The transformations in urban life that took place over the three centuries or so of the late Roman period are well-attested in the archaeological record. This shows an almost universal tendency for cities to lose by neglect many of the features familiar from their classical structure. Major public buildings fall into disrepair, systems of water-supply are often abandoned (suggesting a drop in population), rubbish is dumped in abandoned buildings, major thoroughfares are built on, and so on. The undoubted decline in the maintenance of public structures or amenities - baths, aqueducts, drains, street-surfaces, walls - is suggestive of a major shift in the modes of urban living: of finance and administration in particular. As we have seen (see pages 36-37) the causes were many and complex, but it is clear that what used to be thought of as a ‘medieval’ or even ‘middle eastern’ street plan and arrangement of public and private space was already beginning to appear in the towns of the Roman world long before the conquests of Islam or the end of the late ancient period during the seventh century.
Scores of excavated examples can illustrate these transformations. A good example is the town ofApamaea in the province of Syria II. The city was struck by serious earthquakes in the second half of the fifth century, and again in 526 and 528, and was then besieged and sacked by the Persians in 573. But the archaeological evidence illustrates a more gradual process of increasing impoverishment, alleviated on occasion by imperial and some private largesse. After 573, for example, the agora was abandoned, and the scale of rebuilding was much more limited than after earlier disasters. A major transformation occurred between about 625 and the middle of the century, marked by a functional subdivision of the larger town houses and a ruralisation of the activities carried on in the city. Antioch on the Orontes underwent similar changes, exacerbated by a Persian sack in 540, and many other towns show the sorts of transformations in function described above.
Like one or two other cities which suffered a similar fate, however, the history of Apamaea may also reflect local and regional economic change as much as any general tendency in urbanism; for it is also clear that while they may have undergone considerable change in internal structure, use of space, architectural style and street plan, many more cities continued to flourish, to be the site of intense commercial and industrial activity, and to support substantial ecclesiastical and government administrative activities. The changes in the way the state operated, the shifts in the relationship between civic elites and the government and imperial establishment, the continuing process of Christianisation, and changing lifestyles and patterns of investment among the social elite all contributed to changes in the way towns worked socially and economically, and this also had a direct impact on the ways in which space was used in cities. One version of such change in respect of street plan, for example, has been presented in a ‘model’ form which, while it does not do justice to the very considerable regional variations across the different provinces of the empire, nor to the different timescale which this differentiation implies, nevertheless illustrates the process whereby the classical street plan was changed to suit changing patterns of social and economic activity and identity from late Roman into early medieval times, with streets encroached upon by shops and artisans’ workshops, being also built upon and divided, tending towards the creation out of the regular Roman street plan of a much more complex, sectional arrangement (Figure 3.4).
One of the most obvious changes in the internal structure of cities was the abandonment of pagan temples and the frequent reuse of the building materials for the construction of churches or related Christian structures. This was often done very carefully, even down to the numbering of the blocks of masonry as they were taken down. The fifth and sixth centuries also saw a vast amount of church building across the eastern provinces of the empire - small towns like Anemurium (on the southern coast of Asia Minor) were endowed with some nine churches within and without the walls in a period of less than 200 years, for example. Such activity reflected both new patterns of elite investment and, just as importantly, the increasing importance in the cities of the local bishop and the church, a major corporate landowner. The pattern of change varies from city to city. Baths which had fallen into disrepair during the third or fourth centuries were sometimes repaired and brought back into use. Theatres often remained in use, although employed for functions approved by the church. Gymnasia and related structures such as stadia were sometimes retained, but just as often were built in or over and turned into artisanal or residential structures, occasionally also being rebuilt to include small churches. Large public spaces such as agorai were frequently built on - by churches (which in the context of Christianity came to fulfil several of the community functions of an agora anyway) or by shops, workshops, pottery kilns or houses, sometimes as well by rubbish dumps. At the same time, extensive private residences, often with substantial associated outbuildings, monumental entrance porticoes, internal courtyards, dining halls and administrative spaces, and also with associated churches, continued to be built well into the sixth century, for senior ecclesiastical or government officials as well as private persons, particularly in the suburbs. But the structure and plan changed - the traditional Roman peristyle house begins to be replaced by buildings with more than a single level, and with some of the key reception rooms on the second storey.
Many of these trends are common to the whole Roman world, east and west. Substantial wealth was invested in many major and large numbers of smaller towns until the later sixth century and in some cases, especially in Syria and neighbouring regions, beyond, but the form of that investment reflected new social, administrative and cultural priorities which gave to cities a very different physical appearance from their classical Roman forebears. Some of the key differences were already clearly marked out in the form of the few new cities which were constructed, all at imperial command, during the sixth century. Their characteristics have been summarised as small, fortified, imperial and Christian. Many older provincial cities, where they played a role in imperial civil or military structures, also changed to conform to this pattern - from the later fourth and fifth century in the Balkans, somewhat later in less exposed parts of the eastern empire. Their evolution in Asia Minor into the typical middle Byzantine kastron is not difficult to follow. But the path which urban development would take thereafter is determined also by the political histories of the areas in question: while they share a common late Roman heritage in respect of the developments already described, the fate of towns in territories remaining to the empire after the middle of the seventh century was very different from that of the towns and cities which were in Islamic territory, for example, a reflection of the beleaguered and impoverished situation of the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire in the seventh and eighth centuries.
World History
