Mid-Afternoon Map: What’s With the Wettin Lands

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible. Sometimes, maps help make sense of the world. Other times, they capture its hopeless confusion. Today’s map, from William Shepherd’s repeatedly reprinted Historical Atlas, is one of the hopelessly confusing ones. The magic of this map lies in how precisely it conveys the geography of a region called the Wettin Lands without giving