An Empire Across Three Continents Theme 2 PDF

THEME 38 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY 2 An Empire Across Three Continents THE Roman Empire covered a vast stretch of territory that included most of Europe as we know it today and a large...

THEME 38 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY 2 An Empire Across Three Continents THE Roman Empire covered a vast stretch of territory that included most of Europe as we know it today and a large part of the Fertile Crescent and North Africa. In this chapter we shall look at the way this empire was organised, the political forces that shaped its destiny, and the social groups into which people were divided. You will see that the empire embraced a wealth of local cultures and languages; that women had a stronger legal position then than they do in many countries today; but also that much of the economy was run on slave labour, denying freedom to substantial numbers of persons. From the fifth century on, the empire fell apart in the west but remained intact and exceptionally prosperous in its eastern half. The caliphate which you will read about in the next chapter built on this prosperity and inherited its urban and religious traditions. Roman historians have a rich collection of sources to go on, which we can broadly divide into three groups: (a) texts, (b) documents and (c) material remains. Textual sources include histories of the period written by contemporaries (these were usually called ‘Annals’, because the narrative was constructed on a year-by-year basis), letters, speeches, sermons, laws, and so on. Documentary sources include mainly inscriptions and papyri. Inscriptions were usually cut on stone, so a large number survive, in both Greek and Latin. The ‘papyrus’ was a reed-like plant that grew along the banks of the Nile in Egypt and was processed to produce a writing material that was very widely used in everyday life. Thousands of contracts, accounts, letters and official documents survive ‘on papyrus’ and have been published by scholars who are called ‘papyrologists’. Material remains include a very wide assortment of items that mainly archaeologists discover (for example, through excavation and field survey), for example, buildings, monuments and other kinds of structures, pottery, coins, mosaics, even entire landscapes (for example, through the use of aerial photography). Each of these sources can only tell us just so much about the past, and combining them can be a fruitful exercise, but how well this is done depends on Papyrus scrolls the historian’s skill! Rationalised 2023-24  AN EMPIRE A CROSS THREE CONTINENTS 39 Two powerful empires ruled over most of Europe,North Africa and the Middle East in the period between the birth of Christ and the early part of the seventh century, say, down to the 630s. The two empires were those of Rome and Iran. The Romans and Iranians were rivals and fought against each other for much of their history. Their empires lay next to each other, separated only by a narrow strip of land that ran along the river Euphrates. In this chapter we shall be looking at the Roman Empire, but we shall also refer, in passing, to Rome’s rival, Iran. If you look at the map, you will see that the continents of Europe and Africa are separated by a sea that stretches all the way from Spain in the west to Syria in the east. This sea is called the Mediterranean, and it was the heart of Rome’s empire. Rome dominated the Mediterranean and all the regions around that sea in both directions, north as well as south. To the north, the boundaries of the empire were formed by two great MAP 1: Europe and rivers, the Rhine and the Danube; to the south, by the huge expanse of North Africa desert called the Sahara. This vast stretch of territory was the Roman Empire. Iran controlled the whole area south of the Caspian Sea down to eastern Arabia, and sometimes large parts of Afghanistan as well. These two superpowers had divided up most of the world that the Chinese called Ta Ch’in (‘greater Ch’in’, roughly the west). Rationalised 2023-24  40 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY The Early Empire The Roman Empire can broadly be divided into two phases, ‘early’ and ‘late’, divided by the third century as a sort of historical watershed between them. In other words, the whole period down to the main part of the third century can be called the ‘early empire’, and the period after that the ‘late empire’. A major difference between the two superpowers and their respective empires was that the Roman Empire was culturally much more diverse than that of Iran. The Parthians and later the Sasanians, the dynasties that ruled Iran in this period, ruled over a population that was largely *The Republic was the name for a Iranian. The Roman Empire, by contrast, was a mosaic of territories regime in which the and cultures that were chiefly bound together by a common system of reality of power lay government. Many languages were spoken in the empire, but for the with the Senate, a purposes of administration Latin and Greek were the most widely used, body dominated by a indeed the only languages. The upper classes of the east spoke and small group of wealthy families who wrote in Greek, those of the west in Latin, and the boundary between formed the ‘nobility’. these broad language areas ran somewhere across the middle of the In practice, the Mediterranean, between the African provinces of Tripolitania (which Republic represented was Latin speaking) and Cyrenaica (Greek-speaking). All those who the government of the nobility, lived in the empire were subjects of a single ruler, the emperor, regardless exercised through the of where they lived and what language they spoke. body called the The regime established by Augustus, the first emperor, in 27 BCE Senate. The Republic was called the ‘Principate’. Although Augustus was the sole ruler and lasted from 509 BC to the only real source of authority, the fiction was kept alive that he was 27 BC, when it was overthrown by actually only the ‘leading citizen’ (Princeps in Latin), not the absolute Octavian, the ruler. This was done out of respect for the Senate, the body which had adopted son and heir controlled Rome earlier, in the days when it was a Republic.