ABSTRACT
One of the distinguishing features of the Roman Empire, as it had been of the social and political organisation of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East for many, many centuries, was its cities. These were numerous, even in Western Europe where urbanisation was less intense than in the east, and they were crucially important to the way the Roman Empire worked. Almost from its beginnings, it was organised around cities, which provided the foci of its political structure, as well as a civilised and cultured environment for the lives of its elites. To understand what happened to the fabric of Western European society after the end of the Roman Empire in the west, we need to think about what happened to those cities.
