Chris Hughes exhibit - Summer 2025
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Battle of Blenheim
This map depicts the Battle of Blenheim during the War of Spanish Succession. The war began following the death of Charles II of Spain, who left behind no direct heirs. In his will, Charles left the Spanish crown to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France. Fearing a consolidation of French power, England, the Dutch Republic, Austria, and Prussia formed the Grand Alliance, backing Archduke Charles of Austria for the Spanish throne.
In 1704, the French and their Bavarian allies were threatening Vienna, and with it, the fate of the Spanish crown. However, in just five weeks, the first Duke of Marlborough's army had marched more than 250 miles from the low countries to Bavaria to meet and attempt to stop the French at Blenheim.
Anna Beek, 1704, The Hague, Courtesy of Rich Breiman
A Famous Victory
How clearly?
Another Map of the Battle of Blenheim
Here's another map of the Battle of Blenheim. Despite its style, it is a contemporary map made by John Fawkes. This map is more legible, and not just because it is in English. The positions of the armies are clearly intelligible, but one loses the motion of the battle. What is gained in intelligibility is lost in information.
Map from BritishBattles.com
The Tradeoff
That brings us to what I see as the principal tradeoff of battle maps, between legibility and information. This is a tradeoff faced by all mapmakers, but it may be most obvious in battle maps because of the sheer quantity of non-geographic information they contain, like time. In making battle maps, cartographers must carefully balance the two, and Beek's map of Blenheim is just one approach to the problem.
Aire-sur-la-Lys
Beek's map of Blenheim appears so busy in part because of the complexities of battle. Unlike a feature like a river or street, there's no obvious way depicting the movements of troops across a small field over time.
One way to get around the tradeoff is not to depict a battle at all. If troop movements are hard to map, why map them? Instead, this map provides an overview of the French city of Aire-sur-la-Lys as it appeared following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713-1715), which ended the War of Spanish Succession. Although it does not show an active conflict — there was none at the time — it provides a detailed view of the fortifications surrounding the cities, which would doubtlessly be helpful to any would-be invaders.
Siege of Maastricht
This map shows the 1676 Siege of Maastricht, an unsuccessful attack by William of Orange to retake the now-Dutch city from France during the Franco-Dutch war.
It strikes a balance between geographical and military information by including both a map (without troop movements) and an image of the proceedings. Perhaps most interestingly, it includes a side profile of the city’s fortifications, which would doubtlessly be useful to the Dutch army.
The Siege of Alkmaar (Het Beleg van Alkmaar)
This 1703 depiction of the 1573 siege of Alkmaar is almost entirely pictorial. The siege, which took place in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years War, was a victory for Dutch rebels, who successfully held off their Hapsburg Spanish rulers.
Instead of splitting the depiction into separate map and pictorial elements, this image combines the two, with a geographically faithful creation of the city's surroundings in the background and an image of the Hapsburgian armies in the foreground. While the course of the siege is clearly visible, as are some geographic details, neither is as detailed as Beek's map of Blenheim, the entire thing, however, is much more legible without further context.
William of Orange crossing the English Channel
Military information is often scarcely legible on a map, so why include a map at all? This 1698 image depicts of the armada of William of Orange and Mary Stuart crossing from Hellevoetsluis, in the Netherlands, to England at the beginning of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. The massive armada is correctly and carefully pictured, but not in any particular place.
This is a presentation on maps, after all, and the map is not without geographic detail. At the top of the map the south coast of England and its principal cities are laid out accurately.
The Tradeoff?
It is difficult to map an individual battle, all of the approaches we have looked at, some more creative than others, have succeeded in some areas and fallen short in others. Maps can't depict a battle alone, and in many of the cases we've examined, an image or written description can better serve a viewer. Today, videos can provide compelling and readily graspable depictions of battles, too.
So perhaps maps are not the ideal medium for depicting a single battle, but the cost of the tradeoff between legibility and information could be lessened by changing the information depicted in a map. Instead of focusing on a single battle, maps of military campaigns focus on a larger conflict, and are more successful in transmitting complex information legibly.
William Faden's 1777 Battle of Trenton Map
Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Many thanks to Ron Gibbs for walking me through this image.
Minard Hannibal and Napoleon
These maps are by Charles Joseph Minard, a French who pioneered the use of numerical information on maps.
Like the Revolutionary War maps we saw previously, both maps focus on military campaigns, with the upper on Hannibal's march through the Alps and the lower map focusing on Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Imposed on a geographic map are lines with three relevant details, the position of the army, the date they reached their position, and army's size.
Centuries Later
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