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Imperial Geography and the Medieval Peutinger Map

Emily Albu

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2005

To cite this Article Albu, Emily(2005)'Imperial Geography and the Medieval Peutinger Map',Imago Mundi,57:2,136 148
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03085690500094909
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085690500094909

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Imperial Geography and the Medieval Peutinger Map

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EMILY ALBU
ABSTRACT: The Peutinger map is an extraordinary world map drawn c.1200 and long considered a copy of a
Roman road map made for late antique travellers. This paper presents arguments against these assumptions
and concludes that the lost original was more likely to be a Carolingian display map. Ninth-century scribes
had the expertise and resources necessary for creating an antiquarian work based on Roman itinerary lists,
while Carolingian rulers had ample motivation for commissioning a map to display their Roman imperial
ambitions.
KEYWORDS: Peutinger map, Roman itineraries, mappaemundi, Carolingian maps, Roman geography,
Charlemagne, Roman roads, Jerusalem, Hermann von Reichenau, Beatus maps.

The Peutinger map (often called the Peutinger

Table or Scroll), is an extraordinary world map.
The original parchment roll was 6.745 metres long
and 32 to 34 centimetres high, but at some point it
was separated into its eleven individual leaves,
now preserved in the Austrian National Library,
Vienna.1 The opening section, containing most of
Britain, has been lost. The surviving leaves depict
the rest of the inhabited world known to Roman
antiquity, from Britains eastern coastline to the
farthest shores of India and the island of Sri Lanka.2
Historians prize this map as a unique specimen, the
only world map to come down to us from ancient
Rome. In a recent article on Roman perceptions of
space, for instance, C. R. Whittaker noted that the
only certain [his italics] map, in any sense that we
would recognise it, to survive from antiquity is the
celebrated Peutinger Table, although preserved
in a medieval copy.3 He was repeating here the
received opinion about the map, as asserted by

O. A. W. Dilke: Its date of transcription is twelfth

or early thirteenth century, but it has long been
recognized as a copy of an ancient map.4
There are essentially two reasons, however, why
we need to consider this a medieval, rather than an
ancient, map. The first is the more obvious. The
map as we have it dates from around the year
1200. As we shall see, we cannot presume that
mapmakers copied their models with any precision. Even if there were an ancient prototype,
therefore, we could not reconstruct it from the
existing medieval map. The second reason is more
controversial, but one we must consider: we
cannot prove the existence of an ancient prototype.
In fact, there are better arguments for a Carolingian
original than for a Roman one.5

The Traditional Argument

First we need to understand why historians have
usually called this an ancient map. The Peutinger is

c Emily Albu is associate professor of classics at University of California, Davis. Correspondence to: Prof. Emily
Albu, Department of Spanish and Classics, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616,
USA. Tel: (1) 530 752 2739. Fax: (1) 530 752 2184. E-mail: [email protected].
Imago Mundi Vol. 57, Part 2: 136148
# 2005 Imago Mundi Ltd ISSN 0308-5694 print/1479-7801 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085690500094909

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The Medieval Peutinger Map

an itinerary map, recording routes gathered from
ancient Roman itinerary lists, with distances noted
between towns, spas and other landmarks along
the roads (Plate 1). These distinctive features have
led historians of cartography to treat this as a road
map created for late antique Roman travellers. The
data do come from Roman itineraries, perhaps
ultimately from publicly displayed lists of stages
and distances from one particular place to various
destinations, as Benet Salway has suggested.6 All
the routes that the map charts appear to coincide
with major Roman roads, some 70,000 Roman
miles of these roads as estimated by Dilke.7
Assuming that only travellers would commission
an itinerary map, and that no traveller would want
a map showing long defunct roads, inns and spas,
modern observers have inferred that the map
was roughly contemporary with the itineraries,
that is, Roman. Taking the cities featuredRome,
Constantinople and Antiochas further clues to
the maps inception, Dilke dated the archetype
quite precisely, to between AD 335 and 366.8
Finally, the shape of the map suggests that the
archetype was a papyrus roll, whose form this
parchment copy has faithfully preserved more
than eight hundred years later.9 Papyrus was the
preferred writing material in antiquity, and a
papyrus source meant an ancient source.
Internal evidence does indeed betray the
Peutinger map as a copy of another that had,
moreover, already lost its beginning when the
copyist set to work. Place-names at the left margin
of the first leaf are missing their initial letters, yet
they begin with capital letters, as if the copyist
thought this the start of the name. The scribe
evidently was not creating his map directly from
itinerary lists but must have worked from a
defective map already in existence.
To appreciate the arguments for a Carolingian
provenance for this lost original, we must first
disabuse ourselves of any thought that this was a
map for travellers. What traveller would ever need
to know all the possible routes from Britain to
India? We might imagine that such information, in
pictorial form, could somehow be useful for Roman
imperial officials. As Pascal Arnaud has shown,
however, this is a civilian map. Observing that the
mapmaker used idiosyncratic sources rather than
government archives, Arnaud concluded that this
was not a Roman imperial map or an official
government document, but rather a map made for
private use.10 Yet we know of no pilgrim or other
civilian traveller whose itinerary included Britain

137

and Sri Lanka, or who needed to plot all the roads

in between.
A traveller wishing to journey north or south,
furthermore, would find the map virtually useless.
The maps dimensions render it inhospitable for
any travel but east to west, except perhaps for
journeys in Italy, where the shape of the boot
eliminates some directional confusion. Elsewhere,
with nearly all the routes moving horizontally
across the map, the Peutinger Table would prove a
baffling road map for other prospective journeys.
As early as 1893, Emil Schweder recognized
these problems and suggested that the mapmaker
had intended his creation for display.11 Most
subsequent students of the map have ignored
Schweders argument, but he was surely correct.
Not so useful for travel, the map makes an
appealing object for public viewing. It is still lovely
today and must have been quite striking when its
colours were fresh and vibrant. Stretched out
on a wall or on a table, it would have made an
immediate impression on any observer. The mapmaker was working around 1200, in the age of the
mappaemundi, those great wall maps that hung
in churches and palaces.12 He made his map not
for travel over long defunct roads or past longgone spas and inns, but for exhibition. Did the
maker of the prototype have the same purpose in
mind?

