This excerpt is taken from National Geographic’s new book All Over the Map, a guided tour through the world’s most incredible maps, assembled by Betsy Mason and Greg Miller, authors of the “All Over the Map” series.
Christiaan van Adrichom almost certainly never visited Jerusalem before making this map in 1584. He was a Catholic priest working in Cologne, in what is now Germany, at a time when the Holy Land had been in Muslim hands for centuries, making it a difficult and potentially dangerous place for Christian pilgrims to visit. Nevertheless, Adrichom managed to create an enormously popular map that not only allowed European Christians to imagine a trip most of them would never be able to take, but also took them back in time to picture the city as it existed during the time of Christ.
The map is packed with at least 270 landmarks and references to Christian tradition, all numbered and keyed to captions
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