* The of Julius Caesar, who Senate had existed in Rome for centuries, and had been and remained later changed his name to Augustus. a body representing the aristocracy, that is, the wealthiest families of Membership of the Roman and, later, Italian descent, mainly landowners. Most of the Senate was for life, Roman histories that survive in Greek and Latin were written by people and wealth and from a senatorial background. From these it is clear that emperors office-holding were judged by how they behaved towards the Senate. The worst counted for more than birth. emperors were those who were hostile to the senatorial class, behaving with suspicion or brutality and violence. Many senators yearned to go back to the days of the Republic, but most must have realised that this was impossible. Next to the emperor and the Senate, the other key institution of imperial rule was the army. Unlike the army of its rival in the Persian **A conscripted empire, which was a conscripted** army, the Romans had a paid army is one which is professional army where soldiers had to put in a minimum of 25 years forcibly recruited; of service. Indeed, the existence of a paid army was a distinctive feature military service is compulsory for of the Roman Empire. The army was the largest single organised body certain groups or in the empire (600,000 by the fourth century) and it certainly had the categories of the power to determine the fate of emperors. The soldiers would constantly population. agitate for better wages and service conditions. These agitations often Rationalised 2023-24  AN EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 41 took the form of mutinies, if the soldiers felt let down by their generals or even the emperor. Again, our picture of the Roman army depends largely on the way they were portrayed by historians with senatorial sympathies. The Senate hated and feared the army, because it was a source of often- unpredictable violence, especially in the tense conditions of the third century when government was forced to tax more heavily to pay for its mounting military expenditures. To sum up, the emperor, the aristocracy and the army were the three main ‘players’ in the political history of the empire. The success of individual emperors depended on their control of the army, and when the armies were divided, the result usually was civil war*. Except for one notorious year (69 CE), when four emperors Shops in Forum mounted the throne in quick succession, the first two centuries were Julium, Rome. This piazza with columns on the whole free from civil war and in this sense relatively stable. was built after 51 BCE, Succession to the throne was based as far as possible on family descent, to enlarge the older either natural or adoptive, and even the army was strongly wedded to Roman Forum. this principle. For example, Tiberius (14-37 CE), the second in the long line of Roman emperors, was not the natural son of Augustus, the ruler who founded the Principate, but Augustus adopted him to ensure a smooth transition. *Civil war refers to External warfare was also much less common in the first two armed struggles for centuries. The empire inherited by Tiberius from Augustus was already power within the same country, in so vast that further expansion was felt to be unnecessary. In fact, the contrast to conflicts ‘Augustan age’ is remembered for the peace it ushered in after decades between different of internal strife and centuries of military conquest. The only major countries. campaign of expansion in the early empire was Trajan’s fruitless occupation of territory across the Euphrates, in the years 113-17 CE abandoned by his successors. The Emperor Trajan’s Dream – A Conquest of India? ‘Then, after a winter (115/16) in Antioch marked by a great earthquake, in 116 Trajan marched down the Euphrates to Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital, and then to the head of the Persian Gulf. There [the historian] Cassius Dio describes him looking longingly at a merchant-ship setting off for India, and wishing that he were as young as Alexander.’ – Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East. Rationalised 2023-24  42 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY The Near East. Much more characteristic was the gradual extension of Roman direct From the rule. This was accomplished by absorbing a whole series of ‘dependent’ perspective of kingdoms into Roman provincial territory. The Near East was full of someone who lived such kingdoms*, but by the early second century those which lay west in the Roman of the Euphrates (towards Roman territory) had disappeared, swallowed Mediterranean, this up by Rome. (Incidentally, some of these kingdoms were exceedingly referred to all the wealthy, for example Herod’s kingdom yielded the equivalent of 5.4 territory east of the million denarii per year, equal to over 125,000 kg of gold! The denarius Mediterranean, was a Roman silver coin containing about 4½ gm of pure silver.) chiefly the Roman In fact, except for Italy, which was not considered a province in provinces of Syria, Palestine and these centuries, all the territories of the empire were organised into Mesopotamia, and provinces and subject to taxation. At its peak in the second century, in a looser sense the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to the borders of the surrounding Armenia, and from the Sahara to the Euphrates and sometimes territories, for beyond. Given that there was no government in the modern sense example Arabia. to help them to run things, you may well ask, how was it possible for the emperor to cope with the control and administration of such * These were local a vast and diverse set of territories, with a population of some 60 kingdoms that were million in the mid-second century? The answer lies in the ‘clients’ of Rome. Their rulers could urbanisation of the empire. be relied on to use The great urban centres that lined the shores of the Mediterranean their forces in (Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch were the biggest among them) were support of Rome, the true bedrock of the imperial system. It was through the cities and in return Rome allowed them to that ‘government’ was able to tax the provincial countrysides which exist. generated much of the wealth of the empire. What this means is that the local upper classes actively collaborated with the Roman Pont du Gard, near state in administering their own territories and raising taxes from Nimes, France, first them. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of Roman political century BCE. Roman history is the dramatic shift in power between Italy and the provinces. engineers built massive aqueducts Throughout the second and third centuries, it was the provincial over three continents upper classes who supplied most of the cadre that governed the to carry water. provinces and commanded the armies. They came to form a new elite of administrators and military commanders who became much more powerful than the senatorial class because they had the backing of the emperors. As this new group emerged, the emperor Gallienus (253-68) consolidated their rise to power by excluding senators from military command. We are told that Gallienus forbade senators from serving in the ar my or having access to it, in order to prevent control of the empire from falling into their hands. Rationalised 2023-24  AN EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 43 To sum up, in the late first, second and early third centuries the army and administration were increasingly drawn from the provinces, ACTIVITY 1 as citizenship spread to these regions and was no longer confined to Who were the Italy. But individuals of Italian origin continued to dominate the senate three main at least till the third century, when senators of provincial origin became players in the a majority. These trends reflected the general decline of Italy within political history the empire, both political and economic, and the rise of new elites in of the Roman the wealthier and more urbanised parts of the Mediterranean, such as Empire? Write the south of Spain, Africa and the east. A city in the Roman sense was one or two lines an urban centre with its own magistrates, city council and a ‘territory’ about each of containing villages which were under its jurisdiction. Thus one city them. And how could not be in the territory of another city, but villages almost always did the Roman were. Villages could be upgraded to the status of cities, and vice versa, emperor manage to govern such a usually as a mark of imperial favour (or the opposite). One crucial vast territory? advantage of living in a city was simply that it might be better provided Whose for during food shortages and even famines than the countryside. collaboration was crucial to Doctor Galen on how Roman Cities this? Treated the Countryside ‘The famine prevalent for many successive years in many provinces has clearly displayed for men of any understanding the effect of malnutrition in generating illness. The city-dwellers, as it was their custom to collect and store enough grain for the whole of the next year immediately after the harvest, carried off all the wheat, barley, beans and lentils, and left to the peasants various kinds of pulse – after taking quite a large proportion of these to the city. After consuming what was left in the course of the winter, the country people had to resort to unhealthy foods in the spring; they ate twigs and shoots of trees and bushes and bulbs and roots of inedible plants…’ – Galen, On Good and Bad Diet. Public baths were a striking feature of Roman urban life (when one Iranian ruler tried to introduce them into Iran, he encountered the wrath of the clergy there! Water was a sacred element and to use it for public bathing may have seemed a desecration to them), and urban populations also enjoyed a much higher level of entertainment. For example, one calendar tells us that spectacula (shows) filled no less than 176 days of the year! Amphitheatre at the Roman cantonment town of Vindonissa (in modern Switzerland), first century CE. Used for military drill and for staging entertainments for the soldiers. Rationalised 2023-24  44 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY The Third-Century Crisis If the first and second centuries were by and large a period of peace, prosperity and economic expansion, the third century brought the first major signs of internal strain. From the 230s, the empire found itself fighting on several fronts simultaneously. In Iran a new and more aggressive dynasty emerged in 225 (they called themselves the ‘Sasanians’) and within just 15 years were expanding rapidly in the direction of the Euphrates. In a famous rock inscription cut in three languages, Shapur I, the Iranian ruler, claimed he had annihilated a Roman army of 60,000 and even captured the eastern capital of Antioch. Meanwhile, a whole series of Germanic tribes or rather tribal confederacies (most notably, the Alamanni, the Franks and the Goths) began to move against the Rhine and Danube frontiers, and the whole period from 233 to 280 saw repeated invasions of a whole line of provinces that stretched from the Black Sea to the Alps and southern Germany. The Romans were forced to abandon much of the territory beyond the Danube, while the emperors of this period were constantly in the field against what the Romans called ‘barbarians’. The rapid succession of emperors in the third century (25 emperors in 47 years!) is an obvious symptom of the strains faced by the empire in this period. Gender, Literacy, Culture One of the more modern features of Roman society was the widespread prevalence of the nuclear family. Adult sons did not live with their families, and it was exceptional for adult brothers to share a common household. On the other hand, slaves were included in the family as the Romans understood this. By the late Republic (the first century BCE), the typical form of marriage was one where the wife did not transfer to her husband’s authority but retained full rights in the property of her natal family. While the woman’s dowry went to the husband for the duration of the marriage, the woman remained a primary heir of her father and became an independent property owner on her father’s death. Thus Roman women enjoyed considerable legal *Saint Augustine rights in owning and managing property. In other words, in law the (354-430) was bishop of the North married couple was not one financial entity but two, and the wife African city of Hippo enjoyed complete legal independence. Divorce was relatively easy and from 396 and a needed no more than a notice of intent to dissolve the marriage by towering figure in either husband or wife. On the other hand, whereas males married in the intellectual history of the their late twenties or early thirties, women were married off in the late Church. teens or early twenties, so there