Claudius Ptolemaeus; Giovanni Antonio Magini — Geographiae universae tum veteris, tum novae (1597)

In which matter how much effort was exerted by me, and especially by him who had taken that labor upon himself at my sole expense, those who might find it pleasing to compare this edition of mine and that Venetian one between themselves will judge, I do not doubt. Indeed, no one who has had the progress of your most generous character in view since early childhood, or has known of it beforehand by public fame, could rightly wonder at the reasons why I desired to inscribe this Ptolemaic geography to the most august name of your Illustrious Highness. For just as the study of no art, as the very use of things and the whole phalanx of learned men bear witness, befits any mortal more than Prince men and Magnates: so it is publicly attested and known that your Illustrious Highness, even when you had passed out of adolescence, besides other exercises worthy of a princely man, has incubated in nothing more studiously than in the pleasure of the art of Apelles referring to painting/visual arts and the studies of Mathematical science, and even now, during your leisure, continues to incubate in them. This was, certainly, the first and greatest cause of my dedication. The second is because your Illustrious Highness, by ancestral and paternal right, possesses most extensive provinces, most fertile in almost all things. Although their most accurate descriptions and boundaries are read in the maps of D. Gerardus Mercator, elaborated with the greatest study, they could nevertheless not be omitted among other things in this concise work, so that just as the borders of those regions extend further than those of almost any Prince dwelling in this Holy Roman Empire; so in this part also, the most august fame of your names and Principalities, and the lineage born from the vitals of kings, seemed to demand for itself, as if by its own right, the repeated edition and patronage of this book. However, I am not so secure from the Zoilists envious critics, named after the ancient Greek critic Zoilus and unfair detractors, of whom the present century is most fertile, that I cannot investigate with myself that there are, or will soon emerge, those who will accuse me, incriminate me, and assail me of a certain great impudence, because I, an unknown person and a subject of a foreign land, dare to bother and interrupt your Illustrious Highness, distracted by the affairs of such great regions. But since, as Horace testifies, it is no small praise to have pleased Prince men, I hope and surely trust that the brightness of your name will easily crush these accusations, and those Aristarchuses a term for severe critics will let me go intact the more willingly, because I undertook and completed this edition for the sake of public utility. But if they will not be able to bear even this with a kind mind (as it is proper for Zoilists to carp at others' work rather than to provide their own), I will be sufficiently and more than sufficiently safe from this livid crowd, if only I may be allowed to hide under the shield and patronage of your Illustrious Highness. Therefore, I pray and ask your Illustrious Highness, with as much zeal as I can and suppliantly, that, being free from the later cares and occupations of your regions, you may deign to read through, or at least run through, these Ptolemaic maps with the same affection of love with which you have been accustomed to embrace studies and sciences of this kind from your cradle. Farewell, and may your Illustrious Highness govern for the glory of the eternal God, and for your own eternal salvation and that of your people, happily. Given at Cologne of the Agrippinians, in the year from the Virgin-birth 1597, 13 September, by the Gregorian style.