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1 Rome shifts eastwards
Empires, hegemony, and frontiers
Introduction
The road from the East towards Åanliurfa, ancient Edessa, is nowadays a straight and modern two-carriage motorway that cuts through a basaltic and dusty area in south-eastern Turkey. Coming from Diyarbakir and eager to see such an important place for the first time in my life, I took that road on a hot August morning a few years ago. The city is now inhabited by almost two million people, but despite numerous traces of its historical importance, tourists visiting the city are unlikely to see any evidence for an episode pivotal to Roman expansion in the East (see Figure 1.1).
One day late in the spring of 260 CE, the Roman army was focused on defending the walls of Edessa from Sasanian attack. Little did the Romans realize that the very same day, everything they knew was destined to change. The role Rome had appointed for itself, and for which its army had fought and marched in the four corners of the world, was going to be seriously challenged for the first time. The Battle of Edessa marked a major turning point in the history of the Roman Near East. The Sasanian army emerged victorious from the battle, with the Roman Emperor Valerian along with about 60,000 Roman soldiers captured and condemned to end their days far from Rome, in Bishapur in the heart of Persia.1 A power that had begun as a small riverine settlement in central Italy, and which had gone on to build a global empire largely unthreatened, was dealt a decisive strategic and symbolic blow. After Edessa, the pre-existing balance of power was changed forever. Shapur, the Sasanian king, pushed his army into Cilicia (modern southern Turkey) before being eventually defeated by a coalition led by Odenathus, Lord of Palmyra, a city that in turn came to play a prominent role in the following years.
Edessa thus represented a major challenge to the Roman Empire, symbolized by the capture in battle of the emperor. While the confrontation between Rome and Sasanian Persia did not come to an end with the Persian victory at Edessa, the realization that Roman power faced significant opposition in the East altered Romeās understanding of the nature of its eastern boundaries. Strategy, power, alliances, and other factors, including trade, should be considered the cornerstones upon which the Roman presence beyond the Euphrates had been built and developed. The Battle of Edessa, while a natural outcome of earlier disputes, was also the departure point for a different type of relationship that developed from continuous conflict, but also through the climate of mutual reciprocity that shaped the Mesopotamian plain ā what was then the edge of both empires.
Historical research has so far focused on military operations in the area of the Euphrates, Dura Europos, and essentially the Syrian Desert towards Palmyra, furnishing a large amount of valuable evidence for the Roman presence in the region. In contrast, however, the zones between the Khabur and the Tigris have received far less attention. The consequence of this imbalance is that even the capital of the province of Mesopotamia, Nisibis, is not at all well known from an archaeological point of view, and even historical information about the city is very scarce and quite often unclear.2
Yet Mesopotamia, and specifically the northern part of the Fertile Crescent, was an area of real importance for the interactions between the Roman world and its Eastern neighbours. It was a permeable and porous borderland, never belonging completely to either Rome or Persia. It was an area that managed a precarious balance between West and East, retaining its own peculiar character.
As I hope to demonstrate later on in the book, this specific characteristic ā permeability ā helped the peoples of Northern Mesopotamia to defend the regionās unique role and to control, in a way, the impact of empire. Local actors constituted a third agent that contributed significantly to the evolution of the regional landscape ā its economy, social textures, and military nature ā negotiating its own role between the Roman and Persian empires.
Theoretical background
In a recent book, Lori Khatchadourian notes the use(s) and abuse(s) of the words āsatrapā and āsatrapiesā in newspapers, magazines, books, and television shows from the 1970s onwards, and particularly in relation to Middle Eastern countries and the American interference in their politics. The use of the word to indicate authoritarianism, oriental despotic practices, and political insolence denotes the negative aspect of it, but also suggests that āwhat makes the contemporary journalistic usage exceptionally provocative is not only the trans historical bridge that it builds, but also the unseemly baggage that it bringsā.3 The modern tendency to use the word satrap in reference to power structures of the Middle East has cast it as a contrast to the democratic and righteous vision of the Western world.
In light of this intriguing comparison, I would like to draw attention to another powerful word, which, unlike the term satrap, has an even more complex meaning when used in modern, often volatile, contexts: empire.
