The late Roman world from the sixth century was dominated initially by four land-masses (Asia Minor or Anatolia, very roughly modern Turkey; the Levant or Middle Eastern regions down to and including Egypt; North Africa, from Egypt westwards to the Atlantic; and the Balkans). The Mediterranean and Black Seas united these very different regions, and after the loss of much of Italy and all of North Africa during the seventh and eighth centuries, acted as a connecting corridor between east and west. The climate of these very different regions determined the patterns of agricultural and pastoral exploitation within the empire’s borders and the nature of the state’s surplus-extracting activities.
Asia Minor can be divided into three zones: central plateau, coastal plains, and the mountain ranges which separate them. The plateau rises from about 1,000 metres in the west to over 1,800 metres feet in the east and is typified by extremes of hot and cold temperatures in summer and winter (altitude and the effect of the northern Pontic range of mountains promotes in effect a continental, steppe-type climatic system). Four climatic sectors are usually identified: the Pontic (Black Sea coastal)
Region has warm summers, mild winters, and a regular rainfall across the year - temperatures range from 23° C in midsummer to some 14° C in the winter; the south and west coastal regions have a Mediterranean climate, with mild, wet winters and hot dry summers - temperatures range from 12° C in winter to 20° C in summer; the semi-arid plateau and interior have cold, wet winters and hot, dry summers, with temperatures ranging from freezing and below in mid-winter to 23° C in the summer. Finally, the north-eastern plateaux have warm summers but severe winters, with winter temperatures reaching -12° C to 18° C in summer. This pattern reflects the physical geography, for the relief of the whole peninsula is dominated by ranges in the north and south of over 3,000 metres that encircle the central plateau. To the north the Pontic Alps follow the line of the southern shore of the Black Sea; to the south the Taurus and Anti-Taurus ranges extend along the Mediterranean coast and across northern Syria curving north-eastwards into the Caucasus region. All the mountain zones, but particularly the southern and eastern regions, are characterised by smaller plateaux dissected by crater lakes, lava flows and depressions, producing a highly fragmented landscape. The central plateau itself is divided into several large basins and salt lakes, with extensive eroded areas
Map 1.1 Asia Minor: physical geography.
Map 1.2 North Africa: physical geography.
Around the southern fringes, as in Cappadocia, for example, where the eroded limestone formations have permitted the creation of cave dwellings and subterranean villages. Land-use is determined very clearly by these differences in relief. Agricultural production is limited to the coastal regions - often quite extensive in the Cilician plain or western lowlands, for example, and to the fertile river valleys which cut through the central plateau or coastal ranges. The uplands and plateau have traditionally been exploited by pastoral activity, ranging from sheep and goats to horses and in some areas cattle. In ancient and pre-Islamic medieval times extensive pig rearing was also practised in the transitional zones between plateau and fertile agrarian districts.
In contrast, the limited but fertile agricultural lands of Palestine and western Syria are very much wealthier. Greater Syria, including Palestine and the Lebanon, incorporates a number of very different landscapes, the terrain alternating from rugged highlands (for example the mountains of the Lebanon), through the fertile plains of northern Syria or central Palestine, the hilly uplands around Jerusalem to the desert steppe of central Syria. south of Palestine lay the deserts of the Sinai peninsula, leading then into the fertile Nile valley and delta regions - an area of fundamentally different character, heavily dependent on the annual flooding of the great river and the irrigation agriculture which it supported. Westwards from Egypt stretched the provinces of North Africa, desert through the eastern sector of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania in modern Libya with very limited fertile coastal stretches and inland plateaux, graduating into the coastal plains of Tunisia and modern Algeria. This was in turn clearly delineated by the plateaux and sandy desert regions in the south-east, including the al-Jifarah plain (and beyond them, the great desert), by the Aures range in the centre, and the Saharan Atlas. Mean temperatures along the northern coastline range from a low of 16° C in winter to a summer high of 38-40° C in the eastern region (slightly lower winter temperatures of 8-12° C in the western sector).
