The Long Life of a 1:200,000 Map of Central Europe and the Balkans

Abstract

In the mid-1880s, the geographical service of the Austro–Hungarian army (the König und Kaiser Militargeographisches Institut), was well known for the quality of its production and the how-know of its staff, started the publication of a new map of Central Europe and the Balkans at a scale of 1:200,000. This cartographic series is peculiar in the sense that it used, copied and translated by most European armies for more than a century. In fact, it is one of the most complicated and huge series ever to be published. For a key map that has only 265 boxes, more than 6200 different sheets were published in 56 series. This chapter deals with the methods which were developed to make the inventory, to construct the corpus (from 17 collections), and to identify the criteria for sorting the lists.