Class 11 History Chapter 2 An Empire Across Three Continents Notes in English

1Two Empires, and How We Know About Rome

1.1 Two Thousand Years of Empire-Building

This chapter is the second theme in the book’s section on Empires. In the two thousand years after empires first rose in Mesopotamia, one attempt at empire-building followed another across the region. By the sixth century BCE, Iranians controlled major parts of the old Assyrian empire, and trade networks grew both overland and along the Mediterranean coasts. Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta flourished, and in the late fourth century BCE, Alexander of Macedon conquered North Africa, West Asia and Iran, reaching all the way to the river Beas in India, before his own soldiers refused to march any further.

Alexander’s political empire broke apart quickly after his death, but “Hellenistic” culture, Greek language and ideas mixed with local traditions, especially Iranian, stayed important for almost three centuries after. It was out of the political confusion that followed Alexander’s empire that a new power rose: from the second century BCE, the small but well-organised military forces of the Italian city-state of Rome took control of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

1.2 Sources: How Historians Know About Rome

Roman historians are unusually lucky: they have a rich collection of sources, which fall into three broad groups.

Each kind of source can only tell historians so much on its own, combining them is worthwhile, but how well that is done depends entirely on the historian’s own skill.

1.3 Rome and Iran: Two Superpowers Divide the World

Between the birth of Christ and the early seventh century (down to the 630s), two powerful empires, Rome and Iran, ruled most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The two were rivals, fighting each other through much of their history, and their territories lay side by side, separated only by a narrow strip of land along the river Euphrates.

The Mediterranean Sea, stretching from Spain in the west to Syria in the east, separates Europe from Africa, and it was the true heart of Rome’s empire, which dominated the sea and every region around it.

Iran, Rome’s rival, controlled the whole area south of the Caspian Sea down to eastern Arabia, and sometimes much of Afghanistan too. Between them, these two superpowers had divided up most of what the Chinese called Ta Ch’in, “greater Ch’in”, meaning roughly the whole of the west as China then knew it.

2The Emperor, the Senate and the Army

2.1 Augustus and the Principate

The Roman Empire is usually divided into two broad phases, “early” and “late”, split by the third century CE as a kind of historical watershed. A key difference between Rome and Iran was cultural: Iran’s Parthian and later Sasanian rulers governed a population that was largely Iranian, while Rome was, in the book’s own words, “a mosaic of territories and cultures” held together chiefly by a shared system of government. Latin and Greek were the main administrative languages, the upper classes of the east wrote in Greek and those of the west in Latin, and the boundary between the two ran roughly across the middle of the Mediterranean, between Latin-speaking Tripolitania and Greek-speaking Cyrenaica in North Africa. Whatever language they spoke, everyone in the empire was a subject of one ruler: the emperor.

Most surviving Roman histories were written by people from a senatorial background, so in these sources emperors are judged above all by how they treated the Senate; the “worst” emperors, in this telling, were those who were hostile, suspicious or violent towards senators. Many senators longed for the old days of the Republic, though most must have known this was impossible.

2.2 The Army: Rome’s Third Power Centre

Next to the emperor and the Senate stood the third key institution of imperial rule: the army. Unlike Iran’s conscripted army, forcibly recruited, Rome had a paid professional army, in which soldiers signed up for a minimum of 25 years, a genuinely distinctive Roman feature.

The army was the largest single organised body in the whole empire, and it certainly had the power to determine an emperor’s fate; soldiers constantly agitated for better pay and conditions, sometimes through outright mutiny. The Senate, for its part, hated and feared the army as a source of unpredictable violence, especially once the strained third century forced heavier taxation to pay for it.

Succession followed family descent, natural or adoptive, wherever possible, and even the army was strongly wedded to this principle. Tiberius (14-37 CE), the second Roman emperor, was not Augustus’s natural son at all, but his adopted heir, chosen to guarantee a smooth transition of power.

3Ruling Three Continents

3.1 From Client Kingdoms to Roman Provinces

More typical than conquest by war was the gradual extension of direct Roman rule by simply absorbing a whole series of “dependent” or client kingdoms into Roman provincial territory. The Near East was full of such kingdoms, whose rulers used their own forces in support of Rome in exchange for being allowed to exist. By the early second century CE, every one of these kingdoms lying west of the Euphrates, closer to Roman territory, had disappeared, swallowed into the empire.

Except for Italy, which was not considered a province in these centuries, every territory of the empire was organised into provinces and made subject to taxation. At its peak, in the second century, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to the borders of Armenia, and from the Sahara to the Euphrates and sometimes beyond, home to a population of around 60 million people in the mid-second century.

3.2 Why Cities? The Answer to Governing a Vast Empire

Given there was no government in the modern sense to run things, how did an emperor govern such an enormous and diverse territory at all? The book’s own answer is: urbanisation. The great urban centres that lined the Mediterranean’s shores, Carthage, Alexandria and Antioch the biggest among them, were the true bedrock of the whole imperial system. It was through cities that “government” was able to tax the provincial countryside that generated most of the empire’s wealth, because local upper classes actively collaborated with the Roman state to administer their own territories and collect taxes from them.

