Carte de LA MER CASPIENE levee suivant les ordres du Czar.

A beautifully colored map of the Caspian Sea, with a lot of detail to the western coastline, and decorated with a compass. De l'isle, was working for many years for the Russian imperial academy of St.Petersburg in the cartographic department and took part in surveys. He published his famous 'Atlas Russicus' there and other special area maps.

Description: This is an attractive 1725 dated Guillaume Delisle reduced map of the Caspian Sea. It is one of the earliest to place Carl Van Verden and S. I. Soimonov's 1719 -21 mapping of the entire Caspian Sea. This is one of De L'isle's most important and misunderstood maps. Knowledge of the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region was extremely limited in Western Europe and so Delisle composed this map from assortment of sources, including the Russian explorers, Persian diplomats, Georgian aristocratic and religious figures, and various Russian surveys.

Around 1718 Russian Tzar Peter the Great, sponsored a number of cartographic expeditions to the farthest reaches of his vast empire. One such was a command to map the Caspian Sea given to Dutch navigator Carl Van Verden. Though well known since antiquity, the world's largest lake was largely ignored by surveyors until Van Verden's work in the early 18th century. Van Verden's work was the most advanced mapping of the Caspian Sea to date, offering a new perspective on the region and opening the navigational possibility of the world's largest lake.

In 1721 Peter presented the French Royal Academy with a copy of S. I. Soimonov and Carl Vanverden's map of the Caspian region.

Without further delay, Delisle redrew the map (with great care), translated the inscriptions into French and printed it on separate sheets in reduced size in the Travaux of the Academy. He also included the map in his Atlas. In this way, the exact outline of the Caspian Sea, drawn on the Russian map of 1720, first appeared in a map prepared in western Europe. In 1723, G. Delisle returned anew to the map of Verden and Soimonov and transposed from it the correct outline of 'Caspia' to the map which he was preparing. This can be seen by the outline of Verden and Soimonov on their map of 1720. The fact that Delisle used a map with Russian names becomes clear from the inscriptions on the map of 1723. 'Dua Brata ou Les Deux Freres,''Ostrov Giloi-Isle Habite,' 'Ostrov Svinoi ou Isle des Cochons,' 'Krasnie Vodi ou Les Eaux Rouges,' and others.

The result is this remarkably accurate map, a major step forward in the cartographic perspective of the region, and one of the finest maps Delisle ever produced. Peter the Great, Russia's most expansionists Tzar, was determined to make the Caspian a 'Russian Lake' and invaded the region in 1722 seizing Derbent and Baku.