So what the heck is this? It's a map, of course! Specifically a map of (part of) the world in 1280 A.D. For a while now I've been trying to put together a historical atlas of the whole world that changes through time dynamically (or, because this severely pushes the limits of my computer literacy, has one map for each twenty years of history). So far I've finished maps for 3000 B.C. to 1300 A.D. Not being a professional historian by any stretch of the imagination these maps no doubt have their share of inaccuracies, but isn't it great to see Europe and Asia and Africa all presented in detail and to scale with each other? No? Well, I think it's cool. That's why I made it.

It's also colour-coded for different culture-groups (i.e. dark bluish colours for the different branches of Christendom, reds for polytheistic civilizations including Hindu states, pinks for Buddhist states, dark greens for Islam, browns for nomadic iron-users, light blues for stone age peoples, orange for non-literate iron-using farmers, and magenta for collective forms of government). Organized states have solid borders around them, tributary peoples have their names faded out, and states with access to gunpowder technology have a thicker outline. I've tried to use a consistent naming strategy so that, for example, the Holy Roman Empire is "German Rome" on my map- that is, a nation run by Germans that calls itself Rome. Regions with little in the way of written history, like Africa, tend to be divided by language group rather than nationality.