was an age gap between husband and Bishops were the wife and this would have encouraged a certain inequality. Marriages most important were generally arranged, and there is no doubt that women were often religious figures in a Christian subject to domination by their husbands. Augustine*, the great Catholic community, and bishop who spent most of his life in North Africa, tells us that his often very powerful. mother was regularly beaten by his father and that most other wives Rationalised 2023-24  AN EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 45 in the small town where he grew up had similar bruises to show! *The use of reading Finally, fathers had substantial legal control over their children – and writing in everyday, often sometimes to a shocking degree, for example, a legal power of life and trivial, contexts. death in exposing unwanted children, by leaving them out in the cold to die. What about literacy? It is certain that rates of casual literacy* varied One of the greatly between different parts of the empire. For example, in Pompeii, funniest of these which was buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 CE, there is strong evidence graffiti found on of widespread casual literacy. Walls on the main streets of Pompeii the walls of Pompeii says: often carried advertisements, and graffiti were found all over the city. By contrast, in Egypt where hundreds of papyri survive, most formal ‘Wall, I admire documents such as contracts were usually written by professional you for not scribes, and they often tell us that X or Y is unable to read and write. collapsing in ruins But even here literacy was certainly more widespread among certain When you have categories such as soldiers, army officers and estate managers. to support so The cultural diversity of the empire was reflected in many ways and much boring at many levels: in the vast diversity of religious cults and local deities; writing on you.’ the plurality of languages that were spoken; the styles of dress and costume, the food people ate, their forms of social organisation (tribal/non-tribal), even their patterns of settlement. Aramaic was the dominant language group of the Near East (at least west of the Euphrates), Coptic was spoken in Egypt, Punic and Berber in North Africa, Celtic in Spain and the northwest. But many of these linguistic cultures were purely oral, at least until a script was invented for them. Armenian, for example, only began to be written as late as the fifth century, whereas there was already a Coptic Mosaic in Edessa, second century CE. The Syriac inscription suggests that those depicted are the wife of king Abgar and her family. Pompeii: A wine- merchant’s dining- room, its walls decorated with scenes depicting mythical animals. Rationalised 2023-24  46 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY translation of the Bible by the middle of the third century. Elsewhere, the spread of Latin displaced the written form of languages that were ACTIVITY 2 otherwise widespread; this happened notably with Celtic, which ceased How to be written after the first century. independent were women in Economic Expansion the Roman world? Compare The empire had a substantial economic infrastructure of harbours, the situation of mines, quarries, brickyards, olive oil factories, etc. Wheat, wine and the Roman olive-oil were traded and consumed in huge quantities, and they came family with the mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa, Egypt and, to a family in India lesser extent, Italy, where conditions were best for these crops. Liquids today. like wine and olive oil were transported in containers called ‘amphorae’. The fragments and sherds of a very large number of these survive (Monte Testaccio in Rome is said to contain the remnants of over 50 million vessels!), and it has been possible for archaeologists to Shipwreck off the south coast of France, reconstruct the precise shapes of these containers, tell us what they first century BCE. The carried, and say exactly where they were made by examining the clay amphorae are Italian, content and matching the finds with clay pits throughout the bearing the stamp of a Mediterranean. In this way we can now say with some confidence that producer near the Lake of Fondi. Spanish olive oil, to take just one example, was a vast commercial enterprise that reached its peak in the years 140-160. The Spanish olive oil of this period was mainly carried in a container called ‘Dressel 20’ (after the archaeologist who first established its form). If finds of Dressel 20 are widely scattered across sites in the Mediterranean, this suggests that Spanish olive oil circulated very widely indeed. By using such evidence (the remains of amphorae of different kinds and their ‘distribution maps’), archaeologists are able to show that Spanish producers succeeded in capturing markets for olive oil from their Italian counterparts. This would only have happened if Spanish producers supplied a better quality oil at lower prices. In other words, the big landowners from different Rationalised 2023-24  A N EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 47 regions competed with each other for control of the main markets for the goods they produced. The success of the Spanish olive growers ACTIVITY 3 was then repeated by North African producers – olive estates in this part of the empire dominated production through most of the third Archaeologists and fourth centuries. Later, after 425, North African dominance was who work on the broken by the East: in the later fifth and sixth centuries the Aegean, remains of southern Asia Minor (Turkey), Syria and Palestine became major pottery are a bit exporters of wine and olive oil, and containers from Africa show a like detectives. dramatically reduced presence on Mediterranean markets. Behind these Can you explain why? Also, what broad movements the prosperity of individual regions rose and fell can amphorae depending on how effectively they could organise the production and tell us about transport of particular goods, and on the quality of those goods. the economic The empire included many regions that had a reputation for life of the exceptional fertility. Campania in Italy, Sicily, the Fayum in Egypt, Mediterranean Galilee, Byzacium (Tunisia), southern Gaul (called Gallia Narbonensis), in the Roman and Baetica (southern Spain) were all among the most