the roman empire's african, asian, and illyrian reality (and the Mediterranean’s transformation from diverse paganism to a tightly defined and highly aggressive version of monotheism)
the roman world can no more easily be put into a box than can the kushan empire: actors from africa, the middle east, turkey, and the balkans shaped economics, religion, politics, and culture
next:
Sources:
Martin Goodman, The Roman World 44 BC - AD 180 (Second Edition)
David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay AD 180 - 395 (Second Edition)
A.D. Lee, From Rome to Byzantium AD 363 - 565
Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire
Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World
Walter Scheidel, The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
thank you so much to my former co-worker nzinga who liked this post on linkedin so long ago and whom i love so much (you have always inspired me 🩷)
Above, Left: The Arch of Septimius Severus, first African Emperor of the Roman Empire
Frequently, the Roman Empire is portrayed in film and television as having been led by British-accented men. I doubt I even questioned this when I saw Gladiator as a middle schooler. Perhaps the association of the British accent with Empire was simply too deeply ingrained into me. Also, I was a seventh grader who knew very little about ancient history.
These days, I mostly just find amusement in the way this accent is deployed on television. Including when I encounter Vanessa Hudgens utilizing a fake English accent in her capacity as the queen of Netflix’s fictional nation of “Montenaro” in The Princess Switch. That country, along with its neighbors “Belgravia” and “Aldovia,” could have been generated by a computer algorithm analyzing viewer preferences. In that case, it took in the inputs of American culture and proceeded to locate these countries in Eastern Europe. Conveniently, the British-speaking nations of Belgravia, Aldovia, and Montenaro thereby erase several countries and languages which most Americans couldn’t give a shit about anyway. At first, I sensed they had replaced Serbia or Bosnia, but further research shows that these countries are actually in Romania. In either case, the showrunners, whether humans or computers, already know the obvious: Americans cannot escape an infatuation for a royal elite that all sound like our idea of British people. Admittedly, I now watch this movie every year.
But the use of this accent as the standard for Rome’s leaders is especially startling, and not just in light of the fact one might rather expect to hear the accents of Romance languages. It is also surprising when we think about the distant origins of English itself. When the Roman Empire lost control over Britain in the early 400s, that wild island was already under heavy attack by Saxon raiders whom the Christian Romans considered to be both savage and heathen. The Romano-British nobles appealed for help in AD 410 from the Emperor Honorius (r. AD 393 - 423), who wrote back that they were on their own now. Accordingly, these local landlords instead hired Saxons as mercenaries to provide for their security. But of course the demands of these warriors escalated over time, and they soon overthrew many of their employers. What Roman could have imagined that the accents of a language descended partly from these Germanic invaders of an island on the absolute fringe of the Empire would one day be used to characterize the speech of Roman leaders?
The Romans could never have known that the popular imagination would come to associate their Empire primarily with the modern concept of Western Europe. Not when so many of the most important leaders in the Roman Empire, and within early Christianity, were Africans, Asians, and Illyrians. They came from cities like Alexandria in modern Egypt, Antioch in modern Syria, Carthage in modern Tunisia, Nicomedia in modern Turkey, Bethlehem in modern Palestine. They spoke languages like Coptic, Punic, and Aramaic, with a Syriac literature flourishing in the first century AD. They would also learn one of the lingua francas of the time, typically Greek in the East and Latin in the West. As David Potter argues in The Roman Empire at Bay, these local cultures faced “Romanizing” pressures, but they often developed in their own new directions under these influences. Rome, too, was an important part of this Empire. At first it was the dominant political force, having done the conquering. But this would not always be the case; within the Roman Empire, it was North Africa, Western Asia, and Illyricum (now the former Yugoslavia) which would become far more politically, economically, and culturally important than either Rome or Italy.
Had history played out somewhat differently, then the political unification of the Mediterranean could have been North African rather than Italian in origin. The city of Carthage in modern Tunisia had been founded by Phoenicians from modern Lebanon. When Rome first went to war with Carthage in 264 BC, the Romans did not even have a navy, while the Carthaginians were the dominant seapower of the time. Had Carthage prevailed, its extensive commercial interests would likely have incentivized it to capitalize on the removal of its major rival by building an empire with a very similar territory to that of the Romans. The same groups of people would have then participated in that empire, which we might conceive of as North African. In fact, as the definition of “Roman” steadily expanded, many prominent Roman political and religious leaders actually were Africans and Arabs.
