Resources

You will find here the own resources provided by Ménestrel for this mapping project. All of them are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 France License.

The base maps with elements of relief have been found on the CGIAR’s website. The other were produced basing on data of the Diva-Gis’s website.

Bishoprics and archbishoprics

As a first example of what this section aims at offering, you will find here the list of European medieval (arch)bishoprics with their geographical coordinates, the date of their creation and (if appropriate) their displacement or deletion. For the Italian area, this work owes much to Hugues Labarthe, who is especially the builder of the project "Towards an Atlas of Roman Christianity" on the site E-ecclesia.eu.

About various dates of the Middle Ages, the available files are:

 Shapefiles (SHP), which can be imported directly into a GIS processing software;
 As examples of a result, JPG files and PDF files (this second type of file is heavier than the first one, but it may be easily modified without using GIS processing software).
Since Italian bishoprics are very numerous, we propose specific maps for this peninsula.

About other dates, a user can use the data source as an Excel spreadsheet covering the entire period of the Middle Ages: with this file, he may easily make another selection and thus produce GIS data corresponding to his date of interest. To create a map with these customized data, see the brief instructions on GIS software.

As for now, only the (arch)bishoprics located within the territory of modern Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom are referenced. Similarly, the landscape elements which are represented (coasts, rivers, topography) are those of today. For more information about the data, see the corresponding metadata (in french). Many developments are still possible to improve this section...

You will find here a historical mapping of African bishops in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As for Europe, we offer both historical data (dates for which those bishoprics are attested) and spatial information. For these two types of data, the results which are proposed are less precise than for Europe and very incomplete, firstly because it is a work in progress and secondly because given the available sources, we can never claim to accuracy, nor seek to map all African bishoprics attested before the sixteenth century. The full list of these is available in this database. At present, only 10% of these items were treated in this section. But we are still working...

Map of the African bishoprics

You will find here mapping data about secular collegiate churches which were founded between 600 and 1500 AD. The selected area is the dioceses of France during the Ancien Régime. These data come from the “Collégiales” project of the Lamop, whose authors generously provided us with the data; their website will provide more information, in particular about each entity mapped here.

Since the density of collegiate churches can be very high, it is difficult to include the name of each of them on a map at the European level. We therefore chose not to display this information. But the shapefiles that are proposed below contain this information, so that every user can choose his own display options. Similarly, by looking the source data, he can easily select other dates than those we used here, and produce GIS data corresponding to his own period of interest. For all these operations, see the brief instructions on GIS software.

Here is a map of the main royal or imperial palaces known in the Carolingian period. The list is uncertain because of documentary gaps, and also because it is difficult for the historian to define precisely what a palace was in the early Middle Ages: see J. Barbier, « Le système palatial franc : genèse et fonctionnement dans le nord-ouest du regnum.», Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, vol. 148, nᵒ 2 (1990), p. 245‑299.

Main Carolingian palaces

You will find here mapping data about fortifications which were built between 500 and 1600 AD in Eastern France and studied by the Pôle Archéologique Universitaire of the université de Lorraine. These data were generously provided by the managers of the website Image – Itinéraire Médiéval des sites Archéologiques du Grand Est médiéval, where you will find more data and information on this project.

Castles

Fortified Houses

You will find here mapping data about antique sites: aqueducts, baths, bridges, cities, forts, temples, theatres and vici. Those data are furnished by the website vici.org, where you will find more data and information on this project. They have been completed by Armin Volkmann and Thomas Lienhard. As they are very numerous, it is impossible to present all of them clearly on an overview map of the Mediterranean world. We therefore chose to focus only on the Gallic space in the jpg-maps below (except for the forts, for which the focus is further restricted on a part of the Rhine-Danube limes). But the shapefiles provided below contain all the data about Europe, Africa and Asia. All sites are from classical Antiquity, but no more precise date is given here: to get it about any site, consult the notice about the latter on vici.org.

Aqueducts

Baths

Bridges

Cities

Forts

Temples

Theatres

Vici

Usually, it makes little sense to cartography medieval territories in GIS format: the extreme precision of GIS is not compatible with the elusive nature of our sources about borders or surfaces, and therefore it is better to cartography historical points (such as bishoprics ), excluding lines (such as dioceses). However, we have decided to offer a few such data for the convenience of the user, because it may be convenient to have a map of provinces or kingdoms that can be superimposed with the data proposed above in this page. However, anyone who wishes to use these maps of territories has to remember that the accuracy of these representations is not scientific, and it takes with a margin of error of about 20 km. For the eastern borders of the Frankish world, the inaccuracy is even stronger.

Whereby data are provided as shapefiles, which are directly importable into a GIS software. For each dossier, we also propose a pdf and jpg file, as well as bibliographical references: these were a basis, but have been thoroughly revised in order to produce the result which is proposed here.