Map of the County of Flanders (Image via Wikipedia)
While I was randomly wandering around the internet yesterday I stumbled on the Old Maps Online site. It’s lots of fun.
It’s an interactive database of maps published between 1000 and 2010. You can choose your preferred time-frame by using sliders to narrow down to a specific decade(s), and then move a square over a modern open-source map to give the geographic boundaries.
Any maps which show that geographic region for the chosen time-frame and region are shown on the right hand side of the screen.
Here’s the subset of maps for the Low Countries between 1460 and 1610
It shows maps of Flanders, Zeeland, Limburg, Brabant and the “minor germanies”. Now you too can know the location of places referenced in works of the Low Countries. “Duke of Brabant? He probably lived in Eindhoven, and wow, there was a big lake there in the late 1600s!”
More information on the project from flowingdata.com.
