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Urban Survival and Urban Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean 1

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Urban Survival and Urban Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean 1 Brian Ward Perkins 143 URBAN SURVIVAL AND URBAN TRANSFORMATION IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN 1 Bryan Ward-Perkins Trinity College - Oxford Recent work on the history of towns in the late important feature of the landscape. This change Roman and post-Roman periods, tends to fit under effectively destroyed all ancient traditions of urba- two main headings. Firstly, ‘Survival or Decline’: nism: ‘City life, as it had been known under the did towns flourish in these centuries, or did they Greeks and Romans, almost entirely disappeared, decline in size, in density of population and in pro- and the people of Asia Minor came to live instead sperity? Secondly, ‘Internal Transformation’: how in small towns and fortresses.’ (FOSS 1975, 747). were the monuments and public spaces of those There is, I believe, no reason to doubt the basic towns which survived transformed, in particular outlines of the Foss model, which, with the work of by the appearance of a Christian topography and other scholars, has helped create a new image of by the decline of classical ideals of urban life? the early medieval eastern Empire. Seventh-cen- In this article I wish to focus on two scholarly tury Byzantium is now seen, not as some unchan- debates from the east Mediterranean which relate ging jewel of Hellenic culture, preserving all that to these major issues: the first regarding the survi- was best from the classical world while it rapidly val of cities in the Byzantine East in the seventh cen- decayed in the barbarian West; but as a society in tury; and the second concerning the internal tran- crisis, out of which was born a new Byzantium, sformation of the city in the Byzantine and Arab that, despite its inheritance of late Roman politi- Levant during the sixth and seventh centuries. cal structures, was close in character to the world of the early medieval West: militarised, economi- The Decline of the City in the Eastern Empire cally depressed and culturally impoverished. This revised view of the Byzantine seventh In a series of influential articles and books, century will probably appeal to most scholars published in the 1970s, Clive Foss altered scho- whose primary interests are in the West. There is larly views on Byzantine cities; and thereby hel- often between Westernists and Byzantinists an ped to alter the broader scholarly conception of element of competition, and it is something of a early medieval Byzantine society ( FO S S 1 9 7 5 , relief to feel that modern Byzantinists can no lon- 1976, 1977a, 1977b & 1979). He gathered together ger look down their noses at their barbaric wester- the evidence from excavations in a number of nist colleagues. Scholarly insecurity apart, what cities of Asia Minor (in particular Ephesus and was happening in the seventh-century East must Sardis), and concluded that, while late Antiquity be of considerable interest to historians of both (the fourth to sixth centuries) was a period of con- West and East. Somehow medieval scholarship siderable urban vitality, with many new monu- has to explain how the world of the fifth and sixth mental and private buildings, the early seventh centuries (when it was the East that was both eco- century constituted a dramatic change (in Foss’s nomically and militarily dominant) was transfor- view, attributable initially to Persian invasion). med by the eleventh and twelfth centuries into Substantial parts of the old cities were abandoned, western economic and military superiority in the and the remaining population impoverished. Mediterranean. The issue of when the West achie- Small walled circuits, generally on top of hills and ved this great ‘sorpasso’ has to be central to any often located within the old acropoleis, became an comparative view of East and West in the early 1 Before being presented at Ravello, much of this paper was tow and Marlia Mundell Mango who have read parts of this given in bits to various seminars in Oxford (‘After Rome’, the published version in draft and whose learning I have exploited Byzantine Seminar, and a seminar on towns organised by at all stages of its publication. Because I am dealing with two S.J.Allen, Neil Christie and Simon Loseby), and I am very gra- very specific issues, I have kept references to earlier works to teful to the many people who have suggested corrections and the essential minimum; general discussions of towns in this improvements. I am particularly grateful to my colleague at period and full bibliographies can be found in BR A N D E S 1 9 8 9 , Trinity Chris Prior who produced figs. 1 & 2, and to Mark Whit- CAMERON 1993, CLAUDE 1969, and WHITTOW 1990. 