Speaker
Description
In this presentation, I have the aim to discuss the effects of the pre-Roman, Roman and post-Roman roads in southern Belgium and northern France on the landscapes.
In southern Belgium and northern France, there are roads named after Queen Brunehilda of Austrasia, who lived in the 6th and 7th centuries. Where does this reference come from? These are roads that predominantly pass through the landscape in a straight line. The Romans had built a system of roads in these areas, rectilinear and paved, partly based on older, pre-Roman Celtic roads. When, after the departure of the Romans in the 4th and 5th centuries, the roads partially fell into disuse, they turned into rectilinear cart tracks and as such formed lines in the landscape. Because people in the early Middle Ages had forgotten that they were built by the Romans, they attributed them, among others, to Queen Brunehilda. It is possible that she had parts of these roads restored; however, many 'Chaussées Brunehauts' are in areas where she was not queen.
One of the researched main roads bearing the name of Queen Brunehilda is the Bavay-Tongeren-Cologne road, known today as Via Belgica. It was the main east-west link in northern Gaul, connecting the port of Boulogne with Cologne. Villages, large farms, inns, baths and burial monuments, as well as later fortifications, appeared along this road. As the road gradually changed, so did the landscape. In the 5th century, when the Franks expanded their territory to the south, they kept a large part of this road as their southern border for a while. This created the language border that cuts across Belgium, as the area north of the road became Frankish, while the area south of it remained Roman. Thus, the road transformed from a connection between towns and territories into a dividing line between two languages, a dichotomy that has continued in today's Flemish and French.
These were the transformations that the construction of the road brought about in the landscape: from a pre-Roman cart track to a road with settlements and eventually a division between two languages.
Biography
Cornelis van Tilburg (Waddinxveen, 1965) studied Classics at Leiden University. From 2000 onwards, he is researcher and desk editor at the Department of Classics at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University. His main publications are: Romeins Verkeer (2005, repr. 2014, third edition 2018), Traffic and Congestion in the Roman Empire (2007, repr. 2012) and Streets and Streams: Health conditions and city planning in the Graeco-Roman World (PhD thesis, 2015) and City Gates in the Roman West: Forms and Functions (2022).
