In 1968, Rein Taagepera created growth curves of four empires by measuring the surface area of each and plotting his data on a graph of area versus time. He used his growth curves to analyse the ...development of empires quantitatively, as he considered surface area to be the best measurable indicator of an empire’s strength. His growth curve of the Roman Empire, in particular, has been referenced numerous times by scholars researching the decline and fall of complex civilizations to support their individual analyses of the collapse of Rome. While this thesis surveys only the territories of the Western Roman Empire, many of the parameters used by Taagepera have been either borrowed or adapted in order to define, measure, and graph the surface area of the Western Empire as precisely as possible. This thesis also adds further precision and validity to Bryan Ward-Perkins’ theory that surface area can be used to analyse and quantify the collapse of a complex society accurately.
In order to demonstrate the extent to which differing circumstances and outcomes of provincial history impacted the total surface area of the Western Roman Empire, it was essential to include not only an overview of Rome’s extensive history, but also to establish the chronology, as it related to the Roman Empire, of each individual province, territory, and client kingdom within the Western Empire. Detailed chronologies of Noricum and Britannia have been included to serve as case studies as they comprise a broad range of distinct characteristics and so represent typical western provinces.
My research of the history and geography of the Roman Empire has generated a comprehensive inventory that includes all the pertinent onomastic and chronological data needed to measure the surface area of each of Rome’s western provinces and client kingdoms. When plotted on a graph of area versus time, my data not only produced an accurate representation of the actual surface area of the Western Roman Empire, but also one that facilitates temporal analyses of territorial fluctuations at any given point in the Empire’s history until the fall of the Western Empire in CE 476.
Medieval Food Laurioux, Bruno
A Companion to Food in the Ancient World,
06/2015
Book Chapter
Traditionally understood as falling between the end of the Western Roman Empire (476) and the final disappearance of the Byzantine Empire (1453), the period that historians call the Middle Ages ...covers a millennium. The study of the Middle Ages has recently been thoroughly re‐problematized in a fashion similar to that undergone by the history of food in general. The study of kitchen equipment, notably ceramics, which can, for the Middle Ages, be crossed with archival investigations and iconographic analysis, has been able to certify the transition, in the thirteenth century, from cooking methods favoring boiling in a large pot to a cuisine that simmered food in small pots. The High Middle Ages were marked by the division of the Mediterranean, once unified under the Roman Empire, into three major political and religious areas, which would roughly remain until the fifteenth century: the Byzantine Empire, Islam, and the Latin West.
From the fifth to the eighth centuries, the coinage of most of the former Western Roman Empire went through a transformation from a varied metallic and denominational system to dependence on a single ...denomination, the silver penny. At the end of the fifth century, large multiple bronzes bearing denominational marks appeared in Byzantium. Silver had sunk to a subsidiary and rather evanescent role by the end of the fourth century. The exceptions were Africa and Iberia, where a system of Islamic coinage was introduced, derived from late eastern Roman and Sassanian issues. The path to the silver medieval European penny was complicated, the result of the persistence of a Late Roman siliqua coinage in Italy and the transformation of the Transalpine gold tremissis to a silver coin through gradual debasement.
