East Bithynia, Gerze and Amisos

In Jan '23, I produced a map of Bithynia around Sinop. Here is the region to the southeast of that former map, done yesterday and today, because I'm looking for ways to relax between writing just now.

This was a test, to see if I could work at eighteen 20-mile hexes at the same time. Originally, I was doing them two hexes at a time, and last year I'd moved up to six at a time. With images made earlier this year to attach to the authentic wiki, I was feeling more confident about managing more sweeping areas, to see if it would prove more efficient. It's a little of doing the same sort of detail more repetitively, but this does represent three times as much work as I would have done formerly of about the same area.  Which is desirable.

The above represents what are essentially two routes into the upper lands of Anatolia.  Gerze provides access across the Kastamonu uplands, down into the high plateau west of modern Ankara, which would have been an ancient route that contributed to Sardis and Lydia's enormous wealth 27 centuries ago, while Amisos provides access to the upper Halys valley, the seat of Phrygia, and before that the Hittite Empire, going back 36 to 40 centuries.  Both ports are very old, full of waxing and waning over the centuries, while many wars were fought to control both before the Persians did.  The old fights began after the fall of the Persians and the failed hold of the Seleucids, until the Romans controlled them both again.  Then it was the Byzantines vs. the various tribes that invaded starting in the 10th century, until the Seljuks controlled Amisos after the battle of Manzikert in 1071.  The Othmans controlled Gerze and cut the Byzantines off of trade on the plateau from both ends, ending the latter's income from that alternative route.  The Othmans, later the Ottomans, then strangled Constantinople's trade... which took only two and a half centuries, even after the city was plundered in 1204 by the Venetians.  All fun stuff.

Things like this provide structure to blocks of geography that looks like blobs on most maps, to most poeple. The pleasure I get from seeing the structure generate in close-up scale maps gives me a pleasure it's hard to describe... since people don't, generally, understand or care about maps.