With the vast capabilities of today’s technology, we tend to take for granted the fact that it is possible for us to know virtually everything about a place before we get there. But how did people know what to expect when they undertook a journey before the advent of Google Earth, guidebooks, travel agents and tour companies?
I recently came across one answer to this question while underneath the Roman Arena in the town of Pula, situated on the southern tip of Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula. Mounted on the basement wall of the ancient arena is a copy (actually, a copy of a copy) of an equally ancient map, today known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, or Peutinger’s Map. The map is an itinerarium; an ancient Roman road map that gave travelers an idea of the distances between towns and other points of interest. It was not intended to accurately represent the geography of the empire; in fact, it could be more easily compared to today’s subway maps - displaying stops along a road network while leaving out information that was not of immediate use to the traveler. In both writing and small depictions, the map shows major cities, resting places, and thermal baths. All roads, of course, lead to Rome, which along with the two other major cities of the time – Constantinople and Antiochia – are shown with their own unique thumbnail images. Care was taken to display important thermal cities and public baths, information a weary traveler would be happy to have. Like today’s maps, different colors distinguish certain elements – principle roads, for example, are displayed in red, while bodies of water are greenish-blue.
Twenty two feet long but only one foot wide (6.8 m x 34 cm), the shape of the map at first strikes viewers as curious – why squish the entirety of the Roman Empire into such a long, thin rectangle? The purpose of the map was to be a tool for travelers, and as such, it was necessary for it to be, well, travel-sized. Drawn on parchment paper, the map would have originally been rolled up into a scroll. Travelers could easily unroll the map to see their area of interest, and then simply roll the scroll back up. Anyone today who has wrestled with refolding a large map can appreciate the utility of the Roman design.
While the original Tabula has been lost, a nearly complete copy was drawn by a monk from Colmar in the thirteenth century. The only missing segment of this map is the westernmost portion depicting what is today Britain and the Iberian Peninsula. Historians believe that this segment was lost in the original and was never part of the 13th century copy, though it was reconstructed in 1916 to provide us with a complete picture of what the map would have looked like. The map was tucked away in a library until it was rediscovered in 1494. Shortly after its rediscovery, the map was bequeathed to Konrad Peutinger, a German antiquarian after whom the copy is now named. In 1873 the map was torn into eleven segments for preservation purposes. These segments are today housed in the Department of Manuscripts, Autographs and Closed Collections in Vienna’s National Library, but due to their fragility are not on display to the public.
A number of innovative websites, however, now allow anyone with internet access to virtually navigate ancient Roman roads using this unique map. A useful starting site is Euratlas.net, which overlays the numbered map segments of Peutinger’s Map onto a modern world map to show the extent of the Tabula’s coverage and to compare it to a geographically accurate map. Both Euratlas.net and Romansites.com allow users to enlarge the map segments, but Romansites.com takes these enlargements one step further by identifying key sites when a mouse is held over them. Finally, the Bibliotheca Augustana website gives viewers an idea of the length of the map by showing the entire document in a single piece. Of the three sites, it also provides the clearest reproductions of each map segment.
UNESCO recognized the importance of Peutinger’s Map when it added the document to its Memory of the World Register in 2007. Not only is it historically significant, illustrating, for example, the importance of the Roman road system and the extent of the known world in Roman times, but it provides us with a humbling reminder that we are not the first civilization that, before setting out on a trip, packed up a map to aid us on our journey.
