Tabula Peutingeriana

[3] It covers Europe (without the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles), North Africa, and parts of Asia, including the Middle East, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent.

[4] According to Albu, the map was likely stolen by the humanist Conrad Celtes, who bequeathed it to his friend, the economist and archaeologist Konrad Peutinger, who gave it to Emperor Maximilian I as part of a large-scale book stealing scheme.

[8] This dating is also consistent with the map's inclusion of the Roman town of Pompeii near modern-day Naples, which was never rebuilt after its destruction in an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

[9] The presence of certain cities of Germania Inferior that were destroyed in the mid-fifth century provides a terminus ante quem (a map's latest plausible creation date), though Emily Albu suggests that this information could have been preserved in the textual, not cartographic, form.

The map shows many Roman settlements, the roads connecting them, and the distances between them, as well as other features such as rivers, mountains, forests, and seas.

Besides the totality of the empire, the map also shows areas in the Near East, India and the Ganges, Sri Lanka (Insula Taprobane), and even an indication of China.

However, a rough similarity to the coordinates of Ptolemy's earth-mapping gives some writers hope that some terrestrial representation was intended by the unknown original compilers.

The editors Annalina and Mario Levi concluded that the semi-schematic, semi-pictorial symbols reproduce Roman cartographic conventions of the itineraria picta described by 4th century writer Vegetius,[17] of which this is the sole known testimony.

It is today conserved at the Austrian National Library at the Hofburg palace in Vienna,[18] and due to its fragility is housed away from any public display.

Celtes and Peutinger took pains to eliminate clues related to the map's original whereabouts and thus knowledge about its first three hundred years is likely lost.

According to Welser, who wrote a commentary on the map (the Praefatio), it was the description of the humanist Beatus Rhenanus that "aroused an intense desire in many people to inspect it."