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Social scientists, geographers and many historians have adopted the view that medieval and early modern borders were not linear but merely zones. This view has nowadays been widely accepted and repeated. As many medievalists have pointed out, however, it cannot be denied that many divisions between the powers in medieval Europe looked like clear, linear demarcating borders. Discussions regarding the characteristics of medieval borders have mostly led to the repetition of antagonistic viewpoints. The topic that has aroused the most discussion between these two standpoints among historians in Finland is the Nöteborg Peace Treaty of 1323. The aim of this article is to compare the Western European medieval concept of a border with the border we find described in the territorial division agreed upon by the princely powers of Novgorod and Sweden in 1323. Such a comparison will perhaps enable us to better understand how medieval borders functioned and how they were alike in many ways.Medieval and early modern borders have been a topic of intense discussion during the last two or three decades, the main emphasis having been on arguing whether medieval borders were linear, enclosing boundaries or zone-like frontiers. The geographer J. R. V. Prescott begins his classic study on borders as follows: 'Political frontiers and boundaries separate areas subject to different political control of sovereignty. Frontiers are zones of varying widths which were common features of the political landscape centuries ago. By the beginning of the 20th century, most remaining frontiers had disappeared and had been replaced by boundaries which are lines'. 1 The views expressed in Prescott's book, originally published in 1965, gained many followers, especially among persons engaged in research on state-building processes and the history of ethnicities and nationalism. Although the geographer Malcolm Anderson claimed rather drastically in his much cited book that exclusive linear borders hardly existed at all before the French Revolution of 1789, 2 medievalists have presented numerous examples of medieval divisions that were indeed linear and were clearly marked in the terrain. The debate on the nature of medieval borders has sometimes been a heated one, 3 but to my mind, it has not yet 'hit the nail on the head'. In order to understand the divisions between the medieval

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