This project begins from a simple conviction: that beauty is not incidental to historical understanding, but constitutive of it.
I have never believed that the past can be approached solely through abstraction—through dates, borders, or administrative categories divorced from the ways in which historical actors themselves perceived and inhabited their world. Nor have I found much satisfaction in the now-familiar observation that modern cartography is a Western imposition upon premodern space. That claim is true, but it is also incomplete. It risks mistaking a methodological warning for a total prohibition, and in doing so, it forecloses the possibility that modern tools might be used not to dominate the past, but to translate it.
My maps therefore do not attempt to reconstruct medieval or early modern mental geographies in any pure sense. They are not exercises in antiquarian fidelity, nor do they pretend to resolve the ambiguities of sovereignty, allegiance, or jurisdiction that characterized much of premodern political life. Instead, they rest on a deliberate tension: I employ modern geographic accuracy—clear coastlines, stable spatial relations, legible scale—not as an end in itself, but as a framework within which older visual languages can reemerge.
This choice is intentional. I want the viewer to be able to orient themselves immediately, to recognize where they are in the world, and only then to be drawn into something stranger: unfamiliar scripts, extinct polities, obsolete titles, sacred symbols, and modes of representation that no longer structure our everyday experience. Accuracy, in this sense, is not primarily juridical or administrative. It is cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic. It concerns how space was named, how power was signified, how authority was seen.
The guiding aim is not to flatten the past into modern categories, but to restore some measure of its density—to allow historical difference to assert itself not through confusion, but through form.
Underlying this approach is a broader view of history shaped by long engagement with philosophy and art history, particularly the aesthetic thought of Hegel. I am persuaded that human consciousness does not merely pass through time, but gives itself shape within it; that each historical epoch leaves behind not only institutions and texts, but characteristic ways of seeing, ordering, and beautifying the world. Art, in this sense, is not ornament. It is evidence. It is one of the primary ways in which a society becomes intelligible to itself.
Cartography, when treated seriously, belongs within this domain. A map is never only a technical instrument. It is an argument about space, an expression of what matters, a condensation of political, religious, and cultural assumptions into visible form. To redraw historical maps, then, is not simply to illustrate history, but to participate—however belatedly—in its ongoing interpretation.
This project is also deeply personal. Although any individual map may have taken weeks to complete, the intellectual labor behind it spans years. I devoted both my undergraduate and master’s theses to the Holy Roman Empire not because it was orderly or coherent, but because it was not—because it exposed the inadequacy of modern assumptions about sovereignty, freedom, and political rationality. The Empire’s endurance, fragmentation, and ultimate dissolution forced me to confront the gap between Enlightenment ideals and historical reality, between abstract liberty and lived hierarchy. That same tension animates these maps.
If there is a unifying thread, it is a belief that historical understanding requires more than explanation. It requires attention, patience, and a willingness to dwell with complexity. Beauty plays a central role here—not as nostalgia, but as an invitation. A beautiful object arrests the viewer. It slows perception. It creates the conditions under which curiosity can arise, and under which the past can be encountered not as a dead archive, but as something that once made sense to those who lived within it.
In that respect, this project is neither purely artistic nor purely scholarly. It is an attempt to hold both modes together: to think historically through form, and to make beauty answerable to truth. If it succeeds, even partially, it will have justified its existence.