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AN EMPIRE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS
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The empire we will be talking about is Roman empire which stretched
over Africa ,Europe and Asia.
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In the Roman empire women had stronger position than many countries
even today.
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However Roman empire was largely dependent on slave labor.
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From the fifth century on the Empire fell apart in the West, but
remained intact and exceptionally prosperous in the eastern half
Sources
- Roman historians have a rich collection of sources which we broadly divided into three groups text ,documents and material remains.
- Text sources include historians of the period written by contemporary which are usually called annals.
- Documentary sources include mainly inscriptions and papyri.
- Inscriptions are usually cut on stones in both Greek and Latin which were the main languages in Roman empire, however they are various languages a part from this that were spoken
- The papyrus was a reed like plant that grow along the banks of Nile river in Egypt and was processed to produce a writing material.
- These two Empire control most part of Europe Asia and Africa
- Between the birth of Christ and early part of seven century
- These empire next to each other separated only by a narrow strip of land along the river Euphrates.
- Continents of Europe and Africa are separated by a sea that stretched all the way from Spain in the west to Syria in the east and the sea is called Mediterranean sea known as the heart of Roman empire.
- Rome dominated the Mediterranean and all the regions around the sea.
- To the north the boundaries of the Empire was formed by two great rivers the Rhine and Danube
- To the south a large desert known as Sahara formed the boundary of the Empire.
- Iran control the whole area south of the Caspian sea to the eastern Arabia and sometimes Afghanistan as well.
- The two superpowers had divided up most of the world that Chinese called Ta chin (greater Chin roughly the west)
- The Roman empire can be broadly divided into two phases early and late which is divided by the third century, before the third century the Empire is known as early Empire, after third century to the downfall of the Empire it is known as late Empire.
- Roman empire was the mosaic of territories and cultures that was chiefly bounded by a common system of government.
- many languages were spoken in the Roman empire but for the purpose of administration Latin and Greek were most prominent.
- The upper classes of the east spoke and wrote in Greek and those of west in Latin. The boundary between these broad languages are somewhere across the middle of the Mediterranean between the African provinces of Tripolitania which was Latin speaking and Cyrenaica which was Greek speaking.
Rulers of Roman empire
- All those who lived in the empire were subjected to a single ruler regardless of what language they spoke and where they leave.
- The regime established by Augustus the first emperor in 27 BCE is called the principate system which established the rule o single ruler , he kept the fiction that he was only the leading citizen not the absolute ruler out of the respect of the senate.
- Earlier senatorial class ruled the Roman empire and the system was called republic.
Senate
- Senate had represented the aristocracy they were the wealthiest family.
- They had became of Italian descent later ,mainly land owners.
- Most of the Roman history that survive was return by the people from a senatorial background
- As they wrote the history the worst emperors were those that was hostile to the senatorial and the best for those that were hospitable to the senatorial .
- They were next to the emperor.
- They have feared the army as it was a source of often unpredictable violence.
- The army in Roman empire was of paid soldiers where they had to put in a minimum of 25 years of service.
- The existence of a paid army was a distinctive feature of Roman empire the army was the largest single organized body.
- It had the power to determine the fate of emperor they would agitate for better wages and service condition and the agitation will always took the form of mutinies.
- Succession to the throne was largely on family descent as a natural or adoptive hier.
- For example Tiberius the second in the long line of Roman emperors was the adopted son of Augustus.
- Augustus age is known for peace.
- The Roman empire gradual expansion was depended on absorbing the series of depended kingdoms.
- Some kingdoms was exceptionally wealthy like Herod's kingdom
- Except for Italy which was not considered a provinces, all the territories of the Empire were organized into provinces and were subject to taxation.
- The great urban center's were bedrock of imperial system.
- Government was able to tax the countryside through cities ,the provincial upper class who supplied most of the cadre to the government and commanded the army came to form a new Elite of administrators and military commanders as the new group emerged
- the emperor gallienus excluded senator from military command.
- Individuals of Italian origin continue to dominate the senate at least till the third century when senators of provincial origin became a majority.
