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Italy and the East Roman World in the Medieval Mediterranean addresses the understudied topic of the Italian peninsula’s relationship to the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, across the early and central Middle Ages.
The East Roman world, commonly known by the ahistorical term “Byzantium”, is generally imagined as an Eastern Mediterranean empire, with Italy part of the medieval “West”. Across 18 individually authored chapters, an introduction and conclusion, this volume makes a different case: for an East Roman world of which Italy forms a crucial part, and an Italian peninsula which is inextricably connected to—and, indeed, includes—regions ruled from Constantinople. Celebrating a scholar whose work has led this field over several decades, Thomas S. Brown, the chapters focus on the general themes of empire, cities and elites, and explore these from the angles of sources and historiography, archaeology, social, political, and economic history, and more besides. With contributions from established and early career scholars, elucidating particular issues of scholarship as well as general historical developments, the volume provides both immediate contributions and opens space for a new generation of readers and scholars to a growing field.
Thomas J. MacMaster is teaching at Morehouse College, Georgia. His research focusses on the slave trade and human trafficking in the early medieval Mediterranean, the topic of his forthcoming monograph Slavery and the Making of the Medieval World. He has also published more generally on the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages.
Nicholas S.M. Matheou is programme manager at the Armenian Institute, London. His research focusses on the social, political and economic history of the medieval Middle East and Mediterranean. He has published on East Roman political thought, has a forthcoming study and translation of an eleventh-century Armenian historian and his current research project focusses on the medieval city of Ani.
Contributors
Michael Angold is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently working on the sermons of the Patriarch Germanos II (1223-1240).
Ross Balzaretti is Professor of Italian History at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include Dark Age Liguria: Regional Identity and Local Power, c.400-1020 (2013) and The Lands of Saint Ambrose: Monks and Society in Early Medieval Milan (2019). He is currently finishing a new translation of Paul the Deacon’s “History of the Lombards” and associated texts to be published as North Italian Histories 600-900 AD.
Alessandro Bazzocchi holds a degree in Papyrology, Ph.D. in Roman history, and is an expert on the subject of Modern history, a councillor of the Ravenna Society of Studies, and member of the editorial staff of the scientific journal Ravenna Studie Ricerce.
Francesco Borri worked for many years at the Institut ftir Mittelalterforschung of the Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna, before joining the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he teaches medieval history. His research focusses on the early Middle Ages, aristocratic identities, paganism, and navigation. Among his most recent works: Alboino: frammenti di un racconto (VI-XT s.) (2016); “A Placid Island: H.P. Lovecraft’s Ibid”, Lovecraft Annual, 18 (2018), pp. 105-135 and I Longobardi a Venezia: scritti per Stefano Gasparri, HAMA, 40 (2020), which he edited together with Irene Barbiera and Annamaria Pazienza.
Enrico Cirelli is assistant professor in Archaeology of medieval Europe at the Department of History and Civilizations, Alma Mater Studiorum—University of Bologna. His main research areas cover late roman and medieval urbanism, fortified settlements and archaeology of productions and material culture. He directs archaeological excavations and surveys in Italy and Croatia, and participates in other international research project in Spain, Albania, Palestine, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. His book Ravenna: archeologia di una citta won the Ottone d’Assia and Riccardo Francovich prize (2008).
Roger Collins has held teaching and research posts at the universities of Liverpool, Bristol, and Edinburgh, and has been an Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh since 1998. He has published widely on early medieval Iberia and the Frankish world, and is currently researching for a monograph titled Eurasia Transformed, 200-1000.
Brian Croke is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, with a long record of published research on Roman and Byzantine history and historiography, and on modern historiography. He has books forthcoming on Emperors in Context: Theodosius to Justinian, Reading, Writing and Interpreting History c.250-c.650 and Justinian. From 1979 to 2017 he enjoyed a career in Catholic education, and Australian education, for which he was honoured by church, state, and the education profession.
James Crow is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, his research focusses on the archaeology of settlement and frontiers. Over 30 years his fieldwork and studies have ranged from Hadrian’s Wall in Britain to the Eastern Mediterranean in particular Greece and Turkey from Roman to later medieval times. Recently he has focussed on Byzantine urban and landscape archaeology especially the water supply of Constantinople and on the coastal regions of the Black Sea and the Aegean. He is currently preparing a monograph on his research on the Anastasian Wall outside Istanbul.
