Copper engraving, hand-painted, period, 360 x 840 mm. A highly decorative map of ancient Thrace, that is, the territories of northern Greece and modern Bulgaria, belonging to the historical section of the "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum," the first modern atlas, including maps of all the regions of the world. The brilliant intuition of Ortels, later Latinized, was to bring together the heterogeneous cartographic production of the period into a single corpus, forming the basis for a hugely successful publishing enterprise, published from 1570 to 1612. Before then, in fact, cartographic production had been irregular, local in scale, and the few atlases, the so-called "Lafrerian Atlases," were created on request by collecting maps of some areas, ignoring others. A fine example on slightly browned paper. Traces of offset.