Q-Bam Historical Map Thread

Crazy Boris

Crazy Boris

Banned
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July 1, 1917: Manchu Restoration
 
Pressedflowers

Pressedflowers

Nikephoros Vasilefs said:
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What you wrote pretty much lines up with what I've read and been trying to think about. The question about how far a city's jurisdiction extended and that being the basis by which to judge 'state control' in early societies is the root of what I've been trying to represent on a map. Tonight, I finally sat down and tried to represent what a possible system of could look like. Of course, this system would need to define precisely what each color means and have a way of determining how far a city's control extended in certain terrain, but the vague idea here is the darkest color is cities directly under the administrative control or suzerainty of the sovereign/ruling body (in this case, the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople).

I used the QBAM terrain map people in conjunction with this map of Byzantine population centers in 780CE, and tried to represent the centers of power in the cities with control weakening (colors getting lighter) the farther from these centers you go. For instance, Sicily has bright colors concentrated around Byzantine settlements, and the colors mostly are quite bright in the low lying grasslands, but slowly get more washed out as it goes into the mountains and foothills in the center of the island, which is probably fairly true to the administration at the time. Cities like those dotting the western Italian coast are in light shades because they were only loosely under Byzantine suzerainty in this period.

The colors dotting the mountains of eastern Anatolia represent the line of Byzantine forts guarding the passes into the Taurus mountains. This system would require a lot more research and effort than copying old atlases, but it sort of scratches the itch and is at least more accurate to the political systems of the time than drawing them like modern states with demarcated borders. I do forsee problems with trying to represent subordinate but independent polities and all the things that traditional schemes are quite good at, and maps with multiple polities would get really confusing but I'll cross that bridge if I get to it. I'll try to develop a full map to showcase and see if I should try and take it further.
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Not to nitpick, but the nation of the Romans was not the domain of the emperor, nor the government per se, but the society itself (certainly not during your selected period of representation). I think that's another level of representation that would affect how you display borders is the perception or actualization of power and sovereignty. Is a place a republic or monarchy? Is the land in that area, or the government the property of an individual, or a society, or even still, un-owned. Naturally "feudal" Europe could be seen as the first, but then England qnd Sicily most definitely were administrated and self-perceived as "nations" rather than personal property of their monarchs. Then you have the perception of foreign cultures in the sources. The Romans, who considered themselves a republic, and their nation, naturally perceived other peoples as nations with their cultural bias. This is difficult when we have such little information on those other cultures and differing definitions on what a nation is in the past 2,000 years.
 
CHKeeley

CHKeeley

Pressedflowers said:
Not to nitpick, but the nation of the Romans was not the domain of the emperor, nor the government per se, but the society itself (certainly not during your selected period of representation). I think that's another level of representation that would affect how you display borders is the perception or actualization of power and sovereignty.
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Could you perhaps elaborate a little more on this? I understand that you’re referring to the concept of a Roman Politea that was more complete and cohesive than simply the emperor and the direct bureaucracy, and that sovereignty/ability to rule was often defined by popular perceptions of the Emperor. But at the same time, I’m not sure how that would necessarily tie into “de-facto power” as exercised. While the citizens of the empire had the very real ability to make themselves known in the republic-empire/politea/etc. it was in relation to the office of the emperor itself. “The people” were not an administrative unit, and the court wasn’t keeping tabs on events in the provinces through “society”, but through the strategoi and the strategoi from his tourmarchoi and on down to the basic level of officeholder. Conceptually, I’m not sure I understand how varying perceptions of the sovereignty of the government would affect the day to day administration of said polity itself, because it still exercises taxes and control in a top-down manner largely through appointed go-betweens, officeholders, or functionaries regardless of the pre-modern system we are talking about. Especially in this period of Byzantine history where the entire apparatus of state was geared in a military function and the primary source of legitimacy and authority was in effective defense of the Empire and it’s people from raiding, invasion, etc.

While we certainly know very little about how Byzantine administration was lost in the Balkans, this is what I had in mind when I tried to come up with this method of representation. Byzantine imperial power was exercised in key forts/cities of the coast that served as the last bastion of Roman government (Dyrrachium, Thessalonika, Athens, Patras, etc.) while direct control over the interiors were very shaky and/or entirely untenable due to the influence and/or lack of effective personnel to conduct taxation, exercise military control, etc etc. I was thinking that maybe I should forgo the representation of “interior control” considering how much of it is ahistorical since we have no evidence for it, but maybe just have the “gradients of control” on some of the vague borderlines like the ones in the Balkans I mentioned, and a way to represent the borderlands between Byzantium and the Caliphate in which neither side exercised firm control. I guess a better way to think about what I was trying to do is the level of contact+communication+power projection+influence that the imperial system had over certain regions rather than popular sovereignty and support.

I’m definitely open to suggestions since my idea is incredibly rough, I just am unsure of what you mean
 
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theRTSchultz

theRTSchultz

Confederation of the Rhine Map QBAM.png

Random message, tried my hand at replicating the sick 1812 Confederation of the Rhine map on wiki while using Boris's 1800 and 1812 World maps as referances.
 
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PecuTheGreat

Spinovenator said:
I have tried to fit the 8K-Bam into the Q-Bam and they are too irregular to do it accurately. Maybe someone with Photoshop can do it, but with MS Paint it is really impossible. The Q-bam is too irregular. I really give up :confused:, but I leave here the projection of the 8K-Bam in Robinson with the Q-Bam measurements for someone who thinks they can get it. Personally I think it would be easier to adapt the Q-Bam to more accurate measurements like the 8K-Bam than to adapt the 8K-Bam to the inaccuracy of the Q-Bam. If someone is up for it we could try to adapt the topographic map of the 8k-Bam to the Q-Bam little by little but I can't do it by myself.

PD: I can't upload the complete map, does anyone know how to do it?
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I know this has been long ago but I agree, a Robinson 8K-BAM of about the same size as Q-BAM is a better way to go.
 

TheCrobattian

The 1837 QBAM is sloppy in my opinion, the text needs to be either on a separate layer or the country labels moved to a legend on the dark blue part of the QBAM like in the 1930 QBAM. Some countries and territories aren't labeled at all. Also, the text and country borders are the same colour, making an unusable alternate history base map. Oh and the Amazon River is on the map for some reason?
 
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KillEmAll1989

TheCrobattian said:
So I guess someone else has to make an 1837 map? Cause I can't use Crazy Boris's for reasons listed in post #2,011 above.
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Assuming you're referring to the 1837 map linked in the doc above: the Amazon river is one all modern Q-Bams and has been for quite a while at this point, and while It's definetly old and not up to current standards (having country borders, coastlines and text be the same colour is generally frowned upon), just skimming over it I don't really see any places where there's any ambiguity as to whether a given group of pixels are border/coast pixels or text pixels...? It should perhaps be updated but I don't really see how you can describe it as "sloppy" or "unusable". Besides, if you're at a level of detail where the position of individual pixels is important, then you should really be using other resources than community-made Q-Bams, especially old ones.
 
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