The origins of the Peutinger Table can be traced to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (63–12 BCE), the Roman general and geographer who created a map of his empire for the Emperor Augustus. Carved in marble, the map was finished after Agrippa’s death and placed by his sister, Vipsania Polla, in the Porticus Vipsania as a memorial. The map offered travelers an official measure of distance between points along the roads leading to and from Rome. Travelers referring to it could prepare itineraries, list planned stops, determine the distances between them, and note the location of rivers and settlements along the way.
By the third or fourth century, manuscript copies of the map encompassed the full scope of the Roman Empire, extending eastward to regions conquered by Alexander and going as far as India, to the Ganges and Sri Lanka. At this point, it was unlikely to have been displayed publicly, at least not in its complete form. By then it had become the purview of military planners, for whom it had immense practical value not simply in calculating marching orders, but to ensure that suitable shelter and provisions would be available where and when needed. A copy from this period became the direct progenitor of the Peutinger Table.
The first version to enter print is a copy of a copy. Its immediate source—and the only surviving representation of the Roman original—was produced in north-eastern France around 1265 by an unnamed monk in the city of Colmar, at the time, a free Imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire. By the sixteenth century, the Colmar manuscript had been moved to Worms, where it was discovered by Konrad Celtis, who intended to see it published. Unable to do so before his death, he bequeathed it to Konrad Peutinger, a German diplomat, the owner of the largest library north of the Alps, and the source of its present name. In spite of his own desire, Peutinger, likewise, was unable to have the map printed in his lifetime. It remained in the possession of his library, where it stayed until Abraham Ortelius was given the opportunity to oversee its publication—a project he had wanted to undertake for twenty years, which he conducted at his own expense.
In Ortelius’s reproduction the table is divided into eight sections, spread across four pages. On the reverse Ortelius printed his own extensive commentary covering a range of topics including acknowledgments of the publication’s enablers, a discussion of its practical value to those it was designed for, and explanation of the specifics of how it may have been used, and notes on the extent to which layers of transcription errors were corrected. Still unfinished at the time of his death, the work was completed shortly thereafter, and published in 1598. It is now the world’s oldest roadmap in print. Due to the subsequent deterioration of the thirteenth-century manuscript copy, it is also the clearest available trace of the original Roman map.
Today, the manuscript copy of Peutinger Table is held by the Austrian National Library. A full-sized reproduction is available online at http://www.euratlas.net/cartogra/peutinger/index.html.
