The Battle of Orsha (1514) on maps: mapping the Muscovian war as Renaissance politics of memory

ENOn 14 September 1514, in the vicinity of the town of Orsha, the combined Lithuanian-Polish forces defeated the Muscovian army. Several texts commemorating the battle were written or published in the sixteenth century. The battle was also depicted on several maps. The first was published in 1526, while the last was printed in 1613 and several times republished in the seventeenth century. The central question of the present study is: Why did cartographers mark an event that belonged to the past on the maps created and published for more than a hundred years after it took place? For this purpose, I analyse four maps and one woodcut depicting the Battle of Orsha. The woodcut was printed in the epinicion poem by Andrzej Krzycki (1515). The dissected maps are Bernard Wapowski’s map of Southern Sarmatia (1526), Anton Wied’s map of Muscovy (1556), Stanisław Sarnicki’s map of Poland (1585) and the Radziwiłł map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1613). In the paper, I argue that each cartographical representation of the battle gives a new interpretation of the event. Each of them is also an example of Renaissance politics of memory. On Wapowski’s map, the battle is an element of the Jagiellonian dynastic propaganda, while on the map by Wied, Orsha is an argument in the competition between the Lithuanian Ruthenia and Muscovy. For Sarnicki, the battle is a fragment of the republican discourse of a Calvinist Polish nobleman. At the Radziwiłł map, the victory tells about the great past of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.