This planisphere is one of the few examples of print maps based on medieval portolano examples, derived from Vesconte. Like some twelfth-century world maps, it is circular and is centred on Jerusalem. The ocean surrounds the whole of the known world, the outer parts of which are represented by conjecture.

Two works in one volume. Folio. Title page, fifty-four pages of preliminaries, 1207 pages; title page, ten pages of preliminaries, 361 pages. Engraved device on each title page, three double-page engraved maps, two full-page, one folding letterpress table, woodcut head-and tailpieces, initials.

In the fourteenth century, Pietro Vesconte drew five maps to accompany a treatise by Marino Sanudo the Elder, ‘Liber secretorum fidelium crucis’, ('Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross'), which was intended to inspire a revival in the Crusades. In 1611, the treatise and its maps were republished by 

 (1554–1612), a historian and enthusiast of Crusades literature.

This map was included in the ‘History of the Crusades’ by 

, a French scholar and diplomate who collected contemporaneous accounts of the Christian crusades of the Middle Ages. Part one of Bongars work is a history of the First Crusade by Guibert de Nogent (died c. 1124) titled 'Gesta Dei per Francos' ('Acts of God through the Franks') based on an anonymous eyewitness account called ‘Gesta Francorum’ ('Deeds of the Franks'). Part Two contains supplemental materials copied largely from Sanudo's 'Book of Secrets'.

The first printed example of Pietro Vesconte's portolan map of the world, with Jerusalem at its centre. 

Contemporary half blind-stamped bleached pigskin over boards, the covers incorporating a fourteenth-century manuscript leaf on vellum, over-painted in green, binder’s waste from Nicolaus Pol’s ‘Hemerologion Silesiacum Vratislaviense’ (Leipzig, Lamberg, 1612).

Vesconte's World Map, from Bongars' 'History of the Crusades'