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Redefining Imperial Borders: Marking the Eastern Border of the Habsburg Monarchy in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

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History of Cartography

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((ICA))

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, Eastern Europe became the stage for concurrent imperial expansion projects. The Habsburg-Russo-Ottoman military confrontations plagued the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, located immediately next to the eastern borders of the Habsburg Monarchy. Despite their alliance with Catherine the Great, the Habsburg rulers Maria Theresa (1740–1780) and Joseph II (1765–1790) witnessed fearfully from their Eastern province of Transylvania the Russian encroachment into the Ottoman lands. At such a time, Habsburg interests in the area had to be incessantly negotiated with their powerful rivals, and cartography became a strong weapon in defending Habsburg territory and even furthering expansionist projects. Historians have shown how the depiction of political borders on maps constituted an early-modern development, and how the concept of “border” acquired a linear visual expression with the help of cartography. In this paper I examine this transformation of the eastern border of the Habsburg Monarchy, namely the border of Transylvania with Moldavia. Using archival documents found in Vienna and Paris, I focus on Habsburg explorations and mapping enterprises from the 1750s to the mid-1770s on their eastern border. Whereas the 1750s maps of Stephan Lutsch von Luchsenstein encompassed the first detailed visual representation of the border regions, by the 1770s the Habsburgs had put into place an impressive system of imperial landmarks and had even infringed into Moldavian territory. I argue that cartographic representations of these borders gave weight to Habsburg pretensions in the region.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Pinar Emiralioğlu, Evelyn Rawski, Alex Drace-Francis and Susana Andea for their valuable suggestions and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

    Madalina Valeria Veres

Authors
  1. Madalina Valeria Veres
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Correspondence to Madalina Valeria Veres .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

    Elri Liebenberg

  2. Geography, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

    Peter Collier

  3. Cartography and Geoinformatics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Zsolt Gyözö Török

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Veres, M.V. (2014). Redefining Imperial Borders: Marking the Eastern Border of the Habsburg Monarchy in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century. In: Liebenberg, E., Collier, P., Török, Z. (eds) History of Cartography. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33317-0_1

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