The Balkan peninsula is dominated by mountains, and although not particularly high, these cover some two thirds of its area. The main formations are the Dinaric Alps, which run through the western Balkan region in a south-easterly direction and, in the associated Pindos range, dominate western and central Greece. Extensions and spurs of these mountains dominate southern Greece and the Peloponnese. The Balkan chain itself (Turkic balqan, ‘densely wooded mountain’; Greek Haimos) lies north of Greece, extending eastwards from the Morava river for about 550 kilometres as far as the Black Sea coast, with the Rhodope range forming an arc extending
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Southwards from this range through Macedonia towards the plain of Thrace. River and coastal plains are relatively limited in extent. There are thus very distinct climatic variations between the coastal, Mediterranean-type conditions and the continental-type conditions of the inland and highland regions. Mean temperatures in the Peloponnese and in the coastal regions of southern and north-western Greece range from 5-10° C in winter to 25-30° in the summer, contrasting with northern and central upland temperatures of from 10 to -5° C in winter and 10-15° C in the summer. Rainfall patterns are similarly accentuated, although with a stronger differentiation between those areas west and south of the Dinaric and Rhodope ranges and those to the east - means of about 100 centimetres per annum in the former and of as little as half that much in some parts of the latter have been recorded in modern times. This has in turn generated a very accentuated settlement-pattern consisting in a series of fragmented geopolitical entities, separated by ridges of highlands, fanning out along river-valleys towards the coastal areas.
The highland regions are dominated by forest and woodland; the lower foothills by woodland, scrub and rough pasturage. Only the plains of Thessaly and Macedonia offered the possibility of extensive arable exploitation; the river plains, and the coastal strips associated with them (such as the region about the gulfs of Argos and Corinth, much more limited in extent), present a similar but more restricted potential. Here were to be found in ancient and medieval times orchards, as well as vine and olive cultivation. The relationship between this landscape of mountains, valleys and coastal plains and the sea is fundamental to the political, military and cultural history of the region, in particular in the southern zone. Surrounded by the sea, for example, except along its northern boundary, the extended coastline, with its gulfs and deep inlets serves as a means of communication with surrounding areas and for the dissemination of common cultural elements even to the interior districts of the Balkans. But equally, easy sea-borne access from the west, the south or from the north-east via the Black Sea made the southern Balkan peninsula - in particular Greece and the Peloponnese - vulnerable to invasion and dislocation.
Climate has remained, within certain margins, relatively constant across the late ancient and medieval periods, yet there are a number of fluctuations that need to be borne in mind and which, in conjunction with natural events such as earthquakes, man-made phenomena such as warfare, and catastrophes such as pandemic disease, could have dramatic short - to medium-term effects on the human populations of the region, and thus patterns of settlement, land-use, the extraction, distribution and consumption of resources, and political systems. The climate
Map 1.3 The Balkans: physical geography.
Throughout much of the late Hellenistic and Roman imperial period was relatively warmer and milder than in the period which preceded it, and constituted a ‘climatic optimum’ which favoured the expansion of agriculture. By about 500 CE this situation was changing, with colder conditions persisting up to the mid-ninth century. The human environment of the later fifth to seventh centuries thus became both more challenging and the economy of existence more fragile. Combined with the great plague of the middle of the sixth century this may have affected the human population in a number of ways, although these remain unclear and the subject of continuing debate. Some marginal lands were abandoned, soil erosion increased where agriculture receded, the colder, wetter climate generated increasing water volume in rivers and watercourses, contributing to alluviation and lowland flooding in many more exposed areas. It remains difficult to disentangle the effects of climatic and human factors on the changing landscape. During the ninth century this trend was reversed - and is paralleled by an extension of agriculture and of human exploitation of woodland and scrubland, strong demographic growth and an increasing density of settlement and rate of exploitation of agrarian resources. But from the fourteenth century once more this tendency was halted, and
With lower temperatures, increased glaciation in high alpine zones (in particular the European Alps), a growth in the rate of afforestation, a reduction in agricultural exploitation, and a demographic decline, the fragile conditions of existence of the human populations of the region were once more thrown into disequilibrium, with phenomena such as the fourteenth-century Black Death one of the most obvious accompanying developments. All these phenomena thus form the background to the ‘little ice age’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is against this background that we must understand and interpret the social, economic and political history of the late Roman and Byzantine worlds.
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