A Grammatical Oddity

Today, I read this sentence from Paul Henry Lang's book, Music in Western Civilization: "Starting from the south toward the middle of the sixteenth century, the Jesuit theater moved up to the north, conquered the southern German countries and maintained itself until the period of the Enlightenment."

On first glance, the opening participial phrase looks wrong. It appears to shift inappropriately from one reference frame to another: i.e., space to time. On second glance, I think the phrase is just poorly worded, but it occurred to me that a participial phrase could be written with an incorrect reference frame shift. 

Here's an example: "Starting in the East and moving to the middle of the day, the sun crossed the sky."

I am not sure what this grammatical oddity is called. It is kind of like a garden path sentence, but not. It also reminds me of a comparative illusion, but it's not that, either. The best I could find is this weird little PowerPoint about something called frame shifting. So that's what I'm going to call it: a participial frame shift!