Roman Itineraries
The creation of the Peutinger prototype was a
major undertaking. Its production required first a
sizeable collection of itineraries from which to
draw. Throughout their Empire, Romans produced
many such lists of sites along a given route, with
notations offering information essential for travellers: mansio, for instance, indicated a place to spend
the night; mutationes (changing places) might offer
even simpler lodgings but at least fresh animals
and wagons; in civitates (larger settlements) the
discriminating voyager could hope to find a fancier
meal or other diversions. The lists also typically
give mileage from each of these sites to the next.
Such itinerary lists were the characteristically
Roman method of marking journeys, and they
survive in a variety of media, even carved on
four silver goblets dated to the reign of Augustus
(30 BCAD 14).13
Several manuscripts preserve collections of these
lists from late antiquity. The most extensive of
these, the Antonine Itinerary, supplies both land

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138

E. Albu

and sea routes for nearly all parts of the Roman

Empire at the end of the third century. The
Bordeaux Itinerary records a journey in AD 333,
from Bordeaux to Constantinople, then on to
Jerusalem and back to Bordeaux by a different
route.14 A third collection, the Ravenna Cosmography, compiled around 700, is a cruder list of
about five thousand civitates and other geographical
places, roughly arranged from west to east. The
Ravenna cosmographer must have culled these
names from more precise itineraries. He suggests
that with the help of Christ he could have
written up the harbors and promontories of the
whole world and the mileages between individual
towns.15
The Ravenna cosmographer also illustrates the
persistent interest in these Roman itinerary lists,
which continued to be copied throughout the
middle ages. More than twenty manuscripts for
the Antonine Itinerary exist, for example, and our
best extant manuscript of the Bordeaux Itinerary
dates from the ninth century.16 It is reasonable to
expect Carolingian scribes to have known many
more itineraries than we do. A scribe with good
access to several collections could have translated
them into an antiquarian map. Such a translation
seems more plausible in the ninth century, when
large-scale map making flourished, than in the
fourth or fifth centuries, whenfor all we know
such a world map would be unique.
How did this mapmaker work? The itineraries
themselves yield much of the necessary information, above all the route from one town to the next,
with spas and mileage marked from point to
pointusually in Roman miles (a Roman mile
was equivalent to about one and a half kilometres),
but sometimes instead in local measures, as in Gaul
(leagues), Persian territories (parasangs) and India
(apparently in Indian miles).17 Units such as these
emphasize the itinerary origins of the map, as do
the cartographical signs that identify various
cities and towns, hostels and baths, religious sites,
harbours and, even, a tunnel.18 The Antonine
Itinerary offers relational clues that would help a
mapmaker understand how to arrange the routes.
Nonetheless, the itineraries do not answer all the
questions that a mapmaker would ask, and, not
surprisingly, many elements are imprecisely drawn
on our itinerary map.19 The most distinctive of
these are the wavy lines that mark the sea coasts
and also signify the vaguely identified limits of the
known world. These waves serve as the decorative
frame for the oecumene.

Roman Models for Carolingian Geography

Even given the imprecise qualities of the map, its
maker needed some general knowledge of world
geography beyond the data offered in itineraries.
Map making was an advanced art in ninth-century
Europe, as evidenced by the maps displayed in
monasteries, papal palaces and the dwellings of
Carolingian rulers.20 The Carolingian era, furthermore, witnessed a keen interest in geography.21
For the translation from itinerary lists to world
map, the requisite knowledge could be gleaned
from a variety of textual sources available in
Carolingian libraries, particularly geographical
treatises but also encyclopaedias, biblical exegesis
and histories with ethnographic introductions. All
those texts transmitted the Roman view of the
world, featuring Roman geographical data and
Roman place-names.
Natalia Lozovsky has shown how these various
geographical works of the early middle ages
essentially described the earth of antiquity, only
rarely and occasionally including contemporary
realities.22 One of many examples is Martianus
Capellas encyclopaedia, On the Marriage of Philology
and Mercury. This fifth-century work was apparently little read until the ninth century, when its
prominent place in the school curriculum made it a
centrepiece of Carolingian culture. The ninthcentury commentaries attest to its significance, as
do the large number of Carolingian manuscripts of
the work still extant.23 Martianuss canonical work
set geography into the curriculum by treating it as
a vital component of geometry, installed as one of
the seven liberal arts. In this role, Martianus
personified Geometry speaks at great length about
her measurement and description of the earths
surface, from India to the Pillars of Hercules
(Gibraltar), including the names of regions, rivers
and cities.24 It is a Roman description, with GrecoRoman names that give virtually no indication of
the vast changes that occurred in late antiquity or
the early middle ages.
This archaic portrait of the world does not seem
to have startled its Carolingian audience. On the
contrary, when Carolingian scholars produced
their own geographical treatises, they followed
the familiar antique formula. Dicuil, writing his
Book on the Measurement of the Earth at a Carolingian
court in 825, made only slight reference to
eyewitness accounts, preferring the authority of
ancient texts, whose information he repeated in
identifying Roman provinces and citing other
places by anachronous Roman names.25

The Medieval Peutinger Map

Given the popularity of Roman geography in the
Carolingian world, we should not be surprised
if Carolingians produced a Roman map. Indeed,
Lozovskys conclusion about their geographical
tradition explains just as well the itinerary map:
Early medieval scholars seem to have thought that
geographical descriptions did not require contemporary information. By choice rather than by ignorance,
they continued to reproduce the classical picture of the
world, copying the writings of late antiquity, composing their own tracts, and making this image part of
their education.26

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Carolingian Maps
Charlemagne himself might have had a particular
interest in sponsoring the production of such a
Roman imperial map. His world had a far reach,
and his conquests left him master of nearly all of
western Christendom. He summoned to his court
scholars from the frontiers of his domain and
beyondthe greatest of these masters, Alcuin,
came from York in England. Charlemagne kept
frequent contact with the Byzantine east, and his
envoys travelled far and wide, to Baghdad, for
instance, and to Jerusalem.27 An embassy from the
Abbasid caliph Harun alRashid, around the year
800, brought Charlemagne an elephant named
Abu l-Abbas, who had once belonged to an Indian
rajah.28
Charlemagne had an abiding geographical curiosity. According to his biographer Einhard, his final
will bore evidence of this interest in the form of his
bequests of three engraved silver maps from his
palace in Aachen.29 Two of these maps depicted
Rome and Constantinople, respectively. The third,
which far surpasses the others both in the beauty
of its workmanship and in its heavy weight, was
a map of the entire world, fashioned from three
concentric circles and completed in exquisite
detail.30
Charlemagnes maps reveal much about his
imperial ambitions. To secure his ties with
Byzantium, in 781 he arranged a marriage for his
daughter Rotrud with Constantine VI, son of the
Empress Irene, but in 787 Charlemagne broke off
the engagement. In 802 he proposed another
Franco-Byzantine marriage, this time his own to
Irene, then ruling Byzantium in her own right after
having murdered her son Constantine in 797.
Irene herself looked favourably on this proposal.
The prospect of a western master, however, only
encouraged her enemies to hasten their plots to
depose her that same year and foil Charlemagnes

