ZOF · Zona Franca – Ideas of Territory in the Carolingian Empire

ZOF: Zona Franca – Ideas of Territory in the Carolingian Empire

ZOF investigated discourse on territory in the Carolingian empire. Focus of research was terms and names that were used to designate territory at the southeastern edges of the empire: the areas east of the river Enns along the Danube and Pannonia, the Eastern Alps and north-eastern Italy. By investigating the discourse on the three main levels - imperial, regional and local - ZOF shed light on the different strategies applied by Carolingian actors to appropriate territory and integrate it into the empire. Some of those strategies failed, but some were highly successful. The second objective of the project was to store the found terms and names in a database and to trace the different territories on online maps. In this way the different perspectives and aims of the various actors can be identified more clearly. It enables the user to better understand the ideas and order of territorial spaces from a medieval perspective: fluid areas and spheres of (more or less) influence, power struggles and vague ideas of the actual territory and even some linear borders. For this a database was created. The database can be accessed and searched via the projects website zonafranca.info at www.zonafranca.info/database. Traditional ways of historical maps to visualise those entities are not able to grasp medieval ideas on borders and territory - ZOF developed methods to depict those more accurately according to medieval discourse. ZOF broadened the scope of existing historical maps of the Carolingian Empire by researching and supplementing information from mediaeval source texts, such as spatial narratives or ideas and descriptions that have previously been dismissed as improbable. It critically analysed sources through methods of discourse theory, critical cartography and digital humanities, especially geographic information systems, to create more inclusive maps of the Carolingian Empire. The resulting maps provides a comprehensive historical view of Carolingian territories. Some maps will be published in project-publications (to be expected within 2025), others are available at specific database entries at www.zonafranca.info/database.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union