Map of Brittenburg and Katwijk aan Zee

Designed by the great early modern mapmaker Abraham Ortelius and first published in Antwerp in 1568, this map shows the remains of an ancient Roman fort on the coast of the Dutch Republic. By the early modern period, the structure was entirely submerged by the sea, but appeared, periodically, when sea levels fell to particular lows. Known as the Arx Brittanica, or Brittenburg (so named in the fifteenth century, when the structure was erroneously believed to have been built by medieval Britons fleeing their homeland), the fort was celebrated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the only known archaeological evidence of the Roman period in the Netherlands. Ortelius's map thus played a signicant role in the Dutch historical imagination, finding its way into numerous publications, including Lodovico Guicciardini's history of the Low Countries. The present sheet is identifiable as an illustration from the Latin edition of that book published by Willem Blaeu in Amsterdam in 1613, by which point the fort was permanently underwater.

Ortelius has here depicted the last known appearance of the ruin, in 1562. Tiny figures take in the structure, while others participate in its excavation.