The Bison Trail through the Hercynian Forest: Names, Images, and Identities in Ptolemy’s Tabula Europae IV ad Münster’s Cosmographia

Zoological motifs, omnipresent in medieval and early modern cartography, are extremely rare, and thus particularly noteworthy, on Ptolemaic maps. This article argues that three species of quadrupeds depicted on the Tabula Europae IV in Venice editions of Ptolemy, published several times between 1561 and 1599, reveal the performative role of zoological imagery in Renaissance scholarship. Each motif bears a label of alces (elk), urus (aurochs), or bisons (wisent), evoking associations with Caesar’s Gallic War. The designs, in turn, find models in the revised edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1550). The identities of the three animals, however, remained obscure, given the variety of other names, descriptions, appearances, and references to different places in both earlier and contemporary accounts. At the same time, the figures of alces, urus, and bisons set off widely ramified chains of zoological, geographical, philological, and historical associations of Ptolemy and Caesar with Münster and Conrad Gessner, and of ancient Hercynia and Sarmatia with early modern Prussia, Scandinavia, and Muscovy.