LASOR A VAREA, ALPHONSUS: ALBA GRAECA / BELGRAD

The veduta depicts Belgrade from a bird's eye view, observed from the Danube (Danubio). In the foreground are two riverboats. At the Sava estuary (Saw fl.) there is also a depiction of the fort which maintained an important defensive role from the time of the ancient castrum and the medieval Byzantine fortification, and prevented the Ottoman conquest of the city from the 16th century onwards as the “Bulwark of Christendom”. After 1521, the city became the orientalized centre of the Smederevo Sanjak-bey, up until the Austrian and then Ottoman devastation in the 1688 retreat. Two years later it was again occupied by the Ottomans and it remained an Ottoman border fort until the 1717 invasion of Eugene of Savoy and the 1718 Treaty of Požarevac. Although the map was created during the most turbulent time of the Ottoman-Austrian conflicts, the previous orientalization is poorly recognized when it comes to architecture. Below the very map there is a legend of the numerical designations on the map for the location of the two rivers surrounding the city and the location of the settlements and fortifications. This map is part of a single book sheet on page 26, with Latin narrative descriptions of the towns in alphabetical order. The episcopal centre of Belgrade is mentioned under different variants, from Hungarian (Alba Bulgarica) through Italian (Belgrado), German (Griechich Weissenburg), common in the medieval capital of Serbia, to Slavic (Slauni Biograd), which spread after the Ottoman conquests. The Italian cartographer Lasor a Varea, his real name being Raffaello Savonarola, published his copper-plate veduta of Belgrade in the atlas Universus Terrarum Orbis Scriptorum Calamo Delienatus in 1713.