139

plan.31 Historians cannot agree on precisely what

the emperor envisioned as the practical outcome of
this liaison. In theory, though, the marriage would
have rejoined the western and eastern empires,
severed by the fifth-century invasions of the west,
and made Charlemagne emperor of a restored
Roman Empire.
Charlemagnes maps complement this picture,
with the twin depictions of Rome and
Constantinople, the capitals that his proposed
alliance would have reunited. In his bequest of
the grander third map, we can read yet another
expression of his political longings. We have come
to understand that maps can combine decorative
attraction and apparent objectivity to forge a
beguiling mix of politics and propaganda. Maps
have often signalled grand ambitions. In ancient
Rome the mere possession of a display map was
grounds for suspicion. The emperor Domitian
(AD 8196) ordered the execution of Mettius
Pompusianus for the cartographic crime of painting a depiction of the world on his bedroom wall.32
In twentieth-century Italy, Mussolini was only
evoking old Roman precedent when he erected the
maps of Roman expansion, still on view today near
the ancient forum.33
Like the Roman emperor Domitian before him,
Charlemagne understood the power and ambition
symbolized in the possession of such a map. He had
before him the compelling example of the world
map commissioned by Pope Zacharias (741752)
for the dining room at the Lateran Palace.34 As
Marcia Kupfer has shown, the Lateran map played
an integral part in an artistic scheme that illustrated
papal claims to universal power, asserting divine
authority through apostolic succession from Christ
and worldly authority through the Roman tradition, as expressed in the (forged) Donation of
Constantine.35 Charlemagnes maps answered that
papal assertion of world dominion with a cartographic counterclaim expressed in the silver maps
in his own palace. Louis the Pious, for his part, so
thoroughly grasped the symbolism of his fathers
world map that he did not use the precious metal
to succour the needy, as Charlemagnes bequest
required, but kept the map for himself instead.36
Charlemagne had the ambition to present a
propagandistic map as well as the antiquarian
interests that would encourage a Carolingian
mapmaker to keep Roman roads on this map
relatively unaltered by contemporary markers and
even to imitate the roll format associated with
pagan antiquity.37 A distinctly Roman map would

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140

E. Albu

support Charlemagnes vision of a restored Roman

Empire. On some level, even the devoutly
Christian emperor understood that the antiquity
of pagan Rome could trump the divine authority of
the papacy in matters of earthly hegemony. Ties to
ancient Rome allowed a subtle manoeuvring
around Christian authorities to assert the venerable
Roman roots that Charlemagne claimed for his
restored Roman imperium.
Charlemagnes antiquarian interests therefore
had a decidedly pragmatic foundation. These
interests may well answer a question that has
plagued me ever since I first saw the map: Why did
the cartographer give Jerusalem such a slight,
and archaic, notation? If the prototype was late
antique, it came from an age when Jerusalem was
a prominent pilgrimage site. For their part, the
much later Christian mappaemundi often situate
Jerusalem at, or near, the centre of the map, with
the terrestrial spaces radiating out from this
symbolic mid-point and with Eden, or paradise, at
the top of the map.38 In marked contrast, the
Peutinger mapmaker has made no attempt to
centre Jerusalem or otherwise to draw special
attention to it (Fig. 1). He simply assigned to it
the maps most common ideogram, the doubletowered building used to mark 428 other towns
and villas, like nearby Jericho and Bostra, Nablus
and Caesarea. Furthermore, the Peutinger scribe
has labelled the site antea dicta Herusalem m(od)o
Helya Capitolina [formerly called Jerusalem, now

Fig. 1. The Peutinger map. Detail showing Jerusalem.

The town is identified as antea dicta Herusalem m(od)o
Helya Capitolina [formerly called Jerusalem, now Aelia
Capitolina]. Also labelled is Mons Oliveti [Mount of
sterOlives]. Two road mileages are seen. Vienna, O
reichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 324,
segment 9 (Konrad Millers segment X). (Reproduced
from Plate 9 of Peutingeriana Tabula Itineraria in Bibliotheca
Palatina Vindobonensi asservata nunc primum arte photographica expressa (Vienna, Angerer & Goschl, 1888), by
permission of the University of North Carolina, Ancient
World Mapping Center.)

Aelia Capitolina].39 In summoning this Roman

imperial name, the mapmaker would have been
copying the itinerary sources, preferring to evoke
the antiquity of a pagan Roman world by pointedly
avoiding overt Christian references. The designation of Aelia Capitolina underlines the maps intent
as self-consciously Roman, as does the slight
attention paid to Judeo-Christian sites in general.
Possessing the motivation to create a Roman
map, Charlemagne also had access to the formidable resources necessary for producing the
Peutinger prototype. With Charlemagnes tireless
support and prodding, Benedictine monasteries
throughout his realm built and maintained the
scriptoria that gathered the materials and trained
the copyists needed to create hundreds of manuscripts. In these monastic workplaces, scribes
devised a new script, the Carolingian minuscule,
that would transform western writing to our own
day. Early in the ninth century monastic libraries
began using the term mappa mundi in their
catalogues to identify an unbound parchment
map of the world.40
One of those scriptoria, in a monastery that
housed a collection of Roman itineraries, would
have had the resources to produce the Peutinger
prototype. A Carolingian emperor, even Charlemagne himself, could have commissioned a Roman
map, made from Roman itineraries, to express his
claim to dominion over New Rome. Around 1200,
when the crusades had reawakened Europes
eastern ambitions, someone copied this map,
by then in distressed condition and missing its
first leaf or leaves. That copyist wrote in a late
Carolingian minuscule and very likely worked, as
Patrick Gautier Dalche has argued, in Swabia/
Alamanniathat is, in what is now Switzerland
or southwestern Germany, lands once deep within
the Carolingian empire and at the heart of the
Carolingian monastic revival.41
More than a quarter of a century ago Hans
Lieb identified a likely candidate for a Carolingian
prototype of our Peutinger map.42 In the early
ninth-century catalogue of the library at the
Reichenau abbey he found listed a mappa mundi
in rotulis II.43 This world mapone of the earliest to
be identified with the newly coined Carolingian
term mappa mundiis presumed no longer extant.
In a neat piece of detective work, however, Lieb
uncovered evidence that this lost map was the
Peutinger model.
The evidence lay in an eleventh-century
Chronicon of Hermann von Reichenau (10131054).

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The Medieval Peutinger Map

Born with physical defects that earned him the
nickname Contractus (the Lame), but blessed
with a fine intellect, Hermann entered the
Carolingian abbey at Reichenau, in Swabia/
Alamannia, as a young child, in due time taking
monastic vows there. Under the tutelage of the
scholarly abbot Berno he became an accomplished master, skilled in mathematics and
astronomy as well as history, poetry and music.
In the Reichenau archives, where he spent his
working hours, Hermann must have handled the
now lost mappa mundi. How else could he have
learned an old name for a nearby forest, a name
found in this singular formsilua Marcianaonly
in Hermanns Chronicon and on the Peutinger
map? The Romans called the regions northern
mountain range mons Abnoba.44 In the early
middle ages the larger territory acquired the
designation by which we know it todayNigra
Silva or Schwarzwald or Black Forest. Yet
Hermann resurrected its rare fourth-century
name from, Lieb deduced, the Reichenau map,
from which the Peutinger mapmaker also copied
the otherwise long forgotten term.45

A Roman Copy?
We cannot be sure that Lieb was correct in
identifying the lost Reichenau mappa mundi as the

141

ninth-century Peutinger prototype, which in turn

preserved fourth-century toponyms, like silua
Marciana, from Roman itinerary lists (Fig. 2).
Still, it remains an ingenious and plausible
conjecture. For such a mappamundi, the mapproducing Carolingian era offers a more likely
provenance than the itinerary-minded Roman
world.46 This point deserves special emphasis.
For Romans, itineraries were by far the most
common form of mentally recording or depicting
spatial relationships. Travellers of all sorts plotted
their journeys from place to place in linear
fashion. The famous, often cited, example of a
mapless traveller is Julius Caesar, whose own
accounts of his campaigns never mention a map,
though a map could have rescued him from
serious difficulties at many a moment in his
career when he found himself off-road. This was
true in Gaul, of course, but also in Italy, when
he wandered lost as he tried to join his army at
the Rubicon.47
But let us presume for a moment that a later
Roman had the inspiration, the motive and the
means to arrange itineraries together to create a
world map. If such a prototype did arise in the
fourth century, would our Peutinger be a close
copy, virtually a late antique map, as scholars have
regarded it?

