Land and People

The notion that a sense of geography is essential to historical understanding will be neither strange nor disturbing. In relation to Late Antiquity, as to any historical period, a knowledge of where human beings were settled, of where they forged their aspirations and experienced their hopes and failures, of how their setting affected their cast of mind, is an inescapable concomitant of historical inquiry.

The Later Roman Empire was an empire of the sea, or rather of seas, for it was not just a matter of the Mediterranean, important though that may have been (Ahrweiler 1966; Rouge 1975; Horden and Purcell 2000): the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf were all part of the picture (see Map 2). And these seas were complex in their shapes, and provided access not only over a wide area but to a great variety of terrains. The Mediterranean had its natural division between east and west, running down the Italian peninsula and across to North Africa: an unequal division, moreover, in that the eastern portion was much larger than the western. The eastern was also characterized by what we may think of as its great inlets: the Ionian and Adriatic Seas, dividing Italy from the Balkans, and the Aegean Sea, running north to the crucial straits of the Dardanelles. One has to remind oneself also of the great bight that runs to the south of Turkey, making Antioch, for example, so much further east than Ephesus. Finally, this was a sea of islands. In the west lay Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearics; Sicily and Malta were part of the divide; the Aegean was a great mass of islands, guarded as it were to the south by Crete; and Cyprus nestled below the coast of Turkey. This was no open or high sea and, even if one left its thousands of miles of indented coastline, one was never far from land. All these features become immediately evident when one consults a map; but in one’s imagination it is easy to think of a single and empty stretch of water.

The Red Sea was different in being long and narrow. True, one could usefully sail north and south, between Egypt and the open water that led to the further coasts of Africa and of India; but the Red Sea was also a sea to cross, making the ancient kingdoms of Axum, Meroe, and Ethiopia almost the natural neighbors of Arabia and

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Map 2 Land and People: The Roman World in Late Antiquity.

The Yemen. The effect upon trade, politics, and ideas was never insignificant. And it was natural to hug the coast around into the Persian Gulf, with its further concentrations of settlement and commerce, and eventual access to the southern reaches of the Persian Empire.

Finally, there was the Black Sea. Access, then as now, depended upon the control of narrow waters; but, once gained, access guaranteed both expanse and variety. It was as far from Constantinople to the Caucasus as it was from Greece to the Levant. The southern coast was imperial territory, but then merged into potential points of contact with Armenia and with Persia beyond. To the north, however, a longer coast-line reached into wilder country, rich in timber, hides, and slaves; and the venturesome could take advantage not only of the Danube basin but also of the great rivers west and east of Crimea, the Dnieper and (in the Sea of Azov) the Don - an area long colonized by the Greeks.

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Map 2 (cont.)

Into seas, of course, rivers flowed, and in many cases provided further access inland. It is always worth bearing in mind where those rivers lay. In the western Mediterranean, pride of place goes to the Rhirne, which created an important corridor to Lyon and beyond - the route to Trier and the Moselle, and from there to the middle Rhine. Into the eastern Mediterranean flowed the Nile, another gateway - to Egypt, Sudan, and the mountains of Africa. Both the Danube and the Rhine we have mentioned, rising close to one another, passing through broad plains as often as narrow gorges, uniting peoples on both banks and in themselves immensely long channels of communication. Into the Persian Gulf flowed the rivers of Mesopotamia, the Euphrates and the Tigris, a long and densely populated path from Armenia to the eastern seas. But smaller rivers had their significance: the steep waterways that flowed from Turkey into the Black Sea; the similar defiles that ran north from Greece toward the Danube, inviting intrusion southward.

And the flow of water was, of course, from mountain to plain. The mountains were as crucial a feature of the late Roman scene as any other. They formed boundaries, marked the limits of dense settlement and agriculture, set off the farmer from the herdsman, and gave shelter to bandits and misanthropes. It is an easy matter to run through their names: the Atlas, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, the highlands of Armenia, the Iranian plateau. Each in their way affected the fortunes of those who did not live in them, either as a challenge or an impediment.

Such were the defining elements of settlement and mobility (explored further particularly in the chapters by Humphries (7), Leyerle (8), and Sotinel (9)); but we are concerned here with ‘‘people’’ as well as with ‘‘land.’’ What physical traces can we discern that offer clues to the human adaptation and development of this wide territory? Here, cities and sites and inscriptions play their part. They also occupy what we think of as landscape: they are visible, they have survived, they have names and places on our maps (as described here by Loseby (ch. 10), Brandt (ch. 11), and Trout (ch. 12)). And with the inscribed word we begin to touch the human beings themselves, their self-image, their pride, belief, and hope. This land that we look at was occupied by people born, married, parents as well as governors and governed, and eventually remembered in their death. Before we think of politics, we think of the hierarchies, the industries, the swift uncertainty of ordinary life (the task begun by Cooper (ch. 13), Evans-Grubbs (ch. 14), and Rebillard (ch. 15)).