The map celebrates Habsburg and Christian victories over the Ottoman Empire and was published in the same year as the siege of Vienna and the defeat of the Ottomans by a coalition led by Polish King John III Sobieski. The map includes a decorative title cartouche in the lower left depicting Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I in armour, flanked by the imperial double headed eagle. To the right, captive Ottoman soldiers are shown bound in chains.
Expanding on the firm’s earlier plates Visscher states in the title that the map has been ‘newly corrected’ and enlarged ‘on account of the military affairs between Christians and Turks’. The map stretches from the Gulf of Venice in the West to Constantinople and the Black Sea in the east and depicts Crosses and Crescents on Church and other buildings to indicate the extent of Christian victories and gains.
The map was included in Visscher’s composite Atlas Minor and Atlas Contractus assembled at the behest of private clients.
CLAES JANSZ. VISSCHER 1587-1652 – NICOLAES VISSCHER I (son) 1618-79 NICOLAES VISSCHER II (grandson) 1649-1702. For nearly a century the members of the Visscher family were important art dealers and map publishers in Amsterdam. The founder of the business, C. J. Visscher, had premises near to those of Pieter van den Keere and Jodocus Hondius, whose pupil he may have been. From about 1620 he designed a number of individual maps, including one of the British Isles, but his first atlas consisted of maps printed from plates bought from van den Keere and issued as they stood with some additions of his own, including historical scenes of battles and sieges for which he had a high reputation. Some maps bear the Latinised form of the family name, Piscator. After Visscher’s death his son and grandson, both of the same name, issued a considerable number of atlases, constantly revised and brought up to date but most of them lacking an index and with varying contents. The widow of Nicolaes Visscher II carried on the business until it finally passed into the hands of Pieter Schenk.
