"Medieval history is full of moments that beg to be followed on a map: an army marching to relieve a siege, a castle seized and refortified, a frontier shifting not as a neat line but as a chain of strongpoints, valleys, and mountain passes. Yet when I first began reading the Crusades seriously, I kept meeting the same frustration: many maps were too "thin" to support the kind of ground-level reading the sources invite."
"It's an ideal gateway, and it also makes something obvious: the story is insanely geographical. Places matter constantly - not only the famous cities (Jerusalem, Antioch, Acre), but also the lesser-known fortresses, ports, Roman bridges, mountain ranges, and historical lands that knit the Latin East together. When cartographic detail is low, one is left doing mental gymnastics: flipping between text, modern maps, and scattered references, trying to picture how it all fits."
Medieval Crusader frontiers were complex, shifting systems composed of castles, passes, ports, and other strongpoints rather than neat boundary lines. Detailed geographic context matters for understanding military movements, sieges, fortification changes, and the connective landscape of valleys and mountain passes. Insufficient cartographic detail forces readers to flip between sources and modern maps to reconstruct terrain. Creating a dedicated geospatial database enables precise location plotting and ground-level readings of medieval events. Combining modern geospatial methods with careful historical cartography and design principles yields maps that reveal the granular realities of the Latin East’s fortresses, routes, and strategic landscapes.
Read at Medievalists.net
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