Europe's deepest property records: the cadastres that map centuries
The Franciscan Cadastre of 1817, the French cadastre, the Florentine catasto of 1427, and the parish registers — why European house history reaches back further than American, and what those records actually let you find.
By The Plot Team · May 25, 2026 · 4 min read
An American researching a house usually starts in the 1800s and considers it a triumph to reach the 1700s. A European doing the same work can sometimes reach the 1400s. The difference isn't that Europeans cared more about their houses — it's that European states began mapping and taxing land, parcel by parcel, by name, centuries before the United States existed. Those instruments are called cadastres, and understanding them is the key to how deep European house history can go.
What a cadastre is — and why it goes so deep
A cadastre is a comprehensive register of land parcels: each plot mapped, measured, classified by use, and tied to an owner, made so a state can tax land fairly. The crucial thing for a house historian is that a cadastre is systematic and total — not a scatter of individual deeds, but a single sweep that recorded every parcel in a territory in one campaign. Find your plot in a historic cadastre and you have its shape, its size, its use, and its owner at the moment of the survey, with a parcel number that threads through the later registers.
The Franciscan Cadastre (Austria-Hungary, from 1817)
The grandest of them is the Franciscan Cadastre (Franziszeischer Kataster), ordered by Emperor Francis I and surveyed across the Habsburg Empire from 1817. It mapped every parcel in what is now Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, northern Italy, Hungary, and beyond — to scale, colour-coded by building material (masonry in red, wood in yellow, a convention that may sound familiar to anyone who's read a Sanborn map), with owner names in the accompanying Indikationsskizzen and parcel protocols. Much of it is browsable today through the Mapire / Arcanum map portal, and the parcel registers survive in the regional Landesarchive. Its predecessor, the Josephine Cadastre of the 1780s, reaches back further still. For a house in Vienna, Prague, or Ljubljana, the Franciscan Cadastre can show you the parcel — owner and all — two centuries ago.
The French cadastre (the "Napoleonic" cadastre, from 1807)
France built its cadastre under Napoleon from 1807 — the cadastre napoléonien — mapping every commune parcel by parcel, with matrices listing owners. The maps are widely digitised through the departmental Archives départementales (free to browse); the owner matrices are archival. It became the model much of continental Europe copied, and it's why a French village house can often be located, with its owner, in an 1830s cadastral map.
The Italian catasto — and Florence, 1427
Italy's cadastral tradition is the oldest of all. The Florentine catasto of 1427 — a tax census of the entire Florentine state — recorded households, their property, and their wealth in such detail that it has become one of the most-studied datasets in all of social history (famously digitised and analysed by historians Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber). Few records anywhere let you stand, in effect, inside a specific 15th-century household. Italy's later catasti and the Austrian cadastre (in the north) carry that tradition forward.
Parish registers: the human layer beneath the parcels
Cadastres map the land; parish registers record the people on it. Across Catholic and Protestant Europe alike, parish clergy kept registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials from the 1500s and 1600s — in Austria the Matriken, in France the registres paroissiaux, in the Netherlands the DTB books, in Italy the parish libri. They are name-indexed rather than address-indexed, so connecting a person to a specific house takes the cadastre (or a tax register) as the bridge. But together, cadastre plus parish register, they're how a European house can be peopled back to a time when American land was unmapped.
The honest limits
Depth is not the same as convenience. These records are overwhelmingly scan and map portals, not queryable databases — you browse the cadastral sheet for your commune, you read the parish book page by page, often in old handwriting and older languages. There is rarely a "type an address, get the owner" API for the deep past (the modern land registries that do have ownership are typically paid and recent). European house history is richer than American, but it asks for more patience and more palaeography.
How Plot fits
Plot is honest about this divide. For European addresses it builds a real page from what's openly queryable now — a precise official geocode, the live press archives where they exist (Gallica in France, Delpher in the Netherlands), the listed-monument registers, Wikimedia imagery, and the cross-referenced public record — and it points you to the deep sources by name: the Franciscan Cadastre on Mapire, the cadastre on the Archives départementales, the parish books on Matricula. It assembles the modern, open layer in a minute, and tells you exactly which centuries-old archive holds the rest.