Old Map of Wales by Joan Blaeu, c.1645

Joan Blaeu’s Map of Wales, 1645

Joan Blaeu’s Wallia Principatus vulgo Wales was first published in Amsterdam in 1645 as part of the fourth volume of his Atlas Novus. The National Library of Wales dates surviving examples to 1645–1648 and records the map as the work of Joan Blaeu, published during the period when he was directing one of Europe’s foremost mapmaking houses.

Blaeu did not make a new survey of Wales for this map. Its geographical ancestry can be traced through John Speed’s separate map of Wales, first published in 1611, and ultimately to Christopher Saxton’s pioneering survey of England and Wales published in 1579. Speed adapted Saxton’s geography for his own map of Wales, and Blaeu in turn used Speed’s work as an important source when preparing this new Amsterdam engraving some three decades later.

That history matters because the map is not simply “Wales in 1645”. It brings together geographical information gathered and refined over several generations of British mapmaking and presents it in the very different visual language of the great Dutch atlases.

Map Details

Original title: Wallia Principatus vulgo Wales
Publisher/cartographer: Joan Blaeu
First published: Amsterdam, 1645
Atlas: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive Atlas Novus, Volume IV
Geographical sources: principally John Speed’s map of Wales of 1611, itself drawing upon Christopher Saxton’s earlier survey
Technique: copperplate engraving
Dedication: Prince Charles, the future King Charles II

A Welsh Map from the Amsterdam Atlas Trade

The engraved title may be translated as “The Principality of Wales, commonly called Wales”. Blaeu shows the twelve historic Welsh counties with a dense network of towns, villages, rivers and roads, while the neighbouring English counties provide a geographical context along the Marches.

What immediately distinguishes the plate from the plainer survey maps on which some of its geography depended is its decoration. The title occupies a large ornamental cartouche in the upper right. Below it is a group of heraldic shields, while another elaborate cartouche in the lower right carries Blaeu’s dedication to Prince Charles. Ships occupy the surrounding seas and colour separates the historic counties.

The dedication is particularly useful in placing the map in its time. Prince Charles was the son of Charles I and would eventually return from exile as Charles II. The first edition appeared while Britain was in the midst of the Civil War, giving the prominently royal dedication a political as well as decorative significance.

From Saxton to Speed to Blaeu

Christopher Saxton’s surveys of the 1570s transformed the mapping of England and Wales. His work provided a geographical foundation that later mapmakers repeatedly adapted.

John Speed used this inherited material when compiling his own maps for The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, published in 1611–12. His map was especially important because it presented Wales separately using the newer county geography.

Blaeu subsequently reworked that material for an international atlas audience. His plate dispensed with Speed’s characteristic illustrated borders and instead employed the ornamental cartouches, heraldry, fine engraving and colouring associated with the Blaeu workshop. The result is therefore both a continuation of the English surveying tradition and a distinctly Dutch work of seventeenth-century atlas publishing.

Wales in Twelve Historic Counties

The map records Anglesey, Caernarvonshire, Merionethshire, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Montgomeryshire, Cardiganshire, Radnorshire, Breconshire, Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Glamorgan.

Many familiar names remain readily recognisable: Cardiff, Swansea, Carmarthen, Pembroke, St Davids, Aberystwyth, Bangor and Caernarfon among them. Elsewhere older spellings and seventeenth-century conventions remind us that this is not a modern road map but a historical document assembled from much earlier surveying.

The mountains are represented pictorially rather than by contours, settlements vary greatly in prominence, and county boundaries are made particularly conspicuous by colour. These are features worth examining because they reveal both the geographical knowledge available to Blaeu and the conventions by which an atlas reader of the 1640s expected a country to be represented.

Joan Blaeu and the Atlas Novus

Joan Blaeu took over the family publishing house after the death of his father Willem Blaeu in 1638. Under Joan the business expanded dramatically, eventually producing the monumental Atlas Maior of the 1660s.

The Wales map belongs to the earlier Atlas Novus period, when Joan was enlarging the family’s coverage of Britain and Europe. The National Library of Wales records this plate in the fourth volume of that atlas and notes Blaeu’s position within the flourishing Dutch cartographic industry.

Seen in that context, Wallia Principatus vulgo Wales is much more interesting than a decorative picture of old Wales. It represents a chain of cartographic work stretching from Saxton’s surveying in Elizabethan England, through John Speed, to Joan Blaeu’s Amsterdam publishing house nearly seventy years later.