Watch as 1000 years of European borders change – timelapse map [video] | Hacker News Reader

Watch as 1000 years of European borders change – timelapse map [video]

vimeo.com

127 pointsdannystar79 comments

This map is a strong example of presentism[1].

Modern conceptions about nations and borders just did not exist in feudal Europe. Dukes and other feudal underlings held a significant amount of power, often to the point of full sovereignty, and often held territories under different kings and actively (and militarily) opposed their titular master. such as the case of the Duchy of Burgundy (which once upon a time was one of the most powerful actors in Europe), or the kings of England in their role as dukes of Normandy/Aquitaine.

Not even considering the situations where crown authority is so weak a central state can only be considered to exist in name alone such as the Byzantine empire at several stages in its existence, or the Holy Roman Empire

People back then, more often than not did not adhere to some national identity, usually identifying more with their local town/city/whatever. Their language and culture reflected this reality as well, such as in France and the case of the Langues d'oïl and the Langues d'oc.[2] The languages spoken in southern France were closer to what we now call Spanish or Italian dialects than northern dialects. Nationalism and national identity are very much a modern concept.

This map is pretty much just fluff for these reasons.

A fantastic take on these concepts is the game crusader kings II, which strives to recreate the accurate political realities of medieval Europe. It can be quite challenging to "get it" as a modern player, but it all clicks when you realize whats important is the success of your dynasty rather than your titular holdings (nation). Often related, but often quite opposed!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histor...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_languages

> dutchy of burgundy

There's a book that talks about a lot of these 'lost kingdoms': "Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations"

I thought it had a lot of promise, as I find history fascinating, but it was so-so in reality: http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2012/11/vanished-king...

I was hoping for more odd places I'd never heard of rather than things like the "Kingdom of Italy", which ended completely as a Kingdom, but is still very much a going concern as a country, recent problems notwithstanding. The earlier chapters about places like the Duchy of Burgundy are more interesting, I found.

As for Burgundy, it finally disappeared between France and Austria in 1493, when the Duke of Burgundy had died without an heir. Essentially, it should all have gone to France, but King Louis XI gave the non-French part to Austria to secure an invasion of Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Senlis

Italy was much more rich than the Low Countries were.

I think that is just a necessity considering how long of a period of time this video spans (from the medieval period that you mention, well into the modern age).

If you were making a similar animation that spanned the last 1000 years, how would you suggest presenting it? Are you saying it would not be possible in any meaningful way? Is there an arbitrary date that you would pick that it would begin to be meaningful?

Political border maps fundamentally rely upon our modern preconceptions of nationality and nationalism. No matter how hard you tried, it would always invoke those kinds of concept and all the baggage that goes along with it.

It is not meaningful in the same way attempting to translate Chinese visual poetry (depending on the form and shape and even history of their letters, to make puns and allegory etc) is not meaningful.

The two concepts are just simply not compatible.

"So you have told me about the halting problem, great, so how can we achieve flawless static analysis?" ;)

Nations, indeed. The concept of nations basically arose with the French Revolution. But borders? Oh my yes did they exist in feudal Europe, they defined what realm a count, duke, king or emperor ruled over. But you are right they changed hands rather often.

My largest problem with the video is that the years at the bottom does not match the map. Watch from 1935 and notice how long it takes for Germany to reside, it's into 1955 before Germany has retracted back to East and West Germany. That's ridiculous.

yes, borders of territorial holdings absolutely existed, i didn't mean to imply otherwise.

But as you say they were a great deal more fluid. They did not usually imply the kinds of things modern borders have a strong tendency to (immigration controls, language and culture, etc). Nor was the reality of them largely viewed as immutable and above reproach.

Indeed not. Immigration control and passports did not arise until the first world war, in fact. Border crossings were quite open until then.

But culture was not insignificant. They did not define borders (and some might argue they still don't do to this day) in any way, but they guide monarchs whereto increase their realm's size.

But in a way, while culture didn't define borders, borders did define cultures. Where they speak French or German is largely attributable to the duchies and kingdoms where they spoke French and German.

The arbitrary borders of Europe can largely be attributed to this.

We're talking about a visual representation of 1,000 years in about 200 seconds (a pretty awesome feat) and, instead of focusing on the awesomeness of what it represents, you are hyper-focusing on about a 10-year time period and complaining about how it is "ridiculous". Tough crowd.

