Alliance Visualization - New Approach

Hello everybody,

I was wondering about how to visualize alliances on a map.

For circumstances as in the 19th or 20th century, this is easy: Just color countries according to their affiliation (few large organizations), or link allied nations with lines (many bilateral alliances). This covers so different situations as the Cold War as perfectly as the alliance system of High Imperialism - (to the desired level of simplification, of course). Some examples from the web:




(Part 1/3. To be continued.)

... and an example for the other method (as well as the other century):



(Part 2/3.)

However, in earlier periods we face a completely different situation. In the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, defense and attack alliances were often very constrained - to a short period of time, a certain region, and/or specific situations. At the same time, there were more long-lasting, deeper alliance: namely, by marriage and relationship.

However, such links are much harder to measure: Lineage can never been undone; however, a join by marriage becomes weaker and fainter as a connection as time goes by and the alliance is not renewed by a marriage in a younger generation. This cannot be expressed by assigning one color, or drawing one-type connecting lines.



So I made up a system to estimate the intimacy how crowns are connected to each other.
We will assign degrees of a relationship as a measure of distance.

• Personal Union: There can hardly be a closer relationship between monarchs than if they are identical. ;-)
  I will call that a relation of degree zero.
• The Standard Alliance: King A makes King B marry his daughter. This is usually who an alliance was forged.
  Let us assign degree 2 to these.
• For every generation change on one side, we drift away from this situation by one degree.
  Hence, for instance, "King C is a brother-in-law of King D" means that a standard alliance has been established one generational change ago, and this means we have a relation of degree 3.

That's basically the whole set of rules. Almost everything derives from these.

Now we have a ranking of the closeness of alliances. Now we choose a threshold degree up to which we want to take connections into account, e.g. 6 (which is relatively high!). Then a degree-6 alliance gets the thinnest connecting line we want to use, and we use lines the thicker the lower the degree is.

Let me demonstrate this by an example. I chose Europe in 1490 - for several reasons. For instance, because there are several ladies ruling in their own right, which makes things more interesting.



Some remarks might be in order.

• I did not mark personal unions, as that would only add to confusion, not clarity in this case.
  Lines will start and end at the most important territory of a union (e.g. Denmark rather than Norway).
• Ferdinand, King of Aragon was married to Isabella, Queen of Castilia in her own right. This is further apart than a personal union, but (arguably) closer than anything else. I'll call that a "degree 1/2" relationship.
• King Vladislav of Bohemia was the son of King Kasimir of Poland.
  This is a loser connection than marriage, since a personal union is more likely in the latter case after one heriditary succession. However, it is the closest perceivable link otherwise, and consequently gets degree 1.
• Mary, Duchess of Burgundy in her own right, was the daughter-in-law to Frederic, Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria. How should we assess this relationship? By switching sexes in the young generation, it looks a lot like the "Standard Alliance" as specified above. But, no! It is slightly closer, as Mary's husband, Maximilian, was not just a child to the Emperor, but his primary heir. We will take this into account by assigning degree 1 1/2 to this link.
• The "Standard Alliance" pattern is present between Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and King John of Naples.
  Actually, this seems the only pair of European crowns with this exact relationship at this specific time.
• There are two ways to take one step off from the Standard Alliance: Either the father-in-law dies and passes his realm on to a son (or daughter), or the son-in-law deceases and bequeaths his kingdom to his direct issue. The first situation exists between Denmark and Scottland as well as between Castilia and Portugal (cousins on the thrones), the latter one between Aragon and Naples (brothers-in-law). These are all degree-3 relationships.
• More distant connections prevail between Austria and Portual (degree 4), and between Austria and Poland (degree 6).

A map should help to make some facts obvious.
What we can read off here:

- The map clearly shows how singular the connection between Austria and Burgundy was.
- The Austrian policy of making ties to other powers by marriage is manifested in the many lines starting there.
- The slow weakening of an existing alliance mentioned above is also visble:
Only a few decades before our snapshot, the Austrian and Polish dynasties have worked hard on a strong connection between them. After the extinction of two Habsburg branches, there is not much left of it.
- France, England, and Sweden are not interconnected with other countries as their rulers were closely linked into the nobilities of their own kingdoms.


Your comments? Ideas? Suggestions for improvement?
Thank you!



(Part 3/3.)

This is a very intriguing method and every mapmaker on this board should give this thread a gander.

