The North

The boom which has occurred in the study of Byzantine history over the last few decades has made historians far more prepared to give due weight to the role of the empire in late antiquity and the early middle ages. Yet this new emphasis has meant an eastward shift in a perspective of which the centre of gravity still remains firmly centred on the Mediterranean. Of course there are good grounds for adopting such a perspective, which was that of contemporaries. It is well caught in a large mosaic map which was installed on a pavement at Mabada in Jordan, probably in the second half of the sixth century. The part of the map which survives includes a fascinating depiction of some of the buildings of Jerusalem, Justinian's Nea Church among them, although in its original form the work must have covered a block of territory extending approximately from Thebes in Egypt to Damascus, if not beyond. But the difference in direction between the coastlines of Palestine and Egypt is largely smoothed out, which suggests that the point of observation for each coast is the Mediterranean. ¹ Similarly, when a writer in Gaul drew up a list of twenty noble cities of the Roman world late in the fourth century, half of them lay on the Mediterranean coast, while the remainder were all close to a sea or on major rivers. ² In the ancient world political, commercial and ecclesiastical power was concentrated on coastal cities, which prospered thanks to the wealth and human talent transferred to them from their hinterlands. Roman and Byzantine political history is full of men, such as Zeno, Justin and Justinian, who came from a province to find their fortune in the capital, and for every one who succeeded there must have been hundreds who failed. So it was that when the inhabitants of the empire thought about its geographical extent it was natural for them to envisage it as a great expanse of land lying around the Mediterranean. ³ And Justinian's wars in the West, rarely fought far from the coast, strengthened the Mediterranean axis of the empire.