Johan Gustaf Renat - Biography

Johan Gustaf Renat (1682–1744) was a Swedish military and cartographer. He is mainly known for his role in bringing detailed maps of Central Asia to Europe after several years in captivity.

Early career and Russian Captivity

Renat was the son of Dutch Jewish immigrants who converted nationalities in 1681, the year before his birth.

He served in the army of Charles XII during the Great Northern War as a warrant officer (styckjunkare) in the artillery, but was captured by the Russians after the Battle of Poltava. In Russia, Renat assisted Peter the Great with producing maps of Siberia, and in 1711 he was sent to Tobolsk. 1716 Renat and other Swedish prisoners-of-war took part in Ivan Buchholz's expedition to explore the gold deposits around the Lake Yamysh, but the expedition was ambushed by a Zunghar force and Renat would spend the following seventeen years in Zunghar captivity.

Zungharian Captivity and Return to Sweden

In Dzungaria, Renat helped the khans Tsewang Rabtan and Galdan Tseren to organize their campaigns against Qing rule in Central Asia. Among other things, he organized an artillery regiment and helped the Zunghars to cast cannons.

Renat also discovered that a Swedish widow was in Zunghar captivity, Brigitta Scherzenfeldt, who hailed from Bäckaskog in Scania and had followed her late husband to the war. After the loss of her husband, Scherzenfeldt had ended up with the Zunghars and she assisted the Zunghars with textile production. She later married Renat.

In 1733, Renat and his wife was allowed to leave and he returned the following year to Stockholm, accompanied with four Zunghar female servants, who he baptized when they arrived in Sweden. Renat's family bought a house in Gamla stan where they settled down. In 1739, Renat was promoted to the rank of captain in the Swedish army.

Central Asian Maps

Renat brought two detailed maps of Central Asia with him, which spent a long time in relative obscurity. In 1878, the Swedish author August Strindberg, who then worked as an assistant library at the Swedish Royal Library rediscovered the maps and sponsored their republication in Russia 1881. A decade later the originals were discovered in the library of Uppsala University, where they are still held.

During his famous row with the Swedish cultural establishment in the early 1910s, Strindberg would use the maps to show that Nikolai Przhevalsky was not the first European and Sven Hedin was not the first Swede to have visited the lake of Lop Nor.

See also

• Philip Johan von Strahlenberg

Sources

• Perdue, Peter C. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
• Poppe, Nicholas. "Renat's Kalmuck Maps." Imago Mundi 12 (1955): 157-59. Available through JSTOR.
• Selling, Gösta. "Artur Hazelius födelsehus I." Fataburen: Kulturhistorisk tidskrift (1926): 65-118. (in Swedish)
• Åberg, Alf, and Göte Göransson. Karoliner. Höganäs: Bra böcker, 1976. (In Swedish.)

Work

• Renat, Johan Gustaf. Carte de la Dzoungarie: dressée par le suédois Renat pendant sa captivité chez les kalmouks de 1716-1733. S:t Petersburg: Societé Impériale Russe de Géographie, 1881.

External links

• Russian Maps at the Royal Library (in Swedish)