- A city of Roman empire had a City council and territory which contains villages one City will not be a territory of other City.
- Villages could be upgraded to the status of cities and vice versa.
- Public bath was a striking feature of Roman empire ,people enjoyed it ,one calendar tells us that spectacula filled no less than 176 days of the year
- Roman empire was mosaic of territories that were cultural more diverse than Iran. The dynasty is the partians and the sosanians had ruled the Iran in the period and the population was largely Iranian.
- Iran has conscripted army unlike Roman empire where army was paid.
- Public bath was striking feature of Roman empire and when a Iranian ruler tried to implement that it he encounter the wrath of the clergy there.
The third century crises
- The period of first and second century were period of peace. The third century brought the major signs of internal strain.
- From the 230 the Empire found itself fighting different fronts simultaneously.
- In the Iran a new aggressive dynasty emerged in 225 call the sasanians they are expanded rapidly in the direction of Euphrates in just 15 years They captured the eastern capital of Antioch.
- A whole series of Germanic tribes began to move against the Rhine and the Danube frontiers and the whole period saw repeated invasions of the whole line of provinces that stretched from the Black sea the Alps and Southern Germany.
- The Roman called them 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 that period.
Gender
- Adults on didn't live with families there were nuclear families.
- Slaves were there in family
- Dowry was given by brides family
- However she also inherited her father's property and remain the primary heir of her father.
- Roman women enjoyed considered legal rights in owning and managing properties.
- Divorce was relatively easy and needed no more than a notice of intent to dissolve the marriage by either husband or wife.
- There was a age difference males married in the late 20 or early 30 while women married of in the late teens or early twenties
- marriages were mostly arranged
- Father had subsistence legal control over their children
- It is seen there were casual literacy for example are kingdom which was buried in volcanic eruption in 79 CE has a strong evidence of casual literacy.
- In Egypt where hundreds of papyri survive most formal documents such as contracts were usually written by professionals .
- Literacy was certainly more wide spread among certain categories such as soldiers ,army officers or estate manager.
- The cultural diversity of the Empire was reflected in many ways
- The religious cults and local deities the plurality of languages that was spoken, the style of dress, the food people even the forms of social organization, even the patterns of settlement.
- Aramaic was the dominant language of the near east, Coptic was spoken in Egypt, Punic and Berber in North Africa, Celtic in Spain and Northwest.
Economic expansion
- The Empire had substantial economic infrastructure of harbors, mines, olive oil factories etc.
- Wheat, wine and olive oil were traded in huge quantities and the came mainly from Spain ,gallic provinces, North Africa Egypt and to a lesser extent Italy
- Liquid like wine and olive oil were transported in containers called Amphorae . Mount Testaccio in Rome is said to contain the remains of over 50 million such vessels.
Spanish olive oil
- Spanish olive oil had reached its peak in the years 140 to 160.
- Spanish olive oil was carried in the container called Dressel 20.
- Spanish producers succeeded in capturing market for olive oil from the Italian counterparts as they provided a better quality of oil at a lower price.
- The success of Spanish oil was repeated by North African producers through the third and fourth century. Later after 425 North African dominant's first broken by East ,in the later 5th and 6th century Southern Asia minor Syria and Palestine became major producer of wine and olive oil.
Fertility of regions
- The Empire included many regions known for exceptional fertility like compania in Italy, Sicily, Egypt ,galilee ,Southern Gaul
- The best kinds of wine came from compania
- Sicily and Byzacium exported large quantities of wheat to Rome.
Technologies in Empire
- Roman empire was much more advanced it had developed hydraulic mining techniques, water powered milling technology .
- There was well organized commercial and banking network.
Controlling workers
- There were three million slaves in the total Italian population of 7.5 million
- Slaves were viewed as an investment and writers suggested not to use them where too many required as their health could be affected however this was not out of sympathy but an economical calculation.
- Supply of slaves had declined due to less warfare so the alternatives like slave breeding and wage labor was adopted.
- Slaves and freedman were business managers.
Writers view on slaves
- Columella suggested to keep twice the stock of tools and implements for the loss of slave labor as time exceeded the cost of such items.
