The Peutinger Table represents, in printed form, an early Roman military road map. It is believed to have been drawn first in 1265 as a copy of a map originally inscribed in marble in Imperial Rome, and   it looks much like the folding, serial maps available today from the AAA.

Originally drawn in  twelve sections, the map begins in Spain and progresses  eastward  to the  end of the then known world,   India and Sri Lanka.  The first section, covering Spain, western France, the British Isles and showing, perhaps, the original title, is now lost.

Rediscovered in Germany, the maps were redrawn by Abraham Ortelius, the great Flemish cartographer, in 1598, the last year of his life. Shortly afterward, his friend Johannes Moretus printed  the maps. They were then reprinted  several times, notably in the Mercator-Ptolemy atlas published in Leiden  between 1618 and 1619 and a publication of Ortelius’s own collection of historical maps, the Parergon, in 1624.  The color was added later, probably in modern times. 

The present title commemorates Konrad Peutinger, a sixteenth-century scholar and imperial councilor, who once owned it. That copy, which is the only known copy in existence,  is in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. A life-sized reproduction of the map is available online at http://www.euratlas.net/cartogra/peutinger/index.html. High-resolution JPEG files of the segments are available at Sorin Olteanu's LTDM Project at http://soltdm.com/sources/mss/tp/tp_0.htm.

Follow this link to see the copy in this collection, with segments laid side-by-side.