Our very own Professor Stefan Brink presenting 'Early Maritime Culture and Inland Routes in Sweden' @thinkuhi.bsky.social 7th International St Magnus Conference @uhiperth.bsky.social

Very decent of the Romans to build a road leading from the garage where my car gets serviced to within a few hundred yards of my house. #historyonyourdoorstep #WelshHistory #LoveWhereYouLive

The remains of the foundations of Piercebridge Roman Bridge in County Durham that once carried Dere Street (the Roman road that linked York with Corbridge) across the River Tees. 📸 My own. #RomanSiteSaturday #RomanBritain #Piercebridge

Journée d’étude – Comment quantifier les mobilités de personnes au Moyen Âge ? À partir de différentes formes de transmission (entre autres des découvertes archéologiques, des sceaux, des authentiques de reliques, des cartulaires et des « livres des bourgeois »), nous discute…

Journée d’étude – Comment quantifier les mobilités de personnes au Moyen Âge ?

rmblf.be/2026/04/06/j...

You're in luck, because I wrote about roads back in 2023 (I also discuss older royal road systems)!

acoup.blog/2023/06/02/c...

screenshot from prototype of Environmental Dimensions of Place (EDOP) platform shows an environmental signature returned for Buenos Aires, and a list of World Heritage cities with similar settings

My first presentation on Computing Place and its Environmental Dimensions of Place signature service (EDOPS) is to the @pelagios.bsky.social Place Working Group meeting, 6 April, 14:00 UTC. Easy signup to attend: pitt.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Ah schade, da haben wir uns verpasst. Naja, wir finden bestimmt einen Vorwand in Marburg vorbeizuschauen. Gute Heimreise!

@viabundus auf der #FOSSGIS2026 ich freu mich

The History Dept. of Bonn University, overlooking the Rhine. Now, that has some style.

Nina Dengg introduces us to the fords in the rivers Werra and Unstrut as important nodes of traffic.

Pierre Fütterer speaks about the relations between roads and the natural environment. Long live the holloways!

Bart Holterman about, well, "The (non)sense of calculating historical travel routes and times", comparing model and actual sources.

The workshop "Vormoderne Mobilität in Zeit und Raum abbilden", organised by @laurysarti.bsky.social in Bonn, showed a lot of open challenges in historical research as well as methodology in tackling questions of mobility. Four Viabundi were invited to contribute.

A square, gray-toned satellite map that -- thanks to a scale bar labeled "10km" -- can be seen to cover an approximately 70 by 70 kilometer area. The terrain is mountainous, and a portion of a large river snakes across the map from middle right to center bottom. Labels for "Sinicik" (upper middle) and Kâhta (near center) can be read. A bright blue line starts near the upper left portion of the map and runs eastward to near the middle before turning south-southeastward to eventually end in the large river at lower right. Partway along this clue line a large orange dot and smaller green bow-tie symbol can be seen, but they are not labeled.

Since Monday, the #PleiadesGazetteer editorial college has published 15 new and 41 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 10 people. The usual Monday blog post will summarize a full week's worth of such work, but meantime here's a #SneakPeek at an […]

[Original post on hcommons.social]

Image showing the new interface for the 2003 Medieval Markets & Fairs dataset.

Medieval Markets & Fairs in England & Wales: remember the excellent dataset published back in 2003? I've given it a snazzy new interface, incorporating various updates which were made following publication.

Separately, I'm working on extending it to 1846...

ihr-digital.github.io/markets-and-...

👋

I enjoyed the reminder by @brilliantmaps how exciting the age of railways actually must’ve been. From 1837-1875 the network in France just exploded. Imagine seeing the world open up to you so rapidly after being relatively stuck in your region for so long. Source: buff.ly/RgyNhfd

#earlymodern historians of #trade & #merchants ! I am trying to take stock of the historiography on long-distance merchant guilds/nations/consulates of the past 10-20 years. 1/*

„Im 1234. Jahr n. Chr. gab es eine solch grausame Kälte, dass man von Venedig bis nach Cremona auf dem mächtigen Fluss Po mit beladenen Wagen fuhr. Der Wein gefror in den Fässern“
Wunderzeichenbuch, Augsburg, um 1550.

alte Karte Schlesien mit Breslau in der Mitte, südöstlich Brieg und Oppeln

Breslau, 11. Feb 1626
Freitags ist des Bethlens Braut [1] allhie über Nacht geblieben / die hat 40 Wägen / jeden mit 6 Pferden bei sich - Bürgerschaft mit 200 Pferden, Landobrist von Dohna und viele Adelige ihr entgegen geritten.

aus:
brema.suub.uni-bremen.de/zeitungen17/...