The data is an impression collection, I make no doubt about that. The years attached to the video are just inaccurate. That seems like sloppy work after all the great work was done.

Moreover, as pointed out in another post, this is from a piece of software called CENTENNIA Historical Atlas: http://www.clockwk.com/ Which I would be getting right now, if it had a Linux version.

The reason I complain about the years and the maps not matching is that they are doing a disservice to the people who have collected all this data.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRGKhnn-SWw << Looking at this video, I get a sense of how impressive the data collecting is. Awesome I say. Much more interesting than the timelapse video.

Exactly. The typical example of weak central authority and strong local rule is the Holy Roman Empire (famously described by Voltaire as "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."), yet this is presented as a single monolithic monster of a nation in this time lapse.

And as a person who has sunken more time than he cares to admit into Crusader Kings II (and Europa Universalis IV), I can only add more praise to the level of detail crammed into Crusader Kings II. It really is unlike any other strategy game in its historic accuracy, at least when you consider the late dark ages, and the drama involved with being a ruler of a feudal dynasty is great fun.

If you went back to 1400 and asked someone in, say, Lwow what country they were in, I guarantee 0% would tell you "Poland-Lithuania". Sure, Poland and Lithuania were both ruled by Wladyslaw Jagiello (pardon my spelling and/or lack of diacritics), but no one would have claimed they were the same entity.

Personal unions were not considered to be the same entity unless one was eventually absorbed into the other (like with Castille and Aragon becoming Spain). They didn't even have the same governments, and laws and citizenship were distinct between partners in a union. The only thing they had in common was the head of state.

So yes, labelling them as a single country does seem wrong.

Agree. Instead of maps of territorial borders, it would be much more relevant to map allegiances of populations. France, for example, was certainly not unified during the middle-Ages, unlike presented here in this video. And the King of France had almost no power to rule over power lords from other regions. The concept of strong State dates from post Louis-XIV era. But the map do get Germany right: Germany was indeed a microcosm of small states until the invasion by Napoleon (the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig was a determining time to unify the Germans under a single nation ideal). Italy was also in a similar state of micro-nations until WW1.

What would be interesting, rather than borders, would be to have: - populations by origin - density maps so that you could see the "normands" (from Hungarian descent) penetrating France until they were allowed to settle in Normandy for fear they would bring down the Kingdom. The story of populations is way more interesting than borders.

That is all very true, but these maps are far from meningless. The author maps political regions rather than nations in the modern sense. Take for instance the way Spain changes colour each time there is a major dinastic change. Although nationalism arose as major political force only with the birth of modern democracy (if you want to give power to the people, defining who the "people" is becomes much more important), it wasn't born out of thin air. For example, you can hardly get a more nationalistic text than the portuguese epic poem "Os Lusíadas", published in 1572 (perhaps significantly, in that one corner of Europe that has hardly budged since the 13th century.) The king is praised but the most praise goes to the intrinsic value of a "portuguese people". There are also many many instances in the history of Medieval Europe of townspeople rising to fight a power that is perceived as a foreign occupier. Most of these regions would have been easily recognized by the people of the time as important political entities. Except for the Holy Roman Empire of course: a merchant who'd have needed a degree in political science to figure out to whom was he paying toll when going from town to town.

Any recommendations for overcoming this issue?

I'm working on a project with the eventual goal of creating a crowdsourced, interactive version of a map just like this.[1] We haven't gotten to this point yet (only to the 1930s at the moment), but we will eventually come across this problem. Currently we have "admin" levels (sovereignty > state/republic/colony > region/county > city) but this may be disrupted the further back in time we go.

One advantage of having data like this publicly crowdsourced is that a decision on how the information should best be processed and presented can be made by the community and potentially changed over time. (And now my pitch: help us out! We just started building the community but have big plans.[2])

[1] http://atlastory.com/

[2] http://forum.atlastory.com/

Oh please stop with those Liveleak versions. This has always been the source for this:

CENTENNIA Historical Atlas http://www.clockwk.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQf-PZWFMzY

here's an unofficial one with a broader scope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIRGlqYEVQY

Can't count how many times this was posted here without any attribution.

Unless the OP gives proper attribution or rebuilds this as an interactive version using something like http://dh.stanford.edu/topotime/ and d3 i'll keep flagging this stuff.

Thank you, riginal site does not even load on my Android.