Fig. 2. The Peutinger map. Detail of the silua Marciana [Marcian forest] in Swabia, one of only two forests pictured on the
sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 324,
map. The toponym dates from the fourth century. Vienna, O
segments 23 (Konrad Millers segments IIIIV). (Reproduced from Plates 23 of Peutingeriana Tabula Itineraria in Bibliotheca
Palatina Vindobonensi asservata nunc primum arte photographica expressa (Vienna, Angerer & Goschl, 1888), by permission of
the University of North Carolina, Ancient World Mapping Center.)

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142

E. Albu

The usual scenario for the Peutinger prototype

does not probe this last question of the maps
transmission, allegedly from the fourth century to
the late twelfth. In fact, few ancient manuscripts
survived for more than a couple of centuries. If
the map were displayed or frequently handled, it
would not last as long as manuscripts carefully
preserved in monastic libraries. For the preservation of ancient texts, the Carolingian renaissance
came just in time, providing the resources and the
will that allowed ninth-century scribes to rescue
the Classical corpus from the verge of oblivion.48
Were it not for these Benedictine monks, who
copied disintegrating papyrus rolls onto parchment, arguably the only literary works to survive
intact from Roman antiquity would be Virgils. If
the Peutinger map had a late-antique prototype,
then, we would have to posit at least one
intermediary, perhaps more. Can we believe that
the map remained essentially unchanged through
this supposed transmission from the ancient world?
Can we assume that mapmakers B (ninth century)
and C (twelfth) copied their models exactly?
When students of the map consider this question, they generally answer that we have no
tradition of studying map transmission in the same
way that palaeographers have studied manuscript
transmission. We do not know, therefore, how
precisely the copyists worked. In the absence of
such research, scholars have generally presumed
the manuscript model, by which copyists have
aimed to preserve their original texts in careful
detail. A recent study, however, has suggested that
medieval mapmakers worked more creatively.
In an important article, Ingrid Baumgartner has
demonstrated the astonishing mutability of medieval world maps.49 She surveyed the fifteen
surviving manuscript maps, dating from the tenth
to the thirteenth centuries, all traced to a single
eighth-century archetype.50 These world maps
illustrate a single text, a commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John by Beatus of Liebana. While the
written text remained quite stable through the
centuries, the maps present another story. Within
the Beatus group several variants are quite close,
but no two are identical (Figs. 3, 4 and 5).51 Indeed,
the casual observer might posit only the faintest
relationship between some of these widely divergent copies.
The later maps do retain certain elements from
what is thought to have been the original.52
Generally each one takes up a double folio spread
of the apocalypse codex. Most are rectilinear,

orientated toward the east, with the three continents

of the known inhabited world (Europe, Africa and
Asia) augmented by Paradise, represented as a
virtual fourth continent in the east. The five maps
in Baumgartners first (of three) groups especially
feature this Paradise, conspicuously marked by
depictions of Adam, Eve and the Serpent coiled
in the Tree of Life. In these maps, too, Jerusalem
occupies a prominent position, as does Spain,
specially delineated as the maps place of origin.
Variations even within this map group, however,
point the way to the changes that other copyists
were to make, altering the rectangle to an oval or
circle, for instance, or giving the map an undulating, wave-like boundary. Some mapmakers applied
more colour or added detail to emphasize the old
Roman Mediterranean world while de-emphasizing Paradise and other Christian elements. Others
reduced the size of Spain or specially marked sites
closer to their own homes. Some inserted the
twelve apostles who brought Christianity to this
inhabited world or supplied distinctive city symbols
or added text. The simple model mutated into a
quite busy variant. In short, each mapmaker felt
free to present the map in the way it suited him.
Baumgartner has analysed the impulses that
drove the innovators. Inspired by rediscovered
geographical writings from antiquity, some mapmakers redrew the oecumene to incorporate
reclaimed knowledge. Others looked to the east,
adding crusading sites like Ascalon to their featured
cities. Baumgartner shows how these ever-mutating maps mark far-ranging changes in medieval
conceptions of the world. For our purposes here,
perhaps, we need simply note that the mapmakers
clearly felt no need to copy their models as
precisely as a scribe would copy a text.
For anyone who believes the Peutinger map of
c.1200 to be a copy of an ancient map, the broad
range of variations within the Beatus map cycle
is unsettling. The variations suggest that from
the eighth century onwards, at least, we cannot
assume that mapmaker C would reproduce map A
with any precision. Even if the Peutinger map has
a late-antique prototype, therefore, we cannot be
sanguine that this early map looked like ours in
any specific detail.
We should, then, view the Peutinger as a medieval
map. This is a difficult conclusion for students of
late antiquity to contemplate.53 It means giving up
the certainty of possessing a rare ancient map. But
classicists have much to gain by surrendering that

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143

Fig. 3. Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Apocalypse (eighth century). This map comes from one of the earliest
extant Beatus manuscripts, the Girona Beatus, completed on 6 July 975 in the Spanish Kingdom of Leon. Among the
many images produced by Beatus for his work was a map of the world to illustrate the point that the apocalypse could take
place only when Christianity had reached every corner of the inhabited earth. Differences among the sixteen surviving
exemplars show the lack of constraint on copyists, who created each version as it suited them (see Figs. 4 and 5). 40 6
26 cm. Girona, Museu de la Catedral, Num. Inv. 7(11). (Photograph by Josep Ma Oliveras. Reproduced with permission
from the Museu de la Catedral, Girona, Spain.)

Fig. 4. Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Apocalypse (eighth century). The so-called Facundus copy of Beatus
Commentary was produced in the royal scriptorium of Leon in 1047. This map shares general traits with the map in the
Girona copy (Fig. 3), also made at Leon, but there are many differences in details, such as in the way that Facundus has
displaced Sinai and other Middle Eastern sites by enlarging the image of Adam, Eve and the Serpent in Paradise. 36 6
28 cm. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Vitrina 142. (Reproduced with permission of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.)

