All Comments on 'Map of Italy'

Nice map!

5

Helpful! Visuals prove useful like this one sometimes!

Nice. Very helpful.

I actually went to Google Maps in the middle of chapter 13 to figure out how far it was from Ostia to Marseilles when you wrote that it took Pilgrim two weeks to sail there because that seemed like a long time. This is the Age of (European) Discovery, after all! So I checked...

...and realized, given that winds in Mediterranean are notoriously fickle, that they'd be in a galley and that they'd almost certainly keep in sight of land the whole way, that two weeks is entirely reasonable.

Here's how it breaks down. The trip is about 300 crow-fly nautical miles, but hugging the shoreline adds 150 nautical miles (1 NM=1.15 miles or 1.85 km, if you live in the civilized world). 15th-Century galley speed in the Mediterranean averaged about two knots. Assuming the ship sailed only during daylight and pulled in to port every evening -- pretty much de rigueur for ships in the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age until the 19th-century (for reference, the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 is still all about oar-powered ships not all different from triremes) -- then two weeks turns out to be a perfectly reasonable travel time.

The TLDR? There's lots of innovation going on for Discovery-Age ocean-going vessels, but Mediterranean trade and travel would almost certainly stick to the tried and true and time-tested modalities.

I never doubted you for a second, AE, but I love figuring this sort of thing out on my own and thought I'd show my work. Great job, as usual.

Please allow me 3 comments:

1. I do not think that Trieste was ever (!) apart of the otoman empire.

2. It would be nice if you added a link to the producer of the original map (for copyright reasons, but also for improvement suggestions, like 1.).

3. I like your work a lot. I find it fascinating how you turned a spy story into a historical epos and wonder whether it will return to becoming a spy story again.