TIPS ON USING THE MAPS

These maps can be very useful for a scenario maker. However, there are some things you should keep in mind. One is to beware of the periphery of these maps. Finding the kinds of information shown on these maps is much more difficult than finding the political boundaries most maps represent, and the accuracy tends to drop off as you get farther from the central focus of the map. For instance, a map on Europe might have no or very little information about North Africa or the Middle East. A classic example of this problem is resource maps of the Roman Empire, which make it look like there were no resources beyond the Empire's boundaries. In situations like these, dig a little deeper (interpolating info from forwards or backwards in time, or searching other sections), or use a best guess.

A related problem with resources is that maps typically only show resources that were exploited at a particular time, and not ones that were readily available but not exploited. Looking forward into future maps for the same region can help with in marking off unexploited resources.

City sizes are an extremely problematic thing. Many maps and books tend to greatly exaggerate ancient city sizes. For instance, ancient Rome is typically described as having a million or more people, when in fact it probably never had half a million. (Only China had huge cities of a million or more in ancient times, but unfortunately their censuses were based on districts and not towns, so we rarely know exact city sizes.) As time moves forward into the modern age, the data tends to get better.

The Colin McEvedy Atlases

Luckily, there is Colin McEvedy. He is the author of the Penguin Atlas series. Four of these books cover all of the history of the greater Europe region, and I highly recommend these books to any scenario makers. I have all of his population and trade maps here, but really any of his maps are very useful. The atlases have many frequent snapshots of political boundaries, and also show what cultural grouping any particular political state belongs to. So if you need to know the political boundaries at any time, chances are one of his political maps will cover the time you need. Half of the atlases are made up of text with lots of useful information. Buy them all now! :)

But what really makes these books stand out in my opinion is the city size information. He is just about the only source willing to guess where there isn't reliable census data. He did a very admirable job, and as a result these maps are just about the only ones anywhere to show city sizes for ancient and medieval times. Keep in mind his estimates tend to be very conservative compared to others. For instance, he estimates ancient Rome to have never been larger than 250,000 people, and sees no city larger than 125,000 in the West for the entire Middle Ages. Yet he's probably much more accurate than most, as he is a serious population studies scholar.

One thing to note is that his four books were written at different times, and the quality of the data is quite different from one to another. There is the Penguin Atlas of Ancient History covering up to 362 AD, the New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History covering till 1483 AD, the Penguin Atlas of Modern History covering to 1815, and the Penguin Atlas of Recent History to more or less present day. The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History is the best, since it was published in 1992. One can see many changes between the data in this and the data in the "old" original version of the same atlas, published in 1961. Our knowledge of ancient times grows by leaps and bounds every year. The Recent History is from 1982, the Modern History is from 1972, and the Ancient History from 1967. Obviously the data gets worse the older the book. Lets hope he publishes more "New" versions in the future.

Keep in mind that the city size categories are consistent within each book, but differ from book to book. The result is that the first city maps in each book tend to have only a few towns, but by the end of the book they have many more. Compare his map of 1815 to 1848 to see what I mean. If you're making a scenario that happens to start near the start of one of his books, you can do some guesswork to determine which cities are the next size down.

One great thing about his maps is that in Ancient and Medieval times, they cover a good part of North Africa and Western Asia. They're generally quite accurate too. The one exception is that his ancient maps that reach to Western India usually show India to be empty of cities, which of course isn't true.

In his country population maps between 1483 and 1815, the people symbols represent different religions, and each person is one million people. They are Catholic, Protestant (with arm raised), Greek Orthodox, and Muslim.

Vegetation

One area where this website is unfortunately weak is with vegetation. I will try to include such maps in the all too rare instances where I find them. Of course the reason why there are so few such maps is because vegetation is even harder to guess than city size. How many hundred of years ago did a forest get cut down? Its very hard to know, and there are virtually no records about this. There are some general rules to help you, however. The main one is forest cover. The further back in time you go, the more forest there is. Humans have always been cutting down forest faster than it can grow, and now especially they're diminishing at a very rapid rate. There is a series of maps on this site showing vegetation in the 1960s, and already the vegetation today is very different from those maps, mainly due to loss of forest.

For ancient times, a good guess is to follow the natural vegetation maps most sections have, and reduce forests around areas of heavy population densities. In Roman Empire times for instance, heavily populated places like Italy and Greece were already seriously deforested, but northern Europe was almost entirely solid forest.

Humans also have an unfortunate tendancy to cause desertification. In ancient times, things were much greener. A good example of this is the north coast of Africa. In Roman times this was an incredibly fertile and green area, really the breadbasket of the whole Roman Empire. but a combo of climate change and human mismanagement has caused it to get drier, so today it is only a shadow of its former self. The Fertile Cresent in the Middle East is another example of the same thing happening. So when in doubt, lean on more grassland and more forest the further you go back. There also tended to be many more swamps.

Roads

Actual paved roads were few and far between in Ancient and Medieval times, except in the Roman and Chinese empires. But there almost always were dirt roads along trade routes, except when those went down rivers. So you can follow those for road information.

Good luck with your scenarios!

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