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144

E. Albu

Fig. 5. Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Apocalypse (eighth century). The illuminators of the Saint-Sever copy of
Beatus Commentary, working in Gascony in the third quarter of the eleventh century, produced this distinctive and
detailed version of Beatus map of the world. Note, for instance, the attention they lavished on their own territory and on
the lands of their francophone neighbours. 36.5 6 28 cm. Paris, Bibliothe`que nationale de France, MS lat. 8878.
(Reproduced with permission of the Bibliothe`que nationale de France.)

assumption. To begin with, the medieval map

demonstrates the authoritative force of antiquity
over the medieval imagination. Our medieval
display map affirms an interconnectedness of the
inhabited world by presenting a network of ancient
roads linking Britain and India, the limits of the
oecumene that had inspired Julius Caesar to
emulate Alexander in probing the frontiers.54
The roads united cities great and small, some still
flourishing in the ninth century and some long
lying in ruins, yet all remembered on the map.
The classical influences on the Peutinger map
are profound, and they extend well beyond the
itinerary sources. They reach back to the Roman
understanding of geography and mental maps as
linked to imperial ambitions.55 By showing the
world united by Roman roads, the map presented
to its medieval audience a salient reminder of a
world power that their own rulers could imaginatively restore and hope to recover in fact. Like the
visual itineraries produced by Matthew Paris and
like the mappaemundi, the Peutinger map thus
directed a mental journey rather than a physical
one.56 The map invited its viewers to visualize an
itinerary of geopolitical power on a scale achieved

by Alexander and coveted by the Romans of

antiquity. To display such a map was to invoke a
promise of Roman imperial power restored.
Acknowledgements: I am grateful for the suggestions made
by Richard Talbert and Michael Maas, leaders of the
National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in
Rome in the summer of 2000, and by the participants,
including Brenda Fineberg, Natalia Lozovsky, Frank
Romer and Miriam Vivian. I also benefited from the
advice of Marcia Kupfer, Benet Salway and participants at
other meetings where I gave papers on various aspects of
the map. These conferences include Shifting Frontiers
in Late Antiquity IV (San Francisco, 2001), and international congresses on medieval studies (Kalamazoo, 2001,
2002 and 2004). Colleagues in my reading group at the
University of California, Davis, offered welcome
commentary on a rough draft. Conversations with Peter
Onuf and critiques of earlier versions, by Ingrid
Baumgartner, Evelyn Edson, Marcia Kupfer, Natalia
Lozovsky, Benet Salway, David Traill and the editor and
anonymous reviewers of Imago Mundi improved my
argument. Any errors that remain are of my own making.
Manuscript submitted June 2004. Revised text received
November 2004.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. I first saw a facsimile of the entire Peutinger
sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex
Map (Vienna, O

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The Medieval Peutinger Map

Vindobonensis 324), in summer 2000 at the American
Academy in Rome, where I was participating in a
National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on
Roman mapping and ethnography. To that group I
presented my view that this was a medieval map intended
for display and serving some of the same functions as the
Bayeux Tapestry.
2. On the maps geographical coverage as well as its
exact dimensions, missing leaf or leaves, editions and
reproductions, see Richard Talbert, Cartography and
taste in Peutingers Roman map, in Space in the Roman
World: Its Perception and Presentation, ed. Richard Talbert
and Kai Brodersen (Munster, Lit Verlag, 2004), 11341.
3. C. R. Whittaker, Mental maps: seeing like a Roman,
in Thinking Like a Lawyer: Essays on Legal History and
General History for John Crook on His Eightieth Birthday, ed.
Paul McKechnie (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, Brill,
2002), 81112, reference at 82.
4. O. A. W. Dilke, Itineraries and geographical maps in
the early and late Roman empires, in The History of
Cartography, Vol. I: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and
Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and
David Woodward (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
1987), 23457, reference at 238. Dilke thought that the
archetype dated from between AD 335 and 366, though
the presence of sites destroyed by the eruption of
Vesuvius in AD 79, he believed, might argue for a source
much earlier still. This suggestion echoes Leo Bagrows
assumption that the original was a Roman product of the
first century (Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography, 2nd ed.,
rev. R. A. Skelton (Chicago, Precedent Pub., 1985), 37
38). Ekkehard Weber, Zur Datierung der Tabula
Peutingeriana, in Labor omnibus unus: Gerold Walser zum
70. Geburtstag dargebracht von Freunden, Kollegen und
Schulern, ed. Heinz E. Herzig and Regula Frei-Stolba;
Historia Einzelschrift 60 (Stuttgart, F. Steiner Verlag
Wiesbaden, 1989), 11317, presented the argument for
an early fifth-century date. Patrick Gautier Dalche, La
trasmissione medievale e rinascimentale della Tabula
Peutingeriana, in Tabula Peutingeriana: Le antiche vie del
mondo, ed. Francesco Prontera (Florence, Leo S. Olschki,
2003), 4352, reference at 45, note 13, has cited the
sources that establish the dating of the existing map to no
later than the beginning of the thirteenth century.
5. Ekkehard Weber, Tabula Peutingeriana. Codex
Vindobonensis
324.
Kommentar
(Graz,
Austria,
Akademische Druck- und Vorlagsanstalt, 1976), 22,
theorized that the transmission of an ancient world map
included a Carolingian copy. On this see Gautier Dalche,
La trasmissione medievale (note 4), 4647.
6. Benet Salway, Travel, itineraria and tabellaria, in
Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire, ed. Colin Adams
and Ray Laurence (London and New York, Routledge,
2001), 2266, reference at 58.
7. Dilke, Itineraries and geographical maps (see note
4), 238. This amounts to some 104,000 km of marked
roads.
8. Dilke, Itineraries and geographical maps (see note
4), 23839.
9. O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps (London,
Thames and Hudson, 1985; reprinted, Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998), 114.
10. Pascal Arnaud, Lorigine, la date de redaction et la
diffusion de larchetype de la Table de Peutinger, Bulletin
de la Societe nationale des antiquaires de France (1988): 302
21. Arnaud located this private commission in the early
fifth century, when relative peace encouraged civilian
travel and religious fervour induced Christians to embark

