I love old maps like this. We have a government-funded website [1] which contains historical maps back to the beginning of the 18th century and which can be overlayed on top of current maps. Some of them are beautifully drawn, with tiny castles etc. And they are likely the results of years and years of fairly manual labor and it's striking how accurate they are. It's nice to see our street already existed back then, and some houses are still in the exact same place and some even already existed then (though there were only about 5, vs 50 now). And the church was already there of course. Many of the names of streets/forests/areas haven't changed much phonetically but mainly spelling-wise. And the old names give an insight into why villages were named the way they were.
For interested people, there are also old maps of Switzerland available as "Journey through time" on the government website [1] They are ranging from 1844 to 2013. It's based on Dufour and Siegfried maps, which are presented there: [2, 3]. Time can be changed by clicking on the year number in red.
Yes, that is so fascinating. In my little town - somewhat further up north in Europe - the oldest known map is from somewhere in sixteen hundreds. Except for the church, there isn't a single house left from that time today, but you could navigate blind, relying on the old map alone. Tiny details of topography have survived the centuries: One house protruding half a meter further into the street than its neighbor, the street itself bending and narrowing and widening just so - everything is faithfully preserved, often over several iterations of build-fire/teardown-rebuild. The layout is clearly medieval, so lots undoubtedly go back much further than four hundred years.
David Rumsey's site is one of those wonderful gems of the Internet. How wonderful that all these great old maps can be available to all of us on a site like this!
Interesting that the name "America" is only used for (a part of) Brazil. This appears to support the consensus that America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, who first explored South America.
There's a wonderful collection of US maps including historical, geologic, thematic and minute/degree over at the USGS Store[1]. There also really cheap to order/ship. I bought six maps of the Louisiana area (including one that was ~50 inches wide!) for a total of about 25 USD.
I've always found it interesting that the Ottomans financed Piri Reis, who created one of the greatest surviving maps of that era, but the Ottomans were such minor players on the truly global front. I'm not aware of any attempts by them to colonize the 'new world'. Maybe after Piri reported in they felt it was not worth their time? Or they likely had larger domestic problems to deal with..
If you enjoy old maps and fantastic creatures, you might like Eco's "Legendary Lands" book[0], which is basically an anthology of stories and visions of the world made up in the past.
One (superficial) thing that immediately jumps out at me is how similar that first image is to the weird 'flat-earth' maps produced by conspiracy-theorists and/or trolls today.
Of course the story shows us that this is merely the projection used by the mapmaker, not that they thought the earth was flat.
I'm always surprised at the awful artistic skills of maps during this period. If you look at the details, you can see how wobbly and uneven the simplest of lines and curves are. It seems odd because on the very large scale it would appear as if some sort of compass and other devises were used, but simple lines consist of overlapping strokes, erratic and handwritting that refuses to be consistently centered, and child-like scribbles for trees. For a 20 year effort, it seems careless and lacking in even rudimentary art skills. But this seems tn be every map from the period, not just this one.
Then why not center the letters in each box, rather than write them carelessly? Even if the lines were of uneven width, they're still not straight lines when they should be straight, wobbly when they should be elliptical.
This is not an uncommon reaction to medieval art in general, not just on maps. When I went to school we were taught it was due to "dark ages" of lost skills, but it seems modern history is giving it kinder treatment as "different priorities". Some discussion here:
[1] geopunt.be