144 EARLY MEDIEVAL TOWN IN WEST MEDITERRANEAN middle ages. Currently the seventh century is best, fine-wares, which is what we normally meet seen as a critical moment in the change: when in the East Mediterranean.2 fifth- and sixth-century eastern military power, In the absence of detailed and meticulous stra- and cultural and economic achievement declined, tigraphy, the archaeological debate about cities in leaving the ‘Romanoi’ very much level-pegging the Byzantine ‘dark age’ tends to revolve around with their barbarianised western cousins. two types of find that all archaeologists invariably record and recover: city-walls and coins. Unfortu- Limitations to the Archaeological Evidence nately neither are necessarily reliable indices of the extent and density of settlement. I do not wish to challenge the basic model for The absence of later seventh- and eighth-cen- Byzantine urban history proposed by Foss (and tury coins forms a central plank of the argument recently very effectively extended by him to Lycia: that cities shrank dramatically in the Byzantine FOSS 1994). Indeed I agree with him that the exca- dark age. The absence of new coin is indeed wide- vated evidence strongly suggests, that the classi- spread outside Constantinople, and is very striking cal style of city-life substantially disappeared in (e.g. fig.1). Unfortunately, however, absence of new the seventh century, and took with it almost all coin is not necessarily caused by an absence of peo- the traditional secular public buildings and even ple (though it may be). That it need not be, is shown the sumptuous late Roman aristocratic private by a detailed breakdown of the coin-data from the houses; and that, in roughly the same period, American excavations at the Agora in Athens Byzantine cities shrank markedly in prosperity. (fig.2). Here new coins are extremely rare after the However, in assessing the evidence for one spe- reign of Constans II (641-668), until the reign of cific area of urban decline, shrinking population, I Leo VI (886-912). This evidence, combined with the would urge more doubt and caution than Foss has absence of other evident signs of occupation, was normally expressed. It is very likely that the popu- used by the excavators to conclude that the Agora lation of towns in the Byzantine world shrank region was substantially abandoned in the interve- during the seventh century; but I am not convin- ning period (F RA N T Z 19 8 8 , 1 1 6 - 2 4 ) . ced that the archaeological evidence currently However, there are two anomalous blips on the available is generally good enough to prove this otherwise fairly steady downward path of coin- fact categorically. finds from the seventh and eighth centuries. The My doubts exist because sophisticated techni- most substantial of these, the large number of ques of excavation are far less often deployed in coins of Constans II, almost certainly reflects, not the excavation of Roman and post-Roman cities in a resurgence of activity in the Agora, but the sud- the east Mediterranean, than they are in many of den appearance, after a period of dearth, of an the north-western provinces of the Empire. One abundance of copper coins, due to the arrival in the will search in vain in most excavation-reports city of the emperor and his entourage during his from the East Mediterranean for the kind of travels to Italy in 662-3. microstratigraphy so zealously charted on many Even more striking, since it happens in a sites in Britain, Gaul and Italy, and on some exca- period when new coins were apparently extremely vations in Africa (e.g. several of those at Cartha- rare on all east Mediterranean sites, are the 61 ge), and for the detailed analysis of pottery depo- copper coins of Philippicus (711-713), which form a sits which might (or might not) reveal evidence of thin peak at the beginning of the eighth century. late occupation. It is clear that many east Medi- Like the coins of Constans, these were found, not terranean excavations still consist of only very as a hoard, but as scattered finds over the site. It is roughly stratified and recorded clearances down to theoretically just possible that these 61 coins the first ‘respectable’ structures. represent a sudden burst of activity in the region In these circumstances, evidence for post- of the Agora around the time of Philippicus. But it Roman settlement, which might be of a very ephe- is much more likely that they represent the appea- meral nature, may often have been cleared away rance (for reasons that we do not know) of a single by the archaeologists themselves. Unfortunately, consignment of new coins from Constantinople, 61 a lack of evidence of settlement can all too easily of which were then lost in the area of the Agora by be caused simply by excavators knowingly or the many people who c o n t i n u o u s l y occupied this unwittingly destroying it ( WA R D- PE R K I N S 1 9 8 7 , region of Athens up to at least the early eighth 345-6, for one well documented example).
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