Deborah M. Deliyannis is Professor of History at Indiana University. In addition to publishing an edition and English translation of Agnellus of Ravenna’s Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, she has published Ravenna in Late Antiquity, and is a co-author of Fifty Early Medieval Things: Materials of Culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.
Eduardo Fabbro received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2015 and held a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholarship at McGill. He specialized in early medieval Italy, military history, and the work of eighth-century historian Paul the Deacon. He is currently a lecturer at Trent University.
John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis’30 Professor of European History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is currently also Director of the Princeton Climate Change and History Research Initiative (https://cchri. princeton.edu/) and Executive Director of the Program in Medieval Studies Environmental History Lab. His research focusses on the history of the medieval Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire, in particular in the period from the seventh to the twelfth centuries; on state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times; on the impact of environmental stress on societal resilience in pre-modern social systems; and on the production, distribution, and consumption of resources in the late ancient and medieval world.
Cristina La Rocca is full professor of medieval history at the University of Padua. Her research interests cover various aspects of the early Middle Ages, generally focussed on the Italian case in relation to the broader European context. She has also examined the problem of the city in the early Middle Ages, from a social, topographical and political point of view, and the problem of the “ethnic” interpretation of early medieval burials in nineteenth-century Italian research, from a historiographical point of view. Cristina is the author of a series of works on early medieval wills and on the relationships between genders and the structure of kinship.
Nicole Lopez-Jantzen is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she teaches courses on premodern Mediterranean, modern European, and women’s history. She has also taught courses on medieval history and early Christianity at Drew University, John Jay College, Fordham University and Queensborough Community College. Dr. Lopez-Jantzen received her doctorate in history from Fordham University in 2012, where she analysed the struggle over Ravenna as part of a larger conflict over authority in the post-Roman West. Her recent research has focussed on race, gender, and sexuality in early medieval Italy. In addition to a forthcoming article on sexuality, her article “Between Empires: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages” was recently published in Literature Compass, 16.9-10 (2019). She is also the co-chair of BMCC’s Women’s HerStory Month Committee and on the board of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship.
Thomas J. MacMaster was the last of Tom Brown’s Ph.D. advisees to receive his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. His thesis, “The Transformative impact of the slave trade on the Roman World, 580-720” (2016), serves as the basis of his forthcoming monograph Slavery and the Making of the Medieval World. He is currently working on it and the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Slavery and Human-Trafficking in the Pre-Modern World. MacMaster had previously worked under Tom Brown for his 2011 MSc in First Millennium Studies. He looks to Brown as a model for combining scholarship and both academic and pastoral guidance in his own teaching now that he has returned to Georgia.
Nicholas S.M. Matheou began his academic journey as an undergraduate studying under Tom at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently Past & Present Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research focusses on the social, political, and economic history of medieval Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia and Caucasia; his current research project is titled: “The Fate of Unjust Cities”: Commercial Capitalism, Global History & the Abandoned City of Ani, 900-1400.
Edward M. Schoolman teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he focusses on the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean. He published a monograph, Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy: Hagiography and the Late Antique Past in Medieval Ravenna, in 2016, and is working on new book project on Greek identity; as part of an interdisciplinary team, he has begun to explore the interconnections between history and ecology in Italy.
Patricia Skinner held a Personal Chair in History at Swansea University. Tom Brown’s Gentlemen and Officers inspired many of the early pathways that she took in her research career. Her book, Medieval Amalfi and its Diaspora (2014) owes much to his inspiring work.
Vera von Falkenhausen is professor emerita of Byzantine History at the Universita di Roma-Tor Vergata. She taught at the universities of Pisa, Potenza, and Chieti.
Bryan Ward-Perkins is Emeritus Professor of Late Antique History at the University of Oxford, where he taught from 1982 to 2019. In 2005 he published The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, a wide-ranging essay arguing that the end of the empire in the West was much more disruptive than commonly depicted in recent scholarship. Since then he has directed two major research projects, both with freely available and searchable databases: The Last Statues of Antiquity (with Bert Smith), and The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity.
