I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

This chapter explores the rise of official cartography in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Europe, paying particular attention to state-sponsored mapping and the role of maps in the rise of the state. It also attends to the place of geography in propagating early modern regimes, whether by means of official court geographers—common especially in France, Spain, and the German and Italian states—or by means of commercial mapmakers, who had more prominent parts to play in the cartographic business of the Low Countries and Britain. Our approach to the subject is comparative. It is also necessarily selective, and, following the work of Harley, it focuses on the ceremonial, ideological, and political uses of maps, while other chapters in this volume address more particularly their administrative and strategic uses.

Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt. “Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography.” David Woodward, ed. The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance. University of Chicago Press: 2007.

State mapping arose in conjunction with shifts in state government, especially newly developing notions of the space of realm and rule. Central to the emergence of official cartography was the concept of territorial sovereignty: the idea of the state as a precisely defined and delimited geopolitical unit. Aspects of this particular concept of statehood could be found in the classical world, especially in Rome at the time of Augustus. By the Middle Ages, however, territorial sovereignty was all but forgotten, for sovereignty had become a fundamentally legal construct, the equivalent of imperium or majestas, terms that had less to do with territory than with the power to make and enforce law. Sovereignty in medieval Europe was power over people, not place, and only gradually did it begin to encompass ideas of territoriality. In France, for example, the symbolic turning point occurred in 1254, when the royal chancellery, which had previously referred to the monarch as rex francorum, or king of the Franks, officially adopted the title of rex franciae, king of France. Such language was purely ceremonial, to be sure, yet it augured the emergence of a more territorialized notion of monarchy and, by extension, a more cartographic approach to governance itself. As early as 1259, the French monarch Louis IX, in the course of a dispute with the neighboring county of Champagne, attempted to learn about “the beginning and ends of the lands of this kingdom and of the country of Champagne”; he sought, in other words, to map his realms.6 In general, however, this shift toward a more territorialized vision of sovereignty occurred only gradually. Late medieval jurists continued to think of sovereignty as essentially a human, as opposed to a territorial, construct; even in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes could write about the commonwealth without reference to boundaries or frontiers. As Sahlins has pointed out, the idea of territorial sovereignty was only a secondary consideration when, in the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), the king of France sat down with his Spanish colleague in an effort to fix a linear border between their respective domains. Traditional jurisdictional considerations weighed more heavily than purely geographical ones, and the treaty that was ultimately drafted defined the area annexed by France simply as the “countries, towns, castles, boroughs, villages, and places” that comprised Roussillon and Conflent.7 The result was a border that was, and remains, idiosyncratic.

Despite the particular failure of this treaty to address territorial sovereignty more directly, by the end of the fifteenth century Europe’s rulers did show signs of being territorially conscious—and map savvy—in ways their medieval counterparts were not. The sources of this consciousness were many. To begin with, the translation from Greek into Latin (ca. 1406 –10) of Ptolemy’s Geography contributed to what has been called the “geometrization” of space, the view that land could be measured and described in precise, mathematical terms.8 As in the case of many other humanist “discoveries,” not everyone was at once affected by this development, and for centuries most maps and views were produced without recourse to triangulation, plane tables, theodolites, and the other surveying instruments equated with the rise of Ptolemaic, or “scientific,” cartography. Nevertheless, by the end of the fifteenth century the ideas of Ptolemy and his many followers competed with, and ultimately challenged, at least two prior concepts of mapping: the Aristotelian notion of describing the land primarily in terms of its utility for humans and the Christian approach of delineating the moral boundaries of space, as was typically done in biblically inspired mappaemundi. Both of these strategies did persist, yet they increasingly gave way to Ptolemaic plotting. For example, new ideas of space worked their way into jurisdictional disputes, which soon sparked the development of a “juridical cartography,” Dainville’s term for maps designed solely to assist judges in resolving disputes.9 These juridical conflicts and their resolutions further contributed to the idea that sovereignty, traditionally conceived in terms of contractual relationships between lords and vassals, could also represent power over particular spaces whose boundaries needed to be measured and mapped. As early as the 1420s, Florence and Milan attempted to resolve a boundary dispute through the use of a map, and by the 1450s a series of jurisdictional disputes with ecclesiastical authorities led the dukes of Burgundy to commission new maps describing the territorial limits of their domains.10 Territorial consciousness of a somewhat different sort prompted Pier Maria Rossi, condottiere-prince of Parma, to record his gains in Emilia by decorating his castle at Torchiara with frescos that showed the fortresses and countryside he had recently conquered (this ca. 1460).11 And one of the most telling signs of the rise of territorial consciousness occurred in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, where Pope Alexander VI divided the non-Christian world between the Spaniards and the Portuguese by drawing a north-south line—the so-called Line of Demarcation— 370 leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. According to the terms of the agreement, all lands to the east of the line belonged to the Portuguese, while those to the west went to Castile. The discovery of the Philippines and other Pacific islands by Ferdinand Magellan sparked a nearly century-long quarrel between the Iberian powers over control of the western Pacific. Nevertheless, the Line of Demarcation offers evidence that by this time even the pope had begun to view the world in territorial, as opposed to strictly jurisdictional (or even religious), terms.

