Build nations and their sizes...

[Durakken]

Anyone have any advice on how to make nations, their borders, etc?

Following Rivers and Mountains are the obvious thing to do when deciding borders, but that is tedious and how do you know when you should follow a river and when not to.

I also can't find any data for Kingdom sizes of the middle ages, but my search-fu sucks to begin with. Right now I'm ending up with states with an average size that is about 240,000 km^2 which seems too big, but I'm up to 130 and I've only done 3/4 of 1 continent. This seems a bit much considering there are only around 250 states on Earth presently...

So any advice or tips?

[LEOVIIIIV]

Many medieval kingdoms had contested borders, I suppose if you were to lay them out on a map, you would have 2 nations (one east and one west) and the land in the middle could be claimed by both.
England claiming Calais in France (post Tudor I believe) would be a good example of this.

Try making up some history for the kingdoms. For example, Kingdom A captured a small patch of land from Kingdom B across a river. Maybe a queen from Kingdom C became a widow and married the king of Kingdom D combining the 2 kingdoms making it much larger than others. etc

There can be as many kingdoms as you wish on your map. There could be pockets of bandits, or primitive peoples occupying small areas. Its a blank canvas limited only by your imagination

Hope this helps

[joaodafi]

I'm no expert so I will say that it is "only put the cities in random points of the map and then select the borders anyway," but I can also speak seriously! I researched a lot about it and had the following conclusion:

Are two aspects to be considered, society and geography.

Society set interrelation of the population may be divided into two aspects, which usually have a certain interconnection. The culture and the state.

- Composition of Culture:
*********- Language.
*********- Religion.
*********- Ideology.
*********- Philosophy.
*********- Ethnic groups.
*********- Level of tolerance. (Religious, ideological, etc ..)
*********- Traditions.
*********- History
*********- Etc ...

- State of Composition:
*********- Type of power. (Autocracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, theocracy, etc ..)
*********- Rules and / or system. (Totalitarianism, Democracy, Monarchy, etc ..)
*********- Processes. (Protest, Intervention, election, plebiscite ...)
*********- Policy.

Geography priority defines the territory and demography. The territory is defined for example, the area occupied by a population or a state, geology like valleys, plains, mountains. Demographics indicate how people are scattered around the country, basically shows it is a more cosmopolitan or rural nation.

Having all this in mind it is easy to build a nation on the map.

About the size of the countries in the Middle Ages, I think to create fantasy maps, the only restriction must be creative, because during the Middle Ages there was very small countries, in Europe for example, but also had giant countries like Mongolian empire with 33 million km ^ 2 .. so do what you think best, right.

[Azélor]

The size of a state is almost irrelevant. 240 000 km2 is the size of the UK and a bit smaller than Italy.
Did you know that the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) have more than 300 states at some points in his history? Granted that some were very small but not all states need to be large.
1400: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...0/HRR_1400.png
1789: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...RR_1789_EN.png

I think a lot of people would agree that the HRE was a mess but messing up is a possibility in your world too! I mean that eventually, the lord of one small territory inherit the land of another lord. At his death, his possessions (depending on the rules of successions) can be split between the heirs for example. So sometimes the borders have more to do with the aristocracy (marriage, heritage, claims...) and might not follow the geography.

As for the what is a large state, the Mongol empire mentioned above is really but other empire rose and fell overtime. as you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires

[Durakken]

Many medieval kingdoms had contested borders, I suppose if you were to lay them out on a map, you would have 2 nations (one east and one west) and the land in the middle could be claimed by both.
England claiming Calais in France (post Tudor I believe) would be a good example of this.

Try making up some history for the kingdoms. For example, Kingdom A captured a small patch of land from Kingdom B across a river. Maybe a queen from Kingdom C became a widow and married the king of Kingdom D combining the 2 kingdoms making it much larger than others. etc

There can be as many kingdoms as you wish on your map. There could be pockets of bandits, or primitive peoples occupying small areas. Its a blank canvas limited only by your imagination

Hope this helps

I hadn't thought about that but I have to say coming up with that might be a bit problematic considering the number of states that will be on this map, certainly for a few it's possible but that is quite a lot...