Time to open up the first ice roads!

www.smhi.se/vader/vader-...

The Newport Arch - the remains of the north gateway to Roman Lincoln (Lindum Colonia). Built in around 200 AD, the arch is the only Roman gateway in the UK still used by traffic. 📸 My own. #RomanSiteSaturday #RomanBritain #Lincoln

This is such a cool illustration of how the Mercator map distorts the size of Greenland, which looks as big as the whole continent of Africa on that map but is actually the size of Mexico.

Nach einem sehr bereichernden Workshop zur vormodernen Mobilität in Osnabrück im letzten Juni wollen Christoph Mauntel und ich das Format dieses Jahr in Kiel fortsetzen. Der CFP findet sich hier: www.hsozkult.de/event/id/eve.... Wir freuen uns auf Vorschläge und sind dankbar fürs Teilen. 🤗

Mikola in front of a map of the Lithuanian roads

Shoutout to our dear colleague Dr. Mikola Volkau for his new NAWA funded project "The route to Europe: urbanization and roads in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the 16th to the middle of the 17th century" at the Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences 2025-2027.

Publication – « Routes d’Orient et d’Occident », éd. Benhima Yassir, Gilotte Sophie, Rousset Marie-Odile (Médiévales, 89) Pèlerins, marchands et autres voyageurs sillonnent les routes médiévales, y compris dans des espaces inhospitaliers, ignorant sans doute que les infrastructures routières qu’ils empruntaient ont fa…

Publication – « Routes d’Orient et d’Occident », éd. Benhima Yassir, Gilotte Sophie, Rousset Marie-Odile (Médiévales, 89)

rmblf.be/2026/01/02/p...

This is a useful website to quickly view different map projections. Useful when you want to map a specific region and aren't sure what projection to use. Also, it's just good fun to play with: buff.ly/36nJtxQ

Oops, left out the url to my web site that explains me more fully...https://kgeographer.org

Driving home for #Christmas 🎄

#medievalsky #medievaladvent

The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.705, f. 33r

Kysely historiallisista teistä on käynnissä. Väitöskirjatutkija Katrina Virtanen @utu.fi kerää tämän päivän kokemuksia ja muistoja arkisesta kulkemisesta ja suunnitellusta matkanteosta Suomen vanhoilla teillä. Yhteistyössä @viabundus.bsky.social & Postimuseo. Lisätietoa:
sites.utu.fi/humanisticgi...

Itineraries of 25 Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, 919 to 1519

Itinerant rule, rule exercised through traveling, was a common, yet insufficiently researched pre-modern form of governance. Studying the determinants of ruler itineraries in the Holy Roman Empire AD 919-1519, we argue that rulers focused on monitoring `marginal' elites. Powerful rulers could count on family members and thus targeted unrelated local elites. Weak emperors had to monitor their less loyal relatives and left unrelated nobles unvisited. We reconstruct emperors' itineraries from 72'665 dated and geolocated documents and measure territorial control by their relatives. Exploiting the weakening of imperial power through the Great Interregnum (1250-1273), we find that strong, pre-1250 emperors frequented areas controlled by their relatives relatively less. In contrast, family control increased visits post-1273. Causal identification rests on the discontinuous reduction of emperors' power through the Great Interregnum and differences in family relations between subsequent emperors. The results show strategic itinerant rule as an important but understudied form of governance.

🚨 Very excited that our paper on *Rulers on the Road* has been cond. accepted at the AJPS @ajpseditor.bsky.social. We analyze emperors' strategies of itinerant rule in the Holy Roman Empire 919-1519. Fun working with @claranw.bsky.social, @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social & Jørgen Møller shorturl.at/Spm7z