Septimius Severus was the first African Emperor of the Roman Empire (r. AD 193 - 211). Potter gives a terrific discussion of this man’s rise to power. He was born in modern Libya. On his mother’s side, his origins were Italian. But his father was descended from a family of local Phoenecian elites stretching back to the glory days of Carthage. Growing up at home, he did not speak Latin. He spoke Punic, the language of the Phoenicians, and this apparently gave him a thick accent when he used Latin for his work in the government and army. As he had trouble with the unaspirated “s” in Latin, Potter suggests he pronounced his name as “Sheptimiush Sheverush.” His first wife was also an African. But for his second wife, he paired with the Arab noblewoman Julia Domna, who came from the Emesan royal family in Syria. Some years after Severus died, another Syrian from that storied family, who was a priest working in the local temple of the Syrian sun god Elagabalus (r. AD 218 - 222), would also become Emperor.
Severus rose to power in the midst of the upheavals following the assassination of the Emperor Commodus (r. AD 180 - 192). Potter emphasizes that this was not simply a competition between armies controlled by factions in Rome. Rather, North African and Western Asian cities were now integrated into broader imperial politics, participating in the process by which a new Roman ruler would emerge. In the civil war Severus was to win, these places did not try to assert independence from the Empire. Roman armies were too powerful. Rather, local elites in these cities took sides in the contest for who would take charge of these armies as emperor, with a view to advancing their cities’ interests inside this trans-Mediterranean political structure. It is no wonder then that Tyre, the ancient capital of the Phoenecians in modern Lebanon, sided with the culturally similar Severus. Tyre always took great pride in its Punic heritage, minting coinage with Phoenecian gods and legends. Its nearby rival, Beirut, had been founded as a Roman colony for veteran soldiers. Accordingly, elites there emphasized their Latin origins and Roman gods. But once Severus secured his power, he elevated Tyre to replace Beirut as the provincial capital.
Similar dynamics played out elsewhere, including in Syria between Laodicea and Antioch. Antioch, the former capital of the Macedonian Seleucid dynasty, had opposed Severus. As a consequence, he reduced it to the status of a “village.” Severus then transferred its Olympics to Laodicea, where these games were of course transformed into a celebration of Severus himself. Meanwhile, in modern Turkey, the civil war similarly intensified the political rivalry between Nicomedia and Nicaea over which of the two would have a more important status in the province of Bithynia. Nicomedia, as a reward for siding with Severus, was elevated to provincial capital. Severus also rewarded Egypt with a new possibility for Egyptian elites to earn membership in the Roman Senate, thanks to Alexandria’s defection to Severus during the war.
Above: The Roman Empire under Severus (public domain)
Who would control the Roman armies was no longer a decision for the elites of Rome itself, or even for the magnates of Italy. It was just as dependent upon support from cities and legions in modern Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, several of which contributed to the elevations of Africans and Arabs as the Empire’s rulers. And in AD 212, an edict by the Roman Emperor Caracalla (son of the African Roman Emperor Severus and the Arab Roman Empress Julia Domna) would declare all non-slave men inside the entire Roman Empire to be Roman citizens.
The Balkans, too, came to play a significant role, further contributing to the diminishing significance of Italy. If you visit the beautiful city of Split in Croatia, you will see that half the old town is the former retirement palace of the Emperor Diocletian (r. AD 284 - 305). He abdicated to live there and pursue his hobby of growing cabbages. But he was also born in modern Croatia, possibly to a former slave. Yet his success as a soldier in the Roman Army enabled him to rise up from his peasant background and seize control of the entire Roman State.
Above: Split, Croatia was the retirement destination for the Emperor Diocletian
He and his successors (most of whom were born in modern Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Turkey) hardly spent any time in Rome at all in the remaining two centuries of the Western Roman Empire’s existence. Rome was important economically, containing the largest population, but it was no longer the political capital of the Empire. The provincials themselves instead began playing host to new imperial capitals. Diocletian took Nicomedia in modern Turkey as his capital. And why wouldn’t he? The East was far wealthier and more populous than the West. One of his successors, Constantine, would found and take Constantinople (modern Istanbul) as his. Other imperial capitals would include Antioch, Milan, and Trier. In fact, for the first time since the Roman Republic had used loot from the initial conquest of the provinces to justify suspending direct taxes on Italians, the new rulers emerging from those once-subjugated provinces started making Italians pay these taxes again.
