Region
Silva Marciana
Schwarzwald · Black Forest
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Silva Marciana is the Black Forest, and the name seems to be a late Roman one: the historian Ammianus Marcellinus mentions a march through these woods in AD 361, while earlier writers called the range Abnoba, where Tacitus and Pliny have the Danube rise. The map draws it as mountains covered with trees, yet no firs, beeches or oaks among them; at least three are unmistakably pines, recognisable by their umbrella-shaped crowns. A cosmography of 1546 read the name as the forest of Mars, but that remains a guess.