Medieval frontiers in the Crusader States were rarely tidy lines on a page—they were shifting webs of castles, passes, ports, and strongpoints. Dr Adomas Klimantas explains how building a database allowed him to map those realities with unprecedented detail, blending modern geospatial methods with Victorian-inspired design.
By Adomas Klimantas
Medieval history is full of moments that beg to be followed on a map: an army marching to relieve a siege, a castle seized and refortified, a frontier shifting not as a neat line but as a chain of strongpoints, valleys, and mountain passes. Yet when I first began reading the Crusades seriously, I kept meeting the same frustration: many maps were too “thin” to support the kind of ground-level reading the sources invite.
My turning point was H.E. Mayer’s classic The Crusades, which I picked up as an introduction to the subject. It’s an ideal gateway, and it also makes something obvious: the story is insanely geographical. Places matter constantly – not only the famous cities (Jerusalem, Antioch, Acre), but also the lesser-known fortresses, ports, Roman bridges, mountain ranges, and historical lands that knit the Latin East together. When cartographic detail is low, one is left doing mental gymnastics: flipping between text, modern maps, and scattered references, trying to picture how it all fits.
I thus began looking up places. Then looking up the places behind the places. And, inevitably, realising that the “map in my head” was turning into a project of its own.
Mapmaking: from hobby to craft
Photo courtesy Adomas Klimantas
I’m trained in economics and history, yet mapmaking has been part of my life for a long time, particularly at times when I wanted to picture the history I study. At first it was simply a hobby: the pleasure of design, the satisfaction of layout, the quiet obsession with getting typography, border shades, and mini-maps right.
Academic research changed how I approached it, however. If you want to plot medieval realities onto modern coordinates, you need evidence, cross-checking, and a willingness to admit uncertainty. Over time, my mapmaking became less like a pastime and more like a craft. I began offering custom maps to clients – from fantasy board game makers to museums – where both precision and aesthetics mattered.
In 2021, I committed to a major project: to build the most detailed map of the Crusader States in the 12th-century Holy Land.
Can you actually draw medieval borders?
Photo courtesy Adomas Klimantas
The Crusader States are hard to map since they don’t behave like modern political entities. We’re often tempted to draw borders as firm lines, but medieval power was frequently expressed through networks: fortified sites, tribute relationships, and pockets of authority that expanded and contracted with leadership and war.
Instead of forcing crisp modern shapes onto the Latin East, I aimed to reconstruct frontiers as honestly as possible – grounded in what we can infer from the control and density of fortifications. Less “here is the border,” more “here is the zone where power was asserted, challenged, and defended.”
We thus draw medieval frontiers rather than borders. And that requires data – lots of it.
Historical fortifications database
Photo courtesy Adomas Klimantas
Once I started hunting down locations mentioned in Crusade histories, I fell into the rabbit hole of specialist scholarship. The Latin East is blessed with generations of researchers: archaeological surveys, regional studies, and catalogues that turn scattered ruins and ambiguous place-names into something you can map.
My list grew quickly. I found myself working through older foundational scholarship and modern studies that refine and correct earlier identifications – drawing on the published work of scholars such as Deschamps and Cahen, and later research by Adrian Boas, Denys Pringle, Joshua Prawer, Ronnie Ellenblum, and many others. If you’ve ever tried to reconcile variant spellings or uncertain sites across decades of publications, you’ll know the feeling: it’s a constant act of verification.
Add to it the search for accurate coordinates, which sometimes required scouring through satellite images of an area where a historical castle used to be. The ancient mound of Tell Gouran is a great example. Somewhere in eastern Turkey stood a major Edessan fortification that took me eight hours to locate. I found it not through a scholarly source, but by stumbling upon a place on Google Maps called Tilgoran, which had a mound and remains of fortifications. Later I found it was indeed the former Tell Gouran, having changed its name during the Atatürk reforms…
Eventually I wasn’t just collecting references – I was building a database.
