BEYDE STAETT GENFF. . .[Geneva]

An uncommon and early woodblock panoramic view of Geneva as a medieval walled city on the shores of Lake Leman. The skyline is dominated by the Cathedral of St. Peter, where John Calvin preached during the 16th century. On a sheet with German text below, by Sebastian Muenster, ca 1550.
Geneva, (French Genève, German Genf, Italian Ginevra), a city, and capital of the Genève Canton, in the far southwestern corner of Switzerland that juts into France. One of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities, Geneva has served as a model for republican government and owes its preeminence to the triumph of human, rather than geographic, factors.
It developed its unique character from the 16th century, when, as the centre of the Calvinist Reformation, it became the “Protestant Rome.”
The contemporary city of Geneva is, above all, a service metropolis, retaining its financial importance and housing the headquarters of many public and private international organisations.

Sebastian Munster (1489-1552) was one of the three most renowned cartographers of the sixteenth century, along with Mercator and Ortelius. Munster's 'Geographia' and 'Cosmographia Universalis' were two of the most widely read and influential books of the period. His editions of Ptolemy's 'Geographia', published between 1540 and 1552, were illustrated with 48 woodcut maps, the standard 27 Ptolemaic maps and supplemented by 21 new maps.
These new maps included a separate map of each of the known continents and marked the development of regional cartography in Central Europe. The antique geography was a prelude to Munster's major work, the 'Cosmographia', which was published in nearly 30 editions in six languages between 1544 and 1578 and then was revised and reissued by Sebastian Petri from 1588 to 1628.
The 'Cosmographia' was a geographical as well as historical and ethnographic description of the world. It contained the maps from the 'Geographia' plus additional regional maps and city views with originally nearly 500 illustrations [later expanded to over 1000] which made it one of the most popular pictorial encyclopedias of the sixteen century.