Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

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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

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.

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/

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.

> 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?" ;)

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