A common economic system covering the whole of the Mediterranean was another characteristic of the time. Rome, with its enormous population, was one of the many urban markets around the Sea which housed consumers for imports originating from all over the Empire. Rome’s population was almost completely dependent on grain from Egypt and the province of Africa Proconsularis. Under Roman rule, Carthage, the capital of Proconsularis, was home to one of the Mediterranean’s largest harbors, through which passed much of the grain that fed the masses in Rome. Elites in North Africa benefited greatly from this arrangement, because the Roman State subsidized the financing of the ships which moved these food supplies. The shipowners were allowed to carry other goods, along with the grain, and to make stops in other consumer cities aside from Rome. This meant that the villas of North Africa were effectively being subsidized to produce a wide range of products for many markets and to return with various imports. The Western Roman Empire was so deeply dependent on the wealth and grain of Africa that when a group of Germanic Barbarians, the Vandals, conquered Africa Proconsularis in AD 439, this all but ensured the collapse of the Western Roman Empire’s military machine.
If economic incentives were not enough for conquered elites to cooperate, then the destruction of the Jewish homeland must have served as a terrifying alternative. As Robin Lane Fox discusses in The Classical World, Roman governors had partly co-opted the Jewish upper-classes, but tensions with the poor helped to fuel a revolt that was mercilessly subdued. In August of AD 70, the Roman legions captured Jerusalem. The Roman armies completely destroyed the Jewish Temple and enslaved much of the population. The Emperor Vespasian (r. AD 69 - 79) used loot from the devastated Judaea to build the Colosseum. He also inflicted a special tax on Jews that would contribute to maintaining the god Jupiter’s temple in Rome. Decades later, between AD 132 and 135, the Emperor Hadrian (r. AD 117 - 138) finished off what was left. The Jews who survived the slaughter were completely expelled from Jerusalem. Roman colonists built pagan temples all over the city. Judaea was then wiped off the face of the Earth when the Romans renamed the territory Syria Palestina. This story is not only a crucial chapter in the immense historical suffering of the Jewish people. It is also a reminder that elites across the Roman world often cooperated because resistance against the Roman military machine was completely futile. Better for them to assist with the imperial administration - and hopefully end up controlling these mighty armies themselves, which one day they indeed did.
Above: The Colosseum in April 2014
So if we are tempted to idealize too much based on the participation of African and Asian elites, then we should not forget that the original impetus for Mediterranean political and economic unity was terror, pillage, and the threat of enslavement. The glorious ancient monuments we can see in Rome today were just as fueled by loot and booty as were many of the grand architectural triumphs on display in newer imperial capitals such as Paris or London. In the Roman Empire, however, diverse groups of subjugated Asian, African, and Illyrian elites were able to gain increasing amounts of power within this highly oppressive system.
The Jews perhaps struggled to culturally integrate as well as other groups because their monotheism prevented them from participating in multiple religious traditions simultaneously without betraying the one true God. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In the days of polytheism, most local elites in the Empire were able to balance their own cultural and religious background with their integration into an upper-class, trans-Mediterranean culture built upon a shared education in Latin or Greek and their associated classical literatures. People could maintain their own regional gods and religious customs (recall the Phoenecian city of Tyre) while also participating in Greco-Roman religious rituals, usually without any contradiction. This was not a world in which all cultures and gods were considered “equal,” but it was still far more flexible than Christianity’s eventually strident monotheism.
That said, there was often pressure to bestow Latin or Greek names and concepts upon local gods. And, as Potter points out, due to their tendency to assume everything spiritual they encountered was simply a different shade of Hellenistic religion, the Greeks and Italians themselves often misunderstood what African and Asian traditions were actually saying. Potter shows how they also participated in the now longstanding habit of mystically fetishizing “eastern” thought, especially from Egypt. Even so, the Greco-Roman pagan framework was far more adaptable and inclusive of religious diversity than what was to come. With the rise of Christianity, this remarkably adjustable approach to religion became something of the past, hastening the demise of the Mediterranean World. Christianity, too, however, was a product of that world. It emerged in Judaea, and most of its founding fathers were not Europeans.
