Würzburg. - Herbipolis Würtzpurg

A double-page woodcut view of Würzburg. From a French edition of Munster's 'Geographia', one of the most important 16th Century geographical books.
Herbipolis Würtzpurg is the title of a woodcut by Sebastian Münster from 1548. It is the second oldest known view of the city and at the same time the first representation of the city of Würzburg from a bird's eye view. The illustration is therefore also the oldest city map in Würzburg.
The view goes from the east to the walled old town, the Main, the Mainviertel and the fortress (in the view). Walls and foreland are also shown in the view.
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.