POST-PROCESO

Rome’. Many of the former emphasise discontinuity, and argue that, at least in Italy, hill-top settlements (castelli, kastra) replaced classical patterns of

(dispersed) settlement already in late Antiquity, i.e. during the 300s and 400s AD. The latter, by contrast, see continuity of dispersed settlement up to the 10^th century, and date the incastellamento process - the replacement of “cities” by fortress villages - from that time.

If we look at the region east of Rome itself, the region leading to the Sabine hills, the evidence, both literary and archeological, suggests that Roman

settlement in the Farfa region of the Sabina (NE of Rome) peaked in the 1st- and 2nd-century AD. The end of the 2nd century, however, saw the beginning of a decline in the number of datable sites. Few, if any, sites could be dated to the Byzantine/Lombard period between 500 and 800, apparently confirming the

‘discontinuity’ argument which says that, at least in Italy, the ‘classical’

pattern of settlement had already collapsed, or largely collapsed, in late Antiquity. – Thus Morland, ‘Farfa’. Also Wickham 2005.

The end of Long-Distance Trade: the Evidence of Pottery

Although long-distance trade was already seriously faltering by 600, its demise was not reached until just before 700.

Many productions of both amphorae fine table wares ended in the later

seventh century; this was a systemic collapse. For example, it is now definite that

“Phocaean RS” (PRS: sophisticated ‘red slip’ ceramics from Phocaea in the east Aegean) – once traded across the whole Mediterranean - ceased to be produced in the period 670-700, somewhat later than used to be thought. This is clear from excavations at Emporio on Chios, Gortyn on Crete, and in the Crimea. Trade in PRS had been contracting since the 500s, but the local RS [local types of less sophisticated red slipware] productions did not replace it, for they ceased as well.

They were replaced by coarser types (Wickham 2005: 784 ff).

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With the creation of the Themes (Gk themata) – the regionally based and locally recruited army units – in the 650s, soldiers would have been supplied locally.

Weapons, armour, horses, rations would have been obtained mostly from within each Theme (albeit with coordination from Constantinople whenever a large expedition was being organised). This no doubt hastened the end of the interregional exchange network of Antiquity.

Cities: Going Backwards

Morrisson and Sodini write thus: “The progressive degradation of the cities is clearly perceptible through excavation and is characterised by a break with ‘urban logic’. Thoroughfares became dominated by shoddy and partitioned structures.

The intent of public monuments became subverted: baths and buildings of

importance did service as habitations or workshops: their marbles were torn out, and heating stoves were installed nearby. Refuse and spolia [re-used material]

blocked certain areas of the sites or served as fill for floors of beaten earth.

Sewers and aqueducts were abandoned, and simple trenches took up the functions of the former. Burials began to appear intra muros [inside the town walls], and the walls of the city were no longer maintained. Houses suffered a similar fate.”

“This typology, corresponding to a state of crisis that the city could overcome only by transforming itself, finds confirmation throughout the Mediterranean world. . . . What remains clear is that this urban withdrawal began [in the East] in the course of the sixth century, with varying phases that may be tied to geographic areas” (‘The Sixth Century Economy’, in Laiou ed., 2002 p.189;

emphasis added). Its culmination, of course, came in the 600s.

* * *

Cyril Mango, 1980: his chapter 3, has written at length on what he calls the

"disappearance" of the classical Greco-Roman city system in the East. A more recent account can be found in Wickham 2005: 629 ff. The issue is much debated, some saying cities actually disappeared, others that many survived, albeit on a reduced scale (see Lightfoot 2010 for a summary of the debate on various sides).

Mango for his part stresses that the great bubonic plague of 541-42, "the first of

its kind attested in history", was followed by six further epidemics before 600.

And plague and famine were followed, after 600, by the Persian and Avar-Slav invasions. As a result, in the century 550-650, cities such as Athens and Corinth contracted, or were reduced, to lesser settlements around a central fort.

In the Balkans, many of the ancient cities had simply disappeared by 650, the end-result of a century of war, plague and famine. Chris Wickham, 2005: 630-31, is less inclined to attribute the process to plague; but he agrees that there was major “urban recession” in mainland Greece, mainly after 600, notably at Athens, Corinth, Delphi and Butrint. Athens and Corinth at least survived, if only as large villages; most urban centres were wholly abandoned: a “failure” rate (says Wickham) of 80% in the wider Aegean region.