Preface and acknowledgments
Trimming the preface to this book down to a few simple paragraphs has been far more of a challenge than it should be. This is not because it is difficult to find positive things to say about Tom Brown, whether as a scholar, an educator, or as a human being, rather, it is because it is hard not to say too much. As the present volume’s editors began to discuss the idea of honouring Tom, first with a dedicated stream of sessions at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, and later with this volume, we were regularly met with effusive praise for Tom—if we had written all of it down to share here, this would be a very long piece indeed.
Certainly, it is a fairly straightforward task to point to Tom Brown’s contribution to both academic and more popular studies of the early medieval world. Even without including his bibliography in this volume, many of the chapters presented clearly reflect that fact and show the esteem in which his work on Byzantine Italy is held by colleagues. Of course, that same bibliography also reflects the many other ways that he has become quietly ubiquitous in early medieval history. Important in this regard was Tom’s central role in establishing the journal early medieval Europe, which for nearly three decades now has provided a key forum for the area’s development into a thriving field of study—a dramatic contrast to the poor cousin it often seemed to other areas of the discipline in the early 1990s.
At the same time, Tom has also nurtured students at all levels, whether encouraging sub honours students to look deeper into the often neglected areas of the medieval world, both chronologically and regionally, or by helping to build new taught programmes. One of us, Nicholas, took every course Tom offered at an undergraduate level, taking his first steps in the study of medieval Southern Italy, the empire of New Rome, Armenians, and the wider Mediterranean in these tutorials and seminars. Long a centre for both Medieval Studies in general and Byzantine history in particular, Tom’s courses ensured that the University of Edinburgh retained an almost unique breadth of coverage at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and his teaching provided continuity between a previous cohort of specialists and the current dynamic group teaching and researching this field in the “Athens of the North”. Likewise, the other of us, Thomas MacMaster, from his first day as a postgraduate student at Edinburgh learned not just from Tom's immense knowledge or his seemingly endless bibliographies but also a great many practical and non-academic things.
It is probably on these last, non-academic aspects that Tom is most impressive. From the first academic conference Thomas attended as an Edinburgh student to the last, it seemed that someone would always share a personal anecdote not of his scholarship but, more often, tales of his kindness and compassion. For students who experienced personal difficulties, including one of us, Tom displayed greater concern and helpfulness than might be required or expected of someone in his position. His innate human warmth and pastoral care, combined with his careful scholarship and intellectual guidance, has set a model for many of what an academic should aspire towards. This is seen not least in the present editors’ own collaboration, a product of Tom telling Thomas to look out for Nicholas at a graduate conference they were both attending, after the latter had left Edinburgh to complete postgraduate studies elsewhere.
On the other hand, we are aware that, despite the importance of his academic output, Tom regretted that the competing demands of teaching, administration and family health issues prevented him from publishing the full fruits of his research during his university career. However we know that Tom has already shown himself to be highly “research active” during retirement and we hope that the papers by friends and colleagues in this volume will inspire further published work in the fields which Tom loves, not least by Tom himself.
It is, then, with extreme pleasure that we have produced this volume in honour of Tom. He has given so much of himself to so many of us, whether as a teacher, mentor, colleague, peer, editor, collaborator, and, sometimes, critic, that it seems the very least that might be done in celebration of all that he has given so many.
Besides Tom, we would also like to thank all the contributors for their willingness to contribute, their patience over the project’s completion, and the care they have taken in producing a stunning range of chapters that reflect the depth and breadth of Tom’s influence and interests. Each contributor in turn would like to thank Tom for the various ways he has been a crucial part of their life and career, and some contributors have also included more specific thanks in their chapters. We would also like to thank John Smedley, our original series editor at Ashgate before this was taken over by Taylor & Francis, who played a crucial role in the early stages of the project. Likewise, we owe deep thanks to Michael Greenwood for ensuring the project’s continuation, and helping bring it now to its completion. Finally, we want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their diligence in making this volume a firm contribution to scholarship at the highest level, and so an even more fitting tribute to Tom. We are very proud of the result, and hope that it inspires future students and interested readers to immerse themselves in the study of Italy, the empire of New Rome, and the early medieval Mediterranean in all its diversity, just as Tom has for us.
