Katalin Plihál

The First Printed Map of Hungary

 

...

The map is ascribed to one Lázár, about whom next to nothing is known except that he was alive in the early decades of the 16th century. Lázár (Lazarus) could have been his surname or his Christian name. We do not know when or where he was born or died. He was presumably not in the kind of social position that would have attracted the attention of his contemporaries.
All that is recorded about Lázár the mapmaker is his occupation - secretarius - and the fact that he lived and was in the circle of Tamás Bakócz (1442-1521), Cardinal Archbishop of Esztergom. This was a large circle, since Bakócz in the early 16th century combined the highest ecclesiastical offices (Primate of Hungary, Cardinal and Titular Patriarch of Constantinople) with the highest secular office (High and Privy Chancellor). Bakócz's personal secretaries are known by name. In that period everyone had to be addressed meticulously by their feudal status. The plain style secretarius tended to refer to a layman and this is intimated in the source materials. Lázár is likely to have been working within the Chancellery during Bakócz's term as High and Privy Chancellor (up to June 21, 1521). Many of those who did so were entitled to call themselves secretarius, although their official status was only notarius, for instance if they went abroad on a diplomatic mission. (None of Bakócz's known privy secretaries or Chancellery staff bore the Christian name or surname Lázár. On the other hand, only 10 per cent of the documents from the period before the fateful battle of Mohács in 1526 have survived.)
Deák Lázár could not have graduated from a university, or he would have been referred to as magister. The sources known today mention five 'expert' men who were deák, which in 16th-century parlance meant scholarly men with a knowledge of Latin. The same sources describe him as a Hungarian, and this is confirmed by the name-forms he uses on the Tabula Hungarić. Lázár followed the accepted Chancellery practice of writing 'ee' for a long 'é' - thus Ezeek for Eszék (Osijek), Zeek for Szék, Zeeplak for Széplak, etc. - and 'ew' for 'ö' - Fewdwar for Földvár, Gew, Eskew, Ewsi, Fewldeak, Tertzew, Besenew, etc. The 'c' sound (ts in English) is sometimes written 'tz', for instance in Adatz, Agatz, Bakotza etc. This orthography is characteristic of writings in certain German dialects of the time, although it could have derived from those responsible for setting us the Lázár manuscript in print. On the other hand, dialect practices have been preserved by Lázár in other place-names, for instance in his rendition of the i phoneme e.g., Kézdi is found on the map as Kyzdy.
According to a letter written by the mathematician and cartographer Jacob Ziegler (1470-1549), he and Lázár contemplated compiling the map in 1514. This was not just a theoretical discussion, because Ziegler remembered having compared the printed version with the original manuscript, which could only have been possible if Lázár had been able to show him some kind of completed work.

The fate of the manuscript

Lázár could not have lived to see his map in print. The manuscript was probably kept in Buda, at the Chancellery or in the Bibliotheca Corviniana, established under King Matthias. The man who found it was Johannes Cuspinianus (1473-1529), whose journal shows him to have served as a diplomat in Hungary from 1511 onwards and who was familiar with the royal court. If Lázár had worked at Bakócz's behest, as his employee, his work would certainly have entered the collection of the archbishop, who was a great lover of splendour and of scholarship. In that case, the fate of the map might have been even more convoluted: Bakócz's treasures and books were auctioned after his death, and only one codex has been identified as coming from his library, although other sources relate that he had had numerous codices made for him in Italy. In 1526 the army of Sultan Suleiman II triumphed on the field of Mohács and the young king Louis II fell there. Hungary lost its independence for 150 years.
Cuspinianus found the manuscript some time after September 25, 1526 - after Suleiman the Great had left Buda, his ships filled with statues from Buda Castle, some of the Bibliotheca Corviniana, along with gold and silver devotional objects from the churches. In the early spring of 1528, Cuspinianus wrote his description of Austria, in which he mentions that he was able to gauge the size of Lake Fertő (Neusiedlersee) accurately from a map of Hungary he had found. Georg Tanstetter (1482-1535), of Bavarian origin, who taught at Vienna University, is known to have had a hand in preparing the map for the press. He would have been the one who altered the manuscript to provide space of at least 200 sq. cm, which was required for the title and coat of arms. It was he who probably took the decision to turn it into an upright wall map. (A 'landscape' format would have been more suitable for Hungary, which was then twice as wide as it was long from north to south.) This intervention led to the uniform map structure of Lázár being split into three parts, suggesting that the original manuscript might have consisted of three parts on different scales. If that supposition is correct, it would have to be assumed that Lázár had realised before the printing that his work would be published with an orientation towards the east and a fairly large space taken up by the coat of arms of King Ferdinand of Habsburg. (It would be inconceivable to rearrange a modern map in this way, but attitudes were different in the 16th century. For instance, if the size of the paper was wrong, the 'heel of the Italian boot' might be distorted, or the northern parts of the British Isles simply bent eastwards.)
The intervention is also apparent in the way several names have been duplicated in transit from the manuscript to the printed map, although there was just one place of that name in medieval Hungary. (Examples include Hrussó, Ignéc, Berhida, Szeremle, Kelecsény, Földeák, Solymosvár, Nádudvar, Alsópozsás and Travnik.) These places are actually in a quite regular order, but not on the map published in 1528. If they are used to try to plot the towns and villages in Tabula Hungarić correctly, the structure of Lázár's original, manuscript map becomes apparent.
The manuscript and the printed map were probably on a different scale as well. According to Cuspinianus, Lake Fertő was bigger than it appears on the printed map. In other words, Tanstetter may have reduced the scale of the manuscript. The map was published by Cuspinianus at his own expense and dedicated to King Ferdinand of Hungary (The Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I.)

Printer and printing method

The map was relief printed on the Ingolstadt press of Peter Apianus (1495-1552), a Bavarian and pupil of Tanstetter, and a magister of Vienna University.
The pictorial part of the map and the geographical names were engraved in wood. This procedure was very time-consuming, and in the case of several names, very hard to carry out. Errors could not be corrected and the appearance of the letters was very variable, dependent on the skill of the engraver. New methods were sought by printers to overcome these problems and speed up the process of producing the printing blocks.
One possibility was to arrange Gutenberg moveable type in a trough, to make the text even. However, this raised further problems, because the many troughs would weaken the block and shorten its life, while the inserted letters could fall out during the printing process. Thus copies with printer's errors entered circulation, giving rise to non-existent geographical names. (A good example can be found in the map Regni Hungarić descriptio vera, made by Wolfgang Lazius in Vienna in 1556. The 'C' of Crisiensis (Kőrös) fell out, so that those using the map subsequently referred to the county as Risiensis.)
With the stereotype process, each inscription was cast separately on a plate and then positioned correctly on the wooden block using pine resin or tiny nails. The letting of the inscriptions would be even, but sometimes whole names, not just letters, fell out of the block during the printing. Every known map printed by this method lacks some names. The technique was probably developed and/or first used by Apianus, for printing Tabula Hungarić. The map contains almost 350 marks for towns or villages for which the one copy known today shows no name. This suggests that it was not one of the early copies to be printed. The work was originally printed with four wooden blocks engraved probably by Martin and Michel Ostendorfer. The different degrees of wear on the blocks can be seen on the prints, where varying proportions of the names are missing. (Apianus's son Philipp also used stereotypes for the map he made after the topographical survey of Bavaria, and in that case, the blocks themselves have fortunately survived.)

Katalin Plihál
is a cartographer and librarian on the staff of the map room of the National Széchényi Library (since 1971). She specialises in 16th and 17th century maps of Hungary and Transylvania.