[...]

By contrast, defense against ambitious warlords drove the Italian city-states to map their territories during the conflict-riven fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Or, to put it in Burckhardtian terms, just as Italian condottieri took the lead in the art of war, laying intricate sieges and constructing expert fortresses, walls, and other defenses, so did Italian engineers take the lead in the art of mapping, which well served their princes in the never-ceasing battles of the day.14 War, first in Italy and later elsewhere in Europe, contributed appreciably to the rise of territorial consciousness. It also spawned a class of individuals, soon to be called surveyors and engineers, who developed the mathematical and charting skills necessary to plot out a city’s defensive requirements in the form of ground plans or maps. It follows that some of Europe’s first ground plans—a sure sign of territorial consciousness— came from northern Italy. An early example is the plot of Milan, produced for the Sforzas around 1430; another is that of the Po Valley town of Imola, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and completed around 1484 as part of the town’s fortification strategy.15 Like the contemporary plans of dikes and polders in the Netherlands, these texts were working documents, executed for practical purposes. Yet they contributed all the same to the concept of sovereignty as it came to be understood in later years: official control over space rather than people.

[...]

To be topographically wise, as rulers were plainly counseled, is not quite the same as to be in control of one’s realms; knowing the discipline of geography is not the same as disciplining the land. Yet the two trends tended to run in conjunction around this time, and the first half of the sixteenth century witnessed numerous and varied attempts to rein in the land (or sea), graphically no less than politically. Once again, certain Italian precedents stand out. Venice, following its colonial expansion by the early fifteenth century to the mainland, or terra firma, and in the wake of the growing French threat following the 1494 invasion of the peninsula by Charles VIII, instituted a policy of producing surveys and commissioning regional maps to enable it effectively to manage its growing resources. A prominent map of the “state of the Serenissima” (now lost) decorated the doge’s palace.22 The Venetian project offers early evidence of state-sponsored cartography. It may well have been such Italian influences that prodded the centralizing regime of Tudor England toward a similar strategy of mapping. Yet what Barber has called “the Henrician cartographic revolution” (“a profusion of plats . . . by military engineers”) probably grew out of the more particular circumstances of the 1530s, by which time the pope had excommunicated Henry VIII, and an attack by François I of France (aided by Charles V) did not seem out of the question.23 Whatever the stimulus, the English monarchy seized on the device of maps “as tools in the processes of government and administration,” suggesting that Thomas Cromwell well understood the link between cartography and statecraft. 24 The back-and-forth conflicts between Sweden and Denmark may well have instigated the respective Scandinavian crowns to sponsor projects for mapping their realms; there is even talk of a Konglischen Schule of cartography in Copenhagen.25 And in the Holy Roman Empire the crisis of the Reformation may likewise have intensified cartographic undertakings, including, for example, Tilemann Stella’s great surveying project—which, if never fully realized, did produce an important map of Germany in 1560.26

