Here’s a pretty nifty video showing Europe and the Middle East’s border changes over the last thousand years.
They have the dates in the upper left corner, but if you ignore those it’s kind of fun to try and guess the year based on the map changes.
Tres kewl. MY AP Euro kids were rapt.
Nice video. It really highlights the advantage of the Channel. The borders in the British Isles stay stable for year after year as the borders on the continent roll back and forth.
I like how Portugal is all like “No.”
TL/DW
Who won?
Norway looks bored.
I never new Lithuania was that big at one time. There was a huge Lithuania next to a moderate sized Poland. The it became a hugger Poland-Lithuania. And a couple hundred years later there was a huge Poland, and a tiny Lithuania.
Europeans don’t know how to hold onto land at all. 
Although it would be fun if Risk had county level of detail and hundreds of players, the game might take 1000 years, but it would be fun.
This video makes me want to play Europa Universallis again.
About halfway through Switzerland just stays the same.
Good stuff.
There’s also the thirteenth century when suddenly half the map turns one color. “Hey, look, the Mongols are here!”
And yet, if you were to make a time-lapse of the same time period using photographs taken from orbit, you’d be hard pressed to notice any changes.
Everyone who’s interested in this: check out the Paradox series of historically based computer games, specifically Crusader Kings 2 (1066-1463) and Europa Universalis 3 (1399-1821) - EU4 released later this year. Deep and detailed historical simulation and gameplay.
France should have moved east and taken all those Risk cards.
Lithuania had a sea-coast on the Black Sea!?! Who knew?
Recently I stumbled onto this timeline of human history. Might be a good read to go with those videos.
There goes my morning.
It is interesting the shifting of the lines. Each time one of those lines moved, it meant liberation for some, and oppression for others, and death for still others as a result of whatever conflict preceeded the line shift, I am sure.
But, this has been going on for more than the past 1000 years. IMHO we have been wanting to carve out a piece of land for “our kind” for a long time. I wonder how many more lines we will see form, and shift, as world populations climb and there is more competition for land and resources.
Part of my ancestry is from the city of Lviv in the Ukraine. My grandfather was born there in the early 1900s, and was marked as Austrian on his immigration form at Ellis Island. The city became part of Poland, then Germany, then USSR, and now Ukraine - all in the past 100 years. Prior to that the city belonged to many other entities. Crazy.