Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Who held the map? Twelve centuries of the world in flags

Title card reading 'Who held the map?' in black on cream, beside a world map of 1914 in which each area is filled with its holder's flag: the Union Flag across Canada, India and much of Africa, the Russian tricolour across Russia, the Stars and Stripes, Brazil's green and gold. Text: 3.7% of land under a flag in 1500, 97% in 2010.

What would one of those world-maps-made-of-flags look like in 1500, or 1000? I built it: twelve centuries of the world map, area by area, each piece of land filled with the flag of whoever held it at the time. The most interesting part turned out to be the land where no flag can honestly be drawn.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

You have probably seen the image: a world map where every country is filled with its own flag, the Stars and Stripes stretched across the United States, the Maple Leaf across Canada, the tricolour across Russia. I like it a lot, and it made me want to run it backwards. Whose flag would cover the land where Boston stands in 1700? What flew over Beijing in 1880, or Venice in 1500?

Two open datasets make it possible. Aleš Ourednik’s historical-basemaps project draws the world at many dates, naming each area and the power that controlled it. Wikidata records the flags of many states, often with the years each was in use, and Wikimedia Commons holds the pictures. I joined them for 30 dates from 800 to 2010, and put the result on a map with a play button.

Six small world maps for 1200, 1500, 1700, 1815, 1914 and 2010. In 1200 and 1500 the world is almost entirely in muted plain colours and beige hatching for peoples and cultural regions, with a few small flags in Europe. By 1700 Spanish and Portuguese colours spread through the Americas. In 1815 the United States, Russia and the Spanish and Portuguese empires carry flags. In 1914 and 2010 nearly every area is filled with a flag, the Union Flag across much of Africa and India in 1914
The world in flags at six dates. Only flags recorded as in use that year are drawn; everything else is plain, hatched or blank.

A map with almost no flags

Press play from the year 800 and the first surprise is how long the map stays empty of flags. In the year 1000 not one piece of land can honestly be filled with a flag in use at the time. Heraldry had not yet emerged, and 48% of the world’s land belonged to peoples and cultural regions rather than states. Even in 1500 the share of land under a flag in use is just 3.7%.

That is a choice, and an important one. Wikidata does hold flags for the Ottomans of 1400, but marks them as fictitious, and for Muscovy in 1530 it offers today’s Russian tricolour. Many medieval flags online are modern reconstructions. So I set rules. A flag is shown only if its recorded dates cover the year, or if it is an undated flag of a state that no longer exists, within that state’s lifetime and after 1150. Otherwise the area gets a coat of arms or royal banner where one fits, or a plain colour with its name. Flags Wikidata marks as fictitious or conjectural are never used. The Ottomans, for example, stay plain until their red flag with crescent and star is recorded from 1844.

Map of Europe in 1600 filled with flags and banners: the red cross of St George over England and Ireland, the blue saltire of Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire's black eagle on gold across central Europe, the red Cross of Burgundy over Spain, the French royal arms, the Polish-Lithuanian royal banner, the Danish cross, while the Ottoman Empire in the south-east is plain grey-green
Europe in 1600: crosses, eagles and royal arms, and a plain Ottoman Empire, for which no flag is recorded that year.
Stacked area chart from 800 to 2010 of the share of the world's land by what the map shows. Until 1500 the land is mostly peoples and cultural regions (tan) and states with no flag recorded (grey-blue), with almost no red. Red, flags in use, grows from about 1650, passes half in 1878 and reaches 97% in 2010
Share of the world’s land by the emblem the map can show, at each snapshot.

The map fills in the 18th and 19th centuries, as national flags spread from ships to states and the European empires carried theirs across the world. The share passes half in the 1878 snapshot and reaches 97% in 2010.

The biggest flags on the map

The largest single entry in the basemap at any date is the Mongol Empire in 1279, with 20.5% of the world’s land in one connected land empire, and it has no flag on the map: none is recorded for it. It was not the largest empire overall, though: counting only the United Kingdom and its self-governing dominions, the British Empire in 1914 held 24.1%. From 1600 the largest single entry in every snapshot is Russia, as Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The British Empire is trickier: the basemap gives the dominions their own names, so the United Kingdom’s own land peaks at 11.0% in 1914, or 24.1% with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa added.