densely settled period? or wealthiest parts of the empire, according to writers like Strabo and Pliny. The best kinds of wine came from Campania. Sicily and Byzacium exported large quantities of wheat to Rome. Galilee was densely cultivated (‘every inch of the soil has been cultivated by the inhabitants’, wrote the historian Josephus), and Spanish olive oil came mainly from numerous estates (fundi) along the banks of the river Guadalquivir in the south of Spain. On the other hand, large expanses of Roman territory were in a much less advanced state. For example, transhumance* was widespread *Transhumance is in the countryside of Numidia (modern Algeria). These pastoral and the herdsman’s semi-nomadic communities were often on the move, carrying their regular annual movement between oven-shaped huts (called mapalia) with them. As Roman estates the higher mountain expanded in North Africa, the pastures of those communities were regions and low- drastically reduced and their movements more tightly regulated. Even lying ground in in Spain the north was much less developed, and inhabited largely by search of pasture for sheep and other a Celtic-speaking peasantry that lived in hilltop villages called castella. flocks. When we think of the Roman Empire, we should never forget these differences. We should also be careful not to imagine that because this was the ‘ancient’ world, their forms of cultural and economic life were necessarily backward or primitive. On the contrary, diversified applications of water power around the Mediterranean as well as advances in water-powered milling technology, the use of hydraulic mining techniques in the Spanish gold and silver mines and the gigantic industrial scale on which those mines were worked in the first and second centuries (with levels of output that would not be reached again till the nineteenth century, some 1,700 years later!), the existence of well-organised commercial and banking networks, and the widespread use of money are all indications of how much we tend to under-estimate the sophistication of the Roman economy. This raises the issue of labour and of the use of slavery. Rationalised 2023-24  48 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY Controlling Workers Slavery was an institution deeply rooted in the ancient world, both in the Mediterranean and in the Near East, and not even Christianity when it emerged and triumphed as the state religion (in the fourth century) seriously challenged this institution. It does not follow that the bulk of the labour in the Roman On the Treatment of Slaves economy was performed by slaves. That may have been true of large parts of Italy in the Republican ‘Soon afterwards the City Prefect, period (under Augustus there were still 3 million Lucius Pedanius Secundus, was slaves in a total Italian population of 7.5 million) but murdered by one of his slaves. After the murder, ancient custom it was no longer true of the empire as a whole. Slaves required that every slave residing were an investment, and at least one Roman under the same roof must be agricultural writer advised landowners against using executed. But a crowd gathered, them in contexts where too many might be required eager to save so many innocent (for example, for harvests) or where their health could lives; and rioting began. The be damaged (for example, by malaria). These senate-house was besieged. Inside, considerations were not based on any sympathy for there was feeling against excessive the slaves but on hard economic calculation. On the severity, but the majority opposed other hand, if the Roman upper classes were often any change (….) [The senators] brutal towards their slaves, ordinary people did favouring execution prevailed. However, great crowds ready with sometimes show much more compassion. See what stones and torches prevented the one historian says about a famous incident that order from being carried out. Nero occurred in the reign of Nero. rebuked the population by edict, As warfare became less widespread with the and lined with troops the whole establishment of peace in the first century, the supply route along which those of slaves tended to decline and the users of slave condemned were taken for labour thus had to turn either to slave breeding* or execution.’ to cheaper substitutes such as wage labour which – Tacitus (55-117), historian of the was more easily dispensable. In fact, free labour was early empire. extensively used on public works at Rome precisely because an extensive use of slave labour would have been too expensive. Unlike hired workers, slaves had *The practice of to be fed and maintained throughout the year, which increased the encouraging female cost of holding this kind of labour. This is probably why slaves are not slaves and their widely found in the agriculture of the later period, at least not in the partners to have more children, who eastern provinces. On the other hand, they and freedmen, that is, would of course also slaves who had been set free by their masters, were extensively used be slaves. as business managers, where, obviously, they were not required in large numbers. Masters often gave their slaves or freedmen capital to Opp page: Mosaic at run businesses on their behalf or even businesses of their own. Cherchel, Algeria, The Roman agricultural writers paid a great deal of attention to the early third century CE, with agricultural management of labour. Columella, a first-century writer who came scenes. from the south of Spain, recommended that landowners should keep Above: Ploughing and a reserve stock of implements and tools, twice as many as they needed, sowing. so that production could be continuous, ‘for the loss in slave labour- Below: Working in vineyards. time exceeds the cost of such items’. There was a general presumption Rationalised 2023-24  A N EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 49 among employers that without supervision no work would ever get done, so supervision was paramount, for both free workers and slaves. To make supervision easier, workers were sometimes grouped into gangs or smaller teams. Columella recommended squads of ten, claiming it was easier to tell who was putting in effort and who was not in work groups of this size. This shows a detailed consideration of the management of labour. Pliny the Elder, the author of a very famous ‘Natural History’, condemned the use of slave gangs as the worst method of organising production, mainly because slaves who worked in gangs were usually chained together by their feet. All this looks draconian*, but we should remember that most factories in the world today enforce similar principles of labour control. Indeed, some industrial establishments in the empire enforced even tighter controls. The Elder Pliny described conditions in the frankincense** factories (officinae) of Alexandria, where, he tells *Draconian: Harsh us, no amount of supervision seemed to suffice. ‘A seal is put upon the (so-called because of workmen’s aprons, they have to wear a mask or a net with a close an early sixth- century BCE mesh on their heads, and before they are allowed to leave the premises, Greek lawmaker they have to take off all their clothes.’ Agricultural labour must have called Draco, who been fatiguing and disliked, for a famous edict of the early third century prescribed death as refers to Egyptian peasants deserting their villages ‘in order not to the penalty for most engage in agricultural work’. The same was probably true of most crimes!). factories and workshops. A law of 398 referred to workers being branded **Frankincense – the so they could be recognised if and when they run away and try to hide. European name for Many private employers cast their agreements with workers in the an aromatic resin form of debt contracts to be able to claim that their employees were in used in incense and perfumes. It is debt to them and thus ensure tighter control over them. An early, tapped from second-century writer tells us, ‘Thousands surrender themselves to Boswellia trees by work in servitude, although they are free.’ In other words, a lot of the slashing the bark poorer families went into debt bondage in order to survive. From one and allowing the exuded resins to of the recently discovered letters of Augustine we learn that parents harden. The best- sometimes sold their children into servitude for periods of 25 years. quality frankincense Augustine asked a lawyer friend of his whether these children could be came from the liberated once the father died. Rural indebtedness was even more Arabian peninsula. Rationalised 2023-24  50 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY *A rebellion in widespread; to take just one example, in the great Jewish revolt of 66 Judaea against CE* the revolutionaries destroyed the moneylenders’ bonds to win Roman domination, popular support. which was Again, we should be careful not to conclude that the bulk of labour ruthlessly suppressed by was coerced in these ways. The late-fifth-century emperor Anastasius the Romans in built the eastern frontier city of Dara in less than three weeks by what is called the attracting labour from all over the East by offering high wages. From ‘Jewish war’. the papyri we can even form some estimate of how widespread wage labour had become in parts of the Mediterranean by the sixth century, especially in the East. ACTIVITY 4 The text has Social Hierarchies referred to three Let us stand back from the details now and try and get a sense of the writers whose social structures of the empire. Tacitus described the leading social work is used to say something groups of the early empire as follows: senators (patres, lit. ‘fathers’); about how the leading members of the equestrian class; the respectable section of the Romans treated people, those attached to the great houses; the unkempt lower class their workers. (plebs sordida) who, he tells us, were addicted to the circus and Can you identify theatrical displays; and finally the slaves. In the early third century them? Reread when the Senate numbered roughly 1,000, approximately half of all the section for senators still came from Italian families. By the late empire, which yourself and starts with the reign of Constantine I in the early part of the fourth describe any two century, the first two groups mentioned by Tacitus (the senators and methods the the equites*) had merged into a unified and expanded aristocracy, and Romans used to control labour. at least half of all families were of African or eastern origin. This ‘late Roman’ aristocracy was enormously wealthy but in many ways less powerful than the purely military elites who came almost entirely from non-aristocratic backgrounds. The ‘middle’ class now consisted of the *The equites, considerable mass of persons connected with imperial service in the (‘knights’ or bureaucracy and army but also the more prosperous merchants and ‘horsemen’) were traditionally the farmers of whom there were many in the eastern provinces. Tacitus second most described this ‘respectable’ middle class as clients of the great senatorial powerful and houses. Now it was chiefly government service and dependence on the wealthy group. State that sustained many of these families. Below them were the vast Originally, they mass of the lower classes known collectively as humiliores (lit. ‘lower’). were families whose property qualified They comprised a rural labour force of which many were permanently them to serve in the employed on the large estates; workers in industrial and mining cavalry, hence the establishments; migrant workers who supplied much of the labour for name. Like the grain and olive harvests and for the building industry; self-employed senators, most ‘knights’ were artisans who, it was said, were better fed than wage labourers; a large landowners, but mass of casual labourers, especially in the big cities; and of course the unlike senators many thousands of slaves that were still found all over the western many of them were empire in particular. shipowners, traders One writer of the early fifth century, the historian Olympiodorus and bankers, that is, involved in who was also an ambassador, tells us that the aristocracy based in business activities. the City of Rome drew annual incomes of up to 4,000 lbs of gold Rationalised 2023-24  A N EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 51 from their estates, not counting the produce they consumed directly! Incomes of the Roman The monetary system of the late empire broke with the Aristocracy, silver-based currencies of the first three centuries because Early Fifth Century the Spanish silver mines were exhausted and government ran out of sufficient stocks of the metal to support a stable ‘Each of the great houses of coinage in silver. Constantine