Skip to content
Wellsprings
Abraham Ortelius

Abraham Ortelius

1527 CE–1598 CE · Antwerp

Abraham Ortelius was a cartographer, geographer, and cosmographer from Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands. He is recognized as the creator of the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Along with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator, Ortelius is generally considered one of the founders of the Netherlandish school of cartography and geography. He was a notable figure of this school in its golden age and an important geographer of Spain during the age of discovery. The publication of his atlas in 1570 is often considered as the official beginning of the Golden Age of Netherlandish cartography. He was the first person proposing that the continents were joined before drifting to their present positions.

Adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

See Abraham Ortelius’s journey on the map →

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →

Stop 1 of 1Born

Antwerp

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

See other sages who lived in Antwerp→

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Abraham Ortelius’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Scientists

Works

No works attributed in the corpus yet.