Warm and Ygl

The family coat of arms of the Ygl

Warmund Ygl (also Warmund Ygl von Volderthurn; † June 1611 in Prague ) was an official and cartographer who created one of the first maps of Tyrol .

Life

Warmund Ygl was a son of Wilhelm Ygl from Sterzing . The bourgeois family was raised to the nobility in 1553 and, through marriage, came into the possession of the Volderthurn residence in Volders , after which they called themselves “Ygl von Volderthurn”. Wilhelm Ygl moved with his family to Hungary in 1564, where he managed the copper works in Neusohl (today Banská Bystrica , Slovakia).

Warmund returned to Tyrol in 1577, where he was appointed by the sovereign to be the counter clerk at the Fernstein customs . In 1583 he entered the service of the Chamber , the sovereign financial administration in Innsbruck . There he rose from copyist to chamber clerk adjunct and finally in 1588 to chamber clerk. In 1600 he accepted the position of a chamber accountant in Graz . In 1603 Emperor Rudolf II appointed him to Prague as court chamber bookkeeper because Ygl had a reputation for mastering the Latin language, knowing about mining and being a faithful Catholic. He was appointed to the Imperial Council and died in Prague in 1611.

Warmund Ygl was very educated, he knew Latin and was familiar with the writers of antiquity. During his time in Hungary he translated Johannes Hoffmeister's Iudicium De Articulis Augustanae Confessionis ("What to think of the articles of the Faith Confession") into German and published the translation in 1597. During his time in Innsbruck, he was self-motivated and without an official order with topography and cartography and created one of the first maps of Tyrol.

Warmund Ygl was married twice. From his first marriage to Maria Putzner († 1605) had several children, the only known son Friedrich, who was an imperial councilor and war bookkeeper in Graz and who published a map of Tyrol based on his father's map in 1645.

Even as commoners, the Ygl had a family coat of arms that showed a hedgehog in its nest as a talking coat of arms . In 1547 it was improved by the addition of the imperial eagle .

Ygls map of Tyrol

The Tyrol map of Warmund Ygl (1605)

The "Groß Verner"

Warmund Ygls map Tirolis Comitatus Ampliss (imi) Regionumq (ue) Finitimarum Nova Tabula (“New map of the very extensive county of Tyrol and its neighboring areas”) was published in 1605 by Georg Nigrinus in Prague. The printing templates were made in 1604 by Johann Willenberger from Silesia as a woodcut . Today three copies of the map are known, one is in the Tyrolean State Museum in Innsbruck, one in the Austrian National Library . The third copy, which is in the Göttingen State and University Library , is a reprint of the original woodcuts from 1621.

According to Ygl, he wandered through the country and measured it and either recorded valleys, mountains and rivers himself or asked others about them. However, the basics are likely to come largely from third parties, as a chamber clerk he had little opportunity to travel, on the other hand he was in close contact with local offices such as customs offices and mining administrations, which could provide him with information. He probably also evaluated existing maps, including the map Rhetiae alpestris descriptio in qua hodie Tirolis Comitatus ..., which was published in 1561 by Wolfgang Lazius and several maps of Tyrol published in atlases (including by Abraham Ortelius , Gerard de Jode or Gerhard Mercator ) as The template was used, as well as unprinted cards from Paul Dax .

The map, which consists of nine sheets, has an overall format of 86 × 115.5 cm, the average scale is around 1: 253,000. The area shown is around 19% too long in north-south direction. The dense river network is shown largely correctly, with the main rivers such as Inn and Adige being much too wide. The larger rivers are labeled with their Latin and German names. The depiction of bridges is striking, and shipping on the Inn is symbolized by boats on the Inn between Zirl and Schwaz .

The mountains are shown in the form of molehills, but some are also more natural. For that time, a surprising number of mountains (such as Patscherkofel , Frau Hitt or Martinswand ) are named and marked with M (for mons, Latin for "mountain"), especially those that were used as pass crossings, for agriculture or mining. Passes are also drawn as mountains and labeled with an M, with the exception of the burner , which is correctly shown as an incision. The core area of ​​the Ötztal and Stubai Alps is covered by a continuous ice surface and is labeled as Der Groß Verner - Glacies continua et perpetua . This is the oldest map representation of an Alpine glacier.

Settlements are represented by small elevation drawings and additional symbols for town, market, village, monastery, etc. The only road marked is the connection over the Fernpass  , which leads as a dotted line from the Inn Bridge near Haiming via Nassereith , Biberwier and Lermoos to Reutte  , where it branches off to Immenstadt , Kempten and Füssen .

Altogether more than 2000 place and field names are shown in Ygls map. The majority of it is spelled correctly, based on the language used at the time. In an attached margin there is a Latin commentary in which Ygl mainly gives geographical and historical information on Roman times, but with the exception of a description of the glaciers hardly any contemporary references.

Until the Atlas Tyrolensis published in 1774 , which was the first to be based on systematic measurements, Ygl's work was the most important map of Tyrol. It was an important source for the representation of Tyrol in the great Dutch and German atlases of the 17th and 18th centuries, including Matthäus Merian's Tirol map from 1649. Only a few years after Ygl, Matthias Burgklehner published his map of the firstlich Graffschaft Tirol, which in Tyrol was better known, but was not noticed by foreign cartographers.

literature

• Wilfried Beimrohr: Warmund Ygl and his map of Tyrol. Archive & Quelle 32, Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck 2008 ( PDF; 3 MB ).
• Kurt Brunner: Regional maps of Tyrol by Matthias Burgklechner and their predecessors. In: Mitteilungen der Österreichische Geographische Gesellschaft, Vol. 144, Vienna 2002, pp. 237–254 ( PDF; 7.7 MB ).

Web links

Commons : Warmund Ygls Tirol-Karte  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• The Tyrol map in the map collection of the Austrian National Library
• Works by and about Warmund Ygl  in the German Digital Library