Tabula Peutingeriana

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Map section, edition by Konrad Miller 1887
The Roman road network and the Tabula Peutingeriana

The Tabula Peutingeriana , also Peutinger's table , is a cartographic representation that shows the Roman road network (viae publicae) in the late Roman Empire from the British Isles over the Mediterranean and the Middle East to India and Central Asia . A sera maior, sometimes interpreted as China , appears at the very edge in the east, but without the corresponding land masses being drawn. The road map is to Konrad Peutinger named (1465-1547) and is one of the UNESCO - World Soundtrack Awards .

Made in the late 12th century, the tabula is probably a copy of a Carolingian model, which in turn goes back to the original of a Roman road map. The 680 cm × 34 cm roll map shows the regions of the world known to the Romans from Britain to India, their westernmost section has been lost to this day. It is designed as a schematic diagram and depicts the geographic conditions - apart from a few details - only in a highly distorted manner. Nevertheless, it provided travelers with all the necessary information about the location of the most important cities and horse-changing stations ( mansio ) in the road network of the Roman Empire, as well as the number of daily stages between the stops on the main traffic routes. The land masses appear as horizontal stripes separated by the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The cities are represented by building symbols; the bigger the symbol, the more important the respective city. The number of daily marches is shown by hook-shaped red lines. The indication of the place names and distances at that time in Roman miles forms the basis for street research. Today the map is one of the most important sources for assigning and identifying ancient place names.

history

Late Roman original

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The presumed original of the road map from the second half of the fourth century (approx. 375 AD) contained a graphic representation of the world known at the time, in which the roads were drawn as connecting lines between individual stage locations.

The late antique original can be traced back to various possible forerunners, including a wall map of the globe planned by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa . After his death, this map was carved into the tombstone in the Porticus Vipsaniae , not far from the Peace Altar , on the Via Flaminia in Rome . The Itinerarium Antonini (a street directory of the third century in book form) and several revisions of an older street map of the Roman Empire come into consideration as further precursors .

The original map was apparently made after 330, as it shows the city ​​of Constantinople , which was inaugurated that year . However, it was not up to date at the time, as the cities of Pompeii , Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae are also listed, which were completely buried after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and were not rebuilt. On the other hand, some places in the province of Germania inferior that were destroyed in the 5th century are shown.

The original map has been viewed in research since Franz Christoph von Scheyb's investigation in 1753 as a product of Roman cartography. Michael Rathmann , on the other hand, assumes that the map was made in the Hellenistic period (possibly around 250 BC), as it goes far beyond the sphere of influence of the Roman Empire and shows remote areas of Asia that were of no interest to the Roman Empire . Furthermore, only the world known in Hellenistic times is shown and other areas that were already known to the Romans, such as China or Germania, have not yet been recorded.

Medieval copy

The late Roman road map has only survived in a medieval copy from the 12th century. The humanist Conrad Celtis (alias Konrad Bickel, 1459–1508) discovered the manuscript and gave it to his friend Konrad Peutinger around 1507 . It is not known how Celtis came into possession of this copy or where it was made. Worms , Speyer , Colmar , Tegernsee and Basel were named as possible origins . After Peutinger's death, a copy was made on behalf of a member of the family, after which Abraham Ortelius published a complete edition in Antwerp in 1598 .

After that, Peutinger's copy was considered lost. It was only found again in 1714 and came into the possession of Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1715 . After his death in 1736, Charles VI. his entire library and incorporated it into the Imperial Court Library ( Codex Vindobonensis 324). In 1863, the tabula in the library was broken down into its individual segments for conservation reasons and initially stored between glass plates, and from 1977 acrylic plates.

Modern facsimiles

Peutinger received the imperial printing permission and prepared an edition, but died before that. Count Hermann von Neuenahr the Elder (1492–1530) mentions that he saw the - as yet unpublished - "ancient itinerary" at Konrad Peutinger's in Augsburg, probably during his visit to the 1518 Reichstag.

The first edition was printed by Markus Welser from Augsburg , a relative of the Peutinger family, in Venice in 1591, and then together with Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp, whose quality requirements led to the facsimile being revised in 1598 . This print then appeared in the last edition of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum from 1624, and is considered the best reproduction of this map (better than the original, which has been damaged in the meantime). As far as is known, this map was printed 1225 times.

