Picardia.

Attractive hand-colored, copper engraved map of Picardie, the most northwestern region of France, bordering with Belgium. It features the cities of Amiens, Abbeville and St. Quentin and the Saone River. The ribbon-style scale cartouche features French & German mileage. The title cartouche features two coats of arms and a crown.

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was the prime cartographer during the most important period in the history of map-making. Mercator, second only to Ptolemy, is synonymous with the form of map projection still in use in modern cartography. Mercator was the first to apply projection to navigational charts so that compass bearings could be plotted on charts in straight lines.

Mercator was born in Flanders and established himself there as a cartographer and instrument and globe maker. The quality of his work brought him the support of Charles V for whom he constructed a globe. In later life he devoted himself to his edition of the maps in Ptolemy's “Geographia”, reproduced in his own engraving as nearly as possible in their original form, and to the preparation of his 3-volume collection of maps to which, for the first time was called by the word “Atlas”.

Henricus Hondius (1597-1651) was one of the famous Dutch “Golden Age” cartographers. He initially helped his father and brother to expand their family business of map making. Later in 1621, he opened his own business firm in the city of Amsterdam.

His father, Jodocus Hondius Sr. was himself an ace cartographer who was instrumental in resolving one of the major problems faced by the cartographers of the earlier age, the method of reproducing spherical objects on the two dimensional and continuous rectangular surface. In 1641, Henricus Hondius modified the existing maps made by his family to publish the "Mercator- Hondius Atlas".