Had the same feeling, when seeing this. I don't get why a post that simply embeds a video without bothering to link to the original source or adding any kind of value gets popular on HN.

from my experience linking youtube videos results in an instant [dead]

For some reason watching that and thinking about what was behind a lot of those lines moving reminds me of Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot":

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

Borders are something to fight for, they serve no real benefit for anyone. It is nationalism, racism of sorts.

Claiming a land that been there for millions of years and will be "your property" for 40 odd years. Shoot on sight.

But what drives human to hold onto such failing concept? Fear, anger, pride, instability?

That's not entirely true. They have/had benefit for rulers. They serve to indicate which people one feudal lord can tax and press into his army, and which people shall be pressed into his neighbours army and pay him taxes.

At the very least, when they're marked in treaties, they prevent some confusion and conflicts and give rise to others, depending on the agenda of the rulers involved.

So they certainly have a use for someone, albeit a tiny but highly visible minority.

That I must agree on, useful they are.

As torture equipment or napalm also serves a purpose.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I agree. Some people feel these things are useful, as damaging as they are to the vast majority of those involved.

It can be sarcastic, but it is true and I don't think this should ever be discussed with sarcasm.

One goes to drop bombs on someone else house because he is told so, nor man who drops the bombs nor family below benefits from it.

But I can't find solution, humanity is defective in my eyes, almost fatally defective, it will survive and go on, but must come to absurd and dramatic turn that will bring it to knees and you have start again. And repeat, repeat repeat.

Either I accept this as a part of the game or go insane.

It is not a failing concept, it is the basis of all Western civilization. If you think there would be less violence and suffering without clear boundaries you are mistaken.

Isn't it because there weren't clear boundaries that there was so much war? Anyway, if people wish to muddle up a boundary for their own purposes, they will always find a way, claiming the will of the people to belong to a different country for example.

Fundamentally, a nation state in the modern era is an administrative region and a form of identity. As a form of identity, it is very weak, because identity is a multi-faceted thing that cannot be reduced to as narrow a dimension as "country". As administrative regions, they have shown they prevent the efficient management of global resources by putting national interests before human interests.

The notion of an independent nation-state is an outmoded concept in a globalized world. We need to move to a single global democracy. It's the only feasible form of government at this point when you look at the continuing inability of the big global players to agree on stuff that matters and avoid new armed conflicts.

>We need to move to a single global democracy.

China and Russia would balk. But it hardly matters, the EU can't even agree.

Because we haven't figured out a better way to organize society, let alone get people to adopt it. I hate all these "look at the human race doing irrational things, why can't they just do X instead?" Because the human race isn't a single intelligent agent. It's a bunch of individuals with different ideas, goals, and cultures. Everyone is trying to get to their own local optima. It's amazing our species manages to organize and coordinate effectively at all at such a large scale.

If you got rid of borders tomorrow, then what? What government should right the laws? Should we have one world government? No government? What type of government? Etc.

Considering the pale blue dot is all humanity has ever lived on what land you control seems very important to me.

I was more thinking about all the death and misery involved in moving those borders...

Reminded me of this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/08/12/the_1931_his...

It is of course pretty subjective and not very accurate, but I still haven't seen anything more comprehensive as far as a single timeline.

Cool info graphic! Thanks for sharing.

Haha I wrote about this back in April! http://mapblog.wellingtonstravel.com/post/49107340201/this-i...

If you guys like maps, I run an awesome map blog (I'd like to think). My latest is about 8-bit maps: http://mapblog.wellingtonstravel.com

Also I really like this, which has tons of maps. The latest is Coffee Place Geography: http://flowingdata.com

Thanks for the links. If you haven't already you should check out http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful‎

Cool. But this only goes a thousand years back. My first name is of a King who ruled BC here, and that timelapse captures just a glimpse of what happened here (Arabs came around 7th century AD, Ottoman, Spanish and finally the French.. Which is nothing compared with what happened before 7th century. There are standing still functional buildings older than a thousand years old here (you wouldn't know they're millenial). There's even a Roman plaque in the city greeting you).

And most cities have different names (Roman, Spanish, etc..)

PS: I'm in Algiers, Algeria (Icosium).

Here's a web map with selectable dates.

http://geacron.com/

This is the best thing I've ever seen, thank you!