founded the new monetary Rome contained within system on gold and there were vast amounts of this in itself everything which a circulation throughout late antiquity. medium-sized city could The late Roman bureaucracy, both the higher and middle hold, a hippodrome, fora, echelons, was a comparatively affluent group because it temples, fountains and drew the bulk of its salary in gold and invested much of different kinds of baths… this in buying up assets like land. There was of course also Many of the Roman a great deal of corruption, especially in the judicial system households received an and in the administration of military supplies. The extortion income of four thousand of the higher bureaucracy and the greed of the provincial pounds of gold per year from governors were proverbial. But government intervened their properties, not repeatedly to curb these forms of corruption – we only including grain, wine and know about them in the first place because of the laws that other produce which, if sold, tried to put an end to them, and because historians and would have amounted to other members of the intelligentsia denounced such one-third of the income in practices. This element of ‘criticism’ is a remarkable feature gold. The income of the of the classical world. The Roman state was an authoritarian households at Rome of the regime; in other words, dissent was rarely tolerated and second class was one government usually responded to protest with violence thousand or fifteen hundred (especially in the cities of the East where people were often pounds of gold.’ fearless in making fun of emperors). Yet a strong tradition – Olympiodorus of Thebes. of Roman law had emerged by the fourth century, and this acted as a brake on even the most fearsome emperors. Emperors were not free to do whatever they liked, and the law was actively used to protect civil rights. That is why in the later fourth century it was possible for powerful bishops like Ambrose to confront equally powerful emperors when they were excessively harsh or repressive in their handling of the civilian population. Late Antiquity We shall conclude this chapter by looking at the cultural transformation of the Roman world in its final centuries. ‘Late antiquity’ is the term now used to describe the final, fascinating period in the evolution and break-up of the Roman Empire and refers broadly to the fourth to seventh centuries. The fourth century itself was one of considerable ferment, both cultural and economic. At the cultural level, the period saw momentous developments in religious life, with the emperor Constantine deciding to make Christianity the official religion, and with the rise of Islam in the seventh century. But there were equally important changes in the Rationalised 2023-24  52 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY structure of the state that began with the emperor Diocletian (284- 305), and it may be best to start with these. Overexpansion had led Diocletian to ‘cut back’ by abandoning territories with little strategic or economic value. Diocletian also fortified the frontiers, reorganised provincial boundaries, and separated civilian from military functions, granting greater autonomy to the military commanders (duces), who now became a more powerful group. Constantine consolidated some of these changes and added others of his own. His chief innovations were in the monetary sphere, where he introduced a new denomination, the solidus, a coin of 4½ gm of pure gold that would in fact outlast the Roman Empire itself. Solidi were minted on a very large scale and their circulation ran into millions. The other area of innovation was the creation of a second capital at Constantinople (at the site of modern Istanbul in Turkey, and previously called Byzantium), surrounded on three sides by the sea. As the new capital required a new senate, the fourth century was a period of rapid expansion of the governing classes. Monetary stability and an expanding population stimulated economic growth, and the archaeological record shows considerable investment in rural establishments, including industrial installations like oil presses and glass factories, in newer technologies such as screw presses and multiple water-mills, and in a revival of the long-distance trade with the East. All of this carried over into strong urban prosperity that was marked by new forms of architecture and an exaggerated sense of luxury. The ruling elites were wealthier and more powerful than ever before. In Egypt, hundreds of papyri survive from these later centuries and they show us a relatively affluent society where money was in extensive use and rural estates generated vast incomes in gold. For example, Egypt contributed Part of a colossal taxes of over 2½ million solidi a year (roughly 35,000 lbs of gold) in the statue of Emperor Constantine, 313 CE. reign of Justinian in the sixth century. Indeed, large parts of the Near Eastern countryside were more developed and densely settled in the fifth and sixth centuries than they would be even in the twentieth century! This is the social background against which we should set the cultural developments of this period. The traditional religious culture of the classical world, both Greek and Roman, had been polytheist. That is, it involved a multiplicity of cults that included both Roman/Italian gods like Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Mars, as well as numerous Greek and eastern deities worshipped in thousands of temples, shrines and sanctuaries throughout the Rationalised 2023-24  A N EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 53 empire. Polytheists had no common name or label to describe *Monolith – literally themselves. The other great religious tradition in the empire was a large block of stone, but the Judaism. But Judaism was not a monolith* either, and there was a expression is used great deal of diversity within the Jewish communities of late antiquity. to refer to anything Thus, the ‘Christianisation’** of the empire in the fourth and fifth (for example a centuries was a gradual and complex process. Polytheism did not society or culture) that lacks variety disappear overnight, especially in the western provinces, where the and is all of the Christian bishops waged a running battle against beliefs and practices same type. they condemned more than the Christian laity*** did. The boundaries between