Anton Wied’s Map of Muscovy: Negotiating Hegemony on Russian Lands in the Polish-Lithuanian Cartography

Anton Wied’s "Moscovia", drawn in 1542 but printed only thirteen years later, can be considered the very first example of Lithuanian Renaissance cartography. It’s only one copy, preserved in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel, has not been studied in deep so far: yet, it seems to be fundamental in one of the most urgent questions negotiated in Eastern Europe – that of the political and cultural hegemony on the territories of former Kievan Rus’. In this paper I try to argue that the Wied’s map, with its bilingual (in latinized Old-Polish and in Old-Belarusian) and bi-alphabetical toponymy, establishes a Lithuanian-centered cartographic narration on Muscovy.