Appendix 4
The following maps and road maps help us to understand the relative geographical position of Britannia and the impressive road system on the islands. York’s crucial position in this is made all the clearer.
The Peutinger Map
Tabula Peutingeriana – The Peutinger Map is an illustrated itinerarium (ancient Roman road map) showing the layout of the cursus publicus, the road network of the Roman Empire.
The map is a thirteenth-century parchment copy of a possible Roman original. It covers Europe (without the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles), North Africa, and parts of Asia, including the Middle East, Persia, and India. The Tabula originates from the map prepared by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the Roman general, architect, and friend of Emperor Augustus. After Agrippa’s death in 12 BC, that map was engraved in marble and put on display in the Porticus Vipsania in the Campus Agrippae area in Rome, near the Ara Pacis building.
The Antonine Itinerary
The Antonine Itinerary (Itinerarium Antonini Augusti, ‘The Itinerary of the Emperor Antoninus’) is a register of the 225 stations and distances along various roads based on official documents; it describes the roads of the Roman Empire. Owing to the scarcity of other extant records of this type, it is an invaluable historical record.
The title has led this to be ascribed to Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161), but this cannot be so. The British section, crucially, is titled Iter Britanniarum; Britanniarum is plural, indicating that the collection was put together after Britain was divided into two provinces by Septimius Severus c. 197 (Rivet and Smith, 1979, p. 154). Almost nothing is known of its date or author, although it is likely that the original edition was compiled over nearly two centuries. The oldest extant copy has been assigned to the time of Diocletian and the most likely imperial patron – if the work had one – would have been Caracalla.
The British section, the Iter Britanniarum, is the ‘road map’ of Roman Britain (although it includes less than twenty-five per cent of all the roads in Roman Britain), one of fifteen such itineraries applying to different geographic areas around the empire. The itinerary measures distances in Roman miles.
What was its purpose? Some say it shows routes of the cursus publicus (the imperial postal service); others assert that they are routes of journeys planned for emperors or their armies. Nicholas Reed has given the most plausible explanation; he argues that the itineraries are a collection of routes to be used for the collection of annona militaris, a tax of food and supplies originally imposed by Septimius Severus to provide for the Roman army. Casado sums this up:
This would explain the arbitrary way in which the routes contained in the document were selected, and would also account for the strange ‘detour-type’ layouts chosen, on some occasions, to link two cities relatively close to each other, when the second city is reached after passing through other places that would have made the route much longer than was really necessary.
Here are the four sections of the Iter which involve Eboracum:
Iter I Breenium (High Rochester) to Brough via Corbridge, Aldborough, York intersecting with Itera II, V
Iter II Bratobulgium (Barrens) to Rutupiae (Richborough) via Carlisle, Aldborough, York, Chester, Wroxeter, St Albans, London, Canterbury intersecting with Itera I, III, IV, V
Iter V Londinium to Luguvalium (Carlisle) via London, Colchester, Caistor, Lincoln, York, Aldborough, Carlisle intersecting with Itera I, II, IX
Iter VIII Eboracum to Londinium via York, Lincoln, Leicester, St Albans, London
The Ravenna Cosmography
Ravennatis Anonymi Cosmographia, ‘The Cosmography of the Unknown Ravennese’, is a list of place names covering the known world from India to Ireland, compiled by an anonymous cleric in Ravenna around AD 700.
The naming of places in Roman Britain has traditionally depended on Ptolemy’s Geography, the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table, as the Cosmography was notoriously corrupt and unreliable – the lists of place names being haphazard to say the least. However, the Cosmography is more comprehensive than the other documents. When archaeological investigations began to uncover sites that had evidence of occupation in the Roman period, the Antonine Itinerary and Richard of Cirencester’s De Situ Britanniae were increasingly used to corroborate entries, until, that is, Richard’s work was found to be an eighteenth-century hoax. The Cosmography remained relatively impenetrable until the mid-twentieth century.
In 1949, Sir Ian Richmond and O. G. S. Crawford published a paper originally submitted to Archaeologia, which suggested that the sources for the document had included maps or road books, and that many place names described geographical features. The book was seen as a significant advance in the study both of the document and of Romano-British place names; A. L. F. Rivet and Colin Smith published their landmark The Place-Names of Roman Britain in 1979.
Ptolemy’s World Map – Britain
Ptolemy’s Prima Europe Tabula. The Ptolemy world map is a map of the world as known to Hellenistic society in c. 150 BC and is one of the earliest surviving copies of Ptolemy’s second-century map of the British Isles. Originally published in Ptolemy’s Geographia, this is the second issue of the 1482 map, printed at Ulm, which was the first woodcut map of the British Isles and the first to be printed outside Italy. It is dated 1486 and in the National Library of Wales.
Based on an inscription in several of the earliest surviving manuscripts, it is traditionally credited to Agathodaemon of Alexandria and so is not really by Ptolemy.