Wickham stresses, 2005: 626-27, that some regions, e.g. the outer Balkans, saw economic and urban decline from as early as 550, while in other areas, e.g. Asia Minor, there was little perceptible change up to the Persian attacks in the 610s.

Partly the economic and urban decline in the Balkans was due to successive waves of the plague (Soltysiak 2006).

Urban revival began slowly only in the ninth century, meaning that most of the empire was governed from fortress-outposts (Gk: kastra) in the two centuries from 650 to 850 (2005: 631).

We must imagine, I suppose, that small villages continued to flourish, while the larger towns and cities were left ruined and empty. Cf Haldon 1990: 120: “What remained was instead a pattern of defended villages and fortresses, the strongest of which often came to serve as the administrative and military centres; and, on the coast of the Black Sea, the Aegean, the Adriatic and in south-west Asia Minor, there are a few isolated ports and emporia”. Rautman p. 119 writes of “market towns or fortified outposts of minor significance”.

Haldon, ibid: “The evidence of texts, numismatics and archaeology all point uniformly in one direction: the effective disappearance of the late Antique urban economies which [in the East] had survived up to the reign of Heraclius [610-641]”.

When the Persians conquered Roman Alexandria in 619, New Rome

(Constantinople) could no longer import Egyptian wheat and barley. This was only partly substituted for with new cereal fields in Thrace and, no doubt,

increased imports from Tunisia and Sicily (Browning pp.39, 82). In Asia Minor many of the cities, such as Pergamum and Sardis, Amorium and Ancyra, were either abandoned or much reduced in size after 622 as a result of the Persian invasion (Hodges & Whitehouse p.61).

Browning p.93 says that “only a few” great cities retained the physical pattern of the ancient city, with a long and fully maintained perimeter-wall. The point is made more starkly by Mango, p.48: "Quite simply, the empire was

ruralised". Or as Haldon 1990 pp.111, 121, puts it, “the long-term decline of the classical city [for Haldon, beginning in the 300s] was completed during the seventh century”. Two centuries would elapse before the economy revived, i.e.

from around AD 825.

But others have questioned the thesis that the cities and towns of Anatolia

underwent catastrophic decline from the Sassanid raids of 611-628 (see, eg. in Byzantion 52, 1982, 429 ff) and that the resultant damage meant the extinction or the towns' corporate identity (see in Bvzantina kai Metabyzantina 4, 1985, 65ff). The majority view is that the Persian raids simply accelerated or

punctuated a longer-term development that took up to a century [from AD 565 to 665]. Cf 647-53.

Haldon summarises it well: “Some [poleis] were abandoned or destroyed; those that survived shrank to insignificance, often surviving merely as

defended villages; others owed their continued existence to – and the

existence of a limited degree of commercial activity – to their function as military and administrative centres, of both Church and state; yet others to their

geographical position in respect of trade routes and distance from enemy threat”

(1990: 113).

“What is crucial, and what indeed had actually occurred before the physical destruction of the seventh century, is the change in the function of cities or towns within the late Roman society and economy. They were quite simply no longer relevant to the state or to the greater part of the ruling elite. Where they survived, therefore, it was either because they could fulfill a function in respect to the institutions of the church or state—as an administrative base for example—or in respect of genuine economic and social patterns of demand” (Haldon 1990: 121, emphasis added).

Rural Units

The empire’s population was still some seven to 10 million. As a mental

experiment, let us imagine that there was an average of (say) 300 inhabitants in the sometimes extensive monastic estates, some surviving larger estates, the multitudinous villages and military estates and various free peasant communes.

This gives us, in 650, an empire stretching from North Africa to eastern Anatolia that was comprised of 23,000 to 33,000 dispersed ‘rural units’. Indeed the number of ‘rural units’ was probably larger than that: the large estates should visualized not so much as huge unbroken tracts as a great number of dispersed plots held by a single owner and worked by distinct sets of tenants (Mango 1980:

43).

* * *

Numbers in the East Roman Army, 641-775 According to Treadgold, Army 1995 and State 1997.

As presented in Haldon’s books, a field army of about AD 600 numbered up to 24,000 troops but could be as small as 15,000. The largest field army deployed after 641 was 20,000 (Treadgold 1982: 92).

a. AD 641: Heraclius:

21,800 cavalry and 87,200 infantry: land troops 109,000. Only about a third of

the total under Justinian.