Thomas J. MacMaster & Nicholas S.M. Matheou
Introduction: Italy and the East Roman World, 476-1204
Set in the middle of the Mediterranean, Italy has long had close links with all the shores of this sea—with the eastern Mediterranean, since the time when Aeneas (at least in myth) came from Troy and settled in Latium, and when Greek colonists established “Magna Graecia”, founding most of the great cities of southern Italy, including Taranto, Syracuse, Catania and Naples. These links were just as strong at the end of Antiquity and into the early Middle Ages, the period covered by this book, though the direction of travel of people, goods and political power shifted markedly between the beginning of our period and its end.
In 476 the last Roman emperor in Italy was deposed and replaced by a king of Germanic descent, who formally acknowledged the overlordship of the Augustus ruling from Constantinople. In a bloody war instigated by the Emperor Justinian, which lasted from 535 until 554, his armies were able to translate this formal overlordship into real domination, and Italy became an outlying province of the Eastern Roman Empire (which, for convenience, is often termed the “Byzantine”, although its rulers called it “Roman” right up to its fall in 1453). As we will see from the papers in this volume, in this early period the flow of people, goods and political control was very definitely from East to West, from a dominant Byzantine eastern Mediterranean into Italy. However, by the end of our period, things had changed dramatically: in 1071 the last East Roman stronghold in Italy, Bari, fell to Norman adventurers, who then led aggressive campaigns from southern Italy into Greece. In 1204 came the culmination of this trend, when western “Crusaders”, allied with a comparatively new maritime power, Venice, captured and sacked Constantinople itself and set up a “Latin” dynasty of emperors in the East Roman capital: spoils from Constantinople flowed into Venice (where they can still be seen in the Treasury and built into the exterior of S. Marco), while adventurers from Italy and elsewhere flocked eastwards in search of land and office—men like the Venetian Thomas Morosini, the first Latin Patriarch of Constantinople (the subject of Michael Angold’s paper in this volume, Chapter 11).
By contrast, in the earlier centuries of our period it was the East Roman empire that was dominant over much of Italy, and, with that domination, the flow of officials, soldiers and others was from East to West, a flow which increased for a different reason in the seventh and eighth centuries, when refugees from the Arab invasions of the Near East, Egypt and North Africa arrived in substantial numbers in Italy: for a considerable period in these centuries, Greek-speaking Easterners even dominated the papacy in Rome. Much of Italy from Rome southwards was bilingual in Greek and Latin, or even primarily Greek speaking. Eastern immigrants, and the impact they had, are the subject of several papers in this volume. Jim Crow (in Chapter 5) tells the story of one of the highest-ranking East Roman officials to be sent to Italy: Smaragdus, who twice served as governor, or “exarch”, restored the aqueduct of Ravenna and in 608 dedicated a statue to the emperor Phocas in Rome’s forum; while in Chapter 14 Nicholas Matheou sets out the evidence for a substantial and influential group of immigrants in southern Italy: the Armenians of “Longobardia” (modern Puglia), who played a prominent role in the politics of Bari from the late ninth century until the Norman capture of the city. The cultural impact of such settlers from the Eastern Mediterranean was considerable: in Taranto, as Vera von Falkenhausen shows in Chapter 18, Greek liturgy, language and namingpractices were dominant in the medieval city, in part a legacy from the pre- Roman Greek colonisers, but also the result of centuries of East Roman rule. Until the thirteenth century, the city of Taranto was more Greek than Latin, and so in some ways more closely aligned with the eastern Mediterranean than it was with the North and West.
Goods, as well as people and culture, travelled to Italy in quantity from the eastern Mediterranean, particularly during the fifth and sixth centuries, as shown by the excavations over the last two decades at Ravenna’s port of Classe, which have uncovered large quantities of wine and oil amphorae from Asia Minor and the Near East and which are at the heart of Enrico Cirelli’s paper (Chapter 9); this trade continued into the eighth and ninth centuries, though on a reduced scale and now following different routes, for instance through Comacchio on the River Po. What is striking from the archaeological evidence is the dominance of the East when it came to sophisticated goods: quality agricultural products, quality manufactured goods, and quality building materials (like the marble columns and liturgical fittings of Ravenna’s famous churches) were all Eastern in origin. The reciprocal trade from Italy was in raw materials, of which the best documented, and the saddest, was the trade in slaves, which is the subject of Thomas MacMaster’s paper (Chapter 16); it was on this trade that much of the early wealth of Venice and Amalfi was based. The slow growth of Western trading settlements in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, is often lauded as the origin of West European prosperity, but it is worth remembering that initially this prosperity was substantially based on human misery.
