Known as Peutinger’s Tabula or the Peutinger Table it shows the layout of the Roman Empire’s Road network. Stretching across Europe, North Africa, India, Asia, and parts of the Middle East it very sadly does not include Britain which suggests that a section of the map did not either did not survive antiquity or the early Middle Ages. The version that exists today dates from about 1200 and is a copy of an early scroll, made by a monk in Colmar, which seems to date to about AD400 and which in turn was a copy of an early map. It can today be found in the Austrian National Library in Vienna but is too delicate to be put on display.
Rather than looking like a modern road map it bears a greater resemblance to the London Underground map because of its schematic nature. The map was designed to be used with Roman ‘itineraries’ which identified locations and the distances between therm in typically efficient manner. The most important of the Empire’s cities – Rome, Constantinople and Antioch are decorated so that they are easy to find and then journeys can be calculated from and to these locations. In total there are 555 cities on the map as well as more than 3,000 other place names. These correspond with elements of the Antonine Itinerary.
The scroll was rediscovered in a library in Worms in 1494 and was bequeathed to Konrad Peutinger in 1508, although its not entirely certain whether the scroll was acquired by legitimate means. The map was first published in 1598 but rather distressingly Peutinger took pains to hide where the map originated when his friend Conrad Celtes ‘acquired’ it. It sounds like a novel waiting to happen if you ask me!
Today Peutinger’s Table can be explored online:
https://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/space/tpeut.htm
Barber, Peter. (ed.). The Map Book.(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)