2. Mapping Conflict During the Crusades

Karl Sturm

At a time when the Crusades still serve as the historical starting point for many discussions of the modern Middle East, this map offers perspective on how these messy medieval wars became a go-to metaphor for Christian-Muslim conflict. Shown here are the geographic origins of the Normans and Seljuks, peoples who emerged from Scandinavia and the Central Asian steppe to conquer the Christian and Muslim worlds, respectively, before coming into conflict with one another during the Crusades. In light of their remote origins, the Normans and Seljuks were originally considered uncivilized barbarians by members of the civilizations they ultimately conquered. Both groups zealously embraced their new subjects’ religions to compensate. Thus, when the Normans and Seljuks faced off in the 11th century, the rhetoric of religious war helped each side prove its piety. That same rhetoric performs a similar function today.

3. Mapping Collaboration During the Crusades

The pursuit of power drove plenty of violence between Muslims and Christians during the Crusades, but it also fostered cross-cultural cooperation. One of the most striking examples is this 12th-century map, made by an Arab geographer for a crusader king. After the Normans conquered Sicily from the Muslim Saracens, King Roger II turned to cartography to bolster his rule, hiring the famous Arab mapmaker Muhammad al-Idrisi to depict the known world for him. The resulting work is known as the “Tabula Rogeriana” in Latin and the “Kitab Rujar” in Arabic (or by its full title, the “book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands”). The map drew on classical Greek sources but was oriented, like most maps from the Arab and Muslim Mediterranean, with south on top. That’s the Nile Delta at the top, the Persian Gulf on the top left, Greece on the bottom right, and Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean Islands in the middle. The orange and purple bits that resemble chicken feet are mountains, and the squiggly green lines rivers.

4. German Asia Minor and German Arabia

Many people wonder what might have happened in Palestine if, after the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the British had never colonized it. In all likelihood, the French would have colonized it instead. More broadly, if the French and British had not divided up the Middle East between them, the Germans would have been perfectly happy to colonize the region, perhaps after winning World War I. This map shows a German imperialist fantasy from the end of the 19th century. It appeared as part of an 1897 work by Adolf Guyer-Zeller, a Swiss railroad magnate. In these maps, Guyer-Zeller seems keenly interested in the potential for imperial Germany to create rail routes—not just the famous Berlin-Baghdad railway the Germans began building in 1903, but also links from Aleppo to Moscow and another route east into India. “Deutsch” Arabia certainly would have turned out differently than the British- or French-run Middle East, but it’s unlikely the inhabitants would have been any happier with the arrangement in the long run.