I've always been fascinated by maps. The older I get, the more I appreciate old things. And I love Bulgaria. So I couldn't resist buying this when I found it advertised on the internet. As you can see, it's a map of the Bulgarian region from 1596, by one Johann Bussemacher - who, along with his collaborator Matthias Quad (who quite likely did the original drawing for this map), was a prolific early cartographer working in Cologne, Germany.

I find old maps like this immensely charming. The prominence of natural features like rivers, mountains and forests, instead of the roads that clutter up modern maps, gives a peaceful, bucolic air. The world seemed - and really was - much bigger in those days. Philipolis (Plovdiv) to Turnowe looks like a few days' journey along pleasant river valleys. And even supposing the towns of the day were actually stinking rat-infested dens of disease and iniquity, you'd never know it from their depiction here, with red roofs clustered around quaint spires.

The inland part of the map is striking in its accuracy, especially given that this is one of the earliest available maps of the region, drawn by someone who had presumably never been near the places he was describing. The mountains are in pretty much the right places, even the Strandzha (Mons Mela), although the names have shifted around a bit: the Rhodopes look more like the Rila mountains, and Hemus more like Pirin. The Ischa river meanders north from Sophia to join the Danubius at Russij, which is, well, nearly right - nowadays Rousse is a bit further downriver. Distances are mostly pretty good, too. Sofia to Varna is 49 Hungarian miles, which as any schoolboy knows is about 410 French kilometres: almost exactly right.

But if the joys of old maps come as much from what they got wrong as what they got right, then one must head to the seaside for pleasure with this example. The coast is spectacularly misshapen: there's an island off Varna that must have sunk in some 18th century storm; the Nessebar peninsula is drawn 40km long (that's about 39km too much); and the island of Lemnos almost fills the Aegean. I suspect that this combination of accurate land and inaccurate sea reflects a terrestrial orientation of German cartographers. I've seen a map of the region of similar age from Holland - a seafaring nation - displaying exactly the reverse: a superbly rendered coastline but hopeless interior, with, for example, Bucharest located to the west of Sofia.

A few other features bear pointing out. In 1600 Romania was to the southeast of Bulgaria; what we now call Romania was made up of Walachia, Transylvania, Moldavia and so on. The map recommends what looks like the Razlog-Velingrad-Plovdiv road in Latin as follows: "By this road the army and machines of war can easily cross Thrace." (Maybe there weren't so many potholes in those days.) Just below Philopolis you can see the ancient lingerie centre of Bra, which probably explains the pre-eminence of the Plovdiv area in the garment trade to this day. Mount Athos rises incongruously like a finger from the sea at the bottom of the map. And the ruins of Troy are located with surprising precision, given that the city wasn't to be rediscovered for another 280 years.

Finally, the curious-looking fellow in the corner is Sultan Mehmet III (not II as marked, another small error), who had ascended to the Ottoman throne a year earlier. I can't quite work out his expression: perhaps smug - after all, he ruled over almost everything shown on the map; perhaps nervous - by all accounts he was a sensitive young man, dominated by his scheming mother. In fact he is said to have been so stricken with guilt after having his 19 brothers strangled on his accession that the tradition of fratricide ended with him, which is popularly claimed to mark the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman empire. Maybe so, but it's a sobering thought, when you hold this map in your hands, that at the time it was printed there were still nearly three centuries to pass before all these pretty little towns and villages would emerge into the modern Bulgarian state.