The word āempireā is probably one of the most over-abused terms in modern usage. It is applied generally to an enormous variety of situations, and it can cover a wide array of contexts (from the economic empire of the United States to the film The Empire Strikes Back). Additionally, its adjectival noun, āimperialismā, carries a bewildering array of meanings, interpretations, and specific visions that are substantially (and, in modern contexts, also inevitably) shaped by both negative and positive factors. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word āempireā as āan extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy or a sovereign stateā. Interestingly, the example the OED provides to substantiate its entry is that of the Roman Empire.
As David Mattingly noted, the modern use of the term implies the union of three semantic aspects: the idea of sovereignty, the concept of an unsubordinated state, and expansionism at the expense of other states or regions.4 All these aspects are to be found in the example of the Roman Empire. They occasionally overlap each other and constitute the base upon which Roman expansion was partly constructed. Although today the word āempireā has a slightly different connotation,5 the processes that led to the formation of the Roman Empire are as common to a series of megastates in antiquity (Incas, Assyrians, Persians, Mayans)6 as they are in modern times when economic dependence and the global market created a new world order.
An āempireā is therefore usually seen as an entity that controls other societies, with such control creating the condition of āimperialismā.7 Three major factors can influence the formation of an āempireā: the importance of a single metropolis, which may lead the conquest of distant areas; the strength or weakness of the limits (the āperipheriesā); and the characteristics of the global system, which might contribute to the rise, maintenance, or fall of the entire imperial apparatus. This specific consideration finds its own counterpart in Marxist historiography, which views the formation of empires as being naturally divided between the non-capitalistic entities (the Roman Empire, in this specific case) and the capitalistic powers (in the period from the Spanish Empire onwards).8
More recently, H. Cline and M. Graham have rediscovered a valuable interpretative model of the formation of the ancient empires, first expressed by sociologist Michael Mann. This model envisioned ancient societies to be organized on the basis of four different and overlapping social powers: ideology, economy, military, and politics (abbreviated by Mann with the acronym IEMP).9 The success of empires largely depended on the simultaneous and effective combination of these four aspects, contributing to the creation of the necessary tools to rule over both people and geographical space.10
In this regard, the Roman Empire is an ideal candidate to test the IEMP model: all four aspects overlapped, aligned, and continued to sustain the central power from its very own core in the Italian Peninsula to the distant regions through ties, also with the support of peripheral cores such as major cities (e.g. Antioch, Alexandria, Trier). This particular impact also allowed Rome to exercise a precise form of control over its borders, constructing a complex series of mixed landscapes that involved and affected social, political, economic, and religious life. Peripheries or margins of the empires are places where hegemony and imperialism are negotiated, challenged, and established in cycles.11 In these particular areas, people give shape to particular repertoires of rules that eventually contribute to the creation of multiple mixed cultural frameworks, expressed in the case of Romeās frontiers, and especially mirrored along the eastern frontier of Mesopotamia.12
More perhaps than the republic, the idea of āRoman Empireā brings to mind the image of a powerful, solid, almost infinite entity created by means of territorial conquest, effective military organization, and underpinned by economic success. In the context of the Roman Empire, the dualistic terminology theorized by Gramsci between powers founded on ādominationā and powers based on āhegemonyā is fundamentally useful to understand the dynamics that played out in North Mesopotamia during the early centuries of our era.13 Yet the term āhegemonyā in Gramsci has two sides. On the one hand, it contrasts unequivocally with ādominationā, whereas, on the other hand, āhegemonicā is sometimes used as an opposite of ācorporateā or āeconomic-corporateā to designate the major aspect of a specific historical phase. In such an instance, a particular group moves beyond a position of existence and defence of its economic situation, to aspire towards a new status of leadership in the political and social arena, which might then also extend beyond its own frontiers.14 Gramsci therefore defined societies characterized by the predominance of force as āeconomic-corporateā. These societies are expressed through the application of direct and unfiltered power by means of an economic dictatorship.15 On the basis of this assumption, Gramsci suggested that the normal transition between a formed society and its sociopolitical transf...
