Tabula Quarta Asia (Holy Land and Cyprus)

One of the earliest maps available to a collector of Cyprus, Syria, Mesopotamia,. Babylonia, Arabia Petraea, Armenia Minor and the Holy Land, based upon the Georgraphy of Claudius Ptolemy.

Lorenz (Laurent) Fries was born in Alsace in c1490. He studied medicine at university, and established himself as a physician in France before settling in Strasbourg, in about 1519. There Fries met the printer and publisher Johann Grüninger, an associate of the St. Die group of scholars formed by, among others, Martin Waldseemüller. For the next five years, from about 1520 to about 1525, Fries worked in some capacity as a cartographic editor for or with Grüninger, exploiting the material that Waldseemüller had created from Ptolemy. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to help gauge the exact nature of the relationship.

Fries' first venture into mapmaking was in 1520, for that is the date found on a map of the World, bearing his monogram. The map was a reduction of Waldseemüller's wall-map of the World, published in 1507. The major project that Fries and Grüninger worked on was a new edition of the Geographia of Ptolemy, which was first published in 1522. Fries evidently edited the maps, in most cases simply producing a reduction of the equivalent map from the 1513 edition of the Geographie Opus Novissima. Fries also prepared three new maps for the Geographia: maps of South-East Asia and the East Indies, China and the World, but the geography of these derives from Waldseemüller's world map of 1507.

In 1525, Fries was forced to move on as he had exhausted the existing body of Waldseemüller's works. For whatever reason, his departure marks the end of his cartographic work, and he again turned to writing medical text books, which occupied him until his death in 1531 or 1532. The 1535 edition of Fries’ Geographia was printed posthumously.