Agra

Time-Travelling In Agra As the Mughal capital, Agra was a robust city even before the Taj was built. EPIC JOURNEYSUTTAR PRADESHROHINI CHOWDHURY | POSTED ON: NOVEMBER 1, 2014 The sight of the sun setting over the Yamuna behind the Taj Mahal has mesmerised visitors to Agra for centuries. Photo: Adrian Pope/Photographer's Choice/Getty Images The first time I visited Agra, it was with my grandfather. I remember moonlit gardens, and tall fountains that fell into sparkling silver streams. I remember the dark dungeons of Akbar’s fort. Most of all, I remember the ghostly crypt beneath the Taj Mahal, where lay two solemn graves that sent shivers up my spine. The graves, my grandfather explained, were those of a queen, Arjumand Banu Begum, and her grief-stricken husband, the Emperor Shah Jahan, who had once ruled all of India. The story of Shah Jahan and the mausoleum here built in memory of his beloved wife has fired the imaginations of writers and poets through the ages, as it fired mine, even as a child. As I grew older, my fascination with the Taj Mahal turned into an abiding interest in Mughal history. The more I read about the Mughals, the more captivated I became with them—the larger-than-life emperors, warriors, poets, architects, painters, and their incredible achievements. Agra beckoned again and again. Over the years, I have visited Agra several times—with friends, with my children, and most recently, with a sheaf of notes copied from the journal of Peter Mundy, a young officer with the East India Company, the hand-written original of which I had discovered one grey morning in the British Library in London as I researched pre-British India. Mundy had arrived in India in 1628, the first year of Shah Jahan’s reign, and kept a detailed record of all that he saw and experienced. I expected to find descriptions of Agra, but imagine my excitement when I found in Mundy’s writings an eyewitness account of the building of the Taj Mahal. It is perhaps the only such account that exists. Mundy writes that the Emperor spared no expense building the Taj, so “gold and silver [were] esteemed as common Metall, and Marble but as ordinarie stones”. Construction commenced in 1632, soon after the queen died in childbirth. Legend has it that it took the work of 20,000 artisans to create this symphony in marble. Around the tomb was “set a raile of gold”. This palisade, of solid gold and studded with precious jewels, which Mundy saw in 1632, was then valued at six lakh rupees. It was removed in 1642, and replaced by a marble lattice screen, which is what we see today.  Emperor Shah Jahan, credited with building the iconic monument, was considered one of the greatest Mughals. His reign was immortalised in a visual record called Padshahnama that he commissioned. Photo: Fine Art Images/Dinodia Mundy also writes of the Emperor’s intention to “remove all the Cittie” to the vicinity of the Taj Mahal, building streets, shops and houses close to it. The new suburb and market, to be called Taj Ganj, was to provide revenue for the upkeep of the mausoleum. Merchants, shopkeepers and artisans had already begun to move into the area in Mundy’s time, and in 1643, the shops and sarais there yielded one lakh rupees in the form of rent. Shah Jahan assigned this amount for the maintenance of the Taj Mahal. Taj Ganj still thrives, no longer a suburb, but in the heart of the city through which hundreds of thousands of tourists who come to see the Taj Mahal must pass. As I leave the Taj behind me, the rain begins to pelt down. I take refuge in a small teashop, selling cigarettes, packets of chips, and a strong, murky brown brew that claims to be ginger tea. I risk the tea, and am grateful for its warmth and sugary kick. I look out upon the crowded streets of Taj Ganj, the tourists, the shops selling crude replicas of the Taj. Shah Jahan probably wouldn’t have been surprised by the bustle, for the Agra of his time was also a busy, crowded city, “populous by reason of the greate Mogolls keeping of his court here”, Mundy wrote. “Every day there was about the dharbare [darbar], such a number of Eliphants, horses, coaches, Soldiers, peons” and other people that it was difficult to pass through them. But what was Agra like before the Taj, I wondered. It’s had many avatars. In the 11th century, it was one of the many fortresses sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni on a raid into India. During the last quarter of the 15th century, the fortress was converted into a city by a Rajput king. In 1506, it became the capital