The map below is a schematic representation of all the route sections or 'corridors' used by all the itineraries. Each corridor is a straight line between nodes. These nodes may be shrines, but more often are simply towns at corridor junctions. They are generally some distance apart, so the straight lines between them are for overview only and do not represent any detailed line of any particular road. A corridor may, in fact, consist of more than one road. For example, there may be a road on both sides of a river; some travellers use one, some the other, visiting different towns, but they are all following the same corridor. As the nodes are for delimiting corridors, they don't always correspond to one town, but may represent more than one; similarly, to simplify the map, I've pretended that all itineraries go via the node, though in fact some bypass it.
The more itineraries use a particular segment, the thicker the line, so you can see at a glance which are the most used. The different types of itinerary are coloured differently, with the accounts (diaries and guides) distinguished from the later inventories. Those that appear in both types are in a third colour. Because there are so few early detailed itineraries, it's hard to know how representative they are - whether the traveller was using the main road of the time or was a one-off - but where a corridor is used by more than one itinerary, especially if it appears as well in one of the later detailed inventories, the assumption is that these were the most important routes. Of course, there is a time bias, as most of the itineraries are from the later Middle Ages and may not be representative of earlier times, but with that caveat the map should provide a reasonable picture of the main routes. Many of these main roads remain the main roads of today, even if the exact line may not be exactly as it was in medieval times.
I deliberately use a relief map here, with no clutter of modern roads and settlements. This makes it very plain that medieval travellers largely kept to the main river valleys and the main passes - not for them the hill-walking so popular nowadays.
The map is divided into 6 regions. Click on one of the links or on the region on the map for a page with more details for that region. Each of these pages has a further Google Map with more details on the corridors. You can change the map base to display modern towns, roads etc. You can also zoom in, but the corridor lines do not scale: the further in you zoom the more obvious it becomes that they are simply straight lines between nodes! If you click on the name of the nodes in the text (in blue), it will display a marker on the map.
As an alternative, you can display the whole map as one page without my comments on the regions. Because this displays all the corridors, depending on your connection, server speeds, etc, it can be very slow to load and use. Because of this, I suggest using the regional displays.
- Iberia and Pyrenees: includes SW France, S of Bordeaux and Béziers
- Italy: everything S of the Alps
- Alps: all the Alpine passes and roads into Italy, and the approaches to them
- France/Flanders/England: France as in medieval times, W of the Rhone-Saone corridor
- Rhone/Saone/Jura: the major corridor from the north to the Mediterranean, in medieval times the border between France and Germany
- Germany: everything N of the Alps and E of Maastricht and Lorraine
