Theme #3 :Empires-An Empire across Three Continents

THE ROMAN EMPIRE

• 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 down to the 630s. The two empires were those of Rome and Iran. These two superpowers had divided up most of the world that the Chinese called Ta Ch’in (‘greater Ch’in’, roughly the west).
• The Roman Empire included most of Europe and a large part of the Fertile Crescent and North Africa
• The Roman Empire can broadly be divided into two phases; ‘early’ and ‘late’, divided by the third century crisis. From the fifth century on, the empire fell apart in the west but remained intact and exceptionally prosperous in its eastern half. The caliphate built on this prosperity and inherited its urban and religious traditions.

The Early Empire (1^st to 3rd C)

• The emperor, the aristocracy and the army were the three main ‘players’ 
• The Republic represented the government of the nobility.Senate.
• The Republic lasted from 509 BC to27 BC.Overthrown Octavian/Augustus., the adopted son and heir of Julius Caesar, 
•  ‘Principate’-The regime established by Augustus, the first emperor, in 27 BCE.
• Gradual extension of Roman direct rule,accomplished by absorbing ‘dependent’ kingdoms into Roman provincial territory. The Near East was full of such kingdoms
• At its peak in the second century, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to the borders of Armenia, and from the Sahara to the Euphrates and sometimes beyond.All the territories were organized into provinces and subject to taxation
• A city in the Roman sense -urban centre with its own magistrates, city council and a ‘territory’containing villages which were under its jurisdiction. The great cities were on the shores of the Mediterranean (Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch were the biggest among them). 
• It was through the cities that ‘government’ was able to tax the provincial country sides which generated much of the wealth of the empire.
• Wheat, wine and olive-oil were traded and consumed in huge quantities, and they came mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa, Egypt and Italy. The big landowners from different regions competed with each other for control of the main markets for the goods they produced. The empire included many regions of exceptional fertility.
• Campania (Italy), Sicily, the Fayum in Egypt, Galilee, Byzacium (Tunisia), southern Gaul and Baetica (southern Spain) were all among the most densely settled or wealthiest parts of the empire, according to writers like Strabo and Pliny.
• On the other hand, large expanses of Roman territory were in a much less advanced state. For example, Transhumance was widespread in the countryside of Numidia (modern Algeria)
• Existence of a paid army. The army was the largest single organized body in the empire (600,000 by the fourth century) and  had the power to determine the fate of emperors.
• Political and economic importance of Italy gradually declined within the empire due to  the rise of new elites of administrators and military commanders  in the wealthier and more urbanised parts of the Mediterranean, such as the south of Spain, Africa and the east.
• Emperor Gallienus (253-268) consolidated new elite  to power by excluding senators from military command.
• Many languages were spoken in the empire, but for the purposes of administration Latin (west) and Greek (east) were the most widely used.
• The empire had a substantial economic infrastructure of harbors, mines, quarries, brickyards, olive oil factories, etc.
• 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!),
• Well-organized commercial and banking networks, and the widespread use of money

The Third-Century Crisis

• 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.
• 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 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

Late Antiquity (4^th to 7^th  C)

•  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. Starts with the reign of Constantine I in the early part of the fourth century.
• Changes in the structure of the state that began with the emperor Diocletian (284-305), expansion had led Diocletian to ‘cut back’ by abandoning territories with little strategic or economic value.
• Diocletian also fortified the frontiers, reorganized provincial boundaries, and separated civilian from military functions, granting greater autonomy to the military commanders
• He introduced a new denomination, the solidus
• The other area of innovation was the creation of a second capital at Constantinople (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
• 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.
• The period saw momentous developments in religious life, with the emperor Constantine (312) deciding to make Christianity the official religion, and with the rise of Islam in the seventh century. Greek and Roman traditional religions had been polytheist. Judaism was not a monolith either. Christianization of the empire in the fourth and fifth centuries was a gradual and complex process. Polytheism did not disappear overnight, especially in the western provinces, where the Christian bishops waged a running battle against beliefs and practices they condemned.
• 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. The general prosperity was still expanding till the sixth century, despite the impact of the plague which affected the Mediterranean in the 540s.
• In the West, by contrast, the empire fragmented politically as Germanic groups from the North took over all the major provinces and established kingdoms that are best described as ‘post-Roman’. The most important of these were that of the Visigoths in Spain, destroyed by the Arabs between 711 and 720, that of the Franks in Gaul (c.511-687) and that of the Lombards in Italy (568-774.)
•  By the early seventh century, the war between Rome and Iran had flared up again, and the Sasanians  launched a  invasion of all the major eastern provinces (including Egypt).
• By 642, barely ten years after Prophet Muhammad’s death, large parts of both the eastern Roman and Sasanian empires had fallen to the Arabs .Those conquests, which eventually (a century later) extended as far as Spain, Sind and Central Asia, began 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.

Social Hierarchies

•   Tacitus described the leading social groups of the early empire as follows: Senators, knights, the respectable section of the people, those attached to the great houses, the unkempt lower class (plebs sordida) that, he tells us, were addicted to the circus and theatrical displays; and finally the slaves
• By the late empire, senators and knights merged into a unified and expanded aristocracy, and 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 persons connected with imperial service in the bureaucracy and army prosperous merchants and farmers from eastern provinces
• Below them were the vast mass of the lower classes known collectively as humiliores (lit. ‘lower’) permanently employed on the large estates; workers in industrial and mining establishments; migrant workers; self-employed artisans ,casual laborers and slaves that were still found all over the western empire in particular
• There was of course also a great deal of corruption, especially in the judicial system and in the administration of military supplies
•  Slavery was an institution deeply rooted in the ancient world, under Augustus there were still 3 million slaves in a total Italian population of 7.5 million
• A lot of the poorer families went into debt bondage in order to survive. Parents sometimes sold their children into servitude .Rural indebtedness was even more widespread

Gender, Literacy, Culture

• One of the more modern features of Roman society was the widespread prevalence of the nuclear family.
• Roman women enjoyed considerable legal rights in owning and managing property
• Fathers had substantial legal control over their children
• Casual literacy  was widespread
• The Parthians and later the Sasanians, the dynasties that ruled Iran in this period, ruled over a population that was largely Iranian. The Roman Empire, by contrast, was a mosaic of territories and cultures that were chiefly bound together by a common system of government
• Cultural diversity of the empire was reflected in many ways and at many levels: in the vast diversity of religious cults and local deities; the plurality of languages that were spoken; the styles of dress and costume, the food people ate, their forms of social organization (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
• Element of ‘criticism’. The Roman state though authoritarian a strong tradition 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. Rise of bishops was helped by this factor.