economies. A number of different approaches have been pursued in
recent studies. Horden and Purcell have used the term‘definite places’
as a means of redefining the nexus of human behaviours within four
regional zones—the Biqa, southern Etruria, Cyrenaica, and Melos—
emphasizing the progressive fragmentation that can, in practice, be
discerned as the warp and weft of behavioural patterns. Their focus has
been concentrated at least as much on perceptions of difference, as
identified by travellers, whether witnesses from remote times, or more
recent observers, as it has traced the material imprint of conscious
transformations of the landscapes sketched.^20 Reger has identified three
separate trajectories along which regional and inter-regional economic
connections can be explored, namely geography, ethnicity, and polity.^21
Historians and geographers have not abandoned the conceptual connec-
tion between regions as topographic units, and certain cultural forms of
expression that coincide with these notional territorial entities. There is,
nevertheless, a conscious emphasis in these studies on the complex
behavioural patterns that can reinforce a sense of congruence between
regions and their inhabitants, either amongst the inhabitants themselves,
or as articulated by observers. Fluctuating powers, migrating groups, and
graduated changes of cultural practice have served to modify the human
and constructed textures of Mediterranean as of other regions, sowing
multiplicity and heterogeneity. This heterogeneity has, in turn, provided
the fuel for innovation and further cultural transformations. If we accept
that changing configurations within a given landscape can become the
subject of regional enquiry, it is evident that the boundedness of the
region in question can be defined in a variety of ways. The contents of
this book provide one framework, following a pattern of interconnec-
tions that is especially prominent within thefive centuries explored. This
framework could in principle be enlarged, to include parts of western
Turkey (since the Bosporus was in thefirst millenniumbc, as it remains
today, a bridge between Europe and Asia); northwards, to include the
Carpathian Basin, as well as the Danube estuary; or westwards, as far as
the Adriatic. The connections with these wider territories are acknow-
ledged under different topics in the following chapters. The justification
for concentrating on the east Balkans is partly a matter of historical
(^20) Horden and Purcell, 53–88; coincidentally, their Map 31A corresponds in essence, if
not in the exact contours selected there, with the area covered in these pages; cf. Purcell and
Horden 2005; Millett considers that Macedonia ought, in principle, to be a good candidate
for such a regional approach (2010, 483). 21
Reger 2011; cf. also Reger 1994; Oliver 2006a; Elton and Reger 2007, 13–14; Reger
2013a; 2013b.
Introduction 13