of Sikandar Lodi, ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. Agra remained the capital of the Lodis until the fall of the Sultanate in 1526, when the Sultan, Ibrahim Lodi, was defeated at the Battle of Panipat by Babur, a prince from Central Asia, who established the Mughal empire in India. Though Babur chose Delhi as the capital of his fledgling empire, he spent considerable time in Agra, where he laid out the first of many fine gardens he would go on to build in India. In a letter to his dearest friend Khwaja Kilan, a homesick Babur consoled himself with the beauty he had created in his flower-filled gardens in Agra. “The palas trees which I have had planted, seem to absorb the glow from the dawns and the dusks, and attain the soft hues of Makarana marble,” he wrote. “King­fishers sail carefree over the chinar groves and the marble terraces cradle the velvety lawns. The fountains sing and weep like the sitars…” Not much remains of Babur’s original gardens. Though the Aram Bagh, Dehra Bagh, and Zahar Bagh, all attributed to Babur, still grace the riverfront in Agra, their original layout has been altered considerably. Be that as it may, the gardens still evoke the memory of Babur. As I gaze upon their regal symmetry and serene grace, my heart goes out to the young emperor, conqueror of Hindustan not so much by choice as by necessity, who tried—with considerable success—to recreate the ordered beauty of his homeland in the hot, disorderly land he had had to make his own.  There are 48 pillars in the many-arched Diwan-i-Aam of Agra fort. On its eastern side is the Takth-i-Murassa or the throne room inlaid with precious stones where Shah Jahan sat when he met his subjects. Photo: Blaine Harrington/Age Fotostock/Dinodia Agra truly came into its own during the reign of Babur’s grandson Akbar. One of his first acts upon becoming emperor in 1556 was to move his capital from Delhi to Agra. Agra—or Akbarabad, as the new capital was known—became the heart of the powerful Mughal Empire, and an important commercial centre. In the words of Abul Faz’l, Akbar’s vizier and court chronicler, the city was “filled with people from all countries” and became “the emporium of the traffic of the world”. Appropriate to the strength and majesty of his empire, Akbar built a massive fort in Agra, overlooking the Yamuna. From here, he ruled an empire that extended, at the time of his death, from Kashmir in the north to the Deccan in the south, from Baluchistan and Afghanistan in the west to Bengal in the east. Despite the centuries that have passed, Akbar’s fort still dominates the landscape. Its walls, of red sandstone, rise 70 feet above the banks of the river. I enter through the Lahore Gate, which takes me through several public areas, including gardens and a marketplace which once served the royal ladies, but today serves the tourist trade with its glittering array of cheap trinkets and flashy souvenirs. Of the 500 or so palaces built during Akbar’s time, only a few remain—of the rest, some were demolished by Akbar’s successors to make way for their own, and others by the British to put up barracks.  Geometrical mosaics cover the roof of Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra. Akbar was a great patron of the arts, and his tomb reflects influences not just of the Mughals but also of the artists from Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and other parts of India who worked on it. Photo: Kimberley Coole/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images Akbar also planned his own tomb, and began to build it in Sikandra, a small, crowded village on the outskirts of Agra, several years before his death. It was completed in 1613, eight years after his death, by his son Jahangir. An imposing, three-storeyed structure, it is richly adorned with marble inlay and intricate mosaics of coloured stone. It stands amidst vast manicured gardens where herds of deer graze languidly, and langurs run riot amongst the trees. Contemporary accounts tell us that gold, silver, and precious stones were used to decorate the interior, and costly carpets covered the floor. Peter Mundy paid a visit to the tomb, but was not permitted to enter the chamber where Akbar lay buried, “by reason the Kinge [Shah Jahan] keepes the key of the doore which is alsoe sealed with his signett”. The jewels and costly ornamentation have disappeared but Akbar’s mausoleum retains its stately air. No matter the mood or mode in which I visit Agra, I am always struck by the almost surreal manner in which the brash and