The Balkans under late Roman rule was the least developed and least classical part of the Roman Empire. The mark left by Rome was nevertheless clear and took a familiar military form. Along the Danubian frontier itself there were legionary fortresses, smaller military installations, and a frontier road. There were bridges and other major engineering works along the Danube and its tributaries. The Black Sea fleet patrolled the Danube’s lower reaches, and freight was transported along the river. The main east-west trunk road from Constantinople ran through Adrianople, Serdica, Naissus, Viminacium, Singi-dunum, Sirmium, Mursa, and Poetovia to Aquileia in northeast Italy. This route witnessed all the major troop movements and the engagements of the civil wars between Diocletian’s victory over Carinus in 285 and Theodosius’ defeat of Eugenius in 394. These wars were on a larger scale than any of the confrontations between Romans and barbarian groups in the region, and their regional impact was correspondingly very large.109 The via Egnatia, from Constantinople to Thessalonica and across northern Greece to Dyrrhachium, which had been built in the second century BC, played a subsidiary role in imperial communications in the third and fourth centuries, but became more important in the ifth and sixth centuries, as the central Balkan region became insecure. These roads and military installations were the direct product of imperial policies, decisions, and initiatives.
Civic life, however, remained seriously underdeveloped away from the eastern Aegean, Propontic, and western Black Sea coasts. Between the irst and third centuries there were no more than sixty-nine municipalities and colonies in all the Rhine and Danube frontier provinces between the North Sea and the Black Sea.110 Local aristocracies only sporadically emerged to dominate provincial society through their continued control of landed wealth. There is little evidence for large landed estates, and the Balkans, with the marginal exception of Dalmatia on the Adriatic, produced few Roman senators.111 Military oficers and soldiers were the most powerful element in society, and it was not unusual for such men to serve as magistrates in local towns, many of which had grown up in the immediate neighborhood of military camps.112
The archaeological study of settlements in the Danube region is less developed than in Gaul or Italy. Most work has been done in the provinces of Valeria and Pannonia Prima (modern Hungary), where the late Roman remains, notably a series of rectangular, fortress-like enclosures of the later fourth century, attest a general climate of insecurity. Their walls, strengthened by numerous round towers, protected stone-built granaries, churches, and slighter structures. They have been variously interpreted as fortiied refuges for the local populations, an
Interior frontier line behind the Danube limes, or secure collection points for the imperial awwowa.113
In the later Roman Empire the two most important urban centers were Sirmium in the West and Thessalonica in the East, both of which were used as headquarters by the praetorian prefects of Illyricum. The defenses of Sirmium were improved by Petronius Probus during Sarmatian and Quadic attacks on Pannonia in 373. Ammianus’ description indicates that the civic building of a theater was sacrificed to allow the town defenses to be improved:
He cleared out the moats, which were choked with rubbish, and indulged his native taste for building by raising the greater part of the walls, which had been neglected and allowed to decay owing to the long peace. Even high towers with battlements were now erected, and the works were quickly finished, because he found that materials collected some time before to build a theater would suffice for his purpose. (Ammianus 29.6.11, trans. Hamilton)
Thessalonica, which was accessible by sea from Constantinople, proved a more secure base than Sirmium. Under the tetrarchy it became Galerius’ capital, whose buildings included the surviving triumphal arch built to celebrate his victories over the Sassanians in 297, a rotunda intended as his mausoleum, and a palace with a hippodrome next to it. Thessalonica was the imperial base for Constantine’s naval campaign against Licinius in 324 and for his campaigns on the Danube in the 330s, and became Theodosius’ headquarters from 380 to 382 during his attempt to redress the disastrous situation after the battle of Adrianople. The city was a secure haven for Valentinian II and Justina when they led to Theodosius from Magnus Maximus. As well as high-level administrative personnel attached to the praetorian prefect of Illyricum there was always a substantial garrison. In the later 440s Thessalonica definitively replaced Sirmium, which had been sacked by the Huns, as the administrative center of Illyricum, and was equipped with extensive new fortifications, accompanied by new government buildings and major churches.114 According to the seventh-century Life of St Demetrius, when the emperor Zeno showed signs of relinquishing imperial control over the city to Theoderic the Amal in the 470s, the inhabitants threw down imperial statues and besieged the palace of the prefect of Illyricum, seized the keys of the city gate from the prefect, and handed them over to the bishop of the city. St Demetrius’ life also shows that in the early seventh century Thessalonica was the only safe haven against the barbarians, as the Balkans were lost to Roman control.115 A large pilgrimage church was built around the hexagonal martyr’s shrine of Demetrius (reconstruction and plan in CAH 14, 959, fig. 56).
