Tabula Peutingeriana

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tabula Peutingeriana is a single scroll, 6.75 metres long and just 0.35 metres high, that holds inside it the entire road network of the Roman Empire. Painted onto parchment sometime around 1200, it is a copy of something much older. It shows Rome, Constantinople, Antioch. It traces roads across Europe, North Africa, and deep into Asia, all the way to the Indian subcontinent and what appears to be China. Cities are marked with tiny towers. Distances between stops are noted along stepped lines like a transit diagram. And at one end of the scroll, a section is simply missing.

  How did this document survive? Who made it? Who owned it, lost it, found it again, and sold it for a hundred ducats? And how does a map that was almost certainly stolen end up in the Austrian National Library, where it sits today, too fragile to put on public display? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Map Born from Agrippa

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  Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was a Roman general, architect, and close confidant of the emperor Augustus. Under his direction, a monumental world map was prepared, engraved in stone, and placed on public display in the Porticus Vipsania in Rome, in the area known as the Campus Agrippae, close to the Ara Pacis. That map is almost certainly the distant ancestor of the Tabula Peutingeriana.

  The American historian Glen Bowersock supports this early imperial origin, pointing to details about Roman Arabia that would be anachronistic if the map dated from the 4th century. One detail in particular is persuasive: the map shows Pompeii, the town near modern-day Naples that was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and never rebuilt. A later mapmaker would have had no reason to include it.

  The surviving copy is not, however, a direct copy of Agrippa's original. The map shows Constantinople, which was founded in 328. It gives prominent placement to Ravenna, which served as the seat of the Western Roman Empire from 402 to 476. Scholars Annalina and Mario Levi read these details as signs of a fifth-century revision. The presence of certain cities in the region of Germania Inferior that were destroyed in the mid-fifth century gives a terminus ante quem, a latest plausible date of creation, though not everyone agrees on how to read that evidence. The map also names Francia, a state that came into existence only in the 5th century.

  A competing hypothesis, proposed by historian Emily Albu, pushes the original even later, into the Carolingian period. Albu also challenges the idea that the map's details about destroyed cities are truly cartographic, suggesting they may have been preserved only in textual annotations rather than drawn geography.

• 3. Reading the Scroll

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  Unroll the scroll and what you find is not a map in any modern sense. The land masses are distorted, particularly along the east-west axis. The shape of the parchment itself dictated that distortion: the long, narrow format of a scroll forces the world into a horizontal strip.

  What the map does show, with obvious care, is the cursus publicus, the state-run road network that connected the Roman Empire. At least 555 cities are marked, along with more than 3,500 other place names. Roads appear as a series of stepped lines with destinations noted in order of travel, and distances between stops are indicated at each stage. The three greatest cities of the empire, Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch, are given individualized pictorial portraits rather than the standard two-tower building icon used for lesser settlements.

  The scroll also reaches beyond Roman territory. It notes the Indian subcontinent, the Ganges, Sri Lanka under the name Insula Taprobane, and even a gesture toward China. On the Malabar Coast of southwest India, at Muziris (the present-day Kodungallur), the map marks a Temple to Augustus, one of the main Roman trade ports in the region.

  The editors Annalina and Mario Levi concluded that the map's semi-schematic, semi-pictorial place symbols reproduce cartographic conventions described by the 4th-century writer Vegetius in his account of the itineraria picta, illustrated road lists. If they are right, the Tabula is the only known surviving example of that tradition. The scroll as it survives is assembled from eleven sections. A twelfth section, covering Morocco, the Iberian Peninsula, and the British Isles, is missing from the western end. Konrad Miller reconstructed it in 1898.

• 4. Stolen, Lost, and Sold

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  In 1494, a German scholar named Conrad Celtes found the map in a library in the city of Worms. He kept it for fourteen years but died before he could publish it. In 1508 he bequeathed the scroll to Konrad Peutinger, a German humanist and antiquarian based in Augsburg, after whom the map is now named.

  The circumstances of Celtes's original discovery are disputed. Several scholars believe he did not find the map by chance. They believe he stole it. Emily Albu has argued that Celtes, Peutinger, and their patron Emperor Maximilian I were engaged in a large-scale scheme to acquire artifacts that connected the Holy Roman Empire to its ancient Roman predecessor. Celtes and Peutinger, Albu contends, took pains to erase evidence of where the map originally came from, which is why knowledge of its first three centuries is effectively lost. The theologian Johann Eck was among the first to accuse Celtes of theft. Historian Unger has written that continuing to call the map by the name "Peutinger" amounts to honoring the pilfering.

  When Celtes gave the map to Peutinger, he left written instructions: he wished the map to be turned over to public use after Peutinger's death, perhaps to a library. That wish was not honored. Peutinger and his sons kept tight control over access. The map then vanished. It was only rediscovered in 1597 by Marcus Welser, a member of the Welser family and a relative of Peutinger. Welser wrote a commentary called the Praefatio, noting that the description by the humanist Beatus Rhenanus had aroused wide interest in seeing the map. During the years it was lost, Peutinger and Welser both worked from sketches; those sketches were published in 1591.

  After its rediscovery the map passed between royal and elite families. Prince Eugene of Savoy eventually purchased it for 100 ducats. When Eugene died in 1737, the Habsburg Imperial Court Library in Vienna acquired it the following year, in 1738.

• 5. Into Print and Public Memory

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  The Brabantian cartographer Abraham Ortelius had a copy made of the map, and that copy was published in 1598, shortly after his death. A partial first edition had already appeared in 1591 at Antwerp, titled Fragmenta tabulae antiquae, printed by Johannes Moretus. Moretus then printed the full Tabula in December 1598, also at Antwerp. Johannes Janssonius published another version in Amsterdam around 1652.

  Franz Christoph von Scheyb produced a copy in 1753. In 1872, the German professor Konrad Miller was permitted to copy the original directly, and European publishing houses followed with their own editions. Publishers Williams and Norgate issued a London copy in 1892, and in 1911 a supplementary sheet was added showing Miller's reconstruction of the missing British Isles and Iberian Peninsula sections.

  The map's first publication, technically, had come even earlier. Konrad Peutinger himself published a version in 1507, which is the date attached to his name in the historical record. The full map, however, only reached readers through the 1598 Antwerp edition.

  In 2007, UNESCO added the Tabula Peutingeriana to its Memory of the World International Register. To mark the occasion, the scroll was displayed to the public in Vienna for a single day, on the 26th of November 2007. It was one of the rare times anyone outside a small circle of scholars has been allowed to see it in person. Because of its fragility, it remains off public display at the Austrian National Library in the Hofburg palace, where it has been held since 1738.