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MOSCOVIA by Ruscelli — V Rare Map of Russia - c1561 - Lumenrare Antique Prints & Maps
  • MOSCOVIA by Ruscelli — V Rare Map of Russia - c1561 - Lumenrare Antique Prints & Maps
  • MOSCOVIA by Ruscelli — V Rare Map of Russia - c1561 - Lumenrare Antique Prints & Maps
  • MOSCOVIA by Ruscelli — V Rare Map of Russia - c1561 - Lumenrare Antique Prints & Maps
  • MOSCOVIA by Ruscelli — V Rare Map of Russia - c1561 - Lumenrare Antique Prints & Maps
MOSCOVIA by Ruscelli — V Rare Map of Russia - c1561

MOSCOVIA by Ruscelli — V Rare Map of Russia - c1561

€1.500,00 EUR

Girolamo Ruscelli after Giacomo Gastaldi, La Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino, Venice, 1561–1599

This extremely rare and special map “Moscovia Nuova Tavola” is among the earliest modern printed maps of Muscovy (Russia), adapted by Girolamo Ruscelli from the influential 1550 map of Giacomo Gastaldi, the official cosmographer to the Venetian Republic. It first appeared in Ruscelli’s 1561 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia published by Valgrisi, and later in reissues through 1599.

The plate portrays European Russia and western Siberia, stretching from Scandinavia and the Baltic in the west to the Ural region and Central Asia in the east. Rivers such as the Volga and the Don are carefully rendered, and numerous ethnographic groups are named — Tartaria, Nogai Tartari, Circassia, Alania, Zagatay — reflecting the fragmented understanding of the Russian steppe world by Italian cosmographers. Mountain ranges are stylized in the typical Ptolemaic fashion, with wave-like hatching and tiny fort cities.

The verso text (“Moscovia Secunda Tavola Nuova D’Asia”) explains to Italian readers that Muscovy, though often considered part of Europe, was classified here under Asia — a reflection of mid-sixteenth-century geographical conventions when Russia’s imperial borders were expanding eastward.

Why this map is SUPER RARE and interesting: 

The Moscovia Nuova Tavola is packed with place-names that reveal how Renaissance Europe imagined Russia and Central Asia at the dawn of empire. Many of these names have vanished from modern maps, their echoes surviving only in chronicles or regional memory. The broad label Tartaria stretches across the steppe, encompassing the nomadic Nogai Tartars and the distant realm of Zagatay, recalling the Mongol khanates that once ruled the region. To the south appear Alania and Circassia, ancient Caucasian kingdoms later absorbed or destroyed, while Permia marks one of the earliest printed references to the Urals. Along the Volga—here called the Edil—stand the new conquests of Ivan the Terrible: Cazan and Astracan, signalling Muscovy’s advance toward the Caspian Sea. Classical survivals like Sarmatia, Scythia, and the Monti Riphei show the map’s fusion of myth and observation, blending ancient texts with ambassadorial reports. Even Natolia, misplaced north of the Black Sea, reflects Venetian uncertainty about Asia’s limits. Together these hybrid names chart not only territory but perception: a sixteenth-century world where legend, commerce, and empire intertwined, and where cartography was still an act of imagination as much as of geography.

Scholarly Note

Ruscelli’s Moscovia is not merely a geographic document but a cultural artifact of Venetian intelligence on Eastern Europe at a moment when trade routes to Persia and Cathay were being reconsidered after the fall of Constantinople. It helped Western scholars visualize a region known largely through the reports of ambassadors and travelers such as Baron Sigismund von Herberstein. 

Size:

  • Engraved image (within plate mark): 18.5 × 25.0 cm (7.3 × 9.8 in)

  • Full sheet (with text verso): 25.0 × 35.0 cm (9.8 × 13.8 in)

Verso text translation:

Moscovia (Russia) — Second map of Asia – 1561

English translation of Map Verso:

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MOSCOVIA
Second new table of Asia.

Moscovia, which is contained in this table, is a very great country, so called from the river Moscò, governed by its own lord, very powerful, and Christian, who follows in religion and customs the Greek Church. It has many large plains and good parts of Tartary; it is a flat country, with many forests, marshes, and rivers. It is extremely cold and frozen, in such a way that no other kind of trees or fruits grow there, except the cherry tree, although some affirm that there is also corn in the fields.

In these parts flows the river Alce, which they commonly call the great bog. The people feed themselves with flesh of deer and of fish, and they make a kind of drink out of milk; they go on foot, on horseback, or by sleigh, and they also travel with carts drawn by dogs, which they call granchi (crabs). They say they have mines of silver, and they trade much with the princes and other neighboring regions.

They say also that the people are very skilled in divination, and that many among them have communication with evil spirits; and it is said that in former times the heresy that ended in Moscow began here.

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This Renaissance description of Moscovia reflects how 16th-century Italian geographers viewed Russia as a liminal space between Christendom and the mysterious, half-pagan East. Drawn from Venetian editions of Ptolemy’s Geographia, it fuses factual observation vast forests, frozen plains, deer and fish diets with moralized rumor. The final paragraph, describing “communication with evil spirits” and an ancient “heresy that ended in Moscow,” reveals Western Europe’s anxiety toward Orthodox Christianity, then considered schismatic and culturally alien. Such texts combined theology and ethnography, portraying Muscovy as both a frontier of faith and a land of superstition. For collectors, this passage epitomizes early modern Europe’s blend of geographic discovery, religious polemic, and fascination with the unknown North.

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