Project Goals
The main goal of my project is to experiment with digital tools to visualize and analyze the ways that the spatial configuration of Prussia changed over the course of the crusades. I am defining “spatial configuration” along a number of axes. It is, most obviously, physical. Europeans cleared marshes and chopped down trees in order to clear land for cultivation; they constructed bridges, castles, and towns. There is also a mental component. Crusaders’ first impressions of the region are of a bleak, dark, and pagan wilderness. By 1309, the Teutonic Knights’ headquarters at Marienburg castle (modern Malbork) entertained kings and nobles with lavish feasts, heated floors, and covered walkways. Social and political structures also define the experience and organization of space. Christians organized newly acquired territory into bishoprics, towns, and duchies which parceled out land and its inhabitants by systems which had been developing in the Latin West for centuries. Culturally, the region was enfolded into Christendom; and economically, enfolded into trade networks spanning from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and beyond.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of ways we can understand and study the configuration of space. I am interested in using this project as a means to develop tools to visualize and analyze each overlapping layer and their many connections.