page_title: City map
section_title: Late Middle Ages
hierarchical_section_title: City map / History / Late Middle Ages
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Basel, Holzschnitt aus der Schedelschen Weltchronik, Blatt 243v/244r (lateinische Ausgabe in Sao Paulo) English: Basel, Wood cut from the Nuremberg Chronicle (Latin copy in Sao Paulo)
context_page_description: A city map is a large-scale thematic map of a city created to enable the fastest possible orientation in an urban space. The graphic representation of objects on a city map is therefore usually greatly simplified, and reduced to generally understood symbology.
  Depending upon its target group or market, a city map will include not only the city's transport network, but also other important information, such as city sights or public institutions.
context_section_description: In manuscripts and early printed books of the Late Middle Ages, cities are often shown in profile, or viewed from an elevated standpoint.  Nautical charts of that time sometimes depict partly stylized cityscapes drawn in pictogram form - for example in Cristoforo Buondelmonti's Liber insularum archipelagi (Book of Islands), from the year 1422.
  The Nuremberg Chronicle, which first appeared in 1493, is one of the most important collections of city views of the late Middle Ages, with over 100 such illustrations. Nevertheless, panoramas like this one, or the one in Bernhard von Breydenbach's Travelogue from 1483, had more narrative or representative functions.
  Illustrated in these works are the local conditions and relevant characteristics - such as ports, magnificent buildings, walls, etc. - as a background for highlighting historical descriptions or economic benefits of the city. On the other hand, less emphasis was placed on accuracy: in the Nuremberg Chronicle, merely one quarter of the city views represented the actual appearance of the subject city, and some individual images were even used simultaneously to represent several different cities.
caption: View of Basel, Switzerland, ca 1490, from the Nuremberg Chronicle.
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