The future European domination of the Catholic Church is something which would have been unpredictable in the Roman Empire. Many of early Christianity’s major dramas played out not in Italy but in North Africa and Western Asia. Yet I recently read an awful article in which the infamous right-wing extremist Steve Bannon makes the idiotic claim that “America possesses an underlying culture that has been passed down from Jerusalem, to Athens, to Rome, to London.” Sadly, although he says he laments that American students no longer focus on the Classics, his own discussion of Roman history reads like it was hastily thrown together by a kid who didn’t do the readings. Most ironically, he is using the British historian Edward Gibbon as his supposed source for an argument about this beloved “Judeo-Christian heritage” that continues to obsess so many American conservatives, even though Gibbon himself claimed that Christianity contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire. Shortly after this nauseating digital encounter with Bannon, I was amused to come across a quote in Potter’s book from the second-century African Christian writer Tertullian. One of the first Christian theologians, he was likely of a Berber and/or Punic heritage, and he lived in Carthage. “What then,” Tertullian asked when rejecting the pagan philosophies of Greece, “has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church, the heretics with the Christians?”
Above: The Berber and/or Punic Church Father, Tertullian of Carthage (public domain)
Greek philosophy did in fact influence Christianity, and quite heavily at that. But the religion’s early development was just as centered upon North Africa and Western Asia as it was upon Southern Europe. After Tertullian of Carthage there was Origen, a Christian leader in Alexandria. He also features in Potter’s book. Origen was invited to Bosra in modern Syria to explain his faith to the Roman governor. He also visited the Arab noblewoman Julia Mamaea in Antioch, sister of Julia Domna and member of the Severan Dynasty, for the same purpose. In AD 244, he bravely sent letters to the Roman Emperor Philip, another Arab from Syria, and who may have secretly been the first Christian emperor. As Potter suggests, it might have been the evidence from these letters which doomed Origen. Emperor Philip was killed in a mutiny and replaced with Decius, a hardcore pagan. Perhaps feeling the recent upheavals in the Mediterranean world were the result of the people having failed to honor the gods, this man initiated a grand persecution of Christians which resulted in Origen being gruesomely tortured in Caesarea, modern Turkey, in AD 250.
It wasn’t until the rule of the Emperor Constantine (r. AD 306 - 337), one of the many Illyrian emperors from modern Serbia, that Christianity was legalized and promoted by the Roman State. At that point, Christian emperors found themselves appealed to by numerous factions of Christians competing to have their own interpretation of Scripture become the “official” understanding, deviation from which would ideally be severely punished. The emperors themselves were not always so knowledgeable of the Scriptures, or of the theological philosophies behind these doctrinal disputes. But several did summon the first all-church synods and take sides based either on their own instincts or their own relationships with particular bishops. In these contests, the bishop of Rome competed with bishops from Alexandria, Carthage, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople to define Christian doctrine. It is in the midst of these debates that the fracturing of the old religious fluidity of the Mediterranean World comes to an end, to be replaced by a rigidly enforced theological fundamentalism that sowed deep divisions between many groups within the Empire.
It is important here to keep in mind a crucial difference between the Christian and pagan mentalities. As Robin Lane Fox notes in The Classical World, perhaps the most “proactive” religious policy ever pursued at an empire-wide level by a pagan Roman Emperor was when the Emperor Hadrian deified his dead male lover, Antinous, of whom he had naked statues built and displayed across the whole of the Mediterranean. But when the Christians took power, the bishops proved themselves to be absolutely obsessed with lobbying the emperors to ensure that everyone believed in exactly the same extremely specific doctrines, a focus which came to consume the affairs of state. This was a project that had never concerned the highly adaptable paganism of the Mediterranean World. Yet these same Christians proved unable to agree with one another over what exactly these doctrines should say.
Most of these debates were over the nature of Jesus Christ himself, something about which Christian leaders had great difficulty agreeing for several agonizing centuries. This debate first centered around two general groups, which Potter describes well. The first, frequently represented by church leaders in Rome and Alexandria, held that God “was a single essence that had three Persons.” The second was represented among church leaders in Syria and Anatolia. It was also championed by Arius, a Libya-born Alexandrian priest, and the Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia in modern Turkey. Known as “Arianism” (not at all related to Nazi “Aryanism”), this doctrine claimed that “the members of the Trinity were three essences of God.” More specifically, the Arians posited that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created by and subordinate to the Father. The Syrian church had an old tendency to emphasize Jesus’s humanity and inferiority to the Father in these debates. Long before Arius was born, the Council of Antioch (AD 268) of Syrian bishops had rejected the idea of an equality between the Father and the Son, whereas Alexandrian and Roman ecclesiastical authorities were positing the exact opposite.
