Welcome to Viabundus!

Viabundus map
1.3

Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka's Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways.

Viabundus is a work in progress. Currently, it contains a rough digitisation of the land routes from Hansische Handelsstraßen, as well as a thoroughly researched road network for the current-day Netherlands, Denmark, the German states of Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hesse and North Rhine-Westfalia, and parts of Poland (Pomerania, Royal Prussia, Greater Poland). The pre-modern road network of Denmark will be added soon; the inclusion of other regions is currently being planned. Take a look at our Documentation for further information about what Viabundus is and can do. Do you have questions, comments or do you wish to contribute to Viabundus? Don't hesitate to contact us.

The data collected for the compilation of the Viabundus map is available Open Access (CC-BY-SA) and can be downloaded in various formats below.

Take a look at the map!

Documentation

For a better understanding of what Viabundus is and how it works, please consult the documentation files below. As Viabundus is a work in progress, the data will be made available as new versions of the dataset, which can be found under Downloads. With each new version, the documentation will be updated as well. The version numbers below therefore correspond to the version numbers of the dataset. The Online map always uses the latest version, but older versions will remain available for download as well.

Latest version (1.3)

Viabundus documentation, Version 1.3 (published 17-3-2024) - PDF (English).

Previous versions

Viabundus documentation, Version 1.2 (published 21-9-2022) - PDF (English).

Viabundus documentation, Version 1.1 (published 5-12-2021) - PDF (English).

Viabundus documentation, Version 1.0 (published 19-4-2021) - PDF (English).

Other documentation files

Documentation for the subproject Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, by Maria Carina Dengg (German/English)

Documentation for the subproject Denmark, by Kasper H. Andersen, Peter Jensen Maring and Casper Skaaning Andersen (English)

Download

The Viabundus online map offers a number of tools to explore the pre-modern town and road network of northern Europe, including a basic route calculator and a fair calendar. For more advanced digital analyses, however, it is possible to download the data for further use in research. These are released under the CC BY-SA license, which allows the free use and transformation of the data, as long as the correct attribution is provided. The data are accessible in CSV (for the nodes database) and GML (for the GIS data) formats. For more information about the structure and sources of the provided data, please consult the Documentation files.

Creative Commons-Licentie

As Viabundus is a work in progress, new information will be added continuously, which will be released as new versions of the Viabundus dataset. The map always uses the latest version of the dataset, but for reference purposes, older versions of the dataset will be provided as well in the future. These are also available at Zenodo.

Latest version (1.3) (published 17-3-2024)

Previous versions

1.2 (published 21-9-2022)

1.1 (published 5-12-2021)

1.0 (published 19-4-2021)

Viabundus blog

Contact

We would welcome any kind of feedback that helps us to improve and expand Viabundus. Did you find bugs or errors? Want to cooperate with us or help us with volunteer work? Have any other questions? Please let us know at: (we're also happy to receive praise).

Blog and social media

On the Viabundus blog, we regularly post short stories about the reconstruction of pre-modern roads, various features of the road system and life on the road. Also take a look at our social media accounts: X @theroadsproject, Bluesky @viabundus.bsky.social, Mastodon @viabundus.

Credits

Viabundus was created by:
Institut für historische Landesforschung, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Central project coordination, Lower Saxony, Holstein)

Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte der Hanse und des Ostseeraums, Lübeck (Central project coordination)
Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg (Thuringia, Saxony-Anhaltt)
Radboud University, Nijmegen (Netherlands, Belgium)
In cooperation with Erfgoed Brabant
Aarhus University / Moesgaard Museum (Denmark)
Tampere University / Turku University (Finland)
Independent researchers

In memory of Hugo Weczerka, co-author of Hansische Handelsstraßen, who passed away on 2 April 2021.

How to cite Viabundus

Bart Holterman et al. (ed.), Viabundus Pre-modern Street Map 1.3 (released 17-3-2024), https://www.viabundus.eu.

Project partners and sponsors

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