Low Countries

Antique Maps of the Low Countries — Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg

This category brings together original antique maps of the Low Countries — the territories of modern Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg — produced by the great cartographic publishing houses of Europe from the 16th through the 19th century. These works hold a particular significance in the history of European cartography, since the Low Countries were not only extensively mapped subjects but the home of the most important cartographic publishing industry in the world during the golden age of map-making in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Amsterdam and Antwerp were the great centres of European map production from the mid-16th through the late 17th century, and the publishers who worked in these cities — Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, Blaeu, Jansson and their successors — produced not only maps of the Low Countries themselves but the major atlases that documented the geography of the entire known world. Maps of the Low Countries from these publishers therefore carry the additional significance of being produced at the epicentre of the cartographic industry that shaped European geographic knowledge across the period of its greatest expansion.

The political complexity of the Low Countries across the early modern period — the revolt against Spanish rule, the emergence of the Dutch Republic, the religious wars, the separation of the northern and southern Netherlands and the successive reorganisations of the region’s political geography — is reflected in cartographic publications that document each phase of this history with the geographic specificity of contemporary production. Maps showing the Spanish Netherlands, the United Provinces, the Austrian Netherlands and the subsequent political transformations of the region provide a cartographic record of one of the most politically dynamic regions in early modern Europe.

Dutch and Flemish town plans and city views complement the regional and national maps of the Low Countries, documenting the extraordinary urban development of Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Leiden, Haarlem and their counterparts with a precision and visual richness that reflects the cartographic sophistication of the region’s publishers and their audiences.

Antique maps of the Low Countries are among the most actively collected European cartographic subjects, valued for their historical significance, their connection to the golden age of Dutch and Flemish cartography, and the decorative quality of the finest examples.