This looks inaccurate. The First Republic of Poland was not fully disassembled until 1795, whereas this map shows it as nonexistent as early as 1764. (or is there some desync?)

There seems to be a huge time desync, just watch the 20th century (around WW2 is specially glaring)

Not just a sync problem, as WWII starts at the right time but ends at the wrong time. And it happens for other earlier events too, it's just temporally inaccurate.

The Allied powers occupied Germany until 1949, so still off, but not as much as you'd think.

The animation shows Germany occupying large parts of Europe until 1955, so it's off by ten years.

Ten years too long is what I call "a large error", for an event that lasted 6 years. Off by 150%.

Yup, that's the glaring thing I also saw without paying much attention. Also thought I'd be seeing a huge "Spain" in the late 1500 - early 1600s, since if it applied to the Spain-Portugal affair, it should also to the rise of Phillip II. Anyway, ignoring the errors or misplacements it was interesting to see, which is almost good enough :)

Yes, it seems to be about thirty years early. Silesia becomes part of Brandenburg-Prussia circa 1710 in the video, but this of course didn't happen until the 1740's.

There is problem with the date legend. For some reason, WWII seems to correctly start around 1939, but France is still completely occupied in 1954, and divided in two (I'm not sure what the colours mean) until 1960?

Also, France is shown occupying Belgium and large parts of Germany and the Netherlands in 1763 as well as Italy and Prussia right from 1789? Illyria in 1798?

This is all off by decades, so while the animation is nice, it should not be taken too much as educational.

France being divided into two colors in the mid 20th century was likely pointing to Vichy France (the government set up after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940). While most of France was de jure controlled by France, the northern and Western areas were continuously occupied by the Germans and this distinction is usually noted in WW2 maps and maps of Vichy France

That's probably what was intended, but the Vichy "territory" disappears on this map in 1948 (which is absurd, that was actually in 1942) and did not reappear later - especially not with a different territory: Vichy didn't control the Atlantic coast, while it is included in the south part of the divided territory from 1955 to 1958 here.

It might instead be showing the advance of the US forces, and their retreat while the legitimate French government regained progressive control. But even disregarding the widely off date, the areas shown are very rough and inaccurate. Especially compared to the detail achieved in Italy and HRE in the previous centuries. I really don't think the quality of this visualisation is very good.

It's like EUIII/IV played back at high speed.

Bit sorry to see Napoleon's blob blitz past so fast. It only gives you a brief moment to see how huge his campaign was.

In comparison the Nazis' big purple's blob is all the more noticeable because it occurred at a time when there had already been a lot of consolidation in Europe.

It's especially noticeable because the animation makes it last ten years longer than it actually did.

My immediate reaction was "I've seen all this just by clicking through the dates in EUIV's start screen!" And I think the game's data was more accurate, too, except for missing some tiny German principalities.

I wish someone with lots of time created a Google Maps based website with a time slider so you can see how borders changed in retrospect. Events with links to Wikipedia articles. Seeing Europe, Asia and America change in parallel should be eye-opening.

http://geacron.com/

While we're on the subject, you might like this map of world religions done as an animated spreadsheet: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...

It was a bit of a job to research, and a lot of fun to implement!

Incredibly interesting. Anyone want to speculate on what a video 1000 years from now would look like?

My history of Europe isn't too shoddy, but it's not until you see it visualised that you realise just how much everything moved, even very recently.

I wonder if Crimea will be the next to change?

I suspect many of the different blobs will suddenly merge into one big blog labeled "European Union" one day with Russia and few eastern European hold-outs on the edge.

Another hundred years or so down the line, that blob will merge with another north American blob off the screen to the west.

We should come up with a name for this new country. How about "Oceania"?

And Europe and going east's blob could definitely be Eurasia!

We're getting somewhere.

If anyone is interested in an analysis of TransferWise's business, I wrote a blog post on it last weekend: http://www.staylor.st/p2p-money-transfers/

It's interesting how recent the concepts of the nations of "Germany" and "Italy" are.

Though as another commenter mentioned, the concept of a "nation" (at least the way that we understand it today) is also a fairly recent one.

I guess it depends how strictly you define the concepts - couldn't you argue that Germania extends back to Roman times?

Or for that matter consider the UK - how old is the UK? In it's current form you could say less than a century, or perhaps back to the Union of 1707, or James VI/I.... with parts (say the Kingdom of Scots and Dál Riata) going back 1500 years or more...