Franz Christoph von Scheyb published his edition in Budapest , engraved by S. Lehnhardt in 1825. A copy now exists in the American Academy in Rome.

The facsimile by Konrad Miller dates from 1887. Ekkehard Weber reissued it in 1976 and warned of some small mistakes by Miller.

The map

and display information about the image
The entire Tabula Peutingeriana (edition by Konrad Miller, 1887)

structure

Approximate location of the twelve segments of the Tabula Peutingeriana on a modern map

The medieval map was broken down into twelve segments.

description

The road map was given the name Tabula Peutingeriana for the first time in the printed edition by Peter Bertius (Leiden, 1618/19). In the Austrian National Library it is called Codex Vindobonensis 324 . Copies can be found today - except in the facsimile edition Graz 1976 - in numerous museums, but also in cities that are marked on the map with their Roman names.

The Tabula Peutingeriana originally consisted of an approx. 675 cm long and approx. 34 cm wide roll of parchment , which is now divided into eleven segments. The originally second segment of the tabula shows the British Isles, the Netherlands , Belgium , part of France and western Morocco ; the fact that the Iberian Peninsula is not present on any of the leaves suggests that there was a first segment, now lost, depicting the territories of Spain and Portugal, as well as part of western England. The first segment shown here in black and white is an attempt at reconstruction by Konrad Miller using the Antonini Itinerarium . This attempt is viewed extremely critically in research.

The map is drawn in brown ink ; the road connections are marked with red lines, the city names and distance information in dark ink. Occasionally there are pictorial representations. The inscriptions in Carolingian minuscule from the 12th century indicate a southern German scriptorium . The forest mountains of the Black Forest are called Silva Marciana . Because this term only occurs in the 4th century with Ammianus Marcellinus and the tabula on the one hand and the Reichenau chronicler Hermannus Contractus on the other hand in the 11th century, it has been concluded that the template for the tabula was kept in the monastery on Reichenau. There, in a directory of books from the 9th century, a Mappa mundi in duobus rotulis is attested, which would correspond to the tabula with the former twelve segments.

The area of ​​the Roman Empire is shown up to its northern border. In the non-Roman areas east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, some tribal areas or tribal names can be found, such as Francia for the area of ​​the Franks , followed by Burcturi for the Brukterer , Suevia for the area of ​​the Suebi , Alamannia for the area of ​​the Alamanni , Armalausi , Marcomanni for the Marcomanni etc. The only mountain ranges on the entire map are the Vosges ( Silva Vosagus ) and Black Forest ( Silva Marciana ) with imaginatively shaped trees and bushes.

meaning

The road map drawn from the 4th century is the only one of its kind that has been preserved as the Itinerarium pictum, in contrast to the more common road maps in book form (Itinerarium adnotatum) . In addition, the distances between the stage locations are indicated, in adaptation to the local units of measurement, i.e. in Leugen in the Germanic provinces , whereby a Leuga corresponds to approx. 1500 Roman feet or around 2.22 kilometers. Rivers and lakes are only rarely depicted according to reality, which also applies to the mountain ranges shown.

The names and locations of some places are not always correctly drawn: For example, Kempten (Allgäu) ( Cambodunum ) is on the way from Augsburg (known as Augusta Vindelic (or) um ) via Epfach ( Abodiaco ), ... Bratananium (= Gauting ), Isinisca (= Helfendorf), Adenum (= ad Oenum = Pons Oeni = bridge over the Inn = Pfunzen near Rosenheim), Bedaium (= Seebruck am Chiemsee) to Juvavum (= Salzburg ). The above-mentioned Abodiacum (= Epfach am Lech) probably appears in a falsified form Auodiaco , but again in a more plausible place, namely on the road from Augsburg up the Lech via Innsbruck , Matrei and Vipitenum (= Sterzing ) to Trient . If Brixia was Brixen , it would be on the wrong street. However, since the Latin name for the northern Italian town of Brescia was also Brixia, it can be assumed that the town on the map meant Brescia.

Today the map is of great cultural and historical importance, as numerous places are marked on it and it shows the settlement and the traffic axes of that time. It shows over 200,000 kilometers of roads , but also towns, seas, rivers, forest areas and mountains. Due to their format, distances and landscapes could not be reproduced realistically, which was also not intended by the author. The tab should rather be seen as a stylized map, similar to today's route network plans . It was used to provide an overview of the existing road network and should also show the distances between two locations.

