INTRODUCTIONone base, or ‘capital’, to another – Trier in Germany, Sirmium or Serdica in the
Danube area or Nicomedia in Bithynia – taking their administrative apparatus
with them. By the end of the fourth century, however, the main seats of gov-
ernment were at Milan in the west and Constantinople in the east. The empire
was also divided linguistically, in that while the ‘official’ language of the army
and the law remained Latin until the sixth century and even later, the principal
language of the educated classes in the east was Greek.^2 But Latin and Greek
coexisted with a number of local languages, including Aramaic and Syriac in
Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine, and Coptic in Egypt (demotic Egyptian
written in an alphabet using mainly Greek characters) as well as the languages
of the new groups which had settled within the empire during the third and
especially the fourth century, in particular Gothic.^3 By the late sixth century,
Arabic was also beginning to emerge (Chapter 9). Even in the early empire,
laws had circulated in the east in Greek, and there had always been translation
of imperial letters arid official documents, so that on the whole the imperial
administration had managed to operate successfully despite such linguistic
variety. But from the third century onwards local cultures began to develop
more vigorously in several areas; the eventual divide between east and west
also became a linguistic one (as has often been noted, Augustine’s Greek was
not perfect, and his own works, in Latin, were not read by Christians in the
east), but especially in the east, language use was in practice highly complex.
The period covered by this book saw a progressive division between east
and west, in the course of which the east fared better. Even though it had to
face a formidable enemy in the Sasanians, its economic and social structure
enabled it to resist extensive barbarian settlement far more successfully than
the western empire could do; there was no ‘fall of the eastern empire’ in the
fifth century, and the institutional and administrative structure remained more
or less intact until the Persian and Arab invasions in the late sixth and seventh
centuries. The east was also more densely urbanized and from the fourth cen-
tury onwards the Near Eastern provinces achieved an economic prosperity
and size of population unparalleled until modern times. Nevertheless many
details remain debated, and the sheer volume of recent archaeological evi-
dence makes this one of the fastest developing scholarly areas in the period.
Though poorly documented, the Persian invasion and occupation in the early
seventh century has been thought to have had a severely negative effect, espe-
cially on the cities of Asia Minor, but in Syria and Palestine its impact is hard
to trace in the archaeological record, and Umayyad Syria remained prosper-
ous; similarly, little if any archaeological damage can be securely attributed
to the Arab conquests (Chapter 9). In the west, by contrast, the government
was already weak by the late fourth century, and the power of the great land-
owning families correspondingly strong. Furthermore, the western provinces
had been badly hit earlier by the invasions and civil wars of the third century.
The defeat of the Roman army at Adrianople in AD 378 (see below) was a
symbolic moment in the weakening of the west, and pressures grew steadily
until in AD 476 the last Roman emperor ruling from Italy was deposed; this