One of the most striking features of Roman political history is the dramatic shift of power, across the second and third centuries, from Italy to the provinces. Throughout this period, it was provincial upper classes who increasingly supplied the administrators and army commanders, forming a new elite that grew far more powerful than the old senatorial class, because they had the backing of the emperors themselves. Emperor Gallienus (253-68 CE) went further still, consolidating this shift by excluding senators from military command altogether, to keep control of the army out of senatorial hands.

Living in a city had a very practical advantage too: it was likely to be better provided for during food shortages and famines than the surrounding countryside.

3.3 Public Life in a Roman City

Public baths were a striking feature of Roman urban life, so much so that when one Iranian ruler tried to introduce them into Iran, he faced the fury of the clergy there: water was a sacred element, and public bathing seemed to them a kind of desecration. Urban populations also enjoyed a great deal of entertainment: one surviving calendar tells us that spectacula (“shows”) filled no fewer than 176 days of the year.

Put together, this is exactly what the chapter title means by an empire “across three continents”:

4The Third-Century Crisis

If the first and second centuries were, broadly, a period of peace, prosperity and economic expansion, the third century brought the first major signs of internal strain. From the 230s, the empire found itself fighting on several fronts at once.

5Family, Women and Literacy

5.1 The Roman Nuclear Family

One of the most modern features of Roman society was the widespread nuclear family: adult sons did not usually live with their parents, and it was exceptional for adult brothers to share one household, though slaves were still counted as part of the family, as the Romans understood it.

5.2 Literacy: Patchy, Not Universal

Casual literacy varied hugely across the empire. At Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, the walls of the main streets often carried advertisements, and graffiti covered the city, strong evidence of widespread casual reading and writing among ordinary people. One of the funniest surviving examples reads: “Wall, I admire you for not collapsing in ruins when you have to support so much boring writing on you.”

Egypt tells a different story. Hundreds of surviving papyri show that most formal documents, contracts especially, were written by professional scribes, and often note that one party or another “is unable to read and write.” Even here, though, literacy was noticeably more widespread among particular groups: soldiers, army officers and estate managers.

5.3 A Mosaic of Languages and Cultures

The empire’s cultural diversity showed at every level: in the sheer variety of religious cults and local deities, in the many languages spoken, in styles of dress and food, and in different forms of social organisation and settlement. Aramaic dominated the Near East west of the Euphrates, Coptic was spoken in Egypt, Punic and Berber in North Africa, and Celtic in Spain and the northwest.

Many of these local languages remained purely oral for a long time, until a script was invented for them, and where Latin spread its influence, it sometimes displaced a local language’s written form entirely, as happened with Celtic.

6Trade and the Economy Across Three Continents

6.1 A Mediterranean Economy of Wheat, Wine and Oil

The empire had a substantial economic infrastructure: harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards and olive-oil factories among them. Wheat, wine and olive oil were traded and consumed in huge quantities, coming mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa and Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, Italy.

Spanish olive oil, at its commercial peak between 140 and 160 CE, was mainly carried in a container called “Dressel 20”, named after the archaeologist who first defined its shape. Wide scatter of Dressel 20 finds across the Mediterranean shows how far Spanish oil travelled, and that Spanish producers had captured markets from their Italian rivals, almost certainly by offering better oil at lower prices.

6.2 Fertile Regions and Pastoral Zones

Writers like Strabo and Pliny name several regions with a reputation for exceptional fertility. Campania in Italy produced the best wines; Sicily and Byzacium (Tunisia) exported huge quantities of wheat to Rome; Galilee, in the historian Josephus’s own words, had “every inch of the soil… cultivated by the inhabitants”; and Baetica, in southern Spain, produced olive oil from estates called fundi along the river Guadalquivir.

But large parts of Roman territory were far less developed. In Numidia (modern Algeria), transhumance was widespread, and as Roman estates expanded there, the pastures of these communities shrank and their movement was tightly regulated. Northern Spain, too, was much less developed, home mostly to a Celtic-speaking peasantry living in hilltop villages called castella.

7Controlling Workers

7.1 Slavery: Widespread, but Not the Whole Story

Slavery was an institution deeply rooted across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and even Christianity, once it became the state religion in the fourth century, did not seriously challenge it. But it does not follow that slaves performed the bulk of labour across the whole empire. That may have been true of much of Italy under the Republic (three million slaves in a total Italian population of 7.5 million, under Augustus), but it was no longer true of the empire as a whole.

Slaves were an investment, and at least one Roman agricultural writer advised landowners against using them where too many might be needed at once, for a harvest, say, or where their health was at real risk, such as from malaria. This was hard economic calculation, not sympathy. As warfare became rarer with the first century’s peace, the supply of slaves fell, so slave-owners turned either to slave breeding or to cheaper, more easily dispensable wage labour. Free labour was, in fact, extensively used on public works at Rome precisely because widespread slave labour would have been too expensive, slaves, unlike hired workers, had to be fed and housed all year round.

