How to Navigate the Roman Empire

The Tabula Peutingeriana is one of the most remarkable surviving maps from the ancient world. Held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, it is a medieval copy of a Roman road map, originally drawn on a parchment scroll almost seven metres long and just 34 centimetres high.

The map depicts the road network of the Roman Empire, stretching from the British Isles and the Atlantic coast to the Middle East and India. Thousands of place names, roads and distances are recorded along its routes.

Unlike a modern geographical map, the Tabula Peutingeriana makes little attempt to represent the world to scale. Its extraordinary elongated shape, with the Mediterranean compressed into a narrow strip, reflects its real purpose: showing the connections between settlements and the routes linking them. Distances between places are marked in Roman miles, making it an important record of how people could travel across the Roman world.

You can explore this extraordinary document on the Tabula Peutingeriana interactive map. This website allows you to navigate the original map, search for ancient and modern place names, and explore the locations represented on it alongside a contemporary geographical map. I'd recommend starting with the narrated Demo, which provides a guided tour of the interactive map. This is a great introduction to both the original map and to the many features of the interactive version of map.

Another way to explore the Tabula Peutingeriana is through OmnesViae. Select the 'Tabula' option to view an interactive version of the Peutinger map, or choose 'Iter' to open the site's Roman route planner.

OmnesViae allows you to enter a starting point and destination and calculate a route between them using the ancient Roman road network. Rather than simply drawing a modern route between two locations, it reconstructs journeys using the settlements, road connections and distances recorded in the Tabula Peutingeriana. The planner calculates the shortest route using the distances given in the map, allowing you to discover how a journey might have been made in the Roman world.