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in and out of Spain. His best known work is directly related to Catalonia, where he worked as engineer-in-chief for the army. The plans found in Sweden, however, reveal a previously little known activity in the Royal Army of Extremadura, where Borsano served as a military engineer from 1660 to 1672. Another Italian, Julio Cesar Fontana, also came to Spain in 1622 to work as an engineer and set designer in the court of Philip IV; he is the author of plan 10.

The political and military alliances forged in Europe over the long period covered by this collection influenced the nationality of the cartographers who, at the service of one monarch or another, worked in the Iberian Peninsula. Plans 11 and 12 of Portuguese towns were drawn up in the 17th century by a French cartographer; French authors drew up different plans of Menorca and Gibraltar during the 18th century (13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19), a period of “political affinity” between Spain and France which occasionally gave rise to fruitful collaborations which are difficult to imagine in other historic contexts (20, 21).

However, the Swedish archive collection does contain work by national authors – Spanish and Portuguese – who helped to create today’s important cartographic legacy referring to the Iberian Peninsula. Their names are very closely related to military engineering, as most of them worked for the Spanish and Portuguese armies: Bernabé de Gainza (22 and 1), João Nunes Tinoco (23), Francisco Jiménez de Mendoza (24), Luis de Venegas Osorio (25). It has not been possible to identify the Portuguese and Spanish authors of some of the plans, but their descriptive texts clearly confirm their origin. Spanish are anonymous plans 26, 27 and 28, all drawn