“Groundplan of the old Zürich in the year 1504", Zürich, Heinrich Keller, 1829 | Central Library Zürich, Public Domain Mark

Of Maps and Men | Pt. 1

Let’s try ourselves at creating a medieval township

Michael Stocker
Universe Factory
Published in
7 min readSep 18, 2017

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There’s many aspects and layers of building and mapping new Worlds. In this article I will do my best to address the concerns of topography (the Where) and infrastructure (the What).

In what I write I rely heavily on my formal education (aka. History classes), personal experience of growing up & living in the European countryside as well as this handy article by S. John Ross on the demographics of your Fantasy World:

The Surroundings

Let’s get this going by learning some bits about topography.

Hills

Hills are amazing. Not only do they offer great views compared to flat-lands and valleys, they also provide benefits such as more sunlight (depending on which slope you’re standing on) and some (relatively) dry land during torrents of rain due to their elevation.

They are often chosen as a place for fortifications or other important buildings, such as the odd inn along a busy trade-route, the village church or the governor’s mansion (well, really any mansion or estate for that matter).

Forests

They are the thing. Not only are they an excellent source of wood, a great building material as well as a valuable commodity used for almost anything from fueling a hearth fire to being the base material for ornate tables and benches in a nobleman’s household; they also provide a host of other materials as well as plenty of food, and fulfill many a purpose besides looking gorgeous.

Forest floors are made up of a substrate consisting of dead leaves, rotting trees and lots of other plant-matter. They provide an ideal medium for various edible and inedible plants and fungi to grow and thrive; the dead wood is also a favourite of many insects — especially larvae and worms (yummy proteins). The many roots and dead trees also provide ample spaces for smaller and medium animals to burrow and multiply.

Water

Water makes & breaks things. Too little of it and nothing can grow, too much of it and nothing will persist. Lakes and rivers provide a lifeline for any area they are found in. They are, again, just like forests, teeming with life, providing a home to anything from small insects to fish as big as a man.

Brooks fed by rain, meltwater or springs grow into creeks. Creeks form into streams which join up to become rivers. Rivers grow in size as they converge and eventually flow into the sea. In-between of this sequence can be any number of freshwater ponds and lakes — often situated in valleys or basins.

Where To Settle?

The next step is applying the above knowledge to find a place where a settlement can prosper.

Freshwater Access

As already mentioned this is the maker & breaker of any settlement. Without access to fresh water, plants and humans will wither and eventually die.

While fresh water can be obtained by digging a deep hole and hoisting a bucket up and down it many times a day (colloquially called a well), a moving body of water such as a stream or a river is generally preferable. Not only can we obtain vast amounts of clean water for any purpose from it, we can also dispose of waste downstream.

While a lake can serve in a similar manner, it is less preferable as a source of ready-to-use potable-water. This is due to the fact that water tends to flow much slower inside a lake than it flows in the rivers feeding it or flowing out of it again. This is called the retention- or residence time. For example the water in Lake Zurich (a lake 40km long, 3km wide and some 50m deep) takes an average of 440 days to move from one end to the other. This means that any pollutants or contaminants will reside much longer than in a river.

In addition a river or lake can also serve as a trading route (e.g. moving goods downstream from a remote village to a bigger city).

Defensibility

If we’re going for anything bigger than a village we need to consider defenses. These can range from a single keep or a small castle on an elevated or otherwise preferable position, over palisades to full-blown stone walls and ditches.

Here terrain is key. Any natural features that aid in defensibility are to be incorporated. E.g. a settlement situated on a headland may only need a short stretch of walls; a river can complement any ramparts and force an attacker to ford it at a place you choose; natural caves can be incorporated into a keep, providing cheap but safe haven and storage in case of an attack.

Natural Resources

We already discussed the merits of forests — they provide trees to log, plants & fungi to gather and game to hunt. Any settlement up until the size of a small town will likely want to have easy access to woods. Anything bigger can afford to found satellite villages, usually lying upstream, that provide wood and other resources from forests.

Other than forests there are many interesting natural resources, some more beneficial to a small town than others. Leading on that list is access to large bodies of water, and thus fishing grounds. Fish can be caught and processed the whole year; other than the bodies of water freezing over in winter there are virtually no limitations to the medieval fishing industry — thus a settlement has a constant supply of fresh (albeit smelly) food. Another important resource is arable land. A square mile of developed land is able to support some 120–180 people (depending on the amount of forests, bodies of water, etc. in that area), thus a small to medium village works an area sized between 1½ and 3 square miles.

Moving away from food, staying with soil. Clay is always a good investment. It can be made into pots and dishes (pottery), bricks for building, and even has its applications in medicine. Another valuable resource, that can make settling wetlands more attractive, is peat (also known as turf). Peat is made up of compressed composed plant matter and is a pre-stage to brown coal (and so forth) — thus it is a great fuel for fires.

Less important for standalone villages but more attractive for satellites of bigger towns are mineral ores. During the Middle Ages silver-, copper-, iron-, lead- and tin-ores were the most common to be mined. Combine a ready source of fuel such as peat with a small supply of iron-ore and your settlement can start producing its own weapons and other iron implements.

The Human Touch

Having decided on a good spot we can go about adding a human element to our creation.

Growing a Town

Towns don’t just plop out of thin air (unless you’re in America). Settlements will usually form around some form of industry and then grow. Some will grow faster, some will grow slower. Depending on the speed a town grows it will form along less or more organized paths — making it look more or less organic.

New industries & services will move into the town the bigger it gets and trades- & craftsmen will start organising themselves into guilds. Quarters will form where similar trades converge (e.g. a merchant street or a bleacher alley).

Adding Defenses

Unless there’s already been a need for an early palisade before that, a town will want to start thinking about its first wall when reaching a size of some 3000 to 8000 inhabitants. Depending on the prosperity of a town (and thus the threat of it being attacked) a wall will be built earlier or later.

If a town did not grow around a castle or a keep, it is now that will be the last chance for one to be added. A keep or even castle would then be incorporated into the new city fortifications (e.g. replacing a simple gate, or a tower at the waterfront).

Depending on its location the town’s growth will eventually start to strain the capacity of the city-boundaries. New quarters will pop up outside the walls and eventually a second wall will need to be built (usually around 10'000 to 12'000 inhabitants). The former wall will by now mostly have been incorporated into buildings (e.g. as a supporting wall the building is built against), and might or might not be discernible as such anymore — it is up to you if you want to tear it down or keep it, but it will certainly lose most of its intended function.

Expansion

Favourable placement of a town will allow it to quickly gain in wealth and thus grow due to it becoming a trading hub. Local farmers will bring their produce to the town to sell it to traders and townsfolk. In turn the units and measures imposed by the town will spread and start being used in neighbouring places — making a town even more important.

If resources cannot be acquired through trading, satellite communities become a consideration. The most common of these are logging camps founded upstream from a town that slowly grow into their own communities — which exist solely to provide a city with their goods.

That’s it for the first part. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it!

In the next part we will step-by-step create our own map of a township based on what we learned in this article.

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Michael Stocker
Universe Factory

I like to do stuff and think way too much about how to make stuff seem logical and consistent.