- He also recommended the gang of 10 or group of slave for supervision.
- Opposing this Pliny the elder author of very famous natural history says it's the worst method as in this method slaves for chained together .
- A law of 398 says that worker being branded so they could be recognized.
- There were also debt contract and debt bondage . In a Jewish revolt of 66 CE moneylender bonds were destroyed
- In the late 5th century emperor Anastasios built the east Frontier city of Dara in less than 3 weeks by offering high wages
Division of society
- Tacitus described the leading social groups of the early empire as follows,
- senators (patres, lit. 'fathers');
- leading members of the equestrian class;
- the respectable section of the people, those attached to the great houses,
- the unkempt lower class (plebs sordida) who, he tells us, were addicted to the circus and theatrical displays,
- and finally the slaves.
- late empire, which starts with the reign of Constantine 1
- in the early part of the fourth century, the first two groups mentioned by Tacitus (the senators and the equestrian had merged into a unified and expanded aristocracy, and at least half of all families were of African or eastern origin.
- aristocracy was enormously wealthy but in many ways less powerful than the purely military elites who came almost entirely from non-aristocratic backgrounds.
- Tacitus described this 'respectable' middle class as clients of the great senatorial houses.
- Now it was chiefly government service and dependence on the State that sustained many of these families.
- Below them were the vast mass of the lower classes known collectively as humiliores (lit. 'lower'). They comprised a rural labour force of which many were permanently employed on the large estates:
- self-employed artisans who, it was said, were better fed than wage labourers
Monetary system
- The monetary system of the late empire broke the silver-based currencies of the first three centuries
- because the Spanish silver mines were exhausted and government ran out of sufficient stocks of the metal to support a stable coinage in silver..
- Constantine founded the new monetary system on gold.
Bureaucracy
- The late Roman bureaucracy, both the higher and middle classes, was a comparatively affluent group because it drew the bulk of its salary in gold and invested much of this in buying up assets like land.
- There was of course also a great deal of corruption.
- government intervened repeatedly to curb these forms of corruption
- The Roman state was an authoritarian regime: in other words, dissent was rarely tolerated
- Emperors were not free to do whatever they liked, and the law was actively used to protect civil rights.
- '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.
Diocletian
- Overexpansion led Diocletian to cut back by abandoning territories with little strategic and economic value.
- Diocletian also fortified the frontiers, reorganised provincial boundaries, and separate civilian from military functions. granting greater autonomy to the military commanders (duces)
Constantine
- Constantine consolidated some of these changes and added others of his own. His chief innovations were in the monetary sphere
- Constantine deciding to make Christianity the official religion, and with the rise of Islam in the seventh century
- He introduced a new denomination, the solidus.
- The other area of innovation was the creation of a second capital at Constantinople
- Monetary stability and an expanding population stimulated economic growth
- large parts of the Near Eastern countryside were more developed and densely settled in the fifth and sixth centuries
Religion
- The traditional religious culture of the classical world, both Greek and Roman, had been polytheist. That is, it involved a multiplicity of gods that included both Roman/Italian gods like Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Mars, as well as numerous Greek and eastern deities
- Polytheists had no common name or label to describe themselves. The other great religious tradition in the empire was Judaism. But Judaism was not a monolith
- Thus, the 'Christianisation of the empire in the fourth and fifth centuries was a gradual and complex process.
Kingdoms
- The general prosperity was especially marked in the East where population 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 (Goths, Vandals, Lombards, etc.) 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).
- These kingdoms foreshadowed the beginnings of a different kind of world that is usually called 'medieval'.
- the reign of Justinian is the highwater mark of prosperity and imperial ambition.
- Justinian recaptured Africa from the Vandals (in 533) but his recovery of Italy (from the Ostrogoths) left the country devastated and paved the way for the Lombard Invasion.
- by the early seventh century the Sasanians who had ruled Iran since the third century launched a wholesale invasion of all the major eastern provinces (including Egypt).
Islam
- 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.
- the unification of the Arabian peninsula and its numerous tribes was the key factor behind the territorial expansion of Islam.
