STUDY OF LANDSCAPE OF THE THIRTY YEARS‘ WAR PERIOD IN MORAVIA USING INFORMATION RECORDED IN HISTORICAL ENGRAVINGS

References: 14th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2014, www.sgem.org, SGEM2014 Conference Proceedings, ISBN 978-619-7105-12-4 / ISSN 1314-2704, June 19-25, 2014, Book 2, Vol. 3, 909-916 pp

ABSTRACT
A valuable source for the study of the Thirty Years‘ War is represented by documentary engravings that appeared in spectacular historical publications of that time. The paper focuses on the possibility of researching the landscape and its development using these engravings, particularly in the area of today’s Moravia, which was often a place of the passing, camping or encounter of individual armies. The important places, which were worth capturing by former military engineers, comprise the Moravian cities of Brno, Olomouc and Opava and a camp in Horní Moštěnice near Přerov. Valuable sources of information on extinct historical reality, beside the wartime events themselves, are also the scenes with important military contents – such as besieged towns, systems of field fortifications and whole cut-outs across landscape, both real and fictional. Compared with other cartographic sources of that time or younger ones, the engravings manage to identify individual facts recorded and, in conjunction with a digital terrain model, not only the captured military situation, but also the surrounding landscape as a whole, may be clearly visualized. The interpretation of the plans of military engineers has not been made entirely clear yet. The research suggests that, in some cases, they could be a kind of strategic plans or documentation of an ideal course of combat operations. However, the complex description of reality in these documentary works has much to say even today.

Keywords: landscape, engraving, cartographic analysis, GIS, historical battlefield, Thirty Years’ War