Kiyev Grand Principality, south of Zerkow

As explained in the last post, I'll be mapping the two most northerly sections in expectation of starting to move southeastward, instead of east.  So we begin with these two hexes:

That is, the two hexes surrounded by the thin blue line, with 48 and 49 infrastructure. The orange line running diagonally is the 30th parallel ... thus, the latitudinal line (between 49 22'N and 49 39'N) passes along the red line.  It's important to remember that NORTH is not the top of the map, but the upper right hand corner.

In laying a GoogleEarth image on this line, we can cut the image in half and turn the right hand side 30 degrees as a transition, thusly:

Naturally, the rivers, and everything else, don't match up, but that doesn't matter.  Things are made to fit, so as to create verisimilitude while completely lying about it.  There are no hills in the section, just a couple of rivers ... and of course, there are a few towns to add:

This leaves a big empty hole that we'll fill later.  In the meantime, we've got a small taste of a infrastructure change, as we skirt the edge of the Kiyevan environs.  Virtually all the infrastructure shown emerges from the big city of Kiyev itself, so that this mapping exercise is going around the outside of that centre.

Historically, the Grand Duchy of Kiyev is on it's last legs in 1650.  It's being kicked around like a football between Poland on the west, the Grand Duchy of Moskovy (not yet Russia) on the north and the Ottoman Empire on the south.  Eventually, of course, Moskovy wins this fight.  Point in fact, "Ukraine" doesn't exist in anyone's imagination at this time, except as an area that other entities are fighting over.  There are Zaporozhian and other cossack tribes that are a mix of Russian and Tatar cultural elements, but these don't agree with one another; primarily, in the international theatre, they exist as mercenaries for whomever has the most money.

Kiyev continues to exist because it has a lot of money, is a tremendous crossroads with access to the Dneiper river traffic north-and-south, and the topography that makes Kiyev a great crossing point across that river.  The Dneiper hasn't been dammed, so there are no giant lakes as one might see on a Ukraine map today; the river has some wild places, but it can be navigated to the sea by highly experienced pilots.  These pilots, too, are organised through the Kiyevan state, so this is another hold that Kiyev has over Moscovy's access to the Black Sea.  It helps Poland maintain it's frontier against the Turks, and serves as a trade and communication go-between for Turkish and Russian trade.  Russia gets what they want, the Turks get theirs, and neither has to feel like they've acted respectfully towards the other.

Here's the next section with new rivers drawn; Steblev's actual location has it 12 miles east of my original plotting (I get things wrong all the time):

I've added a label for "Kiyev" at the bottom.  We're still in a steppeland forest, undenuded of trees because this is still the 17th century.  I'm going to extend the forest to the edge of the Kiyevan realm, reasoning that this is a natural boundary between Kiyev and the Tatar lands.  It's as good as any other reason, and obviously we have no evidence for how much forest existed in these areas 350 years ago.

The forest isn't dense, however.  It's continuous copses of trees between tall grass meadows, so that wending one's way along means being in the open much of the time while near enough to a stand of trees to jump inside within a round or two.

This extends past the Kiyevan sheet, so I'll have to make a completely new sheet to the east and sort out what on the above is on which sheet.  This won't be evident to the reader until I post the whole Kiyevan sheet and the one after, as we move off the south edge of both.

Hope that makes sense.