Magni Mogolis Imperium

Circa 1640s

Later hand-coloured copper engraving on paper

Print size: 14.25 x 19.25 in (36.5 x 49 cm)
Sheet size: 20.75 x 24.5 in (53 x 62.5 cm)
Folded: 20.75 x 12.5 in (53 x 31.5 cm)

Jansson’s authoritative late-17th-century map of the Mughal Empire — a cornerstone of Dutch atlas cartography and one of the most widely disseminated European images of Northern India

Jan Jansson’s Magni Mogolis Imperium belongs to the great Amsterdam atlas tradition and represents one of the most widely disseminated European images of Mughal India in the later seventeenth century. Building upon earlier English and Dutch prototypes yet engraved with Jansson’s characteristic clarity, the map renders an extensive dominion from Cabul and Candahar to Bengal, and from the Himalayas deep into the Deccan, presenting the Mughal Empire at its perceived zenith of territorial power.

The composition divides the realm into its Mughal subhas (provinces), while major imperial centres—Agra, Delli, Lahor, Surat, and Patna—form a network revealing the administrative and commercial skeleton of North India. The toponymy reflects the established Baffin–Roe corpus, but is refined through Dutch geographic conventions and later atlas standardisation. Notably, where Baffin had marked the Ganges issuing from the cow’s-head rock of Gaumukh, Jansson substitutes the mythical high-mountain lake of Gaurikund, underscoring how European mapmakers blended pilgrimage lore and conjectural geography into their Himalayan sources.

A striking feature is the elaborate title cartouche at upper left, built around a modified form of Jahangir’s dynastic seal. At its centre lies the emblem of Mughal sovereignty—a lion at repose before a blazing sun—surrounded by roundels naming the Emperor and his eight Timurid predecessors back to Timur (Tamerlane). The cartouche is further enriched with portrait figures understood to represent Emperor Jahangir himself and his celebrated general Mahabat Khan, lending the sheet an explicitly courtly and imperial register.

The map is additionally embellished with lively pictorial vignettes—tigers, elephants, caravans, and European galleons—interweaving the geography of empire with the visual language of trade, travel, and exotic abundance that characterised Dutch atlas imagery of Asia.

Widely reissued, copied, and adapted by later publishers, including De Wit and Covens & Mortier, Jansson’s Magni Mogolis Imperium ensured that this engraved vision of the Mughal domains became one of the most enduring cartographic statements of Northern India in the European imagination.

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