[dinamic]

10 EUR per tile? Shouldn't such maps be in public domain already?

It's odd how differently countries treat their cultural heritage. Poland, for example, has published a lot of archival materials in public domain [1]. But this is not the case for Austrian state, which, I guess, owns large fraction of the maps on OP website (Austro-Hungarian Empire). They also charge large sums for using materials from their digital archives.

[1] https://polona.pl/

[avyeed_desa]

I was researching maps for a certian area that belonged to the kingdom of Bavaria, which is included in OP's link. That map is also almost completely available and accessable from germany's offical geoservices via WMS, which is nice. And the accuracy of these maps is astounding. (Whereas the 18. century map is mostly inaccurate in details) They are military maps, so it makes sense.

However I dug deeper into the history of these (bavarian) maps and suprisingly found that there are a lot more maps that built the basis of the military maps. And boy, they are uncannily accurate. And of course scattered among archives, survey offices and libraries.

I even managed to find a map with the exact locations of buildings that are still standing today. Manually georefercing them showed that they are often only a few centimeters off.

And to get back to this comment: I had a hard time finding a general map from the same area. And when i found it the office that held the records. They also didn't hold one map, but several maps that were made over the years. However they wwere extremly expensive and I was even bombarded with several limitations. E.g. if I'd publish it in a journal I MUST notify the office with details.

Parent comment is right, that they should be in the public domain, however some administrative bodies still believe that they should be guarded as state secrets, probably because these maps were the basis of tax registers and most of the land units on these maps are still the same 150 years later. Even though the same office publishes WMS data of todays situation for free on their website.

[paganel]

Thank you very much for that link, it's a god-sent. I've managed to find an early 1850s plan of my city, Bucharest [1], which is quite rare in itself, at least I don't know of any such good rendering available on the Internet (or I didn't use to know until now). I've also been able to find other really nice resources about my country, Romania.

[1] https://polona.pl/item/planul-bukurestului-ridikat-tras-chi-...

[ovi256]

Depending on the country, you can find many public domain maps, scanned, in the Library of Congress.

Here's the famous 18th century Cassini map of France (first modern triangulated map, three generations of Cassinis worked on it)

https://www.loc.gov/item/gm72002942/

The LoC graciously scanned and hosts this copy. Arcanum also sells it: https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey...

You'll notice that the Arcanum map is scanned, tiled, and hosted as a modern web scrollable map.

[Bayart]

The Cassini map is available in a scrollable format from the French government itself : https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/donnees/carte-de-cassini

Furthermore the site hosts a number of historical and modern maps that are all geographically indexed and can be overlaid.

[jacobolus]

Folks interested in historical maps of arbitrary places should also try searching the David Rumsey collection, which is all freely available online:

https://www.davidrumsey.com