About antique maps of Nordic and Baltic Countries

The name Scandinavia occurs in Pliny. It is a term of great antiquity. 

Scandinavia is a term adopted in geography and history, and is of great antiquity.  Pliny the elder describes the journey to the north, and mentions it as an island of unknown extent. The use of the name Scandinavia as a convenient general term for the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden is fairly recent, according to some historians. The small sovereignties which existed in this peninsula when it first began to be noticed in history, were united into the great monarchies of Sweden and Norway in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Margaret of Denmark succeeded in uniting the crowns of Denmark, Sweden and Norway in the 14th century in her own person by the union of Kalmar in 1397. Sweden left the union in 1573.

The geography of Scandinavia is extremely varied. There are Norwegian fjords, Scandinavian mountains, the archipelagos of Norway and Sweden, the flat  low areas of Denmark. Sweden has many lakes and moraines which are a legacy of the ice age.  A small area along the northern coast east of the North Cape has tundra climate as a result of a lack of summer warmth. The Scandinavian Mountains block the mild and moist air coming from the southwest, thus northern Sweden and Finnmarksvidda plateau in Norway have cold winters.

The North Cape was named by the Englishman Steven Borough, captain of the Edward Bonadventure, which sailed past in 1553 in search of the Northeast passage. 

The term Baltic was first used by Adam of Bremen, a medieval German chronicler, in the late 11th century. The term was derived from the word "belt" and had intally referred to the sea. It began to be used in reference to the region east of the Baltic Sea in the 19th century and the countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. 

The historical Latvian lands were Courland (Kurzeme), Selonia (Selija), Latgale, Vidzeme and Zemgale.