With the Trinitarian dispute between the Egyptian and Syrian churches intensifying, Constantine summoned the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) in modern Turkey, inviting all bishops from the whole of the Empire to formally resolve the issue. But there was no real debate. The bishops, under Constantine’s autocratic gaze, approved a declaration proposed by the emperor himself, probably written with assistance from a Cappadocian priest. This, the famous Nicene Creed, rejected Arianism by proclaiming Jesus to be “consubstantial” with the Father. For many Christian theologians today, not to accept Constantine’s creed means that you are going to Hell.
Above: Mosaic in Istanbul of the Emperor Constantine (public domain)
Meanwhile, Arianism as a theology had to be put down by force of arms over many years. Several Barbarian kings of the Vandals and Goths had already been converted by Arian missionaries, and Arian thought continued to influence Christianity. In dealing with these “heretics,” the Nicene bishops in Italy actually changed the Scriptures. Possibly in order to show the many Arian Gothic kings that the Bible was against them, they added a new passage into the Latin version of the New Testament at the end of the fourth century. This is 1 John 5:7: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.”
The original Scriptures were far from being so clear. These had been translated into the Gothic language by the Arian missionary Ulfilas, who hailed from Cappadocia in modern Turkey. He must have thought his work was instrumental in saving Gothic souls. Yet later on, the Church considered him a heretic for his Arian theology. And as historian Edward Gibbon pointed out, these Gothic kings who thought their souls were saved must have been surprised to hear from the Italian bishops, with their forgeries of the Scriptures, that their forefathers were actually burning in Hell for having stumbled upon a slightly incorrect version of Christianity.
This bizarre obsession among Christians with ensuring that everyone believed exactly the same thing about the nature of God was a completely new force in the Mediterranean World, one that sowed new divisions in a formerly religiously pluralistic environment. Even Constantine was a bit taken aback at first. Potter reports him as having been reluctant to preside over what would become the Council of Nicaea. He wrote to angry Christian bishops that they should not be getting so worked up arguing about the minutiae of something which no mere mortal could ever hope to truly understand. He hoped they could sort it out amongst themselves. But this was a new Mediterranean, one where people would be killing each other over slightly different versions of the same religion, and with much of the bloodshed sprouting from semantic debates about doctrine.
For most Mediterranean pagans, adherence to specific creeds like that of Nicaea did not matter as much as ritual did. These people did not typically encounter foreign religious practices and deities as being somehow “wrong” or “false” (although they did not necessarily view them as “equal”). Instead, they either viewed these gods as alternative manifestations of their own gods, or as new gods that they simply had not encountered yet. The gods were a force in the world that had to be accounted for in order to live a successful life. If these deities did not receive the honors they demanded, they might become angry and intervene against you, or deny you of their favor in your endeavors. In that sense, belief didn’t matter so much as participation in the many festivals and rituals that were interwoven into civic tradition, the maintenance of which was vital for ensuring the good graces of the divine. In the most idealistic conception of this, it wasn’t that there were distinct “religions” so much as there was a great communion of all the gods of mankind. And this was an intercourse in which nearly all Mediterranean groups could fluidly participate.
They still had a basis for persecuting other belief systems, of course. Their struggle with the Christians was not over the Christians’ creeds so much as the Christians’ inexplicable refusal to simply go through the motions of participating in pagan ceremonies and festivals. This is why persecution of the Christians often did not necessarily ban someone from being a Christian. As per a rescript from the Emperor Trajan (r. AD 98 - 117) to Governor Pliny of Bithynia in Turkey in AD 113, persecution of Christians often took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach. Effectively, this left most decisions up to local governors, who, when and if they even cared, normally required Christians to simply participate in the many festivals and sacrifices that constituted the routines of ordinary civic life. Authorities wouldn’t ask too many questions about what specifically they might believe. Christians should not, Trajan stressed, be intentionally hunted down, and anonymous accusations of Christianity should be ignored. Persecution was intensified, however, by the Emperor Decius (r. AD 249 - 251) in AD 250. Possibly sensing that the upheavals of the Roman world indicated that people had fallen out of favor with the divine, he mandated universal sacrifice to the gods. Many Christians, however, viewed even empty and formulaic participation in such sacrifice as a betrayal of Jesus. Plenty were killed for courageously refusing.
