Mid seventeenth century: The golden age of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, the Dutch East India Company was at its most powerful. The hundreds of ships of the multinational sailed the East… to the Indies and Ceylon, to Japan, but also to India, Iraq, etc. The Dutch trade fleet sailed the whole world, a world stretching ever greater distances and mapped with ever growing precision by two Dutch mapmakers.

In 1645 the city of Leiden was granted the right to provide the Amsterdam chamber of the Dutch East India Company with a governor. This was partly the reason for the city to invest in an extensive atlas, essential for a sensible contribution in the international trade discussion. For the amount of 300 guilders in 1659 the famous Dutch printer, publisher and cartographer Joan Blaeu supplied Leiden with an atlas, custom made with the Leiden coat of arms on the binding. Now, 349 years later, Blaeu’s ‘Tooneel des Aerdrijcx, ofte Nieuwe Atlas’ can be seen online in all its glory, on the site of the Regionaal Archief Leiden. Six volumes with hundres of maps that give a magnificent look at the world as people viewed it in the Dutch Golden Age.

The priceless atlas is very fragile and can therefore no longer be displayed to the public. At the request of the Regionaal Archief Leiden, Pictura carefully digitized the books, added meta data to the scans and developed a viewer. It allows people to browse through the atlas online, search countries or cities through the indexes and order prints of the beautiful maps.

On Wednesday, the 12th of March 2008 alderman Jan-Jaap de Haan in the Regionaal Archief Leiden  presented the digital Blaeu atlas to an enthousiastic audience of guests, employees of the archive and Pictura and everyone else that had been involved with the project.