Geography
The Roman Empire is usually said to have reached its greatest extent early in the second century CE during the reign of Trajan (See map of the Roman Empire). When the empire was at its height, it is difficult not to be overawed at the sheer variety of landscapes that filled its borders. And yet, it started off in a rolling and fertile corner of central Italy. Italy has a Mediterranean climate with short damp winters and hot dry summers.
This sort of climate is also found, unsurprisingly, in other regions conquered by Rome along that same sea, the Mediterranean. Southern France and much of Spain have a similar climate, as does much of the northern fringes of North Africa conquered by Rome as well as the coastal parts of the Near East with some exceptions. As you move north from the Mediterranean, however, especially in western Europe, the climate starts to become much more changeable with clear evidence of four fixed seasons. The winters, too, get colder as you head inland, before becoming a bit milder as you head to the north coast, where the gulf stream tempers things and helps produce an oceanic climate, a milder one that is out of keeping with the somewhat northerly latitude of the region. Modern countries that witnessed Roman rule in some capacity or other in this part of the world include Andorra, France, Switzerland, and parts of Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Britain, the most northerly outpost of Rome, is generally mild, with temperatures rarely getting especially hot or especially cold, though the weather can be quite changeable. Just about all of England and Wales fell under Roman control, while none of Ireland did, and southern parts of Scotland only for a time.
As you head south in the Mediterranean to Africa, the fertile northern reaches of the continent quickly give way to the arid conditions of the Sahara so creating something of a physical boundary. Modern countries with evidence of Rome include parts of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. We will return to this issue of physical or geographical boundaries or borders in chapter seven below; suffice to say, in most cases Roman control was demarcated by some sort of geographical feature.2 In the west, for instance, it was the Atlantic Ocean (with some exceptions at the far northwest of Africa) that served as the limits of Roman control, and to the south, as noted, more often than not the Sahara. As we move to the east of Italy, however, and both to the northeast and southeast, two other major geographical features that proved instrumental at various points in marking Roman territory are two of Europeâs major rivers, the Rhine and the Danube. The Romans did make forays east of the Rhine late in the first century BCE and early in the first century CE, but they were stopped in their tracks by Arminius, a German chieftain and former Roman officer. The Danube, for a time, served as the border in southeast Europe. Later, the Carpathian Mountains, which like the Alps in Italy make something of an inverted U north of the Danube, served as the boundary. Not surprisingly, the coastal regions had fewer of the seasonal temperature extremes found in the interior. Greece and the southern Balkans are defined by their mountainous terrain, which does restrict to some degree the amount of arable land. On the other hand, vast plains surround the Balkans. In ancient Dacia, modern Romania, a vast plain stretches northward from the Danube to the Carpathians to the north, east, and west. The modern countries that make up this corner of the Roman world include the aforementioned Greece and Romania as well as Bulgaria, possibly portions of Moldova and southern Ukraine and southern Russia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia.
As we head east from the Balkans, we head into modern day Turkey, and in general the weather gets warmer, and the growing season gets longer. Admittedly, there is considerable variation in the climate of ancient Asia Minor and Anatolia (Turkey), with some of it â the western and southern coastal portions and to some degree the northern coast too â characterized by a Mediterranean climate. As with other places, the inland parts of Anatolia have much more in the way of seasonal variation and extremes of temperature. Much of Anatolia, too happens to be quite mountainous. The last geographical region to discuss is the Near East, long considered the âcradle of civilizationâ, which essentially stretches from eastern Turkey southwards to northern Egypt. The coastal portion, the Levant, has a Mediterranean climate and is quite fertile. The amount of yearly rainfall decreases as you move east towards the Arabian desert that covers much of the Arabian Peninsula and which stretches north towards the fertile crescent, which runs along the eastern Mediterranean coast along one side of the crescent and down between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Mesopotamia) on the other side into Kuwait. Mesopotamia only rarely fell under Roman control, unlike the Levant, and parts of the modern countries of Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt.
For all the talk of geographical boundaries, Italy itself was not only surrounded by water, but also by mountains in the north, and these two geographical features marked the limits of Roman control for a comparatively short (in the great span of Romeâs history) period of time, which means that we should not push the geographical border angle too far. Rainfall varied widely across this vast empire, which at its peak comprised some 6 500 000 km2, with higher amounts of rainfall falling more regularly to the north, and much more variable quantities falling in parts to the south. The kinds of plants grown varied too, with grapes and olives generally restricted to the Mediterranean. Grain could be grown in most parts of the Roman world. Grain was comparatively easy to transport, however, and most, if not all, Roman military bases had granaries used for its storage. Four of the areas of the classical world most commonly associated with grain production include Carthage and North Africa, Sicily, Egypt, and along the north coast of the Black Sea. It was the grain of Carthage and Egypt that had the most pronounced impact on Rome, however.
