piece of cartography in this part of Europe" 120 .
Lubinus was not a professional cartographer, but he had been already famous and renowned author of the map of Rügen, prepared probably in 1608 on commission of Philip Julius, duke of Pomerania-Wolgast, on the basis of the field measurements he took personally. He is also believed to have made a celestial globe and a globe of the Earth 121 . Making the map of Pomerania was a large-scale enterprise, fulfilled not only by Lubinus himself, but with the support of the state authorities. The local officials were obligated by the duke to provide him with all help he might need. During the process, the scholar made use of the same method as Rügen earlier on. The necessary measurements were carried out in the autumn of 1611 (the territories on the left bank of the Oder), and in the springtime of 1612 (the eastern part of the Duchy). The amount of work he did is registered in the preserved documents. According to them, during his research journey of 1612, Lubinus traveled more than 1500 km in 54 days, making 5793 observations and taking measurements in 152 locations, meanwhile collecting historical and ethnographical data from the local population 122 . Apart from this, the mapmaker made use of certain documents from the ducal archive in Wolgast, and probably of some earlier, unknown maps 123 . The painter Johann Wolfart prepared pictures of the main cities and towns painted with nature, and the Pomeranian noble families had to deliver the correct images of their coats of arms, so that later he could decorate the map. The map was finished after six years, and was officially approved by Duke Philip. The drawing was sent to Amsterdam, where Nicolaus Geillekercke engraved it on twelve copperplates. The final version of the map had dimensions of 125 x 221 cm. Scholars are not sure, whether the map was printed on the plates from Amsterdam 124 , or on one of the Pomeranian plates, possibly in Stettin 125 . Unfortunately, Philip II did not live to see it, because he died February 3, 1618. The first printed exemplars were officially given to the reigning dukes Philip Julius and Francis by Lubinus in November that year. An exact number of the printed exemplars of the map is not known, but the scholars estimate, that it did not exceed ca. 50 complete maps 126 . Some further prints were made in 1758, after the copperplates were unearthed accidentally in an old house in Greifswald, only to be definitely lost during the Seven Years War 127 . The map by Eilhard Lubinus bears the full title "Nova illustrissimi Principatus Pomeraniae descriptio cum adjuncta Principum Genealogia et Principum veris et potiorum Urbium imaginibus et Nobilium insignibus" (The new description of the most glorious Duchy of Pomerania, with the genealogy of its dukes, the images of the dukes and of the more significant cities, as well as with the coats of arms of the nobility). All these persuasive elements appeared in the map's bordure or over the sea above the coastline (the genealogical tree of Griffins), making it a visual demonstration of the power and glory of Pomerania, its rulers and nobility, comparable with other similar cartographic/iconographic images of the era. An integral part of the map is "Pomeraniae et rerum in ea memorabilium Brevis descriptio E. Lubini" (A short description of Pomerania and of the notable things therein, by E. Lubinus): information about borders, history, divisions, government, and cities of Pomerania. Apart from that, the map documents a late stage of the country's and the dynasty's cultural and identity transition, when the memory about their Slavic roots coexisted with the progressive acculturation within the German-speaking culture. The inscriptions, including the title and the "Brevis descriptio", are written in Latin as it was the official language of the Duchy and of the European elites at the time. The whole toponymy of the Duchy, however, appears on the map in German forms. Only the etymology of the country's name presented by Lubinus, and the figure of Griffins' semi-mythical ancestor Swentibor (Suantiborus), described in the genealogical tree as Princeps Pomeranorum Sclavorum Wandalorum Ethnicus (a pagan duke of Pomeranians, Slavs, and Vandals) remind of the once-Slavic past of Pomerania.
The scale of the map was estimated to be 1:227000, 1:239904, or 1:240000, and the image of Rügen has a scale of 1:192000 128 . On the map, one can find 3071 locations, a detailed river network as well as other water bodies, objects such as windmills, manors, sheepfolds and forests 129 . Although Lubinus' map is without any doubt a great achievement in mapmaking, it is not free from errors and incorrections. Most of them resulted from the limitations of the measurement techniques and instruments of the time, and some arose during the preparation process of the copperplates 130 . It was recognized, that the map's accuracy is especially low near the seashore and in other areas, where the measurements were straitened by their inaccessibility 131 . According to Krzysztof Siedlik, some of the discrepancies between the cartographic image of Pomerania by Lubinus, and the actual course of the seashore, rivers, and some other water bodies, could be caused by the climate changes, since it was created during the apogee of the so-called Little Ice Age, which probably caused the lowering of the Baltic Sea level by 1-2 meters 132 . Bolesław Wolny distinguished four sectors on the map, each one 128 Ibidem; R. Skrycki, "Wielka mapa", 131. with slightly different cartographical features, which was probably caused by the fact that the cartographic image was based not only on the Lubinus' own field observations and measurements, but also on earlier cadaster maps, prepared in different scale and on different level of accuracy 133 . The map of Lubinus did not fall into oblivion, but became one of the main sources of knowledge about Pomerania for cartographers from Germany and the Netherlands for at least a century 134 . Created as a magnificent instrument of the state propaganda, it did not get, however, a chance to fulfill its primary task. The overall crisis of the Thirty Years' War, which finally reached Pomerania with the Capitulation of Franzburg in 1627, did not create favorable conditions for presenting the country as a regional power. Additionally, in 1637, after the death of the last and childless duke from the House of Griffins, Bogislaw XIV, the Duchy of Pomerania finally lost its status of an independent political entity, and its territory was divided between Brandenburg and Sweden. Ironically, the map which was meant to praise the endless glory and power of the Griffins' Pomerania became a requiem for the Duchy. pierwszej próby bardziej jednoznacznego opisu terenów na południowym wybrzeżu Bałtyku na mapie określanej jako tzw. Cottoniana (XI w.), a z drugiej strony opracowanie mapy Eilharda Lubinusa (1618), która stanowiła najdoskonalsze wczesnonowożytne przedstawienie kartograficzne terenu Księstwa Pomorskiego, a jednocześnie pod względem formalnym stała na pograniczu kartografii renesansowej i siedemnastowiecznej kartografii "pomiarowej". Omówienie sposobu przedstawiania kartograficznego obrazu Pomorza zostało podzielone na podrozdziały, odnoszące się do różnych kategorii map. Pierwszy dotyczy średniowiecznych map encyklopedyczno-symbolicznych, a zwłaszcza możliwych przyczyn nieuwzględniania nazwy Pomorza na zdecydowanej większości map z tej kategorii. W kolejnych podrozdziałach zanalizowane zostały mapy żeglarskie, późnośredniowieczne mapy ptolemejskie i tzw. mapy typu przejściowego, kartografia renesansowa oraz wczesnonowożytne odrębne mapy Pomorza. Szczególna uwaga została zwrócona na sposób rozumienia nazwy Pomorza przez kartografów oraz na sposoby wpisywania przez nich omawianego regionu w szersze konteksty przestrzenne.