Euratlas Historical Vector Data

The Euratlas Historical Vector Data describe the political situation in Europe at the turn of each century A.D. The map covers Europe from 15 degrees west to 50 degrees east, 20 degrees north to 60 degrees north. Duke Univeristy is licensed to provide this data to current Duke Univeristy students, faculty, and staff for four centuries, listed below.

Each archive provides all shapefiles associated with the listed century. The shapefiles included vary by century, but all contain shapefiles identifying the following:

Political: autonomous peoples, cities, second level administrative regions, sovereign states, and sovereign dependent states, each in both Latin-1 and UTF-8 formats.
Political: Uncertain borders as a complement to sovereign state borders. These are unnamed polygons.
Physical: Major rivers, minor rivers, seas.

Later years also contain first level administrative regions and supranational entities, each in both Latin-1 and UTF-8 formats.

IMPORTANT NOTE: These layers use the projection World Mercator (Meters), but the internal coding uses a Standard Reference ID (SRID) value of 3395 according to the European Petroleum Survey Group (EPSG) and Esri uses a Well-Known ID (WKID) number of 54004 for the same projection, so ArcGIS doesn't recognize it (calls the projection "undefined"). Run the ArcGIS tool Define Projection (Data Management) on the EurAtlas layers you wish to use, and specify Projected Coordinate Systems ... World ... Mercator (World), which will then correctly identify the internal i.d. code for use by ArcGIS.

Archive of All Shapefiles by Century

1st century A.D. (0) / See the bibliography
7th century A.D. (600) / See the bibliography
13th century A.D. (1200) / See the bibliography
16th century A.D. (1500) / See the bibliography
17th century A.D. (1600) / See the bibliography
18th century A.D. (1700) / See the bibliography
19th century A.D. (1800) / See the bibliography