viabundus — Viabundus premodern northern European road and waterway network (1350-1650)

Description

The road and waterway network of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650) of Viabundus, a historical map and database of premodern transport and mobility, originally conceived as the digitization of the atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area of F. Bruns and H. Weczerka, Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962), and extended with researched road networks of the present-day Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, several German states (Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia), parts of Poland and the Baltic states, and with navigable waterways.

Nodes are the places that may require an action of a traveler (change roads, pay a fee, change the means of transport, cross a river, reach a destination): settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets, fairs, ferries, bridges, harbors and locks, with the years in which these attributes existed, and junctions of routes. A cluster of nodes in a town can be subordinated to a parent node (parent_id), whose attributes settlement, town, staple and fair apply to them as well. Edges are route segments between two nodes: land roads, winter roads (usable only in winter, e.g. across marshes or frozen lakes), rivers, canals, coastal and lake routes, and ferries, with the certainty of their reconstruction and the years in which they existed (if not given, the whole period). The networks are undirected, and have a few parallel edges (alternative routes between the same nodes; 44 to 83 per network).

There is one network for each version of the dataset on Zenodo: v1_0 (April 19, 2021), v1_1 (December 6, 2021), v1_2 (September 21, 2022), v1_3 (March 17, 2024) and v2 (April 25, 2025), each built from the nodes and edges tables of that version. The edges of v1_0 do not give their end nodes: they are joined to the nodes at their end points (after rounding the coordinates to $10^{-5}$ degrees, about 1 m), and the 3,175 points where edges end without a node (junctions, which are nodes of their own in later versions) are added as nodes. In the later versions, the edges give their end nodes, and the few end nodes that are missing from the nodes table (69 in v1_3, 1 in v2) are added as nodes, at the end points of the edges. In both cases, these nodes have has_record false and no other attributes than their position. The geometries of the edges, the descriptions of the edges, the alternative names of v2 (a separate table), and the tables of literature, populations, fairs, town outlines and waterways of 1500 are not included.

The networks have the following properties (the columns of the nodes and edges tables, whose set changes slightly between versions; missing values are empty strings or -1):

(Node) node_id: the id of the node in Viabundus (-1 for the added nodes).
(Node) has_record: whether the node is in the nodes table.
(Node) latitude, longitude: the position of the node.
(Node) name: the modern official name.
(Node) alternative_names (up to v1_3): other modern, foreign and historical names, separated by semicolons.
(Node) parent_id: the id of the parent node.
(Node) geonames_id (up to v1_2), links (from v1_3 on): the ids of the place in other gazetteers (e.g. gn: GeoNames, wd: Wikidata).
(Node) zoomlevel: the lowest zoom level at which the web map shows the node.
(Node) ready: whether the information on the node is considered correct and complete.
(Node) is_<attribute>, <attribute>_from, <attribute>_to, <attribute>_description: for each of the attributes settlement, town, fair, toll, bridge, staple, ferry, harbour and lock, whether the node has it, the years in which it existed (usually the first and last mentions), and a description with references.
(Node) gregorian_calendar (from v1_1 on): whether the dates of the fairs are in the Gregorian calendar.
(Node) staple_duration_of_stay: the duration of the obligatory stay at a staple market.
(Node) toll_primary_owner (v2 only): the primary owner of the toll.
(Edge) edge_id: the id of the edge in Viabundus.
(Edge) type: land, winter, river, canal, coast or ferry (land, water or ferry before v2, with one edge of type lsnd as given).
(Edge) certainty: the accuracy of the reconstruction (1 very certain, 2 mediocre, 3 uncertain, including the roads digitized from Hansische Handelsstraßen that were not yet checked).
(Edge) zoomlevel: the zoom level (1 to 4) from which the web map shows the edge.
(Edge) from_year, to_year: the years between which the route existed.
(Edge) length: its length (m).
(Edge) section (except in v1_3): the code of the region of the edge (e.g. NDS for Lower Saxony, B-W for the rough digitizations of Hansische Handelsstraßen).
(Edge) comment_id: the id(s) of the comments on the edge, separated by semicolons.
(Edge) ready (v1_2 and v1_3): whether the edge is considered complete.
(Edge) slope_multiplier (v2 only): the factor by which the slope of the segment increases the travel time on foot (1 for water routes).