145

on lengthy pilgrimages. Dilke also recognized this as a

civilian map, since no military stations are indicated
(Greek and Roman Maps (see note 9), 115). See also
Salway, Travel, itineraria and tabellaria (note 6), 4447. I
follow the practice of using the convenient singular
mapmaker, while recognizing that a team might well
have constructed the map.
ber den Ursprung und die altere
11. Emil Schweder, U
Forme der Peutingerschen Tafel, Jahrbuch fur Philologie
39 (1893): 485512.
12. David Woodward, Medieval mappaemundi, in
Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography (see
note 4), 286370, reference at 335. From among the
many allusions to these now lost wall maps, Woodward
here cites the reference to three by Matthew Paris
(c.12001259), on the world map in his Chronica majora
(British Library, Cotton MS. Nero D.V., fol. 1v).
13. The Vicarello Goblets list 106 mansiones between
Gades and Rome, with the mileage from one to the next
(Raymond Chevallier, Roman Roads, transl. N. H. Field
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1976), 4750).
For a summary of some other lists, see Salway, Travel,
itineraria and tabellaria (note 6), 26. Sencer Sahin, Ein
Vorbericht uber den Stadiasmus Provinciae Lyciae in
Patara, Lykia: Anadolu-akdeniz arkeolojisi 1 (1994): 130
37, has added another itinerary to the listing of R. Capelli
and F. Pesando, Gli itinerari romani: repertorio bibliografico, in Viae Publicae Romanae: X Mostra europea del
Turismo, artigianato e delle tradizioni culturali, Roma, Castel
SantAngelo, 1125 aprile 1991, ed. Rosanna Capelli (Rome,
LeonardoDe Luca, 1991), 4144. On the ubiquity of
these itineraries, see Ray Laurence, Afterword: travel and
empire, in Adams and Laurence, Travel and Geography in
the Roman Empire (note 6), 16776, reference at 168.
14. To envision the routes listed in the Antonine and
Bordeaux itineraries, see Figure 3.1 in Salway, Travel,
itineraria and tabellaria (note 6), 2325.
15. Ravenna cosmography 1.18.1015, translation in O. A.
W. Dilke, Cartography in the Byzantine Empire, in
Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography (see note
4), 25875, reference at 260. Dilke concludes that the
cosmographer had access to a collection of Greek and
Roman maps. But true itineraries seem a more likely
source if the compiler really could have added mileage as
the cosmographer suggests. A few of these itineraries
were evidently similar to some used by the creator of the
Peutinger prototype. We will be able to compare the two
more easily when we have the full critical edition of the
Peutinger Map, in the form of an electronic database,
which Richard Talbert is producing. A companion volume
by Emily Albu and R. W. Benet Salway, in preparation for
Liverpool University Press, will provide indices and
commentary. For the full text of the Ravenna
Cosmography, see Ravennatis anonymi Cosmographia et
Guidonis Geographica, ed. Moritz Pinder and G. Parthey
(Berlin, Fridericus Nicolaus, 1860; reprinted Aalen, Otto
Zeller Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962). For other itineraries,
including that of Theophanes (an Egyptian official
travelling in the 320s), see Colin Adams, There and
back again: getting around in Roman Egypt, in Adams
and Laurence, Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire
(see note 6), 13866, reference at 16063.
16. The Pithoeanus, now Paris Lat. 4808. Dilke,
Itineraries and geographical maps (see note 4), 237.
17. Dilke, Itineraries and geographical maps (see note
4), 238.
18. Dilke (ibid., 239), counted fifty-two pictographs for
spas alone, including twenty-eight called Aquae, that is,

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146

E. Albu

presumably featuring baths. Kai Brodersen has presented

the evidence that itineraria picta (illustrated itineraries)
contained such decorative images (The presentation of
geographical knowledge for travel and transport in the
Roman world: Itineraria non tantum adnotata sed etiam
picta, in Adams and Laurence, Travel and Geography in the
Roman Empire (see note 6), 721, reference at 1416).
19. Chevallier, Roman Roads (see note 13), 29, noted
that the imprecision extended even to the drawing and
relative placement of the roads: The fact is, the road
routes themselves are looked upon as being more or less
rectilinear and are drawn independently of each other.
There is no guide to the orientation of the roads nor to the
significance of their bends and twists, so the road stations
are not sited in their correct relative positions. See also
the analysis of Weber (Tabula Peutingeriana (note 5), 12),
concerning the similarly imprecise positioning of rivers
and mountain ranges.
20. Marcia Kupfer, Medieval world maps: embedded
images, interpretive frames, Word and Image 10 (1994):
26288, reference at 26469, has collected and analysed
examples.
21. For a wealth of evidence, see Natalia Lozovsky, The
Earth Is Our Book: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West
ca. 4001000 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press,
2000). She presents further evidence of Carolingian
interest in Roman geography, and the intimately related
connections between imperial power and conquest as
understood by Carolingian rulers and scholars, in her
article, Roman geography and ethnography in the
Carolingian Empire (forthcoming in Speculum). I thank
the author for sending me an advance copy of this
valuable essay.
22. Lozovsky, The Earth Is Our Book (see note 21), 139.
My brief discussion here draws its argument and
particulars from this work. Its author has reminded me
that while Carolingian geographers kept Roman placenames and presented an essentially Roman view of the
world, they also modified the arrangement of their
Roman pieces by shifting the focus from the
Mediterranean to northern Europe.
23. We possess, in many copies, the commentaries of
Remigius of Auxerre, John Scottus Eriugena and Martin
of Laon.
24. De nuptiis 6.588end. This encompasses nearly all of
book 6 (of 9 books). Martianus Capella, ed. Adolf Dick, 2nd
ed. (Stuttgart, Teubner, 1978).
25. Dicuili liber de mensura orbis terrae, ed. J. J. Tierney
and Ludwig Bieler (Dublin, Dublin Institute for Advanced
Studies, 1967). For the argument that Dicuil and the
Anonymous Leidensis introduced some innovations into
the Roman picture of the world, see Patrick Gautier
Dalche, Tradition et renouvellement dans la representation despace geographique au IXe sie`cle, Studi medievali,
ser. 3, 24 (1983): 12165.
26. Lozovsky, The Earth Is Our Book (see note 21), 139.
27. Charlemagne sent embassies to Baghdad in 797, 802
and 807. Richard Hodges, Towns and Trade in the Age of
Charlemagne (London, Duckworth, 2000), 36. Two of
these journeys lasted four years each, prolonged by
frequent absences of the caliph Harun alRashid from
Baghdad as he pursued military raids and pilgrimages
(Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy:
Communications and Commerce AD 300900 (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 471). Ambassadors
whom Charlemagne had dispatched to Jerusalem
returned in 800 bearing gifts from the Patriarch of that
city. Charlemagne undertook a vast building campaign

