Township boundaries and the colonization of the Moravian landscape

Abstract The colonization of European landscapes during and after the Middle Ages has been studied by historical geographers for more than a century. While many details of colonization processes are well understood, landscape-scale studies are largely missing not least because of the difficulties in obtaining compatible temporal data for thousands of villages and the difficulties researchers had to face in processing such data prior to the emergence of historical GIS. In addition, several aspect of colonization history have so far received little attention. One such aspect is trends in the size and shape of the landscape units created in consecutive colonization waves. In this paper we use temporal data – the first mentions of each township in archival documents and a relative chronology based on village layout type – and topographic and environmental data – area, perimeter, area/perimeter ratio, average elevation, annual average temperature, annual average precipitation, prevailing bedrock and soil fertility for each township – to study the process of colonization in 3574 townships in the eastern half of the Czech Republic from the eleventh to the twentieth century. We demonstrate that first mentions in archival documents and current township boundaries can be successfully connected and interpreted at the landscape scale. Our results confirm that colonization progressed from lowlands towards higher altitudes. Less easily anticipated was the pattern in the size of current townships along the temporal gradient specified by first mentions. A significant connection was also observed between the perimeter/area ratio of current townships and spatiotemporal processes, but this pattern was not simply dependent on topography. Current township sizes appear to have been significantly influenced by colonization history, which we offer as a working hypothesis for further research in medieval and post-medieval European landscape colonization.