The populations of the western Danubian provinces used Latin for official and administrative purposes, but this was replaced by Greek in the east. The dividing line ran diagonally northwest from the Adriatic to the Danube, with the cities of Dyrrhachium, Scupi, and Serdica, and the coastal settlements of the western Black Sea on the Greek side of the frontier. The Danube basin itself, even in the lower stretch of the river, remained Latin-speaking throughout, thanks to the influence of the army camps and veteran settlements.116 Military careers provided many with access to a distinctive and militarized version of Roman culture. Here were the origins of the Romanitas of Diocletian and his colleagues in the tetrarchy, and of Justin and Justinian in the sixth century. It was the Latin linguistic experience of the Balkan regions, which ensured that Latin remained the language of government at Constantinople up to the time of Justinian.
These Balkan emperors did not lose touch with their roots. Diocletian, on retirement, returned to his place of origin on the Dalmatian Adriatic coast at Split; Galerius constructed a stately home for himself at Romuliana (Gamzi-grad). That was named after his redoubtable (and pagan) mother Romula, whose own name, a female version of Romulus, also precisely advertised the family’s Roman culture. Both Split and Gamzigrad were designed to be simultaneously fortresses and palaces.117 It is signiicant that retirement in these cases did not mean moving to a Mediterranean city. Justin and Justinian showed similar local loyalty in creating the city of Justiniana Prima, equipped with massive fortiications and conspicuous churches, in the rural country south of Naissus where their families had grown up.118
Another fundamental feature both of the culture and of the settlement and economic pattern of the Danubian regions was the continual stream of immigration from north of the Danube. Larger movements and population displacements are mentioned in the historical narratives and occasionally in inscriptions, including the 100,000 Transdanuviani who were brought across the frontier into Moesia by Ti. Plautius Silvanus Aelianus to become tribute-paying subjects of Rome in the mid-irst century AD (ILS 986). Many more large groups were to follow over the following centuries.119 Barbarians were also continually being absorbed piecemeal, some inding their way as recruits to auxiliary military units, others simply crossing the river frontier as individuals or in family groups, to ind land, work, and livelihoods. The pattern of immigration surely implies that there was land enough for all. The appearance of dark burnished wares in late fourth-century sites on the middle Danube has been linked to the growing predominance of barbarian foederati in the limes forts.120
The presence of well-armed and organized barbarian groups under strong leadership had a huge impact on the Balkan regions. The fear that such groups aroused in the cities of the region is especially brought home by Zosimus’ account, derived from Eunapius, of Alaric’s attack on Greece in 396.
They immediately fell to plundering the countryside and the utter destruction of the cities, killing the men of all ages and carrying off women and children in droves as well as all the wealth as booty. The whole of Boeotia and the other parts of Greece the barbarians passed through after they entered Greece at Thermopylae were so ravaged that they exhibit from that day to this the signs of their overthrow. Only Thebes escaped, partly because of the city’s strength, and partly because
Alaric was too impatient to lay siege in his haste to capture Athens. (Zosimus 5.5.5-7, trans. Ridley)
Athens was saved, according to the pagan historians, by dramatic apparitions of the goddess Athena on the city wall, and of Achilles at the head of the local militia, but other evidence suggests that the city was overrun.
