Interactive maps of Europe in the 19th century (opens in new tab)

I was researching maps for a certian area that belonged to the kingdom of Bavaria, which is included in OP's link. That map is also almost completely available and accessable from germany's offical geoservices via WMS, which is nice. And the accuracy of these maps is astounding. (Whereas the 18. century map is mostly inaccurate in details) They are military maps, so it makes sense.

However I dug deeper into the history of these (bavarian) maps and suprisingly found that there are a lot more maps that built the basis of the military maps. And boy, they are uncannily accurate. And of course scattered among archives, survey offices and libraries.

I even managed to find a map with the exact locations of buildings that are still standing today. Manually georefercing them showed that they are often only a few centimeters off.

And to get back to this comment: I had a hard time finding a general map from the same area. And when i found it the office that held the records. They also didn't hold one map, but several maps that were made over the years. However they wwere extremly expensive and I was even bombarded with several limitations. E.g. if I'd publish it in a journal I MUST notify the office with details.

Parent comment is right, that they should be in the public domain, however some administrative bodies still believe that they should be guarded as state secrets, probably because these maps were the basis of tax registers and most of the land units on these maps are still the same 150 years later. Even though the same office publishes WMS data of todays situation for free on their website.

Thank you very much for that link, it's a god-sent. I've managed to find an early 1850s plan of my city, Bucharest [1], which is quite rare in itself, at least I don't know of any such good rendering available on the Internet (or I didn't use to know until now). I've also been able to find other really nice resources about my country, Romania.

[1] https://polona.pl/item/planul-bukurestului-ridikat-tras-chi-...

Depending on the country, you can find many public domain maps, scanned, in the Library of Congress.

Here's the famous 18th century Cassini map of France (first modern triangulated map, three generations of Cassinis worked on it)

https://www.loc.gov/item/gm72002942/

The LoC graciously scanned and hosts this copy. Arcanum also sells it: https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey...

You'll notice that the Arcanum map is scanned, tiled, and hosted as a modern web scrollable map.

Folks interested in historical maps of arbitrary places should also try searching the David Rumsey collection, which is all freely available online:

https://www.davidrumsey.com

Interesting, thanks for drawing attention to the partitioning of Moldavia. I have a superficial understanding of the medieval history of the regions of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, and their various annexations by their warring neighbours again and again, but wasn't aware of just how much post-Soviet/Russian Empire conflict still seems to be stirring, especially in Bessarabia.

> they'll annex Basarabia like they did in 1812 and again in 1940, to restore the 'glorious' Russian empire of the 19th century

How far into Ukraine do you think they would manage/are likely to go? Odessa oblast has some Russian ethics, but I'm not at all sure they are enough to allow for the kind of dynamics that took place further East.

And if Russia can't/doesn't want to hold Odessa, it will definitely not go as far as Basarabia.

> 2) No Tower Bridge

Was just looking at it before I returned here. Find word LONDON, to the right look for A100 next to St. Katherine's Pier.

221b is NE of the word, in Marleybone, between A41 and Regent's Park. Resolution too poor to see if the statue's there yet. https://osm.org/go/euu4Hniql

Here is the link: https://maps.nls.uk/

A fascinating resource.

One interesting difference between the 19th and 18th centuries in Europe is that the European nations qua "nations" didn't exist until the 19th century.

If you look closely, you can see that the railway lines were later drawn onto the map by hand:

https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-19century-secondsurve...

My family dropped a letter from its name in the same time - apparently because some Church of Scotland minister thought he knew how to spell the family name better than my ancestors did. My elder brother still has the family bible with the spelling change in place.

You might have to wait for it to load. I'm now looking at Moldova (where I come from), and it took ~10s to load a full resolution map. All details except the very very tiny ones are legible

I love the way the hills are drawn. Very different from the now common hillshade + isolines, but very clear nonetheless