Bar chart listing the largest holder of land at each of the 30 snapshots with its flag where one is shown: the Abbasid Caliphate in 800 and 900, small khanates around 1000 and 1100, the Mongol Empire with the longest bar from 1200 to 1400, then Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the USSR and Russia from 1600 to 2010
The largest holder of land at each snapshot, as a share of the world’s land.

European states held 4.9% of the world’s land in 1492 and 46.1% in 1914, counting Russia; without Russia the peak is 29.9%. Some of the ups and downs are the basemap’s labelling rather than history, which I explain in the paper.

Stacked area chart from 1492 to 2010 of the share of the world's land held by European states: a thin blue band for land in Europe, a red band for land outside Europe that grows to over a quarter of the world in 1914 and nearly vanishes by 1960, and a grey band for Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the USSR that grows to about a sixth of the world
Share of the world’s land held by European states, 1492 to 2010.

One place, many flags

My favourite view is the simplest: pick a city and read its flags across time. The land where Boston stands is shown until 1400 as the country of eastern North American hunter-gatherers, then as the land of the Massachusett and the Iroquois, then under England, Great Britain and, from 1783, the United States. Beijing passes from the Tang to the Liao, the Mongols, the Ming, the Qing, the warlords, the Republic of China and the People’s Republic. Moscow has the most holders of the sixteen cities I followed: 9.

Grid of sixteen cities by thirty snapshots, each cell showing the flag or colour of the holder of the city at that date. Rows such as Boston run from hatched cells for peoples to the St George's cross, the Union Flag and then the Stars and Stripes; London shows the royal banner of England, then the St George's cross and the Union Flag; Beijing's row is plain until Qing dragon flags appear in 1878
Who held sixteen cities at each snapshot, shown by their flags.

In the year 1000, not one piece of land can honestly be filled with a flag. By 2010, 97% can.

How old are today’s flags, honestly?

Charts of when every country adopted its flag do the rounds too, usually without sources. Wikidata gives a start date for the current flag of 93 of 194 present-day countries, so that is what I plotted, and I left the rest out rather than guess. The median is 1986, much younger than flags feel, partly because Wikidata often dates the current version: Japan’s flag from the 1999 law, Italy’s from a change of shade in 2006, France’s from a darker blue in 2020. Denmark’s Dannebrog, often called the oldest of all, has no date and is missing.

Bar chart of present-day countries by the 20-year period in which their current flag's Wikidata start date falls: a handful before 1940, then 21 in the 1960s and 70s, 26 in the 1980s and 90s and 22 in the 2000s and 2010s
When the current version of each country’s flag began, according to Wikidata, by 20-year period.

What the map cannot say

Many areas on the older maps are peoples or ways of life rather than states: Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherers, Bantu peoples, the Sámi, the nations of the Americas. They are shown hatched with their own names. Many of these societies governed themselves without states, and none used a national flag of the European kind; the flags some use today are modern and would be wrong on a map of 1500. The basemaps are simplified and in places disputed, borders before 1500 were often zones rather than lines, and the flags are those Wikidata knows, so well-documented states are rich in them. Treat a flag on a medieval map as a state’s recorded emblem, not proof that it flew there that year.

How I did this

I took the 30 historical-basemaps snapshots from 800 to 2010, measured each area’s land on an equal-area grid, and joined spelling variants of each holder. I corrected 2 clear labelling errors in the 1930 map. Each holder was matched to Wikidata items by name, choosing for each year an item whose founding and end dates cover it, and I set the items by hand for 76 important holders such as France’s kingdom and republics, the Qing, and both Chinas: 78.7% of states matched, covering 94.2% of the land they held. Flags then follow the rules above. Borders are not interpolated between snapshots. Every one of the 413 images is credited with its licence, and the data and code are free to reuse.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Ourednik A and contributors, historical-basemaps, GPL-3.0. The simplified boundaries I publish derive from it and are GPL-3.0 too.
  • Wikidata (flags, coats of arms and dates), CC0, via QLever.
  • Flag and coat of arms images from Wikimedia Commons, each credited with its licence in the credits file; two present-day flags from flag-icons (MIT).
  • Natural Earth present-day countries (public domain).
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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