In 622-23 Heraklios took his armies from Anatolia to Armenia and Abasgia, part of modern Georgia, and thence into the Persian heartland. Treadgold believes (1997: 294) that he had assembled an extremely large unified army of perhaps 50,000 men.

b. 668: Constans:

The same, i.e. 109,000.

c. 775: Constantine V:

12,000 elite cavalry in the Tagmata.** Perhaps 8,000 other cavalry? Infantry perhaps 60,000 including 6,000 in the infantry Tagmata. Land troops total 80,000: the low-point in the military capability of early Byzantium (before AD 1071).

Navy: 18,500 oarsmen including 2,000 each in the Themes of Cibyrrhaeots and Hellas, manning perhaps around 125 warships in all. This may be compared with 30,000 oarsmen in 540.

(**) The Tagmata or central regiments were created by Constantine V in the 760s.

In 1982 Treadgold (p.117) preferred a figure of 18,000 for the Tagmata, that is, 4,000 in each of the three cavalry Tagmata: the SCHOOLS or Scholai,

EXCUBITORS and WATCH or Vigla; and 2,000 in each in the three infantry Tagmata: the NUMERA, OPTIMATES*** and WALLS [Greek: Teiché or tagma ton Teikheon]. Haldon prefers a figure of 10,000 for the Tagmata. In 1997 (p.373) Treadgold evidently counts the Optimates (non-combat infantry support troops) among the Themes rather than as Tagmata. Certainly the Optimates functioned virtually like a theme, having their own lands in Bithynia, across the Bosphorus from the capital, i.e. around the Gulf of Nicomedia.

(***) Not be confused with the earlier cavalry unit of the same name.

The Optimates (the elite cavalry regiment of AD 600) seem to have been absorbed into the large Opsikion army that Heraclius and Constans II created from the old praesental armies in the period 615-659. The Opsikion was perhaps created as early as 615 but it did not become a Theme, holding land, until

probably about 659, when Constans further reduced pay in favour of land grants.

Later (from 681) the Opsikion theme was subdivided and its troops were split between new Themes: Thrace in about 681 and then the Buccellarion about 766 (or perhaps as early as 745: see in main text). The lands held by the new infantry Optimates, created presumably about 766/745, were in Bithynia.

In short, the old cavalry Optimates had long disappeared when the new Optimates infantry were created in the 760s. But there may have been a

continuity through the land: possibly the same estates in Bithynia held by the Optimates (now Opsikion) cavalry from 659 were in about 766 given to the ex-Opsikion foot-soldiers who were enrolled in the (new) Optimates. Cf Treadgold Army pp.70 ff.

The Watch

Treadgold believes that the regiment of The Watch – in Greek: Bigla or Vigla, from the Latin Vigilia - was created not under Irene, acc. 797, as Haldon argues, but earlier under Constantine V (Treadgold 1982: 138 note 314; Haldon 1984).

The oldest surviving reference to the office of commander of the Watch, drungarios tes Vigles, dates to 791 (ODB: 663). On campaign, the Watch

performed special duties, guarding the emperor's tent at night and conveying his orders; it was also responsible for prisoners of war.

3. A NEW EMPIRE: THE EARLY ‘BYZANTINE’ PERIOD, from 636 Dynasties:

- Heraclian (from 610).

- Syrian or 'Isaurian'.

- Amorian (to 867).

The restored empire of Heraklios was to enjoy a respite of only eight years of peace: 629-636. The Muslim Arabs would quickly pick up the pieces from the titanic struggle between New Rome and Persia.

Arab expansion had begun under the prophet Muhammad (570-632), as for example in a victory against the Persians in 610. At Muhammad's death, his followers controlled the whole western half of the Arabian peninsula.

Muslim armies subsequently advanced irresistibly in all directions (or rather, in all directions except one): through Palestine and Egypt (635-40) and thence across North Africa to Spain (642-711, Carthage 698); and east through Persia to what is now Afghanistan and southern Pakistan: Persia 637-49, Bukhara,

Samarkand and Kabul 661-80; and then to present-day Pakistan 711.

Only in one place did they fail to conquer, namely East Roman Anatolia.

Three of the five great seats of Christianity fell to the infidel - Jerusalem [637 or 38], Antioch [638], and Alexandria [641]. This left Constantinople and Rome as the only Christian Patriarchates under Imperial rule.

CHRISTIAN TOTALITARIANISM