Time-Lapse Map: 1,000 Years of Europe's Changing Borders

A Time-Lapse Map of Europe’s Changing Borders

This three-minute animation shows the borders of Europe and the Middle East shifting from about the year 1000 to the late twentieth century, frame by frame. Kingdoms appear and vanish, empires swell and collapse, and modern countries take shape only in the last few seconds. The footage comes from the Centennia Historical Atlas, an animated map program created by the American physicist and historian Frank E. Reed. The dates on screen move fast, so treat each frame as an approximate snapshot rather than an exact record.

Below is a guide to what you are watching: how the atlas was made, the big turning points to look for in each period, and the things a coloured map cannot show.

What the Centennia atlas is

Reed, who studied physics at Wesleyan University, got the idea in the summer of 1990, as the Cold War ended and Europe's map was changing almost weekly. The project began as a smaller program called Millennium and grew into Centennia, which charts the region from the start of the eleventh century to the present day. According to its publisher, it records more than 9,000 border changes and shows the situation of each area at intervals of a tenth of a year.

The atlas was built for students. The United States Naval Academy adopted it for its introductory Western civilisation course, and it is used in schools and by researchers in history and political science. A free edition covering 1789 to 1939 is available, and the program has been translated into German and Greek. The video is a time-lapse recording of the program running from beginning to end, credited to Reed's own HistoricalAtlas channel.

Europe around the year 1000

The opening frames look nothing like a modern map. In the east, the Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking continuation of the Roman Empire, is at a high point under Emperor Basil II, stretching from southern Italy through the Balkans to Anatolia. North of it lies Kievan Rus, a large state of East Slavic princes centred on Kyiv that had accepted Orthodox Christianity in 988.

In the centre sits the Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of German and Italian territories under an elected emperor. France is a kingdom on paper, but real power lies with dukes and counts. Most of the Iberian Peninsula belongs to the Caliphate of Córdoba, with small Christian kingdoms in the north. Poland and Hungary are new Christian kingdoms, and the Scandinavian realms are only just emerging from the Viking age.

1000 to 1500: crusades, Mongols and Constantinople

Watch for a few dramatic moments. In 1066 the Normans conquer England. In 1204 the armies of the Fourth Crusade turn on Constantinople itself, sacking the Byzantine capital and carving its lands into Latin states; the empire recovers the city in 1261 but never its former strength. Between 1237 and 1242 the Mongols sweep across the Rus principalities and into Poland and Hungary, and the Golden Horde dominates the eastern steppe for two centuries.

From the fourteenth century the Ottoman state expands from north-western Anatolia into the Balkans. On 29 May 1453 Constantinople falls to Sultan Mehmed II, ending the Byzantine Empire after more than a thousand years. At the other end of the map, the Christian kingdoms of Iberia push south until Granada, the last Muslim emirate there, surrenders in 1492. In the north-east, the 1386 union of Poland and Lithuania creates one of the largest states in Europe.

1500 to 1800: empires and partitions

The Habsburg family now controls a huge collection of lands from Spain and the Netherlands to Austria and Bohemia, while the Ottoman Empire reaches the gates of Vienna twice, in 1529 and 1683, and is pushed back each time. The Thirty Years' War ends with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a settlement often cited as a starting point for the modern system of sovereign states. Sweden briefly becomes a Baltic great power, and Russia expands steadily westward and south toward the Black Sea.

One of the most striking sequences comes at the end of this period. Poland-Lithuania, once enormous, is divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria in three partitions in 1772, 1793 and 1795, and disappears from the map for 123 years.

1800 to 1918: Napoleon, nations and falling empires

Napoleon's France spreads across the map like a flood, peaking around 1810 to 1812, then shrinks back after his defeat. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 redraws borders to restore a balance among the great powers. The century that follows is the age of the nation-state. Greece wins its independence from the Ottoman Empire in a war that began in 1821, recognised in 1830; Belgium separates from the Netherlands in 1830; Italy is unified in 1861 and Germany in 1871. The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 push the Ottomans almost entirely out of Europe.

The First World War ends with the collapse of four empires: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. In a few frames, new or restored states appear, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland and the Baltic republics. The final years of the Ottoman Empire also saw the genocides of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians between 1914 and 1923, and in 1923 the Greek-Turkish population exchange uprooted well over a million people. None of that suffering is visible as a change of colour.

1918 to today: war, division and new states

Nazi Germany's expansion and conquests between 1938 and 1942 cover most of the continent before collapsing in 1945. Afterwards the map freezes into Cold War blocs: Germany is divided, and the Soviet Union shifts Poland's borders westward. In 1974 Turkey invades Cyprus, and the northern third of the island has been under Turkish military occupation ever since, a division the United Nations still does not recognise as legitimate.

The last seconds bring a burst of change as communism ends: Germany reunifies in 1990, the Soviet Union dissolves into fifteen republics in 1991, Yugoslavia breaks apart through the wars of the 1990s, and Czechoslovakia splits peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

What a border map cannot show

A time-lapse like this is a wonderful way to grasp scale and sequence, but it simplifies a great deal. Medieval borders were rarely sharp lines; rulers held overlapping rights, and many regions owed loyalty to several lords at once. Coloured areas hide alliances, rebellions, disputed claims and the lives of people who often spoke different languages from their rulers. Because each frame lasts the same time on screen, a quiet century and a single year of war can feel equally important.

To get more from the video, pause it at moments that interest you, use a slower playback speed, and compare what you see with a good historical atlas or encyclopedia entry for that date. Watching your own country's region a few times in a row is the quickest way to notice how recent many of today's borders really are.

Sources: The Centennia Historical Atlas; Physics World: Once a physicist, Frank Reed; video by Frank E. Reed (HistoricalAtlas2010).

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