@ joaodafi, I'll use that list for help and all thats ^.^ Thanks. Side note, nothing wrong with your writing in particular but it took me like 8 run throughs to translate... Big words + something messed up with my head right now + grammar issues makes it hard to understand lol I was not expecting that. Anyways thanks. what you said is useful...

@ Azelor, The problem with that is I'm thinking Kingdoms and those aren't Kingdoms per se. They are unifications of several kingdoms. I need to think more on the level of Provinces though. Side note, I lol'd at the Largest empires list as someone doctored the French empire map to say that it ruled most of Europe save for the British Isles which it clearly has not done.

[Hai-Etlik]

You're thinking in modern terms. Well defined, fixed borders between well defined, non-overlapping sovereign states is a modern idea that was largely formalized in the Peace of Westphalia that (mostly) ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. Quite a few CGP Grey videos cover the lingering non-westphalian strangeness in the world. The HRH that Azelor mentioned was the primary location of the Thirty Years War as well as being one of the most obvious examples of a decidedly non-wesphalian entity in recent history.

[Pixie]

Like everyone said, the "average" size of a kingdom in middle ages helps nothing in defining historical borders or nations in a conworld. There will always be larger and smaller and the relation between local geography and the technological advancements of a population is what defines how large states can be and where rival states fight(or settle) for boundary regions.

Here's one way to go at this:
1. Define the contiguous areas which share a common terrain type and climate. These will likely be populated by a common culture. Somewhere in those areas, along a fertile river basin or at the base of a mountain ridge, in a natural harbor, etc. place the cultural/economic capital.
2. Imagine the trade routes between those capitals, they should follow rivers for example, or valleys, avoiding deserts and mountain crossings. As you draft those trade routes you will find natural crossroads. These will also be cultural/economic capitals.
3. Now, each of these capitals will fight for territorial influence... find a road between two capitals, decide how far each of them control - i.e., the border in that trade route - repeat for every road.
4. Connect the trade route borders, using ridge lines or rivers whenever possible. The further the borders are from capitals and/or trade routes, the fuzzier they are.

This will give a rough idea (it works for me), but you can also increase the number of cultural/economical capitals in heavy populated areas, specially if they are broken by major rivers. I hope this helps.

[Durakken]

I didn't really think in apply Projection of power. Effective Projection of power on horse back seems to be something = 30km*30 it seems.... or 900km... So contrary to what I thought previously something like 640,000 km^2 isn't that big of a space in these terms.

So What I'm thinking now is that the easiest way would be to do this...

Place Cities at river inter-sections
Follow all rivers you can find as roads
For each river/road connected add a +1. Also, a bit of a repetive at this level, add +1 based on if it is on a river.
There should also be some number representing how much of an intersection the city is.
The higher the number you end up with the bigger that particular city is.

The bigger a city is the more it project and control the cities that it is near allowing it to project power further
The projection of the power of the city should fall off as distance increases so a +8 city at a distance of 400km from another city of +8 their bigness compared to each other would be something like +4.
2 Cities of equal bigness are rivals, but 2 cities with a diferential one will be able to rule the other thus part of the overall kingdom. This comparison should be done at the center point between their zones of influence.

Something like this should generate a realistic distribution. Unfortunately I'm ignoring cities that are not on rivers which I'm not quite sure how to place without doing a ton more work...

[liciobruno]

I agree with Hai-Etlik, and hope the following text can help.
In Europe, in middle ages there was the feudal system, where the king, or the emperor, entrusted to management parts of kingdom to his subordinate lords. If a part was considered too big, the lord divided it to his own subordinates, and so on. The subordinates were accountable to their lord, and lords to their king.
For entrustment, usually there was a document like a contract. I had the opportunity to read some publications of such contracts, and they sounded like this (sorry for the quick abstract):
"(Introductionary part)... give to Lord XXXXX the government of the Castle YYYYY, with villages (if any) ZZZZZ, QQQQ, etc., with all the annexed farmed lands and forests... (Final part)"
So it's evident, there were no exact border lines, at least in the majority of cases.
If there were border problems between two (or more) subordinates (if, for example, there were two villages very close with their farms), their superior lord had to give a fixed border, usually using rivers, valleys or ridges. Very infrequently were used units of measure to estabilish a border. But often, if there were such problems, local wars broke out.
If contented border was between two kingdoms, a big war broke out, so borders between kingdoms were (almost) always based on natural reference points.
Thank you for your patience .