And yet once they came to power, Christian leaders wound up persecuting each other more than the pagans had ever done to them. Even Origen (the African who may have converted the Arab Roman Emperor Philip, and who was then tortured for bravely spreading the Gospel to Roman elites) was later declared a heretic by the Council of Constantinople in 553. He had taken a different view on the nature of Jesus than the one later declared by Constantine in Nicaea, and for that he apparently burns in Hell.
The animosity of another Christological dispute over a hundred years after Nicaea contributed to the demise of the Mediterranean World. After Islam emerged in Arabia in the seventh century, Muslim armies soon descended upon the Eastern Roman Empire. There, they capitalized on long standing grievances held by the Christians of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch. These still did not agree with the Council of Chalcedon’s declaration in AD 451 that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, with each of these natures united in a single “person.” They claimed Jesus was fully divine and fully human, but each of these aspects was in a single “nature.” In the book From Rome to Byzantium, A.D. Lee describes this debate as having been so intense that the Emperor Marcian (r. 450 - 457) had to enforce Chalcedon by deploying soldiers to Alexandria, where they arrested the anti-Chalcedonian priests who controlled the churches there. They then forced the installation of a Chalcedonian bishop, Proterious, who was later lynched by an anti-Chalcedonian mob. To this day, the Ethiopian, Coptic, Syrian, and Armenian churches do not subscribe to Chalcedon. By the time of the Muslim invasions, the anti-Chalcedonian Christians had been so molested as heretics by Chalcedonian Christians in Constantinople that many would welcome the Islamic conquest as a liberation from their fellow Christians. Recently, the Syriac Church declared that, although it still does not recognize Chalcedon, the whole affair was really one of meaningless semantics. In any case, these stringent divisions were the fruits of a religious hierarchy which, complicating the simplicity of Jesus Christ’s original teachings, introduced into the world a remorseless fixation on creating lists of extraordinarily specific beliefs about the divine to which everyone must relentlessly adhere.
Thus, with the growth of Christianity, the ancient customs of religious fluidity which had dominated the Mediterranean for so many more enlightened centuries were brutally replaced by insurmountably ferocious divisions between sects, even within what was theoretically the same religion. The animosity between various approaches to the otherworldly further intensified once the Muslim armies had conquered all of North Africa and Western Asia, thereby cutting off cities like Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem from the future development of Christianity. This could only enhance the relative power of the church leaders in Rome and Constantinople over Christianity’s future trajectory. But these two also gradually drifted apart, and it is worth remembering that Eastern Orthodox Christians would one day be victims to the Western European crusaders’ ruthless looting of Constantinople. Suddenly, there emerges a temptation to think in terms of a “Christian world” and a “Muslim world,” or even of a “Catholic world” and an “Orthodox world,” not to mention a “Sunni world” and a “Shia world.” The old Mediterranean World was lost, as strict new borders were erected in the human imagination between regions inhabited by apparently incompatible religions.
Today many might think of Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia as naturally separated places. The Balkans, where so many Roman emperors came from, is practically the fringe of modern Europe, with the words “Bosnia” or “Serbia” conjuring up images of genocide and ethno-religious conflict. It was in the former Roman territory of Illyricum, which had once been so politically central to a broader field of Mediterranean religious, cultural, and economic connections, where Catholic Croatians and Eastern Orthodox Serbians butchered each other as well as the Muslims between them in Bosnia just over twenty-five years ago. Meanwhile, EU policies often seem to view the Mediterranean Sea less as a medium for connectivity and more as a mote to protect Europe from being inundated by too many Africans and Arabs. But the Scandinavians who are now supposedly defended by these policies were, in antiquity, at best on the outer fringe of a rich multicultural realm that was centered upon the Mediterranean Sea. What is now Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia were among the heartlands of a diverse Mediterranean World which included, but was not always centered upon, countries like modern France, Italy, Britain, and Spain. It was by all of those peoples, not just Europeans, that the religious, cultural, political, and economic development of the Roman Empire was shaped.
Sources:
Martin Goodman, The Roman World 44 BC - AD 180 (Second Edition)
David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay AD 180 - 395 (Second Edition)
A.D. Lee, From Rome to Byzantium AD 363 - 565
Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire
Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World
Walter Scheidel, The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Unless specified otherwise, all photos taken by me