The Art of Memory: The Medieval Peutinger Map

The Peutinger map is an enigma: a twelfth-century map of the Roman Empire, it is secular and oddly shaped, its dimensions distorted to show Rome at the center of the world. Its creator, purpose, and provenance currently remain lost to history. Long considered by classicists to be a copy of a lost Roman original, the map has not been seriously examined by medievalists, possibly because it does not adhere to the Christian "T-O" style of medieval mappaemundi. While other scholars have focused on what the Peutinger map reflects about ancient Rome, I have chosen to explore how the Peutinger map reflects the historical context and values of its twelfth-century creators. This paper argues that the twelfth-century Peutinger map is a product of its own time and place, inextricably linked with the cultural tumult and political upheaval of the long twelfth century (1050-1250 CE). By examining the cultural flowering of the twelfth-century renaissance and tracing the long series of conflicts between the Hohenstaufen kings of Germany and the papacy from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, I show how the cultural context into which the Peutinger map was born is critical to understanding its purpose and value as a piece of Hohenstaufen propaganda. By further examining the three personifications of cities on the Peutinger map--Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch--this thesis explores how the map’s maker synthesized a variety of classical and medieval references to create a vision of the world that uniquely depicted the German kings as the inheritors of ancient Rome.