After many months of work, that effort produced a dataset of 500+ precisely identified fortified sites, including Crusader, Muslim, and Armenian strongholds. That number matters because it changes what a map can do. When you can plot fortifications at scale, patterns emerge: defensive chains and the sheer intensity of building that underpinned the Crusader presence in the region. This makes frontiers possible to identify.
Modern tools, medieval evidence, and Victorian style
Adomas Klimantas is also an Assistant Professor at ISM University in Lithuania
With the dataset in hand, I combined modern geospatial methods with well-documented historical evidence to construct the most detailed map of the Crusader States so far. The aim wasn’t to create a fantasy of perfect certainty, but to be more accurate where accuracy is possible, and more cautious where it isn’t.
One element was still missing: design.
Modern maps are often efficient but emotionally flat – black labels on white space, functional palettes, sterile geometry. That works for quick reference, but it isn’t how most of us want to live with a map. If I’m going to spend an evening reading Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven and tracking the First Crusade step by step, I don’t want the visual experience of a printed web map.
After making this mistake with my first attempt at mapping the Crusader States (see the result here), I turned deliberately to a different tradition: the “Victorian” golden age of cartographic aesthetics. The 19th century marked an era when mapping accuracy had become strong, but ornament, serif typography, and careful colour harmony were still treated as part of the craft.
The result is a map that combines scholarly accuracy with pastel washes, textured terrain, and a layout meant to reward close inspection.
Where this goes next
The underlying fortifications database remains a living project, one that I continue to expand, refine, and verify. My aim is to publish it in scholarly form – complete with coordinates and, where possible, supporting documentation – so that researchers, educators, and enthusiasts alike can build upon it. In this sense, the map is not only an artwork, but also a scholarly synthesis and a preview of a much larger research tool still in the making.
After receiving the approval of Professor Christopher Tyerman at Oxford, I decided to make the map available as a fine-art print, allowing anyone with an interest in the medieval world to enjoy it – framed (or not) on their wall – while reading the next volume in the long and fascinating literature of the Crusades.
You are welcome to explore my portfolio or visit my Etsy shop. And if you would like to talk maps – or simply share a medieval history obsession – you can find me across social media as MapKlimantas.
Medieval frontiers in the Crusader States were rarely tidy lines on a page—they were shifting webs of castles, passes, ports, and strongpoints. Dr Adomas Klimantas explains how building a database allowed him to map those realities with unprecedented detail, blending modern geospatial methods with Victorian-inspired design.
By Adomas Klimantas
Medieval history is full of moments that beg to be followed on a map: an army marching to relieve a siege, a castle seized and refortified, a frontier shifting not as a neat line but as a chain of strongpoints, valleys, and mountain passes. Yet when I first began reading the Crusades seriously, I kept meeting the same frustration: many maps were too “thin” to support the kind of ground-level reading the sources invite.
My turning point was H.E. Mayer’s classic The Crusades, which I picked up as an introduction to the subject. It’s an ideal gateway, and it also makes something obvious: the story is insanely geographical. Places matter constantly – not only the famous cities (Jerusalem, Antioch, Acre), but also the lesser-known fortresses, ports, Roman bridges, mountain ranges, and historical lands that knit the Latin East together. When cartographic detail is low, one is left doing mental gymnastics: flipping between text, modern maps, and scattered references, trying to picture how it all fits.
I thus began looking up places. Then looking up the places behind the places. And, inevitably, realising that the “map in my head” was turning into a project of its own.
Mapmaking: from hobby to craft
I’m trained in economics and history, yet mapmaking has been part of my life for a long time, particularly at times when I wanted to picture the history I study. At first it was simply a hobby: the pleasure of design, the satisfaction of layout, the quiet obsession with getting typography, border shades, and mini-maps right.
Academic research changed how I approached it, however. If you want to plot medieval realities onto modern coordinates, you need evidence, cross-checking, and a willingness to admit uncertainty. Over time, my mapmaking became less like a pastime and more like a craft. I began offering custom maps to clients – from fantasy board game makers to museums – where both precision and aesthetics mattered.