in Jerusalem, where he founded monasteries and

constructed a hostel, a library and a marketplace. He
even bought land in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, hoping
to support his establishments in the Holy Land with the
revenues from these estates (Moshe Gil, The political
history of Jerusalem during the Early Muslim Period, in
The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period, 6381099,
ed. Joshua Prawer and Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem
and New York, Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and New York
University Press, 1996), 137, reference at 14.
28. Hodges, Towns and Trade (see note 27), 36. The
books second chapter, Charlemagnes elephant, demonstrates Charlemagnes ties to Muslim lands, India and
China. The Carolingian king, concludes Hodges, was
clearly intrigued by the East.
29. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. and transl. Evelyn
Scherabon Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel (Coral Gables,
University of Florida Press, 1972), chap. 33. Einhard calls
the three mensae (tables, but also table tops, slabs, planks).
He is unlikely to have known the new word for map,
which was entering the Latin language as he wrote. In
any case, that term (mappa, originally meaning napkin),
would not suit a rigid silver map. For centuries tabula
(writing tablet, counter, public list, painted tablet), served
to designate a map. (So the parchment Peutinger map is
more commonly called the Peutinger Table from the Latin
Peutingeriana tabula.) In his catalogue of Charlemagnes
bequests, Einhard includes a fourth mensa, described only
as made of gold and extraordinarily large and heavy.
Concerning the value of these objects as transmitters of
symbolic meaning, see Matthew Innes, Charlemagnes
will: piety, politics and the imperial succession, English
Historical Review 112 (1997): 83355, reference at 84849.
30. Tertiam, quae ceteris et operis pulchritudine et
ponderis gravitate multum excellit, quae ex tribus orbibus
conexa totius mundi descriptionem subtili ac minuta
figuratione conplectitur (Einhard, Vita Karoli (see note
29), chap. 33).
31. For a summary of this episode, see Warren
Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society
(Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997), 42324. On
the negotiations between Irene and Charlemagne,
Treadgold concludes, The marriage would settle their
conflicting claims to be emperor and would legally unite
the Byzantine and Frankish empires. What this could
have meant in practice was and is quite unclear, but the
empress was willing to consider it.
32. Pascal Arnaud, Laffaire Mettius Pompusianus, ou
le crime de cartographie, Melanges de lEcole francaise de
Rome: Antiquite 95 (1983): 67799. Arnaud uses Dio
Cassius and Zonaras as his primary sources. The Roman
historian Suetonius (Domitian 10.3, in his De vita
Caesarum), reported that Pompusianus carried the parchment map on his person. We cannot tell what sort of lists
or drawings constituted this map.
33. Heather Hyde Minor, Mapping Mussolini: ritual
and cartography in public art during the second Roman
Empire, Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 14762.
34. Liber Pontificalis, ed. L. Duchesne, 3 vols (Paris,
E. Thorin, 18861957), 1: 432.
35. Kupfer, Medieval world maps (see note 20), 267
69.
36. Thegan (d. c.848), biographer of Louis the Pious,
wrote that of all Charlemagnes treasures, Louis kept only
this silver map, triple-formed like three overlapping
disks. According to Thegan, Louis held this sole keepsake
as a fond remembrance of his father (ob amorem patris),
paying a handsome price to retain this memento (Thegan,

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Vita Hludowici Imperatoris, chap. 8, ed. Radolf Buchner,
Quellen zur Karolingischen Reichsgeschichte (Berlin 1955),
1: 222). Einhard (Vita Karoli (see note 29), chap. 33),
wrote that the map belonged to a part of Charlemagnes
estate to be divided among his heirs and those designated
to receive alms. In 842 Lothar, son of Louis, destroyed
this precious artefact and distributed the pieces to
aristocrats in a desperate attempt to buy their support in
the civil war against his brothers. It is difficult to
overestimate the symbolic weight of this act, by which
Lothar signalled his offer to share universal power with
loyal nobles. The destruction of the map presaged the
dissolution of the empire of Charlemagne in the following
year.
37. On Charlemagnes eagerness to reclaim a Roman
heritage, see Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences
in Western Art (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), 44;
and the critique of Panofsky by Lawrence Nees, A Tainted
Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian
Court (Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press,
1991), 510. Like Nees, recent historians have emphasized Charlemagnes Christian revival over his classicizing
interests. Yet as earlier generations of commentators
noted, Carolingian rhetoric revealed a keen interest in
proclaiming ties to classical antiquity, whose Latin texts
the Carolingians preserved from oblivion. Carolingian
scribes would have been able to observe that their most
ancient pagan texts survived on papyrus rolls, while early
Christian writers had moved more quickly to the codex
form. On the persistence in the use of papyrus rolls by
pagan writers while their Christian contemporaries were
choosing the book format for religious texts, see L. D.
Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to
the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed.
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), 3435.
38. For the representation of Jerusalem on medieval
maps, see Ingrid Baumgartner, Die Wahrnehmung
Jerusalems auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten, in
Jerusalem im Hoch- und Spatmittelalter: Konflikte und
KonfliktbewaltigungVorstellungen
und
Vergegenwartigungen, ed. Dieter Bauer, Klaus Herbers and Nikolas
Jaspert (Frankfurt and New York, Campus Verlag, 2001),
271334.
39. Twelfth-century crusaders remembered this name
and understood its history. So, for instance, Fulcher of
Chartres wrote in his account of the crusaders, Historia
Hierosolymitana (c.1130), hanc urbem etiam Aelius
Hadrianus imperator mirifice decoravit et vicos et plateas
decenter pavimentis exornavit. de cuius nomine
Iherusalem Aelia vocata est [This city, indeed, the
emperor Aelius Hadrian marvellously beautified, and he
suitably paved its streets and piazzas. From his name,
Jerusalem is called Aelia] (Fulcheri Carnotensis Historia
Hierosolymitana (10951127), ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer
(Heidelberg, C. Winter, 1913), 1.26.12).
40. Gautier Dalche, La Descriptio mappe mundi de
Hughes de Saint-Victor: retractio et additamenta, in
Labbaye parisienne de Saint-Victor au moyen age, ed. Jean
Longe`re (Paris, Brepols, 1991), 14379, reference at 93
94; Kupfer, Medieval world maps (see note 20), 264.
41. Gautier Dalche, La trasmissione medievale (see
note 4), 4446.
42. Hans Lieb, Zur Herkunft der Tabula Peutingeriana,
in Die Abtei Reichenau: Neue Beitrage zur Geschichte und
Kultur des Inselklosters, ed. Helmut Maurer (Sigmaringen,
Thorbecke, 1974), 3133. Gautier Dalche, La trasmissione medievale (see note 4), 4647, considers it not
improbablethough not a proven factthat Liebs map

