Countries on maps

[Abbas-Al-Morim]

When I map out my world, I have a tendency to use natural borders to divide the world into countries. But sometimes, this leads to unsatisfactory result. It looks too made-up because all countries are boxed in with rivers and mountains. I make political maps so I do not show forest or hill on these maps.

How can I make the borders look more believable, without having a natural border present on the map to explain them? I guess I could make a mental note that there's a forest or some foothills or something. But it's still hard to fight the urge to put mountains and rivers at every border.

Also - how about our real world borders. Are all of those defined by natural borders? How were borders defined in ye olde days?

 

[wordwalker]

One thing I know about ye olde days is that, however borders got defined (usually with perennial wars), nobles often made a ritual of riding along them with their counterparts riding on the other side. They did this when a new lord took lands, so it was his chance and his neighbors' to confirm just where things were and work out disputes with a bit of dealmaking and what records they made from the last ride.

Another point is that kingdoms might not go straight up to each other. You could have degrees of wilderness that one king wasn't making the effort to control, where settlers (or refugees) might go. When the king (or the king on the other side) noticed them he might get some basic tax money and obedience from them, but they might also be left alone until the kingdom grew more powerful or the settlements got numerous enough to draw attention-- and then a king starts "asserting his ancient sovereignty" or even pushing the people out to get land for his own favorites, and all kinds of stories happen.

 

[CupofJoe]

Also - how about our real world borders. Are all of those defined by natural borders? How were borders defined in ye olde days?

Apart from modern borders [some US states, parts of the middle east and Africa etc.] where the borders really are just straight lines drawn on a map I would say that most borders do rely on natural features. Those features may not be obvious to anyone but locals and may have over time completely disappeared. Streams move, trees get cut down, dynasties fall. As an example, I live less than 100m from a stream that was the boundary between two counties. The stream was straightened many years ago but the border wasn't. In about half a kilometre I can cross the county boundary 4 or 5 times... you have to look at the old maps to see why...

 

[skip.knox]

Wordwalker, can you give examples of this? I've not heard of two counts, dukes, margraves, whatever, riding along their borders. Not doubting, just looking for a source.

 

[wordwalker]

Hmm. The only place I can remember is the Conrad Stargard / Cross-Time Engineer books by Leo Frankowski, and I have an impression I've heard about it in other places. It seems like a likely informal method to use, mostly between knights or barons and less at the count-plus level.

 

[Malik]

I intentionally didn't draw borders on my maps. If you don't have clearly-defined borders, you can have lots of little wars going on and lots of reasons for countries to antagonize each other. Before advanced cartography this was the rule and not the exception. Borders were dynamic and always in flux.

Even today, there are sections of Africa that have delineated borders that the countries don't accept. The northeastern corner of Kenya belongs to Ethiopia, Somalia, or Kenya depending on whom you ask. The same is true of the Abyei area of South Sudan (or Sudan, again, depending where you're standing when you ask). The southwest/northeast slope of the Somalia/Ethiopia border is often represented on maps as a dotted line because it has never been firmly and officially delineated. That's coming, though. But I digress.

Hard borders are artifices, typically laid down by people who decided they owned the land while it was being colonized, as a way to separate it from areas that other people decided they owned. The people themselves rarely, if ever, draw definite lines. An area's inhabitants have an understanding of their boundaries. Their rulers don't. Keep that in mind and have fun with it.

 

[skip.knox]

Just to follow up on Malik's post: we moderns take lines on maps seriously, but medieval people didn't even have maps, or at least not ones that we at all useful. Try looking up "T-O map" to see what I mean.

Locals knew boundaries mainly by landscape references: this river, those mountains. Fences could be built to delineate, but the neighbors could (and did) argue that you built the fence in the wrong place. Lawsuits of incredible length were carried out over such matters.

But in a way all that misses the real point. To us, a map that shows an area all of one color indicates a "country" or "nation" -- the words we most frequently use. Pre-modern people did not think in such geometric terms. A "country" was a region, indistinctly defined and rather malleable. The word "nation" meant "a people" more than it did a territorial state. Kings ruled kingdoms, of course, but this had more to do with lines of allegiance than it did with lines on a map. This is one reason (of many!) why medieval politics is so incredibly confusing. Modern politics is a model of clarity, by comparison.

The short version is this: draw your map and use it for your own reference. Know that you can have border conflicts for any of a dozen reasons, some of which can be geo-political, if you wish. Have fun with it.

BTW, ancient politics were a bit different. One of the key factors was language. I'll let others go further along that rode; I'm a medievalist, not an ancient historian.