'Urbanised' villages in early Byzantium, an overview (original) (raw)

In the last few decades, a lot of attention has been devoted to the development of the city in late antique and early Byzantine times. Changes in the late antique and Byzantine countryside have been receiving more attention too; surveys in cities’ hinterlands and territories have multiplied and new approaches to evaluate the productivity of the land have been introduced. Although the interdependence of city and countryside is widely acknowledged, when urban and rural physical evolutions are compared, the spotlight generally is on the city, which is said to have undergone a ‘ruralisation.’ In this article, I revisit urban-rural relations, but I move the focus to rural settlements. In many regions of the eastern Mediterranean they were doing well. Between the fourth and seventh/eighth century, villages grew in size and number and played an important part in the economy as producers but possibly also consumers. I refrain from making general statements on rural versus urban ‘prosperity’ in late antique centuries – something that is exceptionally hard to determine – but instead focus on three noticeable developments in urban-rural relations. After a quick look at the villages of the Aezanitis, where investments in rural architectural decoration match or even outdo those in the urban centre of Aizanoi, I discuss rural settlements in Cilicia that built late antique tetrapyla and arches, and then move on to the villages of Jordan where one of the most remarkable collections of seventh-century mosaics and epigraphy can be found. Finally, I raise some questions concerning the initiators of building works in villages.