crass co-exist with the gracious. On the city’s narrow streets, diesel fumes and the aggressive blaring of a thousand motor horns assault the senses until I turn the corner and, stepping through an archway, am transported into a world of serene gardens and quiet fountains, trees rustling in the morning breeze, and birdsong. It wasn’t much different in Jahangir’s day. The city was built without any regular plan, but hidden amongst its higgledy-piggledy alleys lay the magnificent garden palaces of the nobles of the Mughal court. Along the right bank of the river, which is today occupied by modern buildings, stood the palaces of important court officials. Akbar’s fort continued to be the royal residence, where Jahangir and his queens lived in state. Agra was situated at the junction of several trade routes, and Francis Pelsaert, a young employee with the Dutch East India Company, who arrived in Agra in 1621, and who, like Mundy after him, kept a meticulous account of his time in India, recorded the “indescribable quantities of merchandise”, that passed through the city in the course of trade across the land. These included “immense quantities of grain, such as wheat or rice, sugar, and butter… salt, opium, asafoetida, ‘painted’ cloth called chits [chintz], red salu from Burhanpur, ormesines from Lahore, horses, and large quantities of cotton, which is grown largely between Surat and Burhanpur.”  Marble inlay work lives on in Agra even today, primarily in the form of souvenirs sold to visitors to the Taj Mahal. Photo: Super Stock/Dinodia Today, the markets in Agra are still crowded, but not with the vast varieties of goods that Pelsaert describes. Readymade garments, leather footwear and tourism are the city’s main industries. Visitors also seek its petha, the crystallised pumpkin sweet that is such a favourite in northern India, and its dalmoth, a savoury namkeen that usually accompanies tea. I make my purchases from one of the several busy, brightly lit shops in the crowded market. I am almost ready to say goodbye to the city—except that I cannot leave till I have paid a visit to the tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulah, Nur Jahan’s father. Nur Jahan was a formidable woman. As her husband, the Emperor Jahangir, declined in health and power thanks to his dissolute lifestyle and dependence on opium, she took over the reins of the Empire. She was also a great builder. She constructed inns and sarais for the comfort of travellers, and laid out many gardens in and around the city, which can still be seen. Her crowning achievement as a builder though, is the tomb that she had built for her father, Itimad-ud-Daulah, upon his death in 1622.  Shah Jahan and Noor Jahan’s tombs in the Taj Mahal are covered with calligraphy, which was deeply prized by the Mughals as the primary means of preserving the Quran. Photo: Aldo Pavan/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images The small tomb stands in a large garden on the left bank of the Yamuna, and as I walk up to it, its jewel-like perfection takes my breath away. The perfectly symmetrical building is made entirely of white marble. Its walls are inlaid with semi-precious stones in intricate patterns of trees, fruits and flowers. Pelsaert, who witnessed the building of the tomb, declared that it had already cost ₹350,000, “and will cost a 1,000,000 more before it is finished”. The tomb represents a transition in Mughal architecture—from the imposing, majestic red sandstone monument of Akbar and his predecessors, to the graceful, poetic white marble beauty of the Taj Mahal. For many visitors to Agra, the delicate beauty of Itimad-ud-Daulah’s tomb surpasses the fairy wonder of the Taj Mahal. I stand beside the river and gaze out upon its dark waters, made even darker by the rain-laden monsoon sky. A pair of painted storks, a lone egret, some herons, and an adjutant stork stand morosely upon a sandbank. On the far bank of the Yamuna rises the massive bulk of Akbar’s Fort. To my right, out of sight, where the river curves, is the Taj Mahal. I bid goodbye to this city of romance and history. I will be back soon, I promise, to wander down its narrow lanes, to find perhaps a quiet, leafy garden I have not yet seen, and there to lose myself in the grace and glory of a past that has gone forever, but which holds me firmly captive still. The city takes note of my promise, and answers in the shrieking calls of a flock of parakeets flashing brilliant green across the sky. Appeared in the November 2014 issue as “Time-Travelling In Agra”.