The Peutinger Table by Petrus Bertius: rebirth of a precious medieval map

Like a parchment unrolled to reveal the secrets of a lost world, Tabula Peutingeriana  by Petrus Bertius invites us to travel along the arteries of the Roman Empire through the eyes of a visionary seventeenth-century cartographer.

This extraordinary cartographic document stands as one of the most fascinating attempts to resurrect the geography of the classical world. In every line traced with meticulous precision, in every toponym inscribed among the curves of the consular roads, echoes resound of legions marching to the empire’s frontiers, of merchants crossing continents, of pilgrims following ancient sacred itineraries.

Bertius’s work is a temporal bridge linking seventeenth-century European modernity with the grandeur of Rome, in a visual narrative of remarkable power.

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Style
The Tabula Peutingeriana is a long medieval itinerary map that reproduces a Roman model from the 4th century AD. It schematically depicts the known world of the time, from Britain to India, placing at its center the road network of the Roman Empire, with cities, posting stations, and ports. It is not a realistic geographical map but rather a practical tool for visualizing road and maritime connections.

The most important cities (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch) are represented with monumental icons, such as small temples or walled buildings, to emphasize their prestige. Rome is depicted as a female figure holding a globe, symbol of imperial power. Many rivers, seas, and mountains are only suggested, without geographical precision. Although derived from a Late Roman model, the medieval copy of the 13th century adds stylistic elements typical of manuscript illumination of that time, such as brighter colors, Gothic lettering, and decorative details.

The manuscript we know today is a 13th-century copy, probably executed at Colmar in Alsace by a monk. The Late Antique original has been lost. Its modern history begins in 1507, when it was rediscovered in Worms, Germany, by the humanist Conrad Celtis; he bequeathed it to his friend Konrad Peutinger of Augsburg, a jurist and antiquarian, from whom the map takes its name. Peutinger recognized the document’s importance and circulated it among scholars; the first printed edition appeared only after his death: in 1598, the erudite Marcus Welser, Peutinger’s son-in-law, published in Augsburg a partial version of the Tabula. At the beginning of the 17th century, the map finally left the private sphere of the Peutinger family: it was sold or ceded to the Dutchman Petrus Bertius (1565–1629), geographer, theologian, and cartographer who taught at Leiden and later became cosmographer to the king of France, and who reworked it. Today, the Tabula is preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

Color and lighting
Colors serve primarily a practical and symbolic function: the roads are drawn in red, standing out clearly against the parchment background and guiding the eye along the routes. Rivers are rendered in bluish-green, sometimes with wavy lines to suggest their flow; seas are outlined, occasionally with light blue washes. The most important cities (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria) are depicted with miniated buildings and brighter touches of color—gold, ocher, red, and blue—distinguishing them from smaller settlements.

The place names are written in black or dark brown ink, but sometimes with initials rubricated in red, in line with the practice of medieval manuscripts.

Spatial organization
The spatial representation is characterized by strong longitudinal distortion, with vertical compression that flattens the shape of the territories to adapt them to the elongated format of the parchment. The map is about 7 meters long and 34 cm high: a very narrow and elongated format that necessarily deforms the territories.

Europe, North Africa, and Asia appear as a long horizontal band compressed in height, and Italy, for example, is not “boot-shaped” but rendered as an elongated vertical strip.

This choice reflects the map’s pragmatic function, that of an itinerary guide, shifting attention away from perspectival fidelity toward a clear distribution of information about routes and locations. Traditional depth and perspective are absent, as it is a schematic, planimetric vision.

Composition and framing
The composition follows a horizontal and linear development, with elements distributed in parallel bands separated by bodies of water. Balance is ensured by the constant repetition of symbols and colors that guide the reader’s eye across the map.

The framing is that of a distorted bird’s-eye view, designed to optimize usability and consultation during travel, privileging order and simplicity in the indication of stages and main routes.

Technique and materials
The original medieval map was made on parchment, obtained from treated animal skins, a common choice of the time for its durability and resistance. The manuscript is assembled from eleven sheets of parchment sewn or glued along the edges, forming a roll about 6.7–6.8 meters long and about 0.34 meters high. Originally, there was a twelfth segment, now missing, that would have represented Western Europe.

Welser’s reprint, by contrast, was produced using copperplate engraving or woodcut, depending on the plates, which allowed the lines and symbols of the map to be reproduced more precisely. The support was Renaissance watermarked paper. This first edition did not reproduce the entire length of the roll, but only a portion, rendered in printed tables on separate sheets and then bound together. The graphic rendering remained schematic and faithful to the original, but adapted to book format and the printing techniques of the time.

The Peutinger Table by Bertius represents a document of inestimable value for understanding the geographical imagination of the early modern period. This work, in fact, testifies to the fascination that the ancient world exerted on seventeenth-century European culture, at a time when the rediscovery of classical antiquity was intertwined with the first scientific explorations of the territory.