Peutinger, Konrad

(1465-1547)

   German humanist. Born into a prominent family at Augsburg, he studied at Basel and then at Padua and Bologna, where he was a pupil of several distinguished legal and humanistic scholars. He visited Florence, where he met Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano, and Rome, where he met Pomponio Leto. Leto's Roman Academy inspired him to found a literary sodality of humanists when he got back to Augs-burg in 1488. He became town clerk in 1497 and was named impe-rial councillor by the Emperor Maximilian I, an honor continued un-der Charles V. Peutinger served as a diplomatic representative and representative in the German Imperial Diet for his city and was an of-ficial of the Swabian League. Initially he sympathized with Martin Luther but like most older humanists drew back after it became clear that Luther's movement was dividing the church.

   When Augsburg became Protestant, Peutinger retired from public of-fice and spent the rest of his life on scholarship. He collected and pub-lished Roman inscriptions from the Augsburg region (1505) and in 1506 published a volume of reflections on German antiquity, a field in which he also edited several important texts, including the Chronicle of Ors-berg, Jordanes' History of the Goths, and Paul the Deacon's History of the Lombards. He was also expert in architecture and supervised the construction of the tomb of the Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck and the renovation of the Augsburg city hall. Peutinger collected ancient coins and accumulated a valuable library of manuscripts, of which the most famous is known by his name, the Tabula Peutingeriana, an an-cient map of the military road network of the Roman Empire.