Una guarnigione di cavalleria africana al confine settentrionale dell’impero all’inizio del III secolo d.C.

Abstract

From the area of the Roman fort of Bravoniacum near the modern village of Kirkby Thore, in the English county of Cumbria, come few extremely fragmented Latin inscriptions and some funerary reliefs. Their data, crossed with a Numidian epigraph and with some other historical sources, allows outlining the garrison that occupied the fort in the first part of the third century AD. Groups of African knights recruited on an ethnic basis were placed in the province at the beginning of the 3rd century AD and maintained there as fast deploying troops deputed to the contrast of tribal uprisings in the hilly territories of the newly established province of Britannia Inferior, and probably to support military operations north of Hadrian's Wall as well. The circumstantial evidence reviewed in this work suggests that since the time of Septimius Severus's British campaigns between AD 208 and 211, a division of Numidian auxiliary light cavalry garrisoned the fort of Bravoniacum , constituting the first African community on the island.