Mapping Early Modern European postal networks
One of my central interests are Early Modern networks of correspondence – the routes and manner in which letters were carried in the Early Modern period. As one part of these, I am interested in Early Modern postal networks, that is to say the organised networks of correspondence conveyance. By the early 1600s, much of Europe was crisscrossed by postal routes, following the main arteries of Europe between places of interest such as Paris and Madrid, Venice and London. The postal system required having post houses at about every 10 km along the postal routes. During the 1600s, maps started to appear, which charted these post stops. When I came across such a map for the first time (at the Musée Basque in Bayonne, which happened to have a special exhibit of historical maps when I visited in September 2010), I got quite excited – and was soon spurred to plot the postal routes into Google Maps. I am a fan of historical geovisualisation, and believe that plotting historical data on a map reveals things which are not clear without geospatial referents. But partly I was spurred on by pure geekery.
In any case, the first map that I started to plot into Google Maps was Nicolas Berey's Carte Generale De Toute Les Postes et Traverse de France, dated 1632 (although I am no specialist and I understand there is some concern about the date). This is the one I saw at the Musée Basque, and later found an excellent reproduction online at Barry Lawrence Ruderman's raremaps.com (link to a Berey). I was primarily interested in plotting routes along which some of the people I work on travelled, back 400 years ago. Therefore I have not plotted the entire map (and find no motivation to do so at present); only the following portions:
4. Le Havre to Paris; Brussels to Paris [Brussels extension added 7/2013, taken from Berey 1636 (?) and Ottens 1720]
In addition to creating the above maps, I have also mapped portions of postal routes in Spain. Two are mere sketches, but the extension of the Paris-Bayonne route to Madrid I have plotted in some detail:
3. Stages from Santiago to Madrid
In slightly less adequate detail, I have also plotted some Tudor postal and carrier routes westward from London. I am not entirely happy with the following map:
All of these maps are but the dabblings of an amateur, and I have not even started to use them to any particular purpose. They are presented here with an implied CC license – you are more than welcome to make use of them (and you are welcome to grab the KML data too), but please cite Samuli Kaislaniemi as the author, for they did take a surprising amount of time to create!
Page last updated 31.8.2013 by SK.