Tags

Transportation Roads Spatial Weighted Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

B. Holterman, M. A.B., K. Andersen, M. Dengg, N. Petersen, "Viabundus: Map of Premodern European Transport and Mobility." Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences 7, 1-13 (2022) 10.1163/24523666-bja10025 Sci-Hub
B. Holterman, M. C. Dengg, M. A.B., K. H. Andersen, "Viabundus map of premodern European transport and mobility." Zenodo, dataset, versions 1.0-2 (2021-2025) 10.5281/zenodo.5256288 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://www.viabundus.eu
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5256288

Upstream license

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) according to the documentation; CC BY 4.0 according to the Zenodo records, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Networks

Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
v1_0	13,212	14,819	2.24	0.85	2.24	45495.99	0.12	0.03	286	0.95	Undirected	Unipartite	node_id has_record latitude longitude parent_id name alternative_names geonames_id ready is_settlement settlement_from settlement_to settlement_description is_town town_from town_to town_description is_toll toll_from toll_to toll_description is_staple staple_from staple_to staple_duration_of_stay staple_description is_fair fair_from fair_to fair_description is_ferry ferry_from ferry_to ferry_description is_bridge bridge_from bridge_to bridge_description is_harbour harbour_from harbour_to harbour_description is_lock lock_from lock_to lock_description	edge_id section type certainty zoomlevel from_year to_year comment_id length	917 KiB	1.2 MiB	1.2 MiB	1.2 MiB
v1_1	15,128	18,055	2.39	0.78	2.66	48169.05	0.15	0.03	292	0.98	Undirected	Unipartite	node_id has_record latitude longitude parent_id name alternative_names geonames_id zoomlevel is_settlement settlement_from settlement_description settlement_to is_town town_from town_to town_description is_fair fair_from fair_to gregorian_calendar fair_description is_toll toll_from toll_to toll_description is_bridge bridge_from bridge_to bridge_description is_staple staple_from staple_to staple_duration_of_stay staple_description is_ferry ferry_from ferry_to ferry_description is_harbour harbour_from harbour_to harbour_description is_lock lock_from lock_to lock_description ready	edge_id section type certainty zoomlevel from_year to_year comment_id length	1.1 MiB	1.5 MiB	1.5 MiB	1.5 MiB
v1_2	16,026	19,283	2.41	0.77	2.66	49848.42	0.13	0.04	300	0.98	Undirected	Unipartite	node_id has_record latitude longitude parent_id name alternative_names zoomlevel geonames_id ready is_settlement settlement_from settlement_to settlement_description is_town town_from town_to town_description is_fair fair_from fair_to gregorian_calendar fair_description is_toll toll_from toll_to toll_description is_bridge bridge_from bridge_to bridge_description is_staple staple_from staple_to staple_duration_of_stay staple_description is_ferry ferry_from ferry_to ferry_description is_harbour harbour_from harbour_to harbour_description is_lock lock_from lock_to lock_description	edge_id section type certainty zoomlevel from_year to_year comment_id length ready	1.2 MiB	1.6 MiB	1.6 MiB	1.6 MiB
v1_3	17,587	19,283	2.19	1.00	2.66	41592.88	0.13	0.04	300	0.90	Undirected	Unipartite	node_id has_record latitude longitude parent_id name alternative_names links zoomlevel is_settlement settlement_from settlement_to settlement_description is_town town_from town_to town_description is_fair fair_from fair_to fair_description is_toll toll_from toll_to toll_description is_bridge bridge_from bridge_to bridge_description is_staple staple_from staple_to staple_duration_of_stay staple_description is_ferry ferry_from ferry_to ferry_description is_harbour harbour_from harbour_to harbour_description is_lock lock_from lock_to lock_description ready	edge_id type certainty zoomlevel from_year to_year comment_id length ready	1.4 MiB	1.9 MiB	1.8 MiB	1.9 MiB
v2	18,840	22,613	2.40	0.80	2.67	70353.46	0.11	0.04	364	0.98	Undirected	Unipartite	node_id has_record latitude longitude parent_id name links zoomlevel is_settlement settlement_from settlement_to settlement_description is_town town_from town_to town_description is_fair fair_from fair_to gregorian_calendar fair_description is_toll toll_from toll_to toll_primary_owner toll_description is_bridge bridge_from bridge_to bridge_description is_staple staple_from staple_to staple_duration_of_stay staple_description is_ferry ferry_from ferry_to ferry_description is_harbour harbour_from harbour_to harbour_description is_lock lock_from lock_to lock_description ready	edge_id section type certainty zoomlevel from_year to_year comment_id length slope_multiplier	1.5 MiB	2.0 MiB	2.0 MiB	2.1 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.