Roman Roads Put Military Power Before Rome

Roads near the Roman Empire’s Rhine, Danube and Euphrates frontiers served military needs, while cities such as Byzantium and Ancyra became major junctions, an international study published in Nature Communications found. Its digital dataset maps approximately 299,000 km of Roman roads, infrastructure that carried traffic across the empire and linked frontier units.

The empire’s routes

Researchers applied mathematical models and network science to examine the road system. They measured centrality in three ways: road connections, access to other places, and how often a city linked routes. On those measures, ancient Byzantium, present-day Istanbul; Ancyra, now Ankara; Antiochia, present-day Antakya; and Corinth in Greece ranked above Rome as connecting points in parts of the network.

Tom Brughmans, associate professor of classical archaeology at Denmark’s Aarhus University and a study author, told Anadolu Agency that roads connected communities and moved people, information, ideas, religious beliefs and diseases. Their purpose wasn’t only military. The study also records routes built for military needs, including roads through sparsely settled areas.

Some eastern Anatolian roads climbed to approximately 2,000 meters in the Taurus Mountains. Adam Pazout, a researcher at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, said these routes met military needs and connected frontier units despite the few settlements nearby. The network linked distant places. Its design also served the empire’s military apparatus.

Not every road led to Rome

Brughmans said one of the study’s most surprising findings was that some cities ranked as more central than Rome. “For example, modern-day Istanbul, or ancient Byzantium, was truly very central within the entire empire by connecting traffic between Europe and Asia,” he said. Rome mattered because of its Mediterranean location, but Istanbul held a more central position in overland transport.

Ancyra, capital of the Roman province of Galatia, stood in the heart of Anatolia, on one of the province’s most central roads. Brughmans said its location suited the organization of east-west transport across the peninsula. The findings also mathematically confirmed the central positions of Roman provincial capitals, Pazout said. Researchers still haven’t established whether geography or deliberate Roman planning mainly created that centrality. Pazout said more research is needed.

Brughmans said the saying “All roads lead to Rome” emerged in the Middle Ages and was largely symbolic, not factual. The network places several regional connections at the center of the story, rather than the imperial capital alone.

Old routes, new maps

Some modern roads still follow routes established in Roman times, especially where ancient settlements remain important population centers. Brughmans said transport networks changed considerably after the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of motorized vehicles, though notable continuity remains. The study doesn’t claim modern roads simply reproduce the Roman network; it documents connections that survive between routes and settlement patterns.

Hamdi Şahin, a professor of history at Istanbul University who contributed data from mountainous Cilicia in southern Türkiye, said researchers use milestones, historical texts and surviving paved roads to reconstruct ancient routes. Researchers still discover between 400 and 500 new inscriptions annually in Türkiye, including milestones and other evidence related to roads.

The researchers created the publicly accessible Itiner-e platform so people can explore ancient routes and settlements. They hope its dataset will support further research into how infrastructure shaped economic activity, urban development and regional connections. The map makes the empire’s roads easier to inspect, including routes that linked communities and those built for military needs.