The Tabula Peutingeriana, or Peutinger Map, is a medieval parchment copy of a late Roman road map. It is a long, stretched picture of the roads, towns and distances of the Empire, and it is one of the sources behind the Itiner-e dataset.
Key takeaways
- The surviving map is a copy made around AD 1200 of a Late Antique original, and Konrad Peutinger first published it in 1507.
- It shows the Empire's road network as an itinerary diagram, not a true-to-scale map, and it does not cover Iberia or the British Isles.
- Itiner-e counts a road's place on this map as one of the signs of a main road.
- Our data does not say which lines come from the map, so use the road pages for what we do show.
What the Tabula Peutingeriana is
The Tabula Peutingeriana is an illustrated itinerarium, a Roman road map, that shows the layout of the cursus publicus, the state transport network [1]. The name means "the Peutinger Map", after Konrad Peutinger, who published it in 1507. The surviving copy is on parchment and dates from around 1200. It copies a Late Antique original, and scholars disagree about how that original was made [1].
It covers Europe (without the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles), North Africa and parts of Asia as far as the Indian subcontinent [1]. Its land masses are distorted, especially from east to west, and it shows roads, settlements and the distances between them [1]. That makes it more like a transport diagram than a map you could navigate by.
How it feeds into the road data
Itiner-e used ancient itineraries to identify roads, and names the Tabula Peutingeriana and the Antonine Itinerary as the chief examples [2]. A road that appears on one of them is evidence that it existed and mattered.
That evidence also feeds the main-or-secondary label. In the atlas, a road segment is a main road if it has more than one of three signs: milestones, a place in an ancient itinerary, and a shared course with a long-known major road [2]. A place on the Tabula Peutingeriana is one of those signs. See main roads versus secondary roads.
The map does not give accurate positions. It tells you which places were linked and roughly how far apart they were. To get a line on the ground, the atlas team had to combine it with archaeology, later maps and the terrain [2].
An example from our data
Our data does not record which of its lines come from the Tabula Peutingeriana, so we cannot colour a road by source. What we can show is the kind of long, well-known route that such sources describe. The Via Egnatia is 1,165 km long and crosses 4 countries (Greece, Turkey, Albania and North Macedonia), while the Via Appia runs 576 km through Italy. Both are named in the data. Both are still drawn mostly as conjectured lines: 94.6% and 83.9% respectively.
Britain is a useful contrast. Because the surviving Peutinger Map leaves out the British Isles [1], the Roman road lines in the United Kingdom rest on other evidence.
The thing people get wrong
The Peutinger Map is often called a "Roman map" as if it were an official survey from the age of the roads. It is not. The copy we have is medieval, and the date and origin of its original are debated [1]. Treat it as a valuable but late and distorted record of how a traveller was meant to think about the network, not as a precise record of where each road ran.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Peutinger Map a map of the Roman Empire?
It is closer to a route diagram. It shows roads, towns and distances along them, but its shapes are stretched and not to scale.
Does the Peutinger Map show Britain?
Not in the surviving copy. It covers Europe without the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles, North Africa and parts of Asia.
Can I see the Peutinger Map on this site?
No. We show the Itiner-e road lines, which use the map as one of their sources.
Sources
- Tabula Peutingeriana, Wikipedia.
- Itiner-e: A high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire, Scientific Data (Brughmans et al., 2025).
- Every figure from our own map is worked out from the datasets on the data sources page (checked against Itiner-e version 2024 1.3).