La xarxa viària catalana a l’Alta Edat Mitjana. Una aproximació des de la cartografia

Abstract

We shall first expose which were the main types of roads that existed from the IXth till the XIIth century and the principal characteristics of those roads. Afterwards, the authors focus their attention on several aspects of the road net­work during the high Middle Ages in Catalunya, taking as a starting point the analysis of different sources and, nearly always, thanks to the complementary help of cartography. Refference is made to the existence of roads, that take different names: vies francisques, vies cardoneses, etc. and to the most important paths to the markets of that time, and commercial activities, in general, are listed. Thus the existence of roads is related to the distribution of monastic properties, to the ways followed by those who wore funeral bells, to the existence of fortifications of the first medieval centuries (the cluses) and to the way of organising the population in the different villages. We also try to learn more about the characteristics and age of the roads through the study of the limits of parochial districts, through con­frontations about properties, through the distribution, in a territory, of the places where members of a brotherhood used to live and, even, through the analysis pf the characteristics and distribution of anthroponymies before the years 1000.