Heinrich Schweickher

Southern map of the district of Grüningen (1575 in the atlas)

Heinrich Schweickher (* 1526 in Sulz am Neckar ; † June 28, 1579 there ) was a Württemberg orphan bailiff and cartographer who first mapped the Württemberg districts and published the first atlas of the Duchy of Württemberg in 1575 .

Life

Schweickher comes from the Württemberg nobility . His father Franz Schweickher (1489–1568) had studied law in Leipzig, was a notary, city and court clerk in Sulz am Neckar and had ten children with his wife Margarete Ruoff. Schweickher learned the profession of notary and city court clerk from his father. After he married Katharina Knecht (around 1527, † around 1579), daughter of a court master and tutor to the Counts of Hohenzollern, in 1547, he initially lived in Haigerloch and currently held several offices in Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen . In 1567 he was appointed orphan bailiff in the Duchy of Württemberg. On his numerous visitation trips in his field of activity " ob der Staig ", that is, in the southern half of the Oberland beyond the Stuttgarter Weinsteige, he got to know the topography of Württemberg and created the first maps, sometimes for the settlement of territorial disputes.

Main work

Outstanding were his 51 maps of the offices (administrative districts) of the Duchy of Württemberg, which he colored, provided with decorative frames and coats of arms of the official cities and summarized in 1575 in an atlas dedicated to Duke Ludwig von Württemberg . The dedication is in Latin.

He mostly laid out the southern office maps on a scale of 1: 125,000. On the left edge of the map he recorded the mile scale, on the right the degree count. The maps are divided into two chapters with an index for the offices “under der Staige” and “ob der Staige” and are supplemented by an overview map on a scale of 1: 2,400,000 and a “directory of streams and rivers”. Schweickher did not mark places that were not primarily under Württemberg rule on the official maps. Even Unterriexingen was left out, although larger parts of this village at the confluence of the Glems into the Enz already belonged to Württemberg and were administered by the Vogt in the municipal town of Grüningen (see map above).

North-facing map of Langenburg and the surrounding area (1578)

In the service of others

It is not clear whether Schweickher had lost his position as orphan bailiff or had resigned himself to only work as a cartographer. It is certain that he turned to Count Wolfgang von Hohenlohe in 1578 and offered him to draw up a map of the office, town and castle of Langenburg. Since his test work was obviously convincing, the count commissioned him in 1579 for a Hohenloher Atlas. However, he could not complete this because he fell seriously ill during the survey and died shortly afterwards in June 1579. In 1579, in addition to the “Tabula generalis” from the city and office of Langenburg, there were 14 district maps on a scale of around 1: 10,000. In contrast to the southern maps of Württemberg, the Hohenlohe maps are north. Schweickher's son Franz, who had supported him in the field, was also unable to complete the work.

Map of the Greininger Beamptung for comparison

Colleagues or competitors?

In addition to the pioneer Heinrich Schweickher, other cartographers worked on the land survey on behalf of the government of Württemberg in the second half of the 16th century: in particular Georg Gadner , who generated a high-quality illustrated atlas from his forest maps in 1590 and Jacob Ramminger , who mainly through his "Seehbuch " Appeared , as well as representatives of the Schickhardt family: It is assumed that Heinrich Schickhardt copied from Schweickher with office cards when he was creating another Württemberg atlas. In terms of quality, however, these maps, dated around 1600, appear like drafts of Schweickher's maps.

reception

Schweickher's map series is of great value for the history of the state of Württemberg because it makes the somewhat diffuse former structure of offices and their district boundaries comprehensible and shows the country before it was destroyed by the Thirty Years' War . In combination with Gadner's forest maps, the desertification of a number of settlements can be chronologically verified.

literature

• Irene-Annette Bergs:  Schweickher, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 44 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Friedrich Huttenlocher : History of the cartography of the German southwest. To the work of the same name by Ruthardt Oehme . In: Geography , Volume XVI, 1962, pp. 309–311, digitized version (PDF)
• Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German southwest . Edited by the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Work on the Historical Atlas of Southwest Germany , Volume 3, Jan Thorbecke, Konstanz and Stuttgart 1961.

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Schweickher  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Works by and about Heinrich Schweickher  in the German Digital Library
• Atlas of the Duchy of Württemberg - Cod.hist.qt.102 (WLB digitized version)

Remarks

1. ^ According to the NDB, Heinrich had eleven children with Katharina, seven of them surviving children.
2. ↑ Cf. catalog of works by Irene-Annette Bergs: Heinrich Schweickher , in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 24 (2010), pp. 44–45; NDB
3. ↑ The offices were precursors of 1758 introduced top offices .
4. ↑ Dedication to Duke Ludwig von Württemberg
5. ↑ According to Bergs (NDB), Schweickher's atlas is preserved in two copies, "one in the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart, the other in the Austrian National Library in Vienna". The Württemberg State Library offers the entire atlas as a PDF download (button on the top right) .
6. ↑ Irene-Annette Bergs:  Schweickher, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 44 f. ( Digitized version ).
7. ↑ Here, however, the official location of Sersheim , which was added in 1589, is missing , which, in addition to the qualitative regression, arouses doubts about the dating (around 1605) and Schickhardt's authorship. . See with Schweickher card from Office Grüningen (top) and comment on LABW, hsta Stuttgart, N 1 no. 70: .
8. ↑ Friedrich Huttenlocher : History of the cartography of the German southwest. To the work of the same name by Ruthardt Oehme . In: Geography , Volume XVI, 1962, pp. 309–311, digitized version (PDF)
9. ↑ See maps of the "Beamptungen" in the description of the duchy of Württemberg ob der Staig and under der Staig ( LABW, HStA Stuttgart, N 1 No. 70: Digitized  in the German Digital Library )