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Ist Military Survey

1764-1768 and 1780-1783 (rectification), scale 1: 28 800

Bohemia | Moravia | Silesia

As the base of this survey the Müller's maps (transformed to the larger scale 1: 28 800) were used. Officers of the Military Topographic Service were riding through the country on horseback and mapped it using the "a la vue" method, which means that they simply observed the terrain and anticipated the distances. An officer was able to map the area of 350 square km per summer. The survey was not based on any net of precisely defined triangular points due to the financial and time limits of the work. This was the reason why there was not possible to complete the map of whole Austrian Monarchy from the individual sheets, also the lesser preciseness of the survey results of this factor.

The great attention was paid to the communications (classified according to the traficcability - e.g. the so-called imperial roads), rivers, streams and artificial gullies, land use (arable fields, hayfields, pastures etc.) and various types of buildings - churches, mills etc, all of which being significant for military purposes. Thanks to the different colors representing the individual landscape components (the maps were colored manually) they are easy to distinguish.

Together with the maps also military-topographical descriptions of the area were recorded, containing some information which were not the parts of the maps, such as width and depth of rivers, character of roads and trails, settlement maintenance etc. The material collected during the survey consists of 19 manuscripts for Czechia alone.

On the right side of each sheet you can find the list of settlements and columns prepared for filling the number of inhabitants, usable horses etc. On some sheets these columns are blanked, but the information can be found in the military-topographical descriptions mentioned above.

The importance of the Ist Military Survey lies not only in its preciousness (comparing to the previous surveys in Czech Lands), scale and detailed military-topographical descriptions, but also in period of its origin. It gives us the opportunity to view the area just before the beginning of the industrial revolution, in the period of the full bloom of cultural baroque landscape and its highest diversity.