18th Century Europe in 50 regions / cities

[jesuisbenjamin]

Hi there,

I am currently working on a map for a tabletop game-board themed on 18th century Europe. This map needs to be divided in 50 regions, including seas, each with a city as their capital. Each region should more or less have the same size. Each city used as a region should have some historical significance. The map's border to the south will not be lower than Creta, to the east not further than the Black Sea and to the north not much more than Bergen / St. Petersburg.

So far I've worked at spotting the capitals, with about 40 of them, pinned on a Google Map you can find here.

I'm having a bit of trouble finding relevant cities in the Ukraine / Bulgaria area as well as in the Balkans and Baltics and also between Moscow and St. Petersburg. I'm also not really sure about the Western Germanic area (maps of the Holy Roman Empire are quite confusing and I'm not very familiar with that area historically).

So if you have any suggestion, please let me know, it would really help. If you have doubts as to some cities to be included or not in the map, please let me know as well.

Cheers,
Benjamin

[ravells]

There is a map here of Europe in 1700s (not sure about its provenance). Nothing city-wise between Moscow and Warsaw in that one. The areas occupied by modern day Bulgaria and Romania have nothing shown either. I did think about Minsk in modern day Belarus, but when I looked it up on Wikipedia it had been reduced to a small town during that period and only built itself up later.

It might be worthwhile looking at European maps drawn in the 1700s and taking a look at the cities they depict, then then googling those cities to get an idea as to why they were important then.

Here is a map made in 1787 which is the board of a boardgame! It does mention the town of Wilma in Poland / Lithuania (I have a large size copy of the map in a book at home - I've photographed it for you so you can read the individual place names - you can download them here (apologies in advance for the quality) I'll keep the link up for a week or so and then take it down.

[jesuisbenjamin]

Ha thanks. I came Across this map indeed already. This other one is the best I could find so far, although it makes little difference between cities of importance and minor ones.

[ravells]

Yeah the maps either give too much or too little. Having the cities sorted by population size would be quite cool, but take a look at the link in my post above (I think you read it before I edited it).

[furiousuk]

Well I didn't know that Budapest was 2 different cities! Great maps though

[Lukc]

Well ... I think it's more important that a board game works, play wise, than that it has too be 100% historical. That's my 0.0452 cents.

[jesuisbenjamin]

@furiousuk: yeah, nice huh?
@Lukc: you are right (yet I can't bear the Risk board for this very reason).