religious communities were much more fluid in the fourth **Christianisation – century than they would become thanks to the repeated efforts of the process by which Christianity religious leaders, the powerful bishops who now led the Church, to spread among rein in their followers and enforce a more rigid set of beliefs and practices. different groups of The general prosperity was especially marked in the East where the population and population was still expanding till the sixth century, despite the impact of became the dominant religion. the plague which affected the Mediterranean in the 540s. In the West, by contrast, the empire fragmented politically as Germanic groups from the ***Laity – North (Goths, Vandals, Lombards, etc.) took over all the major provinces the ordinary and established kingdoms that are best described as ‘post-Roman’. The members of a most important of these were that of the Visigoths in Spain, destroyed by religious community the Arabs between 711 and 720, that of the Franks in Gaul (c.511-687) as opposed to the priests or clergy and that of the Lombards in Italy (568-774). These kingdoms foreshadowed who have official the beginnings of a different kind of world that is usually called ‘medieval’. positions within the In the East, where the empire remained united, the reign of Justinian is community. the highwater mark of prosperity and imperial ambition. Justinian The Colosseum, built in 79 CE, where gladiators fought wild beasts. It could accommodate 60,000 people. Rationalised 2023-24  54 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY recaptured Africa from the Vandals (in 533) but his recovery of Italy (from the Ostrogoths) left that country devastated and paved the way for the Lombard invasion. By the early seventh century, the war between Rome and Iran had flared up again, and the Sasanians who had ruled Iran since the third century launched a wholesale invasion of all the major eastern provinces (including Egypt). When Byzantium, as the Roman Empire was now increasingly known, recovered these provinces in the 620s, it was just a few years away, literally, from the final major blow which came, this time, from the south-east. The expansion of Islam from its beginnings in Arabia has been called ‘the greatest political revolution ever to occur in the history of the ancient world’. By 642, barely ten years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, large parts of both the eastern Roman and Sasanian empires had fallen to the Arabs in a series of stunning confrontations. However, we should bear in mind that those conquests, which eventually (a century later) extended as far afield as Spain, Sind and Central Asia, began in fact with the subjection of the Arab tribes by the emerging Islamic state, first within Arabia and then in the Syrian desert and on the fringes of Iraq. As we will see in Theme 4, the unification of the Arabian peninsula and its numerous tribes was the MAP 2: West Asia key factor behind the territorial expansion of Islam. Rationalised 2023-24  AN EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS 55 RULERS EVENTS 27 BCE -14 CE 27 BCE ‘Principate’ founded by Octavian, now calls himself Augustus Augustus, first Roman emperor c. 24-79 Life of the Elder Pliny; dies in the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius, 14-37 which also buries the Roman town of Pompeii Tiberius 66-70 The great Jewish revolt and capture of Jerusalem by Roman forces 98-117 c. 115 Greatest extent of the Roman Empire, following Trajan’s conquests Trajan in the East 117-38 Hadrian 212 All free inhabitants of the empire transformed into Roman citizens 193-211 224 New dynasty founded in Iran, called ‘Sasanians’ after ancestor Sasan Septimius Severus 250s Persians invade Roman territories west of the Euphrates 241-72 reign of Shapur I 258 Cyprian bishop of Carthage executed in Iran 260s Gallienus reorganises the army 253-68 273 Caravan city of Palmyra destroyed by Romans Gallienus 297 Diocletian reorganises empire into 100 provinces 284-305 the ‘Tetrarchy’; c. 310 Constantine issues new gold coinage (the ‘solidus’) Diocletian main ruler 312 Constantine converts to Christianity 312-37 324 Constantine now sole ruler of empire; founds city of Constantinople Constantine 354-430 Life of Augustine, bishop of Hippo 309-79 reign of Shapur II in Iran 378 Goths inflict crushing defeat on Roman armies at Adrianople 408-50 391 Destruction of the Serapeum (temple of Serapis) at Alexandria Theodosius II 410 Sack of Rome by the Visigoths (compiler of the famous 428 Vandals capture Africa ‘Theodosian Code’) 434-53 Empire of Attila the Hun 490-518 Anastasius 493 Ostrogoths establish kingdom in Italy 527-65 533-50 Recovery of Africa and Italy by Justinian Justinian 541-70 Outbreaks of bubonic plague 531-79 reign of Khusro I in Iran 568 Lombards invade Italy 610-41 c. 570 Birth of Muhammad Heraclius 614-19 Persian ruler Khusro II invades and occupies eastern Roman territories 622 Muhammad and companions leave Mecca for Medina 633-42 First and crucial phase of the Arab conquests; Muslim armies take Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and parts of Iran 661-750 Umayyad dynasty in Syria 698 Arabs capture Carthage 711 Arab invasion of Spain Rationalised 2023-24  56 THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY Mosaic at Ravenna, 547 CE, showing Emperor Justinian. Exercises ANSWER IN BRIEF 1. If you had lived in the Roman Empire, where would you rather have lived – in the towns or in the countryside? Explain why. 2. Compile a list of some of the towns, cities, rivers, seas and provinces mentioned in this chapter, and then try and find them on the maps. Can you say something about any three of the items in the list you have compiled? 3. Imagine that you are a Roman housewife preparing a shopping list for household requirements. What would be on the list? 4. Why do you think the Roman government stopped coining in silver? And which metal did it begin to use for the production of coinage? Rationalised 2023-24  57 ANSWER IN A SHORT ESSAY 5. Suppose the emperor Trajan had actually managed to conquer India and the Romans had held on to the country for several centuries. In what ways do you think India might be different today? 6. Go through the chapter carefully and pick out some basic features of Roman society and economy which you think make it look quite modern. Rationalised 2023-24