GENERAL: THE DISTRIBUTION OF CITIES

It is against this background, composed of elements such as physical structure, climate, natural vegetation and land–use which are very largely natural and unchanging, that the general pattern and development of settlement and communications in the Balkan and Anatolian Peninsulas during the later Roman and Byzantine periods should be seen. A further element of major significance, that is the political and administrative history of the various regions that go to make up the two peninsulas, which almost by definition did change and on occasion in a manner which ignored or defied some or all of the natural elements listed above, should also be taken into account. The interaction of these several elements brought into existence, and occasionally maintained, a number of sharp contrasts within each peninsula, as well as a number between them.

A map based upon the Synecdemus of Hierocles, modified where necessary on the evidence of the appropriate Notitiae Episcopatuum and Conciliar Lists, and drawn up so as to illustrate the distribution of cities in the Balkans and Anatolia in the mid fifth century, exhibits a number of interesting and significant features. (Map 14)

The extremely conservative practice of recognising existing communities when a region was annexed and of rarely making fundamental changes thereafter, which had been adhered to by the Roman state throughout, meant that even at this date the distribution of cities largely reflected that which had already existed when each region had come under Roman rule. This practice accounts, in the historically most immediate sense at least, for the most obvious disparities in the density of the distribution of cities within both the Balkans and Anatolia.