Half a century later the most vivid literary testimony to the condition of the central Balkans is to be found in the historian Priscus’ compelling eyewitness account of the Constantinopolitan embassy of 449 to Attila the Hun (see pp. 216-7). The delegation reached Naissus, deserted by its inhabitants except for the sick who sought refuge in the ruins of its churches. The party made camp a little way outside the city some distance above the river valley, which was full of the bones of men who had fallen in the recent war with the Huns. The following day they reached the camp of dux Illyrici, Agintheus, who was obliged to hand over five escapees from the Huns, to be returned by the party to Attila and certain death. After spending a night there they reached the Danube, where they were ferried across the river on boats made from hollowed logs, built for the convenience of Attila when he chose to go hunting on Roman territory. These paragraphs offer a haunting picture of Roman impotence and the utter collapse of the former frontier. What city or what fort, Attila was later to claim in an incensed altercation with the embassy, had been able to hold out against him when he was bent on its capture? The narrative of Priscus documents the fall to the Huns of Sirmium, the greatest fortress city of the western Balkans, of Viminacium, the Moesian frontier city on the Danube, and Ratiaria. Almost all the major fortified cities between Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic and Constantia on the Black Sea were overrun during the period of Attila’s hegemony.121
Another written source, the life of St Severinus, written by Eugippius around 511, throws light on the upper Danubian frontier region at the end of the fifth century, as the provinces of Pannonia and Noricum were being abandoned by the Romans. Noricum covered the northeast access to Italy from the Danube. By the early fifth century the neighboring regions of Raetia and Pannonia had been given up to barbarian control. Ammianus noted that even in the early 370s the legionary fortress of Carnuntum of the early empire was a filthy and abandoned town (Ammianus 30.5.2). Noricum is one of the few areas of the Danube basin where archaeological survey can provide a range of data to match the literary record. This suggests that the local populations began to build fortified hilltop refuges, corresponding to the castella mentioned by the saint’s life. Roman frontier positions along the upper Danube on either side of Vienna were maintained until the 480s. Severinus himself had moved into this region in the period shortly after Attila’s death in 453, and combined the roles of a secular and ecclesiastical leader until the end of his life in 482. He founded a monastery at Favianis, on Vienna’s western outskirts, and himself lived in a fortified tower, a burgus, where he was eventually buried.122 His life reveals the precarious security of the region. The frontier was still held by small isolated groups of limitanei, including a group of barbarian foederati at the fort of Comagenis (Life of Severinus 1-2). Their situation is reminiscent of the pockets of Roman military populations that had survived along the Rhine, as northern Gaul was gradually engulfed by Franks and Alemanni. Barbarian raiders regularly crossed the river to round up livestock or raid for food and other booty; Roman troops mounted sorties to make reprisals (Life 4.1-5). Ammianus had observed similar conditions in Pannonia a century before (Ammianus 29.6.5). The region was largely self-sufficient in agricultural produce - grain, wine, livestock - but there was some capacity for local trade. Severinus himself distributed olive oil, a notable luxury, brought from Italy. Foodstuffs were brought down the river Inn, on the western frontier with Raetia, to the Danube and thence to the Vienna region, when it was suffering from local shortage (Life 3.1-3).
Severinus maintained relations with the Rugians, the main barbarian group settled north of the Danube, but his death left the region more exposed to their attacks and his monastery was pillaged. Odoacar, now king of Italy, intervened and sent his brother Hunwulf (Onoulph) to reclaim the frontier, but this attempt ended in 488 with the evacuation of the remaining Romans and the body of Severinus himself from Noricum to Naples. The withdrawal claimed victims. A group of soldiers from the frontier fort at Batavis undertook to march to Italy to collect pay owing to them, but were ambushed and cut to pieces by barbarians on the journey (Life 20). Noricum was occupied in the early sixth century by the Rugi, followed in the middle of the century by the Baiovari, the Bavarians. Like the encroachment of the Franks in northern Gaul, this brought a definite end to Roman control.
Despite the pressures and the spread of barbarian settlements, the Romans never definitively abandoned the attempt to maintain control of the middle and eastern stretches of the Danube.123 According to the Notitia Dignitatum there were eight legions in these provinces around the beginning of the fifth century, that is 8,000 men, who may have been supported by more than 40,000 limitanei and comparable numbers from the mobile field armies of Illyricum and Thrace.124 These hypothetical figures represent troop numbers on paper, which may have greatly exceeded the true strength on the ground. It is clear, however, that the east Roman emperors, and above all Justinian, made major efforts to secure the closest frontier region to Constantinople itself. Garrisons on the lower Danube were supplied by sea, as is shown by significant finds of late Roman amphora types 1 and 2, which were used between the fourth and sixth centuries to transport wine and olive oil as part of the military annona to this area.125 Procopius provides an impressive account of the construction of fortifications throughout Illyricum (Buildings 4). This involved strengthening the key linear defenses at Thermopylae and the Isthmus of Corinth, to protect Greece, and the wall across the Thracian Chersonese and the Anastasian wall west of Constantinople, which served a similar strategic function in Thrace. Procopius claimed that Justinian also improved the city walls of Ulpiana (modern Ljubljana), Serdica, Naissus, and Pautalia, and refurbished the forts of the lower
Danube. Events were to show that these measures were insufficient to restore security to the Balkans as a whole (see pp. 442-7).
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