The Battle Rose: Meldemann's Panorama of the Siege of Vienna, 1529

Meldemann's Map, copy in Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin, original in Vienna Museum, acquired in 1835 from a private collection. No notes on the provenance of the museum's copy. Photographs of the copy are mine.

The Western concept of what a map is, and what one can or should represent, has developed and expanded as ideas of time, reality, and accuracy themselves have evolved in our cultures. The map published by Nicolaus Meldemann of the failed Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks in 1529 represents a major advance in map-making: not only developing the "bird's eye view" of a territory, but also providing a 360-degree synchronic representation of key battles around Vienna in the siege.

I think the unfolding-rose effect is easier to see in the copy. The war unfurls from the center like the petals of a rose, or, more disturbingly, reminiscent of an explosion with a mushroom cloud, because the modern audience is more accustomed to being poised above the whole scene--a viewpoint unavailable to anyone living in 1529. In reality, the momentum of the siege was from outside, attempting to move inward to surround the great city.

At first glance, the encirclement looks ominous, as though the incursions are burning toward the central city. The museum card for the map was short on details, such that I didn't know that the Turks had lost the siege. So, seeing the city surrounded, I thought that the map was a report of the danger Vienna faced. Once I did some cursory research on the Siege of Vienna, the details in the individual encounters on the map became more clear.

Image of Original Map, Vienna Museum, Woodcut, 1529, by Nikolaus Meldemann, public domain, sourced from Wikicommons

How was this map composed? Only the reportage of Meldemann tells us: he went to Vienna after the siege, looking for illustrations of the battles he could buy and make into woodcuts he could sell in his own shop. He found an artist (name unknown) who had witnessed the battles from the steeple of St. Stephen's Cathedral in the center of Vienna, who sketched a 360-degree panorama of what he witnessed over the course of the siege. The siege lasted 18 days, so one would have to dig deeper than my German translator app permits to figure out which events in the diverse locations occurred when. On this map, sequential time isn't indicated, nor does the map accurately represent all the towns and geographic features. The significant skirmishes and losses are what's recorded. The Meldemann map is not about navigating, but about recording an event: what is on it was already disappearing by the time the Meldemann came looking for the artist: the Ottomans were gone, the burned towns were being abandoned or repaired, and the walls of Vienna were being rebuilt with stronger fortifications and more bastions for defense.

Hereford Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral, circa 1300, public domain, sourced from Wikimedia

Stepping backward a moment, let's look at two other maps where our modern sense of time and navigable geography did not matter.

Above is the famed Hereford Mappa Mundi. This map draws on myths, legends, and theology, much of which had its origins in Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. It is a view of the world which places Jerusalem at its center, and fills in Africa, Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean with all manner of biblical references, pagan slanders, and monsters. The most accurate and least imaginative part of the map is the lower-left, where Northern Europe pines for excitement.

The point of this map is not geography, but to create a visual aid for a Christian understanding of the world which makes theology coherent for believers. Just as spatial accuracy is notional, so, too, is time: on the map, the labyrinth of the Minotaur, the Tower of Babel, and the parting of the Red Sea all coexist. The Mappa Mundi, much like the Christian practice of asynchronous reading of the Bible, treats stories as having importance and accessibility which keep them significant to their audience regardless of their temporal sequence or their distance from the present.

Botticelli's Map of Dante's Inferno, 1489-1490, public domain, sourced from Wikicommons

Botticelli's map may be the great-great grandchild of the Mappa Mundi in terms of design, but the artist is constrained by the specificity and detail of the map's referring text. The artist undertakes to create a visual understanding of a deeply complex poem which aligns Classical philosophy with Christian theology in a discourse on human frailty at the point where the soul refuses to redeem itself. And, to encompass this in a single image. (He does get to make individual illustrations of each circle of Hell, but those aren't maps.)

This map is a schema of the journey two poets make through 34 cantos through Hell to Mount Purgatory in 24 hours. This isn't a bird's eye view, but a kind of cut-away view. Time does matter in The Inferno, as does geography. But the travel's most important feature here is descent, and with each level of descent a new consideration of sin is revealed and discussed. Botticelli must hew closely to the text as he composes his innovative map of a legendary story.

Both the Mappa Mundi and the map of The Inferno share with the Meldemann Map the endeavor to compress multiple events and ideas into one coherent image. The different task which the Meldemann Map undertakes is to meld landscape and history.

Center of the Map: The Center of Vienna--Cathedral and City Walls

The city walls of Vienna were first built in the 1200s. In the illustration, their shape literally centers and defines the layout of the map. The artist, Meldemann said, constructed his account of the siege by looking in all directions from the spire of the cathedral. Here, the cathedral looms as the largest structure in the city, which was common for medieval towns. The artist has to work back and forth with his decisions about perspective. The walls lean outward from the center to permit details of the fortifications and the many portals into and out of the city to be visible. The walls, above all else, must be protected if the city is to survive the siege. The perspective used in drawing the cathedral is a bit more upright than any other object in the city, but its stance does not suggest to the viewer that they are seeing the surrounding town and countryside with the same bird's-eye view the artist tries to convey, nor does he draw the steeple to present it to convey how he was seeing the countryside as drawn here. The map is meant to be viewed episodically, rather than as a whole, which is pretty much how he had to draw it.

