Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation

Looking at any wall map or atlas, we see a world composed of states. The earth's surface is divided into distinct state territories. Each is demarcated by a linear boundary, an edge dividing one sovereignty from the next. The division is accentuated when each territory is blocked out in a separate color from neighboring states, implying that its interior is a homogeneous space, traversed evenly by state sovereignty. Our world is a jigsaw of territorial states, and we take this picture for granted. Thus our historical atlases show medieval Christendom also divided into demarcated and homogeneous territories, though perhaps less neatly (see, for example, McEvedy 1992). Only the configuration is different. Familiar to us, such a depiction would have been utterly unknown to people at the time, who rarely used maps to represent geographical information and did not imagine states (or rather realms) as enclosed spaces. The transformation of their world into ours—the way the state was put on the map—is the subject of this essay.