I am working on the magazine. I'm producing about a page and a half a day, so I should be more than ready for the October issue preview to be ready on September 1st. In the meantime, I'm stoked to work on this, so I am.
Let's start with this corner of Apulia:
Not as heavily infrastructured as I feared, and of course there were far fewer rivers and topographic features, so it went rather quickly. Also, a large part of this is water. I see I forgot to add a road to the town of Le Torri, so I'll repair that before posting this again.
The density of the settlements, the black circle towns, arises because of their importance, even from the source in 1952. It was still more common at that time to take a train rather than a plain to Barletta, Bari or Brindisi (off map), to take a boat to Athens, Cairo or the Holy Land. Moreover, historically, all these places represented the most important trading route in the world, as the Adriatic proved to be dangerous to lighter ships (Venice solved that with technology), so it was best to park along Apulia, unload, and rush back to Egypt for more grain, or Constantinople or Antioch for more luxuries. That chaotic terrain, plus the madness of local tribes, made the Balkans less friendly to trade between 400 BC and 1500 AD. So this coast got rich as the most successful middle-men in world history.
I went on this morning and mapped further west. Below, the sheet map shows the background for context, so the reader can see where we are.
The density of the settlements, the black circle towns, arises because of their importance, even from the source in 1952. It was still more common at that time to take a train rather than a plain to Barletta, Bari or Brindisi (off map), to take a boat to Athens, Cairo or the Holy Land. Moreover, historically, all these places represented the most important trading route in the world, as the Adriatic proved to be dangerous to lighter ships (Venice solved that with technology), so it was best to park along Apulia, unload, and rush back to Egypt for more grain, or Constantinople or Antioch for more luxuries. That chaotic terrain, plus the madness of local tribes, made the Balkans less friendly to trade between 400 BC and 1500 AD. So this coast got rich as the most successful middle-men in world history.
I went on this morning and mapped further west. Below, the sheet map shows the background for context, so the reader can see where we are.
This is the M.12e - Rome sheet, with the Kingdom of Naples and smallish states on the right and the Papal States on the left. I'll be following the slanted line with this pass, concentrating the Adriatic and the rest of the Dalmatian coast for now. I'll post the sheet map of Dalmatia's relationship to the Apulia map above with my next post here. I guess that's about all. The independent state shown, with the heavy border line around it, is the Bishopric of Benevento, which even the Spaniards were unwilling to tax.
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