How the East Roman empire gradually lost control of Italy—between Justinian’s final victory in 554, which put the entire peninsula, and its islands, under the rule of Constantinople, and the fall of Bari in 1071—is of course a long and extremely complex story, with several ups and downs in Byzantine power, but two major factors played a role. One was, quite simply, the impact of further invaders. The first of these were the Lombards, who entered Italy in 568, just fourteen years after Justinian’s final victory, and rapidly took over much of the Po plain and much of central and southern Italy, though leaving Ravenna and Rome (and other cities, like Naples) in East Roman hands. Ross Balzaretti’s paper in this volume (Chapter 17) examines the impact of Lombard conquest on Milan—an Impact that was partly negative, causing the city’s bishop to flee to Byzantine Genoa, but also positive, since early Lombard kings used Milan, which had been a major imperial residence in the fourth century, to enhance their status. In the very early seventh century, King Agilulf issued grants from the palace of Milan and used the city’s Roman circus to proclaim the
elevation of his son to joint rule. In doing this, he was explicitly asserting his own authority but also tacitly acknowledging the status of Constantinople by imitating the court ceremonial focussed on the hippodrome of the Byzantine capital.
Despite frequent attempts to dislodge them, the East Romans never succeeded in making much headway against the Lombards; rather, territorial gains tended to be in the opposite direction. In 751 even Ravenna fell to the Lombards, confining Byzantine power at the head of the Adriatic to nominal control of some maritime cities like Venice, and over the Istrian peninsula, though this too was lost at the end of the century to the Franks (as explained in Francesco Borri’s paper, Chapter 13). With its fall to the Lombards, Ravenna’s political importance through the sixth to the eighth century, as a bridgehead of eastern power in Italy, disappeared for ever, though in both ideology and reality it remained an important city and symbol, contested by Lombards,
Franks, an emerging papal monarchy and the archbishops of the city itself (as explored by Nicole Jantzen-Lopez in Chapter 10).
In thinking about the difficult relations between Lombards and East Romans, we instinctively tend to assume that the latter were the more legitimate and “civilised”, because of their direct political descent from the Roman Empire. But, as Eduardo Fabbro’s chapter (Chapter 4) makes clear, the Lombard perspective, as exemplified by Paul the Deacon’s History, was very different—here the Byzantines are presented as the treacherous parties
in dealings between the two powers. In portraying them in this way, Paul played a part in promulgating the idea, prevalent today, that “Byzantine” can be used as an adjective to describe excessively complex, even deceitful, machinations.
In the late eighth and in the ninth centuries the political map of Italy changed dramatically: firstly, through Frankish invasion, destroying in 776 the Lombard kingdom of the North. This did not immediately impact greatly on East Roman power in Italy, since Ravenna and the exarchate had already fallen to the Lombards, and Constantinople’s control was already essentially restricted to Sicily and the far South. But for Northern Italy the Frankish conquest, and the re-creation of a Western empire through Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome on Christmas Day 800, definitively broke political links with the East, and established instead North European claims, and often effective control, over Northern and Central Italy. For the East Romans and their hold on Italy, much more significant and much more harmful was the Arab invasion of Sicily, which began in 827 and was largely completed in 902, when Taormina finally fell.
