City
Autricum
Chartres
Listen to the story
Autricum, the chief town of the Carnutes, a Gallic people of the province of Lugdunensis, is today's Chartres, and it probably took its name from the Autura, the river Eure on whose banks the town still stands. The geographer Ptolemy knew it as Autrikon. On the map it gets the usual pair of towers, and here the road simply stops, with no onward stretch. Some older copies of the map misread the name as Mitricum, while others drew the two towers but left them nameless. In late antiquity the town came to be called after its people, and that name lives on in Chartres.