For a history of the development of perspective drawing in Western art, click the link in this sentence. The Meldemann artist is struggling to make a number of breakthroughs in this map.

The artist commits to drawing the map of the siege as a clock face, and it may reflect as well how he worked with his paper as he drew, rotating it as he moved out from the center.

He makes another choice that, given how detailed the map is, one could easily ignore: he omits any irrelevant buildings and civilians in the city and for the most part in the countryside (that is, any of these not pertinent to the narrative of the siege). Chronicles of the siege report widespread murder and sexual abuse of civilians, and determined destruction of civilian structures in the Turkish retreat, The map concentrates on military engagements and strategic losses, and shows civilian losses in only a few places. In this, I see the beginnings of modern war reportage and its illustration which won't really change until the use of the camera in journalism, especially with re-focus on civilian casualties in the Vietnam War.

South portion of Map

In this section of the map, the path running (to our orientation) north-south creates a misconception of what's happening--that there are two opposing armies on either side of a natural division. Even when I looked at the map on the wall in the exhibition, I was confused at first--especially because the black-and-white version led me to assume that the division was a stream coming down from the river above. To the contrary, in the foreground, the soldiers are all on the Viennese side, as can be seen by their armor, weapons, and flags. These soldiers are guarding the south portal to the city, and they far out-number and out-gun the Ottomans, who are actually in retreat.

At the top of the image, you can see the small Ottoman camp, distinguished by their tents, smaller banners, and their turbans. They are backed up against a meander of the river behind them in the distance. As they retreat, they've elected wreak havoc in their wake by setting fire to the Viennese-built bridge and its toll (and security) booth.

East Side of Map: War Crimes

Here is the exception to the focus on just the military aspects of the siege. The text reads: "In this forest, the Turks have pitifully strangled several thousand men, women, and children, who have been found lying here and there in many places, and [the Turks] carried away whatever pleased them." You can see the few representative bodies in the top-third of the image, above the small buildings (standing in for towns) that are set on fire. In the upper-right corner, you can see two men on horseback charging a woman who raises her arms in surrender. In the foreground is the Ottoman camp, with its tents, some captured cannons in the lower-left, and a camel in the lower-right (and another near the edge on the upper-middle left).

West side: The Ottoman Emperor's Camp

The caption in this section draws attention to "The great camp of the Turkish Emperor Suleiman, where he was personally situated in a special, large red tent." Below the battle is a note: "The skirmish where Count Hans von Hardeck, the ensign, and others were captured." To the right, we're informed that Grand Vizier Ibrahim is driving his people to battle. The Emperor's camp is a massive tent-city, and appears to be well behind the lines of assault. In descending order along the left side of the image we see supply wagons, grazing horses, and resting camels.

This camp does not appear to be in retreat, so perhaps the artist recorded it at the beginning of the siege, as a reference point for the unfolding of the history.

East Side: Ottomans in Retreat

If The Emperor's camp in the west signifies the beginning of the battle, the east side shows his army fighting the Viennese and losing many of their numbers as they get backed into the woods of Vienna (referred to in the caption at the top of the image). There are more civilian casualties (including a beheading and a slaughtered mother and child on the plain below the torched buildings on the middle-right), but there are Ottoman casualties evident in the fields on the upper-left. On the lower-right, a Viennese knight appears to be marching his horse confidently into the enemy camp as the army amasses in front of the tents. This battle looks to be over.

Threats Close To Home

A final surprising feature of the Meldemann map is found on the northern part of the city wall. The Ottoman army was attempting to breach the walls by tunneling under them. If you look carefully at the arches to the left and right of the main gate, you can see Ottoman soldiers attempting to enter the infiltrate the Vienna. To the left, you can see their soldiers crouching behind a small barrier firing archebuses (early form of muskets) at the Viennese soldiers guarding the wall. You can also see Viennese soldiers firing cannons back in return. I'm not sure I'm seeing it here, but written reports of the siege state that the Viennese were lobbing mines into the tunnels as the Ottomans broke through, which would be a very early European use of sappers in warfare, but incendiary devises to thwart tunnelers goes back to the Classical and Byzantine eras in Greece, known as Greek Fire.

The Meldemann map's rose-like appearance makes it very aesthetically pleasing, but that probably was, at best, an afterthought for the artist. A web might be a better metaphor for what he accomplished, for he wove together several location-specific events which occurred over the course of more than two weeks, connecting them for how they'd look for future audiences seeing them as history--"history" a lot closer to our modern sense of the word than most works contemporary to and preceding his--converting them from the sequential events he experienced. What he created straddles both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in its artistic point of view: medieval art would frequently place several different events in the same painting and make a minimal effort at detail and depth in human figures; renaissance art strove to replicate a credible gesture toward 3D perspective in 2D form, and while it couldn't escape its own inherent biases, aimed to represent the real and factual, bare of religious ideology in particular.