For most of the history Germans were people who were speaking the same language, nothing more. Even the word Germans is misleading, since it’s only the name of the people the Romans first dealt with. It’s as though you were to call all US Americans New Yorkers because you flew in at JFK.

Nationalists were always were good at inventing myths about the history of their particular nation but in reality there just isn’t that much there, at least not before the 19th century. (But the same is true for practically all other nations.)

Nationalism in general is a very young ideology. A good starting point to consider the trajectory and influence of that ideology would probably be the French Revolution (1789), at least in Europe.

Nationalism was a major driving force in the German unification (1871) and the end of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious states (the Austro-Hungarian Empire was already quite an anachronism by the start of the First World War).

During much of that time nationalism was tightly connected with liberalism (democracy, civil rights, …), especially during the failed 1848/1849 revolution in Germany. Practically all of the nationalist goals of that revolution were achieved in the 1871 unification of Germany (which was top-down and happened without any revolution), but hardly any of the liberal goals. Those were implemented only after the First World War (through a revolution), but by that time German society was already hopelessly fractured and hardly anyone was interested in actually supporting the democratic German state and working within that framework. Maybe if the revolution in 1848/1849 had worked out better …

In the 1871 unification of Germany (which was preceded by a couple of wars and lots of diplomacy to insure no one else in Europe would intervene) Bismarck played those in the National-Liberal movement who were more interested in a German nation state against those who were more interested in liberalism. That got him popular support and weakened his opposition. As far his own motives, those are hard to determine. Did nationalism play any role for him? Nationalism was certainly not the only reason to want (from, say, a Prussian perspective) a unified Germany. There were very good economic reasons – especially at the height of the industrial revolution in Europe – to not, say, want to pay customs a few dozens times when shipping a product through Germany and to have this big market to sell products to.

How the nationalist ideology influenced especially German history is very interesting.

This is really amazing to watch I wish I viewed something like this when I was in a high school world history class.

I can remember learning about the Germanic tribes but I never realized how they were put together. The area that is now Germany was very diverse compared to France, England, Italy or even Spain.

Pretty fascinating I have always loved looking at maps especially older ones.

This is exactly what the top comment talks about. Yes, "diverse" if you're talking about the official ruling order, because German Holy Roman Empire had an elected King and Emperor, unlike dynasties in France or England. But that doesn't mean that people spoke 200 languages or considered themselves more diverse than people in England. People's identity was tied to their local area and lord.

Right, I didnt realize that Germany was composed of so many different "local areas or lords" compared to other countries like the UK. But most likely they shared common languages and cultures. I guess the map of UK didnt break them down into different subsets because the local leaders may have fell under one united king.

And to be honest my knowledge pre WWI Germany or rather the area that is now called Germany is pretty lacking. They taught more about France and England from what I remember in grade school history.

What makes you think Germany was more diverse than England/UK et al?

Some times "nations"/"ethnicities" didn't have their own single country because they were "conqured" by another (e.g. the Irish in the then-UK), and sometimes it was because the people in that ethnicity/nation were split amoung several states (e.g. Germany & Italy)

The idea is great and interesting, but the execution is poor. Kingdoms should keep their color and not jump randomly. Also there are huge inaccuracies: Navarre was only conquered by Spain in 1512, after Castille and Aragon had merged into Spain a bit earlier. The map shows a completely different story (not history).

Cool stuff, but there are quite a few errors. Granada, the last of the Muslim kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula, was taken by the Christians (in the Reconquista) in 1492, but the visualization shows this about 20 years too early.

Borders are just another way for humans to classify territoriality...like human cognition does it with reality. Is that an approximation? I'm totally ok with that because everything is an approximation...

This timeline is bugged. Norther war between Sweden and Russia has been implemented wrong. Baltic Sweden has gone to Russia before 1700...

Was anyone else waiting for the Crimean peninsula to turn a slightly darker pink at the end there? Oh wait, that's tomorrow...

Here's the actual Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/89394659

Tagging submissions like ?utm_medium=content&utm_source=hackernews feels weird, is this allowed?

They should really put their blog on a different server than their core product.

aaaaand it's dead

Imagine if it was HTML5

...some people wouldn't be able to open it.

Here's the Vimeo video, instead of the transferwise.com blogspam.

http://vimeo.com/89394659

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