Your style seems to be based on that used by the German-penned Penguin Atlases of World History. You can see it on the cover, in fact.

Wow. No, I wasn't aware of this series.

The cover map shown by you seems to reflect a late 19th century situation.
Do you happen to know what they are implying by the thickness of the lines?
A rough impression of the intensity of contracts?

Would it perhaps work better in Plan form?

Also, using a system of multiple lines would probably work easier to build up thickness (1 line of thickness 1 for a '6', 2 lines for a '5.5', 3 for a '5', 4 for a '4.5', 5 for a '4', 6 for a '3.5', 1 line of thickness >1 (2 or 3?) for a '3', 2 for a '2.5', 3 for a '2' 4 for a '1.5' 5 for a '1' 6 for a '0.5' and one even thicker line for a '0')

Here's the above map in plan form, without multiple lines.

And here's a rough version of multiple lines.

Thande said:

Your style seems to be based on that used by the German-penned Penguin Atlases of World History. You can see it on the cover, in fact.

Click to expand...

Ah ! The good old DTV Atlas. Highly recommended, invaluable source back for my A-level in history .

Boto von Ageduch said:

Wow. No, I wasn't aware of this series.

The cover map shown by you seems to reflect a late 19th century situation.
Do you happen to know what they are implying by the thickness of the lines?
A rough impression of the intensity of contracts?

Click to expand...

Yes, exactly. The two maps about the pre-WWI situation inside the book are a bit more complex. Also, the books also contain very detailed, but condensed
timelines. Again, highly recommended, just found out that the books managed to follow me around over the last 10 years...

@Alex: Yes, you are right, working with the names only makes things clearer in this context. But you know, we all love maps here, and it may be helpful in the background ...

What I did with the thickness of lines is not much different from multiple lines; I just drew lines of 16 - 2 * d points in width, where d is the degree (according to a preliminary definition, which I streamlined somewhat for the presentation here).

Looking at the map/your diagram, however, I think it might be helpful to make more significant differences between the categories?

Boto von Ageduch said:

@Alex: Yes, you are right, working with the names only makes things clearer in this context. But you know, we all love maps here, and it may be helpful in the background ...

What I did with the thickness of lines is not much different from multiple lines; I just drew lines of 16 - 2 * d points in width, where d is the degree (according to a preliminary definition, which I streamlined somewhat for the presentation here).

Looking at the map/your diagram, however, I think it might be helpful to make more significant differences between the categories?

Click to expand...

Yeah. It's easy to tell a very weak from a very strong, but rather more difficult for a strong vs. very strong.

I now remember why I didn't go for multiple lines:
There may be multiple connections (with the same or different degrees) - and I think it's relevant to make them all visible.

For instance, a couple of years later the Habsburg-Spanish alliance was forged by a double marriage ...

Boto von Ageduch said:

The cover map shown by you seems to reflect a late 19th century situation.
Do you happen to know what they are implying by the thickness of the lines?
A rough impression of the intensity of contracts?

Click to expand...

Pretty much, as well as links between more powerful nations like UK/France/Russia to form the Triple Entente as opposed to bilateral links to weaker cobelligerents like Romania and so on.

One way so far not mentioned, and one I'm actually intending to do a (simplified) version of, would be to have the primary alliances as
colored squares with 'cut-outs' of the countries within them.

Bi-lateral alliances could be shown by black lines connecting countries that are part of different alliances or none at all while a line
connecting the alliance boxes could be shown to show when multiple formal alliances have allied.

So this is an update with some improvements, mostly thanks to your comments.

• The thickness of connectors now decreases (roughly) exponentially in the degree of the relationship. Personal Unions are marked separately.
• I shifted towards Alex' style without a map.
• The diagram now is an animated image showing the change in alliances during a (short) period. The "news ticker" at the bottom highlights the relevant events.
• I had to correct the relationship Burgundy-Austria, as Mary had already died 8 years before (and my bad, I forgot to send a wreath).

I've made a couple of corrections and additions,
and I'm gradually expanding the time frame of the diagram.

I wanted to upload the new version, but then I noticed that we can't delete an attachment from a previously published posting.

Now, two blinking gadgets in a row seems a bit much.
I will load my latest version to (some place in) the wiki. But if you have comments to this sort of picture, please tell me so that I can take that into account.

Thanks.

I've been working my way towards these in my TL, but I never thought to have them dynamic...hmm.