About Roman Empire Map
An interactive Roman Empire map with a time slider from 753 BC to AD 1453. See how big the empire was at each key date, which modern countries it covered, and where its provinces and cities lay.
Roman Empire Map is a free, single-purpose website. It is built to be useful on its own: you can explore the map, share a link to exactly what you are looking at, embed it on your own page or download an image of it. Everything is made from open data, and the credits are on the data sources page.
Who runs it
This site is run by Chris Barnes, a sole trader (England and Wales). It is one of a small family of map sites; you can find the others in the "More maps" list at the bottom of every page.
How accurate is it?
We show the data as its authors published it, and we try to be honest about how certain it is. Where something is a best guess, the map says so. If you spot a mistake in how we display or describe the data, please tell us.
How it is paid for
The site is free to use. It may show adverts, and it offers an optional email newsletter. We do not sell your personal data.
Why this site exists
Most Roman Empire maps are a single picture of one moment. This one lets you move through time, from the founding of Rome to the fall of Constantinople, and compare the empire with the countries on today's map.
How the map is made
The outlines of AD 117 and AD 200 come from the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The other dates are built by a script from those province outlines, using a table of when each province became Roman and when it was lost. The table is cited on the data sources page. We do not draw borders by hand. Every area and share on the site is calculated from the outlines by the same script each time, across 13 key dates, 43 provinces and 45 modern countries.
Please treat the borders as approximate
Historians disagree about where Rome's frontiers ran, and the frontier zones were never hard lines. The early dates are the least certain. The legend under the map explains how each date was built.