Jacques Michal

Jacques Michal (* around 1680 in Sedan ; † around 1750 in an unknown place), also called Jacques de Michal , was a Franco-German cartographer and engineer officer who worked in Germany for almost his entire life. At first he was a pure military cartographer and drew sheets of current military events in southern Germany. Soon, however, he was mainly concerned with civil cartography and, over the course of decades, created several substantial maps. For example, a large map of the Swabian District , which was considered the best map of this district in the 18th century and was published in 1725 as a copperplate by Matthäus Seutter in Augsburg . - Little is known of Jacques Michal's immediate circumstances.

Streak of life

The first sheet in the large map of the Swabian District from 1725

Before Jacques Michal went to Germany, he will certainly have received a very good education in the French kingdom, where military cartography has always been highly developed. - From 1703 he served as a soldier first in the Prussian army and from January 1705 in the Baden-Durlach regiment of the Swabian district, in which he completed an officer career and was last (1747) major.

The military cartographic work by Jacques Michal from the first time contains, among other things, drawings of the battle of Höchstädt and a collection of 23 sheets with depictions of military operations in the areas of Weißenburg , Strasbourg , Kehl and Stollhofen , which were completed in 1706 and are dedicated to the margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden (Türkenlouis) were dedicated. Today these drawings are all in the General State Archives in Karlsruhe . A few more sheets can be found in the archives of Baden-Durlach.

The third sheet of the large map of the Rhine from 1735

From 1707 onwards, Jacques Michal created mainly civil cartographies. First he started to design a large map of the Swabian Circle ( Suevia Universa IX. Tabulis Delineata ). This work, which consisted of nine sheets and took more than a decade to complete, was extremely important and overdue, as all the maps of the circle made up to then had many errors and distortions. (This circumstance even made the theologian and map historian Eberhard David Hauber [1695–1765] think of venturing to work out a new district map as a layperson, which he then failed to do when he heard that Michal was already dealing with it. ) In his work, Jacques Michal started from printed documents and made his own field observations in the entire district area; To this end, he obtained information from various agencies. He never seems to have carried out his own measurements of the site. The map had to be revised several times before it was published by Seutter in 1725. For this purpose, Jacques Michal created a rich atlas from the abundance of material obtained ( Geographical illustration of the whole, highly praiseworthy Swabian Crayses 1715–1725 ), which contained 50 handwritten sheets and was lost for a long time, but fortunately was found again sometime after 1960 in the General Archives in Karlsruhe. - On other large cartographies, Jacques Michal created a map of Alsace ( Alsatia Superior Et Inferior III Tabulis Delineata ), a Rhine map ( Rhenus ), a map of the Margraviate of Burgau ( Novissima Delineatio Marchionatus Burgovia ) and a map of Kehl and its surroundings ( Plan and area the Vöste Keèl ).

Jacques Michal was married and had children. His eldest son, born in 1715, was also a cartographer and seems to have worked extensively on his father's work.

Some maps from the Atlas of the Swabian District 1715–1725:

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  The gentlemen of Aulendorf and Königsegg

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  The county of Rothenfels

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  The Waldburg lordships of Zeil and Trauchburg

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  The gentlemen Tettnang, Argen and Schomburg

literature

• Helmut Gier, Johannes Janota: Augsburg book printing and publishing: from the beginnings to the present . Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 1997
• Ruthardt Oehme: The history of cartography of the German southwest: With 16 color plates and 42 black and white maps . Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Konstanz and Stuttgart 1961

Web links

• Entry for Jacques Michal in the German biography
• Bavarian State Library Map of the Swabian District (9 sheets)
• Literature by and about Jacques Michal in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Remarks

1. ↑ Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German Southwest (1961), page 118
2. ↑ Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German Southwest (1961), page 49