Calisia (, ) was a "station" on the so-called "

Amber Road The Amber Road was an ancient trade route for the transfer of amber from coastal areas of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Prehistoric trade routes between Northern and Southern Europe were defined by the amber trade. ...

", mentioned by

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...

, formerly universally identified with

Kalisz Kalisz () is a city in central Poland, and the second-largest city in the Greater Poland Voivodeship, with 97,905 residents (December 2021). It is the capital city of the Kalisz Region. Situated on the Prosna river in the southeastern part of Gr ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

. Besides the similarity of the names, the identification was supported by the closeness between the

latitude In geography, latitude is a geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinate that specifies the north-south position of a point on the surface of the Earth or another celestial body. Latitude is given as an angle that ranges from −90° at t ...

given by Ptolemy (52°50') and the actual latitude of Kalisz (51°45'27"). The validity of these arguments is currently in doubt, mainly due to the identification of Ptolemy's ''Leukaristos'', located at a latitude similar to that of Kalisz, with the name Laugaritio/Leugaritio certainly referring to the town of

Trenčín Trenčín (, also known by other #Names and etymology, alternative names) is a List of towns in Slovakia, city in western Slovakia of the central Váh River valley near the Czech Republic, Czech border, around from Bratislava. It has a populati ...

Slovakia Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's m ...

(this identification is confirmed by a rock inscription made in the winter of 179/180 CE by a Roman military unit, and the biography of the unit's commander, M. Valesius Maximianus, carved on his tomb in Diana Veteranorum in today's Algeria).{{Cite book , last=Bliujienė , first=Audronė , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j-R5DwAAQBAJ , title=Northern Gold: Amber in Lithuania (c. 100 to c. 1200) , date=2011-11-11 , publisher=BRILL , isbn=978-90-04-21735-5 , pages=56 , language=en As Trenčín is much further south than the latitude given by Ptolemy, this identification seems to imply that Ptolemy's data on latitude of places north of the Danube had significant errors, hence making the Calisia-Kalisz identification doubtful.

References

History of Europe Roman waystations Settlements in Germania Magna