Category talk:Battle fronts of the Eighty Years' War

Some issues

Example of a long-used oversimplified map that is wrong on many levels:
• By saying this was the situation in '1579', you're impying all the gold-coloured provinces/cities in the north were already members of the Union of Utrecht in that year, but in many cases they only joined in 1580 or later.
• Walloon Flanders was separate from Flanders.
• Tournaisis was separate from Flanders/Hainaut, and never joined the Union of Arras.
• No cities in Brabant ever joined the Union of Arras.
• Namur, Limburg and Luxemburg had nothing to do with the Union of Arras.
• Showing the language border may be useful, but in this case it is misleading, because it implies that language was an important factor why the French-speaking grey areas seceded from the General Union and the green areas were easily reconquered by the Spanish Army, while the Dutch-speaking gold areas apparently suddenly collectively decided to continue fighting.
These are the kind of mistakes we should try to avoid.

Most maps in this category are directly or indirectly the product of the nl:Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Frontverloop Tachtigjarige Oorlog, Dutch Wikipedia WikiProject that was very active from 2008 to 2009, then had some slumber until going inactive around 2016. Most of its participants including Stuntelaar, Pompidom, kweniston and Arch / Henk B. (known under various aliases) have now become inactive. A wide variety in formats, quality and details of maps have been made for the whole 1566 to 1648 period. I was actually one of the least qualified participants in the beginning, doing most of the data collection and turning it into Microsoft Paint maps (the "Nederlanden [year].png" maps are mine), which mostly Stuntelaar would then convert into refined maps (the "Tachtigjarigeoorlog-[year].png" maps). Then in 2013 Henk B. converted and updated many of these maps into .svg format (the "Tachtigjarige Oorlog [year].svg" maps). It was Rowanwindwhistler who then started translating these .svg maps to Spanish, which is very valuable to provide hispanophone readers access to our cartography of this war that has had such a profound historic and cultural impact on both language communities. I'm quite proud of what we've jointly accomplished, because the illustrative/informative/educational "power" of these maps alongside Wikipedia articles is immense, although the work is far from "done", and far from perfect.

Unfortunately, these maps (including many I've created or edited) aren't without their problems. Much of this stems from a lack of proper knowledge at the time each edit was made, other times there are technical issues in the .svg format that require skills/experience to resolve. Here are some issues that anyone who would like to use, edit or improve these maps should be aware of (and that I alone cannot solve on my own):

• The maps do not make the slightest attempt to cite sources. I know, I know, I am complicit in setting these bad examples. Some time ago I published Commons:Evidence-based mapping, a summary of all existing policies, guidelines and recommendations to stimulate citing reliable sources for whatever information one seeks to visualise in a map. In the future, we should probably try to support our edits by referring to reliable sources that can be verified. This leads into the next problem:

• The political status of various territories at the time shown. Although historians have not figured all of these out yet (if ever), most of these issues have now been settled, but misconceptions continue to exist and sometimes made it into our maps.
  • The Imperial City of Cambrai and the Prince-Bishopric of Cambrésis are frequently incorrectly portrayed as part of the Habsburg Netherlands / Seventeen Provinces, and by extension a member of the Union of Arras, but it was formally independent and part of the Westphalian-Rhenish Imperial Circle rather than the Burgundian. It was similar to the Prince-Bishropric of Liège and the Principality of Stavelot-Malmedy in that regard; Catholic ecclesiastical territories rather than part of the Habsburg Erblande. Nevertheless, the city of Cambrai had a Spanish garrison for most of the 16th and 17th centuries. An exception is the Sept 1580 - August 1581 Siege of Cambrai (nl:Beleg van Kamerijk (1581)), when the city was apparently occupied by Calvinist rebels and besieged by Spanish forces until the pro-rebel Duke of Anjou relieved the city. That doesn't make it part of the Habsburg Netherlands though, any more than the rebel occupation of Rhineland cities such as Rheinberg and Erkelenz made them part of the Habsburg Netherlands.
  • The County of Saint-Pol is sometimes regarded as part of the County of Artois, sometimes separately.
  • The castellanies of Lille (Rijsel), Douai (Dowaai) and Orchies, sometimes known as Walloon Flanders or Rijsels-Vlaanderen, are sometimes regarded as part of the County of Flanders, but this is probably incorrect; they formed a separate province represented in the States-General.
  • Tournai and the Tournaisis are sometimes incorrectly included with the County of Hainaut/Henegouwen or Walloon Flanders, but they formed a separate province represented in the States-General. It is a common misconception that they joined the 1579 Union of Arras, but they never did.
  • The Lordship of Mechelen was independent of the Duchy of Brabant.
  • The County of Lingen was part of the Lordship of Overijssel.
  • The status of Drenthe is unclear, but it probably never had its own representation at the States-General, neither under the Habsburgs nor in the Republic.
  • The County of Zutphen was an autonomous part of the Duchy of Guelders until 1591; it usually couldn't make its own decisions, but it ratified the Union of Utrecht later than the rest of Guelders.

• Technical issues in .svg maps. These issues are not found in the (first-generation) .png maps, even though the .svg format is generally preferable.
  • The layers are sometimes incorrect, e.g. 1579 the Brugse Vrije obscuring the cities of Brugge and Sluis (I don't know how to fix it).
  • The towns are sometimes out of place, some rivers seem to have disappeared (I don't know how to fix it).

I'll leave it here for anyone who is interested. I'm not addressing anyone in particular yet, but I may refer to this talk page entry later if an issue comes up at some point that needs to be urgently resolved. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:08, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

For some more info on the issues with Cambrai and the Cambrésis, the County of Saint-Pol, as well as colouring issues, see User_talk:Nederlandse_Leeuw#File:Tachtigjarigeoorlog-1579.png. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:32, 20 July 2022 (UTC)