Around 555 cities and villages as well as 3,500 other geographical objects such as lighthouses and important sanctuaries are drawn in and often provided with small images. Cities are marked by two houses, metropolises like Rome , Constantinople and Antioch on the Orontes by a large vignette.

literature

  • Konrad Miller: Itineraria Romana. Roman routes on the hand of the Tabula Peutingeriana. Strecker & Schröder, Stuttgart 1916 (digitized version) . (Reprint: Husslein, Bregenz 1988.)
  • Tabula Peutingeriana. Codex Vindobonensis 324, Austrian National Library, Vienna. Commented by Ekkehard Weber. Academic printing and Publishing house Dr. Paul Struzl, Graz 1976, ISBN 3-201-01793-0 (facsimile).
  • Ekkehard Weber : The Tabula Peutingeriana . In: Antike Welt 15, 1984, issue 1, pp. 2–8.
  • Michael Rathmann : Investigations on the imperial roads in the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Mainz 2003, pp. 3–41.
  • Hans Georg Wehrens: Why Freiburg does not appear on the "Tabula Peutingeriana" . In: Freiburg im Breisgau 1504–1803. Woodcuts and copperplate engravings . Herder Verlag, Freiburg 2004, pp. 131 ff., ISBN 3-451-20633-1 .
  • Johannes Freutsmiedl: Roman streets of the Tabula Peutingeriana in Noricum and Raetien . Publishing house Dr. Faustus, Büchenbach 2005, ISBN 3-933474-36-1 .
  • Hans Bauer: The Roman highways between Iller and Salzach according to the Itinerarium Antonini and the Tabula Peutingeriana. New research results on route guidance . Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-8316-0740-2 .
  • Richard JA Talbert: Rome's world. The Peutinger map reconsidered. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-76480-3 .
  • Michael Rathmann: Heinrich Kiepert and the Tabula Peutingeriana (Codex Vindobonensis 324) . In: Michael Bischoff, Vera Lüpkes and Wolfgang Crom (eds.): Cartography of the early modern times. World views and effects (= studies on the culture of the Renaissance 5). Rastede 2015, pp. 13-18.
  • Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, The Paper Snake. Scheyb's fight with the Tabula Peutingeriana . In: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 14, 2020, Issue 1, pp. 77-92, ISBN 978-3-406-74861-5 .
  • Stefan Lehmann : Spatial development and communication channels in the Roman Empire around 300 AD. The cartographic representation of the road network in the Tabula Peuterineriana . In: A. Ranft and W. Schenkluhn (eds.): Kulturstraßen als Konzept - 20 Jahre Straße der Romanik (Regensburg 2016), pp. 175–183.
  • Michael Rathmann: Tabula Peutingeriana. The only world map from ancient times. Introduced and commented by Michael Rathmann . Philipp von Zabern, Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-8053-4999-4 .

Web links

Commons : Tabula Peutingeriana  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Rathmann: Heinrich Kiepert and the Tabula Peutingeriana (Codex Vindobonensis 324) . In: Michael Bischoff, Vera Lüpkes and Wolfgang Crom (eds.): Cartography of the early modern times. World views and effects (= studies on the culture of the Renaissance 5). Rastede 2015, pp. 13–18, here pp. 13–16.
  2. ↑ Ulf von Rauchhaupt : The world to wrap up. In: Frkf. General Currently , January 25, 2019, accessed on January 28, 2019.
  3. ↑ Cf. (published posthumously) De Galliae Belgicae Commentariolvs , nunc primum in lucem editvs. In: Peter van Dieven: Petri Divaei Louanensis De Galliae Belgicae Antiqvitatibvs Liber I. Statum eius quem sub Romanorum imperio habunt, complectens. Accessit huic editioni, H. Nvenari de eadem Galliae Belgicae Commentariolvs . 2nd ed. Christoffel Plantijn, Antwerp 1584, p. 15 ( Google Books ).
  4. ↑ a b Cartographica Neerlandica Background for Ortelius Map No. 227 , Marcel van den Broecke: orteliusmaps.com (there also images of the Welser-Ortelius facsimile).
  5. ↑ Index of the Plates of Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Ortelius (Ort) -number , orteliusmaps.com - with Parergon (Appendix), there No. 227.