Home

This map visualizes the data on roads and bridges that this project has accumulated thus far.

From the layers tab, several background maps are available, including the Cassini map, the first modern topographical map of France made in the seventeenth century. Our map was not made with reference to Cassini’s contours, though notably many of our roads are roughly analogous to those indicated on it.

The filter tab allows you to isolate the roads and bridges in particular sources or source types, as well as to view them by time period. The full citation information for sources can be found on this site’s bibliography page. You can also choose to view the roads either as approximate actual routes or as a simple itinerary with straight lines linking the locations attested in the sources.

A word to the wise: our sixteenth-century dataset for roads is much fuller than for other centuries, so the relative sparseness of roads on our map for earlier centuries should not be taken as evidence that they did not exist.

Map Layers

Select map layers to view using the radio buttons and checkboxes below.

The city and detailed roads layers are best viewed when zoomed-in to the map.

Filter

Download the Data

The data can be downloaded either in zipped ESRI Shapefile format, or as attribute data in CSV format:

ESRI Shapefile:

Historic Roads

Historic Bridges

City Gates

City Main Streets

City Walls

Comma Separated Variable (CSV):

Historic Roads

Historic Bridges

City Gates

City Main Streets

City Walls

Legal notice and Copyright

Data License:

The data produced by this project are covered by the CC BY license.. This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.

Please cite as follows:

Firnhaber-Baker, Justine and Owens, Timothy (eds), Medieval French Roads Project, version 1.0 (St Andrews, 2021), http://www.medievalfrenchroads.org