Beauplan’s Ukraine: open access georeferenced databases for studies of early modern history of Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

In 1630, Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan, travelled to the lands of Poland-Lithuania to begin a seventeen-year military career in the Crown army. The purpose of the Beauplan’s Ukraine (BU) project is to provide a set of open access, georeferenced databases for the populated places, rivers, river fords, river rapids, islands, forests, mountains, valleys, and travel paths that are shown on a selection of maps created by Beauplan. The purpose of this document is to describe how these databases and related materials can be accessed and applied by scholars, with the ultimate goal of this work being to convert the rich source of information provided by Beauplan’s maps into a viable instrument for the laboratory of the historian of south-eastern Europe in Early Modern times.

Keywords

• beauplan
• ukraine
• poland
• lithuania
• ottoman empire
• frontier studies