The Route of the Franks: Travelscapes in postclassical Gaul

This article proposes an integrated interpretation of medieval long-distance travel through the conceptual lenses of landscape archaeology, mobility studies, and sensory approaches to space, focusing on the so-called Via Francigena or ‘Route(s) of the Franks’. Centred on Archbishop Sigeric’s return journey from Rome to Canterbury in AD 990, the study combines the reconstruction of material road networks with an analysis of how movement through space structured perception, experience, and social meaning in post-classical Gaul. Building on interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from archaeology, geography, anthropology, phenomenology, and cognitive studies, the paper advances the concept of the ‘travelscape’ to capture both the physical and immaterial dimensions of travel. Roads are examined not merely as infrastructural artefacts but as dynamic systems that materialised cultural values, power relations, memory, and identity. The article contrasts Roman and medieval conceptions of connectivity, demonstrating how post-classical communication networks emerged as fragmented, adaptive, and locally oriented assemblages, often reusing earlier infrastructures while generating conceptually new axes of movement. Through a detailed geo-historical analysis of Sigeric’s itinerary across France, the study highlights the variability of routes subsumed under the idealised notion of a single Via Francigena. It explores the political, ecclesiastical, environmental, and security-related factors that shaped route choice, including the role of monastic networks, alpine crossings, and regional instabilities. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Sigeric’s personal decisions and embodied experience contributed to the configuration of space, revealing the traveller as an active agent in landscape formation. Ultimately, the article argues that medieval routes should be understood as living, evolving entities whose material traces and experiential dimensions jointly inform our understanding of mobility, landscape, and social practice in the early Middle Ages. By foregrounding movement as a primary mode of engaging with space, it offers a nuanced framework for interpreting historical travel as both a physical and cultural process.