Das Herzogthum Venedig ... Il Ducato di Venezia [separate German and Italian title panels]: Auf allerhöchsten Befehl Sr. österreichisch-Kaiserlichen, auch Königlich-apostolischen Majestät in den Jahren 1801 bis 1805 astronomisch trigonometrisch aufgenommen durch ihren Generalquartiermeisterstab unter der Leitung des Herrn Feldmarschallieuten

NORTH-EASTERN ITALY SURVEYED 1801-05 - LEADING AUSTRIAN SOLDIER SURVEYS VENETIAN LANDS
large engraved map printed on four sheets, each sheet 46.5 x 63 cm., large engraved title panels in both German (top left) and Italian (botttom left), scale circa 1:234000, densely engraved to show topographical features and places, mountain formation shown by hill shading, three large engraved scale panels at lower right corner below the Italian title, hand coloured in wash around regional administrative boundaries with subdivisions inside each region shown by coloured lines of the same colour as that regio's boundary, attractive engraved boundary to the map incorporating scale elements, outer sides edged with green cotton, each sheet diced into 8 parts and mounted on linen for folding to circa 23 x 16 cms., the four sheets contained as issued in a card slipcase covered by grained green paper, slipcase lid with a lozenge shaped salmon coloured title label gilt bordered and gilt titled 'Il/ Ducato di Venezia/ del Barone/ di Zach', some short cracks to the paper covering at the edges of slipcase, else a fine and fresh copy. Rare, particularly so in this condition.

OCLC locates less than 15 copies held institutionally worldwide.
The Republic of Venice was by 1796 not in a position to defend itself and had the competing French armies of Napoleon and the Austrians occupying parts of its territory. Napoleon forced the resignation of the last Doge of Venice in May 1797 and in October France and Austria signed the Treaty of Campo Formio, agreeing to share all the territory of the ancient republic, with a new border just west of the Adige River. The eastern or metropolitan part of the disbanded republic became an Austrian territory under the name of Herzoghthom or Provinz Venedig in German or Ducato or Provincia Venezia in Italian. This territory ran from the Adriatic in the east to just west of the River Adage in the west reaching Lago di Garda and contained the eastern sections of the Italian Alps.This is the territory delineated in this map by Anton Freiherr von Zach (1747 - 1826), a leading Austrian General who rose to prominence in the French Revolutionary Wars as army chief of staff during the 1796, 1799, and 1800 campaigns. In 1800 he played an important role at the Battle of Marengo, where he was captured. During the Napoleonic Wars he was again chief of staff of the Army of Italy in 1805. In 1809 he commanded a division in the Italian theatre.

Zach had brought his family to live in Padua while he and Oberstleutnant Franz Xaver Richter von Binnenthal (1759–1840) mapped the province of Venetia. There Richter met and in 1802 married Zach's daughter Maria Angelika Wilhelmine (1784–1855). Like his father-in-law, Richter served on the staff and became a general officer. Zach was promoted to Field Marshal in 1805.In the Venetian Republic the only survey that used triangulation survey methods prior to this map was a small local triangulation for a map of Padua in 1776. It was "only during the Austrian occupation after 1797 that regular survey work began to cover the entire territory of the former Republic. Headed by General Anton von Zach .. the survey team calculated a trigonometric network from four geodetic baselines; the first one, the most famous of these, measured in the vicinity of Padua (from the city's Porta Santa Croce to Portovigiano) and the other baselines measured respectively on the left bank of the Piave River, in Passariano and in the land of Schwarzaneck in Carinthia. Measurements of the first baseline were obtained with four rods of seasoned wood, each measuring four Viennese klafton (7.59 m) and calibrated against a copy of the French toise; the angles at the vertices of the network were, however, calculated using quadrants of no great precision. War temporarily stopped the geodetic and topographic work, which was concluded in 1805; its results served the production of the unpublished Topographisch-geogetrische Kriegskarte von Herzogthum Venediz consisting of 120 sheets at 1:28,800 scale with military descriptions and the published map Das Herzogthum Venedig ... Il Ducato di Venezia (1806 ca, 1:234,000). ... Franz Xayer [Zack's astronomer brother] intervened to correct the locations of various points" [Matthew Edney et alia (editors) The History of Cartography, Vol. 4. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, (2019), p.464].

Baron Franz Xaver von Zach (1754-1832), Austro-Hungarian astronomer, published "numerous papers on geographical subjects, particularly on the geographical positions of many towns and places, which he determined on his travels with a sextant" [wikipedia].The 122 sheets of the Kriegskarte were eventually published in facsimile in 3 vols., in Treviso in 2005.