147

is the Peutinger prototype. The maps compatibility with

an ideology of renovatio imperii makes it quite feasible, in
his view, that a version of the map existed in the
Carolingian age.
43. The notation a world map on two rolls could
simply mean that the adhesive between two sheets failed,
and the map was preserved in two piecesa possibility
for a long Peutinger archetype.
44. Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 4.79; Tacitus,
Germania, 1.2.
45. Lieb knew this to be a fourth-century name from its
presence in the history of Ammianus Marcellinus (per
Marcianas siluas; 21.8.2). Lieb thought it extremely
unlikely, however, that Hermann got the term from
Ammianus. First of all, Reichenau had no copy of that
text, which indeed found few readers throughout the
middle ages. Ammianus, furthermore, used the plural
form, while Hermann copied the singular, as on the
Peutinger Map. Hermanns text has circa silvam Martianam
at the year 1030 (Hermann Contractus, Chronicon, in
Patrologia Latina 143, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris,
Editions Garnier fre`res, 1882), 235). The Peutinger Map
has SILUA MARCIANA, -ci being a common orthographic
variant of -ti in Latin from the second century AD onward.
Lieb also ruled out the likelihood that the rare term had
survived in the oral tradition around Reichenau from the
fourth century to the eleventh, to surface only in
Hermanns history. He did assume, following conventional wisdom on the Peutinger map, that Hermanns
source, the ninth-century Reichenau map and presumed
proto-Peutinger, was a fourth-century production. The
fourth-century term, silua Marciana, fits nicely with that
supposition. Yet its presumed presence on the Reichenau
mappa mundi no more marks that map as fourth century
than the presence of Pompeii on the Peutinger makes that
a first-century map.
46. Brodersen, The presentation of geographical knowledge (see note 18), 2021. For a forceful restatement of
the way that itineraries dominated and infiltrated all the
other categories of ancient representations and perceptions of space, see Whittaker (Mental maps (note 3), 83
and 93), who succinctly explains why Romans saw their
world this way: Itineraries, like the roads they documented, were the instruments of military conquest and
provincial administration.
47. For the Italian example, see Whittaker, Mental
maps (note 3), 81. For Gaul, see A. C. Bertrand,
Stumbling through Gaul: maps, intelligence, and
Caesars Bellum Gallicum, The Ancient History Bulletin
11:4 (1997): 10722.
48. Charlemagnes palace library held a particularly rich
collection of Roman texts. On the Carolingian rescue of
classical authors, see Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and
Scholars (note 37), 97101.
49. Ingrid Baumgartner, Die Welt im kartographischen
Blick: Zur Veranderbarkeit mittelalterlicher Weltkarten
am Beispiel der Beatustradition vom 10. bis 13.
Jahrhundert, in Der weite Blick des Historikers: Einsichten
in Kultur-, Landes- und Stadtgeschichte. Peter Johanek zum 65.
Geburtstag, ed. Wilfried Ehbrecht, Angelika Lampen,
Franz-Joseph Post and Mechthild Siekmann (Cologne,
Weimar and Vienna, Bohlau Verlag, 2002), 52749. Dr
Baumgartner sent me several helpful articles, and I owe a
special debt to her for her corrections and generous
responses to my questions.
50. Woodward, Medieval mappaemundi (see note 12),
3034, gives a brief description of these so-called Beatus
maps, which occur in manuscripts of the Commentary on

148

E. Albu

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the Apocalypse of Saint John by the Benedictine abbot

Beatus of Liebana (fl. 77686). Woodward traces all these
to the now-lost prototype of 77686. The definitive
edition is John Williams, ed., The Illustrated Beatus: A
Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the
Apocalypse, 5 vols. (London, Harvey Miller Publishers,
19942003).
51. Evelyn Edson has reminded me of Beatus manuscripts with a blank where the map is supposed to be.
Some of the extreme variants may result from a copyists
decision to create his own map or to copy another
available one when his manuscript had no map to follow.
52. On the shape of the first Beatus map, and its
probable source, see John Williams, Isidore, Orosius and
the Beatus map, Imago Mundi 49 (1997): 732.
53. Popular culture, too, continues to elevate the skills
of antiquity and repeat the old story of medieval decline,
contrary to the evidence of maps. Consider, for instance,
the beautifully illustrated coffee-table book by Nathaniel
Harris, Mapping the World: Maps and Their History (San

Diego, Thunder Bay Press, 2002), 22. Under a nineteenthcentury drawing of barbarians scaling the walls of Rome
as ancient statues fall and shatter all around, the caption
reads: Roman mapmaking skills disappeared with the
civilization that had created them.
54. The map calls attention to Alexanders imperial
ambitions with an inscription in India: Hic Alexander
responsum accepit usq[ue] quo Alexander [Here
Alexander got the oracles answer: How far,
Alexander?].
55. On this Roman connection between geography and
imperial rule, see Whittaker, Mental maps (note 3),
especially 84. As Whittaker notes here, a global setting
was one reason why Strabo thought geographia was
relevant to the practice of provincial governors by
stressing the whole oikoumene under one rule.
56. On the contemplative journey effected by the maps
of Matthew Pariss Chronica majora, see Daniel K.
Connolly, Imagined pilgrimage in the itinerary maps of
Matthew Paris, Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 598622.

Table de Peutinger et ambition imperiale carolingienne

La table de Peutinger est une extraordinaire carte du monde dessinee vers 1200 et longtemps consideree
comme une copie dune carte routie`re romaine concue pour les voyageurs de lAntiquite tardive. Cet article
presente des arguments qui vont a` lencontre de ces hypothe`ses et conclut que loriginal perdu etait plus
probablement une carte dapparat dressee a` lepoque carolingienne. Les copistes du IXe sie`cle avaient les
competences et la documentation necessaires a` la realisation dune oeuvre dinspiration antique fondee sur
des listes ditineraires romains ; quant aux princes carolingiens, ils avaient pour leur part suffisamment de
motivation pour commanditer la fabrication dune carte affichant leurs ambitions a` la succession de lEmpire
romain.

Kaiserliche Geographie und die mittelalterliche Tabula Peutingeriana

Die Tabula Peutingeriana ist eine auergewohnliche Weltkarte, die um 1200 n. Chr. gezeichnet und lange
fur die Kopie einer romischen Straenkarte zum Nutzen spatantiker Reisender gehalten wurde. Dieser
Beitrag argumentiert gegen diese Vermutung und kommt zu dem Schluss, dass es sich bei dem verlorenen
Original eher um eine karolingische Karte handelt, die Reprasentationszwecken diente. Karolingische
Herrscher hatten reichlich Grunde, eine Karte in Auftrag zu geben, die ihre Ambitionen auf das romische
Kaisertum untermauerte und Schreiber des neunten Jahrhunderts verfugten uber die notwendigen
Kenntnisse und Mittel, um auf der Grundlage romischer, listenformiger Itinerare ein antikisierendes Werk
zu schaffen.

Geografa imperial y el Mapa de Peutinger

El mapa de Peutinger es un extraordinario mapa del mundo, dibujado c.1200 y considerado desde hace
tiempo como una copia de un mapa de caminos romano hecho por antiguos viajeros. Este artculo presenta
argumentos en contra de esta opinion y concluye que el original perdido es mas probable que fuese un mapa
desplegable carolingio. Los escribas del siglo IX tenan la experiencia y los recursos necesarios para crear un
mapa antiguo basado en listas de itinerarios romanos y los gobernantes carolingios tenan grandes motivos
para encargar un mapa que expusiera sus ambiciones de un Imperio romano.

Downloaded By: [Turkovic, Tin] At: 21:43 22 June 2009

Plate 2a. Giuseppe Bagetti, Loano (Bataille de). Watercolour. 79650 cm. Bagettis painting of the battle between the invading Napoleonic forces and the occupying Austrians at Loano in
Savona Province, Liguria, 23 November 1795, is not an accurate landscape representation. That it was created by manipulating and amalgamating two or possibly three views is seen by
comparing the painting with the photographs below. Archives de la guerre, Vincennes, B2. (Reproduced with permission from the Archives de la guerre, Paris.) See page 155.

Plates 2b and 2c. Two views over the Loano battlefield looking north, photographed from Monte Acuto (above left) and from Monte Croce (above right). In neither case is it possible to
gain an unobstructed view over both the battlefield and the coast line as in Bagettis painting. Authors photographs taken April 2003.