7.2 Managing and Disciplining Labour

Slaves and freedmen (slaves who had been set free by their masters) were, by contrast, extensively used as business managers, since this role did not need large numbers of them; masters often gave slaves or freedmen capital to run a business on their behalf, or even a business of their own.

Columella, a first-century writer from southern Spain, recommended that landowners keep a reserve of tools, twice what they needed, so production never stopped, “for the loss in slave labour-time exceeds the cost of such items”. He also recommended organising workers into squads of ten, easier to supervise closely. Pliny the Elder, by contrast, condemned slave gangs chained together by the feet as the very worst method of organising production.

Rural indebtedness ran deep too. A letter of Augustine records parents selling their own children into 25 years of servitude, and in the great Jewish revolt of 66 CE, the rebels’ very first act was to destroy the moneylenders’ bonds, to win popular support. Yet by the sixth century, papyri show wage labour had become widespread in parts of the Mediterranean, especially in the East, a reminder that coerced labour, though real, was never the whole picture.

8Social Hierarchies

The historian Tacitus described the leading social groups of the early empire in this order: senators (“patres”, literally “fathers”); leading members of the equestrian class; the respectable people attached to the great houses; the “unkempt lower class” (plebs sordida), whom he says were addicted to the circus and theatre; and, at the bottom, the slaves.

By the early third century, the Senate numbered roughly 1,000 members, about half from Italian families still. By the late empire, which starts with Constantine’s reign in the early fourth century, senators and equites had merged into one unified, expanded aristocracy, of whom at least half were now of African or eastern origin. This “late Roman” aristocracy was enormously wealthy, yet in many ways less powerful than the purely military elites, who came almost entirely from non-aristocratic backgrounds.

9Late Antiquity

9.1 Diocletian and Constantine Remake the State

Late antiquity is the term historians use for the final, transformative period in the evolution and break-up of the Roman Empire, roughly the fourth to seventh centuries CE. Changes to the very structure of the state began with Emperor Diocletian (284-305 CE): he cut back overexpansion by abandoning territories of little strategic or economic value, fortified the frontiers, reorganised provincial boundaries, and separated civilian from military functions, giving military commanders (duces) far greater autonomy and power.

Constantine consolidated these changes and added innovations of his own. His most important was monetary: the solidus, a coin of 4½ grams of pure gold, minted on a huge scale, that would in fact outlast the Roman Empire itself.

Constantine’s other major innovation was political: a second capital, Constantinople (modern Istanbul, previously called Byzantium), surrounded by sea on three sides. Because the new capital needed its own senate, the fourth century became a period of rapid expansion for the governing classes. Monetary stability and a growing population together stimulated real economic growth, archaeology shows heavy rural investment in oil presses, glass factories, screw presses and multiple water-mills, and a revival of long-distance trade with the East.

Egypt’s late papyri paint a picture of real prosperity: a relatively affluent, money-using society where rural estates generated vast incomes in gold. Egypt alone contributed over 2.5 million solidi a year in tax, roughly 35,000 lbs of gold, in the reign of Justinian in the sixth century. Large parts of the Near Eastern countryside, remarkably, were more developed and densely settled in the fifth and sixth centuries than they would be even in the twentieth century.

9.2 Christianisation, and a World of Many Faiths

The traditional religious culture of the classical world, both Greek and Roman, was polytheist: Roman and Italian gods such as Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Mars stood alongside numerous Greek and eastern deities, worshipped in thousands of temples, shrines and sanctuaries across the empire. Polytheists, notably, had no shared name for themselves. Judaism was the empire’s other great religious tradition, and it too was far from a single, uniform thing, there was real diversity within the Jewish communities of late antiquity.

9.3 The Empire’s End: A Fallen West, a Surviving East

Prosperity in the East was especially marked, its population kept expanding right up to the sixth century, despite the impact of the plague that struck the Mediterranean in the 540s. In the West, though, the empire fragmented politically as Germanic groups, the Goths, Vandals and Lombards among them, took over the major provinces and founded kingdoms historians describe as “post-Roman”.

In the East, where the empire stayed united, the reign of Justinian (527-65 CE) marks the high-water mark of prosperity and imperial ambition, seen at Ravenna in the famous mosaic portrait made in his own lifetime.

Justinian recaptured Africa from the Vandals in 533 CE, but recovering Italy from the Ostrogoths left that country devastated and paved the way for the later Lombard invasion. By the early seventh century, war between Rome and Iran flared up again: the Sasanians, who had ruled Iran since the third century, launched a full-scale invasion of the major eastern provinces, including Egypt. When Byzantium, as the eastern Roman Empire was now increasingly called, recovered these provinces in the 620s, it was only a few years from the final major blow, which came, this time, from the south-east.

10Timeline: An Empire Across Three Continents at a Glance