In 2021, I committed to a major project: to build the most detailed map of the Crusader States in the 12th-century Holy Land.
Can you actually draw medieval borders?
The Crusader States are hard to map since they don’t behave like modern political entities. We’re often tempted to draw borders as firm lines, but medieval power was frequently expressed through networks: fortified sites, tribute relationships, and pockets of authority that expanded and contracted with leadership and war.
Instead of forcing crisp modern shapes onto the Latin East, I aimed to reconstruct frontiers as honestly as possible – grounded in what we can infer from the control and density of fortifications. Less “here is the border,” more “here is the zone where power was asserted, challenged, and defended.”
We thus draw medieval frontiers rather than borders. And that requires data – lots of it.
Historical fortifications database
Once I started hunting down locations mentioned in Crusade histories, I fell into the rabbit hole of specialist scholarship. The Latin East is blessed with generations of researchers: archaeological surveys, regional studies, and catalogues that turn scattered ruins and ambiguous place-names into something you can map.
My list grew quickly. I found myself working through older foundational scholarship and modern studies that refine and correct earlier identifications – drawing on the published work of scholars such as Deschamps and Cahen, and later research by Adrian Boas, Denys Pringle, Joshua Prawer, Ronnie Ellenblum, and many others. If you’ve ever tried to reconcile variant spellings or uncertain sites across decades of publications, you’ll know the feeling: it’s a constant act of verification.
Add to it the search for accurate coordinates, which sometimes required scouring through satellite images of an area where a historical castle used to be. The ancient mound of Tell Gouran is a great example. Somewhere in eastern Turkey stood a major Edessan fortification that took me eight hours to locate. I found it not through a scholarly source, but by stumbling upon a place on Google Maps called Tilgoran, which had a mound and remains of fortifications. Later I found it was indeed the former Tell Gouran, having changed its name during the Atatürk reforms…
Eventually I wasn’t just collecting references – I was building a database.
After many months of work, that effort produced a dataset of 500+ precisely identified fortified sites, including Crusader, Muslim, and Armenian strongholds. That number matters because it changes what a map can do. When you can plot fortifications at scale, patterns emerge: defensive chains and the sheer intensity of building that underpinned the Crusader presence in the region. This makes frontiers possible to identify.
Modern tools, medieval evidence, and Victorian style
With the dataset in hand, I combined modern geospatial methods with well-documented historical evidence to construct the most detailed map of the Crusader States so far. The aim wasn’t to create a fantasy of perfect certainty, but to be more accurate where accuracy is possible, and more cautious where it isn’t.
One element was still missing: design.
Modern maps are often efficient but emotionally flat – black labels on white space, functional palettes, sterile geometry. That works for quick reference, but it isn’t how most of us want to live with a map. If I’m going to spend an evening reading Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven and tracking the First Crusade step by step, I don’t want the visual experience of a printed web map.
After making this mistake with my first attempt at mapping the Crusader States (see the result here), I turned deliberately to a different tradition: the “Victorian” golden age of cartographic aesthetics. The 19th century marked an era when mapping accuracy had become strong, but ornament, serif typography, and careful colour harmony were still treated as part of the craft.
The result is a map that combines scholarly accuracy with pastel washes, textured terrain, and a layout meant to reward close inspection.
Where this goes next
The underlying fortifications database remains a living project, one that I continue to expand, refine, and verify. My aim is to publish it in scholarly form – complete with coordinates and, where possible, supporting documentation – so that researchers, educators, and enthusiasts alike can build upon it. In this sense, the map is not only an artwork, but also a scholarly synthesis and a preview of a much larger research tool still in the making.
After receiving the approval of Professor Christopher Tyerman at Oxford, I decided to make the map available as a fine-art print, allowing anyone with an interest in the medieval world to enjoy it – framed (or not) on their wall – while reading the next volume in the long and fascinating literature of the Crusades.
You are welcome to explore my portfolio or visit my Etsy shop. And if you would like to talk maps – or simply share a medieval history obsession – you can find me across social media as MapKlimantas.
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