Intersecting religion and urbanity in late antiquity

Abstract

The period of Late Antiquity is characterised by dramatic and even contradicting developments, especially for the urban networks in the Mediterranean and beyond. On the one hand many prosperous cities downsized their earlier territory. The development in the Western part of the (former) Imperium Romanum could outrightly be called a period of de-urbanisation, impacting on the density and strength of the urban networks as much as on the fabric of individual cities from the late third century CE onwards (Osborne and Wallace-Hadrill 2013, 56 f.). Due to the invasion of the Vandals, the western part of Northern Africa witnessed a widespread desertion of cities in the fifth and sixth centuries CE (Leone 2007, 2013; summarily Osborne and Wallace-Hadrill 2013). On the other hand, and in particular in the Eastern part of the Mediterranean, several new cities emerged, and existing cities were expanded, even raised to the status of a capital city. The category of the urban, seen globally as the product of specific economic and social developments in the aftermath of the Neolithic revolution (Childe 1950) and regionally as the result of a specific Greco-Roman circum-Mediterranean offspring and conscious production of a dense network of interrelated and competing urban settlements (Cunliffe and Osborne 2005; Osborne 2005; Zuiderhoek 2017), changed significantly and in correlation to local developments. This happened much in continuity in the East and far into the Islamic period and the second millennium CE, much contrary to the forms of political power and the loci of cultural production in the West. Unsurprisingly, these developments had tremendous effects on the religious sphere. Religious actions, communications, and identities offer tools for carving out social spaces and making or at least modifying urban space. Neither is religion specifically urban nor the city specifically religious. But historically, in many periods and cultures, the shape and development (including growth as much as decline) of cities – and, even more, the different urban spaces created by individuals and different social groups within such built environments – and the shape and development of religious practices and ideas have significantly in-