Looking for reference Medieval Europe Map

[Gamerprinter]

True, the medievil period starts about 1200, so 814 AD is almost 400 years before that, right smack dab in the middle of the Dark Ages. And Dark Ages Europe was very primitive compared to the Roman period, or anytime after. The only people making maps during the Dark Ages were the Arabs - and Arabs weren't mapping western Europe. So as Ravs, suggests, you'll need to look at a medievil map and extrapolate back in time to your intended era.

[SchildConstruct]

True, the medievil period starts about 1200, so 814 AD is almost 400 years before that, right smack dab in the middle of the Dark Ages. And Dark Ages Europe was very primitive compared to the Roman period, or anytime after. The only people making maps during the Dark Ages were the Arabs - and Arabs weren't mapping western Europe. So as Ravs, suggests, you'll need to look at a medievil map and extrapolate back in time to your intended era.

The medieval period starts with the end of the Roman empire (roughly 600 A.D.), and lasted until the renaissance (roughly 1600 A.D.). The hint's in the etymology of the term, really (in plain English, it means "middle age", since the medieval period is in the middle of the Roman Empire's age, and the modern age, when the people started looking at this period of time again).

The Dark Age is called "dark age", because we don't know a whole lot about it (an age that's in the dark), too. It's only in about 800 A.D. that Charlemagne established something like a coherent government with the adjacent bureaucracy, so a lot of what happened before wasn't written down, or wasn't deemed important to keep around. People were generally busy working, and few people could afford spending time on luxuries like learning to write, and even fewer would've cared about anything that happened further back than living memory.

Further, the term "medieval reference map", or even "political map of medieval Europe" doesn't work. Nation-states as we know them today didn't exit, and borders shifted constantly (or reached as far as a day's ride from a vassal's holdings, for example, or were as far as the eye could see, or...).

In a nutshell: You need to nail down the period you want to look at (starting with the time around the First Crusade, kingdoms and such had stabilized enough that making maps would make sense), and then piece together who existed where, working forwards from Charlemagne and backwards from today's nation-states. IOW: Creative Assembly arrived at their map the hard way ).

However, you can look at the game maps for Europa Universalis III and/or Crusader Kings (both by Paradox Interactive), which cover the medieval period from (roughly) 1066 to 1583, and start your research there.

[Sigurd]

If you care anything about accuracy you should take terms like 'medieval' with a grain of salt.

My advice would be to always refer to a map by the year it was made or the year it represents.