The second factor that gradually reduced East Roman power in Italy was subtler, slower and even more interesting than foreign invasion: the gradual erosion of Constantinople’s control over much of Italy through the growth,
within areas of Byzantine control, of local autonomous powers. The most famous and enduring of these were the papal monarchy that asserted itself in the eighth century (and lasted until 1870) and the Venetian Republic with origins in approximately the same period (and finally destroyed by Napoleon in 1797). But these cases were not alone: several Byzantine cities of the South, including Naples and Amalfi, also became effectively independent powers through the eighth to tenth centuries (though here for a much shorter period, being absorbed into a strongly centralised Norman kingdom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries). In none of these cases is there evidence of overwhelming dissatisfaction with East Roman power, such as to lead the cities to suddenly throw off colonial shackles, in the way that African and Asian colonies revolted against European powers in the twentieth century. Rather, helped by dissatisfaction over tax burdens (and occasionally also over religious policy), these cities drifted into independence primarily because the emperor in Constantinople lacked the resources to maintain an effective military force in Italy, so they had to look to their own defence. Rome was an extreme, indeed unique, case of all power eventually flowing into the hands of its bishop, but as Edward Schoolman’s chapter
(Chapter 12) shows, an incremental rise in episcopal power can also be documented elsewhere, for instance in Ravenna and Naples. The everincreasing power of the bishops, as their landed endowment grew through pious donations and as secular power lurched through a series of crises, was not an unequivocal gain, since engagement with worldly affairs often led to conflict with the high ideals of ecclesiastical office (for which see Patricia Skinner’s Chapter 16).
Even in regions like Ravenna, where East Roman power remained relatively strong (until falling to invaders), society underwent radical change during this period. In particular, it moved from a typically “Roman” structure, with a full-time salaried army, and a landed aristocracy that never sullied itself with the business of war, to a world that was characteristically “medieval”: where high-ranking military men acquired estates and merged with the local landed aristocracy, and where all land-owners (except churchmen) became trained in the arts of war. This transformation was the subject of a remarkable book by Tom Brown, the honorand of our volume, which (with a playful nod to Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen of 1955) he entitled “Gentlemen and Officers” (British School at Rome 1984). The sub-title “Imperial Administration and Aristocratic Power in Byzantine Italy A.D. 554-800” was necessary to locate his subject matter in place and time, but its main title perfectly encapsulated his central theme: the merging into a single aristocracy of “Gentlemen” (in other words, land-owners) and “Officers” (in other words, high-ranking military men). This, as John Haldon’s broad comparative essay makes clear (in Chapter 8), was a development that happened all over the Byzantine Empire, and was the single most important internal change of the sixth to eighth centuries.
But only in Ravenna can we track this momentous development in any detail, because only in Ravenna, through the remarkable survival of documents in the Archiepiscopal Archive, do we have a run of charters (on papyrus), recording the sale, exchange and lease of rural and urban properties, that is continuous from the sixth century onwards. Elsewhere in Western Europe there is no comparable collection before the eighth century (when charters start to become numerous from Lucca in Tuscany); furthermore, as the papers by Alessandro Bazzocchi and Deborah Deliyannis show (Chapters 6 and 7), the charter evidence of Ravenna is supplemented by a collection of surviving inscriptions, and a record of continuous building patronage, that are probably only exceeded by the evidence from contemporary Rome. In the Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean there is nothing remotely comparable to this level of survival of evidence until many centuries later. The only other area in the whole of Western Eurasia where early documents survive on the scale that they survive in Ravenna, is Egypt, where the dry conditions have ensured the recovery of thousands of papyri from the soil. But the evidence from Egypt, though considerably more extensive even than that of Ravenna, is fairly fragmentary, at least in general, and the documents are of a wide variety of types, making it extremely difficult to detect broad trends within them; furthermore the history of Egypt was radically shaken up by Muslim Arab invasion and settlement in the seventh century. Only in Ravenna can we examine the gradual transformation of late-antique society within a context of essential continuity.
But Ravenna’s importance in historical study goes well beyond the exceptional quality and quantity of its evidence: as a city that was both “Italian” and “Byzantine”, it played a pivotal role between Western Latin Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, and its history can illuminate trends in both broad regions. For the East Roman Empire, the gradual militarisation of Ravenna’s landed aristocracy and the “landing” of its military, offers uniquely detailed evidence that the emergence of an army rooted in the land (the essence of the “thematic system” throughout the empire), was a slow “bottom-up” development more than the result of decisions from on high. While for the Latin West, the same development, within a region that was always “Roman”, shows that the militarisation of society (which occurred all over Western Europe) could happen without the spur of an influx of Germanic warriors. A western militarised aristocracy, and a Byzantine landed army, meet in Ravenna, and are found to be the same thing. It was Tom Brown who brought out this pivotal truth (Figure 0.1—0.8).
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