[GERMAN MAP OF ROMANIA] N.9. Hermannstadt (Sibiu)

[KAISERLICH UND KÖNIGLISCHES MILITAR-GEOGRAPHISCHES INSTITUT]., Kaiserlich und Königliches Militär-Geographisches Institut, Vienna, 1876.

Original color map on cloth. A little foxing on cloth. Very good. Folded. Oblong folio. (45 x 51 cm). In German. Shows N. Enyed, Zalathna, Mediasch, Hermannstadt, Hatszeg, Petroseni, Ôzt River, etc. Scale: 1/300,000.

Sibiu (Sibiiu - Hermannstadt - Nagyszeben) is a city in Romanian Transylvania. The city straddles the Cibin River, a tributary of the river Olt. The first official record referring to the Sibiu area comes from 1191 when Pope Celestine III confirmed the existence of the free prepositure of the German settlers in Transylvania, the prepositure having its headquarters in Sibiu, named Cibinium at that time. In the 14th century, it was already an important trade center. As of the year 1376, the craftsmen were divided into 19 guilds. Sibiu became the most important ethnic German city among the seven cities that gave Transylvania its German name Siebenbürgen (literally “Seven Citadels”). It was home to the Universitas Saxorum (Community of the Saxons), a network of pedagogues, ministers, intellectuals, city officials, and councilmen of the German community forging an ordered legal corpus and political system in Transylvania since the 1400s. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the city became the second -and then the first most important center of Transylvanian Romanian ethnics. The first Romanian-owned bank had its headquarters here (The Albina Bank), as did the ASTRA (Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and Romanian's People Culture). After the Romanian Orthodox Church was granted status in the Habsburg Empire from the 1860s onwards, Sibiu became the Metropolitan seat, and the city is still regarded as the third-most important center of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Between the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and 1867 (the year of the Ausgleich), Sibiu was the meeting-place of the Transylvanian Diet, which had taken its most representative form after the Empire agreed to extend voting rights in the region (Source: Wikipedia).

A sheet of the collection of 'The general map of Central Europe'. appeared in the years between 1873-1876 with the work of Joseph Ritter von Scheda, (1815-1888) who was a general, geographer, and cartographer.