# Main > General Discussion >  Looking for reference Medieval Europe Map

## RjBeals

I make maps for an online gaming site, similar to Risk. My next project is simply "Medieval Europe". That's a really huge subject, and spans hundreds (almost thousands?) of years. I'm not great with history, and this topic is to vast for my little brain to piece into a game map. But hopefully, theres someone out there who's a history buff who can help out. 

What it should end up being, is a geographic map of Europe and outer Europe including lots of regions and bonuses. Similar to the Sega game Medival II Total War (Map shown below). The larger empires would have a castle that would have to be captured for an even greater bonus. 

My problem is that I can't find suitable reference maps for this. The closest I've come to that I can use as game reference is Europe 814, but I'm not so sure about it. Can anyone of you help by either linking to a map, or a site, or just maybe suggesting a time period with lots of castles and empires? 

Thanks all -

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## moutarde

Check out http://www.worldhistorymaps.info/maps.html - this guy has quite a few good maps of the eastern hemisphere, of various times throughout history.

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## ravells

814 is pre medieval, but if you do a google search for 'Medieval political map' it brings up quite a few good maps you can trace for your game! like this one for example.

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## Gamerprinter

True, the medievil period starts about 1200, so 814 AD is almost 400 years before that, right smack dab in the middle of the Dark Ages. And Dark Ages Europe was very primitive compared to the Roman period, or anytime after. The only people making maps during the Dark Ages were the Arabs - and Arabs weren't mapping western Europe. So as Ravs, suggests, you'll need to look at a medievil map and extrapolate back in time to your intended era.

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## SchildConstruct

> True, the medievil period starts about 1200, so 814 AD is almost 400 years before that, right smack dab in the middle of the Dark Ages. And Dark Ages Europe was very primitive compared to the Roman period, or anytime after. The only people making maps during the Dark Ages were the Arabs - and Arabs weren't mapping western Europe. So as Ravs, suggests, you'll need to look at a medievil map and extrapolate back in time to your intended era.


The medieval period starts with the end of the Roman empire (roughly 600 A.D.), and lasted until the renaissance (roughly 1600 A.D.). The hint's in the etymology of the term, really (in plain English, it means "middle age", since the medieval period is in the middle of the Roman Empire's age, and the modern age, when the people started looking at this period of time again).

The Dark Age is called "dark age", because we don't know a whole lot about it (an age that's in the dark), too. It's only in about 800 A.D. that Charlemagne established something like a coherent government with the adjacent bureaucracy, so a lot of what happened before wasn't written down, or wasn't deemed important to keep around. People were generally busy working, and few people could afford spending time on luxuries like learning to write, and even fewer would've cared about anything that happened further back than living memory.  :Wink: 

Further, the term "medieval reference map", or even "political map of medieval Europe" doesn't work. Nation-states as we know them today didn't exit, and borders shifted constantly (or reached as far as a day's ride from a vassal's holdings, for example, or were as far as the eye could see, or...).

In a nutshell: You need to nail down the period you want to look at (starting with the time around the First Crusade, kingdoms and such had stabilized enough that making maps would make sense), and then piece together who existed where, working forwards from Charlemagne and backwards from today's nation-states. IOW: Creative Assembly arrived at their map the hard way  :Razz: ).

However, you can look at the game maps for Europa Universalis III and/or Crusader Kings (both by Paradox Interactive), which cover the medieval period from (roughly) 1066 to 1583, and start your research there.

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## Sigurd

If you care anything about accuracy you should take terms like 'medieval' with a grain of salt.

My advice would be to always refer to a map by the year it was made or the year it represents.

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## RjBeals

picked up the medieval map again. Here's the base map. I am starting to add gameplay features to it now. It will be cool when it's done.

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## Jan

Hey RjBeals, I really love your maps and the style you make them. Do you allow other people to use them? I want to make a small game for personal use and your map would fit perfectly in. Of course you'll be credited properly. Also if you want help with getting a more historical accurate map I can help you. I have some experience with historical map games.
You can contact me on my email.

Btw modern historians don't use the construction Ancient Period/Dark ages/Middle Ages/Renaissance anymore. It was invented in the Renaissance but modern discoveries have shown that the "Dark Ages" were far from a dark meaningless period while the Renaissance although it brought new elements and a revival of Ancient elements it mostly was a continuum from the late medieval period. If you want to learn more about the Early middle ages I suggest you watch "the Dark ages, an age of light", a BBC documentary.

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## RjBeals

well this map is still incomplete. But I don't care if you use what is posted here. I don't have labels for it yet. Here is the most recent file

http://i.imgur.com/2Bnxu.jpg

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## Jan

Thanks, the update looks great. May I make one suggestion? You've put the papal state in Naples. Rome is much more North of that.

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