I have long held a fascination with maps, particularly historical maps. My sophomore and junior years of high school saw my bedroom’s little hangout nook covered in maps I swiped from my grandmother’s National Geographic magazines. There were maps of China and Mars, a sweeping map of Genghis Khan’s conquest of Asia, an immediate post-Soviet collapse map of Russia covered with these key questions wondering how Russia will get by. Over my bed was a map of the United States, which I had drawn over to accomodate an alternate-history world I was devising, and over my dresser one of Italy, covering the evolution of its borders from the Roman Empire to Unification. There was a large map of Australia toward the ceiling, which I’m sure must have been intentionally ironic on my part, and a diagram of the solar system immediately opposite.

What amazes me about maps is how they color our perception of the world, even in things as basic as “north” being “up,” which is itself a fairly recent convention. In China and much of the Pacific world, they use maps centered on the Pacific ocean, meaning we’re in the Far East, while American maps take the perspective that Western Europe is more or less the center of the world, and everything orients itself from there.

Maps have even colored our understanding of history.

Most maps in history books of the Western World are, more or less, centered on Germany, with Russia  bleeding off the edge and Turkey off on the periphery if it shows up at all. At most, we see the tip of Morocco, and that’s it for North Africa. Europe seems mightily unconcerned with the Muslim world, and we’re mightily surprised to learn that North Africa spent seven-hundred years in the Christian column, and Turkey at least twelve-hundred. To our eyes, the conquest of the southern portion of the Mediterranean basin seems sensible; it’s clearly outside of Europe’s sphere. It’s unimportant. And of course we lost the Crusades — they were aaaaalllll the way over there, on the edge of the map. Holding it wouldn’t have made any sense.

But look at maps from the time, and see how they saw the world.

Asia on top. Europe and Africa on either side of the bottom, and Jerusalem square in the middle, the axis of the whole world, its very center and pivot. Europe didn’t see itself as the center of anything, but as one edge of a Christian world that rapidly began to collapse when Islam blasted its way out of Mecca. The drive to take Jerusalem and the Holy Land was an attempt to recapture, not some colonial periphery, but the key of the world.