Marches is a mapmaking workspace for historical research and teaching. Bring your places, draw the borders your sources describe, and show where the evidence is uncertain.
No account needed. Save your project to keep working; export a map for a paper, a lecture, or the web.
A free tool from the maker of RECTO/verso ↗, a workspace for the research behind your maps.
A single place date means “from this year onward.” Undated or unreadable dates always show. Approximate dates such as “c. 900” switch at the stated year. Range end years are inclusive. Leave From and To blank to use the dates in your map. The same years are used for playback, comparison grids, and image series.
Base map: Made with Natural Earth.
Historical maps are arguments about places, time, and evidence. Marches helps you make those arguments visible.
Marches is a free tool from the maker of RECTO/verso. If your work starts with archive photographs or manuscripts, RECTO/verso helps you organize images, transcribe and annotate them, keep track of sources and rights, and create cited figures, maps, and presentations.
Import a spreadsheet of places as a CSV, or find individual places through Wikidata. Connect places in order to make a route, or draw a frontier or the outline of a territory. Give your routes and borders dates and a source, then use the year filter to explore change over time. Routes show schematic connections between stops.
Mark borders as attested, approximate, or conjectural. Solid, dashed, and dotted lines carry those distinctions into your exported map. Individual sections can have their own certainty when the evidence varies along a boundary.
Choose a map style and adjust colors, symbols, labels, and geographic layers. Download SVG for further editing or PNG for documents and slides. Export a self-contained web map for readers to explore, or GeoJSON for use in GIS software.
Your project saves automatically in this browser. Use Save project to download a file you can back up or open on another computer. Browser storage can be cleared, so it should not be your only copy.
Your project data is processed in your browser. Find a place sends your search text to Wikidata; added places record their source and CC0 license. The base map uses public-domain Natural Earth data and modern coastlines. Check locations and coastlines against sources for the period you are studying.
ZIP downloads use fflate, © Arjun Barrett, under the MIT License. The base map is made with Natural Earth (public domain).
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