# Tabula Peutingeriana > Unknown copyist, south German or Alsatian scriptorium - Copy: c. 1200 (a disputed alternative hypothesis proposes 1265). The lost Roman original it reproduces is of contested date; proposals in current scholarship range from an Augustan-era survey revised in the 4th-5th century, to c. A.D. 300, to a Hellenistic foundation revised as late as c. A.D. 435. > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unknown-peutinger-copyist/tabula-peutingeriana-onb-vienna/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-13 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown copyist, south German or Alsatian scriptorium - **Date:** Copy: c. 1200 (a disputed alternative hypothesis proposes 1265). The lost Roman original it reproduces is of contested date; proposals in current scholarship range from an Augustan-era survey revised in the 4th-5th century, to c. A.D. 300, to a Hellenistic foundation revised as late as c. A.D. 435. - **Medium:** Brown ink, with roads marked in red, on a parchment scroll of 11 surviving sheets (originally 12) glued end to end, now cut apart and mounted separately between glass - **Dimensions:** Approximately 675 to 680 cm long by 33 to 34 cm high across the 11 surviving segments; sources vary by a few centimetres in both figures - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** Medieval copy, German, c. 1200, after a Roman itinerary map of disputed date - **Current location:** Austrian National Library (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek), Vienna, Department of Manuscripts, Autographs and Closed Collections - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary An eleven-sheet parchment scroll, roughly 6.8 metres long and about 34 centimetres high, copied around the year 1200 from a lost Roman map of the road network of the cursus publicus. It is the only substantially complete map to survive from antiquity in any form, in however many removes, and its westernmost sheet, which would have shown Britain, Iberia and Morocco, has been missing since at least the sixteenth century.The map takes its common name from the Augsburg humanist Konrad Peutinger, who never made it, published it, or is even reliably documented as having sought it out; he simply inherited it, by gift, from the man who found it. It passed through his family for two centuries, was bought for Prince Eugene of Savoy in the early eighteenth century, and entered the Habsburg imperial library by 1738, where, as the Austrian National Library, it remains: kept in a safe, its date and purpose still argued over in print by named scholars who flatly disagree with one another, and its own Napoleonic-era history, a period every institutional account of it passes over in silence, left here as an open gap rather than filled with a guess.Added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007, it is currently the subject of an active multispectral imaging project that has already recovered at least one place name invisible to the naked eye, confirming a transcription made by a sixteenth-century reader four hundred years before the technology existed to check it. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1st century BCE - 5th century CE (disputed)** Unknown; a lost Roman itinerary map, the ultimate source of this copy `[disputed]` (origin) The date, authorship and purpose of the lost Roman original are all genuinely contested. Proposals in current scholarship include a map descended from an Augustan-era survey associated with Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and revised in the 4th or 5th century; Konrad Miller's dating to A.D. 365-366, based on the map's emphasis on Rome, Constantinople and Antioch as the three imperial residences of that moment; Richard Talbert's 2010 case for a Tetrarchic display document of c. A.D. 300, made for a public space in an imperial palace rather than for practical travel; and Michael Rathmann's ongoing case for a Hellenistic foundational form, continuously revised down to about A.D. 435. No single position is the settled consensus. - **c. 1200 (disputed alternative: 1265)** Unknown copyist, probably working in the south German region or Alsace `[disputed]` (copying) The surviving manuscript is a copy of the lost Roman original made by a single unnamed individual, described by reviewers of the paleographic scholarship as an artist rather than a scribe, who copied the map layer by layer rather than by pricking or tracing. The best-supported dating is approximately A.D. 1200, in the south German region or Alsace; a more specific, disputed hypothesis assigns the work instead to a monk in Colmar in 1265. The twelfth, westernmost sheet was already missing by the time the map resurfaces in the documented record. - **by 1494 or 1507 (disputed)-1507-1508** Conrad Celtes (1459-1508), humanist and university teacher, Vienna `[disputed]` (discovery, or removal, from a library) Celtes is credited with finding the scroll in a library, most often identified as Worms, though sources are not fully consistent and some instead describe an unspecified monastery library in southern Germany. Some modern scholarship treats the acquisition as an unauthorized removal rather than a legitimate discovery, as part of a wider pattern of manuscript acquisition associated with the circle around Emperor Maximilian I; this record notes that view without adopting it as settled fact. Celtes gave or promised the map to Konrad Peutinger in Augsburg in the summer of 1507 and confirmed the gift in his will, which took effect on his death in February 1508. - **1508-c. 1714** Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547) and his descendants, Augsburg `[documented]` (inheritance and family custody) The map remained privately owned by the Peutinger family in Augsburg for more than two centuries. Konrad Peutinger, Augsburg's town clerk from 1497 and a close associate of Emperor Maximilian I, was among the first German scholarly epigraphists; the map became permanently associated with his name and library even though he neither made nor published it. By the 1590s, family access had passed to the Augsburg patrician Marcus Welser, whose manuscript copies were engraved for Abraham Ortelius and published in Antwerp in 1598 by Johannes Moretus as the first printed edition, already titled from the Peutinger library. The manuscript itself was sold out of the family around 1714 by Ignaz Desiderius Peutinger, dean of the collegiate chapter at Ellwangen, to the book dealer Paul Kuz. - **1714/1715/1717 (sources disagree on the exact year)-1736** Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663-1736) `[documented]` (purchase) The map was acquired for Prince Eugene of Savoy through the scholar and agent Karl Gustav Heraus, reportedly for 100 ducats, a figure repeated across secondary sources but not traced here to a contemporary receipt. It joined Eugene's library at the Winter Palace in Vienna, a collection of roughly 15,000 volumes by the time of his death. - **1736-1738** Emperor Charles VI, for the Imperial Court Library (Hofbibliothek), Vienna `[documented]` (acquisition) Prince Eugene died on 21 April 1736. His library, the Bibliotheca Eugeniana, was purchased from his heir and incorporated into the Habsburg Imperial Court Library; the transfer was completed by 1738, the date the library's own records treat as the map's entry into what is now the Austrian National Library. - **1738-1809-1815 (unresolved)** Habsburg Imperial Court Library (Hofbibliothek), Vienna `[unknown]` (custody, with an unresolved possible gap) Every institutional source consulted describes the map's custody at the Hofbibliothek as continuous from 1738 onward, without mentioning any interruption. That silence is worth stating rather than passing over, because the library is separately and reliably documented to have lost manuscripts and books to French forces during the 1809 occupation of Vienna, when Napoleon's director-general of museums, Dominique Vivant Denon, personally selected material from the Hofbibliothek for removal to Paris, an episode substantial enough to be the subject of a dedicated early study (Ferdinand Mencik's dissertation on the removal of manuscripts from the Court Library by the French in 1809). At least one other named treasure of the same library, the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, is documented elsewhere as seized in 1809 and returned to Vienna in 1815 after Waterloo. No source consulted here states that the Tabula Peutingeriana was among the items removed in 1809, and none states affirmatively that it stayed in Vienna throughout. This record treats the period as an unresolved gap rather than asserting either outcome. - **1815 (or, if no gap occurred, 1738)-present** Austrian National Library (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek), Vienna `[documented]` (custody) Whatever the resolution of the 1809-1815 question, the map has certainly been part of the library's holdings, as Codex Vindobonensis 324, since at least the restoration of normal conditions after 1815, and the library's own current cataloguing and the UNESCO Memory of the World nomination file both describe it as in place today. It was divided into individually mounted segments in 1863 and has been stored between glass since 1937; it is kept in a safe in the manuscripts depot, with access normally restricted to the facsimile. ## Open questions - Was the Tabula Peutingeriana among the Hofbibliothek manuscripts and books that Dominique Vivant Denon selected for removal to Paris in 1809, and