Untitled [A Set of Three Miniature Maps of Southern India and Ceylon]
a) Petrus Bertius, Narsinga et Ceylon
Published in Amsterdam in 1618 in "Tabularum Geographicarum Contractarum Libri Septem."
Approx. 3.5" x 5" (85 mm x 120 mm) map area only, with full margins beyond.
The title is displayed in a strapwork cartouche with the further title of Descriptio Narsingae in the upper margin.
b) Petrus Bertius, Malabar
An original early 17th-century copper engraved miniature antique map of the coast of Malabar; the coast goes from Goa to Cape Comorin.
Approx. 3.5" x 5" (85 mm x 120 mm) map area only, with full margins beyond.
The title is displayed in a strapwork cartouche with the further title of Descriptio Regini Malabar in the upper margin.
c) Petrus Bertius, Cambaia
An original early 17th-century copper-engraved miniature antique map of northern India with Gujarat and the Indus River, bordering Pakistan. Indicates major towns represented by symbols, major rivers, and mountains.
The title "Cambaia" is displayed in a strapwork cartouche with the further title of "Descriptio Cambaiae" in the upper margin.
Approx. 3.5" x 5" (85 mm x 120 mm) map area only, with full margins beyond.
Worlds in Miniature: Early-Seventeenth-Century Dutch Cartography and the Global Imagination of South India & Sri Lanka
The early seventeenth century marks one of the most intellectually dynamic periods in the global history of cartography. It was an era in which European geographic knowledge expanded at an unprecedented rate, propelled by maritime exploration, commercial rivalry, missionary exchange, and escalating encounters between Europe and the Indian Ocean world. Few artefacts capture this cultural and scientific transformation as vividly as the miniature maps produced by Barent Langenes and Petrus Bertius in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Though small in physical scale, these maps played a disproportionately large role in shaping Europe’s spatial imagination of regions such as South India and Sri Lanka.
South India, at this moment, was a crossroads of shifting polities, religious traditions, linguistic zones, and mercantile networks. The remnants of the Vijayanagara Empire, the rise of the Nayaka states in Tanjore, Madurai, and Gingee, the Persianised court at Bijapur, the fortified circuits of coastal Malabar, and the port economies structured by Arab, Jewish, and Christian trading communities all constituted a complex geopolitical tapestry. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, was undergoing its own transformation: Portuguese attempts to establish coastal sovereignty, Sinhalese resistance from the Kandyan highlands, and the persistence of Buddhist monastic and ritual geographies. European engravers and scholars had to assimilate this complexity through the limited, often fragmentary, but highly valued geographic intelligence available to them.
The miniature maps in this theme—Narsinga et Ceylon, Cambala, and Malabar—are products of this synthesis. Originating from the Caert-Thresoor (1598) and its subsequent Latin editions under Bertius, these maps stand at the intersection of multiple knowledge traditions: Portuguese pilot charts, Arab and Persian navigational lore, indigenous spatial memory, mediaeval scholastic geography, and the rapidly evolving conventions of Dutch Golden Age mapping. They represent a distinct cartographic idiom—compact, accessible, richly typographic, and designed for broad dissemination across Europe.
The map of Narsinga et Ceylon reflects an early European attempt to conceptualise southern India and Sri Lanka as related political and cultural zones. The term “Narsinga”, derived from earlier Arabic and Persian sources and associated with Vijayanagara, had already become an anachronism by 1600, yet its presence reveals how European cartographers relied on inherited nomenclature to make sense of a region undergoing rapid transformation. The depiction of Ceylon, by contrast, was informed by more recent Portuguese intelligence, resulting in a recognisable portrayal of the island’s form, port settlements, and mountainous core. The map thus stands at the interface between mediaeval geographical memory and empirical observation. This map was first issued in Barent Langene's Caert-Thresoor and later republished by Bertius in his Tabularum Geographicarum, beginning in 1600, with the total number of appearances of this map running to no less than 12 appearances between 1598 and 1650 in the two works by Langenes and Bertius.
Cambala, representing the western hinterlands, exemplifies the transitional uncertainties of early-modern ethnographic and political mapping. The region’s toponymy blends vernacular, Persian, and Lusitanian forms, and its mountains and forests are rendered in stylised miniature motifs, signalling the engraver’s reliance on second-hand topographical descriptions. Yet this very ambiguity is historically revealing: it captures a moment before the Dutch and English surveys imposed new spatial uniformities, when European mapping still bore the marks of its cross-cultural intermediaries.
Malabar, with its string of pepper ports, is the most maritime and commercially orientated of the group. The miniature map records what Europeans most valued in the region: harbours, anchorages, spice-producing zones, and networks of coastal trade. It reflects the dominance of Portuguese cartographic influence in the area—specifically the transmission of portolan intelligence gathered over a century of Indian Ocean navigation. The map’s emphasis on coastal forms, rather than interior geography, is consistent with the priorities of early-modern maritime empires.
These maps also reveal the intellectual function of miniature atlases. Unlike large wall maps or specialised nautical charts, the Caert-Thresoor was designed for portability and general readership. Students, merchants, and educated travellers could own and consult these volumes, giving rise to a new democratisation of geographic knowledge. South India and Sri Lanka were not merely remote lands described in narratives—they became visualised, systematised, and integrated into a shared European mental geography.
What makes these maps particularly valuable today is their layered hybridity. They preserve elements of indigenous and Arabic nomenclature that would disappear in later European atlases. They record political entities that were already dissolving by the time of publication. They capture the early stages of a cartographic conversation that would eventually evolve into the scientific surveys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And they remind us that cross-cultural geography was never a one-way transmission from Europe to Asia; it was a reciprocal, often uneven exchange shaped by intermediaries, translators, scribes, navigators, and merchants who carried spatial knowledge across oceans and linguistic boundaries.
In essence, the Langenes–Bertius miniatures represent a formative chapter in the visualisation of South India and Sri Lanka. They are windows onto the early-modern imagination—maps that embody both the limits and the possibilities of a world in the midst of becoming global.
(Set of three)
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