Coriovallum
CORIOVALLUM or CORTOVALLUM, a place in the north of Gallia, on a road from Castellum (Cassel) to Colonia Agrippina (Cologne), between Aduatuca (Tongern) and Juliacum (Juliers). The Antonine Itin. makes it 16 Gallic leagues from Aduatuca to Coriovallum, and 12 from Coriovallum to Juliacum. The distances in the Table are the same, but in the Table the name is Cortovallum or Cortovallium, as it seems. Cortovallum is perhaps the true name, as a place named Corten seems to agree very well with the distance from Juliers, and also to preserve the ancient name.
[G.L]Cortovallio in the Peutinger Table, Coriovallo in the Antonine Itinerary (375.7; 478.6). The town lay at the crossing of two Roman roads: Cologne to Boulogne, and Xanten to Trèves via Heerlen and Aix-la-Chapelle. Scores of pottery kilns have been found, indicating that it was a center of the coarse-ware industry, and some of the inhabitants must have been wealthy, judging by the contents of graves discovered here. Excavations have revealed the remains of a bath (ca. 40 x 50 m), several houses, Roman roads, and the ditches of a late Roman fort.
The bath was built ca. A.D. 50 and altered in the 3d c., probably because the heating system did not function properly. An inscription discovered on the site, attests a restoration ca. A.D. 250 by M. Sattonius lucundus (cf. CIL VIII, 2634), a decurio of Colonia Ulpia Traiana (Xanten). In the first half of the 4th c. the bath was at least partly destroyed, and the site was incorporated into the fort by shifting the ditch to the N. The fort lasted until the beginning of the 5th c.; coins and pottery of the 4th c. have often been found. The older finds are in the Leiden and Maastricht museums, the newer ones in the municipal museum at Heerlen.
BIBLIOGRAPHYA. W. Byvanck, Excerpta Romana II (1935) 85-87; III (1947) 27-36; A. E. van Giffen, “Thermen en castella te Heerlen,” AntCl 17 (1948) 199-236MPI; W. Glasbergen, “Terra sigillata uit de Thermenopgraving te Heerlen-Coriovallum,” ibid. 237-62I; J. E. Bogaers, “Heerlen, een bouwfragment met de naam van Marcus Sattonius Iucundus,” Niewsbull. Kon. Ned. Oud. Bond (1957) 133-38; id., “Militaire en burgerlijke nederzettingen in Romeins Nederland (Honderd eeuwen Nederland),” Antiquity and Survival II (1959) 157-59.
B. H. STOLTE