Photograph

Detailed woodcut from Cosmographiae Universalis, Latin, Basel, Switzerland, ca. 1500 showing the city of Fulda, Germany and its famous abbey-monastery founded by Sturmius for Boniface. Three of the major structures are marked in blue in this cropped copy. It is a wonderful picture to study - wait for it to load, then scroll across the width. Note that Fulda was already 750 years old when this was made 500 years ago.

Sebastian Munster 1489-1552 was born in Ingelheim in Germany and died in Basel/Switzerland. Munster was a mathematician, Hebrew scholar and cartographer. In 1540 he published Ptolemy's Geographica and in 1544 the Cosmographia with more than 500 woodcut pages. The Cosmographia was published in 46 editions - in German between 1544 and 1628, in Latin between 1550 and 1559, in Italian in 1558 and in French in 1575. He became Professor of Hebrew at Heidelberg University and later at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He died of the plague. (Whoever made this woodcut, Sebastian or an assistant, seems to have "signed" it with the woodcutter's tools noted in blue above.)