if so, when precisely was it returned? No source consulted for this record names it specifically, though the same library's manuscript collection is separately and reliably documented to have suffered exactly this fate for other named items. - What did the lost twelfth, westernmost sheet actually show? No copy, transcription or independent description of its content survives; Konrad Miller's 1898 reconstruction is a scholarly hypothesis built on geometric inference, not a record of what was drawn there. - Where, precisely, and by whom was the surviving copy made? The best-supported view places an unnamed artist-copyist in the south German region or Alsace around A.D. 1200, but a more specific, disputed hypothesis names a monk in Colmar working in 1265, and this record has not been able to adjudicate between them against primary paleographic scholarship. - Where exactly did Conrad Celtes find the map, and by what right? Sources most often name a library in Worms but are not fully consistent, and at least one line of modern scholarship treats the acquisition as an unauthorized removal rather than a legitimate discovery. - What is the true date, authorship and purpose of the lost Roman original? At least four incompatible scholarly positions are current in print (an Augustan-derived map revised in the 4th-5th century; Konrad Miller's A.D. 365-366 dating; Richard Talbert's Tetrarchic display-document thesis of c. A.D. 300; Michael Rathmann's ongoing case for a Hellenistic foundation revised into the 5th century), and none is the settled consensus. - Is Emily Albu correct that the map is substantially a thirteenth-century Hohenstaufen political production rather than a faithful copy of an ancient original? This record has seen only a secondary account of her argument, not the counter-arguments made against it in the specialist literature, and cannot adjudicate the claim. - What will the Rathmann-Shevchuk multispectral imaging collaboration ultimately recover? Only a limited 2022 test capture had been reported in the sources available when this record was written; the fuller results of the 2026 phase of the project were not yet published. ## Sources - [1] UNESCO Memory of the World Register, nomination form for 'Tabula Peutingeriana', submitted by Austria, Ref. No. 2006-12. - [2] UNESCO, 'Tabula Peutingeriana', Memory of the World Register. - [3] Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, 'Die Tabula Peutingeriana' (institutional blog). - [4] ONB Digital, catalogue record for Cod. 324, 'Tabula Peutingeriana'. - [5] Renate Burri, review of Richard J. A. Talbert, 'Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered' (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.04.14. - [6] Wien Geschichte Wiki, 'Tabula Peutingeriana', City of Vienna. - [7] Austria-Forum (AustriaWiki), 'Tabula Peutingeriana'. - [8] decaf-de / Literaturtirol, 'Die franzosische Besetzung von Wien 1805/1806 und 1809'. - [9] Wikipedia, 'Hours of Mary of Burgundy'. Tertiary source, used only for the documented 1809 seizure / 1815 return of a separate manuscript at the same library, cited as a comparandum for an open question about this object; flagged for replacement with a scholarly provenance study of that manuscript. - [10] Katholische Universitat Eichstatt-Ingolstadt (KU), Chair for Ancient History, 'Tabula Peutingeriana' research project page. - [11] Archaologie Online, 'Neue Datenbank zur antiken Weltkarte Tabula Peutingeriana' (2019). - [12] Archaologie Online, 'Antike Weltkarte in neuem Licht: KU-Forscher analysieren Tabula Peutingeriana mit innovativer Bildtechnik' (24 April 2026). - [13] Geography Realm, review of Emily Albu, 'The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire' (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Secondary account of Albu's book; flagged for replacement with the monograph itself. - [14] Der Standard, 'Tabula Peutingeriana nun Weltkulturerbe'. - [15] Wikipedia, 'Tabula Peutingeriana'. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with Talbert (2010) consulted directly and with the Austrian National Library's own scholarly catalogue. - [16] Wikipedia, 'Konrad Peutinger'. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography of Peutinger. - [17] Cartographica Neerlandica, background note for Ortelius map no. 227 (the 1598 Welser / Ortelius / Moretus edition of the Peutinger map). - [18] Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, catalogue description of 'Tabula Itineraria Ex Illustri Peutingerorum Bibliotheca...' (Welser / Ortelius / Moretus, 1598). - [19] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Tabula Peutingeriana (ONB) and associated file description pages, used to verify image licensing and attribution. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.