Royal Maltropian Cartographic Commission

The Royal Maltropian Cartographic Commission (Irish: Coimisiún Ríoga Cairteorachta Maltróipea) is the government commission tasked with the mapping of Maltropia. The various map series produced by the Commission are regarded as the definitive maps of Maltropia for legal purposes.

It was first commissioned in 1483 by Toirdelbach I to determine the extent of the kingdom's borders after the unification of the Corcagian and Carberian thrones. The Commission produced the most accurate map of northwest Maltropia then in existence, and over the following decades supplemented this with detailed maps of neighbouring territories and of Maltropian cities. It also produced navigational charts, a responsibility which had previously belonged jointly to the admiralty and merchants guilds of Newmarsh. Controversy over this appropriation dogged the Commission into the 1600s, and the admiralty was eventually reinvolved in the process by royal decree in 1624.

The maps created by the Commission were originally intended for military and legal purposes, but they were made widely available from the reign of Ciarán Dathamhail onward, a policy advanced by Baron Uinseann mac Dáithí, the then-head of the Commission. Reproducing large numbers of provincial, urban and other maps proved costly as well as technologically daunting, and the financial burden almost led to the disestablishment of the Commission. A specific tax was levied from 1553 to support the Commission's work, which had become essential to the Maltropian legal system, to its military and to many commercial enterprises.