Joan og Cornelis Blaeu

Joan Blaeu (23 September 1596 - 21 December 1673)

Born circa 1596 and circa 1610 respectively, Joan and Cornelis Blaeu took over their father’s business upon his death in 1638. In the same year Joan Blaeu also assumed his father’s position as the official cartographer to the V.O.C. The original appointment placed the Blaeu publishing house at the center of the mapmaking in Amsterdam, giving them “unprecedented power and influence” (Brotton, 278). The Blaeu brothers worked hard to maintain the firm’s position of prominence, but only five years later in 1642, Cornelius Blaeu died, leaving the publishing firm solely in the hands of Joan Blaeu. In 1648 Joan Blaeu was the first to publish a map depicting Nicolaus Copernicus’ theory of the Earth revolving around the sun, a heretical concept according to the Catholic Church. By 1662 Blaeu completed work on his magnum opus, the Atlas maior sive cosmographia Blaviana (The ‘Large Atlas or Blaeu’s Cosmography’).  On February 23, 1672, a fire destroyed the Blaeu publishing house, a blow from which the firm never fully recovered. Joan Blaeu died the following year, leaving the business in the hands of his three sons, Willem (1635-1701), Pieter (1637-1706), and Joan II (1650-1712). While the business began to decline in the hands of his sons, the Blaeu control over the market truly came to an end in 1703 when the V.O.C. ceased publishing maps that bore the Blaeu family name.