ABSTRACT
As a city revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Jerusalem has been depicted on legions of maps. Most of the realistic maps of Jerusalem from this period offer a bird’s-eye or panoramic view from the Mount of Olives. Historical and religious themes abound in much of the corpus under review, especially its imaginary maps. Accordingly, a significant portion of all maps, especially those of Jerusalem, are graphic conceptualizations of a subjective message, rather than scientific “accurate” reports in the modern sense of the word. With the Crusaders’ capture of the city in 1099, Jerusalem’s stock shot up in both the Christian world and beyond, and became a favorite topic of cartographers. Another historical-imaginary map that falls under this category is Hartmann Schedel’s “Destruction of Jerusalem” in his 1493 Liber chronicarum. In parallel to the developments in survey-based cartography, relief maps and three-dimensional models of Jerusalem made their debut.
