forummapping

In just 33 years, Europe went from barely touching Africa to owning almost all of it — the Scramble for Africa in two maps.

Russia 143.5 million, Turkey 85.9, Germany 83.5, UK 69.5, France 68.7, Spain 49.4. Iceland: 0.4. Europe's population, country by country.

The Golden Horde stretches endlessly east while the Holy Roman Empire and a young Kingdom of Hungary hold the center — high medieval Europe in full color.

1492 is remembered for Columbus. On the map of Europe the same year also closed Muslim rule in Iberia and expelled Jews from Spain. a thread 🧵🗺️

Baroque was the Counter-Reformation's answer to austerity: drama, gold and motion. It reached from Rome to Moscow — the widest spread of any European style.

Germany still had over 60 million people right after losing a world war — the population numbers behind interwar Europe might surprise you.

One assassination away from catastrophe: this is the tangled alliance system that turned a regional dispute into a world war.

Before Spain and Portugal as we know them, Iberia was split between Christian kingdoms and the Almohad Caliphate.

Verdun, the Somme, Tannenberg, Caporetto. Each name on this map of World War I battles carries a number that still shocks. Here are six. a thread 🧵🗺️

Turkey: 26.4 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic metre. Poland 16.5, Romania 16.0. Finland: 4.6. Sweden 5.3. Norway 5.5.

Most of the world generates under 10% of its power from nuclear. France is the standout on the map, with parts of Northern and Eastern Europe in the 25-50% band.

Mezzofanti reportedly spoke dozens of languages, but even a tsar and a founding father make this multilingual lineup surprising.

France gets 67.2% of its electricity from nuclear, Slovakia 65.6%. Germany: 1.4%. Poland: 0.0%. Europe's nuclear divide.

Spanish dominates almost the entire continent's wishlist, except for a few holdouts clinging to French, German, or Russian.

Austria-Hungary lost the war, then the peace. The Treaty of Saint-Germain, signed on 10 September 1919, shows who got what. a thread 🧵🗺️

Pointed arches, flying buttresses, impossible windows. Gothic swept from Paris across Europe from the 1140s — and stopped almost exactly at the Orthodox and Ottoman frontier.

From coups to assassinations, this map marks every country whose head of state met a violent end since 1972.